Republicans Are Never Ever Lying Hypocrites About Public Policy and Government

Health Care Reform Hypocrisy: States Suing Government Willing To Claim Subsidies From Law

More than half a dozen states suing to overturn President Barack Obama's health care law are also claiming its subsidies for covering retired state government employees, according to a list released Tuesday by the administration.

About 2,000 employers have been approved for the extra help to cover early retirees, mainly private businesses. But the list also includes seven states suing to overturn the health care overhaul as an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government.

The seven are Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and Nevada.

They are part of a group of 20 states that have challenged the law's requirement for most Americans to carry health insurance or face fines from the IRS. They argue that government cannot order individuals to buy a particular product. The administration counters that the mandate falls within broad powers conferred on Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

A spokeswoman said Indiana's Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels disapproves of Obama's overhaul, but will take advantage of specific provisions that benefit his state.

"Congress approved health care reform and the president signed it into law. Gov. Daniels does not agree with it, but Indiana will seek funds that help Hoosiers when there are no complicated strings or costs attached," said press secretary Jane Jankowski.

The list of employers who have expressed an interest in the subsidies includes about half the Fortune 500 companies, as well as state and local governments, educational institutions, unions and nonprofit organizations, the administration said. A total of 16 states have been approved, and more are expected to apply.

As medical costs soared in the last 20 years, employers have dramatically scaled back retiree health coverage. The share of large companies providing the benefit dropped from 66 percent in 1988 to 29 percent last year.

"Not only has this coverage disappeared, but individuals between 55 and 64 who are pre-Medicare are really struggling with the private health insurance market," said Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius. "This is one of the most vulnerable populations." Insurers usually charge older adults several times more than what people in their 30s and 40s pay.

To try to stabilize a precarious situation, the health care law provides $5 billion to help employers maintain coverage for early retirees age 55 and older but not yet eligible for Medicare.

The government subsidy amounts to 80 percent of medical claims between $15,000 and $90,000 – significant assistance to help cover high-cost retirees and eligible family members.

Companies can use the federal money to lower their own costs, or pass on the savings to their retirees through lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. Firms that receive federal help have to formally notify their retirees that they've gotten a subsidy.

The retiree assistance is designed as temporary relief until the health care law is fully in place in 2014. That's when competitive insurance markets will open for business, and eligible individuals can get government tax credits to help pay premiums. It's unclear what would happen if the $5 billion runs out before 2014.

The private employers approved for the subsidy include Levi Strauss, United Airlines, Kellogg Co., Mattel, Hewlett-Packard and Dow Chemical, to name a few.

Its an open secret that right-wing wackos like the tea nuts don't let register in their petty hateful brains because that would mean their elected leaders and the corporations headed by conservatives are using the tea nuts. IF ONLY MINNESOTANS WERE AS IMPORTANT AS PAWLENTY'S AMBITIONS....

The heads of Minnesota's most influential medical associations -- which nearly always keep political matters at arms' length -- issued a sharp rebuke. "The governor's decision just doesn't make sense for Minnesotans," the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, the Minnesota Hospital Association and the Minnesota Medical Association said in a joint statement late Tuesday.

That's clearly true, but this gambit has nothing to do with making sense for Minnesotans, and everything to do with pandering to right-wing activists in Iowa and New Hampshire. Pawlenty's constituents will not get aid available to other Americans, but his campaign will get a talking point.

Hari Sevugan, the DNC's press secretary, said in a statement, "After rejecting $7.8 billion dollars for his cash-strapped state where taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet and denying health care to a quarter million of his fellow Minnesotans, Tim Pawlenty's executive order to state employees might as well have read 'You will henceforth work for my Presidential ambitions instead of the people of Minnesota.'"

Glenn Beck Civil Rights Icon?

Glenn Beck Civil Rights Icon?

My gripe with Glenn Beck has always been with his absurd attempt to claim a connection to Tom Paine.

The furiously self-promotional Fox personality wrote a book last year that he suggested was a contemporary update of Paine's pamphlet "Common Sense."

