Month: September 2011
Texans are the Nation’s Most Underinsured
27.2%
Of Texas residents reported being uninsured in the first half of 2011, and continue to be the most likely in the United States to lack health coverage, according to Gallup. At the other end of the spectrum is Massachusetts, where 5.3% of adults are uninsured.
Hoffa: ‘Take Republicans Out – Of Office’
Did Hoffa advocate “second amendment solutions?”
Response on Facebook to someone repeating the FOX News inspired meme that James P. Hoffa called for violence against Republicans and that Democrats should condemn him for it. FOX is showing an edited clip of Hoffa’s speech introducing the president before a union-friendly crowd in Detroit on Labor Day in which Hoffa calls for “taking them out.” Left out, however, was that Hoffa was referring to taking Republicans in Congress out of office. Expect FOX’s distortions to accelerate ahead of Pres. Obama’s jobs speech.
Beginning to Wonder If Republicans Are Right About the Economy?
We’re taking the name of this post at Truth-Out.org, “Three Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law,” as encouragement to share. And since these graphs appeal to our love of accuracy, we will do just that.
For starters, we have the amount that federal spending has increased under Pres. Obama (a barely cost-of-living equivalent 7.2 percent) compared to how much it increased under the two off-the-books wars and one unfunded prescription drug mandate man, Pres. Bush (a whopping 88 percent). Truth-Out noted that the figures do not include recent budget cuts.
But wait, there’s more reality-based number crunching ahead.
Dept. of Irony: GOP Flip-Flop on the Individual Mandate in 2009 Could Cost Them the Presidency in 2012
In the video clip above from the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., in June 2008, Mitt Romney defends the individual mandate as a right-wing solution to universal health care:
In 2009, the GOP propaganda machine erased the mandate’s conservative roots from the national memory banks and redefined it in the public mind as a tool of jack-booted, Kenyan socialism.
ROMNEY: [So we in Massachusetts] said: No more free riders. It was like bringing “workfare” to welfare. We said: If you can afford insurance, then either have the insurance or get a health savings account. Pay your own way, but no more free ride.
And that was what the mandate did. It said, you have got to come with either the insurance or a health savings account or the like.
I think it’s the conservative approach, to make sure that people who can afford care are getting it at their expense, not at the expense of the taxpayers and government. That I consider to be a step towards socialism.
Republicans were not only for the individual mandate before they were against it, they invented it in the 1990s. Now, of course, Romney’s enacting the mandate statewide when he was governor of Massachusetts is a contributing factor to his fading prospects in the 2012 campaign.
Eisenhower Administration Believed in Abominable Snowman
Besides ginning up the old military-industrial complex in the Cold War, the Eisenhower administration in December 1959 issued regulations governing expeditions in Nepal that went in search of the abominable snowman or yeti. Judging by the regulations — issued by the State Department to the U.S embassy in Kathmandu — the government of Nepal was a little sensitive regarding the illusive beast.
The first regulation required a royalty payment of 5,000 rupees to the Nepalese government for the privilege of mounting an expedition to find the critter. The second regulation prohibited killing a yeti except in self-defense. And finally, news or reports that hinted at the actual existence of the yeti were to be turned over to nepal’s government and not given to reporters or news outlets.
Couple the issuance of the yeti regulations with the alleged crash of an alien spaceship at Roswell, N.M., a decade earlier and it helps put into perspective other long-held Republican beliefs. Tax breaks for the wealthy and trickle-down economics pale in comparison with crazy talk about little green men and terrifying snow monsters.
See the actual yeti regulations document after the jump.
