Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia. I hate this fucking guy
In this 100-second “trash compactor” prepared by TPM editor Michael Lester, you can get a pretty good idea of what went down at the Value Voters Summit last Friday.
The thing that usually strikes me about any grouping of Republicans is not how blindingly white they all are, but rather how pinch-faced, nasally and shrew-like most of them seem to be. They’re a very specific type of Caucasian, I suppose. “Cowardly” isn’t the exact word I’m looking for, but Republican men have always struck me as the opposite of what I picture a “hero” to look like.
(*No, that’s not what he said at all, but hey, Matt Drudge can do it, so why can’t I?)
I was as much amused by Rick Santorum’s comment yesterday—“We will never have the elite, smart people on our side”—during his speech at the ultra conservative Values Voter Summit as I was by this paragraph—or some variation thereof—that invariably followed without any need for further comment or elaboration:
“Rep. Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Kirk Cameron, Gov. Jan Brewer, Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Steve King are among other scheduled speakers.”
On nearly every blog, the ingredients of the report were the video of Santorum (see below) and a mention of some of his fellow far-right fuit loops who would be speaking at the conservative Christian political confab. Perhaps they were trying to be droll—I decided to take it that way—or maybe they were just dryly reporting the facts. Either way, a list of those particular Republican names speaks volumes, doesn’t it?
Former GOP presidential candidate Santorum’s full quote was:
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.”
Well, Rick, that’s one way to look at it, but there’s an obvious—or what should be obvious—flip-side to that equation that you might want to take into consideration: WHY do you reckon that it’s difficult for these “elite, smart people” to acquiesce to the will of a bunch of folks who they perceive as a bunch of ignorant hicks who have decided that they’re going to “take back our country” and so forth?
Take it back from…? And where will these science-denying dumbshit Tea party Taliban types take it back to? Before African Americans had the vote or before they were allowed to play Major League Baseball? Just how far back are we talking, here?
His delightfully candid remark calls into question how Mr. Santorum and other Christian conservatives define “freedom,” a word and concept that was thrown around—and shit on—by at least half of the Values Voters Summit’s speakers: Should “the elite, smart people” stand silently by and do nothing and simply allow, without protest or objection, a group of people they consider to be rank ignoramuses and dangerous buffoons to run roughshod over what they see as THEIR OWN RIGHTS (or the rights of others)?
If you take only the example of marriage equality, one groups wants to get married for a variety of benefits that will have virtually ZERO effect—none—on the lives of conservative religious straight people, so why A.) do the people who attend the VVS even care and B.) why do they think that THEY should have final say over what gay people do, simply because they “don’t agree with it”?
Because… Jebus?
That’s not a reason!
What I don’t get, and what is making me laugh, is how it doesn’t seem to phase Rick Santorum even one tiny little bit that he’s is, in essence, defining himself as being a member of the STUPID TEAM that the evil smart elite people want to subjugate with stuff like gay marriage and insurance being required to cover birth control. His argument isn’t “We’re smarter than they are so they should listen to us,” it’s more like… well, to be honest, I don’t even know, really, how the fuck to parse what Santorum believes. Once someone admits that they’re hositle to intelligence itself, I don’t really feel it’s incumbent upon me to search out the nuance of their blinkered, unsophisticated worldview.
Mr. Santorum doesn’t seem to have noticed the causality between his own position of being against birth control and the fact that he lost—and lost miserably—to a man who now seems set to lose handily himself in the general election. But he has made an important observation: “Smart people” and Republicans don’t have a whole lot in common anymore.
In any case, why aren’t the right wing bloggers and peanut gallery commenters at Breitbart, The National Review and WorldNetDaily absolutely up in arms about Santorum calling them stupid?
Tee-hee! Personally, I think Rick Santorum has inadvertently hit on THE defining reason for the GOP’s problems with “the elite, smart people”: Intelligent, NON-GULLIBLE voters will, never, ever cede the control of their lives to the likes of Michele Bachmann, Steve King or Todd Akin. Any Republican politician who could carry Mississippi, Alabama or Arkansas in a national election IS GOING TO LOSE in the more populous, better-educated coastal states. You can stuff your face with Chick-fil-A until you puke, but nothing is going to change that fact, bunky. The GOP has backed itself into a demographic corner, a demographic that’s literally dying off.