In fact, Glenn Beck's Common Sense [1] was short on Paine and long on Beck. And it failed to note the founder's canon of criticism of organized religion, concentrated wealth and know-nothing opponents of government. [2]

But, as silly as Beck's attempt to claim Paine might have been, his attempt to associate himself with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a radical critic of not just racism but of an economic system left tens of millions in poverty, would be comic if it was not so sad.

Beck and his followers say they are out to "reclaim the civil rights movement."

Reclaim it from who? Presumably the people who were involved in the civil rights movement.

As Martin Luther King III notes [3]: "My father championed free speech. He would be the first to say that those participating in Beck's rally have the right to express their views. But his dream rejected hateful rhetoric and all forms of bigotry or discrimination, whether directed at race, faith, nationality, sexual orientation or political beliefs. He envisioned a world where all people would recognize one another as sisters and brothers in the human family. Throughout his life he advocated compassion for the poor, nonviolence, respect for the dignity of all people and peace for humanity.

"Although he was a profoundly religious man, my father did not claim to have an exclusionary 'plan' that laid out God's word for only one group or ideology. He marched side by side with members of every religious faith. Like Abraham Lincoln, my father did not claim that God was on his side; he prayed humbly that he was on God's side.

"He did, however, wholeheartedly embrace the "social gospel." His spiritual and intellectual mentors included the great theologians of the social gospel Walter Rauschenbush and Howard Thurman. He said that any religion that is not concerned about the poor and disadvantaged, 'the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them[,] is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.' In his 'Dream' speech, my father paraphrased the prophet Amos, saying, 'We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.'"

Beck talks in riddles and at a dog whistle like frequency only his genuflecting followers can decode. One minute he stands for everything from victory over the Japanese during WII ( by a liberal president) to being against every advance made in public policy from protecting children from sweat shop labor to Social Security. But the right worships him and Palin like gods - than tell us they think for themselves. Time for a name change that reflects the truth - wacky sheep herd instead of "conservatives".

Glenn Beck says he venerates Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and others -- but for a thoroughly phony reason

Glenn Beck says he venerates Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and others -- but for a thoroughly phony reason

Since announcing Saturday's "Restoring Honor" rally, Glenn Beck has steadfastly maintained that it's not a political rally.

In the promotional video "We Need Heroes," he claims, "This has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with -- who are we?" He venerates "our sacred American heroes and ideas" and proclaims that "we need a George Washington, or a Thomas Jefferson, or a Ben Franklin." Images of Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King provide a backdrop to a single word: honor.

Beck claims to be restoring not only honor, but truth: to be setting the record straight on liberal revisionist history. But his history is the most revisionist of all.

By invoking great American leaders in a call for apolitical heroism, Beck seeks to whitewash the political struggles and debates of earlier eras: to suggest that our finest leaders have always been above politics, and that to achieve their greatness, we need to rise above politics and do "the right thing."

It's certainly true that Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, King were great orators, philosophers, writers and leaders. But they were also great politicians, and to pretend otherwise is to disown the most enduring legacy of American history: that political expression, action and leadership are essential to the health of our democracy.

Benjamin Franklin was not only an eccentric, bespectacled paragon of virtue and wit, but also an active politician whose career included a stint as a speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly during which he fought the Penn family for control of the then-colony.

Thomas Jefferson was not only an eloquent writer and great philosopher, but also an ambitious political schemer. During his time as Washington’s secretary of state, Jefferson fought bitterly with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over fiscal policy and political philosophy, even seeking, unsuccessfully, to remove Hamilton from office through accusations of corruption and ineptitude. Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, now part of the core curriculum of high school American history classes, were essentially political propaganda, the product of the fierce battles waged between Jefferson and Hamilton in the newspapers and pamphlets that constituted the chief media outlets of the day.

George Washington, however revered, was unable to bring about peace in his Cabinet, and privately worried: "I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved." Washington, who disliked political parties and political maneuvering, is the only one of Beck’s heroes to whom the term "apolitical" can even remotely be applied. But still, he sided with Hamilton more often than not and feared Jefferson’s rise to power after his resignation.

