The Lowest of the Low

Our federal government spends money on all sorts of things that are beneficial. Here is one of them.

Shutdown Denies Death and Burial Benefits to Families of 4 Dead Soldiers

The fault for this lies directly with the Republicans and their current adolescent temper tantrum about spending....spending, I might add, they already approved! This example is one of many and very illustrative about how the lack of federal spending has a very real affect on people's lives. This would be why I continually try to remind people that the federal government does all sorts of good things that people fail to note through their continued complaints about it.

Republican Type #7

Sadly, I know a few of these types...

Extremely Uneducated Republicans: 

These Republicans are Republicans because they think it’s cool. They have a Republican friend in one of the other groups listed, so they think they know what they’re talking about. They have terrible spelling and grammar but they expect you to believe whatever they say because they are saying it to you. 

The problem with this type of Republican’s views: 

It’s hard to tell if they ever made it past the 4th grade. Most of their posts are illegible. They don’t know anything about their position other than what they have heard their friends say. They think Republicans are fiscally conservative because they say that they are, and call anyone who doesn’t agree with them “sheep.” They ignore all historical information that is contradictory to what they say. They are 100 percent blind to facts. 

What to remember when debating them: 

No amount of facts or logic will ever convince them that their buddies are wrong. You could be a college professor and they will still think your facts aren’t credible. Instead of trying to argue with them, try explaining algebra to your dog. I’m sure it will be much more productive.

Good Words

“Knowledge and liberty are so prevalent in this country, that I do not believe that the United States would ever be disposed to establish one religious sect, and lay all others under legal disabilities. But as we know not what may take place hereafter, and any such test would be exceedingly injurious to the rights of free citizens, I cannot think it altogether superfluous to have added a clause, which secures us from the possibility of such oppression.” ~Oliver Wolcott, Connecticut Ratifying Convention, 9 January 1788

Shocking...Not

Uninsured Find More Success via Health Exchanges Run by States..

It does help when you don't have adolescents who can't stand losing trying to sabotage your efforts.

Sowell Goes Full Moonbat

A conservative friend of mine posted this piece by Thomas Sowell on his Facebook wall. Check out this insanity.

Perhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt, creating a danger of default. Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt. Even if the debt ceiling is not lifted, that only means that government is not allowed to run up new debt. But that does not mean that it is unable to pay the interest on existing debt.

I've come to the conclusion that Jesus of the Right Wing Blogsphere is not as intelligent as I thought he was. Either that or he is just trying to play to his audience for dollars. He's certainly done that in the past. And I still can't figure out why he doesn't write "Liberals are stupid" for everyone of his books and columns. He certainly could save more time.

But if he does actually believe what he has written here, then he has officially gone full moonbat (as well as not understanding basic math). Raising the debt ceiling does not allow the federal government to spend more money. Congress authorizes how much money the government is allowed to spend and they have already done that. The debt ceiling only determines whether the U.S. government can borrow enough money to fulfill the spending obligations that Congress has already passed into law, like Medicare reimbursements or military pay not to mention unexpected crises that arise that may need funding.

He's not alone either. Politico has a piece up about the default deniers in Congress.

“Spending a day highlighting the debt and the deficit in Congress as part of raising the debt ceiling is probably a healthy thing,” said Tony Fratto, a consultant at Hamilton Place Strategies and a White House and Treasury official under President George W. Bush. “But the moment you start talking seriously about not raising the debt limit it becomes dangerous. And a lot of members of Congress are now saying things that give evidence that they have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to the debt limit and the way government financing works.” 

The tax money the moonbats are talking about speak won't be enough to cover the daily expenses of the government. We already hit our debt limit last May and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has been doing things like tapping exchange-rate funds to raise extra cash. A recent analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center shows that the government will bring in roughly $222 billion and owe roughly $328 billion between Oct. 18 and Nov. 15, assuming the government is open, hence the date of October 17th and the threat of default.

Of course, none of this takes into account the uncertainty factor and how that will play with the image of the United States and interest rates. Sowell simply ignores this. The treasury will be in the position of having to choose which obligations to honor and which ones it won't. And the drastic spending cuts will have an extremely adverse effect on the economy, cutting growth massively. it would lead to another recession.

Whether they choose to believe it or not, a $175 billion dollar cut in government spending would take about 1 percent out of the economy. Stock markets would likely fall. Household wealth would shrink. Consumer confidence would plunge as Americans would cut back on spending. Higher rates on debt would raise borrowing costs, including mortgage rates. That's just the cut in spending, mind you, not an actual default which would add fuel to the flames.

The American Taliban doesn't really care about any of this and simply wants to burn the house down at this point. They want American to fail on Obama's watch. I guess Sowell is has now joined them.

Uh...what the FUCK?

Proof positive that these people are complete fucking moonbats.