So what advice will those multi-million dollar consulting and marketing firms come up with to help the GOP keep winning elections after they get absolutely trounced this November? Forget about them, I say to you, Republican overlords: It was those top dollar marketing smarty-pantses that gave you guys Mitt fuckin’ Romney in the first place
Nope, Rick Santorum has already got it all figured it out for ya, you shadowy reptilian Republican druids who pull the levers of power behind the curtain: It’s all coming down a simple matter of smart vs DUMB and Santorum defined the battle yesterday in a single sentence of crystal clear truth:
“We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”
That’s right, NEVER.
Gutting the educational system is the far right’s very last chance of even holding the ground they have now. The Republican establishment pretty much knows that they can’t win national elections strictly along racial demographic lines anymore. Richard Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy” is kaput after this current election cycle. But since blockheads tend to vote as a bloc, in the long game, taking advantage of “The Great American IQ Stratification” (which is inevitably how history will see it, unless history is written by future David Bartons) and trying to encourage deeper ignorance and more widespread stupidity is the GOP’s only hope.
A poll released Monday by Public Policy Polling shows that Mitt Romney is at a distinct disadvantage in the highly important Electoral College swing state of Ohio, polling just 45% to Obama’s 50%, but one of the ancillary questions the pollsters mischievously slipped in sheds some light on how pathetically misinformed—or willfully ignorant—some Ohio Republicans really are.
Does this seem like a trick question to you?
“Who do you think deserves more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?”
63% percent said Obama, 6% said Mitt Romney and 31% of the respondents said they were not sure.
If you break it down (see cross tabs), about 15% of the Ohio Republicans who rated themselves “very conservative” actually believe that Mitt Romney deserves the credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.
That’s more than one in ten!
Mitt Romney obviously can count on, and receive, the support of the most blinkered ignoramuses in the country. No wonder the GOP is so virulently anti-education. Without the low IQ buffoon bloc standing so square-headed in their corner, they’d never win another election, EVER.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “Democrat” = “smart,” because that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, but self-identifying as a “Republican” is an admission of one of two things: that you are either throwing your lot with the fucking idiot brigade or that you are a fucking idiot yourself.
Those fucking Disney Obama communists also serve FRENCH fries at the American Pavilion! FRENCH fries! Call the Tea party!
GOP delegates Mark and Irene Harris, of Snyder County, Pennsylvania, were “highly offended” to see a Mexican employee working at the “American Pavilion” of Disney World’s Epcot Center, as Irene posted on their “Rock Star GOP” blog from the GOP national convention in Tampa:
Prior to National Republican Convention we visited Disney for three days. During our time at Epcot we visited the different countries. It was neat seeing each country and the employees were from that individual country. Then we visited America . . . one would think you would find American employees. We were offended to find a person from Mexico working in America. Mark spoke up and told them he was highly offended after visiting the other countries and seeing employees from that country and then come to America and find a Mexican. He was very civil but his point was well made.
I’ll bet it was. Imagine being the manager who had to absorb that piece of Mark’s tiny mind… I can’t currently think of anything that could be more painful. Or stupid.
According to their website, “Mark and Irene are both pro‐life, believe marriage is between one man and one woman, are for open records and transparency, believe in very conservative principles and the Republican platform.”
Sounds about right to me! To this information, I have nothing, absolutely nothing, to add.
As if it wasn’t already patently obvious to everyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, last night at the Republican National Convention, 82-year-old actor Clint Eastwood took to the stage and showed America and the rest of the world what the Republican Party is REALLY all about: Senile old white gits yelling crazy, incoherent shit.
Last night, without much effort, Eastwood’s loopy “skit” turned the house full of extremely Caucasian Republican convention goers “every which way but loose.” The rest of the country was just deeply embarrassed for the octogenarian Hollywood legend. The RNC apparently wanted Clint there as the embodiment of modern Republicanism, a stand-in for Ronald Reagan, if you will. Eastwood inadvertently delivered in spades, coming off like a sad, old, spaced cowboy, giving the, uh… strong impression, that the GOP is full of crazy elderly folks suffering from senile dementia.
At least they were happy to loudly cheer one on. As Michael Moore wrote at The Daily Beast this morning:
Speaking to Invisible Obama last night, in a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech & Chong, Clint Eastwood was able to drive home to tens of millions of viewers the central message of this year’s Republican National Convention: “We Are Delusional and Detached from Reality. Vote for Us!”
With his cringe-worthy word salad performance on the same level as Sarah Palin’s, someone close to Clint Eastwood should have said “NO” and said it firmly and hung up the phone when the RNC came a callin’. Looking at the evidence of last night’s pathetic televised fiasco—and his loathsome wife and spoiled daughter’s execrable E! network reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company—Clint seems to be going the route of Charlton Heston, a once legendary Hollywood star, who now comes off like a cranky, punch-drunk fighter who has taken far too many blows to his noggin.