Abraham Lincoln was politically ambitious, and agonized over his political defeats. He was a product of the party system and an important figure in the Whig Party first, and then the Republican Party. Lincoln used his legendary debating skills to make brilliant -- and political -- arguments against slavery and the dissolution of the Union. But his position on slavery evolved gradually in response to shifting political conditions: He initially opposed only the extension of slavery to new Western states, and only endorsed emancipation outright once he believed it necessary for the restoration of the Union.

If anything, some of the strategies used by Beck’s heroes are more troublesome than those utilized today. We would not, for example, look favorably on a politician who purchased a supportive newspaper, as Lincoln did in 1859, nor condone the appointment of sympathetic journalists to Cabinet positions, a tactic that Jefferson utilized in his struggles against Hamilton.

Finally, King, though never a candidate for office, was one of the great political organizers of American history. His legacy has largely been whitewashed since his death; he has been stripped of any hint of radicalism, controversy or political savvy to be hailed as a saintlike figure. His "I Have a Dream" speech has likewise been distilled in the public consciousness to the most nonthreatening, apolitical aspects -- images of white and black children joining hands in the spirit of brotherhood, of multicolored harmony. But previous lines speak of voting and economic mobility, of police brutality and the "marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community," of jail cells and slums. It is a politically challenging address, just as King was a politically challenging thinker and leader.

Conversely, Beck's is a sanitized, easy-to-swallow vision of political change: some people -- the Lincolns and Jeffersons of the world -- are simply right. (Never mind that some of Beck’s heroes hold conflicting beliefs.)

The Right does not do facts much less complicated personalities - many of whom were the kind of intellectual elite that modern right-wing conservatives hate.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie gives new meaning to the word hypocrite - and film-flam artist for that matter.

Estimated Impact of the Stimulus Package on Employment and Economic Output

Estimated Impact of the Stimulus Package on Employment and Economic Output

CBO’s Estimates of ARRA’s Impact on Employment and Economic Output

Looking at recorded spending to date as well as estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies on the economy and using various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. On that basis, CBO estimates that in the second quarter of calendar year 2010, ARRA’s policies:

* Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,
* Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,
* Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and
* Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

Democrats do not have to brag about how great things are - obviously the economy could be better - but they can brag about stopping the massive hemorrhaging left by the Republican management of the economy.

Are Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) now officially idiots - Dire Prediction That Drilling Moratorium Would Be Worse Than BP Oil Spill ‘Failed To Materialize’

You can tell how wrong and desperate a conservative is by the shrillness of their lies - Right-wing blogger Pamela Geller distorts Rauf lecture to falsely paint him as a terrorist sympathizer http://mediamatters.org/research/201008230063

Elite Billionaire Fascists Wage War on President Obama and America Values

Covert Operations - The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
...in 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

The fascist Koch brothers are big financial backers of the Tea Nut movement - the movement which claims it is all grassroots and has no racism in its agenda.

Social Security Turns 75: Democrats Celebrate While Tea Party Republicans Grab the Ax . Why do Republicans hate seniors, children, American workers, the disabled, people of color, gay people -OK why do Republicans just plain hate America.


Now That’s Rich

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

....But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

Besides having an addiction to serial lying, Republicans have a history of rewarding wealth for its own sake and punishing work. Punishing people who work and rewarding the elite just because they are the elite is a hallmark of fascism.

Why Do Republicans Act Crazy and Lie All the Time

Two months later, Fox discovers O'Reilly was used to sell Newsmax products

Fox News and Bill O'Reilly have denied knowing until this week that right-wing website Newsmax was using an interview with O'Reilly to sell its financial schemes. But Newsmax has used O'Reilly to sell financial products for months, and Fox News' Dick Morris has shilled for various Newsmax schemes for years.

O'Reilly knows everything and is never wrong - at least according to his opinion of himself - yet here he is pleading blissful ignorance of any shady behavior.

