Monday Open Thread

Welcome to your Monday open thread. Today we have the return of summer weather and the return of school traffic. Sigh. Yesterday the UD students moved back in as well so traffic everywhere is snarled.

Newsweek does something called journalism and checks GOP rhetoric vs. what the GOP has actually proposed and voted for. Surprise, surprise the GOP plan would increase the deficit and increase unemployment (who could have guessed that laying off teachers, firemen and police actually increases unemployment):

There’s only one problem with Boehner’s message: so far, the things that Republicans have said they want to do won’t actually boost employment or reduce deficits. In fact, much the opposite. By combing through a variety of studies and projections from nonpartisan economic sources, we here at Gaggle headquarters have found that if Republicans were in charge from January 2009 onward—and if they were now given carte blanche to enact the proposals they want to—the projected 2010–2020 deficits would be larger than they are under Obama, and fewer people would probably be employed.

…

The final piece of the puzzle is the Bush tax cuts. Obama wants to extend them for the 95 percent of taxpayers making less than $250,000 a year; Republicans want to extend them for everybody. How will these extensions affect the deficit? Glad you asked. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, “the Democratic proposal would add about $3 trillion to the deficit during the next decade, while the GOP plan would cost $3.7 trillion.” That brings the total Obama deficit to $3.784 trillion over 10 years, and its GOP counterpart to—drumroll, please—$4.155 trillion.

Repealing health care reform costs money, because HCR reduces the deficit. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy costs money because tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. This doesn’t even take into account the costs of privatizing Social Security, the secret program Republicans don’t want to talk about.

The likely GOP Senate candidate from Alaska is a real nut – he’s more extreme than Rand Paul or Sharron Angle.

It’s easy to check off most of the routine garbage — Miller has birther tendencies, demands the elimination of all abortion rights (even in cases of rape or incest), wants to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act, rejects global warming science, wants to “transition out” Social Security, and is eyeing cabinet agencies for elimination, including the Department of Education.

But it’s his constitutional beliefs that help set Miller apart. In July, he rejected the very idea of unemployment benefits, insisting that they’re not “constitutionally authorized.” This does, by the way, make him more radical than Angle and Paul, who’ve denounced extended aid to the jobless, but haven’t rejected the policy itself as illegal.

Yesterday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Miller went even further. (TP has the video)

BOB SCHIEFFER: You have also taken some fairly controversial, some would say, very extreme positions. First, you say you want to phase out Medicare. You want to privatize Social Security. I have to say there are a lot of people in Alaska who are on Medicare and are getting Social Security. Isn’t that position going to be a problem for you in the election, in this general election?

JOE MILLER: Well, yeah, and I would suggest to you that if one thing said the Constitution is extreme then you would also think that the founders are extreme. We just simply want to get back to basics, get — restore essentially the constitutional foundation of the country, and that means the federal government becoming less onerous, less involved in every — basically every item of our lives. And what that means is there does have to be some transition.

It’s hard to interpret this as anything but Miller characterizing Social Security and Medicare as being at odds with the Constitution — a position that positions him on the far fringes of American political thought.

What’s even nuttier is that this guy has a chance to win.