Tag Archives: Republican

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Don’t Be Fooled

09/11/2013 Nativegrl77

**Republicans Try to Force Even More Budget Cuts**

The government will shut down in 20 days – just nine congressional work days — unless Congress passes a bill to keep funding it. And while most of the media focus has been on the GOP’s unceasing effort to defund, delay, and undermine Obamacare, Speaker Boehner (R-OH) is plotting another, more hidden plan to lock in damaging and unnecessary austerity for the rest of the year and possibly into 2014.

Boehner has promised that to avoid a government shutdown, he will ask the House to pass a “clean” short-term budget resolution, simply extending current spending levels while a longer-term deal is worked out. That may sound reasonable, but hidden behind Boehner’s deceptive claims are some pretty dirty truths.

First of all, current spending levels are already painfully and unnecessarily low, but Boehner’s plan would go even further and lock in another round of deep cuts to domestic spending.

But it doesn’t stop there. Boehner’s plan actually increases defense spending by $20 BILLION compared to the sequester, while leaving spending on non-defense discretionary programs at unacceptably low levels.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Here’s Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) crowing about the cuts they are trying to force on Democrats and the president:

“In signing a CR at sequester levels,” Cantor wrote, “the president would be endorsing a level of spending that wipes away all the increases he and congressional Democrats made while they were in charge and returns us to a pre-2008 level of discretionary spending.”

Wait, there’s more! On top of all of this, House Republican leaders have devised a convoluted scheme to try and trick rank-and-file Republicans into not shutting down the government over Obamacare while still being able to somehow claim they defunded the law. This “smoke and mirrors” plan is already being derided by the Tea Party and recent polling found that just 6 percent of voters think delaying and defunding Obamacare is the right path forward.

(This final scheme comes on top of a separate GOP demand issued today that Democrats either agree to delay Obamacare for a year or Republicans will refuse to increase the debt ceiling, thus creating a world economic calamity.)

BOTTOM LINE: Republicans have scheduled just 9 days of work in September and aren’t even planning on being here the week before funding for the government runs out. Passing a partisan spending plan with only GOP votes is just another waste of time that makes it more likely that the government will shut down because of GOP intransigence, demands for damaging austerity, or both.

For a detailed brief from the Center for American Progress on how all of this adds up — or doesn’t — click HERE.

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Whites Only?

09/10/2013 Nativegrl77

By CAP Action War Room

The GOP’s Demographic Doom

Some in the Republican Party continue to argue that the party can make up for its abysmal standing with minority voters by becoming more conservative in order to attract and turn out more white voters.

CAP Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira lays out fresh evidence why this whites-only strategy is destined to fail:

5. White voters are increasingly likely to be single and secular. The idea that the GOP can get higher and higher levels of support from white voters presupposes that the white population is likely to get ever-more conservative and therefore inclined to vote Republican. But what if the reverse is true? Two factors that could make the white population more liberal are family and religion. Thirty five percent of white voters in 2012 were unmarried, compared to 30 percent in 1984. Unmarried whites are far more likely to vote Democratic than married ones.

And in just a five year span from 2007 to 2012, the percentage of whites who are religiously unaffiliated rose from 15 to 20 percent. According to Brownstein, Democrats have averaged a 32 point advantage with white secular voters since 2000.

4. A smaller and smaller proportion of white voters are working class. Working class or non-college educated voters are among the most conservative white voters, regularly giving Republicans a 12-14 point larger margin than they receive among white college graduates. But white working class voters are declining precipitously as a share of voters (down from 54 to 36 percent between 1988 and 2012) while white college graduates are increasing their share (from 31 to 36 percent over the same time period). That means that the white working class is also declining as a share of white voters. Back in 1988, 64 percent of white voters were white working class; by 2012, that figure had dropped to just half of white voters. This trend is likely to continue for many years making the white vote a harder not easier target for GOP appeals.

3. The rise of the Millennial generation. The Millennial generation, as has been widely documented, is the most liberal generation in the electorate by a considerable margin. This is also true of white Millennials—they are considerably more progressive than their older counterparts. In the last two elections, the Republic margin among white Millennials has averaged 20 points below that among white voters as a whole. And Millennials are becoming a larger and larger proportion of the white electorate with every passing year. By the time the 2020 election is held, they’ll make up about two out of every five (37 percent) of all white voters.

2. White Republicans are too concentrated in the most conservative areas of the country. Even assuming Republicans can get past the factors above and continue inflating the national support among whites, that will not necessarily yield success against Democrats’ domination of the electoral college. As Brownstein points out, “Romney’s national margins among the various groups of white voters are inflated by Obama’s utter collapse in the country’s most conservative regions, particularly the South.” This chart makes his point plainly — Obama did much better among white voters in competitive states than in the South or Appalachia:

1. Every year, the pool of white voters shrinks. The most important reason why the GOP’s desperate quest to squeeze ever more voters out of the white population is doomed to fail is that every year there are fewer of them. How Republicans can look at charts like this one:

Or this one:

and still place their faith in a white people forever strategy is beyond me. But they do.

