Anti-Medicaid States: Earning $11,000 is too much (!)

So true! Excerpt:

The political rhetoric during a presidential campaign focuses on the middle class and leaves the uninsured working poor largely invisible, said Rand Corp. researcher Dr. Art Kellermann.

"We hear a lot of talk about unemployment and the aspirations of middle-class Americans. But we don't hear about the consequences of unemployment and the consequences of the collapsing middle class," Kellermann said. Losing health insurance is one of those consequences.

"It's like the public just doesn't want to believe anything else until it hits home," he said, "Until it's their own child, brother or parent that got laid off when they were 58, until then, it's not real."

Anti-Medicaid states: Earning $11,000 is too much

By CARLA K. JOHNSON and KELLI KENNEDY

MIAMI (AP) - Sandra Pico is poor, but not poor enough.

She makes about $15,000 a year, supporting her daughter and unemployed husband. She thought she'd be able to get health insurance after the Supreme Court upheld President Barack Obama's health care law.

Then she heard that her own governor won't agree to the federal plan to extend Medicaid coverage to people like her in two years. So she expects to remain uninsured, struggling to pay for her blood pressure medicine.

"You fall through the cracks and there's nothing you can do about it," said the 52-year-old home health aide. "It makes me feel like garbage, like the American dream, my dream in my homeland is not being accomplished."

(AP) Graphic shows income eligibility cutoffs in states across the nation. Full Image

Many working parents like Pico are below the federal poverty line but don't qualify for Medicaid, a decades-old state-federal insurance program. That's especially true in states where conservative governors say they'll reject the Medicaid expansion under Obama's health law.

In South Carolina, a yearly income of $16,900 is too much for Medicaid for a family of three. In Florida, $11,000 a year is too much. In Mississippi, $8,200 a year is too much. In Louisiana and Texas, earning more than just $5,000 a year makes you ineligible for Medicaid.

Governors in those five states have said they'll reject the Medicaid expansion underpinning Obama's health law after the Supreme Court's decision gave states that option. Many of those hurt by the decision are working parents who are poor - but not poor enough - to qualify for Medicaid.

Republican Mitt Romney's new running mate, conservative Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, has a budget plan that would turn Medicaid over to the states and sharply limit federal dollars. Romney hasn't specifically said where he stands on Ryan's idea, but has expressed broad support for his vice presidential pick's proposals.

Medicaid now covers an estimated 70 million Americans and would cover an estimated 7 million more in 2014 under the Obama health law's expansion. In contrast, Ryan's plan could mean 14 million to 27 million Americans would ultimately lose coverage, even beyond the effect of a repeal of the health law, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation of Ryan's 2011 budget plan.

For now, most states don't cover childless adults, but all states cover some low-income parents. The income cutoff, however, varies widely from state to state.

Most states cover children in low-income families. Manuel and Sandra Pico's 15-year-old daughter is covered by Medicaid. But the suburban Miami couple can't afford private insurance for themselves and they make too much for Florida's Medicaid.

Manuel Pico, a carpenter, used to make more than $20,000 a year, but has struggled to find work in the last three years after the real estate market collapsed. He occasionally picks up day jobs or takes care of the neighbor's yard. Sandra Pico would like to work full time, but can't afford to pay someone to watch her 34-year-old sister, who has Down syndrome.

"No matter how hard I work, I'm not going to get anywhere," Sandra Pico said. "If you're not rich, you just don't have it."

In San Juan, Texas, 22-year-old Matthew Solis makes about $8,700 a year - too much to qualify for Medicaid in that state. Solis, a single father with joint custody of his 4-year-old daughter, said he works about 25 hours per week at a building supply store making minimum wage and is a full-time college student at the University of Texas-Pan American. He aspires to be a school counselor.

He recently sought medical care for food poisoning, visiting a federally funded clinic. But he doesn't see a doctor regularly because he can't afford private insurance. The new health law allows young adults to remain on their parents' insurance until age 26. But that doesn't help Solis, whose father is uninsured and whose mother died of leukemia when he was 8.

"I voted for him (Obama) because he promised we would have insurance," Solis said. "I'm pretty upset because I worked for Obama and I still don't have coverage."

His governor, Rick Perry, like Pico's governor, Rick Scott, is rejecting the Medicaid expansion. So Solis too is out of luck unless his circumstances dramatically change.

In most of the states where governors are rejecting or leaning against the expansion, the income level that disqualifies a parent from Medicaid is stunningly low. Only in New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie has said he's leaning against the expansion, is Medicaid available to parents with incomes at the poverty line and slightly above. New Jersey will cover a parent making $24,645 in a family of three.

Most states base Medicaid eligibility for parents on household income and how it compares to the federal poverty level, which was $18,530 for a family of three in 2011, the year being used for easier state-by-state comparisons.

In Louisiana, the eligibility cutoff for a working parent is 25 percent of federal poverty, or $4,633 for a family of three. In Nevada, it's 87 percent of the federal poverty level, or $16,121 for a family of three.

That's been the range in states where governors are likely saying no to expanded Medicaid.

In contrast, states where governors have said they'll expand Medicaid are more generous with working parents. The Medicaid eligibility cutoff ranges in those states from Washington's $13,527 to Minnesota's $39,840.

