Tag: Republicans

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Politics

House Republicans Cut $16 Billion From Food Stamps For The Poor

Democrats failed on Wednesday to block Republican attempts to cut billions of dollars in food assistance to poor American families, having earlier denounced the plans as an “abomination” and “immoral”.

The Republicans included the $16bn cut to the food stamp programme over the next decade as part of a five-year farm bill debated in the House of Representatives agricultural committee. Democrats submitted an amendment to prevent the cuts but lost in a vote after a heated debate in which some members of Congress said more than 2 million people would lose food assistance under the programme formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap).

“You need to think of that child out there that’s going to go hungry,” said Democratic congressman David Scott. “This right here is the meanest cut of all. It’s un-American. Twenty percent of my home state of Georgia is on Snap. Can you imagine what a $16bn cut will do?”

The Republican move appears to be intended in part to highlight Republican disparagement of Barack Obama as the “food stamp president” because record numbers of Americans now claim the benefit, doubling the cost of the programme since 2008 to $80bn a year. More than 46 million Americans receive food stamps, nearly half of them children.

The agricultural committee chairman, Frank Lucas, justified the cuts in part by claiming that the system had been manipulated by some US states so the federal government provided food to households not entitled to assistance.

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fail ObamaCare Politics Repeal

Republicans Fall Short, Way Short Of Their Health Care Promises

Remember when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act also known these days as “ObamaCare” into law? Republicans all over this nation went wild, promising to the American people that they would “repeal and replace” the law. Well, we’ve seen multiple attempts – 33 so far, but whose counting – to “repeal” the law, but what happened to the “replace?”

Apparently, replacing is not that important. As a matter of fact, it is not even the issue.

From Politico: Even as they cheer their “Obamacare” repeal vote, here’s a reality check: House Republicans have done next to nothing they promised they would when it comes to health care.

Sure, they’ve voted to kill parts of President Barack Obama’s law more than 30 times, slashing funding, using the votes as red meat to rally the base — even squeezing some into law.

But they’ve fallen short of what they promised the American people they would do when it comes to actual health care policy.

Flash back to the campaign promises of 2010: GOP leadership told voters they would “enact medical liability reform,” allow Americans to buy health insurance across state lines, expand health savings accounts, “ensure access for patients with pre-existing conditions” and “permanently prohibit taxpayer funding of abortion.”

Eighteen months after taking the majority, they’ve passed only two of those: an abortion bill and liability legislation.

Republican leaders have passed a resolution asking committees to draft a replacement for the Obama health care law, but don’t look for any thick, comprehensive proposals; they don’t exist.

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Politics

Republican Governor Rejects Voter ID Laws in Michigan

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan surprised his fellow Republicans on Tuesday, refusing to sign two bills that would have required voters to show photo identification before obtaining an absentee ballot. The vetoes are an election-year rarity for the party, which has pressed for tougher voter identification laws nationwide.

They were passed by lawmakers two weeks ago. “These reforms will make a good election system even better by adding appropriate safeguards and improving transparency,” Mr. Snyder said. He said the vetoed bills “could create voter confusion among absentee voters.”

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for the governor, said that confusion had to do with a part of the bills that would have made voters check a citizenship box before receiving a ballot. Mr. Snyder suggested that verification of a person’s citizenship should be done only once, when a voter is first registered, she said.

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Politics weekly address

Presidential Weekly Address – Republicans Are Willfully Doing Nothing To Win An Election

President Obama spoke about our economic future, claiming that we have all the answers to our problems, but because of Republicans’ lack of interest in doing anything to help the economy, things are at a stalemate.

Right now, we’re still fighting our way back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  The economy is growing again, but it’s not growing fast enough.  Our businesses have created 4.3 million new jobs over the last 27 months, but we’re not creating them fast enough.  And we’re facing some pretty serious headwinds – from the effects of the recent spike in gas prices, to the financial crisis in Europe.

But here’s the thing.  We have the answers to these problems.  We have plenty of big ideas and technical solutions from both sides of the aisle.  That’s not what’s holding us back.  What’s holding us back is a stalemate in Washington.

