Much like a Russian opera, the GOP presidential pageant thus far has been a cycle of Republican stalwarts gushing enthusiasm for some new savior, then quickly souring on said savior. Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) , Mitch Daniels, and Jon Huntsman have all gone from rising to fading star at some point or another.
Add Texas Gov. Rick Perry to the conga line of enchantment-dashers.
All through the voter volatility, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney remained the GOP's unsatisfactory default setting.
Warming up in the bullpen, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had become the most recent heart-throb du jour, even though Perry hadn't had a chance to unpin his corsage and take off his prom dress.
But, the most interesting polling information of late came from the Washington Post/Pew Research Center Poll taken Sept. 22-25, confirming yet again that everyone in fact did see the glaringly obvious.
A plurality of Americans believed Republicans were doing more to help the haves rather than the have-nots. Of all respondents, 47% believed the GOP favored the haves, 7% believed the GOP favored the have-nots, and 32% believed Republicans treated both about the same.
Broken down by party affiliation, 72% of Democrats and 46% of Independents figured Republicans were for the rich, while just 20% of Republicans viewed themselves that way. 60% of Republicans felt they were the fairest of all, treating everyone equally.
Meanwhile, folks were telling The Economist/YouGov Poll Sept. 24-27 that the Obama Administration cared about the poor and middle classes, while Republicans cared more for the rich.
53% of respondents felt the Obama Administration was either Very or Somewhat Concerned about issues that affected poor people, while 32% felt the Obama Administration was either Not Very or Not At All Concerned about issues that affected the poor.
People believed Republicans were the Obama Administration's polar opposite, with 33% saying the GOP was either Very of Somewhat Concerned for the poor, while 52% said Republicans were either Not Very or Not At All Concerned for the poor.
Regarding the middle class, 48% thought the Obama Administration was Very/Somewhat Concerned, and 37% Not Very/Not At All Concerned. Again, the GOP was seen as it's antithesis, with 39% believing Republicans Very/Somewhat Concerned for the middle class, and 47% believing Republicans Not Very/Not At All Concerned for the middle class.
When it came to coddling the rich, 46% thought the Obama Administration was Very/Somewhat Concerned about offending upper-class sensitivities, and 36% thought the Obama Administration was Not Very/Not At All Concerned about the rich.
However, a whopping 73% felt Republicans were Very or Somewhat Concerned about the rich, with a majority, 52%, saying Very Concerned for the rich. Only 6% said Republicans were Not At All Concerned for the rich.
52% of the same respondents told The Economist/YouGov they favored raising taxes on those making $250,000 or more a year, and 68% said they favored raising taxes on those making $1 million or more a year, in line with numerous previous polls asking similar questions.
Among those who didn't favor raising taxes on those making gazillions of dollars a year, three new polls revealed the Russian opera angst with their choices to carry the elephant banner against President Barack Obama next fall.
In a situation somehow evocative of the old saw about the two diners at the restaurant where the first one said, "This food isn't very good," to which the second replied "Yes, and the portions are so small," Fox News found that while 50% of respondents felt Obama would lose his re-election bid versus 40% who figured he'd win, only 38% were either Very Impressed or Somewhat Impressed with the current Republican candidates, while 58% were either Not Very or Not At All Impressed with the GOP hopefuls.
Fox News found that the sheen had come off Perry. Awkward performances at recent GOP presidential debates having taken that nice fresh-off-the-showroom new-candidate smell off Perry, and he was the choice of just 19% of Republicans Fox News polled.
Good ol' reliable Mitt Romney plugged along as the choice of 23% of those queried by Fox News. But, Romney had polled at 26% in the same poll in July and August. While Perry had tanked a bit, Romney hadn't prospered. Along with former pizza mogul Herman Cain's recent victory at the Florida Straw Poll, one had to wonder exactly what sort of front-runner Romney was supposed to be.
Cain himself seemed to have gained where Perry had lost, climbing to 17%, with Newt Gingrich (11%), Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) (6%), Jon Huntsman (4%), Bachmann (3%) and Rick Santorum (3%) rounding out the field.
The Economist/YouGov poll gave angst-ridden Republicans more choices, and the field flattened even further. Romney still led, but with only 15%, tied with Christie, followed by Perry (14%), Cain (11%), Palin (8%), Gingrich, Paul and Rudy Guiliani (6%), Bachmann (4%) and Santorum and Huntsman (2%).
CNN/ORC found folks kinder to Perry, holding a narrow lead at 28%, followed by Romney at 21%, Gingrich at 10%, Cain, Palin and Paul tied at 7%, Bachmann at 4%, Santorum at 3% and Huntsman at 1%
For the championship round, CNN/ORC now showed Obama leading all comers, outpacing Romney 49%-48%, Perry 51%-46%, Paul 51%-47%, Bachmann 54%-42%, and Palin 58%-37%.
Everyone kept saying it was still very, very early, which it was, but most people who say that were usually discounting their favorite team being eight games behind at the All Star Break. And, most of those teams never won the World Series. Unless they were the Yankees.
Er, sorry about that, Mitt.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
GOP Pushes RyanCare For All
With the United States Supreme Court, led by five Republican-appointed conservative activists, posed to dismantle President Barack Obama's landmark health care reform law, the GOP has tapped Tea Party stalwart Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to move forward with a new plan to expand his disgraced Medicare couponization scheme to include all Americans.
"While Republicans have advanced many good ideas on health care," Ryan told the conservative Hoover Institute think tank at Stanford University Tuesday, "it is my candid opinion that the party as a whole has yet to coalesce around a complete reform agenda aimed at dealing with the underlying problem - which is runaway inflation in the cost of health care."
