The Ongoing GOP Effort to Take Away Health Care for Millions

America stands alone among developed nations when it comes to not having a national health insurance system. America also stands alone in terms of the high level of claimed religiosity of its citizens, especially those comprising the Republican Party base.  Yet, America's healthcare system - if one can even call it a system since it is mostly driven by corporate greed - treats less well of Americans as basically disposable garbage, left to depend on the most expense, least cost effective means of meeting their healthcare needs.  The result is millions without coverage and Americans paying many times more than those in any other developed nation.  And Republicans want to make the system even worse as the go about sabotaging the remaining aspects of the Affordable Health Care Act - even as they mouth claims of supporting "Christian" values.  One has to wonder if they have ever actually read the New Testament teachings on caring for the less fortunate.  A column in the New York Times looks at the ongoing sabotage.  Here are highlights:  

Republicans still hate the idea of helping Americans get health care. So instead of releasing the kraken, they’ve brought on the termites. Rather than trying to eliminate Obamacare in one fell swoop, they’re trying to undermine it with multiple acts of sabotage — while hoping voters won’t realize who’s responsible for rising premiums and falling coverage.

Which is why it’s important to place the blame where it belongs.

The first thing you need to understand is that Obamacare has been a highly successful program. When the legislation was passed, Republicans insisted it would fail to cut the number of uninsured and would blow a huge hole in the federal budget. In fact, it led to major gains in coverage, reducing the uninsured rate to its lowest level in history, at relatively low cost.

[I]nsurers found that the people signing up were sicker, on average, than they expected, leading to higher premiums. But as of last year, the markets appeared to have stabilized, with insurers generally profitable.

Nobody would claim that Obamacare is perfect; many Americans remain uninsured, and too many of those with coverage face troublingly high out-of-pocket expenses. Still, health reform delivered most of what its advocates promised and caused none of the disasters its opponents predicted.

Yet Republicans still want to destroy it. One reason is that much of the coverage expansion was paid for with taxes on high incomes, so repeal would be a way to cut taxes on the wealthy. More broadly, conservatives hate Obamacare precisely because it works. It shows that government actually can help tens of millions of Americans lead better, more secure lives, and in so doing it threatens their low-tax, small-government ideology.

But outright repeal failed, so now it’s time for sabotage, which is taking place on two main fronts.

One of these fronts involves the expansion of Medicaid, which probably accounted for more than half the gains in coverage under Obamacare. Now a number of Republican-controlled states are trying to make Medicaid harder to get, notably by imposing work requirements on recipients.

What is the point of these work requirements? The ostensible justification — cracking down on able-bodied Medicaid recipients who should be working but aren’t — is nonsense: There are very few people meeting that description. The real goal is simply to make getting health care harder, by imposing onerous reporting and paperwork requirements and punishing people who lose their jobs for reasons beyond their control.

The other front involves trying to reduce the number of people signing up for private coverage. Last year the Trump administration drastically reduced outreach — the effort to let Americans know when and how to get health insurance.

The administration is also promoting various dodges that would in effect let insurance companies go back to discriminating against people in poor health. And when Congress passed a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, it also eliminated the individual mandate, the requirement that people sign up for insurance even if they’re currently healthy.

Preliminary evidence suggests that these efforts at sabotage have already partially reversed the coverage gains achieved under Obama, especially among lower-income Americans. (Curiously, all the coverage losses seem to have happened among self-identified Republicans.) But the worst is yet to come.

You see, G.O.P. sabotage disproportionately discourages young and healthy people from signing up, which, as one commentator put it, “drives up the cost for other folks within that market.” Who said that? Tom Price, President Trump’s first secretary of health and human services.

Sure enough, insurers are already proposing major premium hikes — and they are specifically attributing those hikes to G.O.P. actions that are driving healthy Americans out of the market, leaving a sicker, more expensive pool behind.

So here’s what’s going to happen: Soon, many Americans will suffer sticker shock from their insurance policies; federal subsidies will protect most of them, but by no means everyone. They’ll also hear news about declining insurance coverage. And Republicans will say, “See, Obamacare is failing.”

But the problem isn’t with Obamacare, it’s with the politicians who unleashed this termite infestation — who are doing all they can to take away your health coverage. And they need to be held accountable.

Yet more evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party, especially the evangelical Christians who make up a core constituency. To call them modern day Pharisees is far too kind.  Republicans need to be voted out of office in November, 2018.

