Star-Ledger Editorial:"Forget About WH...The ? now is whether Gov Christie can survive as governor"

Republicans keep coming up with flimsy Obamacare horror stories, because they created the "victims"

FRIDAY, JAN 31, 2014 01:25 PM PST
GOP’s Obamacare fiction series: Latest horror story a creation from start to finish
Republicans keep coming up with flimsy Obamacare horror stories, because they created the "victims"
BRIAN BEUTLER

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What Republicans are doing instead is exclusively canvassing people who either don’t like the law or haven’t figured out how to make it work for them or, in some cases, are genuinely worse off because of it. Or some combination of the three. People who don’t know about the exchanges, or haven’t shopped around, or, like Bette, refuse to participate. By definition a huge number of these stories are going to turn out to be baseless.

And that’s where I’d take things further than Greg does. It’s not just that Republicans prefer to exploit these horror stories rather than remedy them, as Greg describes, but that Republicans have spent the last four years intentionally maximizing the number of misapprehended victims.

Take Bette: The reason she didn’t visit the Washington state health exchange was basically #OBUMMER. “I wouldn’t go on that Obama website at all,” she said. This didn’t start with her cancelation. This started years ago. Republicans told Bette, and others inclined to distrust Obamacare, that they’d face death panels and rationing boards. That their options would be unaffordable, and irredeemable. That the exchange sites would make their personal information vulnerable to hackers and that creepy Uncle Sam would sexually violate them. They said all this in the hope that people like Bette wouldn’t give the law a fair shake, then turned around and feigned outrage on their behalf when the plan worked.


Republicans aren’t sincerely distressed about the things they hear from people like Bette. People like Bette are the goal.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/31/gops_obamacare_fiction_series_latest_horror_story_a_creation_from_start_to_finish/

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the Christie letter:

snippet:

head burial

if this NYT story accurate, that means Christie LIED FOR TWO HOURS DURING PRESS CONFERENCE

if this NYT story accurate, that means Christie LIED FOR TWO HOURS DURING PRESS CONFERENCE
https://twitter.com/EricBoehlert/statuses/429356493578588160

The New York Times
Christie Knew About Bridge Lane Closings, Port Authority Official Says
A Port Authority official says he has evidence to prove the New Jersey governor knew about the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/nyregion/christie-bridge.html

Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

Last election season, a shadowy nonprofit pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to change how electoral votes are counted. The group didn’t disclose who was funding its efforts—a fact that Mother Jones highlighted in a story titled “Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?” But now, thanks to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan government watchdog, it’s clear that organizations with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch footed at least some of the bill.

Each state and the District of Columbia has a certain number of electoral votes, based on their population, and they get to decide for themselves how those votes should be allotted. Currently, every state except Maine and Nebraska gives all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin introduced bills that would divide electoral votes among candidates based on how many congressional districts they won. Because Republicans drew the boundaries of the districts in those states, this scheme would be almost certain to hand Republican presidential candidates the majority of their electoral votes—even if more voters cast ballots for Democrats. (Read more about how the plan would work here.) Presuming the race is close enough, this could decide the nationwide outcome.

In the case of Pennsylvania, a mysterious nonprofit called All Votes Matter spent large sums lobbying for these changes. Local officials wondered about its funding sources. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days,” Democratic Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach told Mother Jones at the time. “We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.” But All Votes Matter didn’t disclose its donors, nor did it have to. The group is organized as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, which means that it can spend money on politics while keeping its donors secret. (Such groups are not supposed to spend more than half of their budget on political causes, but IRS enforcement is slack.) Thus the public knew little about the agendas behind this effort to upend the mechanics of presidential elections.


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http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/koch-brothers-change-electoral-college-rules

Thanks to the Republican Party, Corporate America got it all (by none other than Pat Buchanan)

The Fortune 500 wanted to close factories in the USA and ship production abroad – where unions did not exist, regulations were light, taxes were low, and wages were a fraction of what they were here in America.

Corporate America was going global and wanted to be rid of its American workforce, the best paid on earth, and replace it with cheap foreign labor.

While manufacturing sought to move production abroad, hotels, motels, bars, restaurants, farms and construction companies that could not move abroad also wanted to replace their expensive American workers.

Thanks to the Republican Party, Corporate America got it all


the rest:
http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan/how-the-gop-lost-middle-america.html

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