Why Do Republicans Hate American Children

Why Do Republicans Hate American Children

Since August 2011, 89,000 children in Pennsylvania have lost their Medicaid coverage, including many with life-threatening illnesses who were mistakenly deemed ineligible. The state currently hasn’t a clue whether many of these children have any healthcare coverage at all.

....Enter Republican Governor Tom Corbett and his anti-spending, anti-government secretary of public welfare, Gary Alexander. They decided to plow ahead with their new approach to eligibility verification: ten days to receive and process the overdue renewals, and an assumption of ineligibility if the applications weren’t reviewed during that time period.

Predictably, the offices couldn’t keep up with the new deluge of mail. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that a Republican administration—hostile to Medicaid—had identified a weakness in the system, exploited it, so that it could reduce spending while bolstering its claim that the system is broken.

Who are some of the victims wronged by the Corbett-Alexander approach to children’s health? A 5-year-old with leukemia; a 2-year-old with a congenital heart disorder; a severely disabled 12-year-old who requires home healthcare; 9-year-old twins, one with autism, the other with a hearing impairment; a 1-year-old with cerebral palsy.

Imagine, a parent of a toddler battling cancer, and suddenly a need to—as one advocate put it—“engage in a Kafkaesque process of getting your kid back on Medicaid.”

What is also deeply disturbing is this: normally when a child is no longer Medicaid-eligible in Pennsylvania parents are referred to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federally subsidized healthcare program for low-income kids. The state takes great pride in near universal coverage of children—it offered one of the first CHIP programs in the country in 1992. But as advocates watched Medicaid enrollment fall off a cliff—89,000 dropped between August 2011 and January 2012—CHIP enrollment remained flat.

Where the hell are the kids? advocates began to ask.

DPW’s initial explanation was that the 89,000 kids dropped included families that moved out of state or were no longer income-eligible. But, when pressed for an accounting, DPW’s own analysis revealed that the number of families falling within these categories is paltry.

Secretary Alexander also played games with the numbers. As recently as May 1, during an interview on Pennsylvania public radio, he said: “It wasn’t children that were removed, it was families. We call them cases—so that there are parents and children.”

But Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the health, education and wellbeing of children and youth throughout the state, says that simply isn’t true. It points to DPW’s own records, which show that the 89,000 figure represents children dropped from Medicaid.

As long as you are a mass of cells Republicans love you so much they would start throwing mothers, doctors and nurses in jail to protect. Though goodness help you once you are born. That creepy "love" that Republican had for that mass of cells turns into pure red hate.

Playing Fast and Furious With a Man's Reputation

Happy now, Darrell Issa? The effort you led to discredit Attorney General Eric Holder got you what you wanted from the beginning: a vote to hold in contempt the Attorney General of the United States. You told the New York Times, "This was not the outcome I had sought." There's a word for that.

Regardless, you've earned your coveted footnote: the Congressman who brought about the first such sanction of a sitting cabinet member in U.S. history. And not just any cabinet member, but the one responsible for effective, professional, nonpartisan law enforcement. Not even Alberto Gonzales or John Ashcroft, two of history's least distinguished incumbents of the AG's office, met the fate of Eric Holder.

....On the subject of saving lives, the loss of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was a tragedy no matter who was responsible or how it happened. But let's not forget the Bush administration's multiple uses of the same tactics used to "climb the ladder" of the hierarchy of Mexican drug cartels. Such tracing and tracking of firearms and other items of evidence (think drug supplies, marked bills, stolen property) is common in law enforcement. If managed lawfully and competently (much in question in this case), it's an essential public safety tool.

For a politician to suggest that the agent's life would have been spared had the federal government not allowed the putative murder weapon to migrate south of the border, is naïve or disingenuous. (Thanks in part to the pro-gun lobby, drug-dealing thugs on either side of the border have no trouble buying or stealing vast arsenals of high-powered weaponry.)

But seeking to make political hay of the death of Agent Terry is despicable. The same could be said of efforts to taint the reputation of the highest law enforcement official in the land.

Send an e-mail or fax to your Congressional Representative today requesting they start censure proceedings against Darrell Issa (R-CA) for using his committee chairmanship to pursue a political vendetta against Attorney General Holder.

In Their Political Witch Hunt of Attorney General Holder Republicans Show Contempt for America

In Their Political Witch Hunt of Attorney General Holder Republicans Show Contempt for America

Congress is on track to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt. Given how contemptuous most Americans are of Congress -- only 17 percent approve, an all-time low -- this week's mostly party line vote will be the political equivalent of the congressional pot calling the attorney general kettle, well, black.

Here's what's really going on.

The dispute between the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice, coming to an absurd boil, has an inverse relationship between ferocity and substance.

At first, Republicans demanded every document on the misguided Fast and Furious "gun walking" investigation. Nine months later, they abandoned that tactic and requested only correspondence about how the Justice Department first reacted to congressional oversight. The Department accommodated more and more of their requests. That is, the parties were seemingly on the verge of striking a deal.

Then it exploded. Why? Politics, of course.

As Republicans narrowed their requests for information from the Department, they moved farther away from their role of reforming policies that led to failed plan and closer to a more political question of whether the Department was massaging or manipulating facts.

Just read the committee transcripts. There was little discussion about how the Department should be protecting the border from gun and drug violence, how the law should be enforced or how prosecutions and agents ought to conduct themselves. If they did, they would be fulfilling their oversight role and improving national policy.