How Trump and GOP Can Still Sabotage Health Care for Millions

Moral bankruptcy: Republicans laughing it up when millions would be harmed.  

One can hope that Trumpcare is finally dead, but even if Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan - in my view two of the most horrible, amoral men in America after Der Trumpenführer - admit that they cannot summon the votes to pass a bill mostly motivated by a desire to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy, there remain numerous ways in which they can, and likely will sabotage the Affordable Health Care Act damaging access to health care for millions of Americans.  Why would they do this?  In my view, two main reasons: (i) they have lied about Obamacare for 8 years and they will want to make their lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and (ii) if they can cause the ACA to fail, they open a back door route to kill it and give those ever sought at tax cuts to the wealthy.  That millions will be harmed simply doesn't matter because many of those to be harmed are viewed  rightly or wrongly as as "those people" - blacks, Hispanics, people in big cities - and the rest don't matter in the GOP quest for a new Gilded Age.  Paul Krugman looks at the insidious means of sabotage that may be employed.  Here are highlights:

Is Trumpcare finally dead? Even now, it’s hard to be sure, especially given Republican moderates’ long track record of caving in to extremists at crucial moments. But it does look as if the frontal assault on the Affordable Care Act has failed.

And let’s be clear: The reason this assault failed wasn’t that Donald Trump did a poor selling job, or that Mitch McConnell mishandled the legislative strategy. Obamacare survived because it has worked — because it brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of Americans without health insurance, and voters didn’t and don’t want to lose those gains.

Unfortunately, some of those gains will probably be lost all the same: The number of uninsured Americans is likely to tick up over the next few years. So it’s important to say clearly, in advance, why this is about to happen. It won’t be because the Affordable Care Act is failing; it will be the result of Trump administration sabotage.

Notably, [under the ACA] people aren’t automatically signed up for coverage, so it matters a lot whether the officials running the system try to make it work, reaching out to potential beneficiaries to ensure that they know what’s available, while reminding currently healthy Americans that they are still legally required to sign up for coverage. You can see this dependence on good intentions by looking at how health reform has played out at the state level. States that embraced the law fully, like California and Kentucky, made great progress in reducing the number of the uninsured; states that dragged their feet, like Tennessee, benefited far less. Or consider the problem of counties served by only one insurer; as a recent study noted, this problem is almost entirely limited to states with Republican governors.

But now the federal government itself is run by people who couldn’t repeal Obamacare, but would clearly still like to see it fail — if only to justify the repeated, dishonest claims, especially by the tweeter in chief himself, that it was already failing. Or to put it a bit differently, when Trump threatens to “let Obamacare fail,” what he’s really threatening is to make it fail.

On Wednesday The Times reported on three ways the Trump administration is, in effect, sabotaging the A.C.A. (my term, not The Times’s). First, the administration is weakening enforcement of the requirement that healthy people buy coverage. Second, it’s letting states impose onerous rules like work requirements on people seeking Medicaid. Third, it has backed off on advertising and outreach designed to let people know about options for coverage.

Actually, it has done more than back off. As reported by The Daily Beast, the Department of Health and Human Services has diverted funds appropriated by law for “consumer information and outreach” and used them instead to finance a social media propaganda campaign against the law that H.H.S. is supposed to be administering — a move, by the way, of dubious legality. Meanwhile, the department’s website, which used to offer helpful links for people seeking insurance, now sends viewers to denunciations of the A.C.A.

And there may be worse to come: Insurance companies, which are required by law to limit out-of-pocket expenses of low-income customers, are already raising premiums sharply because they’re worried about a possible cutoff of the crucial federal “cost-sharing reduction” subsidies that help them meet that requirement.

[T]his isn’t about policy, or even politics in the normal sense. It’s basically about spite: Trump and his allies may have suffered a humiliating political defeat, but at least they can make millions of other people suffer.

Can anything be done to protect Americans from this temper tantrum? In some cases, I believe, state governments can insulate their citizens from malfeasance at H.H.S. But the most important thing, surely, is to place the blame where it belongs. No, Mr. Trump, Obamacare isn’t failing; you are.

I'm sorry if I offend my Republican "friends," but Trump is basically human excrement.  The man is foul and toxic and he is harming the nation - perhaps at Vladimir Putin's bidding - and will harm millions of Americans before his reign of terror is over. 

