Water Cooler - Republicans Censoring Congresses Communication with Constituents

Water Cooler – Republicans Censoring Congresses Communication with Constituents

Censored by merlinprincesse

There is a meme that I hate, that politics is a blood sport and that you can’t be involved in it unless you are willing to leave your opponents bleeding into the sand of the arena while you bask in the adulation of the crowd. This idea leads to a culture of anything goes and it makes the governance of our nation much much harder.

Which is where we are with the House Republicans. Having committed political malpractice by forcing a vote on the Paul Ryan Medicare killing budget the Republican leadership finds itself with a stinking, rotting albatross hung around its neck.

So what is a political party with an authoritarian bent to do? Well for one thing they are preventing Democratic Representatives from sending out any communication to their constituents that say the Ryan budget will kill or end Medicare. Even though these are factually true statements (gutting a program and then calling it Medicare does not count as keeping it, no matter what Politifact or the Washington Post Fact Checker say).

In Congress Representatives and Senators are allowed to use federal funds to communicate with their constituents. The only thing they are not allowed to do on that dime is outright electioneering. Meaning that they can tell you that the Republicans are everything but a child of God, but they can’t say “So, vote for me!” explicitly or raise money for the same in those communications.
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Robert Sameulson Tells Lies, Lies, Lies About Ryan’s Medicare Ending Budget

5:32 am in banality of evil, jerks by Bill Egnor

Paul Ryan - Caricature by DonkeyHotey, on Flickr

It is Monday so what do I find in my in-box but another tightly coiled steaming pile of conservative idiocy by Robert Samuelson. It is a real drag to write about him because there really are no snappy pejoratives to describe him that don’t insult the people or item one compares him to. So I am not going to try that today, I am just going to call it straight, Robert Samuelson is a partisan liar.

His entire column is filled with half-truths, false comparisons and blatant lies. Let’s break it down. He starts out by trying to co-opt the “Ending Medicare as we know it” meme that not only Democrats but just about any person that can read and reason understands is the outcome of the Ryan budget. But then Robby ups the ante he says:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that unless we end Medicare “as we know it,” America “as we know it” will end.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. There is no chance that our taking care of the elderly has to end America as we know it. Well, unless you have been so brainwashed by the conservative movement that you are still living in the 1880’s idea of what America is. You know, white, rich and a bunch of basically peasants that are just there to turn the wheels of industry and take the crumbs the Robber Barons deign to leave behind. Then it might be end to that America, which the rest of us left behind long ago.

He then conflates health care spending for government programs (which do include the VA, but he doesn’t mention it since he wants to kill Medicare and Medicaid) and private health care spending. He says:

Uncontrolled health spending isn’t simply crowding out other government programs; it’s also dampening overall living standards. Health economists Michael Chernew, Richard Hirth and David Cutler recently reported that higher health costs consumed 35.7 percent of the increase in per capita income from 1999 to 2007. They also project, that under reasonable assumptions, it could absorb half or more of the gain between now and 2083.

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Tags: conservatives, Health care, lies, medicare, Paul Ryan, Republicans, Robert Samuelson, Ryan Budget
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