It amuses me when cheap labor conservative Republicans blame spending for budget problems. They call for cutting state workers or reducing their pay or cutting programs. In their fantasy land, the Republicans fail to even acknowledge that their beloved tax cuts play a part in shortfalls.
As Media Matters pointed out about a one-sided 60 Minutes report on December 19th:
In 2,600 words about state deficits, you won’t find the phrase “tax cuts.” Instead, CBS adopts the Republican framing that deficits are all about spending — frequently with loaded phrasing like “gold-plated retirement and health care packages.” And throughout the report, CBS allows Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, to launch attacks on unions and make unsupported claims about budget problems, all without ever challenging his assertions and without including substantive disagreement from Christie critics.
And here’s how CBS addressed New Jersey’s pension problems:
It’s also the truth that some of the responsibility for New Jersey’s pension woes lie at the doorstep of the governor’s mansion. Christie and his predecessors have failed to contribute to the state’s share of its pension obligation in 13 of the last 17 years, one of the reasons the fund is going broke. Christie says it’s ancient history.
“We spent too much on everything. We spent too much. We spent money we didn’t have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit cards maxed out, and it’s over. It’s over. We now have to get to the business of climbin’ out of the hole. We’ve been diggin’ it for a decade or more. We’ve gotta climb now, and a climb is harder. Gotta do it,” he said.
You’d never know from CBS’ report that a big part of the reason that “Christie and his predecessors” failed to make required contributions to the pension fund is that they decided to use the money for tax cuts instead. (Like I said, the CBS report takes the GOP-friendly stance that deficits are all about spending, not revenue.)
Former US Senator Mike DeWine was defeated in 2006 for reelection and pretty much disappeared from the political scene. This election season he decided he wanted to be the Ohio Attorney General. He is running against the current holder Richard Cordray. Looking at the first campaign ad DeWine has put out proves he has no idea what the Attorney General really does and he hopes voters won’t know either.
It starts off with a woman named Alice in a courtroom in front of an easel and poster board. Alice’s title says Assistant Prosecutor Greene County. She says Mike DeWine started in the same courtroom as a “Tough on Crime Prosecutor” and that he put rapists, pedophiles, and murders in prison.
He may have had quite a few cases that involved rapists, pedophiles, and murders as he worked in the Prosecutors office from 1972 to 1980. He was elected County Prosecutor in 1976. Greene County Ohio is in the Dayton Metro area and has Wright Patterson AFB and Wright State University but it also has some rural areas. Xenia, the county seat only has 24,000 residents now and back in the 1970’s the county had approximately 125,000 people. By comparison the city of Columbus Ohio – the state capital had approximately 550,000 people in the 1970’s. Even today Greene County only has two court rooms so I doubt DeWine had a heavy case load and if he did he probably had more thefts and domestic disputes to settle than murders and rapes. Not to mention that DeWine hasn’t been in a court room since at least 1980 when he moved to the Ohio State Senate.
In the next segment, Alice points out on the easel that DeWine would stop corruption. Yes, an attorney general is tasked in prosecuting corruption. Okay so he knows part of the job. Or maybe he doesn’t.
In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, DeWine indicated that Cordray should have gotten involved in the corruption probe of Cuyahoga County officials including former county Auditor Frank Russo and Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora.
“We had public corruption, which strikes at the core of the integrity of government, and for almost 10 months you sat on the sidelines,” DeWine told Cordray. “That is not my vision of how this office ought to be run.”
“There is nothing, Mike, you can identify that you would have done. . . that would have furthered the game or advanced the ball,” Cordray shot back, noting that the federal investigation was underway long before he took office. “They didn’t really want state or locals involved because they really weren’t sure where all of this led. I’ve conducted myself so as to be useful to these investigations, not to grandstand or score political points.”
Cordray could have convened the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission to establish a task force to investigate county corruption — perhaps bringing charges under state ethics laws, DeWine suggested. “This is organized crime, he could have convened a task force, he could have said that we need to be involved in this,” he said.
So Mike DeWine would want the state to stick it’s nose into a Federal corruption probe and possibly mess up federal charges just so you can say “we did something”.
Next in the campaign ad, Alice says DeWine will fix the state crime lab. The Attorney General is responsible for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI) that includes the main state criminal lab. DeWine is upset over an issue with delays in DNA testing.
DeWine called the state-run crime lab “the poster child for what is wrong with state government,” saying that there are “huge delays” in processing DNA evidence. He spotlighted a Marietta rape case in which it took 11 months for DNA evidence to be processed.
The problems “didn’t start with Richard Cordray, but they have not been fixed by Richard Cordray,” DeWine said, adding that he would call for an audit and bring in experts to troubleshoot how to improve the crime lab’s efficiency.