Of course, the "many good ideas" all boiled down to more tax breaks for the wealthy, while cutting everyone else off at the knees.
The Politico reported Ryan and the GOP now want to expand their couponization scam to all Americans:
If he's not rich enough to afford a private, individual insurance plan, well, Ryan was a full-fledged Ayn Randian Tea Party zealot, and the Tea Party zealots in the audience at the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential shindig were the ones cheering and hooting for society to "just let him die."
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found the Obama health reform law's mandate to purchase insurance unconstitutional, and the Administration Monday chose not to ask the 11th Circuit to re-hear the case, indicating they were going to take their chances with the Supreme Court.
With a five-justice right-wing majority, the odds that the Supreme Court wouldn't crush Obama's law were somewhere between "none" and the proverbial snowball's chance.
"We know that the first step toward real, bipartisan advances in health policy must start with a full repeal of the president's partisan law," Ryan pontificated. "But the case for repeal must be matched with an even greater intensity by a case for replace..."
In the GOP's 2012 budget proposal, Ryan and Republicans schemed to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office revealed wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
Enraged constituents descended on GOP town hall meetings en masse last spring, demanding Republicans withdraw their Medicare couponization scheme. Ryan himself was besieged and required a police escort to escape a town hall with his skin, but smugly asserted voters had been "overwhelmingly supportive."
Far from contrition, Ryan now aimed to force everyone to buy private health insurance with limited "premium support."
While Medicare was the most efficient deliverer of health care, with administrative costs of just 3%, private, individual health plans were the least efficient, with administrative costs gobbling up 40% of premiums. While Medicare's overhead was limited to the cost of the government employees running it, private insurance overhead was an unlimited frontier of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.
Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly pulled down $13 million in 2009 all by her lonesome. And, that didn't include any fully-loaded corporate jets Wellpoint might have kept warmed up on the tarmac for her. Talk about "administrative costs."
As with any other GOP plan, Ryan's health care plan was just another tax break for the rich, who get a discount off the private plan they were going to buy anyway. In a GOP version of a win-win, Ryan's health care plan was also a giveaway to the insurance industry, which gets all the money that would have gone to Medicare, Medicaid, and employee compensation without having to actually cover anyone for that amount.
As with any GOP version of a win-win, ordinary Americans lost-lost. Most ordinary Americans wouldn't be able to afford the lion's share of monthly premium costs their Ryancare coupons didn't cover. And Americans who didn't have enough income to get tax credits credited, or didn't have jobs at all, a not unlikely circumstance in the current environment, were, well...
Cue the cheering crowd at any GOP presidential debate.
"While Republicans have advanced many good ideas on health care," Ryan told the conservative Hoover Institute think tank at Stanford University Tuesday, "it is my candid opinion that the party as a whole has yet to coalesce around a complete reform agenda aimed at dealing with the underlying problem - which is runaway inflation in the cost of health care."
Of course, the "many good ideas" all boiled down to more tax breaks for the wealthy, while cutting everyone else off at the knees.
The Politico reported Ryan and the GOP now want to expand their couponization scam to all Americans:
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan says it's time for Republicans to rally around a comprehensive "replacement" to President Barack Obama's signature health care reform legislation - with the government giving a limited contribution to help Americans get health coverage.In other words, the GOP aimed not only to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid, but also to alleviate employers of the bothersome bottom line-squeezing practice of offering health care benefits. Then, they'd give everyone a tax credit toward buying private health insurance. In other words, if someone's rich enough to afford a private, individual insurance plan, he'd be rewarded with a nice tax subsidy.
That's the model Ryan wants to apply through Medicare, Medicaid and employer-sponsored health insurance. It's the approach he used earlier this year for Medicare and Medicaid in the House-passed budget, but he now wants to expand it to workplace health insurance by giving people a refundable tax credit to help them buy coverage.
If he's not rich enough to afford a private, individual insurance plan, well, Ryan was a full-fledged Ayn Randian Tea Party zealot, and the Tea Party zealots in the audience at the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential shindig were the ones cheering and hooting for society to "just let him die."
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found the Obama health reform law's mandate to purchase insurance unconstitutional, and the Administration Monday chose not to ask the 11th Circuit to re-hear the case, indicating they were going to take their chances with the Supreme Court.
With a five-justice right-wing majority, the odds that the Supreme Court wouldn't crush Obama's law were somewhere between "none" and the proverbial snowball's chance.
"We know that the first step toward real, bipartisan advances in health policy must start with a full repeal of the president's partisan law," Ryan pontificated. "But the case for repeal must be matched with an even greater intensity by a case for replace..."
In the GOP's 2012 budget proposal, Ryan and Republicans schemed to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office revealed wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
Enraged constituents descended on GOP town hall meetings en masse last spring, demanding Republicans withdraw their Medicare couponization scheme. Ryan himself was besieged and required a police escort to escape a town hall with his skin, but smugly asserted voters had been "overwhelmingly supportive."
Far from contrition, Ryan now aimed to force everyone to buy private health insurance with limited "premium support."
While Medicare was the most efficient deliverer of health care, with administrative costs of just 3%, private, individual health plans were the least efficient, with administrative costs gobbling up 40% of premiums. While Medicare's overhead was limited to the cost of the government employees running it, private insurance overhead was an unlimited frontier of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.
Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly pulled down $13 million in 2009 all by her lonesome. And, that didn't include any fully-loaded corporate jets Wellpoint might have kept warmed up on the tarmac for her. Talk about "administrative costs."
As with any other GOP plan, Ryan's health care plan was just another tax break for the rich, who get a discount off the private plan they were going to buy anyway. In a GOP version of a win-win, Ryan's health care plan was also a giveaway to the insurance industry, which gets all the money that would have gone to Medicare, Medicaid, and employee compensation without having to actually cover anyone for that amount.