To be sure, some states with generous coverage for parents have been forced to cut back. Illinois, facing a financial crisis, ended coverage last month for more than 25,000 working parents. Even so, the state still covers working parents with incomes slightly higher than the poverty line.

The national health law's Medicaid expansion would start covering all citizens in 2014 who make up to roughly $15,400 for an individual, $30,650 for a family of four.

The federal government will pay the full cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016. After that, the states will only pick up 5 percent of the cost through 2019, and 10 percent of the cost thereafter.

So why would any governor say no to such a great deal?

These governors are in favor of smaller government. In principle, they don't want the federal government to expand - even if that expansion would help their own citizens. And they say they don't want their own states paying any more of the Medicaid tab even if it's years down the road.

"We don't need the federal government telling us what to do when it comes to meeting the needs of the citizens of our states," Florida Gov. Rick Scott wrote recently in an opinion piece for U.S. News and World Report. "And we don't need Washington putting states on the hook for future budget obligations."

Also, many conservatives view Medicaid as a wasteful, highly flawed program, akin to no health coverage. Many doctors across the country won't treat Medicaid patients because the payments they receive are so low.

When the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of the health law's Medicaid expansion, it raised the chances for inequity at a time when more Americans have fallen from the middle class into poverty, said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"Why should a sick person in Connecticut have access to health care when they don't in Mississippi and Texas?" Sawhill asked. "We really do have a very high level of poverty as a result of the recession. And the safety net is weaker than ever."

Medicaid, the nation's single largest insurer, is a state and federal program created in 1965 as a companion program to welfare cash assistance to single parents. Today, the elderly and disabled cost nearly 70 cents of every Medicaid dollar, not the stereotypical single mother and her children.

What's largely unknown to many Americans is who is left out of the safety net, said Cheryl Camillo, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. "A huge chunk of the populace is not covered, even by Medicaid," she said.

The political rhetoric during a presidential campaign focuses on the middle class and leaves the uninsured working poor largely invisible, said Rand Corp. researcher Dr. Art Kellermann.

"We hear a lot of talk about unemployment and the aspirations of middle-class Americans. But we don't hear about the consequences of unemployment and the consequences of the collapsing middle class," Kellermann said. Losing health insurance is one of those consequences.

"It's like the public just doesn't want to believe anything else until it hits home," he said, "Until it's their own child, brother or parent that got laid off when they were 58, until then, it's not real."

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Paul Krugman re. Ryan's Budget

Excerpt: Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

The Ryan Role

By Paul Krugman

Mark Kleiman points us to a lamentable but revealing column by William Saletan, which illustrates perfectly how the essentially ludicrous Paul Ryan has gotten so far – namely, by playing to the gullibility of self-proclaimed centrists, who want to show their “balance” by finding a conservative to praise.

Saletan writes:

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.

OK, what? Where is that coming from? Did Saletan miss the whole discussion when the Ryan plan came out? Did he miss the point where even Jacob Weisberg apologized for his initial praise, admitting that

I reacted too quickly and didn’t sort out just how laughable Ryan’s long-term spending projections were. His plan projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050. Defense spending alone was 4.7 percent of GDP in 2009. With numbers like that, Ryan is more an anarchist-libertarian than honest conservative.

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

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Under Ryan's plan, Romney would pay less than 1% in taxes

No wonder Dick Cheney thinks Ryan is a perfect candidate for the presidency (vice-presidency). He's hoping Ryan will be a president (vice president in name only) just like he was!

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/12/romney-would-pay-less-than-1-in-taxes-under-ryan-plan/

Under the budget plan proposed by Mitt Romney’s vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Romney would have paid an effective tax rate under 1% in 2010, according to an analysis by The Atlantic.

Romney’s 2010 tax rate—he has only released complete information for that year, so it is unclear what his burden would have been in other years—would have come in at a tiny 0.82 percent for the year, far lower than the already low 13.9% rate he actually paid.

That huge drop would come primarily from the Ryan plan’s proposal to eliminate taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends. Romney’s income in 2010 came largely from those sources, so those taxes made up the bulk of the overall effective tax rate on his reported $21.6 million income.

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Finding out more about Ayn Rand's/Paul Ryan's philosophy

In a book I recently read called The Sociopath Next Door, the psychologist author reports that 1 in 25 people is sociopathic (self-oriented with no conscience or regard for others). Sociopaths are more prolific in society than most people realize. They abound in politics.  The following article gives important information for those not familiar with Ayn Rand or with Paul Ryan, who espouses her philosophy. 

The Ayn Rand Philosophy Paul Ryan Wants to Bring to America
By Mark Ames

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/mark-ames-paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls.html#Py9DL6RPpYm4Oxzf.99

Excerpt:  Ayn Rand’s philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism” to use her words. To her, those who aren’t like-minded sociopaths are “parasites” and “lice” and “looters.”

There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people go frothing batshit angry at the suggestion that maybe health care coverage should be extended to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it; or when they froth at the mouth in ecstasy at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of their population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays Charlie to the American right-wing’s Manson Family. Read on and you’ll see why

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”

(The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s favorite book — he even makes his clerks learn it, much as Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan tried making his interns read Rand.)