Yep

From a friend's Facebook wall...

Oct 2008: "You'll never get elected and pass healthcare."
Nov 2008: "We'll never let you pass healthcare."
Jan 2009: "We're gonna shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare."
July 2009: "We'll fight to death every attempt you make to pass healthcare."
Dec 2009: "We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare."
March 2010: "We can't believe you just passed healthcare."
April 2010: "We are going to overturn healthcare."
Sept 2010: "We are going to repeal healthcare."
Jan 2011: "We are going to destroy healthcare."
Feb 2012: "We're gonna elect a candidate who'll revoke healthcare NOW."
June 2012: "We'll go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare."
June 2012: "We can't believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare."
Aug 2012: "American people'll never re-elect you-they don't want healthcare."
Oct 2012: "We can't wait to win the election and explode healthcare."
Nov 2012: "We can't believe you got re-elected & we can't repeal healthcare."
Feb 2013: "We're still going to vote to obliterate healthcare."July 2013: "We're going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare."
Sept 2013: "We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare."
Oct 2013: "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"

Real Americans

Here is a most excellent piece on how the shutdown is affecting average Americans. Just because it isn't happening to you doesn't mean that shutting down the government indefinitely is an OK thing to do. Here is a great example.

John Skoog owns a roofing company in Newport, Wash. He was one step away from having his firm certified as a government vendor when the process came to a standstill on Tuesday. "I don't know what to do now," said Skoog, who has a pitch meeting scheduled with the Army Corp of Engineers on Oct. 22. "I can meet with them, but they won't consider my company if I'm not fully certified." Skoog said he has no revenue coming in right now because he was confident in the government contracts.

The government is an important part of the economy. People's livelihoods are being affected and conservatives don't seem to care. They'd rather continue with their temper tantrum and hysteria about government spending. Personally, I'd like it if they looked John Skoog in the eye and explained their position to him.

Nope, Still There

I've waited a while to see if my anger towards Randy Neugebauer, (R-Texas) would subside a little. Nope, it's still there.

This guy is a Grade A, Numero Uno example of why conservatives these days are complete fucking douche bags. This ass hat has the audacity to have a temper tantrum, close down the government and then show up at a national memorial and complain about it?

Fuck you, Randy. You are the reason why this country is not progressing.

Good Words

“No religious doctrine shall be established by law.” ~Elbridge Gerry, Annals of Congress 1:729-731

A Threat To Their Relevance

John Boehner yesterday...

"I and my members decided that the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand," the Ohio Republican said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

He is right that it's a threat...a threat to Republican relevance..

Acting Outside Of Their Interests

After signaling privately that the debt ceiling would be raised, John Boehner and other GOP leaders are now in full pivot mode, stating that they won't do it. They are also stating (stand by for the moonbattery) that the US won't default on October 17th, the deadline to raise the nation's borrowing limit. It could be the usual bloviating but I think it's something more. I think they are actually going to do it. They simply hate the federal government that much.

When this happens, the ensuing fallout will result in the loss of the House in 2014. And it won't be simply because they caused a default. It will be because President Obama, forced into action due to the conservative temper tantrum on steroids, will be seen as a shining knight who saved the nation from economic ruin through some sort of budget or constitutional maneuver. It will be the final tipping point the Democrats need to take back the House.

Further, he will have made the executive branch stronger as a result. Future presidents will be able to wield spending power with greater ease and Congress will be left marginalized and severely weakened. Thus, playing chicken with the debt ceiling is going to end up being a gross miscalculation on the part of the GOP and completely outside of their interests. They are going to bring about the very thing they claim to be fighting against: increased authoritarian power in the executive branch.

That adolescent stomp down the hallway is about to get more dramatic and a whole lot louder. 

Republican Type #6

Racist Republicans: 

[DISCLAIMER: I am putting this one almost last for a reason. I do NOT think all Republicans are racists. I have Republican family members who are not racist. This section is only about the small percentage of Republicans who are ACTUALLY racist, because they do exist. I'm not "playing the race card" or "race-baiting," I'm just describing a small group of racists who also affiliate themselves with the Republican Party] 

Racist Republicans hate Obama because he’s black. They think that all Muslims are terrorists. They think Obama is a terrorist Muslim. They think anyone with a name like Obama’s is a terrorist. 

The problem with this type of Republican’s views: 

They’re racist, but they think Obama is a racist. They can’t understand why people call them racists when they post racist pictures or racist comments and then claim not to be racist. Whenever they possibly can, they will call you a racist, to hide the fact that they are actually racists. 

What to remember when debating them: 

They’re racists. Racists are uneducated bigots. You would have a much easier time convincing an apple tree to start growing oranges.

He's a being a little too kind here. The whole "Obama is a Muslim" thing is far more common than one might think.

Live Fat, Die Young!

