Sunday, September 27, 2015
Republicans Reeling After ObamaCare Enrollment Surges To 17.6 Million
President Obama’s signature health care law is
surging past 2015 expectations as 17.6 million Americans have signed up
under Obamacare.
HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced the new numbers during a speech at Howard University today:
According to a study we are releasing today, as
the ACA’s coverage provisions took effect, an estimated 17.6 million
Americans have gained coverage. And this progress has been even bigger
for people of color: The uninsured rate among African-American adults
has declined by more than 10 percentage points, compared to about 7.7
for the total population.”
….
The ACA is about more than the Marketplace.
People are beginning to understand that the ACA is improving their care
no matter where they buy their insurance. With new protections and
required benefits, like preventive services at no extra cost, it’s
improved the quality of coverage for all Americans.
The promises made by Republican
pretender candidates to repeal and replace Obamacare are looking like
a political suicide mission as ACA enrollment continues to grow. By
Election Day 2016, it is possible that the Republican nominee will be
running on a platform of taking health care away from 20 million
Americans.
President Obama’s health care law has not only been a
political victory, but the President has changed health care delivery
in a historic way. Thanks to the election of Barack Obama to the White
House tens of millions of people have access to healthcare that they
didn’t have before.
Hundreds of millions of Americans are benefiting
from the protections offered to consumers under the ACA. Obamacare has
been a raging success, and Republicans are reeling as they to figure how
to reconcile their repeal and replace rhetoric with the real life
outcome of taking access to health care away from 17.6 million people.
Republicans have been captured in their own
Obamacare trap, and the biggest winners aren’t Democrats, but the 17.6
million people who now have access to affordable health care.
People From These 5 States Will Soon Need Passports to Fly Within the U.S.
No reason was given for why these states and regions were singled out.
Thanks to provisions in the little-known Real ID Act – passed in 2005 – five states will soon require a passport to fly even within the continental United States.
The
Department of Homeland Security has named New York, Louisiana,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, American Samoa, and New Hampshire as locations
where the residents will be required to use their passports to fly on
commercial airplanes. Although there is no reason given for why these
states and regions were singled out, it could possibly be because
driver's licenses – the traditional form of identification used at
airports – have to be compatible with Real ID requirements, and it's
possible that the licenses in these states are not.
As an alternative, the Transportation Security Agency will accept
Enhanced Driver's Licenses, which are used in some border states to
allow travel to Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, but few Americans
have them.
Mathematician suspicious of election fraud hires lawyer to force Kansas to hand over voting records
Jefferson on progressive taxation
~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, October 28, 1785
[Apparently Carson said progressive taxation is socialist. He now joins the ranks of those who should be prohibited from throwing the word “socialism” around until they look up an actual definition.]
With One Tweet, Hillary Clinton CRUSHES Biotech Stocks After Hedge Funder Raises Drug Price 5,500%
Twitter is a powerful tool, as we learned from 2016 Democratic
presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton last Tuesday. Echoing Bernie Sanders’
call from that...
The Cabal Of Stupid Just Can’t Help Itself
by John DeProspo
Fast forward to September 2015, it does not appear the Republican cabal has been able to shake off its simpleton past. Not only is a modern-day P.T. Barnum leading the field of 2016 Republican pretender candidates, but the other two leading prospects, Carson and Fiorina, are political neophytes with the same amount of governing experience as Trump: zero. Could there be a more unmistakable repudiation of the cabal’s establishment candidates as this? Why can’t the cabal learn its lesson?
At that 2013 meeting, which doesn’t seen so long ago, Jindal rightly observed his party needed a complete recalibration. He suggested Republicans, “stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.” Jindal accused his cabal of “looking backwards” and having an obsession with “identity politics.”
A populist-sounding Jindal went on to warn his audience, “We must not be the party that simply protects the well-off so they can keep their toys. We have to be a party that shows all Americans how they can thrive.”
What ever happened to that guy? The 2015 version of the sage Rhodes scholar and Republican governor is nowhere to be found. The 2016 Republican pretender candidate is sounding just as stupid as the rest of the field of wedge-issue addicts.
I believe that Jindal, as do all Republican politicians, does not suffer from a short memory. The truth is that if any Republican pretender candidate wants to become the cabal’s pretender nominee in 2016, he or she must cater and pander to the cabal’s base of low-information, intolerant, religious fundamentalist voters.