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/mark-ames-paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls.html#Py9DL6RPpYm4Oxzf.99

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Obama's Dream GOP Ticket

With Ryan, Romney makes the VP pick Obama wanted
By David Corn

In a way, Paul Ryan is exactly whom President Barack Obama wanted on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney. By selecting the Republican congressman from Wisconsin, whose name is synonymous with the GOP's cut-taxes-for-the-rich and slash-programs-for-the-middle-class-and-the-poor, Romney has helped Obama in his No. 1 mission: shape the election not as a referendum on the sluggish economy but as a sharp clash between opposing sets of values and programs for the future.

Ever since the Democrats' clock was cleaned by the tea party-ized Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama has pursued a grand political strategy of setting up his reelection contest as a choice between archly different visions. Long before Romney had vanquished the midgets of the GOP pack, Obama began using the Ryan budget proposal as his chief foil. In April 2011, he gave a speech at George Washington University that was a tongue-lashing of the Ryan's budget plan, which would end Medicare as a guaranteed benefit and throw more tax breaks at the well-to-do than George W. Bush could imagine. Ryan, who attended the speech, was insulted and immediately blasted the president.

Throughout the 2011 battles over budget cuts (which nearly caused a government shutdown) and the debt ceiling limit (which nearly caused a financial crisis), Obama kept pointing to the Ryan budget as a plan that would cause hardship for many and reflected a pessimistic and Darwinian GOP vision of the future in which the United States could not afford to invest in education, infrastructure, and innovation—the ingredients necessary for a strong economy that would support a vibrant middle class. While the Republicans praised individual freedom and the powers of the market (which didn't work too well in the run-up to the crash of 2008) and once again pressed the theology of supply-side tax cuts, Obama emphasized communal action, prudent investments, and responsible deficit-cutting.

The Ryan budget allowed Obama to do all that. Ryan's presence on the ticket will do the same.

Now Romney owns the Ryan budget—and the Ryan view: draconian government spending cuts that will subject Medicare and Medicaid recipients to the whims of the market (and eviscerate other government programs, such as food safety inspections, law enforcement, and environmental protection) and more post-tax dollars for 1 percenters.

The pick may grant Romney a moment of boldness. Ryan is white guy, but not a boring white guy with no message. He is a wonky evangelist of far-right economic policy. But this move will give Obama another line of attack on Romney—an assault that will consume plenty of political oxygen. Instead of talking about the economy, does Romney want to discuss the details of Ryan's plan? Apparently, yes.

More important, this choice shows that Romney, the onetime moderate GOP governor of a blue state, is marching in lockstep with the tea party parade and has not only accepted but embraced his party's lurch to the far end of the ideological spectrum. This is precisely the sort of behavior that Obama yearned for on the part of the Republicans.

The conventional wisdom is that veep candidates don't matter. That's largely true (with Sarah Palin perhaps a notable exception). Yet Romney's tapping of Ryan—for what the Romney campaign calls "America's Comeback Team"—provides the president the opportunity to bolster his different-vision message. Chicago cannot be unhappy about that.

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Very important article re. Romney and his tax returns

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/18/opinion/kleinbard-canellos-romney-tax/index.html    (See a few excerpts below -- but read the whole article to get a sense of all that Romney may be withholding from the public)

WHY WON'T ROMNEY RELEASE MORE TAX RETURNS?
By Edward Kleinbard and Peter Canellos

EXCERPTS: For 2010, the Romneys enjoyed a federal tax rate of only 13.9% on their adjusted gross income of roughly $22 million, which gave them a lower federal tax burden (including payroll, income and excise taxes) than the average American wage-earning family in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. The principal reason for this munificently low tax rate is that much of Romney's income, even today, comes from "carried interest," which is just the jargon used by the private equity industry for compensation received for managing other people's money.

The vast majority of tax scholars and policy experts agree that awarding a super-low tax rate to this one form of labor income is completely unjustified as a policy matter. Romney has not explained how, as president, he can bring objectivity to bear on this tax loophole that is estimated as costing all of us billions of dollars every year.

Romney's 2010 tax return, when combined with his FEC disclosure, reveals red flags that raise serious tax compliance questions with respect to his possible tax minimization strategies in earlier years. The release in October of his 2011 return will at best act as a distraction from these questions.

So, what are the issues?

The first is Romney's Swiss bank account. Most presidential candidates don't think it appropriate to bet that the U.S. dollar will lose value by speculating in Swiss Francs, which is basically the rationale offered by the trustee of Romney's "blind" trust for opening this account. What's more, if you really want just to speculate on foreign currencies, you don't need a Swiss bank account to do so.

The Swiss bank account raises tax compliance questions, too. (Read about these in the article)

[As for Bain Capital], While Romney may have dissembled about when he actually left Bain Capital, he has been disassociated with the firm long enough that he cannot argue that his tax returns will reveal proprietary secrets.

Nor is this just an exercise in financial titillation or gossip. Disclosure goes to the heart of the truthfulness with which a nominee engages the American people, and it assures us that he in fact has comported himself before the election with the high moral character we associate with a future president.

The U.S. presidency is a position of immense magnitude and requires a thorough vetting. What the American people deserve is a complete and honest presentation by Romney of how his wealth was accumulated, where it is now invested, what purpose is served by all the various offshore vehicles in which he has an interest and what his financial relationship with Bain Capital has been since his retirement from the company. These are all factors that go to the heart of his character and values.

