Texas Republicans want to take millions from HIV prevention and use it to fund abstinence

Texas has the third highest HIV diagnosis rate in the country. Texas is fifth highest in teen pregnancy rates.
 
Republicans in Texas are working on their budget. This past Tuesday they approved an amendment that would cut $3 million from HIV prevention programs and spend that money elsewhere—on abstinence education.

The GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly approved the budget amendment, but not before a tense exchange with Democrats that veered into the unusually personal. Republican state Rep. Stuart Spitzer, a doctor and the amendment's sponsor, at one point defended the change by telling the Texas House that he practiced abstinence until marriage. The first-term lawmaker said he hopes schoolchildren follow his example, saying, "What's good for me is good for a lot of people."

What's good for me is good for a lot of people? Infuriating. So infuriating, in fact, that things got pretty interesting after that little speech.  
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Back on Hill, Ryan Remains a Fiscal Force

Representative Paul D. Ryan, in Washington last week,
resumes his post as the House Budget Committee chairman.

WASHINGTON — Gone is the private jet and the motorcade that swept him from the tarmac to the private hotel entrances. His security staff has been reduced to a few Capitol Police officers, soon to fade away. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin is back to driving his own truck back home, and walking to the House floor here for votes alone, like everyone else.

But while the campaign trappings and the high profile of the national campaign are behind him, Mr. Ryan now finds himself at the center of one of the biggest fiscal negotiations in a generation

Speaker John A. Boehner has tapped Mr. Ryan, who has returned to his post as the House Budget Committee chairman after an unsuccessful run for vice president, to help strike a deal to avoid big tax increases and spending cuts by the end of the year, and to bring along fellow Republicans.

“He helps us toward creating a product,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, “and he helps sell the product.” 

The test will be whether Mr. Ryan — who declined last year to sit on another Congressional committee charged with taming the deficit, in large part because doing so might have hurt his prospects for national office — can make the transition from House budget philosopher to governing heavyweight who can help negotiate a bipartisan deal and sell it to his colleagues.  READ MORE

Will Ties to Pentagon Contractors Push 'Supercommittee' Democrats to Cut Entitlements?

Photo Credit: Department of Defense

AlterNet teams up with Salon and Brave New Foundation to document how Dems on the Congressional "supercommittee" get far more military campaign money and contracts than the GOP.

September 21, 2011

Arizona’s Republican Senator Jon Kyl wasted little time. A member of the bipartisan Congressional “supercommittee” charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions, he did his best to forestall even discussion of cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. “When we had our first meeting the chairman asked, ‘Well what do we think about defense spending?’ and I said, ‘I’m off of the committee if we’re gonna talk about further defense spending,’” he told the audience at a recent forum sponsored by several conservative think tanks.

The Senate Minority Whip may be the most outspoken member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction when it comes to the military budget, but the Democrats currently considering whether to cut the deficit via reductions in defense spending or programs like Medicare and Medicaid have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel, according to an investigation by AlterNet, with assistance from the Brave New Foundation and Salon.com.

Since 2007, Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000. Panel co-chair Senator Patty Murray, for example, has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the super committee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon’s weapons-makers isn’t the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, John Clyburn. An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense’s budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely.
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