Non-Partisan National Taxpayers Union Report: clinton gets worst pro-taxpayer score ever...

www.ntu.org/news ^ | 3.29.02 | Mia T

[Mia T]

03-28-02

Non-Partisan National Taxpayers Union Report:

clinton gets worst pro-taxpayer score ever recorded for a Senate freshman in 1st year

For Immediate Release Thursday, March 28, 2002
For Further Information, Contact: Pete Sepp or Jerry Terry (703) 683-5700

After Two Years Improvement, Congress's Fiscal Voting Records Edge Downward, Non-Partisan Rating Shows

Two New Yorkers Hillary Clinton & Charles Rangel Bottom Out Senate, House

(Washington, DC) High-profile New York Senator Hillary Clinton helped to lead a decline in Congress's overall pro-taxpayer voting records last year, according to the widely-anticipated annual Rating of Congress released today by the non-partisan National Taxpayers Union (NTU). In spite of 2001s tax cuts, the average lawmaker still voted less than half the time to reduce or control the federal government's burden on taxpayers.

Congress made a promising start for overburdened Americans last year by passing modest tax relief, but the months that followed were a disappointing finish for fiscal responsibility, said NTU President John Berthoud. Congress will need to pay more attention to making every dollar count in 2002, not only for the War on Terror but also for pro-growth tax cuts to get our economy moving again.

In 2001, the average pro-taxpayer score in the House of Representatives was 41 percent down from 2000s mark of 45 percent. Averages also slumped slightly for the Senate, to 46 percent in 2001 versus 47 percent the year before. The worst averages for the 25-year history of the comprehensive NTU scorecard were posted in 1988, when they plummeted to 27 percent and 28 percent, respectively, for the House and Senate. The highest marks were reached in 1995, when House and Senate averages were 58 percent and 57 percent, respectively. Averages had been rising for two years prior to 2001.

The ranks of top scorers designated as Taxpayers Friends remained thin. In 1995, 121 lawmakers attained scores sufficient for a grade of A (and hence Taxpayers Friend). The latest Rating identified far fewer Taxpayers Friends in Congress 65 in all. Meanwhile, 235 Senators and Representatives earned the title of Big Spender, for posting F grades in 2001.

New York Senator Hillary Clinton (D) earned the dubious distinction of being the lowest-scoring member of the Senate in 2001, with a 3 percent. This is the worst score for a Senate freshman in their first year in office that NTU has ever recorded. Fellow New Yorker Charles Rangel (D) nabbed the prize for biggest spender on the House side, with a 6 percent score.

On the other end of the pro-taxpayer scale, the highest scorer in the House was Ron Paul (R-TX), with 88 percent. Paul has claimed the top spot in his chamber for the third year running. In the Senate, Wayne Allard (R-CO) earned the highest honor, also with an 88 percent score. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) finished just a fraction of a point behind Allard, with a rounded score of 88 percent.

Ironically, lower-scoring lawmakers might have helped taxpayers more by flipping a coin when voting, Berthoud observed. NTU computed a score for hypothetical House and Senate members, one in each chamber who simply voted yes and no in sequence on all of the bills in the Rating, and one in each chamber who voted no and yes in sequence. Each of the four virtual lawmakers would have posted scores (from 46 percent to 54 percent) equal to or better than the actual averages.

Unlike those of other organizations, NTUs annual Rating does not simplistically focus on only a handful of equally-weighted key votes. For this reason, it has received praise from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Former Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) has said,

[O]f all the Congressional roll calls published by outside interests, the NTUs is the most comprehensive and the most objective. & In fact, it covers virtually every roll call involving federal money. &The strength of this annual roll call is that it makes no effort to provide a self-serving moral assessment.

The Rating, which is based on every roll call vote affecting fiscal policy, assigns a Taxpayer Score to each Member of Congress that indicates his or her commitment to reducing or controlling federal spending, taxes, debt, and regulation. For 2001, a total of 155 House and 194 Senate roll call votes were selected.

The 335,000-member National Taxpayers Union is a non-profit, non-partisan citizen organization working for lower taxes, less wasteful spending, taxpayer rights, and accountable government at all levels. Note: The 2001 Rating, along with a searchable Rating database from the years 1992-2000, are available online at www.ntu.org.