Paul Ryan: I'll Be Speaker But Only If the Neanderthals Supports Me

I have no love for Paul "Reverse Robin Hood" Ryan.  That said, the man isn't stupid (even if he is otherwise horrible) since he has told the House Republicans that he will throw his hat into the ring for the position of Speaker of the House only if all of the elements of the Republican conference support him.  Ryan has no desire to step into the nightmare that drove John Boehner into resigning.  The big question, therefore, is whether or not the lunatic Christofascist/Tea Party elements of the House GOP will swear fealty to Ryan.  Ryan has given them until Friday to decide.  Politico looks at the ongoing circus within the Republican Party.  Here are excerpts:

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who for years has resisted a move into House Republican leadership, said Tuesday night he would serve as House speaker if he is the party's "unity candidate."

Ryan, the Ways and Means Committee chairman, wants to know by Friday if the 247 members of the House Republican Conference support him. If not, he is "happy" to continue as chairman of the powerful tax-writing panel, the 45-year-old lawmaker said.

The Wisconsin Republican laid out a series of "requests" to his GOP colleagues on Tuesday night, including a demand that the major factions within the Republican Conference endorse him before he agrees to seek the speakership. Ryan is clearly trying to shift the onus of his decision onto the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservatives that repeatedly sought to undermine Speaker John Boehner.

Ryan wants the group to refrain from any attempts to remove him from the speaker's chair if he makes a decision they disagree with, though it's not at all clear Freedom Caucus will agree.

"I have left this decision in their hands, and should they agree with these requests, then I am happy and I am willing to get to work."

Ryan added: "This is not a job I ever wanted or I ever sought. I am in the job I've always wanted here in the Congress. I came to the conclusion that this is a very dire moment, not just for Congress, not just for the Republican Party, but for our country. I think our country is in desperate need of leadership."

Ryan described himself as "reluctant" to be speaker and said there were some parts of the job he dreaded. But he said would take on the post if the three major groups inside the GOP conference — the Republican Study Committee, the moderate Tuesday Group, and the Freedom Caucus — all endorse him by Friday.

Ryan also wants Republicans to alter the procedure for "vacating the chair," which is essentially a referendum to remove the speaker from office. Conservatives threatened to force such a vote against Boehner earlier this summer, and Ryan believes it's destructive. 

The Wisconsin Republican is calling on the next speaker to be more visionary. Ryan agreed with Freedom Caucus members and a large bloc of the GOP in supporting changes to rules and procedures to empower rank-and-file members. But he said those decisions must be made together.

As Think Progress notes, the Neanderthals spittle flecked "real Americans" in the GOP are not reacting well to Ryan's demands:

How the Freedom Caucus, and the right-wing, is reacting to Paul Ryan’s demands

Not well.   Many members of the Freedom Caucus are already publicly rejecting Paul Ryan and his demands.

There are 40 members of the Freedom Caucus so the ultimate outcome is still in doubt. They will be under severe pressure from the Republican establishment to reverse course and support Ryan. But the early signs for Ryan are not positive. 

The Republicans’ Incompetence Caucus

I will confess that it makes me nervous when I find myself in agreement with New York Times columnist David Brooks who typically is an apologist for right wing idiocy and the Republican Party.  Thus, it is unnerving when Brooks blasts today's House Republicans and laments about the decline of the GOP into insanity.  Yet along the way as this descent to craziness took place, Brooks was more often than not a cheerleaders for radicals masquerading as conservatives.  Whether or not Brooks has finally seen the light or if his latest column is an anomaly will have to be decided down the road.  Meanwhile, here are highlights from his column on the incompetence and growing derangement of the Republican Party:

The House Republican caucus is close to ungovernable these days. How did this situation come about?

This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.

By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible.

All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.

Among people too ill educated to understand the different spheres, political practitioners adopted the mental habits of the entrepreneur. Everything had to be transformational and disruptive. Hierarchy and authority were equated with injustice. Self-expression became more valued than self-restraint and coalition building. A contempt for politics infested the Republican mind.

Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity became a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise was regarded as a blood betrayal. 

Republicans developed a contempt for Washington and government, but they elected leaders who made the most lavish promises imaginable. Government would be reduced by a quarter! Shutdowns would happen! The nation would be saved by transformational change! 

These insurgents can’t even acknowledge democracy’s legitimacy — if you can’t persuade a majority of your colleagues, maybe you should accept their position. You might be wrong!

People who don’t accept democracy will be bad at conversation. They won’t respect tradition, institutions or precedent. These figures are masters at destruction but incompetent at construction.

These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.

