Republican Hypocrisy category archive

When government employees have to step in to pay for what they need to do their jobs because their employers refuse to, that is for all practical purposes a hidden tax, one born solely by those employees:

When English teacher Stacey DeCotis first saw her new fifth-grade Hanover classroom, it had some desks and not much else. So she went shopping for a small library of books and a host of decorations to liven things up.

Then, with the first day of school just around the corner, DeCotis paid a visit to Teachers Rule, an educational supply store in Rockland, where she stocked up on supplies and personalized items for the students’ first day.

In all, DeCotis spent several hundred dollars – all from her own pocket – to get ready for the first day of classes.

“Some people think I’m crazy to spend so much,’’ she said as she perused the aisles one morning. “But I’m not alone.’’

Public school teachers paying for classroom supplies is not new. But today’s stumbling economy has deepened the need, as budget-crunched schools look to trim costs and more students show up without even basic supplies.

Governments get away with this because, despite rightwing propaganda to the contrary, the great majority of teachers care deeply about doing their jobs and serving their students. So they pay this de facto tax and just keep in trying to teach.

A retired Republican staffer explains why he retired after three decades–his disgust at the tactics of the contemporary Republican Party. A nugget:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'”

Click and read.

Via Jay Bookman.

Dick Polman wonders about Eric Cantor’s insistence that disaster aid be offset by budget cuts in other areas.

But I have questions for the Republican austerity cops. If they’re so committed to the principle of “pay as you go,” if they believe so fervently that fiscal conservatism should trump even the promotion of the “general welfare” (U.S. Constitution, Article I Section 8), then where were they just a few years ago, when the Bush administration launched two wars and successfully pushed a Medicare prescription plan – none of which was paid for?

In particular, why were Republicans so willing to ratify the invasion of Iraq without insisting that the high cost be “offset” by slashing other programs? Cantor never uttered a peep. How come it was OK in 2003 to indulge that neoconservative dream regardless of cost (the Iraq tab approaches $1 trillion), but it’s not OK in 2011 to help Americans recover from a natural disaster regardless of cost?

Gee, I wonder. Perhaps it has something do with who is president today, and who was president in 2003.

The answer is quite simple.

The contemporary Republican Party doesn’t have principles.

It has tactics.

More here.

I wish I could say that this is hard to believe: trying to play three-card monte with teachers’ lives.

But it isn’t. And it’s been lying low for eight years.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2003, top officials from Texas Governor Rick Perry’s office pitched an unusual offer to the state’s retired teachers: Let’s get into the death business.

Perry’s budget director, Mike Morrissey, laid out a pitch that was both ambitious and risky, according to notes summarizing the meeting provided to The Huffington Post.

According to the notes, which were authenticated by a meeting participant, the Perry administration wanted to help Wall Street investors gamble on how long retired Texas teachers would live. Perry was promising the state big money in exchange for helping Swiss banking giant UBS set up a business of teacher death speculation.

All they had to do was convince retirees to let UBS buy life insurance policies on them. When the retirees died, those policies would pay out benefits to Wall Street speculators, and the state, supposedly, would get paid for arranging the bets. The families of the deceased former teachers would get nothing.

The Republican Party has sold its soul for a mess of pottage.

Read the whole thing or listen to EYKW, where I learned of it.

It says something about flack’s conduct when a professor of flackery calls him out.

His irresponsible and unethical communication on behalf of his employer (Senator Scott Brown, R–Dirty Tricks) is the opposite of the type of transparent communication the public deserves from its elected officials.

Facing South details that system’s shameful history and recent resurrection.

Truly venal and shameful.

As a follow-up to my previous post, segregation, like slavery before it, was at heart an effort to steal the labor of its targets by forcing them to work for subsistence, under slavery, then for pittance, under segregation. Dennis G. of Balloon Juice explained how that worked several months ago.

Here’s another of those attempts to legitimize theft of labor.

. . . and going back to the 19th.

MSNBC attempts to untangle the financial trail behind the efforts to resegregate the Wake County, North Carolina, schools:

Yosemite Sam Perry is fond of talking about the number of jobs created in Texas with federal stimulus funds (though he usually leaves out the “stimulus funds” part).

But what about those Texas jobs. Renee Loth decided to look more closely. A nugget:

But is Texas really a model for the country? Let’s look a little deeper. A million jobs in the decade that Perry’s been governor sounds like a lot, but that hasn’t kept pace with the Texas-sized boom in the population over the same period, when 4.5 million job-seekers made the Lone Star state their home. So unemployment in Texas is a middling 8.2 percent – lower than the national average, but higher than the 7.6 percent in Massachusetts.

Further, to quote another governor who tried to ride his state’s economic miracle to the White House, are they “good jobs at good wages?’’ Apparently not, since a third of Texas workers earn too little to stay above the federal poverty line. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas is tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers earning the minimum wage, the lowest-paid workers of all 50 states.

Perry: All hat. No cattle. Much bull.

In four words, Timothy Snyder rips apart taxation teabaggery:

Patriots pay their share.

Follow the link for the rest of his words.

Decoding the code.

I’m a Southern Boy. I know the damned code.

Another example, this one from the Booman.

The undercurrent of racism in teabaggery is turning into a riptide.

I was too young in 1961 to notice this cartoon, but the description of it really does capture the sense of entitlement central to Republicanism:

A 1961 drawing by the great Washington Post cartoonist Herblock showed Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican and retail heir, looking down disdainfully at a poor woman and her children and saying, “If you had any initiative, you’d go out and inherit a department store.” I can picture a similar cartoon featuring Rep. Eric Cantor, the current House majority leader.

Follow the link to see the writer Cantorize the wound.

Afterthought:

In Republican world, there’s never enough money to help the poor and always enough money to help the rich.

Linda Clawson and Sam Seder analyze the Republican tactics and goals in the now-ended FAA funding hostage situation.

Bill Maher:

There are consequences to voting for economic terrorists. There’s a rumor that Joe Biden called the Republicans terrorists this week. And they were furious about this. They were so upset about being called terrorists, they went out and took the FAA hostage.