If it seems Republicans are on the same suicide mission as before – blocking immigration reform, trying to curtail a woman’s right to choose, defending religious intolerance – you would be right. But it’s the bed they made long ago; they simply can’t help themselves.
While the old Republican playbook may still work well on the state level, as for national elections, you can quote the leading Republican pretender candidate, “fuggedaboutit!”
Wingnut Breaks Protocol To Silence Latina Colleague Speaking Against ‘English-Only’ Bill
by Emily Atkin
Daryl Metcalfe, the Republican chairman of the House State Government Committee, had convened a hearing on the “English-only” bill, which he co-sponsors. Under that bill, all state and local government records would have to be in English, something Metcalfe says would save money and “help immigrants to assimilate.”
Rep. Leslie Acosta — who is herself an immigrant and the state’s only Latina legislator — disagrees with Metcalfe’s justification for the bill. However, while she attempted to lay out her argument before asking a question at Monday’s hearing, Metcalfe interrupted her, and turned her microphone off.
French lunatic fringe wingnut leader to face trial for inciting racial hatred
Now if only we would do this here in the U.S.
Sputum from a diseased deranged mind
The Coulter Edition:
Coulter: Deport Immigrants Who Vote Democratic, Keep The Wingnuts
In a hate filled diatribe Coulter repeated
her idiotic and insane claim that Democratic candidates are “winning elections they never
could have won before” because they used the immigration system to
“bring in ringers” ... MORE
Coulter: US Must Reject Christian Refugees Fleeing ISIL
At
a hate fest in St. Louis earlier this month, Ann Coulter stuck with her
standard insane shrieking about how the legal immigration system was set
up by
Democrats to destroy the Republican cabal and, by extension, America,
while praising Trump for bringing anti-immigrant rhetoric into the
forefront ... MORE
Rubio Says You Can Use Parts From Dead Babies, But Only When Dog Kills ‘Em
Hitler Art Collector Held Rubio Fundraiser
An eccentric, wingnut multi-millionaire with an art collection
that includes work by Adolph Hitler hosted a fundraiser for Rubio ...
Stephen Colbert Demolishes Cruz’s Homophobia, Gives Him A History Lesson
Stephen Colbert took the opportunity on last Monday night’s Late Show to
confront his guest, Republican pretender candidate Cruz, about
his anti-gay...
Trump Declares Total War On Fox News, “Fair and Balanced My Ass”
The on again/off again Trump and Fox News
feud is back on in a big way after the Republican frontrunner went a
Twitter tirade against Fox and O’Reilly.
Trump is creating a major headache for Fox News by
doing what many believed was impossible. He is turning Fox News’s own
viewers against the network. Trump is making viewers question the wingnut cred of Fox.
Unlike other Republican candidates, Trump
doesn’t need the endorsement of Fox News or the free media that their
coverage can provide. Trump is his own media machine, so he doesn’t owe
Fox News anything.
On NBC’s Today, Fox News’s O’Reilly dismissed Trump as theater,
“I’ve known Trump a long time, he wants people to like him. When people
criticize him, he takes it personally. And this machine, this tweeting
thing. The worst thing you can give Trump is this tweeting thing.
I just think this is just an extension of his reality show, The
Apprentice. This is just theater right now.”
The lunatic fringe is so fractured that the currently
Republican frontrunner is in a state of war with the cabal’s in-house
cable television network. The longer Trump is allowed to rampage the
more damage his does to Republican chances of victory in 2016. So, Keep It Up, Trump!
Crazy Gaffney Defends Carson's Islamophobia
Sparring with Alan Colmes, Gaffney reveals that he is just another Islamophobic Birther.
Carson Shatters The Religio-Wingnut ‘Christian’ Effort To Turn America Into A Theocracy In 30 Seconds
As Carson spoke to Hannity last Monday night, you could see the
hopes and dreams of religio-wingnut “christians” across the country
shatter into a million tiny pieces.