As with any GOP version of a win-win, ordinary Americans lost-lost. Most ordinary Americans wouldn't be able to afford the lion's share of monthly premium costs their Ryancare coupons didn't cover. And Americans who didn't have enough income to get tax credits credited, or didn't have jobs at all, a not unlikely circumstance in the current environment, were, well...
Cue the cheering crowd at any GOP presidential debate.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Obama Hopes Extremist Republicans Not Reflective of America
Addressing supporters at a California fund-raising event Sunday, President Barack Obama hoped Republicans who cheered for the deaths of uninsured Americans and denied climate change science weren't representative of America.
"I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately?" Obama asked the San Jose, CA crowd. "You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care. And booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay."
"You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change," Obama said. The President offered, "That's not reflective of who we are."
It was, however, exactly who Republicans were.
The Republican breed, drunk with hostage-taking victories, have boldly revealed their true natures. At the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential grandstanding show, the audience cheered when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) whether society should abandon the uninsured and "just let them die."
Flexing their gay-bashing muscles, the audience booed gay service members in Iraq.
"Sadly, the audiences seem representative of what the Republican Party has devolved into," West Virginia State Delegate Nancy Guthrie (D) said of the GOP debate audiences, "and it reflects a very low point in our democracy."
"The audiences don't just appear this way, they are more and more becoming this way," North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern (D) told the Politico.
Iowa State Rep. Josh Byrnes (R) said of the debate crowds,"These are overblown and not representative of mainstream Republicans." He was probably right, as the debate audiences were likely made up of the most civil, well-behaved Republicans. They weren't even carrying firearms.
In the Republican Party, extremism was the new mainstream. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained unapologetic about his disgraced scheme to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless discount coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
"So here's the problem: if you don't address these issues now, they're going to steamroll us as a country," Ryan pontificated on CNN. "And the issue the more you delay fixing these problems, the uglier the solutions are going to be."
Which, of course, was why it was imperative that the nation stop coddling its millionaires and billionaires and start taxing them. Poll after poll revealed nearly seven in ten Americans agreed this was the case, but the other three were Republicans who'd hijacked the government, taken the American people hostage, and regularly ranted about Jesus.
Republicans have rejected making the rich pay taxes, and have obstructed every effort to reform revenue. Instead, they increasingly threatened the nation with increasingly ugly "solutions." Clearly, at some point, they'll eventually get to a Final one.
Typical Republicans not only cheered the prospect of locking the sick and injured out of hospitals if they weren't wealthy enough to pay, they routinely roamed southwestern deserts in pickup trucks hoping to shoot Hispanics, and regularly spouted Bible verses while denying climate change and evolution under the guise of religious freedom.
"I'm shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts," European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard told the Copenhagen Post. "And, when you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it's difficult to take."
GOP Presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry regularly slammed climate change science while shilling for the oil companies, and rival Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) believed sustainability was a United Nations plot to destroy America by forcing white people to take public transit and live among blacks in inner cities.
These were the Republicans winning the laurel wreaths and bathing in the cheers of adoring sycophants. These were the Republican valedictorians.
Rank and file Republicans were toting firearms and feverishly reciting Bible verses after generations of being home-schooled on hate and twisted misconceptions about Christ. Rank and file Republicans were routinely sending their own kids to Christian torture camps to be beaten into accepting right-wing orthodoxy.
Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of an omnipotent ruling class wielding an impoverished and propaganda-indoctrinated peasantry to plunder at will. Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of divinely-anointed warlords reigning over bloodthirsty mobs eager to murder and pillage everyone around them.
There was no hope a Republican breed that tortured their own children for the sake of ideological orthodoxy could be made to accept that torturing foreigners and persons of color was wrong. There was no hope a Republican breed that dismissed science as heresy would ever accept climate change, evolution, or the common ancestry of all humans.
The Republican breed rejected evolution to preserve a supernatural basis for white supremacy. The Republican ruling class manipulated that rejection into a rejection of all science to bolster a climate-destroying fossil fuel industry. The Republican breed rejected civil rights as an assault on white supremacy. The Republican ruling class exploited that hate in a campaign against governance so the wealthy could evade taxes.
Obama hoped they were not reflective of the majority of Americans. After all, there was no hope they would change.
"I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately?" Obama asked the San Jose, CA crowd. "You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care. And booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay."
"You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change," Obama said. The President offered, "That's not reflective of who we are."
It was, however, exactly who Republicans were.
The Republican breed, drunk with hostage-taking victories, have boldly revealed their true natures. At the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential grandstanding show, the audience cheered when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) whether society should abandon the uninsured and "just let them die."
Flexing their gay-bashing muscles, the audience booed gay service members in Iraq.
"Sadly, the audiences seem representative of what the Republican Party has devolved into," West Virginia State Delegate Nancy Guthrie (D) said of the GOP debate audiences, "and it reflects a very low point in our democracy."
"The audiences don't just appear this way, they are more and more becoming this way," North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern (D) told the Politico.
Iowa State Rep. Josh Byrnes (R) said of the debate crowds,"These are overblown and not representative of mainstream Republicans." He was probably right, as the debate audiences were likely made up of the most civil, well-behaved Republicans. They weren't even carrying firearms.
In the Republican Party, extremism was the new mainstream. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained unapologetic about his disgraced scheme to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless discount coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.
"So here's the problem: if you don't address these issues now, they're going to steamroll us as a country," Ryan pontificated on CNN. "And the issue the more you delay fixing these problems, the uglier the solutions are going to be."