Again, I ask this: where was Brooks when these thousand betrayals of conservatism took place?  Some of us have loudly condemned the process all along.  Others were too silent if not complicit in the degradations and betrayals. 

The GOP's Dark Suicide Pact

The descent of the Republican Party into total insanity is now nearly complete.  When extremists and con men like Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan are "too moderate" for the  spittle flecked, knuckle dragging party base, you know that things may beyond the point of no return.  A piece in Salon looks at the sad state of affairs, much of which was engineered by the GOP establishment that put short term electoral success ahead of any remote long term strategy or comprehension of the damage that would be done by the Frankenstein monster they created, i.e., the Chistofascists/Tea Party dominated party base.  One irony to me is that the Christofascists blame gays for the fall of the Roman Empire, but in reality it was ignorance embracing, incurious people like them who killed Rome and ushered in the Dark Ages.  Here are column highlights:

It is time once again to ponder the question of whether the Republican Party can be saved from itself – and if so, what exactly there is to save and why anyone should care. The GOP’s current struggle to find someone, or indeed anyone, who is willing to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the position once held by Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill – the president’s most important counterbalance and negotiating partner, and traditionally the second most powerful job in Washington – is of course a tragic and/or hilarious symptom of much deeper dysfunction.

How large are Heaven and Hell, measured in cubits and ells? Not large enough, it appears, to encompass the pride and arrogance of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40-odd far-right Jacobins who first sabotaged Boehner’s speakership and then torpedoed the candidacy of his chosen replacement, Kevin McCarthy.

In the great tradition of doomed revolutionaries, the Freedom Caucus prefers death, or at least political annihilation – which will be theirs one day, and sooner than they think – to the dishonor of compromise.

They could just as well be called the Suicide Caucus – or the Satanic Caucus, in the grandiose spirit of Milton’s fallen angel, who fights on with no hope of victory: . . .

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the Republicans were boring and small-minded but not especially crazy. They pursued a disastrous foreign-policy agenda during the Cold War, but they were not alone in that, and one could argue that marked the first stages of betraying the tradition of Edmund Burke-style conservatism. On fiscal and social issues, they stood with country-club middle management and small-town Presbyterians and the affluent families who owned the third-largest bank in Indiana or a chain of hardware stores in and around San Diego.

I believe that the Republicans have brought their gruesome predicament upon themselves and that they richly deserve their fate, although they have certainly been nudged toward the precipice by Democratic cowardice and incompetence. 

Whoever the GOP shoves to the podium, whether it’s Ryan or Darrell Issa or Jason Chaffetz or someone even dumber than them, will either have to default on the national debt in November and shut down the government in December or face yet another enraged right-wing revolt. Either way, this Congress (and most likely the next one too, regardless of who is elected president) is a lost cause, and the future viability of bipartisan politics is very much in doubt.

That big Republican victory in the 2014 midterms was a masterfully engineered work of fiction – an artifact of voter suppression, voter apathy and the intensive gerrymandering imposed by GOP-dominated state legislatures after the 2010 census. Republican candidates won barely 51 percent of the vote, but thanks to the imaginative redistricting plans imposed in numerous states, that modest margin was dramatically over represented in the final result. 

Now the Republicans in Congress, along with the “mainstream” or “establishment” Republican presidential candidates, are discovering what should have been obvious all along: The Frankenstein voter base they bred and nurtured with so much money and so much cunning does not like them or trust them. The fanatics of the Satanic Suicide Caucus and their supporters do not want the current Republican leadership to govern anything, or even try to.

When they [the GOP base] repeat its catchphrases about fiscal responsibility and social order in their metallic parasite voices, what they really mean is fiscal holocaust, social anarchy and class war against poor women, black people and immigrants. They dream of conquest, but whatever they can’t conquer – starting with their own political party – they will happily destroy.

GOP Racism and a New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks

As noted numerous times on this blog, today's Republicans are increasingly open about their racism and  the phenomenon is actually no surprise given the fact that the GOP is largely controlled by white Christofascist, many of whom are from the South where religious conservationism tends to go hand in hand with racism and a yearning to maintain white supremacy.  That a black man - actually half black man - occupies the White House simply drives these folks crazy perhaps in part because it reminds them that their days of inflicting their sick moral values and riding rough shod over minorities are waning.  While the phenomenon shows itself in many ways - voter ID laws to disenfranchise minorities, laws to control women's bodies, and efforts to keep non-Christians "in their place," the ugliness is particularly apparent in the GOP's unrelenting attacks on Barack Obama.  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at the ugly and dangerous behavior of the would be segregationists.  Here are highlights:

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.