Ted Cruz's Shutdown Leap

Last year Crystal Wilson, a poor white Arkansas woman, died of "natural causes" -- untreated diabetes -- at age 38. Life expectancy for uneducated white women in Southern states has dropped five years in the last generation. Mostly because they're obese and lack health care. Instead of "Live fast, die young!" it's "Live fat, die young!"

Most people in Crystal's situation, if they can work, work part-time jobs. And so, when the shutdown fight was still about Obamacare, before they admitted it was all about their pride, Republicans tried fleetingly to appeal to fears about the "part-timing" of America. The slant is that companies are making full-time employees work part-time so that they can escape the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.

Some companies may be saying they're doing this because of Obamacare, but this part-timing of America was in full swing when Barack Obama was still in law school. In the 1980s and 1990s companies sent work overseas, fired some employees and cut others to part time. Companies like Walmart have been turning full-time employees into part-time and cutting back part-time hours to increase profits for decades, in part to avoid paying full-time benefits: they hire twice as many people for half the cost. Twenty years ago many high-tech companies like Microsoft hired employees as "independent contractors," to avoid paying health insurance, vacation, stock options, laws concerning working hours, etc. They were sued by those employees and eventually settled for $97 million. Many long-haul truckers and delivery drivers are paid not by the hour, but as "private contractors" paid by the mile.

Republicans point to Trader Joe's and Home Depot's decisions to drop insurance coverage for part-time employees and let them get their health insurance on the exchanges as proof of the damage Obamacare has done. The thing is, Obamacare is a good deal for most of these employees: these companies don't have enough employees in an area to get the best rates (health care is highly localized), so they can't compete with rates offered on the exchanges which will cover a much larger risk pool. Trader Joe's logic is straightforward (from a Time article):

Stated quite simply, the law is centered on providing low cost options to people who do not make a lot of money. Somewhat by definition, the law provides those people a pretty good deal for insurance … a deal that can’t be matched by us — or any company. However, an individual employee (we call them Crew Member) is only able to receive the tax credit from the exchanges under the act if we do not offer them insurance under our company plan.

First off, Trader Joe's was never required to provide part-timers health care -- they do it because they are a great company. Second, only 23% of Trader Joe's employees are part-time. Third, companies like Trader Joe's and Home Depot never paid full freight for part-timer's insurance: some employees have to pay as much as $4,000 dollars a year. Most health care exchanges will offer policies that are cheaper than what Trader Joe's can provide, and since they can get a tax credit under the ACA most employees will save thousands of dollars a year.

Most, but admittedly not all. Employees in states that have been antagonistic to the ACA, have not set up their own exchanges and have not adopted the Medicaid changes will probably wind up paying more. Trader Joe's estimates that 70% of their employees will get a better deal. Their employees in Texas are being screwed by Rick Perry's stubbornness, not Obamacare. This is why guys like Ted Cruz are shutting down the government to stop Obamacare before it gets started: their own voters are going to turn on them when they realize everyone else is getting a better deal.

Now, because of Obamacare, part-time employees of Walmart who were never able to get decent health care will now be able to get the same deal that workers at Trader Joe's can get. And it turns out that Obamacare isn't the job-killer that Republicans say it is: Walmart is making 35,000 employees full-time.

The real question isn't why Trader Joe's is dropping health care for part-timers, it's why any company is offering health insurance. It never really made sense, but it wasn't so bad when companies footed the whole bill. But as soon as they started making employees pay for it, any cost containment went out the window. Since employees aren't the customer of the insurance company, they have no say in the negotiations; they have no leverage and no choice, but they get stuck with the price increases. The employer makes their decisions for them based on what's best for the company, not the employee. It's no better having your company dictate who your doctor is than the government.

Here's another example of the "terrors" of the health care exchange: my wife and I left the corporate world more than ten years ago, and that meant getting our own health insurance. It's very expensive: the day before the health care exchange in Minnesota opened we got a notice from Blue Cross that our policy will go up 22%, to $995 a month (that's with a $6,000 deductible). We never got tax breaks for this plan because we're not a corporation -- corporations get tax breaks for their CEOs' Cadillac health insurance plans, but we had to pay the full cost for our bare-bones coverage.

So my wife went to the MNsure website (the local health care exchange), and found an identical plan -- same company, same coverage, same deductible -- for only $775. And that's the top price, without tax credits based on income.

That must be the magic of the marketplace conservatives keep talking about.

One reason exchanges can offer lower prices is competition: there are now millions more customers in the marketplace who can directly compare prices on the Internet. Another is that there are fewer middle men: no insurance agents and brokers are needed. As many as 100,000 insurance agents may be out of jobs. We were forced to buy our current plan through an agent several years ago, who still gets a monthly commission and has done absolutely nothing ever since. This worthless overhead is the sort of "job" Republicans refer to when they talk about "job-killing" Obamacare. Our Republican state senator happens to be a licensed insurance agent who opposes Obamacare and tried to use his position as chairman of a Senate committee to torpedo the state exchange.

