Month: October 2013

Timothy Egan: GOP on the wrong side of history

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Related to an earlier post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, Timothy Egan at the New York Times writes today, Wrong Side of History:

Screenshot-9In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a
paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of
Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the
National Institutes of Health.

And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a
“slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as
tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying
to say it’s not their fault.

It’s too late. They flunked hostage-taking. About 30 or so
Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while
breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants
who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. The headline, today
and 50 years from now, will be the same: Republicans closed the
government to keep millions of their fellow Americans from getting
affordable health care.

They are not righteous rebels or principled provocateurs. They are
not constitutionalists, using the ruling framework built by the
founders. Just the opposite: they are a militant fringe of one party in
one house of Congress in one branch of government trying to nullify an
established law by extortion. This is not the design of the
Constitution.

The coverage gap in ‘ObamaCare’ is due to red state sabotage

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The red states continue to vote against their own economic best interests because of "freedom!" to be ignorant and poor.

Non Sequitur

The New York Times breaks down the coverage gap in "ObamaCare" due to red state governors and legislatures sabotaging coverage for their poor citizens (with an assist from the Roberts Supreme Court on making participation in expanded Medicaid optional). Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of
Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single
mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have
insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to
help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have
declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical
insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million
Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The
federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less
than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people
with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on
the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are
poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has
income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

Demographics-map

Interactive map Where Poor and Uninsured Americans Live

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are
home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of
poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the
country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those
excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’
aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion —
many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of
poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H.
Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is
their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to
the entire health care system.”

Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A friend sent me a link to an interview on All In with Chris Hayes, in which Hayes interviewed Michael Lofgren who spent 28 years working in Congress, the last 16 of which as a senior analyst for the House and Senate Budget Committees, and who penned this controversial opinion two years ago for Truth Out, Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult; and Bruce Bartlett, former senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, and former deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in the George H.W. Bush administration.

These are Republicans with impeccable credentials who have had enough of the radical extremism of the modern Republican Party. Transcript for Tuesday, October 1:

MICHAEL LOFGREN: [T]this is not the 80s. This is something new. The party that I joined was the party of Lincoln, the party of Theodore Roosevelt. The party of Eisenhower. These were patriots all. They were for one nation, indivisible.

Now, what we have an insurrectionist, neo-Confederate party that seems
dedicated to all kinds of apocalyptic outcomes. I don`t know whether this comes from their fundamentalist religious outlook, or whether it`s just good fundraising for them among their base. But they are no longer a normal political party. They are an insurrectionist party that is bringing down the government.

* * *

[I] think what we`re really seeing here is a crisis of democracy, where one party believes its principles are so correct, so strong and the other party`s principles are so evil that we`re essentially talking about God compromising with Satan, and you can`t
do that, and therefore, they`re justified by using any means necessary, perhaps even revolutionary or military means, to get their way, despite the fact that the majority disagrees with them.

They don`t think that that matters in the slightest. The truth of their principles is the only thing that matters to them.

* * *

HAYES: Mike, you said the word "insurrectionist". And I want to ask you about the evolution from a normal party to what you called a not normal party.

How did that happen? What is the rupture? What`s the break that happened to create the conditions for a party to start acting in a way the current modern Republican Party is acting?

LOFGREN: Well, I would say Newt Gingrich`s speakership in 1995 was a weigh station on road to this what we have now.

But I would also say that the GOP as it exists now is kind of a Frankenstein monster that was created by the twin shocks of 9/11 and the financial meltdown in 2008, because 9/11 sort released a lot of unpleasant things in the American id, a kind of absolutism of good versus evil, a kind of totalitarian outlook. We`ve seen this with the NSA.

And then the 2008 crash was similar to the Great Depression in many countries. We were lucky. We had FDR. Many countries went violently to the right.

Candidates and committees update

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By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings

…In unsurprising news, AZ House Speaker Andy Tobin (R-Paulden) announced that he is running for the CD1 seat currently held by Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick.

In
the press release touting his candidacy, Tobin took a page from DC
Republicans and blamed Kirkpatrick for the Republicans' shutdown of the
federal government, including operations at the Grand Canyon.

From the above-linked Tucson Weekly story, written by Jim Nintzel –

"Kirkpatrick is so committed to protecting ObamaCare and supporting Nancy
Pelosi, she has literally voted to shut down the Grand Canyon.”

 It's
not true, and I daresay that Tobin is intelligent enough to know that
it isn't true, but this tactic of pointing accusatory fingers at others
(like, say…Democrats) to distract from their own failings.

We saw a prime example of this locally in 2007 when Tobin's former legislative colleague Jack Harper accused then-Congressman Harry Mitchell, a Democrat, of ignoring deplorable conditions at the Arizona *State* Veterans Home.

At
the time, Mitchell was a newly-minted member of Congress and chair of
the investigation subcommittee of the US House's Veterans' Committee.

Harper was a long-time member of the Arizona legislature and the chair of the AZ Senate's Government Committee.

Guess which one had more jurisdiction over the conditions at the AZ State Veterans Home? 

Hint: it wasn't Mitchell, but the truth didn't slow down Harper then any more than the truth is slowing down Tobin now.

Housekeeping
stuff: Any FEC filings by Tobin aren't on their website yet.  Remember
that government shutdown that Tobin blames on Kirkpatrick? 🙂

 

An Epidemic of Wrongful Convictions

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Posted by Bob Lord A few weeks ago, I posted on the Debra Milke case. Her murder conviction, based almost exclusively on the testimony of a dishonest cop, was thrown out. The prosecution had concealed exculpatory evidence.  Today, I read in the Phoenix New Times how a 77 year-old man, wrongly convicted of murder in … Read more