Republicans seem to think they will soon be matching the Gipper’s 64 percent share of the white vote in his 1984 re-election victory and then some. But, as Karl Rove (!) put it, “it’s unreasonable to expect Republicans to routinely pull numbers that last occurred in a 49-state sweep.” Unreasonable the white voters strategy may be, but since when has that stopped the contemporary Republican party from believing something?

BOTTOM LINE: Instead of demanding more damaging austerity and pursuing an endless series of unpopular attacks on Obamacare, Republicans should attempt to broaden their appeal by pursuing policies like immigration reform with a pathway to earned citizenship.

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OBAMACARE by the Numbers …

09/06/2013 Nativegrl77 3 Comments

Guess how some members of Congress are spending their August vacation:
They’re touring the country, going state by state and district by district to convince people that Obamacare isn’t working — never mind the benefits that millions of families are already feeling.
After trying and failing to repeal the law (40 times!), they’re starting to get desperate. OFA’s Truth Team is here to set the record straight.
Fight back against the cynical opponents of Obamacare by sharing some truth about how Obamacare is already helping folks all across the country — here’s a perfect graphic to get started:

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Is your member of Congress afraid of Regulatory agencies

09/04/2013 Nativegrl77

just another rant …

What we need are MORE Regulatory agencies doing their jobs … period

If you hear the noise, the fear mongering coming from Teapublicans you might want to laugh first, tilt your head to the side then furrow your brow and ask where were you when the reports came in that we were losing 750,000 jobs month after month, that several financial institutions crashed due to some big time corruption.

Unfortunately, knowing job creators are sitting on trillions of dollars due to what they call “excessive regulation” and “uncertainty” in a time when lack of it created our financial crisis is quite offensive as some Americans continue to lose homes, jobs and health care. The fact is that members of Congress actually needs to invest in their fellow Americans. It is not lost on me that Teapublican members of Congress have conveniently forgotten about the Bush agency parties, drilling permits approved of with tankers that probably were just on the edge of being technically safe. How remarkable is it to hear the current nonsense about the Keystone XL pipeline after all that happened and was exposed during the BP spill is a lesson in what members of Congress will do say and push when their personal investments are involved. It is obvious they have forgotten what led up to the Massey Mine disaster as well.

Fact is, there are things that need strict guidelines, most parents want Clean Air, Clean Water and not only affordable health care but some of us would actually pay a smidge more to make sure that food, flights and anything else that seems too big to handle for an individual can be by the Government and not privatized. If Teapublicans believe privatization is the only way to create more jobs remember; that it also means your cost for services may go up which folks are complaining about now … right; an increase in insurance premiums could be just a start. I like having firefighters, cleared roads, police, the EPA and FEMA and most thing it is worth paying the Government to act for everyone, not just a select few. I will not forget the man who failed to pay his protection fee which resulted in his house burning down; that is what privatization does. I expect the Government to be our children’s watchdog for their health, our future and corrupt regulators need not apply. While the Heritage Foundation is the Teapublicans training ground with quite different attitude about regulations, it is my contention that the Heritage Foundation opinion should not be driving what Republicans in Congress say do or vote.

Yet, folks and organizations like the Grover Norquist’s and the Heritage Foundation just do not understand that they only represent a small percentage of voters and after having read the article it definitely sounded like the Heritage Foundation would love to go around the voter if they could. I find it almost amusing to read how conservative groups rationalize their feelings about regulations. The Heritage Foundation subscribes to wanting a new society. That should scare us all. Then again, it just sheds light on how out of touch the Heritage group is and if this is the meme being pushed on members of Congress who are not only supposed to be working for the People paid by “We the People”, it is truly a sad example of what being a member of Congress means.

I totally get Capitalism. We all strive to be self-sufficient. I just happen to believe it should be with a lower case c, which includes small businesses, and those who aspire to get ahead not just or only for big Corporations who more often than not seem to send opportunities and jobs overseas to avoid regulations .

The featured picture Is called “Faces” taken from the National Museum of African American History and Culture article

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52 Clinics Closed

08/27/2013 Nativegrl77

Going Backwards on Women’s Equality Day

Today is Women’s Equality Day, which marks the anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It’s now been 93 years and while much progress has been made, everyone’s right to vote is under attack and women are still far from equal.

Unfortunately, we also got fresh evidence today that the GOP’s war on women is taking a discernible toll on women’s reproductive rights. An analysis by the Huffington Post found that 52 clinics have closed since the recent record-breaking assault on abortion rights accelerated in 2010.

Check out their graphic to get a sense of the coast-to-coast assault on access to abortion:

2013_08_AbortionClosures-555x1019