The Ryan Repugnican budget is NOT about the deficit!

[Photo from here.]

One of the things we must remember about Repugnicans:  They never mean what they say, and they never say what they mean.

The Repugnicans have engaged in class warfare.  It's the rich against the rest of us.  At the moment, the rich are winning.

The infamous budget proposed by the Repugnican representative in the House, Paul Ryan (R. Wis.), is not about reducing the deficit!  Just as the recent brouhaha in Ryan's home state made clear that the budget proposed by Governor Walker had nothing to do with the state deficit, but rather was about union-busting and establishing corporate power at the expense of the people of Wisconsin, so Ryan's budget, while having no impact on the federal deficit, will commence to fulfill the Repugnican wet-dream of so many years - to rid our country of the safety net for its most vulnerable citizens and create a permanent class of elites to rule over the rest of us.

Joshua Holland, writing for AlterNet, details the essence of Ryan's devastating plan in his article, "How Fraudulent Is the GOP Budget Plan?  It Wouldn't Even Make a Dent In the Deficit!"

It is so radical, says Holland, that "According to an analysis by the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the plan would slash all public spending other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by almost three-quarters by 2050.  And because the 'budget does not envision defense cuts in real terms,' what this means is that 'most of the rest of the federal government outside of health care, Social Security, and defense would cease to exist.'"

Holland continues:  "And it's not just a matter of bait-and-switch; the entire proposal is a fraud.  Just consider this:  while selling their plan to the public as a 'serious' and 'bold' attempt to reduce the federal deficit, Republicans are overstating how much it would cut the budget gap by ten-fold."

In other words, what the Republicans claim about their budget is not in line with reality!  And not only have they claimed reductions which are invalid from the start, but they've made several math "errors" to make the budget look better than it is.  For example, one "math error ... exaggerated how much we'd save in interest payments by $230 billion over the next decade - a number significantly higher than the amount of deficit reduction they'd get out of the plan."

The worst  of it, as Holland notes, is that "while the plan's deficit reduction is largely fantasy, the pain it would impose on working Americans is very real.  Almost two-thirds of the $4.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years come from programs that help those with lower incomes."

There is much more.  The main thrust of Holland's article is that, as usual, under any Repugnican plan, the rich get richer and the rest of us get screwed!  Royally.

Now, the original tea party folks didn't like getting royally screwed by the royalty in England.  Our tea party folks have been conned by our "royalty" here at home.  The Koch brothers, for example, operating in the shadows, have garnered an army of middle- and lower-income people to work against their own best interests.

Anyone who is not a multi-millionaire and votes Repugnican has a death-wish.

This is a class war and it's just beginning. 

Read all of Holland's excellent article here.

God Weighs In

Dennis Baxley, radical christianist theocrat of the American Taliban

[AP photo from Yahoo News.]

Dennis Baxley has been once again elected to the Florida Legislature.  He served in the House previously, where he perpetrated a variety of pernicious and dastardly legislation.

Baxley is from Ocala, which, while a nice place to live, is representative of the worst of redneck, right-wing, christianist politics. At one time, he headed up the Florida division of the theocratic Christian Coalition which has as its goal the overthrow of our current governments (local, state and national) and their replacement by christianist governments, based upon a fundamentalistic christianist interpretation of that hoary old collection of nonsense, the christianist Bible.

At various times, Baxley has fought the teaching of evolution in our public schools; he has fought for the right to carry weapons on to the property of one's job site; he has argued in favor of vouchers which would provide religious kooks taxpayer money to send their kids to parochial schools to be taught goofy religious delusions and mythologies, including Creationism; he has promoted the notion that a fetus is a person; he has claimed that Christians teaching on college campuses are being persecuted; he implied that perhaps President Obama's "Muslim" upbringing (which is a myth in itself) may lead Obama to go easy on Islamic radicals; he has further implied that Obama's former association with the infamous Rev. Wright casts suspicion on Obama's claim to be a Christian; and the list goes on and on. Baxley stands on the far right fringe of American politics: he is a theocrat; he is dangerous to our democratic system and to the ongoing viability of our Constitution.

Now, along with most every other Repugnican in the Florida legislature, Baxley is focusing on issues which have no relevance to a secular democracy and are of little concern to most of our citizens.  For example, because he is a right-wingnut christianist, Baxley thinks abortion is wrong. That's fine and that's his right. He shouldn't have one, then!

But because he is a right-wingnut christianist with a direct pipeline to his god, Baxley has concluded that he has the right to impose his religious views on every woman in the state of Florida! So, he is sponsoring an amendment to the Florida Constitution which would make it impossible for any woman to obtain any money from the state for an abortion, no matter what the reason.

What's really crazy about this is that it will cost over $90,000 to do the necessary footwork in Florida's 67 counties to get this amendment on the ballot in November. But in the last three-year fiscal period, the state of Florida spent about $3,000 on Medicaid abortions. Now this is the same guy who cries about deficits and how we must not raise taxes on the poor corporations, blah, blah, blah...but he's willing to toss about $100 thousand dollars of your money and mine to foist his particular religious viewpoint on the rest of us!

Baxley, probably because he's a man of some substantial financial means being part-owner of a funeral home is not concerned about jobs, housing and the homeless, the environment, saving the Everglades, global warming, health care, etc. or other issues that impact regular folks like you and me. Unfortunately, that is also true of most every other Repugnican in the Florida Legislature!

Baxley has said that this amendment, which is really about banning all abortions in the state and a means to get a foot in the door to reverse Roe v. Wade, is the most important thing he's ever done.


It's sick! When are the people of Florida going to stop electing these ass-hats to be legislators?