This video brings a new clarity to the inequities of wealth distribution in this country. It is this inequality that the Republican Party is fighting tooth and nail to maintain.

The tar sands oil spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2010 still hasn’t been cleaned up. The GOP’s Keystone XL Pipeline Lies

Now we have another spill. This time in a middle class development in Mayflower, Arkansas. The video below shows it all.

Still think having more of this crap transported across this beautiful country is a good idea? The benefits are temporary, the damage is permanent. This is the same stuff that will be carried across thousands of waterways in America while being transported in the Keystone XL Pipeline.

“Last year, some of my sisters and I became known as the Nuns on the Bus. Together, we journeyed through many parts of America to raise awareness of the plight of working poor families and the threat Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget posed to them and to our country as a whole. Last week, Rep. Ryan unveiled his new Republican budget. It is a budget that rewards wealth instead of work; one that reflects the worst of Ayn Rand as it undermines the best of America. It will take from working poor families to spend more on the wealthy, and it won’t even reduce the national debt.

[...]

Paul Ryan sees government programs as evil. I see children sleeping in cars, pregnant women without health care, and the elderly unable to pay for their medication as the real evils. Yet that is the reality for far too many Americans, and Paul Ryan’s budget would make it so for even more.

Paul Ryan and many Republican colleagues argue that we should cut government programs because churches should provide these services, an argument not based in reality. The need is simply too great. Bread for the World released a study last year showing that every house of worship in this country would have to raise an additional $50,000 in revenue each year just to be able to fill the void the Ryan budget would create — $50,000 from each church, synagogue and mosque in America. That’s a huge new tax Paul Ryan would place on all our churches, a burden many could not afford.

Ryan also completely ignores the fact that churches and faith groups like Catholic Charities depend heavily on government programs like food stamps to support their work and provide the services that help so many of America’s struggling families. There is a powerful public-private partnership between our churches and government that fuels America’s safety net. Without government, that safety net will fail and more children will go hungry in this wealthy nation. That is immoral.”

Read the rest of the article here: Paul Ryan’s budget undermines the best of America

“Earlier this month, during one of his new across-the-aisle good-will tours, President Obama pleaded with Senate Republicans to ease up on their record number of filibusters of his nominees. He might as well have been talking to one of the statues in the Capitol. Republicans have made it clear that erecting hurdles for Mr. Obama is, if anything, their overriding legislative goal.

There is no historical precedent for the number of cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama administration. Chuck Hagel became the first defense secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul. Kathleen Sebelius and John Bryson, the secretaries of health and human services and commerce, were subjected to 60-vote confirmation margins instead of simple majorities. Susan Rice surely would have been filibustered and thus was not nominated to be secretary of state.

Gina McCarthy, the nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is being blocked by Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri until he gets the answers he wants on a local levee project. And Thomas Perez, nominated to be labor secretary, is being held up by Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, who is angry about the Justice Department’s enforcement of voting rights laws. By comparison, there were four filibusters of cabinet-level positions during George W. Bush’s two terms, and one under President Ronald Reagan.”

Read the rest of the article here: Malicious Obstruction in the Senate

The Republicans are going to have to convince millions of poor Americans that irrespective of the past thirty years of poor-bashing the GOP has engaged in; the past thirty years of advancing policies that transfer money from the poor and the middle class to the very rich; they actually have poor people’s best interests at heart. Good luck with that.

Republicans see that it is in their electoral interests to be seen as being a party that is willing to help poor people. Not because it is the right thing to do. Not because helping the poor is one of Jesus’ main points of Christianity. Nope. They have decided to do it so they don’t continue losing national elections by the landslides with which they lost the last two presidential elections by. In other words, the Republicans are going to continue to lie to you until you believe it.

The truth is that unless you are part of the greedy rich or a CEO of a large corporation, the Republicans only care about your vote and not about you or your struggles. They just do not care about you personally, at all, on any level.