For a nominee to America's highest office, a clear and transparent reporting of his finances should be nothing more than routine. (DUH)

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Democrats can hardly contain their elation at the Ryan pick

Romney and Ryan - 2012
By Steve Benen

As a rule, when your opponents seem really happy about your choice in running mates, it's fair to say you've made a provocative choice.

And this morning, Democrats are practically giddy, unable to believe their good fortune.

Three different sources close to the Romney campaign indicate to NBC News that Mitt Romney will announce House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate at tomorrow's campaign event in Norfolk, VA.

The announcement will be in front of the U.S.S. Wisconsin -- which just happens to be Ryan's home state.

With recent national polls showing Romney trailing President Barack Obama, Ryan is a bold pick.

"Bold" is certainly one way to look at it.

Readers may recall that I tend to think running-mate choices fall into one of three categories: Augusts, Novembers, and Januaries. If a nominee picks a January, he or she is looking for someone who can help govern once inaugurated. If he or she picks a November, the nominee is picking a running mate intended to help win the general election. And if the candidate picks an August, he or she is trying to bring a party together and satisfy intra-party demands.

Paul Ryan is an August. Romney, who never quite made the transition from the primaries to the general election, has been subjected to heavy pressure from conservatives to choose the right-wing House member, and it appears the lobbying campaign was successful. The Republican nominee still feels the need to satisfy the demands of his base, and Romney isn't in a strong enough position to disappoint them.

As a result, both the left and right have the Republican running mate they hoped for -- Romney has picked the architect of a radical, Medicare-crushing budget plan, debated by the least popular Congress since the dawn of modern polling. Indeed, it's fair to say the radical Ryan budget helped make this Congress so widely disliked, which makes his VP nomination that much more remarkable.

For months, Democrats have been trying to inject the "Romney-Ryan plan" into the political bloodstream, and now, the Republicans' presidential candidate has made Dems' job easier. The Obama campaign hoped to make Ryan Romney's effective running mate, never expecting the GOP candidate to make this literal.

The result is a dynamic that was hard to predict. Romney isn't even trying to reach out to moderate voters; he's taking the most far-right candidacy in modern American history and turning it to 11.

Postscript: Just as an aside, this will be the first Republican ticket in American history not to have a Protestant. Romney's a Mormon and Ryan is Roman Catholic.

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A humbling experience: The Hubble Pointing at Nothing

 

A humbling experience: The Hubble Pointing at Nothing Here is what happened when astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at what appeared to be absolutely nothing, and left it there for 10 days, and then again for 11 days. Then they made the images into a 3-D presentation. The results are incredible and almost incomprehensible to the human mind.  Turn your sound on; there is a narrative. http://www.flixxy.com/hubble-ultra-deep-field-3d.htm

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Good analysis on Romney's pick of Ryan

By Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker magazine, who recently did an in-depth interview article on Paul Ryan. (Very interesting article--should be read by everyone to get a good picture of Ryan, the man and the politician. Read it at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza)  As Lizza points out, Romney has made a daring decision, no doubt dictated as an inevitable one because his campaign up till now has not enamored him to the voters.  His pick of Ryan gives Americans a clear and definitive choice between two ideologies.  Read this short update analysis by Lizza: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/looks-like-ryan-mitts-pick.html

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Very Important Choice this Election: United Church of Christ Minister

Now that Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as a running mate, the choice between the candidates has never been more important for all Americans. Romney's constant switching of positions has shown he stands for nothing and goes with whatever way the wind blows, but Paul Ryan takes a firm stand.  We're at a crossroads of two divergent directions.  The roads the Republicans and Democrats want to take our country down are starkly different. The road we choose will forever mark us as a nation. The following essay by a Christian minister spells it out very clearly. 

MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER
By Rev. Chuck Currie, United Church of Christ Minister

Paul Ryan once said: "Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism." The Wisconsin congressman and GOP nominee for vice-president has been known to give copies of Rand's books for gifts and has told many he bases policy after Rand's views. What did Rand believe so strongly? "What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty," once said the philosopher, and perhaps that is why Ryan has fought to cut Medicare and lead a revolution in the U.S. House to gut social services.

Roman Catholics, evangelicals and mainline Christians are among the many faith voices in the U.S. that have condemned Ryan's efforts.

Faculty at Georgetown University wrote Ryan a letter last year that stated in part: "...your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love."

Ryan's budget proposals affects the support of seniors, cut assistance to programs aimed at combating childhood hunger, and would leave people who have lost their jobs without heat during cold winter months. This isn't hyperbole but reasoned analysis of his budget goals from non-partisan groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan's plans would eventually end "everything from veterans' programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low-income families," according to the CBPP.

At the same time, Ryan and his allies - including Mitt Romney - want to cut taxes for the wealthiest. That is why I joined over 60 religious leaders last week in writing to Congress that: "Favoring the wealthiest 2% over working families is irresponsible public policy that fails a basic moral test. We are not economists or tax experts. But this debate is about more than dry statistics or competing fiscal theories. Ultimately, these choices reflect our values and reveal our priorities as a nation. We urge Members of Congress to put families and workers before ideological agendas that favor the powerful."

Christians can come to different conclusions on difficult issues and there is no Christian ticket in this presidential election. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are both faithful people and we should assume the same of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Yet President Obama - who fought to extend health care to all Americans - and Mitt Romney, who has promised to cut health benefits even to the elderly (as Paul Ryan has advanced) have certain moral differences in their platforms that should give all Americans regardless of faith background or ideology pause.

