GOP to the Uninsured: Drop Dead, Don't Use Contraception

To listen to Mitt Romney's campaign ads, one would think that the Republican Party was actually concerned about the nation's economy.  But the actions of Republicans in the House of Representatives reveal the GOP's real agenda: keeping millions of Americans without health care coverage and controlling a woman's vagina and uterus.  And as for the economy, the only real focus is to destroy it in the hopes of destroying Barack Obama.  The collateral damage done to countless lives and families doesn't matter.  It's not even on the GOP's radar screen.  First a column in the Washington Post looks at the continued quest to kill health care reform and the promise of health care coverage to some 30 million Americans, many of whom are children.  Here are excerpts:

The House is voting (again) to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday.  Meanwhile, six Republican governors (so far) say they won’t go along with the law’s planned Medicaid expansion for 4 million uninsured people in their states, even though the feds would pick up nearly all the tab.

Republican message to uninsured Americans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling couldn’t be clearer: You’re on your own. 

The party may not have officially adopted the “let ’em die” policy of right-wing hecklers at that CNN primary debate, when Ron Paul was asked what should be done when uninsured folks show up at the hospital. But as a practical matter, Republicans are in pretty unsavory territory. What other conclusion can we draw when Rick Perry, who presides over a state where fully one in four people lack health coverage, makes swaggering indifference to these Texans’ plight a point of sovereign pride? 

In America — alone among wealthy nations — everyone is a pink slip or job change or new illness away from finding they’ve lost coverage or are uninsurable.  This is the shameful reality behind the GOP’s rhetoric on health care. Republicans don’t want to spend a penny to insure the uninsured.

As the ranks of the uninsured have soared, the size of Republican compassion has shriveled. Why?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave me the most convincing explanation not long before he died in 2003. “Those folks never vote for us,” he told me, summing up the Republican mind on the issue, “and we have our priorities for the money.”  Like trillions more in tax cuts for the best-off Americans over the next decade. 

Here’s what you should do, Mr. President. In the debates this fall, pull out a small laminated card you’ve had made as a prop for this purpose. Then remind Mitt Romney that the ranks of the uninsured today are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming. Read that list slowly, Mr. President. Then ask your opponent: Would America turn its back on the citizens of these 25 states if everyone there lacked basic health coverage? That’s what we’ve been doing for decades.

What strikes me is the callousness and utter lack of compassion for other living, breathing human beings demonstrated by the GOP.  The hypocrisy is even more stomach wrenching as Republican elected officials and candidates profess their Christian beliefs and stick their noses so far up the ass of the Christian Right that it's a wonder they don't suffocate.  And then there's the GOP obsession with controlling sexual practices of women.  As The Hill reports, another effort is underway to kill the contraception mandate under the health care reform package of the Obama administration:

A new Republican bill would remove the teeth from a contentious Obama administration health mandate by barring the federal government from penalizing employers that do not comply.

The measure was written in response to the Affordable Care Act, which requires that most employers cover birth control without a co-pay for employees. Under the GOP bill, employers that object to birth control for religious reasons can refuse to cover it without facing financial penalties from the government. 

Sensenbrenner's bill would erase the taxes faced by employers who choose not to cover certain healthcare benefits "by reason of adherence to a religious belief or moral conviction." 

The GOP "moral conviction" is to increase unwanted pregnancies and once those babies are born to kick them to the curb and leave them uninsured.   Once a baby exits its mothers womb, in the world of the GOP it's on its own. The Party's moral bankruptcy is nearly complete.

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Bloomberg Businessweek: How the Mormons Make Money

With all of the recent media coverage on Mitt Romney's focus on money - can we say greed? - and secretive financial transactions, the timing of a new Bloomber Businessweek article on how Mormons and the Mormon Church make money is perfect.  The net impression is that Mitt Romney comes by his secrecy and unrelenting focus on making a buck as a matter of religious upbringing.   As the article states, the Mormon Church sees no distinction between spirituality and making money - as much money as possible.  And like Mitt Romney who doesn't miss a chance to avoid paying taxes, the Mormon Church gets a lot of tax sheltering (not to mention competitive advantages against for-profit businesses) for its commercial enterprises via its tax exempt status as a church.  Perhaps it is no coincidence that Mitt Romney was once a Stake President in the LDS church - making him the lay Mormon equivalent of a church figure in charge of a diocese.   Here are some article excerpts:

Late last March the Mormon Church completed an ambitious project: a megamall. Built for roughly $2 billion, the City Creek Center stands directly across the street from the church’s iconic, neo-Gothic temple in Salt Lake City. The mall includes a retractable glass roof, 5,000 underground parking spots, and nearly 100 stores and restaurants, ranging from Tiffany’s (TIF) to Forever 21. Walkways link the open-air emporium with the church’s perfectly manicured headquarters on Temple Square. 