Which, of course, was why it was imperative that the nation stop coddling its millionaires and billionaires and start taxing them. Poll after poll revealed nearly seven in ten Americans agreed this was the case, but the other three were Republicans who'd hijacked the government, taken the American people hostage, and regularly ranted about Jesus.
Republicans have rejected making the rich pay taxes, and have obstructed every effort to reform revenue. Instead, they increasingly threatened the nation with increasingly ugly "solutions." Clearly, at some point, they'll eventually get to a Final one.
Typical Republicans not only cheered the prospect of locking the sick and injured out of hospitals if they weren't wealthy enough to pay, they routinely roamed southwestern deserts in pickup trucks hoping to shoot Hispanics, and regularly spouted Bible verses while denying climate change and evolution under the guise of religious freedom.
"I'm shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts," European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard told the Copenhagen Post. "And, when you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it's difficult to take."
GOP Presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry regularly slammed climate change science while shilling for the oil companies, and rival Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) believed sustainability was a United Nations plot to destroy America by forcing white people to take public transit and live among blacks in inner cities.
These were the Republicans winning the laurel wreaths and bathing in the cheers of adoring sycophants. These were the Republican valedictorians.
Rank and file Republicans were toting firearms and feverishly reciting Bible verses after generations of being home-schooled on hate and twisted misconceptions about Christ. Rank and file Republicans were routinely sending their own kids to Christian torture camps to be beaten into accepting right-wing orthodoxy.
Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of an omnipotent ruling class wielding an impoverished and propaganda-indoctrinated peasantry to plunder at will. Republicans have resurrected the medieval social order of divinely-anointed warlords reigning over bloodthirsty mobs eager to murder and pillage everyone around them.
There was no hope a Republican breed that tortured their own children for the sake of ideological orthodoxy could be made to accept that torturing foreigners and persons of color was wrong. There was no hope a Republican breed that dismissed science as heresy would ever accept climate change, evolution, or the common ancestry of all humans.
The Republican breed rejected evolution to preserve a supernatural basis for white supremacy. The Republican ruling class manipulated that rejection into a rejection of all science to bolster a climate-destroying fossil fuel industry. The Republican breed rejected civil rights as an assault on white supremacy. The Republican ruling class exploited that hate in a campaign against governance so the wealthy could evade taxes.
Obama hoped they were not reflective of the majority of Americans. After all, there was no hope they would change.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
GOP Takes Disaster Victims Hostage, Demand Job-Slashing Ransom
Scuttling off into the night, House Republicans fled the Washington, D.C. scene late Thursday night after grabbing the nation's disaster victims hostage and issuing a ransom demand of $1.6 billion. Republican kidnappers had earlier in the week fallen out over how much ransom to demand, as some in the gang figured their original demand for $1.5 billion from a successful auto industry job-creation program wasn't enough. In the end, Republicans upped their ransom demand to $1.6 billion, adding $100 million from another Energy Department program that guaranteed clean energy loans.
In a bipartisan 59-36 vote Friday, the Senate quickly rejected the House GOP's demand for $1.6 billion from those programs in exchange for $3.65 billion in disaster relief. Even conservative stalwarts at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were appalled at the GOP perfidy, warning that cutting those programs would eliminate thousands of jobs.
Republicans attached the disaster relief to the continuing resolution that funded the government beyond Sept. 30, yet again threatening yet another shutdown if they didn't get their way.
"While we moved a responsible bill, it's time for the Senate to move the House-passed bill," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters Friday after his minions had fled town for a week-long recess, making negotiating the ransom demand impossible. "It is really the most responsible thing to do, and any delay that occurs because of inaction by the Senate will only imperil the needed disaster relief for thousands of families all across the country."
"There has never been an offset for disaster assistance," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reminded everyone.
"We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday. Unless Congress could agree to a temporary resolution to keep funding the government, it could be forced to shut down in October.
"Listen, there's no threat of a government shutdown," Boehner had said Thursday. "As long as our demands are met," no one heard him mutter under his breath.
Republicans demanded that Americans choose between funding tornado, earthquake, hurricane and flood relief and funding relief from the economic disaster Republicans fomented with their fiscal policies.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted Americans to give up rebuilding their economy so his wealthy cronies in Virginia's 7th Congressional District could get pricey makeovers for their McMansions. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) wanted Americans to abandon a program that moved production of the Ford Focus from Mexico to Michigan and the Nissan Leaf from Japan to Tennessee so her state could get money to rebuild houses destroyed by a flooding on a floodplain.
"Disaster assistance is absolutely critical for my district," whined Emerson, who apparently didn't give a fig about the unemployment disaster she was exacerbating by gutting the job-creation program.
Cantor and Emerson hated that the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program they wanted to gut had already created 40,000 jobs, reviving an entire industry that didn't just build cars, but all the parts that went into them. Cantor and Emerson and Republicans hated that the auto industry provided ordinary Americans with good-paying jobs that actually let them buy the things they made.
"Again, while the Chamber understands the importance of reducing America's unacceptable debt and believes that all programs must be on the table," said Bruce Josten for the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "the Chamber urges you to bear in mind the facts about the ATVM loan program, which promotes manufacturing in the U.S...."
Cantor and Emerson didn't want the American economy to be revived while Barack Obama was president. Cantor and Emerson and all their GOP ilk not only didn't want to revive an auto industry that had showed the world how to build cars, they didn't want to revive a nation that had given the world the car culture, with LA freeways and hot rods and low riders and muscle cars and beach music and drive-ins and fuzzy dice and tuck-and-roll and Candy Apple Red and Suzanne Somers in a white T-bird.
Cantor and Emerson figured America should just give all that up and subcontract it out to Korea.
