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You can listen to the audio here or watch it here but Jorge Mesa-Tejada was kind enough to send in some text to buttress the segment on which he spoke about looking over School District Budgets:

HOW TO READ AND UNDERSTAND A SCHOOL BUDGET

 Taxpayers are usually mystified when they are handed out a thick package of charts, tables and numbers when they arrive at School District’s Public Budget Hearings and/or Deliberative Sessions.  How do you cut through all that fog and get to the items that are meaningful to you? How will that affect your taxes next year?

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It seems everyone can be “big hearted” when it isn’t their own money being spent (emphasis mine) but it is ONLY because of the raw naked force of Government demanding it.  The Left is perfectly fine with both the premise (“why ISN’T it moral to force redistribution?”) and the action (“If you don’t, we’ll either take more from you, take your Freedom away and put you into the klink, or (even better), both”).  It seems like the Republicans….

Dear Mr. Obama:

In last-night’s State of the Union address you said “And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it.  If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.”

The premise of your plea is mistaken: raises aren’t given by votes, by you, or by Congress: they’re given only by employers.  And employers must fund these higher payments out of the revenues they earn by competing successfully in markets.  Employers, therefore, can afford to raise their workers’ pay only if their workers become more productive – an outcome that is not achieved by a legislature waving its wand over workers’ paychecks.

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“The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that membership in a labor organizations had fallen to it lowest level yet, comprising just 11.1 percent of all wage and salary workers.  The number was a modest decline of 0.2 percent from the previous year and continues the movement’s gradual decline over the last few decades. It has dropped nine percentage points from its high of 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year the Labor Department began tracking the number.

The BLS’s data showed that just 6.6 percent of private sector workers now belong to a union, while 35.7 percent of all public sector workers — people employed by the government at some level — are members. Overall, there are 14.6 million people in unions, with the private sector ones only slightly exceeding the public sector ones in total numbers, 7.4 million to 7.2 million.”

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David Corn, pretty much far Left as one can get without being BFF with Castro bros (ok, maybe he’s standing between them in that picture over there) is now welcoming Mitt Romney as a brother-in-ideology (reformatted, emphasis mine):

It is time for liberals to cheer Mitt Romney.

Not because his possible entry into the 2016 Republican presidential contest could cause chaos for the GOP. But because Romney, apparently seeing the error of his “severely conservative” ways, has become a progressive crusader. Initial news reports noted that Romney was telling Republicans privately that should he mount a third presidential bid he would run to the right of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, an all-but-announced contender. Yet in public remarks, Romney has been sounding like a born-again lefty. At an investment management conference in Utah this week, Romney told the crowd that a new-and-improved candidate Romney would focus on climate change, poverty, and education.

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“They’ve riddled it with giveaways the super-rich don’t need, denying a break to middle-class families who do.  ‘Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one per cent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth,’ the president demanded.  ‘We can use that money to help more families pay for childcare and send their kids to college.”

‘Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?’ he asked later in his address, ‘or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?’

Obama first wants to hike the capital gains rate on couples making more than $500,000 annually, from 20 to 28 per cent.

ANY time you hear someone say one of these…

• You don’t need that

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“It’s not just the New England Patriots who are dealing with deflated balls right now.“

The context after the jump – and there’s more than a few folk that agree with it

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“I don’t want anybody being day care poor”

Is there ANYTHING that Progressives believe, at this point,  people should do for themselves?  I think not and certainly my taxes, more and more, reflect that.  Certainly, our national debt says that.  As Steve’s favorite (ok, one of them) phrase goes “Is it EVER enough”?  Sadly, no.  I’ve oft decried the notion that has become prevalent the last couple of decades and summarize it this way: why bother to have kids?

Obama launches $80B child care push

President Obama on Thursday detailed a new $80 billion proposal intended to help more families afford child care as part of a post-State of the Union policy push the White House hopes can win over Republicans and independents.  The president called for the federal government to dramatically expand the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that provides states grants for childcare assistance programs to help low- and middle-income families.

“In today’s economy, when having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families, affordable, high-quality child care and early childhood education — these aren’t just nice to have, this is a must-have,” Obama said in remarks at the University of Kansas.

Seriously – what is the point of having kids when someone else always has them?

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Thomas Crown, a former director at Red State, makes it clear why.  I counsel you to go read the whole thing (reformatted and emphasis mine):

The Republican Party was founded on the principle that all human beings are possessed of inherent dignity. In some manner or another, for one hundred and fifty years and more, the Democrat Party has denied this fundamental truth, turning to one group after another to demean, dehumanize, and when possible, simply kill. There is a straight line from the men who went to the bloodiest war in our nation’s history to keep men and women in chains, to the men who donned white hoods to terrorize and hang with the implicit cooperation of elected Democrats, to the party that now fights so that a child can be brutally killed at any time from conception to a crowning head and beyond.

…That gift, like the Republican Party’s patrimony, lies in shambles today. The party — my party for thirty-one years and more, from before I could vote to today — has at long last cast aside the pretenses of three decades. We now know it for what it is: A party that believes government should grow (just not too fast!); that opposes government pork for Democrat-favored industries and loves it for Republican-favored ones; and a party that is comfortable with abortion on demand, all the way to the birth canal, just so long as money isn’t diverted from subsidies for Boeing for it.

In today’s hyper-connected world, it is FAR easier to see what the actions are versus what is preached and said.  And at the national level, they are being found wanting.  The fault is their’s.

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It seems like the Republicans may be looking at us in the base as being all LIVs (Low Information Voters)?  Haven’t they’ve seen what has happened to others in the past that tried this stunt? Reformatted, emphasis mine:

Pro-amnesty Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), in delivering the Republican’s Spanish-language response to the State of the Union (SOTU) address, called on Obama to cooperate with the GOP in crafting “permanent solutions to our immigration system.”  Freshman Rep. Curbelo did not challenge the president on illegal immigration or executive amnesty.  Meanwhile, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) gave an English-language GOP response that did not even mention the word “immigration.”

“We should also work through the proper channels to create permanent solutions to our immigration system — to secure our borders, modernize legal immigration, and strengthen our economy,” Curbelo said in Spanish. “In the past, the president has expressed support for these sort of ideas. Now, we ask him to cooperate with us to approve them.”  This is the fourth year that the Republican party has delivered a State of the Union response in Spanish.  In the past, the Spanish version has been a close translation of the English original. That was not the case this year.

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