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Download 2001 Ratings in PDF

Visit NTU's Rating of Congress Home Page

[Mia T]

 

March 28, 2002 -- WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton scored an "F" in her first year in Congress by voting for more new government spending than any of her 99 colleagues, an anti-tax group reports.

Clinton set a record, getting a 3 percent rating for her 2001 voting record, the lowest score ever for a freshman and lower than any other senator, according to the National Taxpayers Union.

Sen. Charles Schumer scored 9 percent, according to the group, which reviewed 194 Senate votes cast last year for their relative impact on taxpayers.

Clinton dismissed the ranking: "Getting a high score from this group would mean cutting billions of dollars in aid for New York," she said through a spokesman.

Among New York House members, the lowest score went to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan), with 6 percent, while Rep. Vito Fossella (R-S.I.) claimed the highest score, 68 percent.

TAX FOES GIVE HILL WORST RATING EVER

New York Post

 

Look, if the Dem leadership and Gore had called for Clinton to resign after he admitted that he lied to the grand jury, the incumbent president Gore would have been elected easily in 2000...no bones about it....and then, where the hell would the country be today? Scary thought.....ken5050

 

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Mark Twain

reckless rodham-clinton-gore reinvention-of-government schemata

KNOWNOTHING VICTIMS RODHAM/CLINTON REVISITED

^{Q ERTY2} "There isn't a shred of evidence."

HILLARY, YOU KNOW, ^{KnowNothing Victim} Q ERTY4 ^{double bagel},

W I D E B O D Y. _{low-center-of-gravity} Dim Bulb, _{Congenital Bottom Feeder}

_{Q ERTY3} ^{zipper-hoisted}

clinton zipper vitiated by obvious spilth

_{Humpty Dummies}

Q ERTY6 _{utter failure} ^{4th-Estate Malfeasance} (DEATH BY MISREPORT)

_{rodham-clinton} ^{reality-check} BUMP!

 

reckless rodham-clinton-gore reinvention-of-government schemata

by Mia T

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mia T]

MARK TWAIN _{Senator Dim Bulb} ^BUMP!

[JohnHuang2]

Thanks for the ping, Mia

[Mia T]

Will the media ever get a chance

to question the self-anointed

listening-tour-'queen'

about her reckless

taxing scheme

as well as the rest of the

reckless rodham-clinton-gore

reinvention-of-government schemata??

 

hillary clinton, Congenital Bottom Feeder, Cowers Below Network Radar, Continues to Subsist on Cozy Clintonoid Interviews of Colmes Kind

by Mia T

EW YORK, Sunday, Feb. 3 -- Rather than courageously confronting major league media, hillary clinton continues to subsist on cozy clintonoid interviews of the Colmes kind. Again today, clinton chose to be interviewed not by George Will et al. on the network ABC show, Sunday Morning with Sam and Cokie, but by second-string clinton lackeys on third-rate local fare that followed Sunday Morning in the New York market.

Clinton failed to exceed local performance parameters with ease, clogging the airwaves with standard-issue clinton claptrap.

By continuing to eschew the politically obligatory Sunday morning circuit and formidable inquisitors like George Will, clinton only encourages the incipient whispers of ineptitude, depravity and failure that are filling the Senate cloakroom.

 

 

In addition to this display of cowardice, ineptitude, depravity and failure, one of the more significant continuous predictors of clinton's political moribundity is clinton's tic-like insertion of "you know."

 

A marker for ineloquence, vulgarity, ignorance, rube-meets-valley-girl demographics, low self-esteem, anxiety and insincerity, clinton "you knows" were less frequent during this interview than during the one conducted on January 17^th by Jeff Greenfield. This result is consistent with the previous finding, that the frequency of clinton "you knows" varies directly with the intensity of interviewer contempt for the clintons and inversely with the magnitude of interviewer softballs.

If hillary clinton continues to secure her politically moribund position via second-string clinton lackeys on third-rate local fare, Mort Sahl put the intellectual--if not the final--nail in the clinton legacy coffin on CNN's first-waterloo last month.

