Republican: Sick People Don’t Deserve Affordable Care

Every now and then a Republican official will inadvertently blurt out a statement that reveals the GOP's true agenda.  In the midst of the GOP effort to repeal and "replace" Obamacare, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, performed this function and underscored the GOP's true attitude towards the poor and less fortunate when he said poor people did not deserve health care access and were a burden on others.  The others, no doubt are the wealthy to whom the GOP is trying to give a trillion dollar tax cut.   This from the party that pretends to revere "Christian values"  and which has the support of 81% of evangelical Christians.  As noted in today's earlier post, there a few more self-centered and selfish than today's Republicans and their Christofascists supporters.  They rail against abortion, yet once a child is born to a poor - or minority - family, they attitude is to simply let them die rather than part with any of their money.  The moral bankruptcy is complete.   Jonathan Chait looks at Brooks' revelation.  Here are highlights:

Republicans usually defend their health care position with an array of buzzwords like choice, patient-centric, or competition. In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, makes the case for Trumpcare in much starker terms: it will free healthy people from having to pay the cost of the sick. “It will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy,” explained Brooks, “And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.” 

It is certainly true that the Republican health care plan will spur insurance companies to charge more money to people with expensive medical needs, and less to healthier people. (It will also transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from the poor, who will get reduced Medicaid and tax credits to buy insurance, to the rich, who will receive a large tax cut.) The idea that morality dictates healthy people pay less, and sick people more, has been floating around the margins of conservative health care thought. John Mackey, the libertarian owner of Whole Foods, made this case in a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed denouncing Obamacare. When Democratic Senator Tom Harkin in 2010 proposed that it was time to stop segregating Americans on the basis of health status, the conservative health care analyst Jeffrey H. Anderson scoffed, “Having people pay their own way is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”

Of course, you can’t pay your own way if you’re too poor or sick to afford your own projected medical costs. Indeed, sometimes people who are healthy at the moment find one day they are not, or they have a sick child, or maybe they simply want to have a baby. (The cost of bearing children is another one Republicans want to be borne entirely by those doing it.) The Republican plan expresses one of the core beliefs shared by movement conservatives, and utterly alien to people across the globe, right and left: that people who can’t afford the cost of their own medical care have nobody to blame but themselves.

When one votes Republican, this mindset and immorality is what one is voting for whether one wants to admit it or not.  To my Republican "friends" I suggest that they take a good, long look at themselves in the mirror - especially on Sunday mornings as they head to church where they will feign piety and religiosity.   Jesus would not be forgiving of such callous, selfish behavior. 

How Trump Has Tapped into GOP Pyschosis

If one looks at many of Donald trump's avid supporters, they exhibit many frightening psychological traits that some might describe as a form of psychosis. They seem motivated most by fear and hatred of others - a common trait of the Christofascists - and border on obsession when confronted with demographic changes that in their minds threaten their perceived much deserved white privilege.   In some ways, the GOP base is reminiscent of the segments of Germany's population in the late 1920's and early 1930's that were reeling from Germany's loss in World War I and the social and economic disorder that followed. Hitler recognized that this fear and loathing could be tapped into and used to fuel his rise to power.  Donald Trump is now doing the same thing here in America.  A piece in the New York Times looks at those who are flocking to Trump and the psychological issues that motivate them to embrace what is in many ways a form of fascism.  Here are excerpts:

Jesse Graham, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, elaborated on the purity-disgust dimension of this year’s political campaign:

More than any other Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump has been appealing to a particular combination of in-group loyalty and moral purity concerns. On the purity side, he often expresses disgust, often toward women and women’s bodies (e.g., Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate). But his purity appeals are most commonly in the context of group boundaries, like building walls on our national borders to prevent contamination by outsiders, who are cast as murderers and rapists, both morally and physically dirty.

These themes, in Graham’s view, have laid the groundwork for Trump’s popularity with explicitly racist and fascist groups:

The National Alliance and National Vanguard spawned The Turner Diaries, which imagined a dystopian future where America is ruled by lazy and corrupt Jews and Blacks, until a morally pure white resistance group nukes the Pentagon. Trump of course is not advocating anything like these horrors, but the moral intuitions he’s playing on can lead in this direction if unrestrained by other moral concerns, such as injustice and the suffering of out-group members.

According to Graham, Trump’s personal style attracts voters, including current and former Democrats, who are drawn to authoritarian leaders:

Trump is more domineering than the other candidates, bullying opponents and reporters alike, calling them losers, refusing to ever apologize for anything. This could indeed appeal to those high in social-dominance orientation and authoritarianism, particularly those who mistake such domineering for actual authority.