Cantor and the people of Virginia's 7th Congressional District believed they were entitled to millions in disaster relief, but that people elsewhere weren't entitled to relief from the GOP economic disaster. Emerson and the people of Missouri's 8th Congressional District figured they were entitled to rebuild over and over on a floodplain, but people elsewhere weren't entitled to rebuild the nation's economy.
Given that the Commonwealth of Virginia already received $1.51 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised, perhaps America should just get on with remaking its auto industry and tell Virginians they'd already gotten as much as they were going to get. Given that the great state of Missouri already received $1.32 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised, perhaps America just should get on with revitalizing its car culture and tell Missourians to go jump in their floodplain.
Cantor and Emerson and the Republican breed figured Americans should just hand all their money to the GOP and die of cervical cancer, as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wanted by withholding HPV vaccine, or die of any disease, injury, or illness, as the cheering, hooting audience at the CNN/Tea Party presidential debate Sept 12 wanted by witholding medicare care from the uninsured and insurable, or simply be consigned since childhood to the GOP-shielded torture camps secreted in Emerson's Missouri backwoods.
Or, Americans could just ditch the GOP, and drive off in that white T-bird.
In a bipartisan 59-36 vote Friday, the Senate quickly rejected the House GOP's demand for $1.6 billion from those programs in exchange for $3.65 billion in disaster relief. Even conservative stalwarts at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were appalled at the GOP perfidy, warning that cutting those programs would eliminate thousands of jobs.
Republicans attached the disaster relief to the continuing resolution that funded the government beyond Sept. 30, yet again threatening yet another shutdown if they didn't get their way.
"While we moved a responsible bill, it's time for the Senate to move the House-passed bill," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters Friday after his minions had fled town for a week-long recess, making negotiating the ransom demand impossible. "It is really the most responsible thing to do, and any delay that occurs because of inaction by the Senate will only imperil the needed disaster relief for thousands of families all across the country."
"There has never been an offset for disaster assistance," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reminded everyone.
"We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday. Unless Congress could agree to a temporary resolution to keep funding the government, it could be forced to shut down in October.
"Listen, there's no threat of a government shutdown," Boehner had said Thursday. "As long as our demands are met," no one heard him mutter under his breath.
Republicans demanded that Americans choose between funding tornado, earthquake, hurricane and flood relief and funding relief from the economic disaster Republicans fomented with their fiscal policies.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted Americans to give up rebuilding their economy so his wealthy cronies in Virginia's 7th Congressional District could get pricey makeovers for their McMansions. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) wanted Americans to abandon a program that moved production of the Ford Focus from Mexico to Michigan and the Nissan Leaf from Japan to Tennessee so her state could get money to rebuild houses destroyed by a flooding on a floodplain.
"Disaster assistance is absolutely critical for my district," whined Emerson, who apparently didn't give a fig about the unemployment disaster she was exacerbating by gutting the job-creation program.
Cantor and Emerson hated that the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program they wanted to gut had already created 40,000 jobs, reviving an entire industry that didn't just build cars, but all the parts that went into them. Cantor and Emerson and Republicans hated that the auto industry provided ordinary Americans with good-paying jobs that actually let them buy the things they made.
"Again, while the Chamber understands the importance of reducing America's unacceptable debt and believes that all programs must be on the table," said Bruce Josten for the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "the Chamber urges you to bear in mind the facts about the ATVM loan program, which promotes manufacturing in the U.S...."
Cantor and Emerson didn't want the American economy to be revived while Barack Obama was president. Cantor and Emerson and all their GOP ilk not only didn't want to revive an auto industry that had showed the world how to build cars, they didn't want to revive a nation that had given the world the car culture, with LA freeways and hot rods and low riders and muscle cars and beach music and drive-ins and fuzzy dice and tuck-and-roll and Candy Apple Red and Suzanne Somers in a white T-bird.
Cantor and Emerson figured America should just give all that up and subcontract it out to Korea.
Cantor and the people of Virginia's 7th Congressional District believed they were entitled to millions in disaster relief, but that people elsewhere weren't entitled to relief from the GOP economic disaster. Emerson and the people of Missouri's 8th Congressional District figured they were entitled to rebuild over and over on a floodplain, but people elsewhere weren't entitled to rebuild the nation's economy.
Given that the Commonwealth of Virginia already received $1.51 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised, perhaps America should just get on with remaking its auto industry and tell Virginians they'd already gotten as much as they were going to get. Given that the great state of Missouri already received $1.32 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised, perhaps America just should get on with revitalizing its car culture and tell Missourians to go jump in their floodplain.
Cantor and Emerson and the Republican breed figured Americans should just hand all their money to the GOP and die of cervical cancer, as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wanted by withholding HPV vaccine, or die of any disease, injury, or illness, as the cheering, hooting audience at the CNN/Tea Party presidential debate Sept 12 wanted by witholding medicare care from the uninsured and insurable, or simply be consigned since childhood to the GOP-shielded torture camps secreted in Emerson's Missouri backwoods.
Or, Americans could just ditch the GOP, and drive off in that white T-bird.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
GOP Kidnap Disaster Victims In Third Hostage Take-Over
Failed Hostage Vote Leaves GOP Leaders Red-Faced
Needing to pay for disasters that wrecked the East Coast last month and to fund government operations past Sept. 30, House Republicans once again proved they were incapable of counting votes, drafting responsible legislation, or even passing their own bills. Taking the nation hostage yet again, this time Republicans couldn't even agree what their ransom demands were.
