Free Republic

Opponent Mary Burke weighed down by jobs plan plagiarism allegationsMary Burke weighed down by jobs plan plagiarism allegations. Gov. Scott Walker is casting himself as a turnaround artist, seeking re-election with a pitch to voters that he revamped the state’s spending and business climate in just four years. For a governor with presidential aspirations, it’s a case he’s likely preparing for a national audience as well — but first he’ll have to get through a tighter-than-expected re-election race against Democrat Mary Burke, a former state secretary of commerce. As if that wasn’t enough, analysts say that his race could also...

Democratic candidate for governor Mary Burke stumbled Thursday when asked to define plagiarism and said she had not violated her principles with a jobs plan that includes nearly word-for-word sections that also appear in other candidates' plans. Burke, who is running against GOP Gov. Scott Walker in the Nov. 4 election, also stressed the importance of providing citations in her plan, but an aide said later no changes to the plan would be made. Asked by reporters to define plagiarism, Burke said: "This, this probably, using words, exact words, from a source that doesn't, that isn't cited and isn't attributable."...

MADISON, Wis. — In this week’s Marquette Law School poll, 48 percent of respondents said Madison millionaire Mary Burke, the Democrat’s candidate for governor, has not been clear enough about what she would do if elected. Now it turns out Burke’s signature jobs plan, the one area in which she seemed clear about her intentions, was lifted from others. Buzzfeed, which has had its own PR black eyes with plagiarism, reported late Thursday that Burke’s plan, “Invest for Success” pilfers entire passages from the jobs plans laid out by Delaware Democratic Gov. Jack Markell in 2008, and Democratic gubernatorial candidates...

As I’m writing this, President Obama is doing his usual economic grandstanding routine in Chattanooga, Tennessee — and considering that Amazon just announced that they’re going on an epic hiring spree, their local Chattanooga warehouse is making a mighty convenient backdrop for the president jobs-oriented speech. The president is going on and on about “the ingredients we need” for good jobs, and all of his latest Keynesian stimulus ideas for economic growth, and talking up America’s need to “invest” in the jobs and infrastructure of the future.Funnily enough, courtesy of Obama’s first and biggest round of what we were promised...

Mitt Romney's plan to create 12 million jobs in his first term as president is being criticized as hyperbole, political fantasy, and pie-in-the-sky. But is it? History can help answer the question. But, as has been brought home to us during the presidential campaign, history can be read in different ways. Romney critics can rightly point out that the only times in the postwar era when the U.S. economy generated a net increase of 12 million or more jobs in a period of four consecutive years were during the Ford-Carter years and the Clinton years. From 1976-1979 jobs increased by...

(Reuters) - In a rare display of cooperation, Republicans and Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly approved a limited jobs bill on Wednesday that would help some veterans find work but otherwise do little to bring down the nation's 9 percent unemployment rate. The bill, aimed at government contractors and veterans, is so far the only piece of President Barack Obama's $447 billion job-creation package to clear Congress. Republicans have lined up behind a contrasting agenda of their own ahead of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections. It passed the House of Representatives by a unanimous vote of 422 to 0. Only...

From the folks who brought you “Cut, Cap and Balance” comes a plan to create jobs by growing the economy — not the government. The Republican Study Committee this morning unveiled the Jobs Through Growth Act, a bill that incorporates tax reform, regulatory rollback and boosts to energy production. The legislation builds upon the past work of House Republicans, packaging “the best of the best” into one neat program.Among other things, the bill creates a new optional tax system, in which taxpayers pay just two rates: 25 percent on the first $50,000 of income for single filers or the first...

WASHINGTON – House Speaker John Boehner "respectfully challenged" Barack Obama during a phone call Thursday over statements the president made about the existence of a GOP plan to address the jobs crisis. Obama had called Boehner to congratulate him for passing three trade agreements but, according to Politico, ended up getting pulled up by the speaker for saying earlier Thursday that he had not seen a Republican jobs plan. "I haven't yet seen" a GOP plan that would create jobs in the near term, Obama said at a press conference, adding, "And so, eventually, I'm hoping that they actually put...

David Axelrod’s out doing the hard sell on Barack Obama’s jobs bill — and by “hard sell,” I mean approaching it with all of the honesty of your average used-car salesman pitching the last AMC Gremlin in existence. ABC’s Devin Dwyer reports on Axelrod’s pressure on Congress to pass the bill: As President Obama’s jobs bill heads toward its first test vote in the Senate, senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod says that members of Congress who oppose the measure willingly defy a majority of American voters.“Since introducing the American Jobs Act, the American people have rallied around President Obama’s...