John Jost, a professor of psychology at N.Y.U., picks up some of the same themes as Haidt and Graham. In an email he writes that Trump

is tapping into and indeed amplifying anger and fear, primarily among white citizens who are older and less educated than the average Republican voter. He is answering that anger and fear with tremendous self-confidence and 100 percent certainty, which some people find impressive and reassuring.

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, was emphatic in placing authoritarianism first in describing Trump’s current success.  Abramowitz is one of a number of scholars who see Trump as posing a significant danger to American democracy. He wrote in an email that Trump

is very clearly, in my view, advancing a modern American version of fascism. A lot of the coarse language, harsh personal attacks and misogyny play into the theme of “strong leadership” and willingness to say things that are “politically incorrect” no matter who doesn’t like it.

Trump’s campaign style, his bullying and his pointed insults of competitors, fit into the psychological research concept of “social dominance orientation.” . . . . Those with a social dominance orientation agree strongly with such statements as:

“Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups;” “it’s O.K. if some groups have more of a chance in life than others;” and “to get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on other groups.”  And they disagree with such statements as: “It would be good if groups could be equal;” “we should do what we can to equalize conditions for different groups;” and “no group should dominate in society.”

Trump had captured “the resentment and sense of loss” in a large segment of the white electorate:

These folks have lost a lot with the hollowing out the middle and working class; if you combine that with floating xenophobia, you get this kind of reaction.

Sidanius argues that Trump’s supporters have been receptive to this kind of appeal since Obama’s victory in 2008 and his re-election in 2012, but until now, “nobody was there to exploit it, to pick out the marketing opportunity. This is Trump’s genius.”

Graham and Haidt have found in their research that for the most conservative voters, the two “values” with the strongest appeal are authority and purity.

The strong appeal of purity to committed conservatives helps explain why Trump’s supporters are not put off by his compulsive focus on disgust.

The accompanying chart, adapted from their 2009 paper “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” shows how this works: for the most conservative voters, the emphasis on the importance of the values of authority and purity increases while the stress placed on fairness and the avoidance of harm declines.

Trump has already left an indelible imprint on the political system. He has inflicted tremendous damage on the Republican establishment, as he hoped he would, but he has done much more. By setting a populist agenda that appeals to millions of Republicans and to substantial numbers of Democrats and independents as well, Trump has opened the door to a reshaping of the traditional two-party coalitions.

As everything shifts and we question previously sacrosanct boundaries, Trump and his supporters embody conflicts that the American political system will be hard pressed to resolve. Whatever happens next, he has remade the landscape on which these conflicts will be fought — for better, or, more likely, for worse.

Trump has played to the ugliest elements in the GOP and has tapped their emotional and psychological fears much as Hitler did in Germany.  It is a very scary thing to watch. 

The 99% and American Insecurity

As the Republican Party's presidential candidates begin to disingenuously talk about their "concern for working Americans," "American workers," and/or the middle class, they conveniently ignore the reality that their party's policies have exacerbated the dire straits that most Americans face.  Worse yet, they and their wealthy supporters have no clue how most Americans live and just how financially insecure most in the 99% are in fact.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality and the clueless mindset of the wealthy.  Here are some excerpts:

America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.

Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.

Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.

I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.

Take, as a prime example, positioning on Social Security. For decades, a declared willingness to cut Social Security benefits, especially by raising the retirement age, has been almost a required position — a badge of seriousness — for politicians and pundits who want to sound wise and responsible. After all, people are living longer, so shouldn’t they work longer, too? 

Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most. . . . A majority of Americans over 65 get more than half their income from Social Security, and more than a quarter are almost completely reliant on those monthly checks.

Washington still has no clue about the realities of life for those not yet elderly. Which is where that Federal Reserve study comes in. . . . . 3 in 10 nonelderly Americans said they had no retirement savings or pension, and that the same fraction reported going without some kind of medical care in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. Almost a quarter reported that they or a family member had experienced financial hardship in the past year.And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.

[W]hile things could be worse, they could also be better. There is no such thing as perfect security, but American families could easily have much more security than they have. All it would take is for politicians and pundits to stop talking blithely about the need to cut “entitlements” and start looking at the way their less-fortunate fellow citizens actually live.

