Politics Plus

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) is a medical doctor.  As such, he has to have had considerable exposure to the scientific method.  In addition, he gas to have taken the Hippocratic Oath, promising to do no harm.  Sadly, he seems quite content to ignore both.

Today, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held its confirmation hearing for Gina McCarthy, who was nominated by President Obama to be our next Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator. During the hearing, one of her chief inquisitors was Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), who is one of three doctors in the United States Senate and a long-time opponent of public health safeguards from dirty air, water and climate pollution.

Barrasso used this opportunity to indicate that he only applies the physician’s Hippocratic Oath to “keep them from harm and injustice” when the harm would occur to the profits of big oil and coal companies. Furthermore, he frequently denies the ever-strengthening scientific understanding that human activity is responsible for climate change. It’s like a physician denying that smoking causes cancer.

Barrasso began his opening statement today by falsely accusing the Obama administration and the EPA of “making it impossible for our coal miners to feed their families…. These people are heroes and they deserve better than what they are getting from the EPA.” The facts say otherwise — the average number of coal-mining jobs under the Obama administration has been over 15 percent higher than under George W. Bush. Moreover, McCarthy has received a lot of support from industry officials including American Electric Power, a company that relies heavily on coal…

…So why is Senator Barrasso is protecting polluter interests over public health? Maybe it has something to do with the $526,866 in campaign donations from oil or gas. Or maybe the $122,831 from the coal industry? Whatever the reason, the doctor is a longtime practitioner of political malpractice. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

The spelling in my graphic is NOT a typo.  I’ve shared the beginning and the end of the article.  Click through to read the details on how Barrasso has abandoned his medical training, his oath, and his constituents to support the destruction of our planet for polluter profit.

Not Long ago, Rand Paul embarrassed himself and his party with a  condescending attempt to paint the GOP as attractive to Latinos.  Yesterday he was outright insulting, when he embarrassed himself and his party to black students at Howard University.  Republican minority outreach has one problem.  To succeed, Republicans must convince minority communities that obviously racist GOP policy is not at all racist.

So now we know the basis of Kentucky's libertarian Sen. Rand Paul's strategy for expanding the Republican Party's appeal to African Americans: amnesia.

That's the only conclusion I can reach after watching the C-SPAN broadcast of Paul's 52-minute appearance today at Howard University. He deserves credit for appearing before a potentially hostile audience to make the case for conservative policies with which most black voters utterly disagree. But he also deserves strong criticism — even derision — for pretending that there's any mystery about why most black folks are so skeptical about the GOP. He wants us to forget the party's recent history — and his own.

So in his speech today, he asked, "How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?"

He went on to argue that blacks began to switch their long-standing allegiance from Republicans to Democrats during the Great Depression. "The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance, while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible: the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets," Paul argued… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Root>

Rand seems to think that he gets to make up a history different from what actually happened. He insulted black people by accusing them of moving to the Democrats during the great depression, because they prefer welfare to opportunity. Horse feathers shit! The Republican Party came to be as the progressive party that freed the slaves and, after the war, fought for their equality. The Southern Democrats, aka Dixiecrats, were the racists that opposed them. In the 1960s, Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans combined to pass the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts. In a play for political power, the Republicans adopted the Southern Strategy, in which they adopted the Dixiecrats racist policies. The Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party and became its base. Until that time, black people were overwhelmingly Republican. Only after the Republican Party adopted racism as policy did the majority of black people change their support to the Democrats. That's what really happened.  Idiot, son of Idiot, named after Idiot spread more BS than an agricultural spreader.

Rachel Maddow demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, that Rand Paul also lied when he claimed he has never been against the Civil Rights Act.

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Like his racist father, Paul has said he believes that businesses have the right to racist discrimination.

I believe that the Republican Party is committing slow suicide.  Because demographics in this country are shifting, they will need successful minority outreach to survive.  However the only they can do this is to abandon racism and bigotry, but if they do, they lose their base, without which they cannot survive.  When they adopted the Southern Strategy, they sold out to hate to gain power.  Now they can’t let go of it.