Despite His Anti-Government Rhetoric, Gov. McDonnell’s Budget Surplus Results From Government Assistance

While most states are experiencing debilitating budget deficits, Virginia is “feeling flush” after turning a $1.8 billion deficit into a $403.2 million budget surplus at the close of the fiscal year. In a celebratory speech before the Virginia legislature Thursday, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) credited higher tax revenue, state agencies’ fiscal responsibility, and serious budget cuts for the state’s ability “to balance the books.”

McDonnell’s victory tour continued with a stop on the Fox Business network to tout “fiscal prudence and conservative budgeting” as “the key” to his surplus. When enamored host Gerri Willis asked him whether Washington “could learn something from Virginia,” McDonnell replied he hoped his fiscal responsibility in Richmond “would be a model for Washington”

...McDonnell’s “prudence” would be a shining example for the federal government if he hadn’t relied on one important contributor: the federal government. According to a Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis report released this week, last year’s Recovery Act provided $2.5 billion in stimulus relief to “maintain crucial services for [Virginia] citizens” and “help close the state’s budget shortfall in 2010-2012.”

Rule One in America is that conservatives can act like the biggest lying hypocrites imaginable and get away with it simply because they are soooo... superior to everyone else.

Why do Republicans hate our freedoms - Republican Attacks on Muslims Threaten the Security of the United States, Are the Republicans terminally stupid or are they just playing the dangerous fool?

Al Gore Was Right. Fox is the Official Propoganda Wing of Conservative Extremists

Imagine if the New York Times gave $1 million to the Democratic Party

I'm sure curious what Fox News talkers like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck make of the news that their corporate bosses recently contributed $1 million to the re-election drive of Republican governors nationwide. Unfortunately we don't know what the talkers think of the stunning development because there's apparently been a news blackout inside Fox News and it appears nobody on staff is allowed to discuss the embarrassing development, let alone try to defend the actions.

Then again, maybe O'Reilly and Hannity and Beck don't want to discuss the seven-figure GOP gift because it makes a mockery of their long-standing crusade against the liberal media and how journalists are in bed with Democrats and are a corrupting influence; because news of the $1 million gift simply confirms the long-held suspicion that the Fox news talkers work for a propaganda outfit, not a news company.

So maybe they don't want to talk about the story because it will only highlight their hypocrisy. Keep in mind, as Media Matters noted yesterday, in 2008 O'Reilly himself often railed against (liberal!) NBC and bemoaned how the corporate giants used its "power and money" to play politics.

You mean, like having your bosses sign a $1 million check to a political party, Bill?

So sadly, we don't know what Fox News insiders think of the GOP largess because they're apparently not aloud to speak for themselves. (Bill has been muzzled!)

But what we do know this, if the tables of the story were turned and we learned that the New York Times had contributed $1 million to a Democratic Party re-election fund, O'Reilly would probably right now be in the 14th hour of an emergency, non-stop Times-bashing, on-air marathon on Fox News, getting periodic, late-night breathers from Beck and Hannity and anyone else at Fox News who makes a living in front of the camera.

Meaning, Fox News would declare WW III, and by nightfall I'm sure there would be a right-wing mob assembling in Times Square, marching on the newspapers' headquarters. And don't even get me started on the hysterics that would be bouncing around the right-wing blogosphere, or the hysteria Rush Limbaugh would be unleashing on the AM dial.

If the New York Times gave $1 million to the Democratic Party, there would be an unequivocal right-wing Freak-Out of the highest order. A collective meltdown that would give Brent Bozell heart palpitations.

But when Fox News bosses give a cool $1 million to the GOP, Bill O'Reilly doesn't say boo.

Fox in concert with wing-wing extremists give America it's daily dose of Prvda just as Stlain's Pravda did to the people of the soviet Union and they have the gall to call Democrats socialists. So much for honor and intergirty from conservatism - the most entrenched anti-American movement in our nation's history.

The Daily Show: You Can Build A Catholic Church Next To A Playground — But Should You? (VIDEO)

Handy Guide to Carly Fiorina's lies, bye-bye's and job killing surprises