According to GOP Minority leader John Boehner, we the American people must work until we are 70 years old before we can draw social security benefits. Republicans also intend to impose perpetual tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy Americans.
The Republican Party that racked up a mind numbing deficit during the W. years is now obsessed about the growing deficit.
I guess the GOP lawmaker's teabagging ventriloquists have taken total control of the message machine now that the opposition party is in charge. This is especially true since most Democrats, though not all, are working on behalf of the American people.
Over the past several days GOP lawmakers have railed about cutting spending and all voted against extending unemployment benefits for the jobless based on the party's hypocritical and pretentious "grave" concern for the deficit. At the same time, Republicans in Washington are committed to continuing the W. tax cuts to the rich despite the fact that tax cuts would add to the deficit substantially, maybe to the tune of $100 billion.
Credibility apparently no longer matters.
Ronald Reagan Republican economists Alan Greenspan and David Stockman insist that continuing tax cuts with borrowed money could be disastrous. Stockman went as far to call the GOP economic strategy as
vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
Paul O'Neill, U.S. Treasury under W. Bush, essentially said the same thing. W. and Cheney, by the way, had fired O'Neill because he had the nerve to oppose Bush's hair brained tax cuts and war in Iraq. Maybe that is the time in which the GOP started its purge of moderate and sane Republicans.
John Boehner completly ignores the Republican economists and he continues to cry out for extending the Bush tax cuts while screaming about spending and the deficit at the same time.
Meanwhile the Republican bashing of Hispanics grows more intensely hateful by the day. John Boehner and the GOP appear to be on a mission to repeal the 14th Amendment all in an effort to strip the citizenship of children born in this country whose parents may or may not be legal residents.
Protect Fat Cat at all costs.
Apparently the Republican Party is unwilling to penalize employers that take advantage of cheap labor by employing undocumented workers. I guess it is far easier for the self serving cowards to beat up on those who are in dire straits and in desperate need of mere survival.
Racism. Religious Intolerance.
Jeesh. Who do the Republicans like anymore except themselves? We know the GOP has had "issues" with African Americans for some time. Right wing operatives and hate mongers led to Acorn's dismantling precisely because the organization registered voters, many of whom are African American. We know Republicans loath and fear Muslims because of their willingness to lump the terrorists in with peaceful, law abiding and well meaning Muslims. The teabagging wing seems to have taken control of the message machine and the Republicans are beginning to sound like a bunch of potentially violent revolutionaries.
A Party of, for and by the Rich.
Preferably all of whom are the color of white bread and mayonnaise.
The authoritarian Party for the Wealthy and that of Intolerance and Obstruction is also on a crusade to destroy whatever is left of a safety net for the American people. Yesterday in the New York Times, Frank Rich wrote a chilling article on just how committed the GOP is to undoing this very safety net.
The leaders who would actually take over should the Republicans regain Congress are far closer to the revolutionaries than most voters imagine. Take Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has been relentlessly promoted by the right as the intellectual golden boy of the G.O.P. and who would be elevated to chairman of the powerful budget committee in a Republican House. His much publicized "Roadmap for America's Future" - hailed by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard as "the most important proposal in domestic policy" since Reagan's voodoo economics - not only revives the failed Bush proposal of partially privatizing Social Security but tops him by replacing Medicare with a voucher system that, like Ryan's skewed tax cuts, would benefit the superrich while raising taxes and medical costs for everyone else.
Ryan's proposal has only 13 co-sponsors in the House (out of 178 G.O.P. members). That number is low, he recently conceded, because his colleagues are "talking to their pollsters, and their pollsters are saying: 'Stay away from this. We're going to win an election.' " Once that election is won, the road will be clear and the ideologues will take over the asylum. Ryan's radicalism will be abetted by the new House speaker, John Boehner, who didn't even wait for the BP well to be plugged to announce that "a moratorium on new federal regulations" would be "a great idea."
So, they've put a lid on Ryan until after the election. If Republicans do take over the Congress we know what will be numero uno on their agenda.
Rich also discusses the GOP crusade to repeal the 14th Amendment.
Now we have a Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, joined by such onetime "moderates" as John McCain and Charles Grassley, calling for hearings to "look into" the 14th Amendment. That Reconstruction landmark, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in America, was such a prideful accomplishment of the old Party of Lincoln that the official G.O.P. Web site has been showcasing it to counter the Republicans' current identity as a whites-only country club. Even Lindsey Graham - who could rightfully be anointed "This Year's Maverick" by The Times Magazine as recently as July 4 - has joined the 14th Amendment revisionists and is slurring immigrants as baby machines who come to America to "drop a child" for nefarious purposes. The Hispanic-bashing has gotten so ugly that Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, wrote last week that Graham and McCain "may never fully recover" their reputations.
And yesterday, on Meet the Press, John Boehner said Americans should have to work until we are 70 years old until we should draw social security benefits.
The GOP leader said Social Security was the most important entitlement to reform, though he also pledged Republicans would bring legislation to the floor to repeal and replace the healthcare reforms passed earlier this year if the GOP wins back control of the House this fall.
But Boehner also floated several other reforms to Social Security, paired with raising the retirement age, to make it more solvent. Boehner said benefits should be tied to increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) instead of wage inflation, and he suggested reducing or eliminating benefits to Americans with a "substantial non-Social Security income" while retired.
The House Minority leader also said they have to be
"We just need to be honest with people," he said. "I'm not suggesting it's going to be easy, but I think if we did those three things, you'd pretty well solve the problem."
The above quote is grounds for funny farm certification. The Republican Party and its serial and pathological lying over the past ten years has rendered it incapable of grasping truth and factual information. The hate talk and fear mongering from GOP leaders and demagogues Rush, Sarah and Glenn has poisoned and obliterated the party's ability to think critically and rationally at all.
So, when Republican politicians say they go around the country to talk to and listen to the American people to whom do they speak and what do they actually hear? Who are the American people, according to the GOP? Lobbyists? GOP high roller donors? Wall St. hedge fund managers? Health insurance CEOs? BP?
Based upon its most recent agenda the GOP certainly has no interest whatsoever in knowing the opinions, needs, interests and desires of the working and middle classes.
For it is on a crusade to burn the safety net of all that earn less than $250K a year.
