Friday, October 16, 2015

Last Call For Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

Someone please tell me once again how moderate and sensible a Republican Gov. John Kasich is so that I can laugh at them endlessly for being fools.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich said today in his first major policy speech of the campaign that, as president, he would gut the U.S. transportation and education departments and would balance the budget within eight years. 
Kasich, the governor of Ohio, said downsizing the two federal agencies and returning much of their power and funding to individual states would send money and control away from Washington and back to the states, a centerpiece of his economic plan. 
He panned the federal gas tax in particular, saying he would return almost all of it to state coffers. He said he would limit the U.S. Department of Transportation’s role nearly entirely to providing research support to states. 
"You keep your money and you fix your roads the way you want to," Kasich said in Nashua, New Hampshire, today.

In the immoral words of Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in "Back To The Future", where we're going, we don't need roads.  The Interstate Highway System?  Not our problem, your problem.

Over 100 programs run by the Department of Education, meanwhile, would be packaged into four state grants, transferring control over education to the state and local levels, according to his plan
A centerpiece of the roadmap Kasich laid out would involve balancing the federal budget within eight years of his assuming the presidency and his pushing for a constitutional amendment that would require a balanced budget annually. As a congressman, Kasich was a chief architect of balancing the federal budget in the 1990s, the last time it was balanced. 

Oh, so now it was Kasich who balanced the budget during the Clinton years.  Sure.  And then Kasich became George W. Bush's budget director during the "deficits don't matter" era of big government and war spending by credit card and ended up crashing the economy in the process.  That worked out well, didn't it?  Too bad we didn't spend that money on schools or roads instead of wars.

To rein in what he called unnecessary federal rules, he would enact a yearlong moratorium on new regulations “so we can catch our breath,” he said. "No more rules and regulations from Washington for one year." 
His plan also calls for cutting the top tax rate for individuals from 39.6 percent to 28 percent and lowering the number of tax brackets from seven to three. For businesses, the top rate would drop from 35 percent to 25 percent.

The Kasich Plan is simple: to take what most Republicans want to do with tax cuts for the rich and cuts to Medicaid with block grants and make massive austerity cuts everywhere. If anything Kasich's austerity plan is by far the worst of the GOP.

But he's the moderate, remember?

The Money Game

In the post-Citizens United world of campaign finance, whoever runs out of money first loses the race. Rick Perry and Scott Walker ran out of cash and closed shop, and with third quarter campaign fundraising figures now out, the candidates who have raised tens of millions will go on. It's the candidates who have raised only chump change in comparison who are on the way out, and top of that list of losers running out of money is Bobby Jindal.

Thursday could mark the beginning of the end for Bobby Jindal’s increasingly slim presidential hopes.

The Louisiana governor’s campaign reported having just $260,000 to spend at the end of September after raising a little over half a million dollars and spending significantly more than that in the third quarter. It’s a paltry sum compared to his rivals, and if Jindal can’t jumpstart his White House bid soon, he could be headed the way of Rick Perry and Scott Walker, who ended their campaigns when their coffers ran dry.

Jindal’s haul—or lack thereof—was the most ominous signal that came from the quarterly FEC filing deadline on Thursday, which showed that the top two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, each raised more money between June and September than any of the 15 Republicans still in the race. (Donald Trump, of course, has access to more money than any of them through his own personal wealth.) Clinton raised $28 million and Sanders raised $26 million. Ben Carson’s rise to a close second in the polls was reflected in his fund-raising, as he led the GOP field by taking in $20 million in the third quarter. 

Perry ran out of cash, Walker is a million in debt now, and Jindal will soon join them. And it says the world that Ben Carson has gotten $20 million dollars from people. Fool and his money are soon parted, I guess.

Bitter Home Alabama, Con't

Alabama Republican Gov. Robert Bentley is upset that the real racists are accusing him of shutting down DMV offices in predominately black counties as a ploy to disenfranchise black voters who will need photo IDs in order to vote in 2016 and that you're crazy for thinking it has anything to do with race because it doesn't, and you're the real racist if you think so!

They are wrong on this issue," said Bentley. "Everyone can get a license and everyone can get a voter ID. They (critics) really don't have anything to talk about. It's politics at its worst. And it's race politics at its worst."

Bentley told the group that he had worked hard to help change the image of the state.

"Alabama is not George Wallace's state. I don't want it to be George Wallace's state." said Bentley. "I want us to be inclusive. I don't want us to look at the color of people's skin. I don't want us to look at whether they are male or female. We are all Alabamians and I'm their governor. I know most of them (blacks in the affected counties losing driver's license offices) are not going to vote Republican. But you are not going to win people over by not being inclusive."

And that doesn't matter if you make it so difficult for them to vote that they can't vote at all, in a state that doesn't have any public transportation, so that they can't get to the driver's license office and get an ID in the first place.  No, everyone can't get a license, and that's the whole point.

StupidiNews!