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... as if there ever was even a slight chance that this piece of crap bill would pass in the adult chamber of our government. The nice thing is that 5 Republicans grew a spine and then voted " no " on the Ryan budget plan. The Democrats wised up and they all voted " No." The vote was 40 in favor, 57 opposed. Republican voting No: Scott Brown Susan Collins Lisa Murkowski Rand Paul Olympia Snowe
Be INFORMED
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Republicans Resort To Censorship..
… as they continue to get clobbered by their own constituents at town hall meetings where the Medicare coupon system created by Paul Ryan has been the major discussion.
After hearing from senior citizens and from the citizen journalist about what a lousy idea their Medicare plan is, the GOP has grown tired from hearing it, so they have resorted to another Republican trick. that would be Censorship. No more video or audio recordings of these events unless you happen to be a credentialed press person.
As DailyKos reports, Michigan has done even more to stop the spread of the meetings on the Internet.
In Michigan, they've taken it up a notch, courtesy of Tea Party control freaks who not only banned a group of senior citizens and reporters, but called security on them at an event with Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI).
Rep. Justin Amash held a townhall meeting sponsored by a Tea Party group on Saturday sponsored by a Tea Party group, but a group of senior citizens and two reporters — including this one — were denied entry to the event.The traditional purpose of a townhall meeting is for an elected official to meet with his constituents in public, giving the people a chance to ask questions and engage in dialogue with their representatives. But neither the organizers nor Amash apparently wanted to hear from or speak to a group of concerned senior citizens — even at a time when the fate of Medicare is being debated in Congress.
About eight senior citizens arrived at the Prince Conference Center on the Calvin College campus for a chance to question Amash concerning his voting record in regards to eliminating Medicare.
Once barred from attending the event, the seniors stood out in the parking lot where they were taking questions from this reporter and Tanya Somanader of Think Progress, the two members of the media who were denied access. Eventually, six security guards arrived on the scene and said that both the seniors and the reporters had to leave.
ThinkProgress's Tanya Somanader has more:
According to security, the people who called them said the seniors had thrown things at the Tea Party organizers....According to multiple members inside, no objects were ever thrown. When asked, the conference center staff said they did not call security — indicating that the Tea Party asked security to move the constituents away from the building....
Attendees at the event, however, told ThinkProgress they were surprised reporters were not allowed in. One attendee went back inside to inform Amash that reporters were waiting in the lobby. However, according to Tea Party member Paul Meyer, the organization appointed him to keep reporters out, even after the event was over as we were considered a “security issue.”
After further questioning, security was summoned for a second time. According to the guards, the call again came from Tea Party organizers.
When leaving the event, one attendee stopped to tell ThinkProgress how Amash was a politician of principle. In singing his praises, she told ThinkProgress that “he is a big proponent of transparency.”
With transparency like this, who needs a back room to deal in?
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
The Budget: Republican Logic
As is par for the course, the Republican Party American Taliban have no logic, especially when it comes to ANY kind of budget. So their plan now is to force the Democrats in to choosing between the GOP budget or the one from the Obama administration. That would be the budget proposal idea’s that the Dems haven’t come up with in the last 2 years. Read more.
by kos for Daily Kos Tue May 24, 2011
Mitch is very confused. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
The GOP's new favorite talking point:
Republicans in both chambers are accusing Democrats of playing politics with the House budget vote, and they have tried to counterattack by pointing out that Democrats haven’t bothered in the past two years to come up with their own budget proposal.
But...
[Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell will counter Reid’s floor tactics by forcing Senate Democrats — who have to defend 23 seats in 2012 versus 10 for Republicans — to vote on the budget plan offered by President Barack Obama.
So which is it? Have Democrats offered up a budget plan or not? Because simple logic dictates that both cannot be true.
Not that logic has ever been an impediment for this Republican Party.
Medicare: The GOP Can’t Agree
POLITICO: GOP divisions run deep over Medicare, budget plan Mon May 23 By Joan McCarter for Daily Kos
There's a lot to unpack in this POLITICO story about the infighting within House Republicans over the radical "Path to Prosperity" plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, and leadership's embrace of it. While the focus of the story is on the Medicare debacle, the story really reflects the struggle the party is having over whether to follow the Tea Party down the political rabbit hole.
