Politics Plus

The depth of hypocrisy to which Republicans stoop never ceases to amaze me.  This is not the first, nor will it be the last article I’ve posted on Arizona’s Republican death panel, but Brewer the Butcher blew me away with this beauty!

Anxious over serious state deficits, many Republican governors have decried Medicaid as the “monster” eating at the budget. Chief among them is Arizona’s Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who is committed to gutting Arizona’s Medicaid program at the expense of transplant patients. Ignoring pleas from Democratic lawmakers and transplant patients to restore the $1.4 million in funding to the transplant program, Brewer insists that such “optional [Foxtopia delinked],” “Cadillac” treatment for the dying must go toward recouping one-tenth of a percent from Arizona’s projected budget shortfall.

Brewer is no stranger to sacrificing the welfare of vulnerable constituents for a buck. But this particularly callous dogma made enough waves across the pond to bring Britain’s Channel 4 News Washington correspondent Sarah Smith to her doorstep. Confounded by Brewer’s dismissal of the lives her decision damns, Smith asked Brewer “how many people have to die” before she’d reverse her position. Calling the “obvious” question “unfair,” Brewer then quipped that “if people are so worried about the transplant patients, then they should ask the federal government in Washington to send us more money”:

I managed to “doorstep” her as we call it in TV – i.e. I caught her at a public event and just started asking questions, uninvited.

“How many people have to die before you are prepared to reverse your decision on the transplant operations?” seemed like the obvious question.

She said she thought that was unfair and started to explain how dire the state’s financial situation is. If people are so worried about the transplant patients then they should ask the federal government in Washington to send us more money, she said. But she would not explain to me, or to any Democrats in the state capitol, what she has done with the nearly $200 million she was already given in ‘stimulus funds’ to spend on anything she liked.

While suggesting that Arizonans should request more federal funding, Brewer openly vilifies a law — the Affordable Care Act — that provides exactly that. The health care law’s Medicaid expansion will foot 100 percent of the bill for states to expand until 2016 and 90 percent after 2020. However, to receive this funding, states have to maintain current eligibility levels in Medicaid and CHIP, something Brewer does not wish to maintain… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

For starters, Brewer has $30 billion in stimulus money rat-holed for undisclosed projects.  Frankly, I would like states who vilify federal projects the way Brewer has the health care package, flawed though it may be, should not get funding for the project, but I know better.  The poorest residents would suffer.  Can there be any doubt that Obamacare is better than Republicare?

Since it’s inception, the Republican Party has been going after the flawed but needed Health Care Reform package, using a twisted interpretation of the Commerce Clause.  The media is buzzing that one of those cases bore fruit today when a Virginia District Court Judge rules that the individual mandate is unconstitutional.  What the MSM is NOT telling you is that the judge in the case is a Republican activist who received money for working against HCR.

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Monday that a key provision of the nation’s sweeping health-care overhaul is unconstitutional, the most significant legal setback so far for President Obama’s signature domestic initiative.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry E. Hudson found that Congress could not order individuals to buy health insurance.

In a 42-page opinion, Hudson said the provision of the law that requires most individuals to get insurance or pay a fine by 2014 is an unprecedented expansion of federal power that cannot be supported by Congress’s power to regulate interstate trade.

"Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market," he wrote. "In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]

Hudson is the first judge to rule that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. He said, however, that portions of the law that do not rest on the requirement that individuals obtain insurance are legal and can proceed. Hudson indicated there was no need for him to enjoin the law and halt its implementation, since the mandate does not go into effect until 2014… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Washington Post>

What he’s not saying is that federal courts have upheld individual mandates to purchase auto insurance.  Because the mandates were state rather than federal mandates, the basis for them was not the Commerce Clause.  I would be surprised to see him upheld at the Appeals Court level.  Two other District Court judges in other districts have upheld the law.  Of course, the big worry is that when this gets to SCOTUS, there are four activist Republican ideologues, who have repeatedly shown a complete disregard for the Constitution in making their decisions.