Watching a religious leader celebrate a mall may seem surreal, but City Creek reflects the spirit of enterprise that animates modern-day Mormonism. The mall is part of a vast church-owned corporate empire that the Mormon leadership says will help spread its message, increase economic self-reliance, and build the Kingdom of God on earth. “

 It’s perhaps unsurprising that Mormonism, an indigenous American religion, would also adopt the country’s secular faith in money. What is remarkable is how varied the church’s business interests are—and, at a time when a former Mormon bishop is about to receive the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, that so little is known about the church’s financial interests.

[S]ays historian D. Michael Quinn, who is working on a book about the LDS Church’s finances and businesses, “The Mormon Church is very different than any other church. … Traditional Christianity and Judaism make a clear distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal, while Mormon theology specifically denies that there is such a distinction.” To Latter-day Saints, opening megamalls, running a Polynesian theme park, and operating a billion-dollar media and insurance empire are all part of doing God’s work. Says Quinn: “In the Mormon worldview, it’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”

Mormons make up only 1.4 percent of the U.S. population, but the church’s holdings are vast. 

First among its for-profit enterprises is DMC, which reaps estimated annual revenues of $1.2 billion from six subsidiaries, according to the business information and analysis firm Hoover’s Company Records (DNB). Those subsidiaries run a newspaper, 11 radio stations, a TV station, a publishing and distribution company, a digital media company, a hospitality business, and an insurance business with assets worth $3.3 billion.

AgReserves, another for-profit Mormon umbrella company, together with other church-run agricultural affiliates, reportedly owns roughly 1 million acres in the continental U.S., on which the church has farms, hunting preserves, orchards, and ranches

As a religious organization, the LDS Church enjoys several tax advantages. Like other churches, it is often exempt from paying taxes on the real estate properties it leases out, even to commercial entities, says tax lawyer David Miller, who is not Mormon. The church also doesn’t pay taxes on donated funds and holdings. Romney and others at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm co-founded by Romney in 1984, gave the Mormon Church millions’ worth of stock holdings obtained through Bain deals, according to Reuters.  

According to U.S. law, religions have no obligation to open their books to the public, and the LDS Church officially stopped reporting any finances in the early 1960s. In 1997 an investigation by Time used cross-religious comparisons and internal information to estimate the church’s total value at $30 billion.  .  .  .  .  a recent investigation by Reuters in collaboration with sociology professor Cragun estimates that the LDS Church is likely worth $40 billion today and collects up to $8 billion in tithing each year.

 Many Mormons see their church’s economic success as a sign of good stewardship, but at least a few I spoke to say they are uneasy about the price tag of the new Mormon mall, the church’s lack of transparency, and its centralized finances. “The money may be perfectly administered, for all we know,” says Ron Madson, 57, a lawyer and lifelong Mormon who once served as a church bishop. “But we don’t know. … When we see these expenses for the City Creek Mall, for the hunting preserves, these commercial enterprises, Ensign Peak, we don’t know where it’s going.”

A recently published article co-written by Cragun estimates that the Mormon Church donates only about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church gives about 29 percent.

There's a lot more, but these excerpts give readers the drift of the article.  Huge inflows of money and small charitable outflows.  Much like Mitt and Ann Romney's finances - or so it would seem since they refuse to release their tax returns which might show that they value something other than making and hanging onto lots and lots of money.

Alan Chambers Fails to Come Clean on "Hardball"

While I applaud Alan Chambers' long over due honesty (and by extension the new found honesty of Exodus International) in finally - and many would say very, very belatedly - admitting that reparative therapy doesn't work and that claims that one can "pray away the gay" are fraudulent at best.  Unfortunately, Chambers and Exodus have stopped short of a full and complete confession.  First, no apology can compensate for the families that have been torn apart by the propaganda that Exodus and its affiliates have disseminated for years.  Second, no apology can atone for the suicides that ex-gay "ministries" have promoted  by their lie that being gay is a "choice" and something that can "change."  Lastly, Chambers fails to own up to the real agenda of the "ex-gay" proponents from the beginning which is summarized well by Wayne Besen:

Ex-gay programs have never really been about converting gay people into heterosexuals. It has really been a gigantic marketing and public relations campaign used by anti-gay organizations to say, “Gay people don’t need equal rights, they need therapy and prayer instead.”

