Tag Archives: Republican Bamboozlement

The New Wingnut Welfare Gravy Train

I think we’re all pretty familiar with the wingnut welfare system. The Republican party nurtures their young leaders by providing them jobs in bogus think tanks, where they can publish books nobody reads, send out press releases and appear on TV as a ubiquitious “Republican strategist.” Apparently Republicans have found an even newer way to shovel money at themselves – health care reform legal challenges.

For example, the Republican Lt. Governor of Missouri is frustrated because his Attorney General is a Democrat and won’t sign up for the states’ legal challenge. That doesn’t stop him though, he’s hiring a private attorney:

A Republican operative who was behind a sophisticated effort to make it harder for poor people and minorities to vote is back in the news. He’s handling Missouri’s lawsuit against the health-care reform law.

Mark “Thor” Hearne has been hired by Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder to challenge the law’s constitutionality. Several other states are bringing similar claims. Kinder is mounting a fundraising effort — even launching a website — to pay for the challenge to the law because the state’s Democratic attorney general has declined to get involved.

Former New York Governor George Pataki is trying to leverage the health care reform repeal gravy train into a presidential run:

Pataki launched his organization, Revere America, with the lofty initial goal of collecting one million signatures on a petition to repeal “ObamaCare.”

The petition is full of tea party dog whistles: The law (or “bill”): “ignores the will of the majority of Americans who vigorously oppose government controlled national health care;” “tramples on the Constitution” and “represents an arrogant disregard for the personal freedom of the people of the United States.”

But the petition’s real purpose, as Pataki admitted in a C-Span interview, is to “get over a million e-mail addresses of people who would support us in working to repeal ObamaCare.” And, presumably, of people who would support a Pataki for President campaign.

I assume Pataki will use this organization to fundraise as well as building his supporters’ list. I’m pretty unclear on what Pataki’s organization will actually do besides allow Pataki to travel and to give speeches to excite the base.

Teapartiers = Delaware GOP

So apparently the Delaware GOP is on the same path as the rest of their party and publicly get in bed with these teabaggers. The teabaggers are having their annual collective tax pout at the state-funded (the state that collects taxes for just such efforts) Wilmington Riverfront (and other publically funded places throughout the state) this April 15. Tax Day. So droll. Anyway, guess who is smack in the middle of pimping this thing? You guessed it, the Delaware GOP:

Note to Tea Partiers — you do not get to claim independence from the GOP when they are — clearly — involved with pushing your events. So remember folks, when you see these guys taking advantage of tax-funded public areas to whinge about their taxes you are looking a a fully astroturfed and fulled pimped out group here sent out to advocate for policy that never impacts them, but does advantage their funders. Wonder what old “moderate” Mike thinks about his party leaving him behind for a teabagging.

h/t and thanks to our anonymous tipster.

GOP Donors Are Suckers

If Republican donors were mad about the Palin family clothes grab on donor’s dimes, I wonder how they’ll feel about this:

The Daily Caller examines the Republican National Committee’s FEC filings, and discovers a few things that are not likely to go over well with GOP donors. Such as:

Once on the ground, FEC filings suggest, Steele travels in style. A February RNC trip to California, for example, included a $9,099 stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $6,596 dropped at the nearby Four Seasons, and $1,620.71 spent at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.

In Which We Find the Local GOP Bamboozling Again About Budget Discipline

Today’s installment of GOP bamboozlement comes via the News Journal, where they are now trying to convince people that they want to constrain government spending. You should read the whole thing, but I’m not so sure who this convinces:

The proposal, co-sponsored by Rep. Deborah Hudson, R-Fairthorne, would require a three-fifths majority vote to approve the state’s budget if it expands faster than the rate of inflation.

Huh?

I’m not thinking that this addresses anything germaine about our current budget situation. And why would they want to do this now — it isn’t as though they were concerned about the growth in spending when they ran both chambers.

So in response to more budget shortfalls, all these guys can come up with are procedural moves that do absolutely nothing to constrain said spending. One of these days someone will ask them to put their budget proposals on the table and get them to stop showboating on this thing. What is fun about trying to index the government to the rate of inflation is that much of what the government does almost always rises faster than the rate of inflation and how do you fit genuine emergencies into “inflation”? How do you pay for the snow removal if the Feds don’t kick in? How do you pay for beach replenishment if the Feds don’t? The state runs landfills, whose operating costs almost always go up faster than inflation. I could go on, but you get the idea.