Sahl, the 60s satirist and self-professed "radical independent," who cut his political-eyeteeth at the Hungry i, announced, "I have no desire to meet clinton; with no morality, there's nothing there." That the eponymous Clinton News Network televised the demise only adds to the irony.

By way of contrast, the intrepid iconoclast, who never knew a president he didn't skewer, went on to express pride in knowing "the two Bushes," the Kennedys and Nixon.

So much for the clinton legacy.

The CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme, counterproductive on its face, is now officially dead. If the clintons had any concern for the American aesthetic, they would bury it...and themselves, while they're at it.

 

hillary's head revisited:

hillary clinton's brain (such as it is) II

 by Mia T

The smartest woman in the world would relish "the raucous give and take of American democracy, " as Charles Kuralt once put it.

hillary clinton, by contrast, subsists on cozy clintonoid interviews of the Colmes kind...

In her new book, Political Fictions, Joan Didion indicts the fakery of access journalism practiced by vacant politicos like the clintons, whom she sees as "purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news."

(More Didion: "No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.")

 

 

THE HILLARY, YOU KNOW, CLINTON TRANSCRIPT:

Analyzed and Annotated

 

by Mia T

January 22, 2002

 

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE [YOU KNOW] 'UPDATED'

 

 

ABSTRACT

Background:

Using internal polling, the clinton 'infrastructure' determined that its cozy-clintonoid-interviews-of-the-Colmes/King-kind-scheme is no longer working. The scheme, which successfully shepherded and shielded the vacuous, inept, corrupt clintons for nine years, is now, post-9/11, yielding diminishing returns--and worse--increasing ridicule.

Hence, we had the clinton 'infrastructure' interviewer recalculation last week that specified more interviewer gravitas...and less lapdog...but not more doggedness...that is to say...that specified Jeff Greenfield.

A miscalculation, as it turned out. Greenfield made up in contempt what he lacked in inexorability. (Although he conducted the entire interview circumambulating on eggshells, Greenfield did eventually ask the ugly questions.)

Analysis:

Greenfield's circuitous path to clinton depravity and failure necessitates a nonlinear analysis of the data; we will use a nonlinear least squares curve fitter. Proportional hazards political survival regression analysis will generate a political survival curve for hillary clinton, which will show her viability (so to speak) over time.

Political survival time is defined as the length of the interval between the initial political trial balloon and political moribundity. Political moribundity is defined as two consecutive political failures--(one in the case of 9/11), or three not-necessarily-consecutive boo-filled public appearances, or one instance of a serious proposal generating laughter.

ASIDE: Since by any of these standards, hillary clinton is already flatlined, the more interesting question for this analysis would be: "What the hell is this moribund loser doing in the political arena, anyway?"

Survival is influenced by one or more factors, called "predictors" or "covariates", which may be categorical (such as the quality of 'infrastructure') or continuous (such as intellect or eloquence or character).

Results:

• clinton rigor mortis rendered any discussion of clinton moribundity moot.
• Nonetheless, one of the more significant continuous predictors of political moribundity is clinton's tic-like insertion of "you know," a marker for ineloquence, vulgarity, ignorance, rube-meets-valley-girl demographics, low self-esteem, anxiety and insincerity.
• clinton uttered "you know" 52 times. Greenfield eventually caught the bug and uttered six "you knows," himself. (There is a cautionary tale here for wannabe clintonoid lapdogs.)
• Frequency of clinton "you knows" varied directly with intensity of Greenfield contempt and inversely with magnitude of Greenfield softballs.
• clinton confirmed my hypothesis of Rubin complicity in a clinton coup. See "The Daschle Scheme".

GREENFIELD: Tonight, a conversation with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on the nation and the world after September 11, on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.

THE COMPLETE ANNOTATED INTERVIEW (NB: a very long, you know, download because of the, you know, clinton criminal, you know, redundancy.)

[concerned about politics]

But....but.....Hillary, the smartest woman in the world, said this group was just trying to take funding away from NY.

Why, that would make them part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy group!!!! Right wing radicals!!

[ChaseR]

Thanks for pinging me Mia....BTTT