Tag Archives: GOP

May 13, 2013 · 5:42 PM

Bobby Jindal To GOP: ‘It’s Time To Get Over’ Election Loss

Governor Bobby Jindal’s poll numbers may be low in Louisiana, but once again he’s giving his fellow Republicans some sage advice.  The last time he gave the GOP advice, they were not too happy with his choice of words.

The Huffington Post

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) spoke at a GOP dinner in New Hampshire on Friday, urging his fellow Republicans to “get over” last year’s electoral defeats and instead focus on reassessing party priorities ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

“We lost an election that we probably should have won,” Jindal said at a GOP fundraiser in Manchester, N.H., according to ABC News. “It’s time to get over it. … I think we can win elections by sticking to our principles, but I do think we need to make some changes and I think we need to think seriously about where we go from here.”

He continued, “We spent too much time last year criticizing the other side without saying what we were going to do instead, without saying what we were for.”

The Republican governor made headlines last year when he called on members of his party to end “dumbed-down conservatism” and “stop being the stupid party.” During his New Hampshire speech, Jindal offered an explanation for those remarks.

“What I meant by that was we’ve got to present thoughtful policy solutions to the American people — not just bumper stickers, not just 30-second solutions,” Jindal said, according to the Washington Times. “We have to have the confidence and the courage in our convictions and show them that our ideas will benefit them.”

Jindal has frequently been floated as a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. However, he has brushed off the speculation, insisting that it is too early to wade into the race.

“Anybody on the Republican side even thinking or talking about running for president in 2016, I’ve said, needs to get their head examined,” Jindal said during a February appearance on “Fox and Friends.” “And the reason I say that is, we’ve lost two presidential elections in a row, we need to be winning the debate of ideas– then we’ll win elections.”

 

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May 11, 2013 · 4:14 PM

House GOP Votes To End Overtime Pay With ‘Working Families Flexibility Act’

Our Representatives are no longer average politicians who relate to their constituents.  They’re millionaires or at the very least wealthy men and women who spent a lot of money to get into office.  Many bought their seats in Congress usually with the help of special interests and sometimes with their own money.

What do they possibly know about hourly wages or the struggle of the working poor?  This bill is outrageous and I hope it doesn’t pass in the Senate, although that is doubtful since they’re all cut from the same economic cloth and have no clue about Americans who struggle to make ends meet on their hourly wages.   Fortunately, the Senate Democrats are the majority and may vote against this bill.

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The GOP-led U.S. House voted to allow employers to replace overtime pay, as currently required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), with compensatory time off, or comp time. This sounds great until the bill, inappropriately titled “The Working Families Flexibility Act,” is actually looked at. Despite its claim of increased flexibility, it will make it easier for employers to schedule lots of overtime without paying, and give workers far less flexibility in their lives.

While the comp time would be provided at the same time-and-a-half rate as the FLSA requires for overtime, it would hurt the many low-wage, hourly workers in this country who so frequently depend on overtime pay to make ends meet.

Employers must pay out any comp time no later than 31 days after the end of the company’s year or the end of the calendar year, whichever the company adheres to. While that may wind up being a fairly hefty chunk of pay all at once, it doesn’t help with weekly and monthly expenses for those who are used to depending on overtime pay, though an employee can request payment for any unused comp time at any time under this act.

Furthermore, that accrued and unused comp time is essentially an interest-free loan to the employer, right out of the employees’ pockets. Yes, employers have to pay if the time isn’t used, but they get a 30-day window, even if the employee requests to have comp time cashed out early. With that window, the employee may or may not see the money on their next paycheck, making it harder to plan and to meet unexpected expenses.

The bill also doesn’t contain provisions for allowing workers to use their comp time when they need it, say, for emergencies, sudden illness, parental obligations, surgery, etc. The FLSA is already woefully inadequate when it comes to providing for time off, paid or otherwise, and this does not touch on that issue at all. Ergo, an employer can pay its employees with comp time, but refuse to let them use it when they need it.

One analysis of the bill says it creates incentives for employers to overwork employees who agree to take comp time. Employees can bank up to 160 hours under the law, but those employees who don’t agree to it and want to keep getting overtime pay would probably not get the hours they’re looking for. Indeed, this bill also says nothing about having to provide overtime hours equally to employees regardless of their overtime or comp time status.