Now, here’s the dirt.

News outlets have noted that Hudson, as an owner of Campaign Solutions, Inc. (a Republican consulting firm that worked the 2010 election cycle for John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, John McCain, and other GOP candidates who’ve placed the purported unconstitutionality of health care reform at the center of their political platforms) had a conflict of interest inasmuch as he has received between $32,000 and $117,000 from Campaign Solutions as a result of its work on this issue… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Wikipedia>

He even worked on the campaign of Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia AG who brought the case.  There can be no denying that he has a conflict of interest and violated judicial ethics by not recusing himself.

There are certainly a plethora of reasons for Senators and Representatives to oppose the Tax Capitulation Act.  Granting huge income tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, who neither need nor deserve the relief.  It gives $25 billion in estate tax cuts to only the 6,600 richest plutocrats, an average of $3.8 million per family.  For Americans earning less that $20,000 per year, it’s a tax INCREASE.  It gets only one year of unemployment relief, and does nothing for the 99ers.  If that were not enough, already, yet, it promises to trash the bond rating for US securities.

Ratings agency Moody’s on Monday warned the United States will put its top level credit rating at risk if Congress extends a sweeping package of tax cuts and unemployment spending.

As the hotly-contested package was being considered by Congress, Moody’s said passage would lift the odds of a potentially damaging credit outlook revision.

"Unless there are offsetting measures, the package will be credit negative for the US and increase the likelihood of a negative outlook on the US government’s Aaa rating during the next two years," said Moody’s Steven Hess.

The threatened outlook revision would be one step short of a full downgrade, but could nonetheless rock global financial markets and see Washington’s cost of borrowing soar… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Alternet>

I understand that this has already cleared cloture in the Seneate, bought with generous slabs of pork.  The buzz from the House is that Democrats will be fighting only the estate tax increase.  In short, it’s time to get out our Vaseline.  We’ll need it.

Few places on earth create more foreign policy challenges for the than Pakistan.  It is a nuclear state with an unstable government, a history of aiding nuclear proliferation, intense hostility with India, an ally, national interests over Afghanistan that differ from ours, a history of support for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and more.   With all that, the last thing we need is an embarrassing incident.  Nevertheless, Republicans ignored all this when they duped Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US into hosting a fund-raiser without telling him that’s what it was.

At Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel, Ali Gharib reports, “The Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. hosted a fundraiser at his residence for a neoconservative D.C. think-tank, which solicited donations of $5,000 for invitations to the event”:

But the think-tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), didn’t bother to tell the Pakistani embassy that the event was a fundraiser or that it was sandwiched in the middle of a two-and-a-half day conference on “Countering the Iranian Threat” put on by the group.

“We didn’t know at all that they have done this fundraising,” Imran Gardezi, a spokesperson for the Pakistani embassy, told the Middle East Channel. “And neither did they share with us that they would be doing this conference. Very frankly, we didn’t know about this conference.”

FDD’s president Cliff May — who, like his FDD colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht, is a strident advocate of aggressive action [propaganda sheet delinked] against Iran — denied that the event was a fundraiser, telling Gharib that “friends and supporters” were invited, and that there was no “quid-pro-quo” between the $5,000 donation and invitation to the dinner.

“I invited FDD donors at or above the $5,000 level to the event,” May wrote in a follow-up interview by e-mail. “Others friends of FDD were invited — at my discretion. Several FDD staff members were invited as well.”

The conference’s schedule reads [Neocons delinked]:

7:00 pm

Dinner at the residence of one

of Washington’s noteworthy Ambassadors

(Closed to Media)

(Minimum $5,000 gift required. Contribute here [Neocons delinked], or for more information on becoming a donor, please contact [e-mail of FDD staffer removed])

… [emphasis original][emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

The Republican did what Republicans do when they open their mouths.  He lied.  This stunt was particularly devious and harmful to ongoing relations with Pakistan.