For most of us....it's not a game

In the video Rand Paul talks about a winning strategy but what's he winning? The country is losing $300 million for every day the government is shut down.I saw Rand Paul give that GOP messageIn of the day on CNN. He said that the administration only had four people guarding the embassy in Benghazi but they had 5 park rangers keeping the vets from visiting the WWII memorial.  I heard that talking point being used several more times during the day by representatives and Fox News hosts.

I saw our own representative Blake Farenthold fall for Chis Hayes's  trap. Chris asked Rep. Farenhold if he wanted to defund Obamacare. Farenthold said that he wanted fairness and a delay of the individual mandate ,just like the president gave to small businesses. Chris Hayes said that the delay would cause Obamacare to fail and the GOP knew that.. Bam, that's when Mr. Farenthold forgot the talking points and admitted that he wanted to defund Obamacare. Back in August of this year,Rep. Blake Farenthold joined 79 fellow Republicans by signing a letter to John Boehner urging him to use defunding Obamacare as a strategy to pass the CR. The representative knew that he had been had and his facial expressions said it all. Rep. Blake Farenthold is not a bright fellow but the straight-line party Republicans will try to send him back to Washington year after year and then they wonder why our government is in a mess.

Fox News are doing their best to help the Republicans by referring to the shutdown as a slim down or a slowdown.  Right wing talk show hosts and Fox News hosts are downplaying the effects of the shutdown. Millionaires will never feel the effects of the shutdown.

Republicans are trying to deflect blame because the Senate won't pass their piecemeal approach. The only reason Republicans added funding NIH to their piecemeal legislation,was that there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about 30 children being denied cancer treatment. 

The GOP now wants now wants a lifeline to save face. Several Republican have said the president has to give the GOP something and they go on to list a laundry list of goodies but they don't want to give anything in return. Keeping government open is what congress is supposed to do. 

I heard that John Boehner might consider passing a clean bill to raise the debt limit to keep the country from defaulting but insist that the government remain shutdown until he gets a grand bargain.

What Did We Learn (if anything) Yesterday?

The Sunday talk shows have become a testing ground for new talking points. Republicans are now trying to switch the blame of a government shutdown on Senate Democrats and the president because they won’t negotiate the repeal of Obamacare. Senator Ted Cruz is trying to say Harry Reid will use every trick in the book to strip out the repeal of Obamacare portion of the bill. That’s not a trick, Mr. Cruz, that’s normal procedure. He said that Harry Reid should not pass a partisan bill. Hello, that’s what the House of Representatives did.

Here’s the deal, as long as the president of the United States is named Obama, the Affordable Health Care Act will stay intact.

The GOP has won the continuing resolution battle so far, because the sequester spending cuts are part of this bill. That’s something that the house Democrats wants to look at when the bill comes back to them.

Yesterday, Chris Wallace put up his partisan bullet points on how terrible Obamacare was, but he never mentioned that the law was doing quite well in states that have accepted the transition. Senator Claire McCaskill was ready when he mentioned that Walgreens was no longer covering their part-time employees. She explained that Walgreen's is issuing vouchers to their part-time employees, so they can purchase much cheaper health insurance. Chris Wallace tried to say that the vouchers might not be enough, but that is just an assumption. The president has always said that if you can come up with something better; than by all means do it. Chris Wallace then mentioned that the president promised that if you liked your current healthcare policy with your company, you would be able to keep it. The president did not envision the steps companies would take to deny health care benefits. I guess you could choose to blame the president if you like, but it’s a weak argument if you ask me.

 I advise reading J.R. Ortega, of the Victoria Advocate, column about the health care issue in today’s newspaper or you can read the on line version here.

I’m one who believes in polls but I never thought that we would use the results to try and repeal a law. Social Security and Medicare would not get 100% likeability in a poll. I’m surprised that we used the poll to decide whether we should bomb the Syria or not. It’s funny; the poll that states that 90% of Americans favor background checks continues to be ignored.

I don’t know why “Meet the Press” continues to invite Wayne La Pierre of the NRA to be their guest after another gun mass murder. All they have to do is replay what he said the last time and double down on it. Now he’s said that there weren’t enough good guys with guns. He was calling for those in a military to be armed on a base where civilians are the majority. When I was in the service, our rifles were locked up for a reason. We had the military police for security. Mr. La Pierre’s statements have become weirder and weirder. David Gregory asked the chief lobbyist for the gun manufacturers, why it is in reasonable to require a background check for gun sales between strangers. Mr. La Pierre said “ just down the road(Washington, DC) 13-year-old girls were being trafficked, illegal drug deals were being made, and now you want two hunters to be under the thumb of the government when they purchase a hunting rifle from each other.” We should stop fooling ourselves. Congress will not do anything except maybe make some small changes that are cleared beforehand with the NRA. The changes will have to come from communities, where the real power is. Only 35% of household own guns, so a community is not beholding to the NRA. When those communities get sick and tired of all the violence, steps will be taken as they were in New York.

The President Throws Down the Gauntlet

One of the best lines from President Obama’s speech is afternoon was when he said, “You just can’t be against something; you've got to be for something.” He told the Republicans stop having meaningless votes on repealing Obamacare and come up with a better plan. I took it to mean “put up or shut up.” The Affordable Care Act has never been popular in polls (34% approve, and 47% oppose)but as Cokie Roberts said this morning, the Kaiser Foundation has a much better poll which shows that people love different components of the Affordable Care Act, but they are still confused about certain aspects of the plan. Who can blame them with the smokescreens the GOP throws out. Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee want to tie repealing Obamacare to raising the debt ceiling and are willing to shut down the government over it. They might as well call for shutting down the government right now.