Much of that is wildly hypocritical considering Congress is only slated to be in session for 126 days this year. The phrase “overworked and underpaid” will apply to workers even more under this law, while Congress works less and less. They’re paid $174,000 per year to work for less than half of it.

There is also no recourse for employees who find themselves intimidated or coerced into agreeing to comp time, despite this bill’s prohibition against that. Their only recourse is to sue, which is expensive and time-consuming, and may or may not be successful. Employees who manage to get a class certification for such litigation would also likely find themselves with less-than-fair financial compensation from whatever settlement is reached, since that is the typical outcome of class-action lawsuits.

In other words, this law hamstrings hourly workers and puts the few remaining cards they have into the hands of their employers. It doesn’t help families, it hurts them, by continuing to erode workers’ rights.

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May 10, 2013 · 8:27 AM

Paul Ryan: Progressivism Is ‘Arrogant And Condescending’

Pot…meet kettle.

The Huffingtom Post

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) belittled progressives during a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday.

“Progressivism is well-intentioned but it is also — in my humble opinion — arrogant and condescending,” Ryan said, according to a transcript. “Instead of helping people make their own decisions, it makes those decisions for them. It makes Washington the center of power and politicians the center of attention.”

While Ryan had harsh words for progressives, he conceded their “vision proved compelling.”

“The Left keeps winning elections,” Ryan continued. “Why? Well, you can see the appeal. In uncertain times, people look for security. Progressives seem to have an answer … the progressive state offers a sense of security. But it’s a false sense of security because government can’t keep all its promises.”

Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is the de-facto spokesperson for the GOP on fiscal austerity. In March, the House passed Ryan’s budget, which would balance the federal budget in 10 years by slashing spending on safety-net programs for the poor. The text of his budget cited a well-known study from Harvard economists on government debt that was recently repudiated by a group of scholars at the University of Massachusetts, who said the study had “serious errors.”

Despite the blow to Ryan’s austerity argument, he declared on Wednesday that “we have to stop spending money we don’t have.”

After defining conservative principles, Ryan said the Republican Party “must go” into “our inner cities, our barrios and our poor rural communities” and “demonstrate our full vision of freedom and community.”

“This vision is our response to progressivism,” he said.

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May 8, 2013 · 7:49 AM

Mark Sanford South Carolina Victory Takes Him From ‘Free Fall’ To Rebirth

Mark Sanford wins…

The Huffington Post

“Americans”,  journalist David Halberstam once wrote, are “remarkably tolerant of error, particularly if it is self-confessed.”

Mark Sanford is thanking his lucky stars that’s the case. The former South Carolina governor won his old seat in Congress back on Tuesday, after voters in the state’s coastal 1st Congressional District decided to overlook his many misadventures since he first admitted an extramarital affair in 2009.

Sanford, 52, a Republican, defeated Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a 58-year old businesswoman best known nationally as comedian Stephen Colbert’s older sister, in a special election to fill a seat vacated by former Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). Scott was appointed by the state’s Republican governor to the U.S. Senate after Jim DeMint left his seat early to lead The Heritage Foundation, a D.C. think tank.

“It would be the most obvious of obviouses to say that I thought politics was forever over for me,” Sanford told The Huffington Post in an interview last week. “But something happened that never happened in our state, which is, you know, a United States senator retired early. I mean that just doesn’t happen in South Carolina.”

Two weeks ago, Sanford was in “free fall,” as he described it. His past indiscretions -– which played out in front of a national audience four years ago -– were dredged back up by news of trespassing complaints that had been lodged against him by his ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, for showing up at her home uninvited.

“I said to my guys at the time, ‘Look, this thing’s over with if people think that I’m the kind of guy that would go, you know, creeping through the hedge of my ex’s house,’” Sanford said.

Continue reading here…

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May 1, 2013 · 5:22 PM

Ohio Republicans Want To Punish Colleges That Enable Students To Vote

Another outrageous GOP policy…

Think Progress

In 1979, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision holding that state cannot place unique burdens on college student votes that do not apply to other members of the electorate. Nevertheless, Ohio Republicans now want to punish state universities that encourage students to cast a ballot. Under a budget amendment filed by Republicans in the Ohio House, state universities that provide documents enabling students to register to vote in their college town, rather than in the state where their parents reside, will be forbidden from charging those students out-of-state tuition. Thus, the amendment would effectively reduce the funding of state schools that assist their students in registering to vote.