Republican lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.

It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of the attack on the president’s legitimacy was a letter signed by 47 Republican senators to the leadership of Iran saying Mr. Obama had no authority to conclude negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Try to imagine the outrage from Republicans if a similar group of Democrats had written to the Kremlin in 1986 telling Mikhail Gorbachev that President Ronald Reagan did not have the authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal at the Reykjavik summit meeting that winter.

There is no functional difference between that example and the Iran talks, except that the congressional Republican caucus does not like Mr. Obama and wants to deny him any policy victory.

Arizona legislators, for example, have been working on a bill that “prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive order issued by the president of the United States that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the United States Constitution.”  . . . The bill sounds an awful lot like John C. Calhoun’s secessionist screed of 1828, the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.

Republicans defend this sort of action by accusing Mr. Obama of acting like a king and citing executive actions he has taken — on immigration and pollution among other things. That’s nonsense. The same Republicans had no objection when President George W. Bush used his executive authority to authorize the torture of terrorism suspects and tap the phones of American citizens. It is not executive orders the Republicans object to; it is Mr. Obama’s policies, and Mr. Obama.

If this insurrection is driven by something other than a blend of ideological extremism and personal animosity, it is not clear what that might be. But it is ugly, it deepens mistrust of government and it harms the office of the president, not just Mr. Obama.

The GOP's Blindness to Objective Reality

Ever since Barack Obama's election in 2008 Republicans have done nothing but predict doom and gloom and then do all in their power, especially in Congress, to make the dire predictions come true regardless of the consequences inflicted on average Americans.  Behind much of it was the unspoken racism that motivates much of the Republican Party base, a base that is terrified of losing its white privilege and outraged that a non-white occupies the White House.  Yes, the economy needs to improve much more to benefit many Americans, but as a piece in Blue Virginia notes, things are far better now than when Barack Obama took office despite the constant GOP efforts at obstruction and economic sabotage.  What's most frightening is the blindness of many in the GOP due to their racism and bigotry.  Just think what could have been accomplished if the GOP had put the nation and average Americans ahead of destructive partisanship.  Here are some article excerpts:

[C]heck this out: six years into the presidency of Barack Obama, it turns out the U.S. economy is booming, the stock market is in record territory, wages are rising...etc. Or, as a headline today in the Washington Post put it: The boom is here: the economy just grew 5 percent, and it's not going to stop. Oh yeah, and let's not forget that we're in the midst of an energy boom, with falling gasoline prices, plummeting crude oil imports and booming wind and solar output. All this, by the way, just six years since the economy collapsed under President George W. Bush, and not even six years since President Obama inherited one of the worst economic situations since FDR took over from Herbert Hoover in 1932. 

For any observer not blinded by partisanship, right-wing ideology and/or animosity towards our nation's first African-American president, this is beyond impressive. It's also striking to consider the contrast between what Republicans predicted would happen and what actually happened. A few examples of the many ways in which Republicans have been (wildly) wrong the past 6 years include: 

*Republicans and Tea Partiers asserted, over and over and over again, that the Recovery Act of 2009 would not work. They were completely wrong. In fact, as it turns out, the Recovery Act ended up doing almost exactly what it was intended to do: provide classic Keynesian, counter-cyclical "stimulus" to an economy in desperate need of it. The only problem, frankly, was that it wasn't big enough, particularly in terms of aid to the states, and for that we have Republicans and a few conservadems to blame. If it weren't for them, we almost certainly would have come out of the recession earlier and stronger than we did. In short, the current economic recovery has come about in SPITE of Republicans (and a few conservadems). 

*Republicans and Tea Partiers called President Obama every name in the book, with "socialist" and even "communist" or "Marxist" being several of their favorites. Yet, just as in the case of Bill Clinton, the economy has boomed under this supposed "socialist," with the stock market - not exactly a bastion of "to each according to his need" types - now at record-high levels. 

*Repblicans and Tea Partiers claimed that the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare," would be a disaster, the ruination of America, blah blah blah. In fact, it's been nothing of the sort. Instead, we're getting constant headlines like US uninsured rate heads toward new low and O-Care premiums stable nationwide and U.S. Experiences Unprecedented Slowdown In Health Care Spending. So much for Republicans predictions of doom on all those fronts. As for "Obamacare" being a "job killer," which we heard about a gazillion times from right wingnuts the past few years, let me simply refer you to the headlines and first couple paragraphs of this post, about the booming economy, soaring stock market, plummeting unemployment rate, etc.