What continually strikes me is that the GOP and much of its base claims to support and value Christian beliefs, yet in fact, they don't give a damn about others, especially the poor and unfortunate.  Indeed, they are modern day Pharisees.  Hence why I am no longer a Republican and why in many ways I don't want to be called a Christian.  Christianity as defined and practiced by the far right is truly something foul and ugly.  

Killing the Right Wing Fantasy that Private Charity Can Meet Public Need

Go to any right wing blog and you will find posts whining that the state and/or federal government has should have no role in supporting the poor and needy  Instead, these greed driven screeds claim that private charity should meet the needs of the sick, the poor, the unemployed, etc.  The reality, of course, is that private charity doesn't have the capacity to meet the need for assistance.  The other reality is that government has stepped in to fill these types of needs for many decades.  The so-called welfare state did not suddenly arise out of nowhere in the 1960's.  But, dealing with and accepting historical reality is not something that today's GOP and its Christofascist/Tea Party is exactly known for.  These folks live in a fantasy world.  A piece in Democracy Journal destroys the far rights favored talking points on taking the government out of providing a social safety net.  Here are excerpts:

Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed—and we’re better for it.

[C] conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life; given the chance, they could do it again. 

This vision has always been implicit in the conservative ascendancy.  . . . which argued that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state. This idea is also the basis of Paul Ryan’s budget, which seeks to devolve and shrink the federal government at a rapid pace, lest the safety net turn “into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

But this conservative vision of social insurance is wrong. It’s incorrect as a matter of history; it ignores the complex interaction between public and private social insurance that has always existed in the United States. It completely misses why the old system collapsed and why a new one was put in its place. It fails to understand how the Great Recession displayed the welfare state at its most necessary and that a voluntary system would have failed under the same circumstances. Most importantly, it points us in the wrong direction. The last 30 years have seen effort after effort to try and push the policy agenda away from the state’s capabilities and toward private mechanisms for mitigating the risks we face in the world. This effort is exhausted, and future endeavors will require a greater, not lesser, role for the public.

Beyond the need to deflate the imaginary landscape of the contemporary right, there’s also a need for liberals to reform their project. Liberals need to reclaim the public. Liberals need to be able to articulate that the welfare state succeeded in exactly the ways that the private insurance system failed in the Great Depression.

The state does many things, but this essay will focus specifically on its role in providing social insurance against the risks we face. Specifically, we’ll look at what the progressive economist and actuary I.M. Rubinow described in 1934 as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: “accident, illness, old age, loss of a job. These are the four horsemen that ride roughshod over lives and fortunes of millions of wage workers of every modern industrial community.” These were the same evils that Truman singled out in his speech. And these are the ills that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, and our other public systems of social insurance set out to combat in the New Deal and Great Society.  

Over the past 30 years the public role in social insurance has taken a backseat to the idea that private institutions will expand to cover these risks. Yet our current system of workplace private insurance is rapidly falling apart. In its wake, we’ll need to make a choice between an expanded role for the state or a fantasy of voluntary protection instead. We need to understand why this voluntary system didn’t work in the first place to make the case for the state’s role in fighting the Four Horsemen.

As for social insurance specifically, the historian Michael Katz has documented that there has always been a mixed welfare state made up of private and public organizations throughout our country’s history. Outdoor relief, or cash assistance outside of institutions, was an early legal responsibility of American towns, counties, and parishes from colonial times through the early nineteenth century.  

But there were a few major problems with these [charity or welfare] societies. The first was that they were regionally segregated and isolated. These forms of insurance didn’t exist in places without dense cities, industry, or deep ethnic and immigrant communities. Even in states with large cities and thriving industries like California and New York, only 30 percent of workers had some sort of health-care coverage through fraternal methods. Moreover, the programs were fragmented and provided only partial insurance.

Thus, though they were pervasive throughout this time period, they never provided more than a sliver of actual, robust social insurance. As the Russell Sage Foundation concluded at the time, private societies stand “as a tangible expression of a keenly felt need, a feeble instrument for performing a duty beyond its own powers.”

That need was partly what gave rise to the Progressive movement. Private charity simply didn’t have the breadth and depth necessary to truly respond to the Four Horsemen in this industrializing era, and Progressives saw a greater role for government to address these ills.

There is more to the piece that deserves a full read.  Suffice it to say that the conservatives' fantasy about private charity meeting society's actual needs is a fictional as their claims that America was founded as a "Christian nation."  Conservatives' real goal is to slash social safety net spending so that they can amass more for themselves as the kick the poor, the sick and the unemployed to the curb. Ultimately, selfishness - along with racism and religious based bigotry - is the main motivation behind their quest. 