What I know for a fact is that government is not free. I also know that there are probably ways to get additional efficiencies from this government (hey — what about a unicameral legislature? How much would that save?), but at some point if you want to be taken seriously about constraining spending, you need to start putting real solutions on the table. Man up and tell Delawareans what — exactly — services now enjoyed by Delaware taxpayers that you would eliminate in an effort to ratchet down on spending. It is well past time to stop letting these bamboozlers pretend that government is free, to stop letting them get away with avoiding the political risks of actually enumerating what they would cut. And until they do — it just isn’t possible to consider them serious about dealing with either spending or budget challenges.

Sunday Afternoon Reading

The Party of Cruelty was written by James Howard Kunstler last week after the HCR was almost a week ago, but I just saw it yesterday. It is a long read, but a truly excellent retort to the apocalyptic fear and loathing ramped up by repubs — not just during the process, but also afterwards. Fear and loathing that is now being expressed in physical threats and in property destruction aimed against lawmakers who voted for this. Make sure you go over there to read the entire thing:

It was amusing to see the Republican party inveigh against health insurance reform as if they were a synod of Presbyterian necromancers girding the nation for a takeover by the spawn of hell. This was the same gang, by the way, who championed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, then regarded as the most reckless giveaway of public funds in human history. Along the way, they enlisted an army of nay-sayers representing everything dark, disgraceful, and ignorant in the American character. If the Republicans keep going this way, they’ll end up with something worse than Naziism: a party that hates everything but believes in absolutely nothing. […]

[…]I hope that Mr. Obama’s party can carry this message clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of the public interest. […]

Democrats won’t go this far to criticize Republicans, but it is really clear that in getting themselves utterly wrapped up in just obstructing everything to score political points, they are not getting any of the people’s business done. And they don’t see this as a problem — which is the sign of folks who were never interested in governing in the first place. Which is the heart of the repeal and replace strategy, right? More political point scoring, no thought to the many solutions now made law and no coherent replacement out there that does anywhere near what this law now does.

But it is clear that republicans no longer have anything to say about real governing goals — and as long as all they’ve got is fear and loathing they won’t.

Radio Ad — Call Mike Castle Hands Off Our Healthcare!

Good job!

I heard this ad during Al Mascitti’s show Friday AM — it is a good reminder that Mike Castle is spending his days in DC voting for the interests of his party and for those of various lobbyists.

[quicktime]https://delawareliberal.net//wp-content/uploads/2010/03/CastleVoteNoHealthCare032610.mp3[/quicktime]

It’s a good idea for Delawareans to remind him that we are still here, so calling him to say Hands Off is a good idea. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch the office on recess from John Boehner’s Congressional Vote Re-Education Camp.

Shep Smith Is Tired of the Overheated Rhetoric Too

…and apparently took RNC Chair Steele to task on this during his show today:

The Large Hadron Collider ran through a bunch of tests last week (and will shut down for some maintenance) and the predicted end of the world did not happen. HCR was passed in the House yesterday and the world still spins on its axis. Even better — the S&P and the NASDAQ are up abit today, so the economy certainly did not come crashing down as predicted. The fear mongering and the manufactured outrage didn’t get these repubs much and maybe Shep wants to know what the rest of us want to know: when will these guys abandon the apocalyptic bullsh#t and get to work? Steele really embarrasses himself here — if you can’t drop the talking points to have a conversation with someone who has asked you something outside of the comfort zone of those talking points, you aren’t leading anybody.

Mike Castle’s HCR Response — The Unbelievable Lameness of Faux Moderation

As xstryker noted last night, Mike Castle definitely voted no for HCR and its reconciliation bill. Castle’s office put out a press statement on last night’s historic vote, that should be read in it’s entirety to fully comprehend how badly he is managing to maintain any moderate cred while marching lockstep with his party. But let’s take a look at a few things here:

The debate about how to reshape health insurance in order to reduce skyrocketing costs, and increase access, has dominated the attention of Congress for the past year. While there are many areas of agreement, Congress and the American public remain divided and it is easy to see why. While I am glad the “deem and pass” procedure was abandoned, and the House of Representatives allowed an actual vote on the bill, I feel strongly that Congressional leaders and the President have missed a real opportunity to take incremental, bipartisan steps that recognized the concerns of Americans who feel as though they will foot the bill for widespread reforms that they do not embrace.

See the problem? We get another unenthusiastic recitation of his party’s talking points on this thing, certainly. But how can you have “many areas of agreement” with the HCR and then call for small, incremental steps to get this done? There was little about this effort that was small, unless he wants to count the 200+ Republican amendments included to this thing. But either Castle is trying to dog whistle his party’s sense of entitlement (you have to do what we say or it doesn’t count!) or he hasn’t been paying attention. And note the faux concerns for what Americans feel about this — there are alot of Americans genuinely confused about what is in this bill. And that is a real failure of Democrats for not messaging this thing properly; of Republicans who lied about this non-stop AND the media who did little to help their audiences sort out fact from fiction. More on that in abit.

Throughout the debate, I have advocated for common-sense policies that aim to lower costs and expand access, without compromising the quality of American medicine or raising taxes on the American people. I have urged leaders to consider legislation to drive down the costs of care first, in order to increase access and coverage through affordability.

Oh really? The only thing I can remember is the wellness thing — which wouldn’t have been especially effective at expanding access, might lower costs for people who are healthier and also lets somebody — government or insurance company decide if you are taking care of yourself well enough to get those lower rates. Other than this, Castle has been largely AWOL during this thing. (BTW — did anyone hear Castle speak last night? I didn’t, but wasn’t completely glued to my computer screen all day.)

While there are policies embedded in this legislation that have bipartisan support, they are buried under budget gimmicks that threaten the long-term solvency of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security– the existing entitlement programs that are draining the federal budget based on their current obligations. Health care reform will impact the lives of every American, our federal budget, and 1/6 of our economy. Reform should hold insurance companies accountable, eliminate barriers to competition and quality care, promote prevention, and drive down health care costs. To ignore the costs and enact unrealistic and misleading legislation will only prolong our health care challenges for generations to come.

Budget gimmicks? These are budget gimmicks that Mike Castle voted for:

  • BushCo Tax Cuts — the gimmick here was wiping out budget surpluses, replacing them with structural deficits (meaning they never got paid for), and letting them expire in 10 years to, you know, make the deficits look smaller;
  • BushCo War Expenditures — this was a double counting scheme, where they got to vote for a bloated Appropriation for the DOD AND they got to vote for a War Supplemental. The gimmicks here would include a backdoor funding mechanism for the DOD (increasing the pool of funds funds for Halliburton, Blackwater, et al) AND bypassing the annual budget ceiling in order to spend more money on the DOD.
  • BushCo Estate Tax revisions — this effort reduced he amount of federal estate taxes levied on weather people. Except to make the deficit numbers smaller (and to not have to pay for this), they let the tax drop to 0% this year and return to its 2001 levels in 2011.

In other words, Mike Castle spent the last decade voting for budget gimmicks, but it was OK because His Party Told Him To. But here he is pretending that no one will remember any of this stuff and count of this fake moderation to tide him over.

He ends with more talking points on how to change this bill. Some of that is worth doing, but none of that would cover 30M+ people for health insurance. None of it. And like the rest of his caucus, Mike Castle bailed on any real substantive discussions about this bill — if they cared about long term cost controls, they could have been heros everywhere by joining in the process to work this out. Instead, they want to pretend that this little stuff actually stands in for making major reform work better. This is the price of a policy of Obstruction Only. A policy that Mike Castle is fully committed to. And as you listen to him claim to be trying to influence process, remember that he is specifically lying to you. Because it is the policy of his party to Just Say No to Everything — a policy that has nothing to do with the lives of Delawareans — because his party has judged that to be in their best interests. Working towards common sense solutions means you have to work with the other party to have some impact. And as long as he isn’t doing this — because this is the will of his party — you aren’t watching anything near moderation.

Cap and Trade is Not a Tax; or Why Delmarva Dealings Failed His Economics Class

Because in spite of this attempt to invoke this appeal to the authority of a basic economics class (which this person Cato has clearly never had), just claiming that TAXES ARE BAD is just not an argument when dealing with cap and trade. Because cap and trade is not a taxation system, it is an emissions trading system for emissions allowances.

Those allowances price in to the cost of energy production and delivery the cost of pollution by greenhouse gasses. But they also represent a total cap of emissions too. Back in the 90’s a cap and trade system for emissions causing acid rain was implemented and has been more successful — and cheaper — than expected. The reason that this is not a tax is because the power plant owns something of value when they buy an allowance. And because an emissions trading system typically builds in some scarcity (the cap — the number of allowances is finite and that number typically decreases after time), those allowances can become fairly valuable. But also fairly expensive for a plant that is pretty dirty. A some point, a plant will discover that it is in its business interests to just invest in cleaning up rather than to continue to pay for allowances. Plants that are cleaner or who get cleaner (if they time it right) can have a valuable asset to sell to those plants who are still dirty and still in need of many allowances. These allowances start to really devalue once the demand for them slows — after lots of plants clean up.

There aren’t any taxes that act that way. But apparently they only way he can possibly object to this scheme is to misname it. But this is a conservative and one of their core tenets is hat taxpayers should always foot the bill to cleanup after corporate polluters. And yet for SO2, pollution reduction attainment was faster than expected, compliance costs by power plants was lower than predicted, and energy prices did not get out of control.

But go take a look at what an emissions market — cap and trade — did for SO2 emissions since 1989. (I can’t embed that map, but do click the arrow in the lower left hand of the map to start the animations.)

I don’t normally answer back blogs calling out my work, but this one is important. Cap and trade has a real and hugely successful history here, in the US (in fact, Tom Carper is working on new SO2 and NOx criteria in a revised version of the CAA that will include, I think Mercury) and the biggest reason it has been successful is that it used the power of markets to drive different behavior, let each plant decide for itself how it could most efficiently reduce its emissions AND its timetable for doing so and reduce the environmental costs for all of us. But mostly I trust that the liberals and progressives who read here will actually get how these markets work — unlike the conservatives among us who (in spite of their claims otherwise) really don’t get how markets should work and just resort to their usual clowning to make a point.

Christine O’Donnell Announces — A Good Look at the Hypocrisy Train

So have you had a chance to see this announcement? (Link opens up to WDEL video.)

It is completely choice: nonstop wingnut dog whistles and none of it made any sense. AND we see Ms. O’Donnell try to spank Mike Castle for his age, his liberalism, and for not being a real conservative. The best bit, though, is when she takes questions. In the first you can see her run through the rehearsed name calling before settling in to say something sort of coherent. She was asked about her previous money issues –had to clarify if the reporter was asking about the country or her issues — and decided to wade through the “arrogance of Mike Castle” and the “Lords of the Back Room” (Get.Out. This is a definite drift into David Vitter territory — nudgenudge, winkwink) and “the Party Bosses are scared” rehearsed (badly) talking points. Lots of bluster and not much sense. Another questioner reminded her that she said she would not run unless she could get the right money and asked about her progress on that. This resulted in another blustery answer — with a reference each to exceeding and meeting goals; getting support and funds from supporters and national leaders everywhere and telling the questioner that only the numbers available on June 30 will count for evaluation. WTF.

The entire thing could have been phoned in from repub talking point central. But it was completely choice to see the manufactured outrage over government spending. Not only because here would be another repub who never cared about this when BushCo was spending money like it was going out of style but because apparently she can’t even manage her own funds! It’s pretty damned nuts to listen to her have on about spending other people’s money wisely and the evils of overspending in light of her own issues.

According to this account from the Community News, there was even a little intrigue at the event:

Aside from members of the media, the room was filled with campaign supporters except for former senior campaign staffer David Keegan, who said he worked for O’Donnell in 2008 and planned to ask O’Donnell about her finances. Keegan, of Hockessin, was escorted out of the press conference by campaign officials, who told him only those with press credentials were invited, while he loudly proclaimed that he was responding to a Facebook invitation.

“She had me escorted out because she was afraid of what I would say,” he said after the press conference.

Wonder what Mr. Keegan wanted to ask?