In exploiting the “ex-gay” industry, our opponents have positioned homosexuality as a sinful, unnatural behavior that could be altered, rather than being an integral and immutable part of a person. This message has either directly or indirectly been used as a club in which to bash LGBT people in referendums for the past fifteen years and serves as a wedge issue to fire up their base in election cycles. Embracing these groups also allowed the Religious Right to smarmily and cynically claim they “loved” LGBT people and were just trying to help them.

If religiously brainwashed and tortured gays want to be masochists and betray both their own integrity and lie to those they claim to love it's one thing.  But the moment they take this lie and use it against others as "ex-gays for Pay," they truly deserve a special place in Hell.  They have simply made themselves feel better about themselves at the cynical expense of others - while making a buck in the process. (see the image below for some of these lying frauds)  Cheap whores have more integrity and virture than "ex-gays for pay" such as Chambers.  I hope Wayne Besen is correct when he predicts:

Without holding out the magical promise of change, Exodus has little value to the Religious Right’s political ambitions. While some evangelical voters may see celibacy or sham marriages as reasonable options, most Americans will consider such demands as cruel, unrealistic, and potentially damaging to both the gay person and their spouse. In other words, pushing the impractical idea of turning millions of LGBT people into sexual ascetics won’t play beyond the extreme right’s base.

Just a couple of years ago, Exodus offered flashy ads that exploded with hope. One ad for their national convention confidently screamed: Revolution, radically change your world. Freedom from homosexuality is possible.

What is Exodus’ new message to teens? “Live a life of hell on earth so you can get to heaven when you die?” Or, maybe their new recruitment brochure might say: “A life of sexual frustration and loneliness has never been so fun!”

 I can only wonder how many of the individuals in the image above have either (i) given up the lie, ( II) found themselves in sham marriages, or (iii) committed suicide.

Frank Ocean Performs 'Bad Religion'

I noted last week that singer/songwriter Frank Ocean had come out and acknowledged that his first love was another man causing a stir in both the hip-hop and R&B music worlds. Last night Ocean made his first ever television appearance on Jimmy Fallon's stage and performed out "Bad Religion," which is a track from his debut album Channel Orange.   A video clip is set out below.   As noted in my post last week, part of Frank Ocean's coming out statement was  “I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more.”  He's apparently making good on that statement since the lyrics of "Bad Religion" read in part as follows:

This unrequited love
To me it's nothing but
A one-man cult
And cyanide in my styrofoam cup
I could never make him love me
Never make him love me
Love
Love
…
It's a bad religion
To be in love with someone
Who could never love you
I know
Only bad religion
Could have me feeling the way I do

Needless to say, I also believe that the title of the song sends a message about religion that focuses on fear and hatred of others.  Here's the video clip:

I continue to wish Ocean the best of everything on his journey. From my own experience, admitting who one really is and not feeling the need to lie and hide anymore is a remarkable, liberating experience.  For me, it was as if a huge, huge weight had been taken off of me.  Yes, moments of fear persisted at times, but over all, it was perhaps the most soul restoring thing I have experienced.  I sincerely hope that Ocean finds the liberation and self-acceptance that I found.  I also hope that his courage will inspire others to stop lying to both themselves and those around them.

The Stupidity of the Tea Party

It's amazing how the Koch brothers, Mitt Romney and the plutocrats use the bigotry and prejudices of the Tea Party crowd to manipulate these cretins into supporting those who are their own worse economic enemies.  I guess their hatred for gays, minorities, et al, supersedes their common sense.    Bigotry in this case carries a high price.

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Rick Perry "Proudly" Refuses health care for 1.2 Million Texans

Mitt Romney is not the only Republican who holds contempt for the less fortunate.  Just yesterday Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that he was rejecting an estimated $164 billion dollars in federal aid coming on line under the Affordable Health Care Act and kicking 1.2 million low-income Texans to the curb with no health care coverage.  To many in the GOP, the less fortunate are simply disposable trash.  Even as they boast of the religiosity while utterly ignoring the Gospel message about caring for the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless.  Raw Story looks at Perry's "proud" rejection of coverage for needy Texans.  Here are highlights:

In a statement published Monday morning, Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) “proudly” declared that he will decline to implement key tenets of the Affordable Care Act — a move that will see his state forgo an estimated $164 billion dollars in federal aid and leave over 1.2 million low-income Texans, who would have finally been eligible for health care, helpless and uninsured.

