Thank you  for building a campaign website!

If you need help, or have any questions,
please Email Cliff Lyon or call 801.274.0882 (24/7)'

Step 1

Step 2

Ed. Note: Opponents of health reform appear to have run out of fresh smears against health insurance reform and have started recycling old debunked attacks. In response to those that brought up this attack that Politifact proved false months ago, we simply bring back this classic Reality Check first published on October 1, 2009.

Last night Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann questioned health insurance reform, raising the spectre of school-based "sex clinics" that would take students to "have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night":

It means that parents will never know what kind of counsel and treatment that their children are receiving.  And as a matter of fact, the bill goes on to say what's going to go on -- comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor acute medical conditions, referrals to follow-up for specialty care -- is that abortion? Does that mean that someone's 13 year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser.

The absurdity of this claim earns high honors from Politifact, a non-partisan research organization: Pants on Fire!

Critics of the Democratic health care proposal have been increasingly raising concerns that the plan would provide taxpayer-subsidized abortions (a claim we address here). The Liberty Counsel, a conservative group, puts a different twist on that concern, alleging that Page 992 of the bill "will establish school-based 'health' clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!"

The claim comes from a long list of items allegedly in the bill that is posted on the group's Web site and has been widely circulated in a chain e-mail. The list looks a lot like one that we checked in July, based partly on blog postings by Peter Fleckenstein on his blog Common Sense from a Common Man . In fact, the Liberty Counsel says it adapted its memo from Fleckenstein's original work.
…

We spoke with Sarah Speller at the Liberty Counsel, who told us that the group had been getting a lot of calls about the memo and that everyone there was very busy as a result. However, she assured us that "as far as our office can tell, everything in the overview is accurate. That's about all I can tell you," she said. "I'm just relaying what I've been told to say."

That's not persuasive. We see no language in the three main versions of the bill that would allow school-based clinics, which have a long history of providing basic health services to underprivileged students, to provide abortions. Nor would the clinics even be new — they have been around for three decades. So we rate the claim Pants on Fire!

From Bloomberg, we learn how China is pushing an ambitious domestic clean economy agenda, planning large scale projects that will keep their citizens employed and civil unrest at bay.

A 20 gigawatt wind farm that will be the world's largest is scheduled for completion by 2020 and, as the Bloomberg article also notes, the country will also be building the world's largest solar installation and embarking on an enormous reforestation project. (They've either been paying attention to the latest research indicating that forests can attract their own rain, or they're just sick to the teeth of the dust storms. Either way, they're being proactive.) For a country that doesn't want to be tied to binding international targets, China's still doing a good job of jumping into the climate problem with both feet.

How could we get there?

First, we obviously have very different economic and social considerations. China has high labor flexibility because they're bringing a lot of people up from nothing and they've made a point of creating jobs for their majority of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, so they've developed a track record of delivering on employment promises. The US job market experience over the past three decades has largely been one of trading downwards in both job quality and availability, leaving an electorate that's sensibly distrustful of the elite's willingness to secure new opportunities for them. Being at different points in our cultural dialogue, the exact same solutions aren't going to work in both countries.

But what about the New Deal, or the Danish model? At the previous link, Meteor Blades of Daily Kos discusses the need for new approaches at the president's upcoming jobs summit and quotes Robert Kuttner, from his book, Obama's Challenges:

On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland, and even the far-right Heritage Foundation ranks Denmark eleventh, giving it demerits only for the size of its public sector. Denmark’s financial markets are clean and transparent, its barrier to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industry policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent, the lowest in the OECD. [Now 4.1%, and the lowest in the OECD – MB.]

On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP socially and has the world’s second-highest tax rate after Sweden, as well as strong trade unions and one of the world’s most equal income distributions. For the half of the GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world’s most creative system of worker retraining.