The Victims of GOP Obstructionism

The economy continues to struggle to recover even as the Congressional Republicans engage in non-stop obstructionism and gridlock legislation on everything from economic stimulus, infrastructure rebuilding and immigration reform.  While these GOP saboteurs win the praise of delusional Christofascists and their likewise bigotry filled Tea Part first cousins, the obstructionism has very real victims. Millions of Americans have suffered directly and many, many more have suffered indirectly.  It is an ugly legacy and it underscores the hypocrisy of the GOP's feigned reverence for Christian values.  A column in the New York Times looks at these victims.  Here are some column highlights:

In an election year, there are always winners and losers. Rarely, however, are there so many victims.

Legislative gridlock, which was already bad enough, has devolved into a cynical, poisoned status. 

With a few obvious votes, Congress could improve the lives of millions of people — the unemployed, the undocumented, the uninsured. But instead of being helped, those in need are punished for nakedly political reasons.

It says a lot about this shameful state of affairs that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), one of the most powerful and savvy officials in Washington, had to put his career on the line to win an increase in the federal debt ceiling. Failure to act would have caused a catastrophic default. No new government spending was involved; rather, the Treasury simply needed to pay for spending that Congress already had authorized. Raising the limit was a no-brainer.

Yet Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who continues to redefine the word “shameless,” almost led the nation into calamity by forcing Republican senators to go on record in favor of the increase. Since the GOP base has been told — wrongly — that refusing to hike the ceiling would somehow help get the debt under control, senators who voted to do the right thing risked a tea party challenge.

Congress managed to avoid inflicting grievous harm on the entire nation. A number of subgroups have not been so fortunate.

The Americans most obviously suffering because of Congress’s unwillingness to do the right thing are the 1.7 million jobless workers who have lost their long-term unemployment benefits.

Again, Republicans are wary of angering the party’s conservative base. It’s not so much a matter of increasing the deficit — a three-month extension would cost only $6 billion, and Democrats have proposed offsets — but that far-right dogma considers such payments a moral hazard that encourages idleness. Never mind that recipients of unemployment benefits, by definition, were employed until relatively recently and can demonstrate that they are actively looking for jobs.

The working poor are suffering unnecessarily as well. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 is far too low. In the past, Republicans have joined Democrats in voting for needed increases. In an election year, however, struggling wage-earners are out of luck.

The 11 million men, women and children who are in this country without documents are also victims of the calendar. President Obama and the entire congressional leadership agree that there is an urgent need for immigration reform. 

Also unfairly punished are the millions of uninsured Americans seeking coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Despite the Republican Party’s best efforts, Obamacare is working. But it would work better if Congress would cooperate with Obama in making a host of technical adjustments to the program.

 It’s one thing to seek an advantage at the polls. It’s another thing to make innocent people suffer for your ambition. Guilty members of Congress — and I’m specifically including you, Sen. Cruz — should hang their heads in disgrace.

The Republican Armageddon Caucus

Obstruction and outright sabotage are now the main hallmarks of the Republican Party at the national level.  Particularly among some of the worse far right ideologues who naturally are the darlings of the drooling, spittle flecked GOP base.  This group offers nothing in terms of proposed solutions to many pressing problems and needs and instead seek only to destroy government and needed programs  And equally disturbing is the reality that thanks to shameless district gerrymandering, it will be difficult to get rid of these horrid individuals.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this cabal of  lunacy and what it may hold for the nation.  Here are excerpts:

[A]fter three years of congressional dysfunction brought on by the rise of a radicalized brand of conservatism, it’s time to call the core questions:

Will our ability to govern ourselves be held perpetually hostage to an ideology that casts government as little more than dead weight in American life? And will a small minority in Congress be allowed to grind decision-making to a halt?

Congress is supposed to be the venue in which we Americans work our way past divisions that are inevitable in a large and diverse democracy. Yet for some time, Republican congressional leaders have given the most right-wing members of the House and Senate a veto power that impedes compromise, and thus governing itself.

On the few occasions when the far-right veto was lifted, Congress got things done . . . . All these actions had something in common: They were premised on the belief that government can take practical steps to make American life better.

This idea is dismissed by those ready to shut down the government or to use the debt ceiling as a way of forcing the repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act and passing more draconian spending reductions. It needs to be made very clear that these radical Republicans are operating well outside their party’s own constructive traditions.