I’m sure Clint being offered the presidency of the NRA isn’t far behind!
The best part? How NO ONE is talking about Mitt Romney today. They’re all talking about how crazy old Clint Eastwood went on national tee-vee last night and shit in his diaper!
NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson put it succinctly when she described the cut-aways to Ann Romney during Eastwood’s skit as like watching “the mother of the bride listening to a drunken wedding toast.”
The Clint Eastwood memes are proliferating like Tribbles today. You’ve already seen the “Eastwooding” meme, here are a few more:
The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee mined comedy gold yesterday at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida by asking attendees about “individual liberty” and what it means to them and to Mitt Romney.
Now, one of the more interesting things about this story is that it broke on TPM. Actually, not quite. We first saw a tweet from David Shuster. Then we got confirmation of what happened from CNN and were the first to run the story. (This morning the RNCC essentially confirmed something rotten had happened.) But you may have noticed that one of the biggest news organizations in the world — CNN — has been remarkably tight-lipped about this.
So it’s worth noting why that probably is. There’s a normal and correct tendency for a news outfit not to want to make itself into the story. But this goes way beyond that and puts CNN in an exquisitely awkward position. CNN has been bending over backwards of late trying to position itself as the last holy beacon of objectivity and fairness in cable news, as Fox and MSNBC play to more clearly partisan audiences. Yet they’re under almost constant assault from conservatives for alleged (and basically mythical) liberal bias.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Convention is the GOP’s quadrennial ‘we love us a lotta non-white people’ fest. And given what I said above the last possible thing CNN wants is to rain on that parade or become the focus of a huge messaging nightmare if attendees were harassing an African-American member of their team. Certainly, the Convention organizers want to avoid discussion as much as possible too.
As a side note, one can only imagine how Fox News would be going to town over this had something somehow analogous happened to one of their staffers at a Democratic convention.
Journalists don’t tend to like non-transparency from other news organizations. And CNN’s relative silence (they did finally put out a basic report this morning) will, I suspect, generate a backlash from viewers outraged by the incident.
If this incident isn’t the breaking point for CNN, when will that breaking point EVER occur?
Aren’t any of them—besides Soledad O’Brien, who is clearly a fan of the series—watching The Newsroom?
There’s much to ponder in Washington Post opinion writer Harold Meyerson’s piece in yesterday’s paper, “In modern GOP, the old South returns,” but the take-away for me was his brittle characterization of the Republican philosophy as “We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back.”
The Republican ticket may hail from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan head the most Southernized major U.S. political party since Jefferson Davis’s day. In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.
No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180. Founded as the party of the anti-slavery North and committed to deep governmental involvement in spurring the economy (land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railway), today’s GOP is the negation of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. It is almost entirely white — 92 percent, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats.
The beliefs of the white South dominate Republican thinking. As the white share of the U.S. population shrinks and the Latino share rises, Republicans have passed draconian anti-immigrant laws and opposed legislation enabling immigrants brought here as children to gain legal status. They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988. Consider the Romney campaign’s ads falsely attacking President Obama for gutting welfare reform. “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job,” proclaims one such commercial. “They just send you a welfare check.” Obama’s plan, as several media fact-checking monitors have noted, does nothing of the sort. The spot clearly seeks to resurrect the kind of resentment of African Americans that the GOP exploited back in the days when welfare was a major program. The Romney campaign has evidently concluded, since virtually its entire pool of potential voters is white, that it must rouse the sometime voters among them with such expedients — which explains why it is running more of these ads than any others.
To that Meyerson is eager to add, there is a strong tradition of straight-up Southern-fried idiocy (which has nothing to do with racism) that the GOP establishment cynically embraces, religion and her superstitious handmaiden, scary, “burn the witch”-style anti-intellectualism:
In the anti-government column, the Ryan budget, which House Republicans enthusiastically adopted, would cut taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and halve the share of spending on every domestic, non-entitlement program. It would decimate education, transportation and funding for college students and scientific research. It would bring the nation down to the developmental level of the anti-tax, anti-public-investment Southern states of yore.
The ghosts of Dixie — of the Scopes Trial and the underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming? Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans — adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it.