A Republican race so vile that presidential aspirant Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) casually condemned a yet unknown number of women to die from cervical cancer so she could score points with the Luddite anti-vaccine crowd; so reprehensible that hundreds of Tea Party zealots at last week's nationally-televised GOP presidential debate cheered for abandoning the uninsured to misery and death; so unspeakably evil that thousands of rabid GOP evangelical supremacists routinely consigned their own children to brutal torture camps secreted across the South and Mountain West, will try again Thursday to fulfill House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's vision of axing $1.5 billion from an auto industry jobs program so his wealthy cronies can get lavish makeovers for their Virginia McMansions.
Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) were red-faced when their first stab at taking disaster relief hostage so they could gut more American jobs failed to muster the required yeas to permit another GOP football-spiking, booty-shaking, finger-shooting end zone dance. They'd schemed to tack the disaster relief onto the continuing resolution needed to keep the government funded after Sept. 30, with the $1.5 billion theft of job-creation funds lurking inside it like the chest-bursting monster from the Alien movies.
Republicans wanted to restrict disaster relief for recent hurricane, flood, and earthquake damage to a paltry $3.65 billion, short of what was needed to address the multiple catastrophes that plagued the East Coast, but apparently sufficient to gussy up the overpriced tract houses Cantor's well-heeled supporters lurked in throughout Virginia's 7th Congressional District.
Knowing his pals couldn't enjoy their new Carrera marble counters and new Mpingo-wood decks unless they knew that getting them had caused children to go hungry and mothers to cry in anguish, Cantor aimed to raid $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which had already created 40,000 jobs. Plundering nearly half the remaining money set aside for that Bush-era job-creation project would certainly add to the economic misery endemic across the nation and add to his pals' enjoyment of their new McMansion makeovers, Cantor reasoned. Furthermore, it would prevent building more energy-efficient cars in America, earning a tip of the cap from oil moguls everywhere.
Unfortunately for evil-doers everywhere, the GOP scheme failed to pass muster Wednesday. Demonstrating yet again the GOP leadership had been ditching class and swilling beer down by the levee during third-grade arithmetic, their bill went down to ignominious defeat in the House of Representatives, 230-195. 48 Republicans joined all but six Democrats in opposing the scheme.
"We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year," complained Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). He told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "They can't get together the basic Republican votes on the House side to even pass the continuing resolution they agreed to just a few weeks ago, let alone some disaster aid for a country that's been hard-hit by a lot of disasters."
Many Republicans voted against the measure because it hadn't included more spending cuts to offset the disaster relief. More cuts would likely violate spending agreements forged in the debt-ceiling deal, but if Republicans couldn't speak with forked tongues, they'd never get to speak at all.
The greater problem was that some Republicans actually realised the disaster funding was inadequate, and figured it shouldn't be offset with cuts elsewhere.
However, many contrite Republicans promised their leadership they would vote for the bill given a mulligan.
"So far, not enough has switched," Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told the Hill. "A number of them did stand up and say they would vote yes, so that's what the Speaker has to decide over the next few hours: Are there enough to go with the offset we had yesterday, or if not, then we'll have to go with no offsets."
Over in the Senate side, Harry Reid (D-NV) had won passage of a disaster relief measure with bipartisan support, 62-37. Ten Republicans joined Democrats to pass a much more realistic $6.9 billion disaster relief package without requiring cuts to other programs.
Any crazy House GOP scheme that shorted disaster spending and gutted vital job-creation programs to pay for Virginia McMansion expansions was doomed in the Senate.
"We don't know what they're going to do over there today," said Reid.
Clearly, Republicans didn't know what they were doing either. They, along with everyone else, just knew it was going to be evil.
Needing to pay for disasters that wrecked the East Coast last month and to fund government operations past Sept. 30, House Republicans once again proved they were incapable of counting votes, drafting responsible legislation, or even passing their own bills. Taking the nation hostage yet again, this time Republicans couldn't even agree what their ransom demands were.
A Republican race so vile that presidential aspirant Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) casually condemned a yet unknown number of women to die from cervical cancer so she could score points with the Luddite anti-vaccine crowd; so reprehensible that hundreds of Tea Party zealots at last week's nationally-televised GOP presidential debate cheered for abandoning the uninsured to misery and death; so unspeakably evil that thousands of rabid GOP evangelical supremacists routinely consigned their own children to brutal torture camps secreted across the South and Mountain West, will try again Thursday to fulfill House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's vision of axing $1.5 billion from an auto industry jobs program so his wealthy cronies can get lavish makeovers for their Virginia McMansions.
Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) were red-faced when their first stab at taking disaster relief hostage so they could gut more American jobs failed to muster the required yeas to permit another GOP football-spiking, booty-shaking, finger-shooting end zone dance. They'd schemed to tack the disaster relief onto the continuing resolution needed to keep the government funded after Sept. 30, with the $1.5 billion theft of job-creation funds lurking inside it like the chest-bursting monster from the Alien movies.
Republicans wanted to restrict disaster relief for recent hurricane, flood, and earthquake damage to a paltry $3.65 billion, short of what was needed to address the multiple catastrophes that plagued the East Coast, but apparently sufficient to gussy up the overpriced tract houses Cantor's well-heeled supporters lurked in throughout Virginia's 7th Congressional District.
Knowing his pals couldn't enjoy their new Carrera marble counters and new Mpingo-wood decks unless they knew that getting them had caused children to go hungry and mothers to cry in anguish, Cantor aimed to raid $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which had already created 40,000 jobs. Plundering nearly half the remaining money set aside for that Bush-era job-creation project would certainly add to the economic misery endemic across the nation and add to his pals' enjoyment of their new McMansion makeovers, Cantor reasoned. Furthermore, it would prevent building more energy-efficient cars in America, earning a tip of the cap from oil moguls everywhere.