Are we are brother's keeper, our sister's keeper?

Or are we fighting the idea that taking care of one another is a moral responsibility?

This election will matter.

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Paul Ryan's Budget Numbers DON'T ADD UP

This information won't interest Tea Party types, whose in-the-Bubble minds resist facts as if they were the plague.  But it is Important information for all fact-gathering, concerned voters who care about the truth.  Read the NEW YORKER article for factual truth about Paul Ryan's budget numbers:  profile

RYAN'S and ROMNEY'S NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP
By Susie Madrak

Economist Jared Bernstein beautifully eviscerates the intellectual foundation (or lack thereof) for Paul Ryan's economic policies -- which is really not difficult, even for bloggers. The problem? The members of the media who are still too damn lazy to do the math, and instead proclaim him as a real policy wonk. (Fortunately, Ryan Lizza is not one of those stupid journalists.)

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza provides a profile of Rep Paul Ryan, with a rich discussion of his vision for limited government.

It’s a good read, but it left me thinking about what it is that troubles me most about Rep Ryan, an earnest guy who’s come a long way and influenced a lot of people at a relatively young age. The problem is his numbers don’t add up. And that’s a particularly big problem for a celebrated budget wonk.

It’s actually not hard to write down plans that purport to quantify Ayn Randian visions. You cut deeply here and there—always from 30,000 feet up so you don’t have to get into fights about specifics—you turn big programs over to the states (e.g., you “block grant” foods stamps and Medicaid), you privatize social insurance, you voucherize Medicare with vouchers whose costs lag prices.

Then, in the spirit of another Ryan hero, Jack Kemp, you write down a bunch of supply-side tax cuts.

But the problem with all that is obvious, and here Ryan is guilty of that which he accuses his adversaries: intellectual laziness. Ayn Rand was a philosopher, a novelist. She never worried about public infrastructure, retirement security, budget deficits. Kemp’s trickle down ideas, still promoted today by the likes of Art Laffer and Larry Kudlow, not to mention Gov Romney, have never come anywhere close to working. They’ve led not to balanced budgets and broadly shared growth, but to larger deficits and greater income concentration.

It’s thus no more plausible nor responsible to tout such an unrealistic vision from the right than it would be for an American politician to proclaim his allegiance to the ideas of Karl Marx and write down plans for confiscating wealth and socializing the means of production.

Moreover, and this is really pretty inevitable, when you learn a bit more about the politicians who write down and support plans like Ryan’s, as Lizza does here, it turns out that the federal government has played and continues to play an important role in their district and state, as has very much been the case with Ryan in WI.

Go read the whole thing  ( profile.) He also points out how the same holes appear in Mitt Romney's economic proposals, too.

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WHAT IS ROMNEY HIDING?

Why doesn't Romney reveal his tax returns?
By Brent Budowsky

What is Mitt Romney hiding? What is he so afraid of? Why doesn't he release years of his tax returns, as his father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, a very good man, did?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brought this issue back to center stage. I am not going to speculate about how many years, if any, Romney paid no taxes. But Romney's response to Reid is that Reid should put up or shut up.

Huh? It is Romney who needs to put up, by releasing the returns. I would virtually guarantee that in the hidden tax returns there are some things that most Americans would deeply resent. Why else is Romney hiding them? Many Republicans agree! Many Independents agree!

Give 'Em Hell Harry scored big with this one. Sean Hannity may be upset with Reid, but my question to Sean is: why do you think Romney is hiding the returns? Republicans are running the wrong Romney. Isn't it funny that George Romney's position is much closer to Reid's than Mitt Romney's, on the matter of candidates for president keeping their tax returns secret?

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Romney's fictitious take on the Revolutionary War

Romney is the candidate of the party that claims to revere the foundation of our country and its Constitution, yet he doesn't know his Revolutionary history.  Sigh. What more can be said to show this man up as the phony he so obviously is?  Romney committed to writing – in a book that he claims to have personally authored – an account of the start of the Revolutionary War that is upside down. He has British warships attacking and capturing Boston, a British victory, rather than the Redcoats being bloodied by the Minutemen at Concord and driven back into Boston, an American victory.

Romney's Revolutionary War Bungle
by Robert Parry

You’d think that Republican presidential hopefuls who claim to idolize the American Founders would at least have a rudimentary knowledge about the historic events that led to the Revolution, especially one hopeful who served as governor of Massachusetts.

Yet, Mitt Romney, who presided as Massachusetts governor for four years in the capital city of Boston, wrote in his book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,that the Revolutionary War began in April 1775 when the British attacked Boston by sea.

“In April 1775, British warships laid siege on Boston Harbor and successfully took command of the city,” Romney wrote.

However, in the actual history, the British military controlled Boston long before April 1775, garrisoning Redcoats in the rebellious city since 1768. The British clamped down more tightly after the Boston Tea Party on Dec. 16, 1773, imposing the so-called “Intolerable Acts” in 1774, reinforcing the Boston garrison and stopping commerce into Boston Harbor.

The aggressive British actions forced dissident leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock to flee the city and take refuge in Lexington, as colonial militias built up their stocks of arms and ammunition in nearby Concord.

