Stop The lies, make these people show what really comes first their career or the county.

How Republican Governors are lying to the Unemployed
A major talking point of the Republican governors who are not going to take the unemployment funds in the stimulus bill is that it is a permanent tax increase, but by looking at the bill, it is clear that potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, and Mark Sanford are at best wrong, or even worse, lying.
Here is what Gov. Jindal (R-LA) said on Meet The Press today, “Well, it, it's--no. The $100 million we turned down was temporary federal dollars that would require us to change our unemployment laws. That would've actually raised taxes on Louisiana businesses. We as a state would've been responsible for paying for those benefits after the federal money disappeared… If you actually read the bill, there's one problem with that. The word permanent is in the bill. It requires the state to make a permanent change in our law. Law B--our employer group agrees with me. They say, "Yes, this will result an increase in taxes on our businesses, this will result in a permanent obligation on the state of Louisiana."
Gov. Barbour (R-MS) said on CNN's State of the Union, "There is some (stimulus money) we will not take in Mississippi. If we were to take the unemployment insurance reform package that they have, it would cause us to raise taxes on employment when the money runs out, and the money will run out in a couple of years. Then we'll have to raise the unemployment insurance tax, which is literally a tax on employment. I mean, we want more jobs. You don't get more jobs by putting an extra tax on creating jobs.”
Gov. Sanford (R-SC) said that the bill would require his state to cover part-time workers, "What we would be required to do would be, for the first time, increase the level of benefit for part-time workers. Right now, it's full-time workers -- increase it to part-time workers. We can't pay for the benefits already in the program, but to get the stimulus money, we've got to increase the program's size and scale."
Here is the text of the bill’s unemployment section, which can be found in Title VII of the bill, “For an additional amount for ‘State Unemployment Insurance and Employment Service Operations’ for grants to States in accordance with section 6 of the Wagner-Peyser Act, $400,000,000, which may be expended from the Employment Security Administration Account in the Unemployment Trust Fund, and which shall be available for obligation on the date of enactment of this Act: Provided, That such funds shall remain available to the States through September 30, 2010.”
First off, someone needs to tell Gov. Jindal that the word permanent does not appear in the text. The question is where are Republicans getting the lie that this is a permanent tax increase? The answer can be found in Section VI of the Wagner-Peyser Act, which says, “No State's allotment under this section for any fiscal year shall be less that 90 percent of its allotment percentage for the fiscal year preceding the fiscal year for which the determination is made.”
Jindal and the others are making a very faulty assumption here. They are assuming that the unemployment rate will stay high in 2010, and they also make the assumption that the federal government will not provide any additional funding. Their first assumption is possible, but the second won’t happen. It would be unprecedented for the federal government to cut funding while unemployment is high. No matter what party is in control, this doesn’t happen.
What is really going on here is that these governors are willing to put their own political ambitions ahead of the needs of the people of their state. All three of these gentlemen want to run for the Republican nomination in 2012, and they think that they will endear themselves to the GOP base by taking a hard line against the stimulus. If this means twisting the truth and hurting the unemployed in their states, so be it. Their position is based on cold political calculus, which may benefit them with Republicans, but would destroy them if any one of them were lucky enough to become the GOP nominee.

Is this what change looks like, and if it is I like it.