Unfortunately for evil-doers everywhere, the GOP scheme failed to pass muster Wednesday. Demonstrating yet again the GOP leadership had been ditching class and swilling beer down by the levee during third-grade arithmetic, their bill went down to ignominious defeat in the House of Representatives, 230-195. 48 Republicans joined all but six Democrats in opposing the scheme.
"We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year," complained Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). He told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "They can't get together the basic Republican votes on the House side to even pass the continuing resolution they agreed to just a few weeks ago, let alone some disaster aid for a country that's been hard-hit by a lot of disasters."
Many Republicans voted against the measure because it hadn't included more spending cuts to offset the disaster relief. More cuts would likely violate spending agreements forged in the debt-ceiling deal, but if Republicans couldn't speak with forked tongues, they'd never get to speak at all.
The greater problem was that some Republicans actually realised the disaster funding was inadequate, and figured it shouldn't be offset with cuts elsewhere.
However, many contrite Republicans promised their leadership they would vote for the bill given a mulligan.
"So far, not enough has switched," Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told the Hill. "A number of them did stand up and say they would vote yes, so that's what the Speaker has to decide over the next few hours: Are there enough to go with the offset we had yesterday, or if not, then we'll have to go with no offsets."
Over in the Senate side, Harry Reid (D-NV) had won passage of a disaster relief measure with bipartisan support, 62-37. Ten Republicans joined Democrats to pass a much more realistic $6.9 billion disaster relief package without requiring cuts to other programs.
Any crazy House GOP scheme that shorted disaster spending and gutted vital job-creation programs to pay for Virginia McMansion expansions was doomed in the Senate.
"We don't know what they're going to do over there today," said Reid.
Clearly, Republicans didn't know what they were doing either. They, along with everyone else, just knew it was going to be evil.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Poll Finds Obama Deficit Reduction, Jobs Plans Popular
The deficit reduction and jobs plans President Barack Obama recently proposed, dead long before arrival among Republicans focused on obstructing anything except more tax cuts for their rich cronies, at least appeared popular with ordinary Americans.
One of the most popular items among proposals that sought to trim $3 trillion off the federal deficit while kick-starting the economy was the so-called Buffett Rule, which aimed to guarantee millionaires and billionaires paid taxes at least at the same rate as everyone else.
A new Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 66% of respondents favored the President's plan to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year, in line with nearly two dozen previous polls that found most Americans wanted the rich to pay their fair share to reduce the nation's debts or shore up entitlements. Another 32% of respondents turned out to be Republicans.
Even more popular was Obama's proposal to increase taxes on corporations by closing loopholes. 70% favored that idea, while 26% were opposed. A chunk of Republicans apparently didn't understand the question, probably because they couldn't imagine anyone asking whether corporate loopholes should be closed. It was GOP intransigence on adjusting the depreciation rate for corporate jets - not eliminating the deduction for corporate jets, as any sane person would demand, but just making it take longer to write them off - that scuttled deficit reduction talks during the debt ceiling hostage crisis.
Those polled favored five of six other Obama proposals:
Even Republicans among the respondents favored five of the eight proposals, rejecting only the tax hikes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year; the extension of unemployment benefits; and reducing Social Security taxes.
65% of those polled figured Obama's jobs plan would help create more jobs at least a little, including 27% who believed it would help a lot. 60% felt Obama's jobs plan would help the economy at least a little, including 23% who felt it would help a lot.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was exasperated. "Unfortunately, what we've seen now is the president has made a decision that he's going to go into full campaign mode now, 14 months before the election," he sputtered Wednesday as a reporter for the Hill scribbled down his whining.
God forbid the President of the United States advocate the wishes of the American people.
The Politico reported the so-called moderate intelligentsia was up in arms as well, claiming Obama had abandoned his centrist position and caved in to the left. First off, 'moderate intelligensia' was an oxymoron, and secondly, Obama hadn't come anywhere near, let alone caved in to, the left.
In fact, in a right-of-center nation, Obama was clearly espousing a right-of-center position, thus nailing the two-thirds nodding thoughtfully. The so-called moderate intelligentsia and their self-styled centrism appeared actually to be somewhere to the right of Louis XVI, who himself was to the right of Louis XIV. To be precise, the so-called moderate intelligentsia appeared more like the fawning courtiers brown-nosing and toadying up to Louis XVI. Their concept of centrism appeared to consist of protesting symbolically before caving in to whoever had 85% of all the wealth, then letting them add another hundred rooms and six hundred fountains to their Versailles.'
Republicans, meanwhile, appeared politically somewhere between Genghis and Kublai Khan.
While Obama's proposals fell far short of doing all the right things in all the right ways, he at least took a couple baby steps in the right direction. Although Obama failed to raise taxes on the rich enough to pay off everything that needed paying off, and failed to cut the unconscionably high taxes on the poor and middle classes (see sidebar), he at least acknowledged the rich ought to pay at least a little more. Although Obama failed to put forth plans to fix the $2 trillion in infrastructure needing repairs, or even to plug the $1 trillion hole in the nation's economy, he at least tried to get some potholes filled and get a few classrooms brought up to code. Although Obama failed to call for the kind of revenue recirculation and spending the nation really needed to haul it out of the doldrums, he at least proposed a few measures incenting business to hire a few more unemployed.
You can't get much more right-of-center than that.
The Christian Science Monitor's calculator-and-spreadsheet gang figured out that Obama's plan didn't reduce the deficit by as much as the President claimed, as the $1.6 trillion in additional revenue the Buffett Rule and other tax hikes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year was actually being counted after renewing all the Bush tax cuts as well as Alternative Minimum Tax relief, which were both deficit-financed.
Doing nothing and just letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 would have reduced the deficit more.