Wingnut Cabal Seeks Help Rewriting the Bible Because It's Not Wingnut Enough
The King James bible and more recent
translations are veritable primers of progressive agitprop, according to
the founder of "conservapedia".
by Richard Schiffman
Liberal bias in the media pales in comparison to what you’ll find in
your standard-issue bibles, according to conservapedia.com, a kind of
Wikipedia for the religious right. The King James bible, not to mention
more recent translations like the New International Version (NIV), are
veritable primers of progressive agitprop, complains Andy Schlafly, the
founder of conservapedia.com. (His mother, Phyllis, is an activist best
known for her opposition to feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment.)But not to worry. Andy Schlafly’s coven is on the case, and they have invited you to pitch in. Well, maybe not you, exactly, but the "best of the public,” whose assistance is solicited in proposing new wording for left-leaning bible verses.
Don’t know Aramaic, Hebrew or ancient Greek? Not a problem. What they are looking for is not exactly egghead scholarship, but a knack for using words they've read in the Wall Street Journal. They have a list of promising candidates on their website—words like capitalism, work ethic, death penalty, anticompetitive, elitism, productivity, privatize, pro-life—all of which are conspicuously missing from those socialist-inspired bibles we’ve been reading lately.
In the several years since their translation project was inaugurated, all of the new testament and several books of the Old have been thoroughly revised. But lots still remains to be done. If you've got a soft spot for Leviticus, the Book of Amos, Lamentations or Numbers, they are all still available for rewrite, so get cracking!
To give a sense of how to go about your own re-translation, here are some examples of changes the editors have already made.
Take that story where the mob surrounds a woman accused of adultery and gets ready to stone her, but Jesus intervenes and says, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" (John 7:53-8:11). It might have been a later addition that wasn’t in the original gospels, according to some deluded-thinking, or rather wingnut-leaning scholars. So the editors have excised this bleeding-heart favorite from the good book, and they've also removed jesus’ words on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
“The simple fact is that some of the persecutors of jesus did know what they were doing,” Schlafly points out, proving that, “jesus might never had said it at all.”
Another thing jesus might never have said at all is, “Blessed are the meek.” Change that one to, “Blessed are the dog-fearing,” the translation’s editors advise, which is far less touchy-feely than the King James version.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
The Daiily Drift
Welcome to the Saturday Edition of The Truth Be Told.
Our latest comment:
Great, keep it up.
~ Holly Miller
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~ Holly Miller
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Republicans - No apples for you... !
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8 Reasons Reagan Was the One of the Worst Presidents Ever
When I worked for Rock the Vote during the 2008 election, I covered
the election from the youth perspective, for the youth perspective. I
attended both...Boehner's Gone
***
Get ready for the extreme lunacy of the lunatic fringe that Boehner held in check even with his limitless incompetence to fire up - lucky for us such bursts are quickly extinguished, but it will be painful for a spell.Bernie Sanders Eviscerates Paul In Debate Over Senior Food Program
During a 2011 hearing on America’s senior hunger crisis, Senators
Bernie Sanders and Al Franken threw their full support behind the Older
Americans...CBO Confirms Obama’s Claim That Maintaining Sequester Destroys Jobs and Growth
The CBO determined that maintaining sequester-level cuts would lead
to 500,000 fewer jobs and 0.4% less growth in 2016, and 300,000 fewer
jobs and 0.2% less growth…
One of the important lessons Americans should have learned over the past six-and-a-half years is that when the voters elected an African American man as President, Republicans wholly embraced governing by crises. A person from outside of America may believe that Americans want government by crisis, but recent polling reveals that is not the case. It is particularly true when a Republican budget crisis is driven by religion to deny low-income women access to cancer screenings and reproductive health services. By now, most Americans are aware that Republicans could not possibly care less that even their supporters do not want a manufactured crisis to threaten a government shutdown, or that their resolve to maintain harsh austerity in their precious sequester will devastate hundreds-of-thousands of Americans’ jobs and thwart economic growth and continued recovery.
President Obama has pleaded, cajoled, and attempted
to shame Republicans into sitting down and negotiating spending
legislation for the next fiscal year before the October 1st deadline,
but that would put a damper on the ‘govern by crisis’ plans favored by
Republicans. What is surprising in a way is that there are Republicans
who agree with President Obama that the time for negotiating a
bipartisan budget that corrects the Republican cabal sequestration disaster is at
hand, but they are beholden to McConnell
and his bosses Cruz and Lee whose only religious bona
fides are on the line. While Republicans in the House and Senate are
driving the shutdown crisis and rejecting any proposal to negotiate a
way out of the sequester, the Congressional Budget Office released a
damning report about the economic tragedy of keeping sequestration cuts
in place.