The Revolutionary War began not with British forces seizing Boston in April 1775 as Romney wrote, but when the Redcoats ventured forth from Boston on April 19, 1775, to seize Adams and Hancock in Lexington and then go farther inland to destroy the colonial arms cache in Concord.

The British failed in both endeavors, but touched off the war by killing eight Massachusetts men at Lexington Green. The Redcoats then encountered a larger force of Minutemen near Concord Bridge and were driven back in a daylong retreat to Boston, suffering heavy losses. Thus, the Revolutionary War began with a stunning American victory, not with the American defeat that Romney described.

Tea Party Favorites

In misreporting the start of the Revolution, Romney joins some of his past rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, in getting basic facts about America’s Founding wrong.

Earlier in Campaign 2012, Gov. Perry put the American Revolution in the 1500s and Bachmann put the opening battle in New Hampshire, not Massachusetts.

“The reason that we fought the revolution in the 16th Century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown if you will,” Perry said, missing the actual date for the war for independence by two centuries and even placing it before the first permanent English settlement in the New World, Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the first decade of the 17th Century.

While pandering to Tea Party voters in New Hampshire, Bachmann declared, “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.” (She may have gotten confused because there is a Concord, New Hampshire, as well as a Concord, Massachusetts.)

However, one can almost excuse such historical ignorance coming from two public officials who live far away from the historic events. It’s harder to comprehend how Romney, who lived in Massachusetts much of his adult life and was governor of the state for four years, could get such a basic historical fact – how the Revolutionary War began – wrong.

Key events, including Dr. Joseph Warren dispatching Paul Revere and William Dawes to warn the countryside of the British attack, occurred virtually within eye sight of Boston’s Beacon Hill where the State House sits. These also are events that are near the heart of every Bay State citizen and are celebrated each April with the Boston Marathon on the Patriots Day holiday.

Yet, Romney committed to writing – in a book that he claims to have personally authored – an account of the start of the Revolutionary War that is upside down. He has British warships attacking and capturing Boston, a British victory, rather than the Redcoats being bloodied by the Minutemen at Concord and driven back into Boston, an American victory.

One could say that the real “Case for American Greatness” began very differently than Mitt Romney describes.

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What's good for the goose...oops, but not this time!

Romney seems to live by his own rules, made up second by second, to suit whatever position he wants to take at the time. Taking the measure of this man in the usual ways is impossible, as he jumps around, all over the map.  Best way to take his measure is to assume he is always lying and is completely untrustable.  Look at this excerpt from the following article - and what other possible conclusion could one reach?  ...when everyone expected Reid to back off and excuse himself, he doubled down, forcing another angry denial from the Romney camp. However, said Maddow, Romney did this very thing in 2002 when he was running for Massachusetts governor; he would not release his tax returns.

He demanded, however, that the husband of his opponent in that election, Shannon O’Brien, release his tax returns in addition to Mrs. O’Brien’s records, which were already available to the public. “What is she hiding?” demanded longtime Romney aide and confidant Eric Fehrnstrom.

Yet now, as Maddow points out, when Harry Reid is doing the exact same thing, all the Romney campaign can do is whine and complain about how unfair this tactic is and how nasty mean old Harry Reid is being. And while the campaign is making what Maddow calls “positive empirical claims” about Gov. Romney’s taxes, they still refuse to disclose the actual records.

Romney demanded opponents' tax returns and lied about residency in 2002
from Raw Story

On Thursday, Romney did something which he rarely does, which is to take questions from reporters. In the entire six day overseas trip that he recently completed, he took three unscripted questions, in spite of the fact that the campaign was traveling with a full compliment of representatives of the media.

Yesterday’s questions revolved around Reid’s allegations that a source from Romney’s hedge fund, Bain Capital, has told him that the former governor paid no income taxes at all for ten years, a charge the Romney campaign has noisily and emphatically denied, but produced no proof. Even as reporters have hammered Romney to release the forms, he has doubled down and refused. 

Thursday, Reid issued a statement calling Romney “the most secretive presidential candidate since Richard Nixon…Forget president, Mitt Romney couldn’t get confirmed as cabinet secretary. Every single nominee overseen by the Senate Finance Committee has to release more tax returns than Romney is willing to release.”

The dogged intensity of Reid’s hard offense against Romney has shocked many in Washington. Reid is normally a much more mild-mannered type and this honey-badger style attack is very out of character for him.

“Even for a person who’s usually hyper,” Rachel Maddow said, “that is a little unhinged: an unnamed single source making a phone call to his office with a wild accusation that the Senate Majority Leader puts on the record to reporters, even though he admits it’s just hearsay and he doesn’t know if it’s true? That’s outrageous. It’s weird.”

And yet, when everyone expected Reid to back off and excuse himself, he doubled down, forcing another angry denial from the Romney camp. However, said Maddow, Romney did this very thing in 2002 when he was running for Massachusetts governor, he would not release his tax returns.

He demanded, however, that the husband of his opponent in that election, Shannon O’Brien, release his tax returns in addition to Mrs. O’Brien’s records, which were already available to the public. “What is she hiding?” demanded longtime Romney aide and confidant Eric Fehrnstrom.

Yet now, as Maddow points out, when Harry Reid is doing the exact same thing, all the Romney campaign can do is whine and complain about how unfair this tactic is and how nasty mean old Harry Reid is being. And while the campaign is making what Maddow calls “positive empirical claims” about Gov. Romney’s taxes, they still refuse to disclose the actual records.

