Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Charlie Bass… a message from Charles Chamberlain, Democracy for America


“When Congressman Charlie Bass voted to end Medicare; that was an attack on New Hampshire families like mine.”

Jane Brickett is a Social Worker in New Hampshire’s North Country. She has a disability and if she didn’t have Medicare the doctor bills could bankrupt her.

She’s one of the lucky ones. If Republicans succeed in destroying Medicare, Jane’s children might be able to find a way to save her house and keep food on the table. Thousands of others seniors and children depending on Medicare and Medicaid won’t be so lucky.

It’s time to make sure New Hampshire voters know what Charlie Bass has done. We’ve created another hard hitting ad with our friends at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee showcasing a personal story a real person. Please contribute now to keep the ad on the air.

Watch the ad and keep it on the air

Republicans will end Medicare if we don’t stop them and nothing will hurt Republican Charlie Bass more than the truth.

Let’s make sure there isn’t a single person in his district who hasn’t heard Jane’s story.

Contribute now and keep it on the air

Thank you for everything you do.

-Charles

Charles Chamberlain, Political Director
Democracy for America

~ Recent Post

Health Care:The GOP’s Health Care Flip Flop


In Oct. 2009, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) urged Congress to use the insurance program he created in Massachusetts as a model for nationwide health reform. This proved to be excellent advice, since President Obama signed a law that is based on Romney’s health plan several months later. Nevertheless, Romney plans to deliver a “major policy speech” later today disawowing the very advice he gave Congress less than two years ago — laying out a plan to repeal “Obamacare” and replace it with an unambitious array of minor health reforms. Moreover, Romney’s speech comes just two days after a federal court of appeals heard the first appellate case challenging the ACA on the grounds that it is unconstitutional to require someone to either carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. Even though the the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent both unambiguously establish that the ACA is constitutional, the GOP has nearly unanimously endorsed the meritless constitutional attack on the ACA. It wasn’t always this way, however.

THE MANY FACES OF MITT ROMNEY: Romney’s support for a health plan that provides life-saving, affordable health care to nearly every Massachusetts resident has not endeared him to the GOP primary electorate, which is why he’s tried to distance himself from his own single most significant accomplishment. Earlier this year, Romney tried to excuse his decision to sign the prototype for the ACA by explaining that it was just fine for him to sign a state health care plan, but absolutely unacceptable for Obama to sign an almost identical federal health care plan. Needless to say, this kind of hairsplitting did nothing to rescue Romney’s incipient campaign. Sixty-one percent of Republicans in the crucial state of Iowa indicate that they will not vote for someone who “supported a bill at the state level mandating that voters have health insurance.” More importantly, Romney’s bizarre state/federal distinction is at odds with his longstanding position on federal health reform. As far back as 1994, Romney indicated that he would support a Republican health plan that included an insurance coverage mandate. Today’s speech is Romney’s second attempt to wash away his proudest achievement. In it, Romney will recycle a discredited McCain-Palin proposal that would cost 20 million people their employer provided health care, he will embrace the GOP’s plan to gut Medicaid, and he supports a completely unworkable scheme that will allow patients to wait until they get sick to buy insurance, draining all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into and leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

THE GOP’S INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: In 1991, four conservative health policy scholars proposed requiring all Americans to carry health insurance in an effort to “persuade President George H.W. Bush and his administration to adopt a universal health-care proposal that would keep the government from eventually taking over the sector.” Two years later, Sen. John Chafee (R-RI) and 21 mostly Republican co-sponsors introduced a bill which took up this proposal for an individual insurance mandate. Five senators who opposed the ACA — Robert Bennett (R-UT), Kit Bond (R-MO), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) — co-sponsored Chafee’s bill. In mid-2006, Romney became the first elected official to sign an individual insurance mandate into law. Two Republican Senators even voted for an insurance mandate before they voted against it. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) voted in support of a Senate Finance Committee proposal which included an insurance mandate, and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) voted in support of Romney’s health plan as a member of the state legislature. In other words, for all their strident rhetoric against insurance coverage requirements, the truth is this requirement was invented, nurtured and supported for nearly two decades by the GOP.

TEARING UP THE CONSITUTION: Hypocrisy, incoherence, and unworkable plans are the least of the GOP’s sins. They are prepared to tear up the Constitution as well. In a series of lawsuits challenging the ACA, Republicans claim, falsely, that Congress has never before passed a law that imposes a consequence on people who don’t buy a product, and that this somehow makes the ACA unconstitutional. Yet, as a panel of federal judges pointed out on Tuesday, this claim has no basis in the actual text of the Constitution. Rather, the Constitution provides that Congress may “regulate Commerce…among the several states,” and the very first Supreme Court decision interpreting this language made clear that this power is “plenary,” meaning that Congress may choose whatever means it wishes to regulate interstate marketplaces so long as it does not violate another textual provision of the Constitution. Thankfully, it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will take the GOP up on its offer to replace the actual Constitution with a tenther manifesto, but the fact that one of the nation’s two great political parties believes that they can rewrite the Constitution shows nothing less than utter contempt for the nation’s founding document.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Gitmo -The Neverendin​g Story


Yesterday, the New York Times and other news outlets reported on a “trove of more than 700 classified military documents” that provide “new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.” The documents were obtained by the open government website WikiLeaks but obtained by the Times through another source. The documents reveal details about detainee behavior and treatment, but are “silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation.”

