Tag Archives: GOP

Politics Trumps Both Compassion and Common Sense

Apparently, common sense is fairly uncommon, and compassion is just a word in the dictionary.

The Dallas News recently reported that Texas’ refusal to expand Medicaid and participate in the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) will cause individual health insurance premiums to rise a whopping 9.3%.

The Texas Observer reports that Texas will not only leave 100 billion dollars “on the table,” but the decision will cause a raise in local property taxes. (The burden of emergency medical care generally falls on property taxpayers in Texas–just as it does in Indiana. When people take Mike Pence’s advice and get their “access to care” through the Emergency Room, property taxpayers pay for that unnecessarily-expensive care. )

Fiscal stupidity is one thing. Essentially telling poor people to f**k off is another.

Nearly 7 million adults ages 19 to 64 would qualify for Medicaid in the 25 states that have not voted to expand it, according to an Urban Institute report. Those 7 million people won’t get Medicaid and they won’t get federal help to buy health insurance.

The refusal to expand Medicaid won’t “defund” the Affordable Care Act, or change any of its provisions. The only “message” it will send to Washington is “we’ll show you–we’ll hurt ourselves!”

The bottom line: Rick Perry, Mike Pence and other Republican governors care more about obstructing Obama than about the health of their economies or their citizens.

That’s politics these days. And it’s not only stupid, it’s despicable.

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Excuse Me While I Hit Myself Repeatedly with a Hammer….

A recent post at Maddowblog began with the following observation:

Since so much of the public has no idea what the debt ceiling is, what default is, what bond markets are, or what the full faith and credit of the United States means, polling on the subject just doesn’t tell us much.

The post went on to describe a different sort of poll that proved the point; it asked about the debt ceiling, but phrased the same question two different ways. When asked simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, respondents were pretty evenly split. The second version asked whether Congress should prevent the government from borrowing money in order to pay its debts;  73% of those responding to the question when it was posed that way said such a step would seriously harm the economy, and opposed it. Only 22% approved.

The American people aren’t stupid. When the question is asked using language citizens understand, they resoundingly offer the right answer. The lesson of this–and multiple other examples–is twofold: (1) the public is generally unfamiliar with the language of its own government, with many equating “raising the debt ceiling” with incurring new debt; and (2) polls that politicians reference to “prove” that the American public is on their side of an issue tend to be worthless and/or deceptive.

Thanks to their own extremism and lack of elementary economic knowledge, the Tea Party zealots who have captured one of America’s major parties and the House of Representatives are poised to do substantial damage to the people they have been elected to represent.

Pundits from both Left and Right (even Karl Rove!) predict that the government crisis they are determined to precipitate will create a backlash that can only hurt the GOP, but those warnings are falling on deaf ears. As a friend of mine used to say, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

The broad, sane middle of the American public will need to batten down the hatches and prepare for a totally unnecessary period of fiscal and economic misery–brought to us by people motivated by one and only one “principle”–ensuring that thirty million Americans currently without health insurance don’t get access to healthcare.

And to make sure they don’t, they’re willing to plunge the country into another recession.

Excuse me while I go hit myself some more with that hammer….

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Dear Lord, Where Do They Find These People?

According to Rep. Tom McClintock, there simply is no such thing as white-collar crime.

At a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills, California on Tuesday, a constituent asked McClintock for his “stance on Wall Street criminal practices.” The congressman responded, “Well first of all, for a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It’s pretty simple.”

I think we know what’s simple, and it isn’t the Congressman’s intriguing theory of what it takes to constitute criminal behavior.

Every day, it seems we meet a new officeholding whack-a-doodle.

This week it was Lee Bright calling Lindsey Graham a “community organizer for the Muslims.” Last week, Steve King explained that for every young immigrant who was a valedictorian, there were a hundred others with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Before him, Paul Broun insisted that evolution and climate change were “lies from the mouth of hell.” Rand Paul insists that  black people have no trouble voting–and that despite his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and any and all measures to lift people from poverty, he’s all for equality. And of course, almost every week there’s some new insanity from Louie Gohmert, who Charles Pierce memorably called “perhaps the dumbest mammal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse.”

There’s a new one just about every day. Michelle Bachmann hasn’t even taken her crazy eyes into retirement yet, and literally dozens of her fellow Republican Congresscritters are contending for her title of  “least securely tethered to reality.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

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How Long Can This Continue?

The State, a newspaper in South Carolina, reports that Senator Lindsay Graham–the very right-wing South Carolina Senator who is coming up for re-election–has attracted a primary opponent. Because, you know, Graham is insufficiently insane.

State Sen. Lee Bright announced his candidacy Tuesday for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, calling incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham “a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“During the (congressional) recess, when I would hope that he would be around folks in South Carolina, getting their feelings on so many issues that affect their lives, he has instead chosen to take his time to be a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood and that concerns me,” Bright told supporters in a conference call. “He needs to spend more time listening to what the brothers in South Carolina have to say.”

Increasingly, I feel as though I have fallen down the Rabbit Hole with Alice, or I’m living in one of those science fiction books I used to read, where the protagonist goes to sleep only to wake up in an alternate universe.

Mr. (not very) Bright uses all the dog whistle words: community organizer. Muslim. Next thing you know, he’ll be accusing Graham of having been civil to the President (although he’d be hard pressed to find an example of Graham actually voting for something the President proposed. At this point, if President Obama suggested we endorse the sun continuing to rise in the east, most Republicans would call the very idea “socialism” and oppose it.)

I know we Americans have gone through periods of hysteria and bigotry and self-destructive behaviors before. We just didn’t have the internet and Facebook and blogs to rub our faces in every paranoid utterance, every display of aggressive ignorance and racial animus. I want to believe that this, too, shall pass…..

But I’d feel so much better if someone could assure me that we will come to the end of this cycle of crazy before the harm done becomes irreparable.

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Is This Possible?

It is something akin to an article of faith that white senior citizens are the backbone of the GOP–that they will troop reliably to the polls to support the Grand Old Party even as it regresses into an anti-reason, anti-science cult.  It is overwhelmingly my age cohort (aka “old farts”) that watches Faux News, votes religiously (in both senses of that word), and constitutes the loyal and irreplaceable base of the Republican Party.

I have resigned myself to the probability that improvements in American political life won’t occur until the over-65 generation dies off.  Of course, that inconveniently includes me, but hey–it is what it is. I routinely apologize to my students for the mess my generation is  bequeathing them.

But then I read this! Is it possible?

Carville-Greenberg, the Democratic polling operation, has recently reported growing disaffection with the GOP among the elderly.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

According to Carville-Greenberg, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent) in 2010, but among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the generic Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.) Seventy-one percent of seniors disapprove of the Republicans in Congress. Only 28% of seniors view the GOP favorably, down from 43% in 2010. During that same period of time, seniors’ approval of Democrats actually rose three points, from 37% to 40%.

More than half (55 percent) of seniors say the Republican Party is too extreme, half (52 percent) say it is out of touch, and half (52 percent) say the GOP is dividing the country. Just 10 percent of seniors believe that the Republican Party does not put special interests ahead of ordinary voters.

These numbers, if accurate, reflect a sea change in a constituency that has been the GOP’s most dependable voting bloc.

Evidently, when a party gets crazy enough, even its most loyal foot-soldiers begin to notice.

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