If Todd Akin’s asinine comment about rape moved people as high up on the GOP totem poll as Karl Rove and Mitt Romney to call on him to step down from the Republican ticket in the Missouri Senate race, then why aren’t the GOP bigwigs (and the media and frankly every single woman in the entire US of A) calling for Paul Ryan’s head over his EQUALLY offensive, head-shaking, gob-smackingly stupid comment that RAPE is but a “method of conception”???
There could be no greater testament to the utter abdication of responsibility by what passes for a “news” media in America in 2012 than that, despite the grotesquerie of this cavalierly callous comment, chances are better than good that this is the first you’re hearing of it.
Here, watch it—and try to figure out why this has gotten NO MAINSTREAM MEDIA play (not even here at the Huffington Post) despite it being, to my mind, a far more offensive remark than Todd Akin’s imbecilic blurt of last weekend. What, are we tired of stupid remarks about rape now, so Ryan gets a free pass?
Given the demands for Akin’s resignation from a mere Senate race when his musings on “legitimate rape” were publicized, what do you imagine the reaction would be if people were as familiar with VP wannabe Ryan’s stunning statement? Might there be a cacophony of outrage? Might there be calls for his resignation from the ticket? Might there be a focus on how fundamentally oblivious these people who would make our laws are to not just women’s but humans’ rights and dignity? Sure, there might, but then of course people would have to have heard about it.
According to the man who would be the proverbial heartbeat away from the White House, and who in any event would—given Romney’s utter hollowness—have an inordinate influence on the judicial appointments that will determine how much freedom our children get to live under, RAPE = “METHOD OF CONCEPTION.” And yet, unless you’re a frequenter of one of a dozen or so lefty blogs—or my friend on Facebook—you probably knew nothing about it.
I truly despair for the country my 14-year-old daughter is inheriting. That a remark this intensely revealing of the danger posed by this ticket can go basically unreported is as nauseating to me as the quote itself.
Three wonderfully cutting satires of GOP morality appeared in the pages of Tikkun, America magazine and plenty of other places.
This “parable” of The Rich and Therefore Blessed Young Man was my favorite:
1. As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him and knelt before him, and asked, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 2. And Jesus said to him, “What have you done so far?” 3. And he said to Him, “Well I was born into a wealthy family, got into a good school in Galilee because my parents donated a few thousand talents for a building with a nice reed roof, and now I have a high-paying job in the Roman treasury managing risk.”
4. Looking at him, Jesus felt an admiration for him, and said to him, “Blessed are you! For you are not far from being independently wealthy.” And the man was happy. Then Jesus said, “But there is one thing you lack: A bigger house in a gated community in Tiberias. Buy that and you will have a treasure indeed. And make sure you get a stone countertop for the kitchen. Those are really nice.”
The disciples were amazed. 5. Peter asked him, “Lord, shouldn’t he sell all his possessions and give it to the poor?” Jesus grew angry. “Get behind me, Satan! He has earned it!” Peter protested: “Lord,” he said, “Did this man not have an unjust advantage? What about those who are not born into wealthy families, or who do not have the benefit of a good education, or who, despite all their toil, live in the poorer areas of Galilee, like Nazareth, your own home town?”
6. “Well,” said Jesus, “first of all, that’s why I left Nazareth. There were too many poor people always asking me for charity. They were as numerous as the stars in the sky, and they annoyed me. Second, once people start spending again, like this rich young man, the Galilean economy will inevitably rebound, and eventually some of it will trickle down to the poor. Blessed are the patient! But giving the money away, especially if he can’t write it off, is a big fat waste.”
The disciples’ amazement knew no bounds. “But Lord,” they said, “what about the passages in both the Law and the Prophets that tell us to care for widows and orphans, for the poor, for the sick, for the refugee? What about the many passages in the Scriptures about justice?” 7. “Those are just metaphors,” said Jesus. “Don’t take everything so literally.”
Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama’s fiscal approach and his money managers’ embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren’t made until years after he left the company.
Bain isn’t a company so much as an intricate suite of steadily proliferating inter-related holding companies and limited partnerships, some based in Delaware and others in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, designed to collectively house roughly $66 billion in wealth in its many crevices and chambers. When Romney left in 1999, he and his wife retained significant investments in many of those Bain vehicles—he claims they are “passive investments” and that they are managed in a blind trust (though the trustee isn’t blind enough to meet federal standards of independence). But aside from disparate snippets of information contained in his federal and Massachusetts financial disclosure forms, his 2010 tax returns, and SEC filings, the nature of those investments has been obfuscated by design.