THE DETAILS: The Times editorializes today that the documents serve as “a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created” at Gitmo and “describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.” “Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture,” the Times editorial notes, adding that suicides there “were regarded only as a public relations problem.” The documents show that there were 158 detainees “who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be ‘of little intelligence value’ with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban.” The Guardian notes that 212 Afghans at Gitmo were either “entirely innocent,” “mere Taliban conscripts” or “had been transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so.” Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Qahtani, “was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself.” And U.S. forces held Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, for 6 years before finally letting him go. Hajj had insisted he was just a journalist and he went back to work for Al-Jazeera after his release.

DOUBLE GUANTANAMO?: The idea of Guantanamo has become so toxic internationally that even military leaders such as Gen. David Petraeus want it shut down. “Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it,” Petraeus said in 2009, adding, “I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.” Yet at the same time, others sing Guantanamo’s praises. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), who will likely run for president next year, said in his last campaign for the White House that the prison needs to be expanded, not closed. “I want them on Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there,” Romney said during a 2007 presidential debate. “Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo,” he later added.

FAILING TO CLOSE GITMO: Just three years ago, closing the Guantanamo Bay prison had broad bipartisan support. While Obama campaigned on closing Gitmo, even Republicans, including President Bush and Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), agreed. But Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent announcement that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed would be tried in a military tribunal instead of a civilian court all but ended any hopes that the prison would be closed anytime soon. Yet, as the Washington Post chronicled last weekend, “For more than two years, the White House’s plans had been undermined by political miscalculations, confusion and timidity in the face of mounting congressional opposition.” Who’s fault is it that Gitmo is still open? While Democrats in Congress largely abandoned the President, the White House didn’t exactly put a lot of political capital on the line either. As former White House counsel Greg Craig noted, “There was a real serious problem of coordination in this whole thing.” Indeed, the administration had planned to transfer some uncontroversial detainees to Northern Virginia but abandoned the move at the last hour after Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) discovered that Gitmo detainees would be moving to his district. The White House never cleared their plan with Wolf. Since then, as Obama noted last year, Gitmo has “been subject to a lot of…pretty rank politics.” And as “Not In My Backyard” cries from members of Congress intensified, the legislative branch eventually cut off funds to close Gitmo and approved a measure to bar any detainees from being relocated to the United States.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

AP-GfK Poll: Raw feelings ease over health law …


By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR and JENNIFER AGIESTA, AP

WASHINGTON — As lawmakers shaken by the shooting of a colleague return to the health care debate, an Associated Press–GfK poll finds raw feelings over President Barack Obama’s overhaul have subsided.

Ahead of a vote on repeal in the GOP-led House this week, strong opposition to the law stands at 30 percent, close to the lowest level registered in AP-GfK surveys dating to September 2009.

The nation is divided over the law, but the strength and intensity of the opposition appear diminished. The law expands coverage to more than 30 million uninsured, and would require, for the first time, that most people in the United States carry health insurance.

The poll finds that 40 percent of those surveyed said they support the law, while 41 percent oppose it. Just after the November congressional elections, opposition stood at 47 percent and support was 38 percent.

As for repeal, only about one in four say they want to do away with the law completely. Among Republicans support for repeal has dropped sharply, from 61 percent after the elections to 49 percent now.

Also, 43 percent say they want the law changed so it does more to re-engineer the health care system. Fewer than one in five say it should be left as it is.

“Overall, it didn’t go as far as I would have liked,” said Joshua Smith, 46, a sales consultant to manufacturers who lives in Herndon, Va. “In a perfect world, I’d like to see them change it to make it more encompassing, but judging by how hard it was to get it passed, they had to take whatever they could get.”

His extended family has benefited from the law. A sister-in-law in her early 20s, previously uninsured, was able to get on her father’s policy. “She’s starting out as a real estate agent, and there’s no health care for that,” said Smith. The law allows young adults to stay on a parent’s plan until they turn 26.

Congress stepped back last week to honor victims of the rampage in Tucson, Ariz., that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., facing a long and uncertain recovery from a bullet through her brain.

There’s no evidence the gunman who targeted Giffords was motivated by politics, but the aftermath left many people concerned about the venom in public life. A conservative Democrat, Giffords had been harshly criticized for voting in favor of the health overhaul, and won re-election by a narrow margin.

House Republican leaders say they’re working to keep this week’s debate — and expected vote Wednesday — from degenerating into a shouting match, but it depends on the Democrats, too. Republicans want a thoughtful discussion about substantive policy differences, said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 GOP leader. The AP-GfK poll was under way when the attack in Tucson took place Jan. 8.