The Ohio edition of PolitiFact checked DeWine’s statement on BCI and said it was half true:
We find that DeWine’s statement is accurate when he states that the processing of DNA evidence is currently taking “up to six months,” as at least the Marietta example far exceeds that window. Even Cordray’s own statistics show that processing of DNA evidence stretches beyond six months in about 7 percent of cases, including at least three cases not shipped to an outside lab.
But the BCI statistics Cordray’s office provided show that more than 90 times in 100 the processing time falls somewhat short of “up to” six month mark cited by DeWine. Cordray’s staff also cites records that show that the turnaround time has dropped by about one-third. That’s clearly additional contextual information not given by DeWine that tends to undercut the clear inference of his statement — that DNA cases are dragging on for long stretches of time under Cordray.
Maybe DeWine thinks that the crime lab should operate as fast as the ones on TV. Also an issue with DNA testing doesn’t seem enough to complain that the whole lab needs to be fixed. The lab does a lot more than DNA testing.
Back to Alice.
Next she points out DeWine will “enforce the law” which is what an Attorney General does except in Ohio the AG is focused more on state wide civil crime, state wide commercial fraud, and state appellate cases not violent crimes. Local jurisdictions deal with violent crime. The video shows DeWine standing among police officers as if he is directing them. I would be shocked if any sitting Attorney General would show up at an active crime scene and direct law enforcement personnel unless they have been called in by a local prosecutor or a court and even if that happened the AG wouldn’t show up in person.
The Special Prosecutions Unit is composed of career prosecutors who, at the request of county prosecutors, prosecute serious felony crimes throughout Ohio. The unit may be appointed by the court to serve as a special prosecutor when the county prosecutor has a conflict of interest or may assist a county prosecutor when he requests additional resources. Areas of focus include homicides, child sex offenses, white collar crime, and alleged wrongdoing by public officials.
The day to day job of the state AG is not like a local prosecutor and what cases the office works on is limited.
Of course since DeWine is a Republican he throws in a bone about “protecting jobs”. Alice tells us he won’t “kill jobs or hurt small business with endless lawsuits…”
So let me get this straight. DeWine will enforce the law except if it kills jobs or hurts small business?
Yep he is a Republican – protecting the business interests over the interests of the state.
The commercial is a great example of a GOP candidate making his or her quest for an office more important than the actual day to day operation of the position. My guess is DeWine is hoping the low information voter will assume wrongly that the Ohio Attorney General is suppose to be a tough crime fighter putting away the criminal riffraff – unless that might hurt jobs or small businesses.
By the way, the woman named Alice in the ad is Mike DeWine’s daughter so of course she has no bias at all.
Reminds me of the summer shark attack reports the media feeds on in the slow news time when Congress is on recess. The Cordoba House issue in New York City is like those sensationalize shark attack stories. It allows the Republicans and their media lap dogs to distract us from the real issues like the economy and two wars we are fighting. Of course it happens all the time.
What ticks me off about this is they do this every election cycle. [Republicans] never want to talk about substance, and they get their way– every election cycle we talk about whatever they want to talk about. Our political system fiddles while America burns, and it’s because the Republican message machine dictates the conversation.
In this episode Doug rants about the blatant lies favored by people who are part of the Republican party and he mentions again some upcoming TV shows in the fall and waxes about the coming football season.
The right wing propaganda machine spit out another manufactured outrage about an incident involving the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case from 2008. Not only is it a continuation of the GOP “southern strategy” but it’s also based on false information and omissions. Shocking, right???
The “southern strategy” is basically race baiting to win elections – scare white people about blacks and other minorities.
What the conservative biased media fails to tell you is that there was action taken in the New Black Panthers case and the Bush Department of Justice failed to act on a similar case in 2006.
But Perez noted DOJ’s decision to proceed with default judgment against the man with a weapon [in the New Black Panthers case]
Perez: “[T]hey made the judgment on the merits that we should proceed with the default judgment against the gentleman who was — who had the stick.” Adams’ attack is completely undermined by comments Perez made that were edited out by Kelly. Perez specifically discussed the DOJ’s decision in the Black Panther case to “proceed with the default judgment against the gentleman who was — who had the stick and that the evidence didn’t sustain the case against the national party or the head of the national party for the reasons that we have discussed.”
Perez: “[T]he Department declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” in 2006. In the very testimony Kelly cited, Perez highlighted a case that completely undermines the notion that the DOJ’s decisions in the Black Panthers case were unprecedented or racially motivated. Perez testified that in 2006, the Justice Department “declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” “when three well-known anti-immigrant advocates affiliated with the Minutemen, one of whom was carrying a gun, allegedly intimidated Latino voters at a polling place by approaching several persons, filming them, and advocating and printing voting materials in Spanish.” [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 5/14/10]
Biased media like FOX News regularly trumps up any incident involving minorities but ignores any incident where the perpetrator is white. Here are racists they don’t show you on FOX.
