GOP Strategy 101: Pick On The Little Guy
Religious leaders attempt to remind the so-called religious right that the Bible wasn’t written by Ayn Rand.
While religious conservatives and Republican political leaders gathered at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington this weekend, another group of religious leaders held a small gathering across the street to warn GOP against the perils of the Republican Party’s fiscal priorities.
The leaders — Rev. Jennifer Butler, Jim Wallis, Rev. Derrick Harkins, and Father Clete Kiley — asserted that the GOP efforts to cut funding from many anti-poverty programs while balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest Americans were not in line with Christian values:
They don’t bear the brunt of our fiscal irresponsibility because they didn’t cause it. We did not get into fiscal trouble because of poor people. … The poor didn’t cause this. Let’s not make them pay for it.
(Source: thinkprogress.org)
Saturday, June 04, 2011
GOP Strategy 101: Pick On The Little Guy
Friday, June 03, 2011
OMG! Medicare Is Going Bankrupt
OMG! Medicare Is Going Bankrupt
Eric Zorn of the Chicago Sun Times cracks open the history books, to hilarious effect:
Chicago Tribune July 2, 1969: The Medicare hospital trust fund faces bankruptcy by 1976 and taxes must either be raised or benefits reduced the senate finance committee was told today.
New York Times July 7, 1981: Medicare payroll taxes already imposed by Congress, including two increases scheduled for 1985 and 1986, will only be able to keep the hospital insurance system solvent for eight to 10 more years, three Cabinet officers informed Congress. Even under the Reagan Administration’s highly optimistic economic projections, the fund will be bankrupt before 2000, the three said.
Washington Post,March 6, 1983: Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici warned the nation’s governors the other day, “Medicare can be bankrupt in 2 1/2 years,” unless some way is found to put the brakes on its burgeoning costs.
Chicago Tribune: June 25, 1983: Medicare is in danger of bankruptcy as early as 1986, the system’s trustees declared Friday.
Chicago Tribune, March 10 1984: To avert Medicare’s expected insolvency, a federal advisory council proposed Friday raising the eligibility age to 67, taxing employer paid health insurance benefits and boosting the tax on alcohol and tobacco… the Congressional Budget Office said Medicare may be insolvent in 1989
New York Times, January 20, 1985: In the last few years, when it appeared that the Medicare trust fund would run out of money in 1987-89… But the need seemed less urgent after the Congressional Budget Office issued new estimates last September indicating that the Medicare trust fund would not go bankrupt until 1994.
Chicago Tribune February 6, 1985: Medicare is still expected to go bankrupt in 1991, and a new flood of red tape is not helping America’s hospitals.
New York Times, March 27, 1985: Reagan Administration officials said tonight that new projections showed the Medicare trust fund would not go bankrupt until late in 1990′s.
Chicago Tribune, Nov. 17 1985: Last spring, the government estimated that the Medicare trust fund would run out of money by 1998. Given less optimistic assumptions about the economy, it could happen as soon as 1992
Washington Post, April 1, 1986: The Medicare hospital insurance program faces bankruptcy by 1996, two years earlier than projected last year.
Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1986: Dr. Jerald Schenken of Omaha, an AMA trustee, said the doctors have worked for more than two years on formulating the plan, because they fear the current Medicare system will go bankrupt by the end of the century.
New York Times, May 22, 1988: Reflecting the view of the Reagan Administration, Dr. William L. Roper, the head of the Federal Medicare and Medicaid agency, said, ”With the Medicare Trust Fund expected to go insolvent shortly after 2000, it is hard for us to sign on for a major expansion of the Medicare program beyond the catastrophic care bill.”
New York Times, January 22, 1989: The fund that pays all Government reimbursement for hospital care of Medicare patients is projected to become insolvent in the next decade or so.
Washington Post May 4, 1990: Control of health costs is considered by many experts to be the number one health problem in the United States. Such costs are expected to bankrupt Medicare by the year 2003.