Before their 2010 election victory, Republicans had never been willing to use the threat of default to achieve their goals.
The very fact that everyone now accepts the term “Obamacare” to refer to a measure designed to get health insurance to many more Americans is a sign of how stupidly partisan we have become.

The health-care exchanges to facilitate the purchase of private insurance were based on a Heritage Foundation proposal, first brought to fruition in Massachusetts by a Republican governor named Mitt Romney. Subsidizing private premiums was always a Republican alternative to extending Medicare to cover everyone, the remedy preferred by many liberals.

But that was then. The right wing’s recent rejection of a significant government role in ending the scandal of “a health-care system that does not even come close to being comprehensive and fails to reach far too many” — the words were spoken 24 years ago by the late Sen. John Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican — tells us why Congress no longer works.

The GOP has gone from endorsing market-based government solutions to problems the private sector can’t solve — i.e, Obamacare — to believing that no solution involving expanded government can possibly be good for the country.

Behind all of the GOP posturing is something else: Greed.  The base of the GOP which constantly blathers about its religiosity and Christian ideals in truth doesn't give a damn about other citizens.  They don't want to pay anything toward the common good and basically hate everyone other than themselves.  They are a scourge on America and the world.

GOP Excludes Food Stamps from Farm Bill

For a political party that falls all over itself pretending to honor - indeed worship - Christian values, the passage of a GOP Farm Bill yesterday that excluded any funding for Food Stamps (which were described as one of "some extraneous pieces") demonstrates that the hypocrisy of today's Republicans is now complete.  How is one honoring the Gospel message of feeding the hungry and caring for the poor when one votes for passage of legislation that kicks their poor and hungry to the curb?  These modern day Pharisee truly would like to see the poor just die off and disappear.  Especially if they are non-white.  Mitt Romney's "the 47%" comment did indeed show today's real GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this disgusting display of GOP hypocrisy and selfishness:

There was a rare moment of candor on the House floor this week.  Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), a committee chairman and the man who led House Republicans to their majority in 2010, was explaining why he and his colleagues decided to drop the food stamp program from the farm bill. 

“What we have carefully done is exclude some extraneous pieces,” he said.  Extraneous? For almost 50 years, food stamps have been part of the annual farm bill, and the $80 billion spent on the program keeps tens of millions of Americans, about half of them children, from going hungry.

Without a single Democratic vote, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill that, if allowed to stand, would provide hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies but not a dime for the hungry. Happily, Americans are unlikely to starve as a result of Thursday’s vote because the Senate won’t allow the House’s farm bill to become law if the food stamp program isn’t restored.

But as a political matter, the food stamp folly shows just what a difficult situation Republican leaders find themselves in. For the second time in two days, they had been forced to placate conservatives in their own ranks by taking a position that alienates crucial segments of the electorate.

On Wednesday, the House GOP caucus huddled and determined that, because of conservatives’ objections, they would not take up the bipartisan Senate immigration bill, or any major immigration legislation, anytime soon.

. . . . inviting new charges that Republicans are hostile to racial minorities — 36 percent of food stamp beneficiaries are identified as white — and the poor. 

Today's "conservatives" - most of whom describe themselves as "godly Christians" - are horrible people who care nothing about others and add daily fuel to why one would never be described as a Christian.  

Like Paul Ryan, Cuccinelli Claims Alliegance to Catholic Teaching But Embraces Ayn Rand Instead

As a former Roman Catholic who left Catholicism is utter disgust after the sex abuse scandal first exploded in Boston in 2002, I continue to be both amazed and disgusted by Republican politicians who wrap themselves in religiosity, claim to supportive of the Catholic social gospel, yet then embrace a cold, ruthless and heartless capitalism and demonstrate that they view much of humanity as disposable human garbage.   Paul Ryan, who wanted to gut social programs and destroy the social safety net is but one example.  Indeed, Ryan was even condemned by the generally bankrupt Catholic Church hierarchy which found Ryan's ruthless slashing of the social safety net to be utterly inconsistent with Catholic social teachings.  Here in Virginia, we have another similar hypocrite who embraces his Catholicism for show and political display, but who champions policies diametrically opposed to the true Catholic social gospel.  Here are highlights from a piece in National Review:

What book would he write about if he had to write a college-admissions essay?  .   .   .  .  Ultimately, he picks Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Rand, Cuccinelli says, “captured an awful lot of the battle for our government that’s going on right now” and saw “the natural course of bigger government, [the problem of] relying on it for everything, and the control it takes over everything as it goes down that path.” Cuccinelli observes that “we’re having a debate about that right now in this country, about whether that’s the right way to go or not.”