Antihonetus personality disorder (AHPD), more commonly referred to as factualpathy, is described by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as an Axis II personality disorder. It is characterized as a chronic and cerebrally fatal disease, manifested by an obsessive compulsion with disregarding facts and truths. The afflicted will present symptoms of manic cerebral paroxysms caused by a profound phobia of facts or truths. There is currently no known cure or treatment. Contemporary American liberals, and their luminary Barack Obama, possess such repugnance for the Founding Fathers, their founding principles, and anyone in league with them, that they will...

President Barack Obama's latest economic plan could save or create up to 400,000 education jobs, the White House said on Tuesday as Obama pushed his $447 billion plan to revive the economy. Obama's proposed American Jobs Act would provide $30 billion for state and local efforts to retain, rehire and hire educators, supporting 392,400 jobs, according to projections released by the Education Department and White House Council of Economic Advisers. That money would last one to two years and states would have to sign agreements they would not use the funding for other purposes. "We know that putting hundreds of...

Buried in the text of President Obama’s jobs bill is a provision named the “Fair Employment Opportunity Act,” which would make it illegal for employers to discriminate against the unemployed. At a recent town-hall event, the president singled out this provision as a much-needed federal safeguard against businesses’ reluctance to hire, in the words of one softball questioner, “really good candidates that suffered from a downward trend in their credit history due to lack of job opportunities.” Like many of the policies outlined in the president’s plan, the measure sounds like a well-intentioned effort to help the 9 percent of...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner didn't dispute a Harvard economist's estimate that each job in the White House's jobs plan would cost $200,000, but said the pricetag is the wrong way to measure the bill's worth. And he also pointed out, in an interview today with ABC News' David Muir, that there is no other option on the table for getting the economy moving and putting more people back to work. "You've got to think about the costs of the alternatives," Geithner said when asked about Harvard economist Martin Feldstein's calculation that each job created by President Obama's American Jobs Act...

Last week, in the wake of President Obama’s jobs speech, I wrote that the president seemed poised to campaign for re-election on an essentially centrist policy agenda: A short-term payroll tax stimulus, a plan for tax reform that would close loopholes while lowering corporate rates, and a long-term plan for deficit reduction modeled on the grand bargain that the White House and John Boehner were supposedly close to striking during the debt ceiling negotiations. The president’s goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent,...

As expected, the GOP presidential contenders criticized and blistered President Barack Obama's speech, to which he was nearly twenty minutes late, in which he proposed increased taxes as part of his overall economic plan. Businessman Herman Cain's response and statement stood out as the most effective and powerful among all the candidates because it did what few statements and responses do -- actually respond Obama's words. In his speech, Obama said that his proposals did not represent "class warfare" and were more reflective of solid math. Cain seized upon those words and cited his degree in mathemathics and how he...

The GOP calls it 'class warfare,' but the president’s proposal to raise taxes on millionaires is actually a move toward fairness and fiscal sanity. The biggest problem in our politics for the last 30 years has been . . . what? Fill in the blank. Too much spending? Debt to future generations? Cultural politics? None of those. Plain and simple: taxes. The anti-tax revolt that started in 1978 in California (Proposition 13) has destroyed this country. Our taxophobia has made the rich vastly richer and reduced the amount of money for the public benefits the rest of us depend on,...

After getting hammered by Republicans in the debt-ceiling debate, Barack Obama clearly wanted to go on offense with his own deficit-reduction proposal. That opened up the opportunity to go fully populist, blaming the wealthy for not paying their fair share in order to propose massive tax hikes along with his supposedly new ideas for spending reductions. However, the Washington Post reports today that the ideas are not only not new, they won’t meet their targets and don’t actually reduce the deficit much from Obama’s previous proposals — and could derail any serious attempt by Congress to reduce spending in the...

Pres. Barack Obama promised to have a plan to pay for his massive new stimulus bill by Monday. He broke that promise, as he has broken so many others, and remains in the “plan to have a plan” stage of his inscrutable meditations, having only made yet another unsubstantial speech, full of high sentiment and short on details. The president says he wants to ensure that the very wealthy do not pay lower effective tax rates than do the middle-class, and argues that families and businesses earning more than $250,000 in any given year should pay an additional $1,500,000,000,000.00 or...

Back in July President Obama went on national television to deliver a lie filled speech on why we had to raise the debt ceiling. In that speech the president stated that the federal government needed to raise an additional $1.2 trillion in new revenue. First let’s dispel the myth that the government actually does anything to earn revenue. First of all, “revenue” is simply Madison Avenue speak for taxes. The only way the government can receive funds to the treasury is by taking money, by levying taxes, from hard working Americans. More recently the president has been championing his much...

Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) appeared on KDKA in Pittsburgh and said that Obama's 'jobs plan' will not work as presented. Casey believes the president's plan needs to be broken apart and multiple votes will be needed to get anything done. “I’m afraid if we tried to pass one big bill, I think there’s a lot of skepticism about big pieces of legislation with all kinds of different component parts. We should break this up", said Casey.