Washington Post December 13, 1994: The trust fund that finances Medicare is projected to become insolvent in the year 2001
Los Angeles Times May 31, 1995: For weeks, Republicans have been talking about a report that warns that Medicare is in danger of going bankrupt in the year 2002.
Chicago Tribune April 25, 1997: Medicare trustees said Thursday that the program providing health care to more than 38 million senior citizens is still headed for bankruptcy in 2001.
Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1999: [The National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare] was created in 1997 to deal with Medicare’s projected bankruptcy in 2008.
Medicare is always about to go belly-up. Always. That is the story the Republicans want to sell you so they can cut your entitlements. The GOP is excellent at creating scenarios that will never happen in order to cut your services.
(Source: oliverwillis.com)
Over 40 years of going bankrupt.
Clarity Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias
"When you transform a program that pays seniors’ medical bills into a program that gives them a voucher that almost certainly isn’t enough to buy adequate insurance, you can call the new scheme Medicare, but it isn’t the same program…. Republicans are proposing to destroy Medicare; saying that clearly isn’t scare tactics, it’s simply pointing out the truth."Paul Krugman, from the aptly named article, “Clarity Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias”.(Source: The New York Times)
Sarah Palin On Paul Revere: Abject Moron
“He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.”
Abject moron.
Friday, May 27, 2011
The GOP Clown Sideshow
The clownish sideshow ring mastered by the fringe GOP candidates is a textbook Catch-22 for the GOP. If party leaders publicly badmouth, marginalize, or ostracize them than that almost certainly will blow the very slender chance they already have of making Obama a one term president. This would be the GOP’s nightmare and Obama’s dream. The GOP thankfully is stuck with its clowns.
Palin, Bachman, Trump, Cain, Perry and Paul know that any utterance, no matter how silly and irrelevant, will be picked up, played up, and endlessly talked about in the mainstream media. Their idolatrous followers love every word from them.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Conservative Radio Is Tanking
Right-wing talk radio may have worn out its welcome, at least for now,” reports Crain’s New York Business.A new Arbitron report shows Rush Limbaugh’s ratings down 33% from a year ago and Sean Hannitty down 28% over the same time period. Meanwhile, more centrist personalities — Don Imus in the morning and John Batchelor at night — were both up from a year earlier.
Nice to see that stupidity is losing it’s appeal.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
GOP: Speak The Truth, Get Snuffed
Newt and I are considered political opposites, but I couldn’t agree more with what he said Sunday about the plan to end Medicare. He acknowledged that it is right wing social engineering. It was refreshing to hear such candor from a top Republican. Gingrich was saying what everyone knows to be true: The plan is extreme.... He is the Republican canary in the coal mine. When that canary speaks truth, he is snuffed out. What Newt seems to realize is that it would be impossible to win the White House if they embrace the Ryan plan. If Republicans make endorsing the Ryan plan the standard in the Republican primary, it will make the nominee unelectable. -- Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Debt Ceiling As Historical Relic
Before 1917, Congress needed to approve each and every debt issuance. But when World War I hit, the legislature decided to make the process easier, setting an overall debt limit and letting Treasury issue as many bonds as it needed to stay within it. A century ago, the ceiling made more sense. The government was smaller, with discretionary spending a bigger portion of the federal budget. Having the additional check helped to keep appropriations under control. But now, the debt ceiling does little to encourage smarter budgeting. Most of the country’s debt stems from spiraling mandatory spending on programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security anyway.” - Anne Lowrey
Annie Lowrey calls it “the budgetary equivalent of the appendix”
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Republicans Hate Medicare
"Republicans … hate Medicare because it represents everything they are philosophically opposed to: a government-run program that works and is popular across the political board. It’s tough to shout about the dangers of universal health care when the two greatest protectors (if not creators) of the elderly middle class are those pillars of 20th-century progressive change, Social Security and Medicare."Tim Egan
Monday, May 16, 2011
Get To Know Mitch Daniels
Mitch Daniels: Architect Of The Bush-Era Debt Crisis
In other words, the “fiscal conservative” Daniels oversaw the federal budget as it was making its precipitous dive from a $236 billion surplus – then on a trajectory to eliminate the entire federal debt in a decade – to a $400 billion deficit by the time he left in June 2003.