Last September, I sent Congress a jobs bill full of the kinds of bipartisan ideas that could have put over a million Americans back to work and helped bolster our economy against outside shocks.  I sent them a plan that would have reduced our deficit by $4 trillion in a balanced way that pays for the investments we need by cutting unnecessary spending and asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little bit more in taxes.

Since then, Congress has passed a few parts of that jobs bill, like a tax cut that’s allowing working Americans to keep more of your paycheck every week.  But on most of the ideas that would create jobs and grow our economy, Republicans in Congress haven’t lifted a finger.  They’d rather wait until after the election in November.  Just this past week, one of them said, “Why not wait for the reinforcements?”  That’s a quote.  And you can bet plenty of his colleagues are thinking the same thing.

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Politics

Republicans Block Transparency in Political Ads

The opponents of a new rule to post political ad information online have opened up another front in a long-running fight, inserting language into an appropriations bill that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from implementing the transparency measure.

The FCC voted in April to require television stations to put detailed data on political ad purchases online. The information, which includes who buys ads, for how much, and when they run, is currently open to the public but is available only on paper at individual stations. Media companies have lobbied hard against the rule, and the National Association of Broadcasters recently sued in federal court to stop it. The rule is currently under review by the government and will not go into effect until July at the earliest.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., chair of the financial services and general government subcommittee of the House appropriations committee, added language to an appropriations bill ordering that no funds to be used to implement the disclosure rule. The bill,which passed the subcommittee Wednesday, funds the FCC and other agencies for fiscal year 2013.

The move by Emerson adds another question mark to the process of creating an FCC website with political ad data. At a subcommittee hearing Wednesday, a Democratic amendment to remove the Emerson language was defeated on a party line vote.

[Pro Public]

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Politics Senate vote

Senate Republicans Are Determined To Make Women Second Class Citizens

Republicans are sticking to their guns on this one. Let’s try to understand exactly what is meant when politicians say “equal pay for equal work.”

Let’s say there are two truck drivers, a male and a female. The both start at the same point, let’s call that point… point A. They drive the same road carrying the same merchandise to point B in another state. When the two drivers arrive at point B, the male truck driver gets paid $10.00 for driving his truck, and the female driver gets $7.77. So two people driving the same vehicle along the same route going the same distance, gets paid differently base on their gender. Males get more, females fall back.

How is this right?

It’s not. But today in Congress, Republicans blocked a bill that would have allowed hard-working women the opportunity to get equal pay for the equal work they’re doing every day. These women are in the workforce, doing the same work that men do, but Republicans are united in their effort to keep women’s paychecks in second class status.

After the bill failed in the Senate, President Obama expressed his frustrations with Republicans, saying “...it is incredibly disappointing that in this make or break moment for the middle class, Senate Republicans put partisan politics ahead of American women and their families.”

And the Republican leader Mitt Romney? What did he have to say about women getting equal pay for equal work? Well, we’re still waiting. Mr. Romney was given many opportunity to respond to reporters’ questions about where he stood on women getting equal pay for the work they’re doing, but still, Romney stay quiet. “We’ll get back to you on that,” was the response from Romney’s Campaign manager.

We can only hope the women of America are listening. Republicans have been on a constant war against women’s rights, women’s health and women’s economic needs. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum – from far-left Democrat to far-right Republican – denying hardworking women a fair pay for them doing the very same work a man is doing is wrong. And voting for a Republican who is determined to keep women as second class citizens, is also wrong!

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Politics voters

This Is Too Much Excitement for Mitt Romney’s Candidacy

They can’t contain themselves! These Romney supporters are beaming with excitement for their 2012 Republican hero as they proudly display their signs in support of the candidate. Anymore display of excitement and we may have to censor this group as rated R, wait no… X!

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Wisconsin Wisconsin Union Bashing

Republicans Hate Unions. Why Is That? – Video

The reason was always obvious, but hearing Rachel Maddow explain why Republicans hate unions put a level of simplicity to the topic that anyone and everyone should get… even Republicans.

