Politics Plus

Republicans learned the hard way.  Once people get to experience the good done by such programs as Social Security and Medicare, they become resistant to Republican attempts to take away their benefits to give the money to billionaires.  That’s why Big Insurance and their Republican lackeys are so desperate to kill ObamaCare now, before that happens.  Here is how they are paying at least one Republican Governor to screw his own people.

Last week Georgia’s Insurance Commissioner proudly came out as an Obamacare obstructionist, bragging that Georgia would require "navigators" – people hired to assist individuals sign up for Obamacare — to be licensed by the Georgia Department of Insurance.

That was bad enough, but now it gets really ugly. Via Raw Story:

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R)’s family and business partner have been receiving payments from a secret Political Action Committee called Real PAC. Half a million dollars of the money donated to the PAC has come from corporate health care interests which — like the governor and Georgia state Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens — oppose the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare.”

According to investigative reporter Jim Walls of Atlanta Unfiltered, the PAC hasn’t filed taxes or the required financial disclosures in two years, and the information it did file for 2011 was incorrect.

Contributors to Real PAC include Aetna, Humana, Blue Cross, United Health care and other interests that want to keep health insurance premiums and other costs as high as possible. Bryan Long of activist group Better Georgia told Raw Story that the list of donors shows who Gov. Deal really works for.

… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

Here’s the Hudgens video, to show you just how unashamed they are.

GA Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens Admits Obstructionism from Georgia Democrat on Vimeo.

Republicans want you covered by RepubliCare, so if you can pay, you get health care.  If you can’t you get the RepubliCare Death Benefit.

Here is the twenty-second article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is Ben Shapiro, author and propagandist for Breitfart. He is so honored for the most outrageous example of projection you could imagine.

If don’t know who does the scheduling for C-SPAN’s Book TV, but apparently they wanted to help Breitbrat Ben Shapiro sell some more books, since they had him on for a three hour long interview as part of their In Depth series this weekend.

Shapiro discussed everything from how he was big Rush Limbaugh fan in college and how Rushbo’s wingnut brother encourage him to write his first book, to his making friends with Andrew Breitbart around that same time, to pretending that Limbaugh and O’Reilly aren’t bullies, to how he’s been friends with Ann Coulter since he was 18, to comparing the Obama administration to the Mafia. He also apparently doesn’t think All in the Family was funny and claimed "leftism" was imported from Germany. But it’s the mean old left’s fault we all can’t get along and don’t dare try to tell him otherwise.

In the segment above, we are supposed to believe that ABC’s George Stephanopoulos is a liberal, or that anyone on the left considers Stepho and his merry band of overpaid Villagers "journalists." Shapiro then proceeded to treat the viewers to one giant case of projection in an attempt to explain why the poor, downtrodden, picked on, victimized right wingers like himself are forced to personally attack those on the left and how no one is ever allowed to call them racists because there’s no evidence of that whatsoever in Shapiro World.

No one on the left is allowed to complain about voter ID laws that make it harder for minorities to vote, or laws that keep gay people from getting married, because that makes you the mean nasty bigot. Got it? As Karoli has pointed out here before, this is nothing new for the likes of Shapiro…

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

Here’s the video:

Does he strike you as one of those fellows, who lusts for power, because of the shame he suffered when little girls used to beat him up on the school bus and tale his lunch money? This is projection in his purest form. For those not familiar, projection id attributing your own beliefs and behavior to others.  Anyone, who believes the lie that there is no such thing as Republican racism, has either never read the Republicans on Parade series, or refused to believe documentation in the Republican racists’ own words.

May each of you enjoy the day, while giving thanks and appreciation to our labor movement, because we owe them so much.

ThinkProgress has assembled just five of the many things that Americans can thank the nation’s unions for giving us all:

1. Unions Gave Us The Weekend: Even the ultra-conservative Mises Institute notes that the relatively labor-free 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.

2. Unions Gave Us Fair Wages And Relative Income Equality: As ThinkProgress reported earlier in the week, the relative decline of unions over the past 35 years has mirrored a decline in the middle class’s share of national income. It is also true that at the time when most Americans belonged to a union — a period of time between the 1940′s and 1950′s — income inequality in the U.S. was at its lowest point in the history of the country.

3. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.

4. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”

5. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”…

Inserted from <Think Progress>