The GOP really stepped in it this time! In the House every Republican voted for the Ryan Plan. Then word got out about what was in the plan and seniors started showing up at town hall meetings asking their representatives, to quote Palin, “WTF”? The representatives even went so far as to write a letter to President Obama pledging to do better if they got a do-over.

They may get a do-over on the vote. The Senate is poised to vote, possibly today, on the Ryan Plan. It will not pass. But it will put GOP Senators on the record regarding the plan. Two GOP Senators have already announced that they will oppose the plan. One is the newly minted and presumed Tea Party darling who replaced Teddy Kennedy. The other is the centrist leaning Olympia Snow. They are already being threatened with primary challengers and DEM monetary support for any challenger.

But what happened in an election yesterday really tells the story. In a small Congressional district in up-state New York, a DEM won. She is only the fifth Democrat to hold this seat since 1823. This district is a lot like Mesa County. No Democrat need apply.

This time the GOP outspent the DEM in a district that they rarely bother to support monetarily. Usually it will vote GOP without the expense. There are about three times more registered GOP voters than DEM in the district. But this time even Karl Rove pushed money into the race.  The DEM still won.

The GOP will argue that the DEM won because there was a third candidate in the race who took votes from the GOP candidate. Maybe, but the DEM candidate also took votes from the GOP candidate, or she wouldn’t have won. It was demographically impossible for the DEM candidate to win without GOP votes.

Why did she win? Simple—she was against the Ryan Plan, and so are voters.

Homework

Ryan Plan

WSJ Story About GOP Do-Over Letter

NY Times Story about Senate Vote on Ryan Plan

Wikipedia Listing of Representatives from NY 26

GOP Preemptive lawsuit

In addition to writing this blog, I participate in several on-line discussion groups. One I somewhat fondly call the E-mail List From Hell. It is a lot like the Hotel California, you can check-in, but you can never leave. Every now and again, someone posts to that list something that deserves to be shared widely.  The following is one of those posts. The author is writing in response to a conversation that began with the letter, signed by GOP freshmen Representatives, including our very own Scott Tipton, asking for a do-over on the vote on the Ryan Plan. It seems they didn't read the legislation, and didn't know what it was all about until their constituents raised Hell with them when they got back to their districts.

From Sarge:

This isn't rocket science.  The wise man would ask, "what changed from the year 2000 when we had surpluses" over the next 8-years that lead to near total collapse of the US Economy and Trillion Dollar deficits?

Simple.  Besides TRILLIONS in tax cuts and Corporations no longer paying taxes on World Record profits...

...the USA DOUBLED it's already massive defense budget, increased intelligence and other spending by 34-Billion a year, increased the size of the Government Bureaucracy by creating DHS and increasing the size of Goverment faster than at any time in history...  then started a Trillion Dollar War... then started another Trillion Dollar War...  then passed multiple UNFUNDED programs, like Medicare Part D that made it ILLEGAL for Government to even dare ask a Drug Corporation to lower their price, then the Congress passed an unfunded Energy Bill that had Tens of Billions in Tax Breaks for Oil companies (to the point they pay no tax) and then gave away our natural resources (oil) royalty free (called in the law, royalty waivers) so that America could make no money off the oil under our land the way countries do everywhere else in the world, then wrote subsidies, also known as Corporate Welfare... BILLIONS WORTH A YEAR  in checks from taxpayers just handed to Oil Corporations for free, increases in Crop subsidies (corporate welfare - unfunded), a 10-Billion Dollar unfunded Tobacco Crop Buyout Bill passed by the Congress back in 2003, a 700-Billion Dollar unfunded Wall Street Bail Out Bill...

...  I could go on.  Such as the offshore loopholes that were passed that led to the exodus of factories and jobs and revenue in America.

Taxes (revenue) were massively slashed, while spending immediately skyrocketed and policy was created to get jobs to leave.

That's what happened.  And every last one of those things is still burdening America to this day, and we have one political party determined to keep it that way.