No matter how favorably pollsters with the Tarrance Group or other firms spun the bill in their pitch—casting it as the only path to saving the beloved health entitlement for seniors—the Ryan budget's approval rating barely budged above the high 30s or its disapproval below 50 percent, according to a Republican operative familiar with the presentation.The poll numbers on the plan were so toxic—nearly as bad as those of President Barack Obama's health reform bill at the nadir of its unpopularity—that staffers with the National Republican Congressional Committee warned leadership, "You might not want to go there" in a series of tense pre-vote meetings....
The outward unity projected by House Republicans masked weeks of fierce debate, even infighting, and doubt over a measure that stands virtually no chance of becoming law. In a series of heated closed-door exchanges, dissenters, led by Ryan's main internal rival—House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.)—argued for a less radical, more bipartisan approach, GOP staffers say.
At a fundraiser shortly after the vote, a frustrated Camp groused, "We shouldn't have done it" and that he was "overridden," according to a person in attendance.
A few days earlier, as most Republicans remained mute during a GOP conference meeting on the Ryan plan, Camp rose and drily asserted, "People in my district like Medicare," one lawmaker, who is now having his own doubts about voting yes, told POLITICO....
"The tea party itch has definitely not been scratched, so the voices who were saying, ‘Let's do this in a way that's politically survivable,' got drowned out by a kind of panic," a top GOP consultant involved in the debate said, on condition of anonymity....
On several occasions, Boehner has seemed squishy on the Ryan budget. In talking to ABC News, Boehner said he was "not wedded" to the plan and that it was "worthy of consideration."
Still, even if Boehner had opposed the plan—and his top aide, Barry Jackson, expressed concerns about the political fallout to other staffers—he probably couldn't have stopped the Ryan Express anyway, so great was the push from freshmen and conservatives.
That's not to say some of the speaker's allies from the Midwest didn't try. Camp and Ryan hashed out their differences in a series of private meetings that, on occasion, turned testy, according to several GOP aides. Camp argued that the Ryan plan, which he backed in principle—and eventually voted for—was a nonstarter that would only make it harder to reach a bipartisan framework on real entitlement reform.
Apparently still believing that their problem isn't a draconian and hugely unpopular plan to end Medicare, but all in how they are presenting the plan, the GOP is gamely sticking to it: "The GOP message team is already scrambling to redefine the issue as a Republican attempt to 'save' Medicare, not kill it."
"We have a message challenge, a big one, and that's what the polling is showing," conceded Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a former Karl Rove protégé who enthusiastically backed the Ryan plan. "There's no way you attack the deficit in my lifetime without dealing with the growth of Medicare. Do we get a political benefit from proposing a legitimate solution to a major policy problem? That's an open question."
That's where the messaging is going to attempt to focus, and where Dems have to fight back. The GOP will try to frame the entire debacle as a reflection of their seriousness about the deficit. Never mind that, as Digby points out, "they sure put out a crappy plan. That's one of the problems that Politico fails to address—the plan itself was debunked over the course of the first week and Ryan's reputation for seriousness and 'brio' took a major hit."
Steve Benen echoes that:
It's worth noting that the Politico article reports, simply as a matter of fact, that that the House Republican leaders intended to "boldly position their party as a beacon of fiscal responsibility." What the article doesn't note is that this is absurd—there's nothing fiscally responsible about the House GOP plan. The numbers don't add up; the finances are fraudulent; and even the Medicare "savings" would be applied to tax cuts, not deficit reduction. The media really needs to start understanding this.
The media needs to start understanding that, but Dems also need to hammer that point, over and over. We already know that there are going to be plenty of squeamish Dems who will feel the only response to the GOP's cries of "fiscally responsibility" will be to demand more and dumber cuts (case in point, Sens. Claire McCaskill and Joe Manchin). Following the GOP into political oblivion on slashing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security wouldn't prove "fiscal responsibility," just political weakness.
This is a huge political problem for the Republicans. It's time for Dems to throw them another anchor or two.
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