What makes the flexicurity model both attractive to workers and dynamic for society are six key features: full employment; strong unions recognized as social partners; fairly equal wages among different sectors, so that a shift from manufacturing to service-sector work does not typically entail a pay cut; employer freedom to hire and fire as necessary; a comprehensive income floor; and a set of labor-market programs that spend an astonishing 4.5 percent of Danish GDP on programs such as transitional unemployment assistance, wage subsidies, and highly customized retraining. In return for such spending, the unions actively support both employer flexibility and a set of tough rules to weed out welfare chiselers; workers are understood to have duties as well as rights.

Danish workers don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, or switching jobs, or of being abused by their employers. Denmark clearly has the labor market flexibility and high employment that the Chinese prioritize, but without any of that unpleasant social unrest. Everybody gets what they want, nobody gets left behind.

Why won't we do that? More, why won't we do that so our industrial sector can fearlessly retool to profit from the biggest challenge our species faces?

Climate change is now responsible for so many natural disasters that it's already a major humanitarian crisis. Coastal cities may be washed away, flooding and shifting rainfall threatens food security, and melting ice is already causing water shortages that are projected to get worse.

Solving each of these problems is a job opportunity for millions of people. Indeed, because of the persistent truth that it takes more effort to fix a problem than to avoid it, humans have created an enormous amount of work for ourselves.

All the reasons to move fast on transitioning to an efficient, clean, renewable energy economy are good ones. There's no labor shortage preventing the work from getting underway at once. Most of our international competitors are doing it and making loads of money at it. So again, what's the hold up?

Update: And if we needed one more reason to act urgently to create these new industries, Nouriel Roubini, one of the economists exiled to the hinterlands of polite opinion for the crime of being right, says that under business as usual, the jobs aren't coming back for years. That's a major problem for political incumbents anywhere in the world.

I'm no brilliant, 11th dimensional chess player, but it seems to me that unless Democrats want to fall prey to a 'throw the bums out' sentiment in the next election, they'd better get moving on job creation with a powerful quickness.

It's Time to Put Jobs First

We've got a jobs crisis in this country, and we need to fix it—now!

This fact shouldn't come as a surprise—in fact, a look around our nation makes it painfully obvious. The "official" unemployment rate is 10.2 percent--that's one in every 10 workers without a job—but that doesn't include the millions who have been unemployed and discouraged in the long term, and the millions more who are barely getting by with part-time work.

While millions go without work, some people are talking about "recovery"—as though numbers on Wall Street or profits at the big banks are the same as the real economy for working families. Wrong. We're still in crisis--and if we don't create jobs now, we will slide even further.

We have to put America to work—at good jobs that support families. We've tried out the everything-must-go, trickle-down, bubble economy for the past decade, and it's been a disaster. If we're really going to have a recovery--not just a recovery on Wall Street or for the big banks, but for real people—we absolutely must create new jobs.

Last summer at an event in Ohio, I met a young woman who is facing this crisis head-on. Lacey, who is not yet 20 years old, wants to become a teacher. But after her dad's factory closed and he was laid off, she had to put off her hopes of attending college to help her parents keep a roof over their heads. Lacey took a job in a school cafeteria--until the state budget got cut, and she got laid off, too. After months in which she and her father were both searching for jobs, Lacey said she felt lucky to find a part-time, fast-food job that pays half of what the cafeteria paid. Lacey has more unemployed friends than friends with jobs, and, like a third of workers her age, she's still living with her parents. Here's what Lacey said to me that day:

I wanted to be a teacher to help children get the education they need to get ahead. But now I feel like I'm just going backward myself. I'm really scared for the kids my age. We want to work. We need jobs.

We owe Lacey our support. We owe Lacey and millions like her a future to be hopeful about—not one to be feared. Lacey and her generation could find their future permanently stunted, their potential never fully met. That's unacceptable. We can't afford to let that happen.

The recovery package passed by Congress this year was a major accomplishment, and it saved our country a million jobs, but it only takes us part of the way toward repairing the damage done to our economy. We need serious, active investment in job creation. Our economy has lost more than 8 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007--that's a big hole to fill.