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Politics

The World is Rejecting Austerity – Republicans Push More Austerity in America

aus·ter·i·ty

[aw-ster-i-tee]

noun, plural aus·ter·i·ties.
1. austere  quality; severity of manner, life, etc.; sternness.
2. Usually, austerities. ascetic practices: austerities of monastery life.
3. strict economy.
Austerity is also described in economics, as a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided.
—–

A day after voters in France and Greece toppled governments in a European backlash against austerity measures, Republicans moved forward with legislation to replace $78 billion in automatic spending cuts to defense and discretionary domestic spending with a much larger $261 billion cut focused only on domestic spending.

The GOP said its bill highlights the Democrats’ obsessions with raising taxes and inability to accept even reasonable spending cuts to a government that is $16 trillion in debt.

“We shouldn’t be taking more from hardworking Americans to fix Washington’s mistakes,” Ryan said in a statement. “Instead, we should be solving the problem with structural reforms to our entitlement programs to make them strong and sustainable.”

Democrats said the party-line vote showed Republicans were more interested in protecting tax breaks for oil companies than in funding programs that help the poor and needy.

“It is no wonder commentators are calling Republicans reverse-Robin Hoods,” said Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who offered a motion that would have replaced cuts to Medicaid and children’s health insurance with cuts to oil and gas subsidies.

[The Hill]

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Politics right winged

Arnold Schwarzenegger to Republican Leaders – Stop Being the Party of Right Winged Nuts

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger looked at his Republican party and decided to write an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times, begging for his party to go back to the days of Reagan, to forget the right winged nonsense and be more inclusive.

A recent decision by Nathan Fletcher – a Republican State Assemblyman and Republican State Legislator Anthony Adams to leave the Republican party and become Independents, prompted Mr. Schwarzenegger to write his piece.

“In the current climate, the extreme right-wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn’t meet its strict criteria. Its new and narrow litmus test for party membership doesn’t allow compromise,” Schwarzenegger wrote.

It’s time for the Republicans who are so bent on enforcing conformity to ask themselves a question: What would Ronald Reagan have done? He worked hard to maintain a welcoming, open and diverse Republican Party. He would have been appalled to see Republicans like Fletcher and Adams conclude that they had no other option than to leave the party.

The former California governor called on his party to compromise and he used Reagan as an example. “To succeed, Republicans need to embrace true Reaganism,” he said, “and that means embracing the true Reagan, a brave and independent leader who believed in solutions and compromise.”

And he mentioned other prominent Republicans who worked together for the American people and who believed in compromise like Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

Teddy Roosevelt is still a hero among environmentalists for his conservationist policies. Dwight Eisenhower believed in the value of investing in infrastructure, and we can thank him for our highway system. Nixon, who originally attracted me to the party, nearly passed universal healthcare. He also created the national Environmental Protection Agency, which some modern Republicans want to close down.

Schwarzenegger offered this little piece of advise to the Republican leaders;

It’s time to stop thinking of the Republican Party as an exclusive club where your ideological card is checked at the door, and start thinking about how we can attract more solution-based leaders like Nathan Fletcher and Anthony Adams.

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Politics

Government Is Not The Problem, Republicans In Government Is The Problem

An article in the Washington Post attempts to pinpoint where the problem lies in Washington, and the conclusion was what we’ve all been saying for a long time – Government is not the problem, Republicans in Government is the problem.

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

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Politics

Biden Tries to Save The Violence Against Women Act from GOP Block Party

Vice-President Joe Biden will Wednesday lead a Democrat push to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, the 1994 legislation that now faces opposition from some conservatives.

Biden will be joined by Attorney General Eric Holder, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, White House Advisor on Violence Against Women Lynn Rosenthal and Sharon Love, mother of Yeardley Love and founder of the One Love Foundation, to talk about the need to reauthorize the law.

The New York Times has reported that the law would expand financing for and broaden the reach of domestic violence programs.

However, it said some Republicans say the measure unnecessarily expands immigration avenues by creating new definitions for immigrant victims to claim battery, and also dilutes the focus on domestic violence by expanding protections to new groups, like same-sex couples.

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