Instead, they raised the ante on what certain key officials at the Department of Justice and the White House may have said to each other about how to talk to Congress about what were already acknowledged as mistakes.

A legitimate and far-reaching inquiry into how best to protect the American people devolved into the kind of crass political theater that the American people despise.

There are four reasons this fight became so aggressive and acrimonious:

    First, Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa announced his intention to move to contempt at The National Rifle Association's annual convention, To the already locked down and secured audience, Issa declared that the Obama Justice Department views the tragic death of a border agent as an excuse for more gun laws.
    Second, returning the favor, the NRA announced that it intended to "score" the contempt vote in Issa's committee, signaling they would put their muscle - votes and money -- behind this attack on the the Department. The defenders of the Department's position on documents -- lawyers, constitutional scholars, a smattering of interest groups -- are a political cricket next to the NRA's gorilla.
    Third, every hour of every day that Attorney General Holder is preparing fastidiously for nine hearings on the Hill at which Fast and Furious is in play, he is not out in the country talking about protecting the United States and about achievements on behalf of the American people. This is the most devious and insidious misuse of oversight authority and the right wing -- from their own viewpoint -- are kicking ass in this respect.
    Fourth, this coordinated attack is really about the priorities of Attorney General Holder and President Obama. The conservatives on the Committee are furious that Holder has not rolled over as access to voting is restricted across the country, which has a devastating and disproportionate effect on minority voters. They are furious at his lawsuits against Arizona and other states with newly draconian anti-immigrant laws. They are furious that he sued Sheriff Arpaio, that his Civil Rights Division aggressively prosecutes hate crimes and policy brutality, that the Environmental and Natural Resources Division is alive again and that the Anti-Trust Division says 'no' to some business mergers and deals.

Simply put, the right wing has been at Holder's throat from the very beginning, which is odd, given that Holder is the most qualified person in decades to be attorney general, having been an attorney at DOJ, a judge, U.S. attorney, and deputy attorney general. No one has ever had more experience with and devotion to the Department of Justice than Eric Holder.

Unfortunately, because of a political mismatch, this battle's messaging is lopsided. Conservatives wrap themselves in the honor of a tragically slain border agent and the completely fabricated but nonetheless compelling stench of "cover-up," while the administration finds itself in the muck talking about documents and something called "the deliberative process privilege." It is easy to see why the politics are irresistible for the GOP.

We are likely, but not guaranteed, to see a contempt vote on the floor of the House of Representatives this week. The vote will greatly satisfy Rush Limbaugh and the membership of the NRA. It may cause the White House to make its institutional and political interests the priority and leave the attorney general to take a hit like this. It will cause countless progressives, and much of black and Latino America, to wonder why the first contempt citation to make it through the House will be directed at the first black attorney general. It will lead to more cynicism about the true nature of Congress and whose interests it serves.

A 17 percent favorability rating means never having to say you're sorry.

Imagine these events were taking place in a court of law instead of Congress and the court of public perception - Republicans would be found pants down with no evidence. As it is they can toss around all the ginned up conspiracy theories they like. The NRA says it is all about some secret desire to tighten gun control. Guess how many gun related laws have been presented by Democrats or suggested by President Obama? ZERO. Government is broken and it will remain that way as long as there are conservatives in Congress. Republicans are in Congress to make sure government is not by and for the people.


The NRA does gone bonkers - NRA Acts Like Finger Pointing Punks, Says Obama's Routine Executive Privilege Claim Proves Our Crazy Fast And Furious Conspiracy Theory.

What is Darrell Issa (R-CA) Hiding In His Fast and Furious Witch Hunt

Darrell Issa Shows Contemptible Disregard for the Constitution

He failed to build a credible case or a credible coalition for his initiative. After a day of increasingly ridiculous posturing, Issa secured the contempt citation he sought. But is came on a straight party-line vote that rendered the decision all but meaningless.

The chairman's heavy-handed style invoted the reproach that the contempt vote was "nothing more than a political witch hunt," as People for the American Way president Michael Keegan termed it.

“To be sure, Congress has a legitimate interest in investigating Operation Fast and Furious, but Chairman Issa and Republican majority on the Committee appear to be more interested in scoring political points than in getting to the bottom of what happened," argued Keegan, who added that, “The hoops the Committee is demanding the Attorney General jump through illustrate that these contempt hearings are as partisan as they are extreme. Over the course of this ‘investigation,’ the Committee has ordered the A.G. to produce documents whose confidentiality is protected by federal law, has refused to subpoena Bush Administration officials to testify about their knowledge of the operation during their time in office, has refused to allow public testimony from officials whose testimony counters Issa’s partisan narrative, and has repeatedly rejected the A.G.’s efforts to accommodate the committee, making compliance all but impossible."

Issa's actions undermined not just his own credibility but any sense that he and his allies might be acting in defense of -- or with any regard for -- the Constitution.

As TPro has already noted Issa has no case. he also seems to be following a political agenda rather than uncovering any new facts. Throughout his "investigation" he has refused to follow the trail back to a conservative Republican administration. fast and Furious does sound like it was a boneheaded idea, but it was an idea and action that started before Holder even took office.

New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims - “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon. Conservative Republicans lied and thousands died. If Issa is concerned about justice how about prosecuting Bush and former administration officials for treason.

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