$2 billion earmark for FutureGen near zero emissions power plant in Mattoon, IL = JOBS
$39 billion slush fund for “state fiscal stabilization” bailout = JOBS
$5.5 billion for making federal buildings “green” (including $448 million for DHS HQ) = JOBS
$200 million for workplace safety in USDA facilities = JOBS
$275 million for flood prevention = JOBS
$65 million for watershed rehabilitation = JOBS
$200 million for public computer centers at community colleges and libraries = JOBS
$650 million for the DTV transition coupon program = JOBS
$307 million for constructing NIST office buildings = JOBS
$1 billion for administrative costs and construction of NOAA office buildings = JOBS
$100 million for constructing U.S. Marshalls office buildings = JOBS
$300 million for constructing FBI office buildings = JOBS
$800 million for constructing Federal Prison System buildings and facilities = JOBS
$10 million to fight Mexican gunrunners = JOBS
$1.3 billion for NASA (including $450 million for “science9 D at NASA) = JOBS
$100 million to clean up sites used in early U.S. atomic energy program= JOBS
$10 million for urban canals = JOBS
$2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars = JOBS
$1.5 billion for carbon capture projects under sec. 703 of P.L. 110-140 (though section only authorizes $1 billion for five years) = JOBS
$300 million for hybrid and electric cars for federal employees = JOBS
$198 million to design and furnish the DHS headquarters = JOBS
$255 million for “priority procurements” at Coast Guard (polar ice breaker) = JOBS
$500 million for State and local fire stations = JOBS
$180 million for construction of Bureau of Land Management facilities = JOBS
$500 million for wild land fire management = JOBS
$110 million for construction for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service = JOBS
$522 million for construction for the Bureau of Indian Affairs = JOBS
$650 million for abandoned mine sites = JOBS
$75 million for the Smithsonian Institution = JOBS
$1.2 billion for summer jobs for youth = JOBS
$412 million for CDC headquarters = JOBS
$500 million earmark for NIH facilities in Bethesda, MD = JOBS
$160 million for “volunteers” at the Corp. for National and Community Ser vice = JOBS
$750 earmark for the National Computer Center in MD = JOBS
$224 million for International Boundary and Water Commission – U.S. and Mexico = JOBS
$850 million for Amtrak = JOBS
$100 million for lead paint hazard reduction = JOBS

What I can’t understand is how people can be so sightless when the truth is staring them right in the eye, dead in their face but yet they ignore all that is there. When you turn your back on reality for redirect, how pathetic you are to sell yourself and those around out for people who could give a dam about you. I hear people around me every day crying about how they not able to do this or take care of that, kids in school and they can hardly keep up with the house and car payments then there are the doctor, insurance payments layoffs and on and on and you would think that they would understand how simple economics work, well people you need to get past the perception that the GOP and most of the media gives a dam about you. 800 billion dollars spent in Iraq to rebuild the county over there, and that’s what we know about but they want to feed Americans bull, a tax cut won’t do squat for this county and when shit hits the fan all out don’t cry about what the president didn’t do. Look at what you allowed to happen.

