From a political party overflowing with sociopaths and creeps, none other than Dick Cheney encapsulates to a greater degree what it is the Republican party has become. The blood of ...
It can be debated as to whether the filibuster came about as a political accident or was created to give minority parties a stronger say in opposing specific legislation they ...
While gun nuts sink a little deeper into madness with each passing day, Seattle is turning guns into bricks.
The Seattle Police Department collected more than 700 guns during a buyback ...
Had enough of right-wing political crap and find yourself with a deep desire to get as far from the madding crowd as you can?
Read on...
The opportunity to travel to Mars ...
Here's the full quote from Charles P. Pierce.
If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should ...
A guest post from James Fidlerten.
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After September 11, 2011, America became united, as it grieved the loss of so many lives on American soil. The tragic event also changed so ...
I'm not sure that 'crazy' is strong enough an adjective to describe the many (or few) who go to the absurd lengths they do in defending America's out-of-control gun culture. ...
When an enabler of sexual abuse directed at children sits on the threshold of sainthood, you know you're living in a world of screwed-up priorities.
The canonisation of Wojtyla is getting ...
Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, ponders Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
Looking back, O'Connor said, she isn't sure the high court should have ...
Barbara Bush on a Jeb run in 2016.
"We've had enough Bushes."
An entire planet concurs.
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Today we learn...
The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the ...
The above is in response to Maureen Dowd's ridiculous assertion that President Obama is incompetent for failing to get the 60 votes the Senate required to move the gun background ...
In desperate need of an excuse for voting against background checks, here's the one an unnamed Democratic senator is using.
“Guns, gays and immigration — it’s too much. I can be ...
The vote came in at 55 to 45 in favor of expanding background checks for gun sales. In most institutes of democracy, that would have been more than enough to ...
Even for Louie Gohmert apologists who can't quite grasp the fact that the man is a complete moron whose Idiot Quotient rivals that of Michele Bachmann, it has to be ...
Exactly.
Boston. Fucking horrible.
I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."
But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be ...
Less than 24 hours after the tragedy at Boston and without a clue as to whom the perpetrator might be, the bigots have crawled out from under the rocks they ...
When did ignorance become
a point of view? ~Dilbert
Is it time yet to make a double-digit IQ a prerequisite to running for public office?
Via Foolocracy:
Texas Rep. Joe Barton doesn’t believe ...
During an interview with Kaiser Health News Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said he opposes Obamacare because every single American already has the health care.
“There is no one who doesn’t have health care in America. No one. Now, they may end up going to the emergency room. There are better ways to deal with people that need health care than this massive new program.”
No one except the 49 million who don’t have insurance and therefore do not have access to regular health care. The best they can hope for is to wait until their health deteriorates to the point where they require emergency services. How wonderful.
Tell me again how the U.S. has the best health care system in the world…a system that allows thousands of its citizens to die needlessly each year because they are unable to afford health insurance…a system that has allowed medical costs to become one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy…a system which has the U.S standing out as the only developed country in the worldwithout a universal health care plan for its citizens.
Disgraceful.
I can think of no better reason to ensure that as few as possible of these sadistic conservative pricks win back office in 2014. If ever there existed a political party that deserves to be wiped off the electoral map, its the soulless, backward thinking, ignorant and heartless Republican Party.
It really takes no effort to hate their guts and everything they stand for.
At least three people were shot in a shooting at Lone Star College in north Houston, Texas some time before 12:30 PM. Witnesses on the scene say the shooting may have escalated after a heated argument, possibly over a bad grade. At least two victims were caught in the crossfire and suffered “multiple gun shot wounds,” KTRK reports, and are in serious condition. They were brought into surgery at Ben Taub General Hospital. One of the victims — who was shot in the leg — is a school employee. The other, a younger student, was found on the ground unconscious, with his eyes closed.
…reminded me of an email a friend sent me with a poster attached containing the words you see in the illustration above. I’d give credit to the author of those words but there was none mentioned.
Texas has some of the most lax gun laws around and they’ve been making a lot of noise bitching about President Obama’s suggestion that gun control laws be tightened in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. Texas’ pea-brained governor, Rick Perry, believes that the fix to gun violence lies not in tighter gun laws but instead in more prayer.
“As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.”
Yeah, that’s it. Pray for the nation’s children while you make it easier for any kook to obtain semi-automatic weapons without as much as a background check. And while you’re at it, let bullshit politicians like Marco Rubio parade about uttering their NRA-endorsed crap.
“President Obama is targeting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens instead of seriously addressing the real underlying causes of such violence.”
When you have nothing else, lies and fear will have to suffice. Blaming gun violence on video games and movies is not going to make a dent in the number of people killed each year by gunfire. Only 52 people in Canada were killed by gunfire in 2011; Japan had 48 and Great Britain had 8. In the same year, there were just under 11,000 people killed in the United States by gunshots and yet Canada, Japan and Great Britain have the exact same violent video games and movies available to their population as does the U.S. Might not the reason for the high death rate by guns in the U.S. be that it has the laxest gun laws in the industrialized world while Canada, Japan and the U.K. have some of the strictest?