Plus, because of proposals developed on Daniels’s watch – such as tax cuts favoring the rich and unpaid-for projects, including the invasion of Iraq and a new prescription drug plan – the fiscal situation of the federal government continued to sink over the ensuing years, plunging to a trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit by the time Bush left office in 2009.
This is the next Republican savior-in-waiting?
Vermont Going Universal
On May 26, Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont is expected to sign legislation that will create universal coverage in the state—eventually. Vermont will use subsidies from the Affordable Care Act to help create a Canada-style system. And its system, or so the theory goes, will become so popular and cheap that the rest of America will want to copy it.
(Source: Slate)
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Libertarianism is every spoiled college kid's dream.
Libertarianism is every spoiled college kid’s dream. Fortunately like most college kids’ dreams, it will never come true.
Libertarianism is the biggest load of bullshit, rivaled only by Ayn Rand and her Objectivist “philosophy”. I like the civil aspect of it - the idea that each person can do what they want as long as it doesn’t violate the rights and privacy of others - it’s the other parts of libertarianism that I don’t care for. Libertarians don’t believe in any kind of regulation of the private sector, they envision a world where corporations can do whatever they want without fear of the government stepping in, as long as it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights. Because as we all know, corporations love nothing more than to respect and uphold the rights of people.
Then there’s their view on national government, which is basically “FUCK DA GUVMENT!” They believe the government’s only function should be national defense and protecting people’s rights, so in their vision, the government would only be comprised of a Department of Defense, a Department of State, a watered down Congress and a weak presidency. Maybe, there might be a Department of Justice, but who knows. Even then, the federal government would have little-to-no actual power or influence, which means people would be at the mercy of their state governments and corporations.
Libertarians like Ron Paul think this is all hunky dory, but let me paint you a picture of what a libertarian America would look like: State governments would be owned by corporations and the rich, like what happened in Wisconsin, but taken to the extreme. The South would be nothing but a series of Christian theocracies where if you’re black, gay or anything else disagreeable, you’ll be imprisoned, run out of the state or just straight up lynched on the spot. If you’re a worker, then you’re so totally fucked, it’s not even funny. No minimum wage, no union, no kind of aid from the state or federal governments. If you’re not rich, you are basically fucked in a libertarian society.
Of course, you could move to one of the better states (if there are any), but traveling would be long and difficult, because without federal money, all the highways, interstates and transportation infrastructure in general is just gone. State governments can’t afford to maintain all this stuff on their own. Hell, it was the federal government that fronted the money to build all that in the first place! Oh sure, there’ll be nice, well maintained roads, but those will only be for the rich who can afford it. You won’t be able to, because the meager salary you’ll be making (remember, no minimum wage in a libertarian society!) will go towards trying to pay your rent or food.
Actually, scratch the rent part, you’ll never be able to afford it. Don’t worry, you won’t be living on the street alone, you’ll have plenty of company, what with all the low-income families! No government assistance means no low-income housing for the poor. State governments would immediately sell all that property to corporations who, in turn, would evict the tenants, bulldoze the houses and build a mall or a gated community or something.
Speaking of selling government-owned property, say goodbye to national parks and state parks as well. What? Those places are full of trees and other resources and denying free enterprise to strip mine those parks for all their lumber, oil and precious metals is so very anti-libertarian!
Welcome to the Libertarian States of America.
(Source: corruptpolitics)
Friday, May 13, 2011
Ate Your Lunch
"I was eating souffle at Rise Restaurant with Laura and two buddies. I excused myself and went home to take the call. Obama simply said ‘Osama Bin Laden is dead.’ … I told Obama, ‘Good call.’"— George W. Bush, on how he learned of bin Laden’s death.
No need to finish his souffle, Obama just ate his lunch.