What did not change and has not added one penny to the debt and deficit?  Social Security and Medicare.  But that is what Republicans want to get rid of.

Now either America reverses that trickle down bullshit, or we perish as a nation.

My post yesterday elicited a response from my personal troll. He left a message that says, in part, “Why should the government be paying for abortions unless for the sole reason of population control? On top of that we get obamacare and now the government can kill off the elderly. Sick country we live in.”

Kevin King, you are absolutely wrong on so many levels that it makes my head spin.

First: Government does not pay for abortions, with limited exceptions for women who have been raped, are victims of incest, or when the woman might die without the procedure. Government has not paid for abortions since it was made illegal to do so. This isn’t about banning abortion; it is about making it impossible for American women to access both abortions and birth control, even if they pay for it themselves. What the bill passed by the House does is take away tax credits for companies who offer insurance to their employees if the insurance includes abortion as a covered procedure.

For people who claim to love and support the U.S. Constitution, the Tea Party seems to have a complete lack of respect for our body of laws. Abortion is a legal procedure in the U.S. Nobody is wild about willy-nilly use of abortion, and nobody considers U.S. policy to be focused on population control, except the lunatic fringe of the extreme right wing.

When a woman is raped, and becomes pregnant as a result of that rape, the lack of access to things like the morning after pill or abortion is making her a permanent victim. Her rapist may or may not be caught and tried. But without any consideration, that woman is sentenced to permanent victimhood. She endures at least nine months of physical stress, possibly followed by a lifetime of paying for a pregnancy that was not her choice, but was forced upon her. There is nothing about justice or freedom in that formula. There is nothing about justice or freedom in a nation that would force the victim of incest to suffer through a pregnancy that was not her choice, but was forced upon her. Sometimes I think that if a man could get pregnant, we wouldn’t see so much testosterone in health care debates.

Second, there is nothing in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that kills seniors. There is a lot in the Ryan proposal to destroy Medicare and Medicaid that does. For some reason, legislators are ignoring the fact that before Medicare and Medicaid, seniors couldn’t get insurance. Insurance companies, especially those with a profit motive, are betting that you will give them your money, but that you’ll never need their services. They have a sophisticated actuarial with one focus, how to pay the bare minimum, so that profit can be maximized. No actuarial has figured out how to get money from seniors and make a profit, because seniors get sick and die. Before there was Medicare, that’s what seniors did. Other than the extremely wealthy, old people had no option, because most of them couldn’t afford health care. The life expectancy of Americans went up because of Medicare and Medicaid, not in spite of it.

When I was running for office, I kept hearing that nobody has ever read the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Bullshit. I’m convinced that no Republican has ever read it, but I’ve read it, and lots and lots of medical professionals have read it. There is nothing in it about death panels. That idea came from Sarah Palin, who clearly never read the bill. The so-called death panels are not about restricting access to health care, they are about giving patients and their family useful information about the end of life process. Today doctors are not reimbursed for the time they spend at bedside talking about options and their impacts upon the patient’s quality of life. Having had many of those conferences last June, when my father was at the end of his life, I can tell you that it is some of the most important work that a doctor does. To call it a death panel is a bunch of bullshit dreamed up because the extreme right wing looks at everything as a political game. If the other side scores a point, the extreme right wing isn’t satisfied in putting up another point, they insist on taking the point off the scoreboard.

Life isn’t a game. Stop playing around with the health of women, children and seniors. Get your testosterone out of my health care and my government.  Kevin, I posted an annotated and highlighted copy of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act below. Read it before you post more nonsense at this site. You certainly seem bright enough, but you are not dealing with facts. You have been led astray by people who are playing a game instead of seriously looking to solve America’s problems. We need jobs, not more restrictions on freedom. This isn’t a game; it is a matter of life and death.

Homework:

ACLU Analysis of Abortion Funding

Highlighted and Annotated Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

American Life Expectancy

The Story of How Medicare Came to Be