What does our jobs agenda look like? It's based on five key points that will give working families the help they need now and set us on a better course in the long term. Congress and the Obama administration must take these steps to turn around our dangerous slide.

1. We must extend the lifeline for jobless workers. The families who have been hit by this economic crisis are at risk of losing unemployment benefits, food assistance and health care benefits at the end of the year. We need to act now to prevent the human suffering and economic damage that would result.
2. Rebuild America's schools, roads and energy systems. We must put people to work to fix our nation's broken-down school buildings and invest in transportation, green technology, energy efficiency and more.
3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services. State and local governments and school districts have a178 billion budget shortfall this year alone—while the recession creates greater need for their services. States and communities must get help to maintain critical frontline services, prevent massive job cuts and avoid deep damage to education just when our children need it most.
4. Fund jobs in our communities. While workers go without jobs, important work is left undone in our communities. These are not replacements for existing public jobs. They must pay competitive wages and should target distressed communities.
5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street. The bank bailout helped Wall Street, not Main Street. We should put some of the billions of dollars in leftover Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to work creating jobs by enabling community banks to lend money to small- and medium-size businesses. If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs. The administration can act on this immediately.

Families like Lacey's are hurting, and they need support. Millions are losing not only their jobs but also their homes, their health care and their hope. We can't afford to do nothing—America's working families are demanding action now and we intend to fight for them. We'll work with businesses, government and community organizations to make a jobs agenda a reality. We'll call out and fight back against those who would block progress, and we'll work hard to support leaders who do the right thing.

We need jobs now.

.

Washington, D.C. – Appearing on Fox News Sunday this past weekend, Republican Minority Leader John Boehner erroneously claimed that not a single road contract resulting from economic recovery funding had been let in his state of Ohio.  In fact, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported this morning, more than 52 road and bridge infrastructure projects are already approved, amounting to more than $84 million in new spending.   Please see below for a statement from DNC National Press Secretary Hari Sevugan on Boehner’s false claims and unabashed hypocrisy:

“Given that he championed and continues to advocate the very same economic policies that got us into this mess to begin with, perhaps John Boehner just doesn't know what creating new jobs looks like.  Or perhaps he was willfully misleading the public about the effect of the President's economic recovery package to score political points,” said DNC National Press Secretary Hari Sevugan.  “Either way, considering that the Republican 'alternative' included ZERO funding for construction projects, it's the height of hypocrisy for Boehner to criticize the status of these projects at all.  I’d say it’s time for John Boehner to decide who he really represents – the people of Ohio or the 'Party of NO' – but he’s already made that clear through his false and irresponsible claims.”

 Cleveland Plain Dealer: Boehner "Was Wrong" When He Said That There "Hasn't Been A Contract Let" In Ohio By The Economic Recovery. "When U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner told a newscaster Sunday that not a single stimulus-funded road contract in his home state of Ohio had been let, he was wrong. The Ohio Department of Transportation has OK'd 52 stimulus-funded road and bridge projects at a cost of nearly $84 million. Boehner told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that in 'Ohio, the infrastructure dollars that were sent there months ago,' as part of the economic recovery package, 'there hasn't been a contract let, to my knowledge.'" [Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7/7/09, http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1246955468164200.xml&coll=2]

FLASHBACK: Boehner Admitted That Economic Recovery Funds For Construction Projects Would "Create Much-Needed Jobs."  "Congressman John Boehner (R-West Chester) issued the following after federal officials ordered Ohio transportation officials to kill a $57 million slush-fund to study projects and put the money into shovel-ready projects: 'The stated intent of the so-called stimulus package was to create jobs, and certainly a $57 million slush-fund studying projects did nothing to achieve that goal. With Ohio’s unemployment rate the highest it’s been in 25 years,  I’m pleased that federal officials stepped in to order Ohio to use all of its construction dollars for shovel-ready projects that will create much-needed jobs .'" [Rep. Boehner release, 6/15/09, http://boehner.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=132281]