It was never reported by mainstream media, but a couple of weeks ago the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) formally announced,
and warned Republicans that their promised failure to provide relief
from automatically triggered cuts to critical national priorities would
lead to 800,000 fewer jobs and 0.6% less economic growth; the CBO
parroted President Obama, most Democrats, and a few semi-sane
Republicans and recommended a bipartisan budget agreement to provide
responsible relief from sequestration.
Specifically, the CBO determined that maintaining
sequester-level cuts would lead to 500,000 fewer jobs and 0.4% less
growth in 2016, and 300,000 fewer jobs and 0.2% less growth in 2017. For
Koch Republicans, the idea of killing 800,000 Americans’ jobs and
retarding America’s world-leading economic growth while an African
American man is in the White House is just business as usual and a way
to slow down the President’s economic success.
One of the biggest obstacles to getting a budget
deal finished by the October 1st deadline besides the religious right’s
demand that poor women be denied reproductive health services and cancer
screenings through Planned Parenthood is Republican leaders demanding
sequestration level cuts stay in place while military spending is
increased. It is true the religious defunding crusade is a great help
for Republicans intent on governing from crisis to crisis with shutting
down the government as their primary bargaining chip, but the Republican cabal
leadership’s demand to keep sequester level domestic cuts in place is
why there have been no negotiations to date.
In fact, the theocracy issue aside, the biggest
obstacle, and why there have been no negotiations, is that Democrats
insist that any increases in defense spending be matched dollar for
dollar with increases in non-defense domestic programs. Republicans
naturally want much, much, much more spending on the military paid for
with many, many more cuts to domestic spending. Up to today, McConnell is never going to allow any negotiations to change sequester
spending levels because he still claims the Budget Control Act, the
Sequester, was the Republican cabal’s greatest accomplishment in the past five years
despite the damage it wrought on economic growth, job creation, and
general welfare of the American people.
There are very few in government who believe the
sequester was a beneficial crisis, and there are Republicans who agree
with the President that the time to fix the sequester is long past. In
fact, one Republican senator admitted
that not all Republicans are crisis-oriented or willing to deliberately
kill jobs and hamper economic growth. The anonymous Senate Republicans
said, “A few of us have suggested that we should start talks and get something going with Democrats, but Mitch has been very consistent.” It is likely that McConnell is not enamored with the prospect of angering the real Senate and House leader Cruz.
Last month, according to Dent (R-Penn), several senior members of the “House
Appropriations Committee, including the panel’s chairman, Rogers (R-KY) took a chance and actually told the
Republican leadership that the time to negotiate a way out of the
impasse is now, not in the shadow of the papal visit or a government
shutdown Oct. 1.”
Like President Obama and a few Republicans,
Democrats have also called for bipartisan budget negotiations to avoid a
crisis including Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. Reid laid out who
is standing in the way of both avoiding a government shutdown and
saving 800,000 jobs and economic growth. Reid parroted something that is a persistent issue when Republicans have a say in governing, “there is no good reason to wait until the last minute. We’ve known for months that government funding runs out on Oct. 1. Senate
Democrats have been calling on Republicans for months – both publicly
and privately – to sit down with us and work out a bipartisan path so
that we can avoid another shutdown. So far, we’ve been met with nothing
but silence. I say to my Republican colleagues, let’s get started –
there is no good reason to wait until the last minute.” Bernie Sanders actually went along with President Obama and said, “We
must end sequestration now ahead of the end of the fiscal year and
prevent a budget showdown that will help nobody. It makes no sense to
head towards a crisis when we have a clear path towards a better
solution.”
It is tragic, actually, that over the past
six-and-a-half years there have been clear paths toward better solutions
than heading to another senseless budget crisis, but Republicans will
not comport government without crisis unless they achieve their goals.