Ultimately, Cuccinelli is opposed to freedom, or at least freedom for any one other than Christofascists such as those who are epitomized by the hate merchants at The Family Foundation and angry white Tea Party extremists.  As for the social gospel, he's against expanded health care, he supports strict voter ID laws to disenfranchise minorities, and he wants women basically kept   barefoot and pregnant in the home, and, of course, he wants gays criminalized and subjected to felony charges under Virginia's unconstitutional sodomy statute.  

Out of Touch Romney Calls $200,000 - $250,000 "Middle Income"

This blog has noted time and time again Mitt Romney's utter inability to grasp much less feel the slightest  empathy for the lives of most Americans  He and his wife truly are today's version of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of the American political world.  And now Romney has underscored this reality yet again when he said during a :Good Morning America" interview that "middle income" as income of $200,000 to $250,000.  Perhaps in Mr. Romney's world of great wealth and privilege, but in low wage Hampton Roads that income bracket would put one among the wealthy. Back in the real world the U.S. Census Bureau reports that median income is $50,000 - that's right, a mere one-quarter of what Romney sees as "middle income."   The Washington Post looks a Romney's latest "sliver foot in his mouth" moment.  Here are excerpts:

Mitt Romney is promising to reduce taxes on middle-income Americans.  But how does he define “middle-income”? The Republican presidential nominee defined it Friday as income of $200,000 to $250,000 a year and less.

Romney’s comments came an interview broadcast Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“No one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is (to) keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers,” Romney told host George Stephanopoulos.

“Is $100,000 middle income?” Stephanopoulos asked.  “No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less,” Romney responded.


The Census Bureau reported this week that the median household income — the midpoint for the nation — is just over $50,000.

Obama wants to extend Bush-era tax cuts for those making less than $250,000, while Romney wants to extend the tax cuts for everyone.

Romney has not explained how he would keep his plan from growing the nation’s deficit.

Romney’s Continued Uphill Challenge

Michael Gerson - with whom I frequently disagree sharply - has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the continued weakness of the Romney/Ryan campaign and the inability so far of Romney's huge spending on anti-Obama ads to shift the dynamics of the election.  The piece seems largely on point albeit anti-Obama.  The reality is that between his mostly details free "plans" for the country and his robotic like personality, Romney just doesn't seem able to get any real traction.  All of which, in my opinion, is a good thing and demonstrates that perhaps American voters are not as stupid as some in the GOP like to believe.  The problem with Romney isn't just the man, but also lies with the GOP's message that best plays with angry white evangelicals and the super wealthy.  Here are some column excerpts:

The presidential race has been stable for months but not in a way favorable to Mitt Romney. On his best days, Romney is even with President Obama. On his worst, Romney is a few points behind.  This dynamic has not been changed through advertising. More money has been spent on TV ads in the general election so far this year than during the entire 2008 presidential election.

The selection of Paul Ryan did not change the structure of the race. What initially seemed like an ideological choice — previewing a shift in campaign strategy and content — now seems like a more personal decision.

Romney’s convention speech did not change the unfavorable stability of the campaign. Romney softened his image through biography; he did not broaden his appeal with unexpected outreach. There were no innovative policy initiatives directed toward Hispanics or suburban women. The speech was humanizing but ideologically uncreative.

With less than two months until the election, Romney is left with dwindling opportunities to reshape the dynamic of the race. This places extraordinary pressure on him in the presidential debates that commence on Oct. 3.

This analysis requires an admission. Obama’s political strategy has generally worked. The president could not run on his economic performance. So he has turned the race into an ideological contest that he has a better chance of winning. His convention speech — equally light on creative policy — emphasized the choice between Democratic community and Republican selfishness. 

Romney has made his contribution to the success of Obama’s strategy. The Democratic convention also included an aggressive outreach to Hispanic voters — enabled by Romney’s alienation of this group during the Republican primaries. The policy of “self-deportation” has pushed a community heavy with social conservatives and entrepreneurs toward the party of Sandra Fluke and Elizabeth Warren. Quite a legacy for Romney to leave.

While Obama’s approach is currently succeeding, it has not yet succeeded. A base strategy requires a party’s base to turn out on Election Day. For Obama, Latinos, single women and younger voters must become likely voters. 

Obama has significant vulnerabilities. But Romney does not appear to have a route to victory that allows him to coast. If he plays not to lose, he seems likely to lose.