FLASHBACK II: House Republicans' Economic Recovery Package Offered A Host Of Tax-Cutting Measures Instead Of Spending. "Far from rolling over, House Republican leaders are trying to win concessions from President Obama over the massive economic stimulus package and have proffered a bill of their own to put on the negotiating table. The counter-package, which is separate from a substitute amendment already proposed by House Republicans, would shift focus entirely from spending to tax relief. ... Their bill, called the Economic Recovery and Middle-Class Tax Relief Act of 2009, promises a host of tax-cutting measures. It includes a 5 percent 'across the board' income tax cut; an increase in the child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000; a freeze on capital gains and dividends tax rates at 15 percent; and a number of other measures targeted toward businesses. ... House Minority Leader John Boehner dismissed the Democratic proposal as a partisan grab bag driven by 'old liberal spending priorities.'" [Fox News, 1/28/09, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/01/28/house-republicans-push-counter-proposal-stimulus/]

FLASHBACK III: House Republican Economic Recovery Package Was Comprised Almost Entirely Of Tax Cuts. "The party's leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, said the measure "won't create many jobs, but it will create plenty of programs and projects through slow-moving government spending." A GOP alternative, comprised almost entirely of tax cuts, was defeated, 266-170." [AP, 1/28/09, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/28/house-gop-stimulus-plan-h_n_161564.html]

Vice President Biden Applauds Utah for Meeting Recovery Act

Milestone Ahead of Schedule

Utah Obligated Half of Its Highway Funds on March 12

Washington, DC – Vice President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today announced that transportation projects funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) are putting people to work and building a foundation for the country’s long-term economic strength.   

As part of the Administration’s effort to infuse Recovery Act funds swiftly into the economy, states are required under ARRA to obligate 50 percent of their highway funds by June 29, 2009.  Working in coordination with the U.S. Department of Transportation, all 55 U.S. states and territories successfully beat this deadline at least 10 days ahead of schedule.   

Nationwide, to date, $19 billion has been obligated to fund over 5,300 approved for highway and other transportation projects nationwide.  Of those, 1,900 projects are already underway.  Already in Utah, the state has put to work $145.5 million in highway funds - or 97.4 percent – of the funds required under the Act.  

“Our number one priority with the Recovery Act is getting folks back to work – and there is no better way to do that in these early days than by putting shovels in the ground and jump-starting projects like these that create jobs and boost local communities,” said Vice President Biden.  “By delivering on these projects ahead of schedule and under-budget, we have been able to do even more than we expected – create more job opportunities more quickly, with more dollars left over to put toward more projects that put people back on the job.” 

As of today, Utah’s largest ARRA-funded project is a $15.9 million road structural overlay on I-80 in SummitCounty, from Echo Junction to Emery. This 12-mile-long project, about an hour east of Salt Lake City in an economically distressed area, is fully funded by ARRA and will improve safety for motorists along what has become a road with deteriorated conditions.  

Across the country, many transportation projects funded by the Recovery Act are coming in under budget and ahead of schedule.  Reports continue to show that contractor bids to build and repair transportation networks are coming in substantially below the original engineering estimates.  In some cases, thanks to fierce competition for the work, bids are 10, 20 and even 30 percent lower than expected.  That means states are able to stretch taxpayer dollars, completing additional projects and creating even more jobs.  

“Every state not only met the 120-day deadline, they beat it,” said Secretary LaHood.  “This is a testament to the fact that we’re putting money out there quickly and helping to get the economy back on track.”  

President Obama signed ARRA on February 17, 2009, and funding was made available on March 3. ARRA funding for highway projects may be used for restoration, repair, construction, and other activities under the Surface Transportation Program. Each proposed project must be approved by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Governors must certify that proposed projects meet certain conditions and that the state will use ARRA funds in addition to, not in replacement of, state funding of transportation projects. 

Priority is given to projects that are projected to be completed within three years, are located in economically distressed areas, or will maximize job creation and economic benefits.