However, the CSM figured it was a darned sight better than anything Republicans wanted, which was more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for the very, very rich paid for by exterminating all Americans through dismantling health care (axing Medicare, Medicaid, and, eventually, employer-provided insurance, because, why the heck should they bother?), eliminating old age pensions (raiding Social Security and anything a union or employer might provide, because why shouldn't the rich plunder anything they could plunder?), and reducing the nation to a toxic wasteland (nixing the EPA and abolishing cumbersome "job-destroying" regulations).
Republicans still weren't going to pass anything the President proposed anyway, unless the President was ready to be "serious" by Republican standards, which meant lavishing more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies on the very, very rich, allowing them to plunder Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and requiring everyone to burn as much fossil fuel as inefficiently as possible.
Thus, so long as Republicans weren't going to allow the President do anything anyway, Obama might as well go into full campaign mode. As the real right-of-center candidate.
One of the most popular items among proposals that sought to trim $3 trillion off the federal deficit while kick-starting the economy was the so-called Buffett Rule, which aimed to guarantee millionaires and billionaires paid taxes at least at the same rate as everyone else.
A new Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 66% of respondents favored the President's plan to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year, in line with nearly two dozen previous polls that found most Americans wanted the rich to pay their fair share to reduce the nation's debts or shore up entitlements. Another 32% of respondents turned out to be Republicans.
Even more popular was Obama's proposal to increase taxes on corporations by closing loopholes. 70% favored that idea, while 26% were opposed. A chunk of Republicans apparently didn't understand the question, probably because they couldn't imagine anyone asking whether corporate loopholes should be closed. It was GOP intransigence on adjusting the depreciation rate for corporate jets - not eliminating the deduction for corporate jets, as any sane person would demand, but just making it take longer to write them off - that scuttled deficit reduction talks during the debt ceiling hostage crisis.
Those polled favored five of six other Obama proposals:
- Tax cuts for small businesses, including hiring incentives, was favored 85% to 13%.
- Providing additional funds to hire teachers, cops and firefighters was favored 75% to 25%.
- Tax breaks for hiring those unemployed longer than six months was favored 73% to 26%.
- Additional funding for public works projects, including fixing up 30,000 schools, was favored 72% to 27%.
- Extending unemployment insurance benefits was favored 56% to 41%.
Even Republicans among the respondents favored five of the eight proposals, rejecting only the tax hikes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year; the extension of unemployment benefits; and reducing Social Security taxes.
65% of those polled figured Obama's jobs plan would help create more jobs at least a little, including 27% who believed it would help a lot. 60% felt Obama's jobs plan would help the economy at least a little, including 23% who felt it would help a lot.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was exasperated. "Unfortunately, what we've seen now is the president has made a decision that he's going to go into full campaign mode now, 14 months before the election," he sputtered Wednesday as a reporter for the Hill scribbled down his whining.
God forbid the President of the United States advocate the wishes of the American people.
The Politico reported the so-called moderate intelligentsia was up in arms as well, claiming Obama had abandoned his centrist position and caved in to the left. First off, 'moderate intelligensia' was an oxymoron, and secondly, Obama hadn't come anywhere near, let alone caved in to, the left.
In fact, in a right-of-center nation, Obama was clearly espousing a right-of-center position, thus nailing the two-thirds nodding thoughtfully. The so-called moderate intelligentsia and their self-styled centrism appeared actually to be somewhere to the right of Louis XVI, who himself was to the right of Louis XIV. To be precise, the so-called moderate intelligentsia appeared more like the fawning courtiers brown-nosing and toadying up to Louis XVI. Their concept of centrism appeared to consist of protesting symbolically before caving in to whoever had 85% of all the wealth, then letting them add another hundred rooms and six hundred fountains to their Versailles.'
Republicans, meanwhile, appeared politically somewhere between Genghis and Kublai Khan.
While Obama's proposals fell far short of doing all the right things in all the right ways, he at least took a couple baby steps in the right direction. Although Obama failed to raise taxes on the rich enough to pay off everything that needed paying off, and failed to cut the unconscionably high taxes on the poor and middle classes (see sidebar), he at least acknowledged the rich ought to pay at least a little more. Although Obama failed to put forth plans to fix the $2 trillion in infrastructure needing repairs, or even to plug the $1 trillion hole in the nation's economy, he at least tried to get some potholes filled and get a few classrooms brought up to code. Although Obama failed to call for the kind of revenue recirculation and spending the nation really needed to haul it out of the doldrums, he at least proposed a few measures incenting business to hire a few more unemployed.
You can't get much more right-of-center than that.
The Christian Science Monitor's calculator-and-spreadsheet gang figured out that Obama's plan didn't reduce the deficit by as much as the President claimed, as the $1.6 trillion in additional revenue the Buffett Rule and other tax hikes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year was actually being counted after renewing all the Bush tax cuts as well as Alternative Minimum Tax relief, which were both deficit-financed.
Doing nothing and just letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 would have reduced the deficit more.
However, the CSM figured it was a darned sight better than anything Republicans wanted, which was more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for the very, very rich paid for by exterminating all Americans through dismantling health care (axing Medicare, Medicaid, and, eventually, employer-provided insurance, because, why the heck should they bother?), eliminating old age pensions (raiding Social Security and anything a union or employer might provide, because why shouldn't the rich plunder anything they could plunder?), and reducing the nation to a toxic wasteland (nixing the EPA and abolishing cumbersome "job-destroying" regulations).
Republicans still weren't going to pass anything the President proposed anyway, unless the President was ready to be "serious" by Republican standards, which meant lavishing more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies on the very, very rich, allowing them to plunder Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and requiring everyone to burn as much fossil fuel as inefficiently as possible.
Thus, so long as Republicans weren't going to allow the President do anything anyway, Obama might as well go into full campaign mode. As the real right-of-center candidate.
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