Politics Plus

Do you remember the fiscal cliff?  It certainly had its share of media attention.  Since then, we’ve been preoccupied with the Republican Sequester, the Republican Shutdown, the Republican Hostage Crisis over the Debt Limit, and thank goodness, the Republican Cave-in.  There is another cliff that we hit today, and our failure to address it will cause millions of Americans to suffer needlessly, thanks to the Republican War on the Poor.

As Karoli noted in her rant this week, we’ve got the corporate media for the most part out there breathlessly reporting on the failures of the web site for the rollout of "Obamacare" and Congress wasting our time with more witch hunts, and what are they ignoring? Devastating cuts to the food stamp (otherwise known as SNAP) program.

Media Matters did a report on the lack of media coverage on those cuts which are about to take place Nov. 1st, and the damage and negative impact they’re going to have on our economy: REPORT: The Food Stamp Cuts The Media Won’t Tell You About.

As they’ve discussed in other reporting as well, what coverage we have had from the likes of Fox and their ilk has been dishonest B.S. like this, and this doesn’t even begin to nibble at the sheer volume of attacks on the working poor that are leveled on that network, week after week, month after month on their so-called "business block" every Saturday morning. It’s a literal cesspool of this type of garbage and worse: Fox’s Shameless Misrepresentation Of SNAP Recipients.

Chris Hayes and his guests gave us what we rarely see in the media these days, an honest look at and discussion on the devastating impact these cuts are going to have on real people’s lives who are hanging on by a thread and cannot afford to have their services cut any more…

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

The rest is worth the read.  Click through.

Here’s the included video in two clips.

America is the richest nation in the world, but the way our so-called "free", but really captive market distributes wealth is the most inequitable in our nation’s history. Just think how many people we could feed if we could just cut welfare for the 0.1%! How sad it is that Republicans left the war on hunger to wage war on the hungry.  They are simply without shame!

While I support calls for a hunger commission, I see no solution coming from such a body if Republicans are included in equal numbers.

Visualize this if you will.  You’re paying $200 per month for a used car, and though you are happy at the moment, you don’t know that you’ve been ripped off.  The engine, the brakes and the transmission are all about to fail, and the dealer has an escape cause built into your warranty, so he won’t honor it.  Now, let’s say someone comes along, takes your car, and gives you another that is in good repair and has a solid warranty for $205 per month.  Wouldn’t you say you were better off?  Those cancelled health insurance policies are much the same, but Republicans are calling the solution a rip-off.

A new controversy over the president’s health-care law is threatening to overshadow the messy launch of its Web site: Notices are going out to hundreds of thousands of Americans informing them that their health insurance policies are being canceled as of Dec. 31.

The notices appear to contradict President Obama’s promise that despite the changes resulting from the law, Americans can keep their health insurance if they like it. Republicans have seized on the cancellations as evidence that the law is flawed and the president has been less than forthright in describing its impact.

“The real problem is that people weren’t told the truth,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Tuesday on “CBS This Morning.” “You can remember, they were told that they would be able to keep their policies if they liked them. Now you hear hundreds of thousands of people across the country being told they couldn’t.”…

Inserted from <Washington Post>

Lawrence O’Donnell provided excellent coverage of this controversy.  (International readers, if you can’t view this. try searching YouTube or Bing Videos for Lawrence O’Donnell “Health Care: Campaigning or Governing”.  If not there by the time I post this, it should be in a day or two.)

Here’s the bottom line. If your health care policy is such a rip-off that it fails to meet the bare minimum standards that ObamaCare requires, and since ObamaCare is forcing your company to meet those bare minimum standards, ObamaCare is doing you a BIG favor. It is preventing you from getting sick and discovering that you don’t have the coverage you thought you do. Even the insurance companies cancelling policies say they will move customers into better policies that do meet the ObamaCare standards. However, some companies are trying to switch people into their most expensive product without informing them that they have less expensive policies that meet the standards.  Republicans are bitching about it, because it interferes with their RepubliCare plan: pay or die.

I bet you all remember the Kerry Campaign, and the Republican meme that Kerry was for Iraq, before he was against it, labeling him as a flip-flopper.  The Republican Party seems to have taken that page from Kerry’s playbook, because lately they have performed some flip-flops that even make Little Lord Willard etching his sketch seem tame.  Marco Rubio on Immigration reform is just one of many examples.

He was a leading member of a bipartisan "Gang of Eight" Senators who pushed a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the chamber earlier this year.

But with that measure facing little hope of passage in the Republican-controlled House, Sen. Marco Rubio feels Congress should play small ball when it comes to approving any bills on immigration reform.

Alex Conant, spokesman for the first-term Republican from Florida, said Monday  those who favor the comprehensive immigration overhaul passed by the Senate in June need to be "realistic in our expectations" of what the House might embrace.

"An all-or-nothing strategy on immigration reform would result in nothing. What is keeping us from progress on a series of immigration issues on which there is strong consensus is the fear that a conference committee on a limited bill will be used to negotiate a comprehensive one. We should take that option off the table so that we can begin to move on the things we agree on," Conant added in a statement to reporters…

Inserted from <CNN>

Rachel Maddow discussed how this fits into Republicans' extreme aversion to work. And they call minorities lazy!!

Despite Republican lies that there is no time, there is plenty of time to pass immigration reform. Obama and the Democrats gave them WAY too much in the Senate Bill, but once something Republicans say they want becomes amenable to Obama and the Democrats, Republicans refuse to take yes for an answer. They want to sabotage government, not govern. Since they go to such lengths to avoid their jobs, remove them!