Media Matters: Fundamentally flawed stimulus coverage
by Jamison Foser

If there's one fact that should be made clear in every news report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress, it is this: Government spending is stimulative.
That's a basic principle of economics, and understanding it is essential to assessing any stimulus package. So it should be an underlying premise of the media's coverage of the stimulus debate. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. Indeed, reporters routinely suggest that spending is not stimulative.
Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains: "Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple. ... Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy."
Unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don't seem to understand that.
ABC's Charles Gibson portrayed spending and stimulus as opposing concepts in a question to President Obama: "And as you know, there's a lot of people in the public, a lot of members of Congress who think this is pork-stuffed and that it really doesn't stimulate. A lot of people have said it's a spending bill and not a stimulus."
That formulation -- "it's a spending bill and not a stimulus" -- is complete nonsense; it's like saying, "This is a hot fudge sundae, not a dessert." But nonsensical as it is, it has also been quite common in recent news reports.
There's another problem with Gibson's formulation, though -- in describing the stimulus as a "spending bill," he ignores the fact that the bill contains tax cuts, too. Lots and lots of tax cuts. And those tax cuts, by the way, provide less stimulus than government spending on things like food stamps and extending unemployment benefits. It probably goes without saying that Gibson didn't ask if the bill would be more effective if the tax cuts were replaced by additional spending.
MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, among others, has repeatedly suggested "welfare" provisions in the bill wouldn't stimulate the economy. This is the exact opposite of true; those provisions are among the most stimulative things the government can possibly do. There are some fairly obvious reasons why that is true, beginning with the fact that if you give a poor person $100 in food stamps, you can be pretty sure they're going to spend all $100 of it; but if you give a rich person $100 in tax cuts, they probably won't spend much of it at all.
But we needn't rely on logic and common sense to know that welfare spending is stimulative; economists study these things. One such economist is Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, who served as an adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign. Zandi has produced a handy chart showing how much a variety of spending increases and tax cuts would stimulate the economy. According to Zandi, a dollar spent on increasing unemployment benefits yields $1.64 in increased gross domestic product, and a dollar spent on food stamps yields $1.73 in GDP.
As for tax cuts, Zandi says the most effective form is a payroll tax holiday. A one dollar reduction in federal revenues as a result of such a tax holiday would produce a $1.29 increase in GDP -- far less than the benefit realized from extending unemployment benefits, increasing food stamps, providing general aid to state governments, or spending on infrastructure.
Yet if you turn on MSNBC any given morning, you're likely to find Mika Brzezinski saying something like, "I want to look at the plan and how much of it is sort of welfare programs and how much are things that we know, either from history or because economic experts somehow know this, actually stimulates the economy." Or like this: "Does this plan add up to the definition of stimulus? I don't think it does. And I don't question the value of food stamps and helping low-income people pay for college. It just shouldn't be in this bill." Or this: "If you're gonna have welfare programs in this bill, call them welfare programs and pass them, but don't call them facets of the bill meant to stimulate the economy. I do feel like there's some old politics at play here."
There's old politics at play, all right -- the old politics of demonizing "welfare spending" without any regard for the simple truth that such spending not only helps those Americans who are struggling the most feed their families, it also does more to stimulate the economy than anything else you can think of.
What you probably won't see is Mika Brzezinski or Charles Gibson or any other TV reporter suggesting that the tax cuts in the bill are not stimulative and should be stripped -- even though they are less effective as stimulus than unemployment benefits and food stamps.
At this point, it becomes impossible to ignore the elephant in the room: Television anchors like Charles Gibson are not going to qualify for food stamps anytime soon. But they would certainly benefit greatly from some tax cut provisions that wouldn't do nearly as much to stimulate the economy.
(This is not the first time Gibson has shown himself to be badly out of touch on basic economic issues. During a Democratic presidential primary debate, Gibson challenged the candidates on their support for repealing President Bush's tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year by saying that a family in which both parents are schoolteachers would be hit by the repeal. Gibson's cluelessness was so apparent, the audience actually burst out laughing at him.)
So far, the news media's coverage of the stimulus debate has consisted largely of repeating false Republican spin and pontificating about which side has been making their arguments more successfully (all the while ignoring the media's own role in aiding the GOP.)
The bright side is that if reporters care about informing the public, it's pretty easy to do -- they just have to start basing their reports on the true premise that government spending is effective stimulus, rather than on the false premise that it isn't. Everything else flows easily from there; for example, asking Republicans why they want to lard up the bill with less-stimulative tax cuts rather than unemployment benefits.
Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Media: What's This Spending Doing in My Stimulus?
02/04/2009
by Jim Naureckas
There's a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan--which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex--but now it's moved on to anything that...well, it's hard to say exactly what's objectionable about some of the programs media are objecting to.
Take this confused passage from an L.A. Times editorial (2/2/09):
But too many of the items have little apparent connection with economic growth--witness the nearly $5 billion for prevention, wellness, "comparative effectiveness research" and training in the health field, the $2.1 billion for Head Start and the $300 million to improve teacher quality, just to name a few examples from the 647-page House bill. Other provisions, such as the $64 billion for preventing layoffs at schools, colleges and "high priority" state programs, are about saving jobs, not creating them. In the short term, there may be no difference between preventing job cuts and increasing payrolls--one prevents a bad situation from worsening, the other makes a good situation better. But an investment this large should pay long-term dividends by increasing productivity, and that's hard to do when so much of the money is going toward maintaining the status quo.
Let me just say that if you don't see the connection between improving education and increasing productivity, than you really shouldn't be writing editorials about the economy.
Or here's a short item from the New York Times' Science section (2/3/09), a reprint of a blog post by Andrew Revkin:
Both [the Senate and House stimulus] bills would spend "$600 million for accelerating satellite development and acquisition, acquiring climate sensors and climate modeling capacity, and establishing climate data records." They also call for at least $140 million for climate modeling.
Regardless of the merits of such research, does it fit in a bill meant to exploit unoccupied labor in an economic downturn?
The short answer is: yes. A slightly longer answer is provided by economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/3/09):
Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple. There is a question of whether the spending will go to areas that will provide benefits, long-term or short-term, to the economy, but there is no question that money that is spent will create jobs and therefore is stimulus.
Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy.