So Republicans have plan to sabotage America’s business sector, kill jobs and make working class Americans feel guilty for getting sick. That may or may not be the direct result of their bitterness about being voted out of power or their unhinged hatred of anything that resembles progressive, such as health-care reform. Health Care Cost Growth Hurts Nation’s Economic Performance
The study found that excess growth in health care costs has adverse effects on employment, output and value added to GDP in the U.S., and that these effects are greater for industries where high percentages of workers have employer sponsored insurance. For example, the study estimated that a 10% increase in excess health care costs would reduce employment by about 0.24 percent in an industry such as motor vehicles, where about 80% of workers have ESI, compared with about 0.13% percent drop in the retail trade, where about one-third of workers have ESI. Economy-wide across all the 38 industries, a 10% increase in excess health care costs growth would result in about 120,800 fewer jobs, $28 billion in lost revenues, and about $14 billion in lost value added.
Many Republicans on some subjective level honestly feel they love the U.S.A. though for most of the last fifty years many Republicans have also loved the U.S.A. the way abusive parents love their children. Its a twisted and destructive kind of love that is willfully blind to the damage they do. Trying to sabotage any progress reforming health-care in America is just another unconscionable example.
In Conservative logic there is the premise that goes round and round – “Obama said something socialist-sounding, therefore/Obama IS a socialist, therefore/Socialism is whatever Obama does” (from A Layman Attempts To Understand Wing-Nut Psychology). So appointing “czars”, you know like Bush did, plays right into that little circular game, Fox News Poll Propels Myth About Obama “Czars”
Last week, ThinkProgress noted that Fox News reporter Wendell Goler thoroughly debunked conservative fearmongering about President Obama’s supposed 30 czars, which they often claim “don’t need to be confirmed by the Senate.” “There is no constitutional issue” and many of these “czars” are “confirmed by the Senate,” reported Goler. Despite this, a new Fox News poll asserts that “Obama has appointed over 30 czars” and “Czars are advisors to the president who work outside of the cabinet and do not have to be confirmed by the Senate”:
Many of these “czars” have regular titles just as they have in previous administrations (Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy), but for reasons unknown to those of us that live outside Area 51, have suddenly been referred to as czars. The czar thing doesn’t really fit the socialist narrative since it was the czars the Russian Revolution removed from power. Not the first far Right narrative that did not make sense.
Bush Weighed Using Military in U.S. Arrests
A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.
The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.
Not surprising news considering the Chicken-Little fever that BushCo and the Right suffer from to this day. Bill Mahr and Jon Stewart have both done shows satirizing the Right’s view of terrorists as super human – our home grown murdered, rapists, kidnappers and arsonists are frail amateurs compared to terrorists so there is no way the police and FBI could handle them. Cheney advocated and Bush at least entertained the idea of sending in something like the 101st Airborne to nap six terror suspects – all now in a domestic jail by the way. Why did Cheney even consider the bizarre possibility that the administration could trample over the Constitution. Because neocon enabler John Yoo said presidents have unlimited war time powers.
Another Conservative Hypocrite Hoist On His Own Petard– Paul Stanley (R-TN). Stanley took pictures of the young woman with whom he was having an affair. Must have been mementos destined for the family values album.
The Long Goodbye 