President Obama will continue to use his bully pulpit because he knows that his good plans will never see the light of day in Congress. The president has seen his approval dropped to a low of 45% because of the staggering economy. Congress has dropped to an all -time low of 12% and 57% of the voters would vote to replace everyone, and that doesn’t bode well for the GOP if they want to retake the Senate.

The president talked about investing in our future, and he emphasized it by saying, “if you think education is expensive. wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21^st century.” He knows Congress is a problem, so he said he will bend the ear of educators, business leaders and CEOs to get something done. The president said that the FCC is currently working to get high- speed Internet to  in 99% of our schools. That was one example of what a president has the power to do. The other is making the costs of making higher education affordable.

I liked that the president brought up the idea of a minimum wage increase and said he will reward the CEOs and business leaders who treat their employees’ right. He singled out Costco and the Container Store for the efforts in paying their employees a decent wage, providing health care and other benefits.

The president was honest by saying that even if we don’t implement all of his ideas, the economy will keep growing because of our resources, standing, and  our resilient people, but we will grow at a much slower pace. He said most of our bridges would be eligible for Medicare. Our buildings, airports and broadband services need upgrading and repair because we’re falling behind our competitors.

The Republicans will roll their eyes, some will write pessimistic, uninformative letters –to- our editor and others will continue to oppose anything that President Obama is for. Let them consume themselves with President Obama,phony scandals,$17 trillion debt ,empty rhetoric and keep supporting their bad legislators because our economy will continue to improve without any help from them, and the voters will take notice in 2014.

We Have a Taxing Problem

It was disturbing to hear that the IRS wasted $50 million three years on several hundred conferences. Yes, the $50 million was extravagant but why are we just now investigating the matter? Checks and balances should have been in place years ago. The IRS cannot be squeezing every nickel out of taxpayer’s liability and then take part in a spending frenzy. It’s like the 2- pack a day father scolding his teen-age son for smoking. That agency needs a $50 million cut in their budget request.

I was watching the circus Congress calls an investigative committee, grill the new IRS Commissioner who had to sit there and take partisan questions. In a court of law the legislators would have been warned after an opposing lawyer shouted “ inadmissible hearsay judge” and the judge would have replied “ sustained” and I’ve watched enough of Law and Order shows to know. The IRS Commissioner or anyone else who works for the IRS  cannot comment on a specific case under the privacy laws. They can give an opinion to a  hypothetical question. Politicians,members of the committee,the chairman of the committee,pundits and the news media are not bound by any ethics. They can hype up the questions and answers to suit any agenda they are pursuing;and they do.

The IRS scandals has lead some to call for tax reform and a flat tax ,as if that’s going to solve the current problems. The scandals are unrelated to anything that can be fixed with tax reform. The tax-exempt classification can be solved by deleting the word “primarily” from the regulation and go back to using “exclusively” for social welfare and not a dime for politics.

This morning the panel of “Morning Joe” called for bringing home some of $92 billion,18 of the Fortune 500 firms who are legally putting away their profits in tax shelters abroad. They suggested that we drop the corporate rates from the present 35% to 25% and tax the sheltered funds they have out there at 5%. How many times do we have to be hoodwinked by corporate America before we learn our lesson? We tried that a couple of times and companies used the savings to buy back their shares and actually laid off additional people to boost their bottom line;thanks suckers. Corporations pay an effective tax rate of 17%,so if we drop their corporate rate to 25%,their accountants will find ways to pay an effective rate of 10%. We need a flat tax for corporations not individuals. Corporations don’t take their firms overseas because the corporate rate is too high. They get countries to build roads,warehouses, and supply them with cheap labor and weak environmental  and workplace laws. 
 
We don’t have to be a part of the uninformed who try to sensualize everything, as if they have now found the smoking gun.For example,Bill O’Reilly told his viewers that the outgoing IRS Commissioner had visited the White House 157 times, so something was up.First,for the first time ever in our history, the Obama administration allowed the visitor logs to be posted for public viewing, as part of their transparency agenda. The 157 visits were known several years ago but that number just means that he was cleared for a visit by the Secret Service. Those visits could have well been across the street from the West Wing because they share the same logs. The IRS will part of the Obamacare transition, so it’s highly probable that the Commissioner had to be there for important meetings.  Still a skeptic?  Jon Stewart has the answer for you. The first visit would have the president telling the commissioner to kill those conservative applications;the second visits would have been to ask how he was doing. In reality, not one of the applications in question was  ever denied and an application is unnecessary to hold yourself out to be a 501 (c ) (4 ).

Yesterday,the Young College Republicans stated the obvious when they submitted the results of the difficulty of  the GOP efforts to recruit young members.They started by saying that the Republican Party is "closed-minded, racist, rigid, and old-fashioned."It’s probably going to take another election loss before they see the errors of their ways. Right now, the party is holding out hope that they will win the 2014 off-year elections, so they don’t have to change. That’s why they have become the party of NO. They are still waiting on reinforcements, but they can’t decide whether they will be led by Chris Christie or some combination of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or Rand Paul.. 

God must have a lot of patience because he's always getting involved in GOP politics....:-)

" Barely 36 hours after the caustic New Year’s Day vote, Boehner faced a coup attempt from a clutch of renegade conservatives. The cabal quickly fell apart when several Republicans, after a night of prayer, said God told them to spare the speaker. Still, Boehner came within a few votes of failing to secure his speakership on the initial vote, an outcome that would have forced a second ballot for the first time in nearly a century."

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/john-boehner-god_n_3381883.html