The fact is, the system set up by the ACA is exactly the sort of health care solution conservatives have been pushing since Clinton's health care initiative 20 years ago. Obama made huge concessions to conservatives when he gave up single-payer and accepted the individual mandate with the ACA. Mitt Romney signed Obamacare's godfather into law in Massachusetts in 2006. The only reason Republicans are fighting it now is to display their hatred of Obama and wreck something he fought tooth and nail to make happen.

Republicans claimed to be shutting down the government now to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. But what would they replace it with? Exactly the same thing. They want to stomp on it, tear it apart and piss on it just because Obama tricked them and gave us the health care solution conservatives have been demanding all along.

In the end the people who will be hurt the most by Republican opposition to ACA are poor uneducated whites who live in Southern states -- the most reliable Republican voters. People like Crystal Wilson.

And that's the future Tea Party Republicans want for all of us.

The Plan All Along

AP News has a story up about how the shutdown has eroded confidence in America in many corners of the world. I submit that was the plan all along and Rachel Maddow recently confirmed this in the video clip below.

 

The New York Times confirmed this today.This shutdown has been planned for months with the specific goal of making sure the president fails. In case anyone was wondering, yes, they are just that petty. If they can't have their way, then it's temper tantrum time and they are going to trash their room.

In this case, however, the room is our country.

Good Words

"A general toleration of Religion appears to me the best means of peopling our country… The free exercise of religion hath stocked the Northern part of the continent with inhabitants; and altho’ Europe hath in great measure adopted a more moderate policy, yet the profession of Protestantism is extremely inconvenient in many places there. A Calvinist, a Lutheran, or Quaker, who hath felt these inconveniences in Europe, sails not to Virginia, where they are felt perhaps in a (greater degree).” ~Patrick Henry, observing that immigrants flock to places where there is no established religion, Religious Tolerance, 1766

Republican Type #5

Are there any real Birthers that post here? Well, maybe one but I think he's just being a dick (see: adolescent contrary)

Birther Republicans: 

The birthers think that Obama was born in Kenya. No matter how much evidence you present that is contradictory to that thesis, they will continue to insist that he is not the legitimate president. They are sore-losers because McCain lost the election in 2008 – even though President Obama has won reelection since then. They will never support Obama, even if he paid off the entire national debt. 

The problem with this type of Republican’s views: 

They think Obama was born in Kenya. They think that Orly Taitz, who grew up in a communist country, is credible, and that Obama is a socialist. They think Donald Trump is a smart guy. They think that Obama’s birth announcements in Hawaiian newspapers were propagated over 40 years in advance of his election, just so that he could be elected someday. 

What to remember when debating them: 

Don’t waste your time. You could wave Obama’s actual birth certificate in their face and they would still say it’s a fake. They are sore-losers and they will never be happy as long as Obama is president. Make jokes asking to see their birth certificates, or Sarah Palin’s birth certificate. This is the best way to get them to go away.

Republicans Vote to Undercut Everything About the Shutdown

The Republicans in the House of Representatives just passed a bill that would pay federal employees for not working.

Admittedly, federal employees aren't working because Republicans have shut down the government in a snit, supposedly over Obamacare. So it's not government employees' fault they aren't working, and they shouldn't have to suffer for Republican grandstanding.

For people who constantly bitch about government waste, the Republicans sure do waste a lot of the government's time and money. If you're going to pay these workers for all the time they're not working, you might as well have them work. The bill for back pay is the best argument to end the shutdown right now.

But Republicans won't, and that's complete insanity. The cost of this interruption in government services won't just be the time that people aren't working. There were millions of dollars of expenses in preparing for the shutdown, and there there will be millions associated with restarting. People will be hurt: businessss near national parks that depend on tourism will lose money that will never be recovered, and defense and other government contractors that are not working because of the shutdown will also feel the pinch. Billions of dollars will be wasted.

This shutdown isn't about wasteful government spending or the deficit. It isn't about the budget. It isn't even about Obamacare. It's about a small minority of Tea Party Republicans who want to throw their weight around because they can. Republican congressmen Peter King got it dead right when he called Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas who egged House Tea Party members to shut down the government, a "fraud" and accused him of "governmental terrorism."

The insanity of the Tea Party is best exemplified by Marlin Stutzman of Indiana:

“We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

They don't even know what they want. Geeze, at least Muslim terrorists know what they want.

Good Words

“I never liked the Hierarchy of the Church — an equality in the teacher of Religion, and a dependence on the people, are republican sentiments — but if the Clergy combine, they will have their influence on Government” ~Rufus King, Rufus King: American Federalist, pp. 56-57