When he disclosed his finances to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in 2007, Romney took care to publish the underlying holdings of many funds he invested with—after disclosing his $1 million-plus stake in “GS 2002 Exchange Place Fund LP,” for instance, he listed six pages of individual equities the fund held, from Panera Bread Co. to Tribune Co. But when it came to the Bain investments, he simply listed the value of his investments in odd-sounding entities like “Sankaty High Yield Partners II LP” with no indication of what was inside. In an accompanying note, he claimed that he had tried and failed to get the information: “The filer has requested information about the underlying holdings of these funds and values and income amounts for these underlying holdings. However, the fund managers have informed the filer in writing that this information is confidential and proprietary, and has declined to provide such information.”
That information—for Sankaty and 20 other funds—is now available here, in the form of 48 documents totaling more than 950 pages. They consist predominantly of confidential internal audited financial statements from 2008, 2009, and 2010, as well as investor letters from the same period, for Bain entities that Romney has previously disclosed owning an interest it. Owing to the timeframe—during and after the catastrophic economic meltdown of 2008—some of the investments show substantial losses. One limited partnership had even entered into liquidation as of October 2008 after failing to meet certain payments owed to partners. Others show astronomical gains.
The documents are exceedingly complicated. We don’t pretend to be qualified to decode them in full, which is why we are posting them here for readers to help evaluate—please leave your thoughts in the discussion below. We asked an attorney who specializes in complex offshore corporate transactions, including ones involving Cayman Island entities, to review them and help us understand them. (We also asked the Romney campaign. It hasn’t responded yet.)
After THIS, how the hell is Mitt Romney going to be able to continue stonewalling on his MIA tax returns? Maybe he should just release them right now to, uh, I dunno, change the topic from how Paul Ryan wants old people to starve and die and for women who have been raped to give birth to the rapist’s baby ‘cos that’s what Jesus told him to do?
The idea that these documents are, currently, as I type this, being analyzed by crowd-sourcing is either a fortunate or very unfortunate fact of political life in 2012!
Depends on who you are, I guess. Mitt Romney must be going fucking insane right about now.
The “Old Fart Rants” videos are my new favorite thing on YouTube. Old Fart is the best! A man after my own heart and a fellow resident of Hollywood, CA.
Old Fart is my new homie. How could I resist a line like:
“To call this guy [Todd Akin] a stupid fucking piece of shit is an insult to shit.”
Sounds (exactly) like something I would say!
“Why worry about the Taliban with Republicans right in our own backyard? The once proud Republican Party has become a complete clown show - all that’s missing is the seltzer bottles! No wonder they’re trying to rig the 2012 elections - they wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell otherwise! And anybody who can’t see it should be put into a mental institution. If anybody’s vote should be suppressed, it should be anybody stupid enough to vote for a Republican!”
Judge Tom Head, a Texas Republican who chairs Lubbock County’s Commissioners Court told a local talkshow on the Fox 34 station that the county needs to increase the property tax rate by 1.7 cents in coming fiscal year so that the sheriff’s department is adequately prepared to fend off the U.N. troops who will be sent to Lubbock County if President Barack Obama is re-elected and “the people” revolt. Yes that’s what he said.
A judge! An important man who makes important decisions about other people’s lives…Via Fox 34:
Head said he and the county must be prepared for many contingencies, one that he particularly fears, is if President Obama is reelected.
“He’s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the UN, and what is going to happen when that happens?” Head asked.
“I’m thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.
“Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ‘em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’.
Ooooohhh, big man! I love how the Fox newscaster on the Lubbock station looks like he’s about to bust about laughing at Head’s “heroic” bravado. What a fucking idiot, oy vey!
Do you know how people as dumb as Judge Tom Pinhead here get into elected office?
First they decide to run.
Second, more people vote for them than voted for their opponent.
Sometimes more stupid people than smart people vote in certain parts of the country and that would explain why Tom Head is a judge.
Although Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Congressional Republicans as a whole are trying to take the offense on Medicare by painting Obamacare as siphoning off funds from Medicare that will materially harm seniors—it worked like a charm in the 2010 midterm elections—an article that appeared this morning on Talking Points Memo about Romney and Ryan’s actual intentions re: Medicare is getting a lot of attention.
As has been noted repeatedly, that strategy requires Romney and Ryan to disavow Medicare reforms the GOP recently endorsed overwhelmingly as a part of the party’s budget, which Ryan authored.
All along Romney has been claiming that he and Paul Ryan won’t change Medicare for existing beneficiaries — only for the people who will get old in the “future.”