“This is a fiscally stupid decision on the part of Rick Perry,” Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Rebecca Acuña told Raw Story. “Texas would be one of the states that gets the most money from the federal government and the Medicaid expansion would have provided health care to more than a million Texans. It’s… It’s very sad that Rick Perry is willing to play politics with the health of Texans, and that’s exactly what this decision is.”

 With his announcement, Perry becomes the sixth governor to refuse implementing a key aspect of the Affordable Care Act: the Medicaid expansion and the state-based health care exchanges. Republican governors in Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Wisconsin have made similar decisions, but Texas is by far the biggest.

Perry would seem to be inviting a political free-for-all thanks to the relative size and power of the Texas hospital industry, which absorbed more than $4.6 billion in unpaid emergency medical costs in 2010. While not seeing it as a cure-all, Texas hospitals largely praised the Affordable Care Act for dramatically expanding health care options for poor people, who are ultimately paid for by others who carry their own insurance. Nearly 25 percent of Texans — 6.5 million people — do not have health insurance, including more than 1.2 million children, and the state’s health care system ranks last in the nation overall.


In a letter to Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius (PDF), Perry opined that giving poor people health care and setting up exchanges that make health insurance cheaper are both “brazen intrusions into the sovereignty of our state.”

The state of Texas has the most restrictive Medicaid program in the country, requiring that a family of three make no more than $188 per month to qualify. Under federal rules administered by the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid would be expanded to 133 percent of the poverty level, covering an additional 1.2 million Texans under the program. That would cause a 46 percent increase in Medicaid enrollment which the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (PDF) estimated would cost the state 3 percent more in 2019 than it currently pays, and the federal government would have picked up the rest

David Frum to Romney: Be a Better Rich Guy

Even GOP leaning conservatives seem to be picking up on Mitt and Ann Romney's tone deafness when it comes to making themselves look utterly out of touch with the vast majority of Americans.  David Frum is one such conservative who notes that the Romney fundraisers in the Hamptons over the weekend could not have been arranged to look more damning if they had been orchestrated for Romney by the Obama campaign.  Admittedly, many voters are not all that smart and/or don't follow politics as closely as they ought to, but the images of obscene wealth do ring home.  Especially when added on top of reports of Swiss bank accounts, tax haven holdings, etc.  Here's Frum's advice to Romney via The Daily Beast - advice that I personally hope Romney ignores:

In Robert Caro's new LBJ biography, he tells this story of John F. Kennedy: Kennedy faced considerable opposition within the Boston Democratic organization when he first ran for Congress in 1946. He made an early public appearance at an event organized by the local leadership. One after another, contenders for the nomination took to the stage to tell party members how they "came up the hard way." At last it was JFK's turn. He opened his speech, "I see I'm the only person here tonight who didn't come up the hard way." Caro tells us that the quip turned the whole room around, confirming the old saying that in politics you get a lot further with a joke and a lot of bribes than you do with a joke alone.

Still, I thought of that story as I read Josh Green today:

Mitt Romney’s fundraising events in the Hamptons yesterday wouldn’t have looked much different if the Obama campaign had organized them on his behalf. From the ostentatious mega-mansions, to the Bentleys and Ferraris, to the guests’ crass boasting about their yachts and condescending putdowns of the poor and middle class, the whole scene seemed designed to reinforce Team Obama’s preferred image of Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat concerned only for those with a comparable net worth.

For Romney, just back from a jet-skiing vacation at his lakeside manse in New Hampshire, the events will raise lots of money and put further distance between himself and the president. In June, he and the Republican National Committee out-raised President Obama and the Democratic National Committee $106 million to $71 million. But every time Romney draws attention to the unseemly aspects of his wealth (or when his supporters do, like the Hamptons crowd), he undercuts that fundraising advantage and hurts his candidacy. He does this a lot: bragging about his multiple Cadillacs, proposing a $10,000 bet during a GOP debate, boasting of his friendship with NFL owners. Romney’s problem is that while he was very good at getting rich, he isn’t any good at *being* rich. In fact, he’s downright terrible at it.

What strikes me most about Romney is his seeming sense of entitlement.  His attitude is akin to that of the wealthy in the movie Titanic where the Leonardo DiCaprio character was viewed by most as an alien bug to be stepped on.  Romney doesn't seem to get it that it was largely his birth into wealth that allowed him to live the way he does.  Had he been born into a working class family, he'd likely be one of those "little people" his Hampton donors scorn.

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