From Salon.com:

“It’s safe to say that the Republican Party’s recent decision to “relaunch” itself and suddenly reach out to poor people is motivated more by a naked desire to win votes, than by some Gandhi-like benevolence. If the party’s policy platforms — highlighted by an Edward Scissorhands-like budget that slices programs for the indigent — weren’t a dead giveaway, the RNC’s new ballyhooed strategy plan comes right out and says it.

And yet, despite its dubious origins, the party’s new approach is a striking statement regarding the political power — and numbers — of lower-income people in this country: Rather than dismiss, slur or divide poorer Americans (as in prior elections), Republicans have now made the political calculation that they’ve no choice but to talk directly to them and win their votes.

It bears reminding, this is the Republican Party whose iconic political heartthrob famously demonized “welfare queens,” and whose current “leaders” recently referred to Barack Obama as the “food stamp president.” It’s the party that has almost exclusively talked about poor people, not to them – and when it did mention them, it often was to attack and engender resentment from others (or to express their lack of concern for them).”

Read the rest of the article here: Republicans love poor people now

No debt crisis = no spending cuts in the social safety net. That makes Speaker Boehner sad.

“We do not have an immediate debt crisis,” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) – 3/17/2013. This admission was given on ABC’S This Week With George Stephanopoulos. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) echoed this sentiment later on in the day.

GOP: We’ve been lying all along

Why this sudden switch to the truth?

Have the Republicans decided to give up trying to get rid of the social safety net? Have they decided to step into reality? Have they decided to do what is right for the country instead of only what is good for their party?

No, no, and no.

I think I might have the answer.

I don’t say this because I am cynical about our politics – I am – and I don’t say this because I think the Republicans are engaged in Machiavellian politics – I think they have, they do and they will – no, I say this because it is the only thing that makes sense.

The greedy rich, who run the Republican Party, can read the writing on the wall. They know that if the Republicans continue to stress spending cuts, the Democrats will insist on the greedy rich paying higher taxes. Since the American people are behind the Democrats, the greedy rich know they are holding a losing hand.

This doesn’t mean the Republicans are going to stop attempting to get rid of the social safety net – they won’t – it means they will lay low for awhile; change their rhetoric to soften it a bit and allow the heat to die down before they resume their war on Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, gays, lesbians, African – Americans, women, Latinos, the poor, the elderly, the middle class: Basically they are at war with anyone who isn’t rich and white and against everything that doesn’t benefit those rich white folks.

From the Wall Street Journal:

7.1%: What the unemployment rate would be without government job cuts.

While most industries have added jobs over the past three years, the recovery has largely bypassed the government sector.

Federal, state and local governments have shed nearly 750,000 jobs since June 2009, according to the Labor Department‘s establishment survey of employers. No other sector comes close to those job losses over the same period. Construction is in second worst place, but its 225,000 cuts are less than a third of the government reductions. To be sure, construction and other sectors performed worse during the depths of the recession, but no area has had a worse recovery.

A separate tally of job losses looks even worse. According to the household survey, which is where the unemployment rate comes from, there are nearly 950,000 fewer people employed by the government than there were when the recovery started in mid-2009. If none of those people were counted as unemployed, the jobless rate would be 7.1%, compared with the 7.7% rate reported on Friday.

Read the rest here: Number of the Week: Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts

Hey Mitt, can you believe that the American people still think we are on their side?

Freudian slip
noun
an unintentional error revealing subconscious feelings.

Rep. Paul Ryan experienced a Freudian slip while talking with reporters about his “new” budget. (His “new” budget is just his old budgets on steroids).

“This to us is something that we’re not going to give up on, because we’re not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people.” – Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) 03/12/2013

Destroying the social safety net in America, which includes health care, is and has been the goal of the Republican Party since each piece was enacted. In other words, they are opposed to and have been attempting to get rid of Social Security since 1937, and Medicare since 1965 etc.

Here is the video; originally published on Daily Kos on 03/12/2013