[Like nearly all of us, yeah?]
Now Romney’s own advisers and campaign surrogates are saying that this ain’t so.
As outlined in a memo the campaign released Saturday, Romney plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, and thus to spend over $700 billion more on the program in the coming decade than the government would spend if the health care law stands.
That commitment would leave Medicare poised for insolvency in 2016, years before he proposes to phase in the voucher system. Which means Romney would have two options: find new Medicare cuts or taxes to extend the life of the program, or preside over its demise.
On Fox News Sunday, Romney adviser Ed Gillespie tried to address the conundrum. “There are other reforms as well. As you know Governor Romney supports increasing over time bringing the Medicare eligibility age in line with the Social Security retirement age.”
But raising the Medicare eligibility age is a benefit cut, and implementing the increase before 2016 would violate Romney’s pledge to leave the program unchanged for people between ages 55 and 65.
Avik Roy, an outside health care adviser to the Romney campaign, admits that committing to billions of dollars in higher Medicare spending in the near-term will make it difficult for Romney to achieve its separate goal of reducing overall federal spending to modern lows. But he notes that Romney could make up the difference elsewhere in the budget or, by “mak[ing] other changes to the Medicare program, such as increased means-testing, that don’t alter the program’s basic structure.”
Further means-testing of Medicare would amount to a benefit cut to current seniors.
These admissions rest on top of the fact that by repealing the Affordable Care Act, Romney would wipe out new Medicare benefits included in the law. Repeal would result in higher payments to doctors and hospitals, and the restoration of overpayments to insurers participating in Medicare advantage. But for beneficiaries, it would re-open the Medicare prescription drug donut hole and eliminate coverage for preventive services and annual checkups that the ACA created.
Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan would cost senior citizens an additional $6400 or more a year out of pocket! Did you hear that Republican retirees? Considering that Paul Ryan’s “voucher” amounts to “Here’s a coupon for your old age, go fuck yourself oldster and please hurry up and die” HOW IN THE WORLD—at a time in history where far fewer than half of the American population has anywhere NEAR the amount of savings they’ll need to retire on—-can the Republicans think running on a platform that essentially says to senior citizens: “Let them eat Advil!” is anything but a very, very bad idea?!?
A “wheelchair army” would come to Washington, DC and kill them all if Paul Ryan’s plan were put into place. Every damned one of them. You have to shake your head in amazement at people who are anywhere near retirement age who would vote Republican. It’s beyond idiocy.
I had a friend who died when he was 94 years old. How in the hell would, say, even a spry 84-year-old, just come up with another $6k a year? How the fuck would you do it at that age? Get a job as a greeter at Home Depot? Flip some burgers at McDonald’s? Slot machines? The fucking lottery? Pulling it out of your ass? INVESTING IN WALL STREET???
It’s preposterous… and it’s pretty much what the Republicans have in store for you. For YOUR old age! Nope, it’s not an abstraction, dumbshit Fox News viewers and “low information voters,” (LIV) it’s your “golden years” that Mitt is talkin’ ‘bout!
The Democrats, if they play their cards right politically (which they never, ever do, but might it happen by accident?) could inflict some major damage to the Republicans this election if they’d run a few commercials with a wheezing 90-year-old dealing with bill collectors, having to choose between food and his prescriptions and being told “We’re sorry sir, your coverage won’t pay for dialysis anymore” by a kindly-faced nurse who smiles as she shuts the door in his face.
The same actor in all of them. Maybe it’s a couple. Yes! It’s a couple, even better.
An elderly man staring straight ahead has tears running down his face. CAMERA PULLS OUT, REVEALING his wife, asleep in a medical bed in their living room with IV drips and heart monitors beeping softly in the background. He is holding his sleeping wife’s hand.
OLD MAN:
Honey, can you hear me? I don’t
know how much longer we can
keep going on like this.
The camera sees collection notices in his hands. The top one, which the camera lingers on long enough to read indicates that their gas and electricity is about to be shut off
VOICE OVER:
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s plans to end
Medicare and replace it with their
“coupon” will cost you an extra $6400
a year out of pocket. $12,800 for a
married couple. Where will YOU come up
with an extra $12,000 a year in
your old age?
The man, sobbing, lays his head on sleeping wife’s body.
OLD MAN
Honey, I don’t know what to do,
I don’t know what to do, baby.
The lights in their apartment sputter and go off.
The heart monitor stops beeping.
VOICE OVER
This could be your old age. Mitt
Romney is not the solution.
Mitt Romney is the problem.