In the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, it was alleged that Romney had gamed his taxes to qualify to run for governor. The Massachusetts Democratic Party said that Romney had lied about filing jointly as a resident of Massachusetts and Utah, a charge that the Romney campaign denied and denied and denied until the very last minute when they were forced to admit that yes, the charge had merit and that Romney had filed retroactively.

In that instance, as in this one, Romney and his top aide Eric Fehrnstrom said over and over, “You’re just going to have to take our word for it,” while refusing to disclose any proof.

So what are they hiding this time?

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Have you read the book Guns, Germs and Steel?

If you haven't, you're not alone.  Neither has Mitt Romney, but that doesn't stop him from misinterpreting and misquoting it--and getting it all wrong.  In this article, the book's author sets things straight:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/jared-diamond-mitt-romney_n_1732559.html

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Mitt Romney: A Statue of Himself?

Perfectly stated, Maureen!

Gadding of a Gawky Gowk
by Maureen Dowd

Remember when Janice Soprano shot her fiance to death after he punched her in the mouth? Then she calls Tony to come over and help her. He mops up the blood and has his thugs chop up the body.

“All in all, though,” Tony tells his sister sincerely, as he drops her at the bus station, “it was a pretty good visit.”

By Sopranos standards, all in all, Mitt Romney had a pretty good visit overseas. But by political standards, it was more like Munch’s “The Scream.”

When Barack Obama went abroad in July 2008, searching for some foreign policy cred, European leaders smothered him with love and respect.

More than 200,000 Germans thronged to the Victory Column in Berlin, hailing him as “Redeemer” and “Savior.” In a joint press conference in Paris, a smitten Nicolas Sarkozy was so touchy-feely that even Obama looked a little embarrassed.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased Obama on the plane to London later.

Poor Mitt Romney had no such magic carpet ride. He insulted the British and infuriated the Palestinians while pandering to the Israelis and American Jewish voters, including donors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson who tagged along.

Egged on by some of the same neocon advisers who brought us the Iraq pre-emptive invasion, Romney offered “Go ahead, make my day” diplomacy, signaling he would support Israeli action to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In an inadvertently hilarious grand finale in Warsaw, where Romney was pandering to American Catholics by dropping Pope John Paul II’s name every chance he got, his spokesman insulted the traveling press clamoring for a rare dollop of attention from the Republican contender.

Obama gave four press conferences and plenty of individual interviews when he went abroad as a candidate. But when reporters traveling with Romney mutinied as Mitt left a wreath-laying at a war memorial in Pilsudski Square, pressing on the gaffes and on why they were being shut out, campaign spokesman Rick Gorka shot back crudely that the press should kiss a part of his anatomy, noting incongruously: “This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.”

Indeed.

The true measure of how inglorious the trip was? Senior Romney strategist Stuart Stevens assured the press how glorious the trip was.

He took the cascade of chuckleheaded moments and tried to plant the crazy idea in our brains that they were a mark of Romney’s steadfast character.

“He has a tendency to speak his mind and to say what he believes,” Stevens said, “and whenever you do that, there will be those that disagree with you, and there will be those that agree with you.”

Romney himself tried the same silly spin with ABC News, telling David Muir when asked about the damaging headlines: “You know, I tend to tell people what I actually believe, and referring to the comments that were made in the media is something which I felt was an honest reflection of what was being concerned, or what was concerning folks.”

That quote is alarming on two levels: First, Romney never seems to say what he actually believes, and, second, he doesn’t seem to actually speak English.

Mitt’s foray showed some new colors, as he intended, but they were not flattering ones. We now know how little he knows about the world, how really slow on his feet he is, what meager social and political agility he has.

Wherever he went, whatever situation he was in, he remained frozen in himself. It was reminiscent of the stinging review of an Oscar Wilde lecture by Ambrose Bierce, who wrote that Wilde was a “gawky gowk” who “wanders about posing as a statue of himself.”

The odd odyssey underscored Mitt’s off-putting mix of opacity and insularity. Weren’t American elites once more worldly, like the Kennedys and the Harrimans? Romney was in the forefront of a revolution in American finance, he was the governor of an important state and he was an elder in the Mormon Church. But that’s all the stuff he doesn’t want to talk about, so we’re left with a narrow spokesmodel, banally handsome with an empty look; not like President Obama and Bill Clinton, where you always see the brain whirring behind the eyes.

Barack Obama created a character called Barack Obama, a remote, superior sort who comes down from the mountaintop during campaigns to assure us that he’s just like us.

Romney is not on the mountaintop. He’s here, mingling among us, present but absent. A fence wrapped around a wall.

Stuart Stevens is right when he says it’s easy to imagine Romney in the White House. I can visualize him right now, lapidary and frozen, in the Rose Garden. A statue of himself.

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GOOD NEWS WE NEVER HEAR ABOUT

Here is a story you may not have encountered, since it is hardly ever mentioned in mainstream news. Its' more of the good news that never gets reported by the corporate media machine in the US.  Not hard to see why we don't hear about it. It's a success story of people rising up against the banks and claiming back their nation from the grasp of the greedy elites.  Can't have the rabble hearing about THIS!  They might get ideas...

http://crazyemailsandbackstories.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/icelands-amazing-peaceful-revolution-still-not-in-the-news-backstory/ 

ICELAND (GP) – No news from Iceland? Why? Last we heard, people were rising up and overthrowing the bankers. Then, no news on the television or newspapers for two years. What happened? Why won’t the papers and TV tell us how the bankers successfully crushed or minimized another rebellion? Because… THEY DIDN’T! This time, the people won.