This is the second GOP attempt to restrict college students from voting in just the past month. About a month ago, a North Carolina Republican lawmaker filed a bill that would raise taxes on families with college students if the student registers to vote at school rather than in their parents’ hometown.

It’s not difficult to guess why Republicans support these — and other — efforts to make it harder for college students to cast a ballot. As former New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien (R) said when explaining his support for measures to make it harder to vote, “the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do.”

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April 15, 2013 · 2:34 PM

What country does the Tea Party represent?

What country does the Tea Party represent?

Salon

House Republicans are no longer swayed by public opinion, imperiling the GOP and grinding government to a halt

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

With an assist from some long-term demographic trends, House Republicans have redistricted, propagandized and policed themselves into another country.

As a result, they have become unmoored from the political incentives that typically drive law-makers’ decision-making process. Public opinion no longer sways them, and that is creating a potentially insurmountable problem for the party establishment’s efforts to broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond angry old white people.

House Republicans may care about the GOP’s national fortunes in the abstract, but too many are impervious to what the public at large wants because of the nature of the districts they represent. At the same time, a steady stream of spin from the conservative media provides insulation from the realities of American politics, and deep-pocketed outside groups punish Republicans for any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

This isn’t just a serious problem for establishment Republicans. It’s ground our government to a halt, as Congress is virtually incapable of action, even on issues where there is something approaching a consensus among the public at large — like universal background checks for firearm purchases, for example. They’re supported by 80-90 percent of voters, but face a steep uphill climb in the House.

How did this happen?

The Great Gerrymander of 2010

In 2012, Democratic House candidates got 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but came away 33 seats short of the majority – only the second time since World War Two that such a reversal has taken place. That was the fruit of a well-funded, multi-year plan by the Republican State Leadership Committee to take over state houses before the 2010 Census, and control the redistricting process that followed.

And they gerrymandered with a vengeance. As Princeton University scholar Sam Wang noted, “although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense… partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties.”

By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: [Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats [which] exactly matched the [proportion of the] newly elected delegation.

Democrats Are “Inefficiently Distributed”

But, as a number of observers pointed out after the mid-terms, even this aggressive effort to redraw districts in their favor wasn’t quite enough to lock in Republicans’ control of the House. This is where the organic trend comes in. Political scientists Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stamford explain (PDF) that as a result of migration and urbanization, Democrats tend to be “highly clustered in dense central city areas, while Republicans are scattered more evenly through the suburban, exurban, and rural periphery.” This results in what the authors call “unintentional redistricting,” with “a skew in the distribution of partisanship across districts such that with 50 percent of the votes, Democrats can expect fewer than 50 percent of the seats.”

Hyper-Partisan Districts

Those two trends have resulted in a dwindling number of competitive districts. As the New York Times’ numbers-guru Nate Silver pointed out, the number of “landslide districts” – which he defined as those that went for one party by 20 or more percentage points than the electorate as a whole – has doubled since 1992, while the number of swing districts has fallen from 155 to just 64 over the same period.

When you look at the racial composition of districts, the trend becomes even more pronounced. According to the Census Bureau, 111 House republicans represent districts that are at least 80 percent white.

Continue below the chart, here…

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April 13, 2013 · 9:14 AM

GOP Congressman’s Bumper Sticker: ‘If Babies Had Guns, They Wouldn’t Be Aborted’

Disturbing tweet of the day…

Where is the logic in the above tweet. All I see is more hysterical, irrational and frankly, dumb rhetoric from an ill-informed GOP politician.

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April 7, 2013 · 6:24 PM

Is the GOP Sincere in Denouncing its Bigots?

Good question…

Alternet

There has been an outcry from some GOP members concerning GOP bigotry. But the sea change may be much less than meets the eye.

In a week’s time the wide range of what was once considered routine GOP bigotry was on full display. Dave Agema, a former West Michigan state representative, and Republican National Committeeman called gays “filthy homosexuals.” Next, Alaska Rep. Don Young blurted out the epitaph “wetbacks” in discussing the immigration issue. Then 23 members of the so-called White Student Union attended the Conservative Political Action Conference where its leader tacitly endorsed segregation and even slavery.