The current goal is maintaining sequestration-level cuts for all
domestic programs, increasing military spending, eliminating Planned
Parenthood funding, drastically slashing social safety nets and
eliminating anti-poverty programs; all demands that Democrats and
President Obama will not support. Many Americans have been led to
believe the emerging crisis is solely about Planned Parenthood funding,
and that may be somewhat true. However, at the rate Republicans love
killing Americans’ jobs and retarding economic growth that the CBO
warned is the result of not addressing sequester cuts, pundits should
consider the real impetus for the looming crisis is the Republican cabal’s rejection
of eliminating their precious sequester.
Unions Celebrate As The Koch Brothers Fail To Buy The White House For Walker
Unions are celebrating the rapid demise of union busting national disgrace, the idiot Walker.
Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) said in a statement:
In the end, even the Koch brothers couldn’t save Walker and his negative, anti-worker message. America heard what
he had to say, and decided that a man who could compare decent,
hard-working, patriotic Americans to terrorists was unfit for the
highest office in the land, or any other office for that matter.
Americans aren’t fooled.They understand that a
campaign against unionized employees is a campaign against working
families to lower the wages, benefits, and working conditions of all
workers.
The early demise of the Wisconsin idiot’s
misbegotten campaign should serve as a warning to all other candidates
for office: You can’t win an election by attacking working people you’re
asking to vote for you.
Walker’s loss is America’s gain.
President Richard Trumpka of the AFL-CIO summed up
the feelings of many union members, “Walker is still a disgrace,
just no longer national.”
Walker’s failure to launch as a pretender
candidate was good news for union members and all workers on two fronts.
First, Walker was the chosen candidate of the Koch brothers, who
believed that Walker would be the Republican candidate who was most
likely to carry out their agenda. Secondly, Walker tried to save his
struggling campaign by reviving his union busting agenda. However,
Walker’s support continued to drop in the polls.
Walker’s failure as a candidate represents the
failure of union busting as a national political issue. The Koch
brothers lost their top candidate, as the nation’s biggest union buster
completely flopped as a pretender candidate.
White House Releases Official Statement, Calls The Entire Republican Cabal Racist
Wow. The White House has just officially labeled the entire
Republican cabal racist. President Obama isn’t playing around his last
year in office. This is unprecedented. 
Republicans Try To Rig The 2016 Election By Blocking LEGAL Immigrant Citizenship and Voting
All of the chatter on the Republican campaign trail
is about illegal immigration, but Republicans are pushing back on an
effort by President Obama to get legal immigrants citizenship and
registered to vote. There is an effort mounting on the right to stop
legal immigrants from becoming citizens and voting.
According to Politico:
It turns out that many Republicans consider
legal immigration a more immediate and existential threat to the republican cabal
than illegal immigration. While the total number of illegal immigrants
is estimated at 11 million, there are more than 13 million permanent
legal residents — and that number could grow at a clip of a million a
year.
….
Wingnuts have increasingly been raising the
alarm about legal immigration as a more imminent threat to Republican
power than any possible pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11
million undocumented people living in the U.S.
Just last month, immigration
hard-liner Sessions (R-Ala.) called for reducing the number of
green cards issued each year, warning that the government is on track
to allow 10 million new permanent residents into the country over the
next 10 years. While his analysis focused on what he considered the
potential negative economic impacts, the political implications were
unsubtly telegraphed in the states cited to put the 10 million figure
into perspective: The new residents would be “larger than populations of
Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina combined.”
The Republican objection to immigration is about
keeping the electorate small, white, and wingnut. Republicans saw
what happened when new voters of color entered the political process in
2008 and 2012. Demographics are not working in their favor, so the
opposition to citizenship for immigrants is another way to keep people
from voting.
Instead of competing for the support of these
potential voters, conservatives are putting their efforts into excluding
them from the electoral process.
As a reminder, these are legal immigrants that
Republicans are trying to keep from becoming citizens and voting. This
group of immigrants followed the rules and did everything the correct
way, but conservatives are still trying to stop them from becoming
citizens and voting.
The Republican cabal can’t win a contest of ideas,
so they are going to try to rig the game. Legal immigrants should
respond to these tactics by completing the six-month long citizenship
process and immediately registering to vote.
The Candidate Cutoff For The Next Republican Cabal 'Debate' Should Be 5 Percent
It's time for the rnc to cut down the amount of clowns allowed to participate in the next debacle (ahem, excuse us, 'debate')..
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