Opposition to the law remains strongest among Republicans. Seventy-one percent of them say they’re against it, as compared with 35 percent of independents and 19 percent of Democrats. Republicans won back control of the House partly on a promise to repeal what they dismissively term as “Obamacare.”

“I just think that the liberal left is more going for socialized medicine, and I don’t think that works well,” said Earl Ray Fye, 66, a farmer from Pennsylvania Furnace, Pa., and a conservative Republican. “It just costs too much. This country better get concerned about getting more conservative.”

One of the major Republican criticisms of the law found wide acceptance in the poll, suggesting a vulnerability that GOP politicians can continue to press.

Nearly six in 10 oppose the law’s requirement that people carry health insurance except in cases of financial hardship. Starting in 2014, people will have to show that they’re covered either through an employer, a government program, or under their own plan.

Rich Johnson, 34, an unemployed laborer from Caledonia, Wis., said he thinks the heart of the law is good. “The problem I have with it is mandating insurance so that you have to have it or you’ll get fines,” said Johnson, an independent. “I just don’t think people should be forced to have it. The rest of it, I have no problem with.”

The individual mandate started out as a Republican idea during an earlier health care debate in the 1990s. More recently, Massachusetts enacted such a requirement under GOP Gov. Mitt Romney and the Democratic Legislature. Nowadays, most conservatives are against it, and GOP state attorneys general are suing to have the mandate overturned as unconstitutional.

Other major provisions of the law, including a requirement that insurers accept people with pre-existing medical conditions, got support from half or more of the public in the poll.

Loralyn Conover, 42 a former music teacher with multiple sclerosis, says she hopes repeal goes nowhere. Senate Democrats say they’ll block it.

The new law “opens the door for people like me to have some kind of pay-as-you-go health insurance,” said Conover, of Albuquerque, N.M. “It’s nice to be able to have something . and not be dropped in the cracks of society.” She couldn’t get health insurance when she was first diagnosed, but is now covered by Medicare.

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Jan. 5-10 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,001 adults nationwide, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

____

Associated Press writers Douglass Daniel, Bradley Klapper and Michele Salcedo contributed to this report.

____

Online:

Poll questions and results: http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com/

~ my 2cents ...

wicked Wednesday &some News …


The New Republican members Congress, dang not even the old Republicans have talked about jobs, jobs, jobs seriously since the midterm elections placed them in the Majority in the House of Republicans.

So, is anyone else wondering when we all will be outraged enough to march on the Republican Tea Party because I sure am. The idea that there will be investigations of every nook and cranny especially if Obama had a hand in it sounds very expensive and though no cost estimates have been given spending money on trying to prove something or someone is guilty instead using that money to create jobs is outrageous.  There will be new rules coming from the Republican Tea Party to be listed and rumors that they will vote against raising the Debt Ceiling and we may default on and could cause all kinds of issues

I am outraged that these people want to repeal and or privatize health care let alone what Republicans call Obamacare, which stands to save elder people, those with children under the age of 26 can stay on their parents health care while in College and if you have a pre-existing condition and you are a woman  …we are considered a pre-existing condition.  Though we all know the Senate will not repeal the new health care law the fact is repealing it would leave a lot of women with diseases at risk.  I hope everyone is listening to what the Republican Tea Party is saying but unlikely to carry out … Lindsey Graham stated that if President Obama comes our way we will compromise? why would people vote for these people.  John Boehner said, “That he is going to do whatever it takes to see that as he calls it Obamacare never gets implemented. I want everyone to watch listen and be aware that Mitt Romney created and implemented Universal Health Care in his own state of Massachusetts while telling Americans that we do not deserve it with a vote of no on the floor of Congress and while he has not said much watch to see if he has the courage to say repeal Obamacare when it is actually based on what his constituents have.  While Republican Tea Party members of Congress try to repeal our new health care law Paul Ryan wants to Privatize Social Security, Medicare and Darryl Issa along with Michele Bachmann will start investigating everything in sight especially if it is related to Obama because like the old Congress …the Republicans of 111th had a goal – to ruin his Presidency and the new 112th Republican Congress will try but as Margaret Mead said …

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

It is time for the Democratic Party to Unite if not to protect everything that was accomplished over the last two years …to protect Americans from the hands of a Political Party, Republican Tea members that have a family values platform that will force their ideologies on the rest of us telling us what we can do or not.   I want to know if anyone else thinks that is big Government at play.

Other News …

**President Obama signs the 9/11 healthcare bill

**Chris Christie still defending his vacation plans

**Flooding in Austrlia

**Cuomo plans to freeze state worker pay for a yr

**Debt limit fight is a sure thing

**Republican Tea Party promise to cut and investigate

**Seahawks win playoff bid

**Zsa zsa has to have a leg amputation

**Issa reveals his hit list -wikileaks, Afghanistan, fannie mae/freddie mac, FDA, President Obama, Financial crisis inquiry commission, the New Black Panther group?,

**Packers stay in the game and gain playoff berth

**Kent company recalls sprouts

**Tribal police,FBI and investigate shooting on Swinomish Reservation

CSPAN …