And while Rick Perry works on making guns easily available for all, he’s refusing to implement parts of ObamaCare that would make health care more affordable for all of his state’s citizens – 25 percent of which have no health insurance.
In a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Perry said he will not implement an health insurance exchange. Also, he will not expand Medicaid to cover families earning below 133% of the Federal poverty level. That leaves an estimated 1.5 million Texans eligible for expanded Medicaid coverage without healthcare and leaving an estimated $13 billion in Federal funds to be distributed to other states.)
Perry wrote, “I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our Constitution and our founding principles of limited government.
Which state has the worst healthcare in the country? According to a study by the US Department of Health and Human Services, it’s…Texas. Surprise!
Guns, yes. Health care, no. And that, my friends, is how you take care of the citizens of your state.
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If there is a single conservative politician who epitomizes everything that is wrong with the Republican party, it has to be Florida’s crooked (if not deranged) governor, Rick Scott. There apparently is no lie too big, too blatant or too self-serving that Scott will not use in his deliberate quest to turn Florida politics into a bigger joke than it already is. Here’s his latest.
The state’s chief economist has warned the staff of Gov. Rick Scott that his Medicaid cost estimates are wrong, but Scott keeps using them anyway, according to e-mails obtained by Health News Florida.
Scott says he opposes expanding Florida Medicaid because it would cost too much: $63 billion over 10 years, he says, with the state paying $26 billion of that.
But those numbers are based on a flawed report, according to a legislative budget analyst and State Economist Amy Baker. A series of e-mails obtained by Health News Florida shows the analysts warned Scott’s office the numbers were wrong weeks ago, but he is still using them. He cited them in a Tampa Bay Times op-ed on Sunday and at at a Washington press conference on Monday.
Scott knew that his numbers were completely off but he went with them anyway because he and his fellow Republicans would never let anything as trivial as truth or facts get in the way of blocking the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. As Steve Benen points out, the actual cost to Florida for Medicaid expansion would be in the range of $1 billion over the next 10 years – not the $26 billion Scott claimed.
I don’t think I’ll ever understand why Floridians elected this con man to govern them. It was common knowledge at the time that Scott had been CEO of a company that pleaded guilty to 14 counts of corporate felonies after a U.S. Justice inquiry discovered that Scott’s company had swindled Medicaid and Medicare for millions. The company was fined a total of $1.7 billion in what was to be the largest government fraud settlement in U.S. history.
The people of Florida knew this…and yet a majority of them elected him to office anyway. Now all Floridians are paying the price for the stupidity of so many. How unfortunate.
A number of states are still reluctant to accept that this summer’s positive Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act combined with Barack Obama’s decisive win in the election ensures that ObamaCare is, and will continue to be, the law of the land. Governors in Florida, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska have all stated that they are unwilling to implement essential parts of the health care law. Specifically, they are refusing to set up health insurance exchanges and expand the Medicaid program as stipulated by the ACA.
And now comes news that after strong opposition to the health care law, Florida’s Rick Scott has begun to change his tune.
The election is over and President Obama won. I’m responsible for the families of Florida … If I can get to yes, I want to get to yes.
I don’t think anyone involved in trying to improve health care should say ‘no, no, no. Let’s have a conversation.
That might be the first intelligent thing Rick Scott has said as governor and it should be welcome news to the 25 percent of uninsured in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale corridor who struggle through life with no health insurance. Scott’s reversal follows a Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute report that concludes that there is a substantial financial benefit to be had by states like Florida that implement the law.
The researchers determined the state could save up to $100 million a year because allowing people to join Medicaid would reduce the financial burden on other state-funded safety net programs.
“It is time for Florida’s elected officials to take a serious look at this option,” said Joan Alker, research associate professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. “Our study found that the state can actually save money while ensuring that a million Floridians can get the health coverage they desperately need. And this decision affects all Floridians as Florida’s hospitals will be put in jeopardy if the state does not move forward.”
This report is as good a reason as any for Scott and other governors to work with the feds on implementing the ACA. But the real kicker here, I think, is the slow realization that their president is not Mitt Romney. It’s Barack Obama.
If Romney had won, it’s anyone’s guess as to how successful Republicans would have been in repealing ObamaCares. What you can be certain of is that there would have been at least four years of congressional efforts to defund the law and to hold back its implementation. That’s not going to happen now. There will still be some griping and reluctance on the part of those like Rick Perry who again stated this week that Texas will not take part in setting up the insurance exchanges, but as Rick Scott discovered, there’s some stuff in life that’s inevitable. And one of those inevitable concepts is the idea that decent health care should be affordable and available to every citizen, no matter how poor they are or where they live.
When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is. So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance … or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservatism.
Free emergency health care is a “form of socialism” and the individual mandate is “ultimate conservatism.” Got it.
Look, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way.
Okay. Mitt is keeping to his story. Emergency room health care: BAD. Personal responsibility: GOOD.
So let’s see what he had to say when asked the following question by 60 Minutes: “Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the fifty million Americans who don’t have it today?”
Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people—we—if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.
And the web gets a little more tangled with each passing day.
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