The people of Iceland have overwhelmingly risen up and forced their government puppets of the banks to resign. Primary banks have been nationalized. The debt scam imposed by Great Britain and Holland money printers was declared null and void. A public assembly has been created to rewrite Iceland’s constitution.

The best part is, all of this happened without violence or bloodshed. A whole country’s revolution succeeded against powers that created the current global crisis without a shot being fired. A very good reason exists for the apparent failure of television and newspapers to provide any publicity on this unprecedented event: what would happen if the rest of the EU and the United States took this as an example?

 

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Mitt the Twit

MITT'S OLYMPIC MEDDLE

by Maureen Dowd

 

SO the Republican presidential contender, eager to show off more than gubernatorial experience, travels overseas to bolster his foreign policy credentials. Then, in a TV interview, he blurts out a shockingly ill-considered, if undeniably true, observation that snowballs until the poor guy collapses into an international punch line.

It was a vertiginous fall for George Romney, who, while running for president in 1967, asserted that generals and diplomats had given him “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get” when he toured Vietnam two years earlier.

And it was painful for Mitt, who had to watch his father’s epic gaffe from afar, while he was over in France struggling to drum up a few Mormon converts.

In their book “The Real Romney,” Michael Kranish and Scott Helman quoted Mitt’s sister Jane as saying the episode deeply affected Mitt: “He’s not going to put himself out on a limb. He’s more cautious, more scripted.”

That’s when Mitt began to build his own sterile biosphere, shaping his temperament and political career to make sure he never stumbled into such a costly moment of candor.

Even though the Mormon doesn’t drink coffee, he has measured out his life in coffee spoons, limiting access to reporters, giving interviews mostly to Fox News, hiding personal data, resisting putting out concrete policy proposals, refusing to release tax returns, trimming his conscience to match the moment, avoiding spontaneity. But somehow he ended up making the same unforced error that his dad did.

It’s like the epigraph in John O’Hara’s “Appointment at Samarra.” You can run from fate, but fate will be waiting in the next town, at the next marketplace.

Even as he angled to appear Anglo-Saxon and obsequiously vowed to restore the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, Mitt condescended to the nation that invented condescension. The Brits swiftly boxed his ears for his insolence and foul calumny.

Conservatives in London oozed scorn. Mayor Boris Johnson mocked “a guy called Mitt Romney,” and Prime Minister David Cameron suggested it was easier to run an Olympics “in the middle of nowhere.” Fleet Street spanked “Nowhere Man” and “Mitt the Twit.”

Conservatives on Fox News were dumbfounded. “You have to shake your head,” Karl Rove said. Charles Krauthammer pronounced the faux pas “unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible. I’m out of adjectives.”

The alarming thing about Romney is that he has been running for president for years, but he still doesn’t know how to read a room. He doesn’t take anything in, he just puts it out. He doesn’t hear himself the way the rest of us hear him.

In the Mitt-sphere, populated by his shiny white family, the Mormon Church and a narrow, homogenous inner circle, Romney’s image of himself as wise, caring, smart and capable is relentlessly reinforced. That leaves him constantly surprised that other people don’t love what he is saying.

We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes. But what drives his gaffes is his desire to preen over accomplishments.

As a candidate, he’s expected to stoop to conquer, to play a man of the people. But he really wants voters to know that he earned $250 million, and not even in the same business where his dad made a name for himself.

So he keeps blurting out hoity-toity stuff to make sure we know he’s not hoi polloi — about his friends who are Nascar owners, his wife’s Cadillacs, how he likes to fire people and how he, too, is unemployed. And he builds a car elevator in the middle of an economic slough.

In his interview with Brian Williams in London, Romney couldn’t resist giving himself the laurels for saving the Salt Lake City Games by analyzing whether the British ones were off by a hair, or a hire.

Then he tried to scamper back to the obligatory common-man script and ended up looking clumsy and the one thing he most certainly is not: unuxorious.

After going all the way to London to see the Olympics, he decides he won’t watch his wife’s mare, Rafalca, compete in horse ballet? He tries to win the political horse race by going to the Games, which are literally a race in which he has a horse, and then feigns disengagement?

“This is Ann’s sport,” Romney told Williams dismissively. “I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it. I will not be watching the event.”

He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him, using a British insult for a daft know-it-all.

Romney programmed himself into a robot, so he wouldn’t boil over with opinions and convictions, like his more genuine dad.

But if we’re going to have someone who’s removed, always struggling to connect and emote, why not stick with the president we already have?

Better the android you know than the android you don’t know.

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Bill Moyers interviews Chris Hedges -- don't miss this one!

Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’ | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

 

EXCERPT:

There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are 
trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a 
direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist *Chris Hedges* calls 
these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on /Moyers & 
Company/ to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, 
Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that 
plundered them thrive.

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Bill Moyers Interview of Chris Hedges -- Don't miss this one!

The tragic results of unbridled GREED.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/chris-hedges-on-capitalism’s-‘sacrifice-zones’/

 

EXCERPT: There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill.

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