In times past, the silence from the GOP officials and rank and file would have been deafening. It would have reconfirmed the standard knock against the GOP as a party of Kooks, cranks misanthropes, and, of course, bigots. But in each of the three cases, there was an outcry from local GOP officials, bloggers, and GOP campus groups. They publicly denounced the bigotry, and in the case of Young, House Speaker John Boehner, Arizona and Texas Senators John McCain, and John Cornyn, and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus blasted Young’s remarks.

At first glance, this seems a signal that the GOP recognizes that it’s widely considered the party of bigotry, and that it’s willing to do something about it. But the sea change may be much less than meets the eye. Many top GOP officials are still mute on its party’s bigots. The official record still stands that no top GOP official aggressively and consistently denounces the bigoted remarks or acts by a GOP operative, representative, or senator.

The RNC in its near 100 page blueprint for reaching out to minorities, gays and young people did raise faint hope that the GOP may indeed have finally woke up that America is changing, and it can’t win national offices anymore solely with conservative white male Heartland and Deep South voters, or through the use of the crude race baiting. But this hope ignores the GOP’s horrible history of dealing with its blatant bigots and bigotry. The pattern was on ugly display in 2002 when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott touched off a furor seemingly touting the one time pro-segregation battles fought by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. It took nearly a week for then President George W. Bush to make a stumbling, tepid disavowal of Lott.

In the next decade, a legion of Republican state and local officials, conservative talk show jocks and even some Republican bigwigs made foot-in-mouth racist cracks that invariably got them in hot water. Their response when called on the carpet was always the same: They make a duck and dodge denial, claim that they were misquoted or issue a weak, half-hearted apology. Each time, the response from top Republicans was either silence, or if the firestorm was great enough, to give the offender a much-delayed mild verbal hand slap. Lott was dumped from his Senate Majority Leader post, but soon got a top post back as Senate Minority Whip after a kind of, sort of mea culpa.

The bigger dilemma for the GOP when the bigots of their party pop off is that they remain prisoners of their party’s racist past. It’s a past in which Republican presidents set the tone with their own verbal race bashing. President Eisenhower never got out of the Old South habit of calling blacks “nigras.”

In an infamous and well-documented outburst at a White House dinner party in 1954, Ike winked, nodded and whispered to Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren that he understood why white Southerners wouldn’t want to “see their sweet little girls required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.”

Continue reading…

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April 6, 2013 · 4:19 PM

Maddow: Republicans still trying to intrude into your bedroom

Maddow: Republicans still trying to intrude into your bedroom (via Raw Story )

Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow pointed out that in spite of whatever attempts the GOP is making at the national level at rebranding itself, the party is lost without its “bedroom intrusion agenda.” Even as national Republicans like Olympia Snowe come out in favor…

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March 29, 2013 · 1:46 PM

Alan Simpson: ‘Men Legislators Shouldn’t Even Vote On’ Abortion

I don’t often agree with former GOP Senator Alan Simpson but in this instance, he is spot on…

The Huffington Post

Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) has never shied away from turning his trademark brand of colorful rhetoric on his own party, and on Thursday he did so again, in a scathing examination of the Republican approach on social issues.

In an interview published in the Los Angeles Times, Simpson, who has weighed in prominently on fiscal issues in recent years, blasted the trend of old, white Republican males feeling compelled to legislate on abortion.

“[It's] a hideous thing. It’s terrible,” Simpson said of the medical procedure. “But it’s a deeply intimate and personal thing. … Men legislators shouldn’t even vote on it.”

Simpson also called out what he saw as a “homophobic strain in our party,” and accused members of the GOP of following a social agenda that was inconsistent with their broader political ideology.

“You’re a Republican, you believe in get-out-of-your-life and the precious right to privacy, the right to be left alone,” Simpson said. “Well then, pal, I don’t care what you do. You can go worship the Great Eel at night, I don’t give a rat’s … . But don’t mess with me and don’t then go take a position I have and wrap religion around it.”

(Read the rest of Simpson’s interview with the Times here.)

Simpson has expressed similar disagreements with Republicans on social issues in the past. In 2011, he targeted intolerance in the party, suggesting that it often ended up being a hypocritical display of hate.

“But I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, you know, moral values while you’re diddling your secretary while you’re giving a speech on moral values,” he said. “Come on. Get off of it.”

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