*Republicans and Tea Partiers were also wildly wrong about the U.S. energy situation, from absurd claims that President Obama was causing higher gasoline prices to claims that he was stifling U.S. energy production. Instead, what we're seeing is an energy boom in the U.S. on all fronts, combined with low energy costs (including plunging costs for clean energy sources like solar and wind).

*Republicans and Tea Partiers ranted and raved about the deficit, ignoring a few important facts, like: a) President Obama inherited a deficit of $1.2 trillion from Bush/Cheney; and b) the deficit for 2014 was just $483 billion -- far less than half what President Obama inherited from Bush/Cheney. Of course, if Republicans really cared about the deficit, which they obviously don't based on their records when they were in the White House (see Reagan's and Bush's huge deficits, compare and contrast to Clinton's surpluses and Obama's sharp cuts in the deficit he inherited), they would have voted to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts. 

Just imagine how much more we could have made with a Republican party willing to work together for the good of the country, as opposed to working for President Obama to "fail?" It boggles the mind.

This list really could go on all day, getting into foreign policy as well (e.g., so much for right-wing claims that Vladimir Putin was kicking Obama's butt or whatever), but I think the point is clear by now. Bottom line: Republicans have been wrong on basically everything the past 6 years. Will they admit that they were wrong? Apologize for their overheated rhetoric and counterproductive actions during Barack Obama's presidency? Of course they won't!

When one considers the objective facts rather than being motivated by racism, bigotry and fear of others with different skin colors or sexual orientation, one has to wonder why anyone would vote Republican.  

Are Umarried Women the Key to 2014 Midterm Elections?

Despite protests to the contrary, the Republican Party is maintaining its war on women when not temporarily distracted by the GOP's war on the poor.  The GOP opposes equal pay legislation that would protect women and seeks to oversee every intimate aspect of women's bodies, and in some states are pushing for laws that would make it harder for women to escape abusive marriages.   Thus, the claim that the GOP is not anti-woman - other than perhaps those who opt to stay home barefoot and pregnant - simply do not match up with objective reality.  A piece in Politico looks at the role unmarried women may play in deciding the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections.  Here are excerpts:

[M]arital status is one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will vote and for which party, which is why so many progressives and Democrats are paying attention now.

A majority of American households are now unmarried, and nearly a quarter of the presidential-year electorate were unmarried women. But marriage is now politicized too. Nearly 60 percent of those who call themselves Republicans are married and three-quarters of the conservative Republican base are married. By contrast, two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats for Congress in 2012; two-thirds voted for Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor in 2013.

But if you want to know why unmarried women are now the focus, it is not because they are assuredly Democrats, or even assuredly voters. In an off-year election, and when so many are struggling economically, unmarried women are no guarantee at the polls.

In our most recent national survey, just two-thirds of unmarried women who voted in 2012 said they were almost certain to vote in November, and 10.5 million unmarried women who voted in 2012 are project to stay home in November.

And in our latest poll done for NPR – conducted jointly by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic – the Democrats were ahead by 1 point in the generic congressional ballot (44 to 43 percent), but unmarried women gave Democrats 58 percent of their votes. That sounds high, but it is nearly 10 points below what we would see in a presidential-year election, suggesting that Democrats have some work to do.So, if you are a Democrat and want to change your electoral fortunes in November, unmarried women are the biggest and best opportunity. Right now, these are votes on the table

What unmarried women (widows, never-marrieds and divorcées) share—and what makes them lean so heavily for Democrats—is being on their own, vulnerable economically, at a time when jobs that pay enough to live on are very scarce. That is the main finding of the research we have conducted over the last couple of years. For most Americans, the economy is a challenge every day.

[O]ur research shows that what motivates them to vote are economic issues, particularly those that affect working women and mothers. In Virginia, much of the Democrats’ advertising was focused on abortion and contraception and no doubt increased Democratic support, but it did not raise turnout among unmarried women.

The take away for Democrats is that they must not only stress the issues of equal pay and contraception/abortion, but they must also stress that the Democrats are better for economic prosperity for all and that it is GOP obstructionism/policies that have  deliberately held America;s economy back as the GOP sought to destroy Barack Obama - and millions of Americans along with him.