The Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, has proven, yet again, that unless you are a fairly healthy, white male, with no disabilities (like being Jewish, Catholic, Mormon or phyisically disabled) you can NOT participate in the great dream that is America.

The GOP voted NO again, this time as several of their own implored them to pass the UN Convention on People with Disabilities. The stupidity of some of the comments coming from supposedly grown men is absolutely amazing.

The automatic NO coming from the GOP has to stop.

If Harry Reid does not eliminate the filibuster on Jan. 1, he should be replaced. Their is no place in modern society for a group of angry old men to be controlling our country.

I agree. The GOP has been, and still is the party of NO. And if anyone wants to filibuster, let them work for it, the old fashioned way.

The GOP should be ashamed of themselves dishonoring the disabled, and dishonoring their colleague Bob Dole.

Maybe the new Congress will see it differently. There will, after all, be a few more Democrats and a few less Gee NO peeers.

Personally I believe people like Romney paying 10.3% on 21 million are the ones to target not the well to do working families even those making 500K or more. Unfortunately people like Romney won't pay one dime more by simply raising the rate. They should set a cap on the amount of money they can shelter at lower rates. It annoys me people like Romney will thumb their nose at us whatever we do on taxes.

Larry-Personally I believe people like Romney paying 10.3% on 21 million are the ones to target not the well to do working families even those making 500K or more. Unfortunately people like Romney won't pay one dime more by simply raising the rate. They should set a cap on the amount of money they can shelter at lower rates. It annoys me people like Romney will thumb their nose at us whatever we do on taxes.

Totally agree with you. Increasing the tax rate while,a good first step. Should only be the start. There is no moral reason that a person working hard everyday and drawing a salary should pay tax on that salary.While someone making their income from invested money pays little,or nothing on their huge income. The tax rate should be the same,however you gain your living. This is one of the main reasons we have a deficit.The very wealthy with their offshore accounts,and other tax-free wealth are destroying this country.

They not only boxed themselves in they closed the lid, and in typical republican fashion they forgot to drill holes for breathing.

What a great comment. And so true. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Republicans cannot see how they have destroyed their brand through taking a bullet for the super rich. First, they risked our good credit rating to save the rich, now they risk our economic recovery for the likes of a casino mogul's tax cut. Unbelievable.

They are able to lock themselves in with no oxygen because they don't have brains that need it.

I saw this article the other day,which says it all:

Republicans Are More Willing to Cause Another Recession than Abandon the Rich

By: RmuseDecember 7th, 2012

Every creature on this planet has a purpose in life whether it is an animal that exists to procreate, or a human who studies to learn how to build bridges, and regardless the end to be attained, it takes ardent dedication to that purpose to find a measure of success. Unlike animals, humans are able to devote themselves to a cause, or an ideology, and history is replete with catastrophic results of ideological devotion. Any strict ideology is dangerous because it is usually entails some form of oppression, and it is nearly always the case that regardless their numbers, an ideological group with power and influence will abuse the masses mercilessly. The conservative movement is devoted to the ideology that government exists to benefit the rich and corporations, and that their primary job is robbing the people of their assets; it has been their purpose for seventy-five years.

Conservatives’ are hardly concealing their intent to protect the wealthy any longer, and voters plainly rejected them in the election last month. Regardless, Republicans have held firm to their stated goal of never raising tax rates on the richest 2% of income earners in what has been a two-year crusade they will stick to even if it means taking the economy over the fiscal cliff. The Republican counter offer to President Obama’s balanced proposal to avoid sequestration cuts maintained Bush-era tax rates for the rich and proposed $1.4 trillion in various cuts that affect the poor, middle class, and the elderly. Nonetheless, hardline conservatives assailed Boehner’s proposal for closing tax loopholes and not being made up of spending cuts exclusively.

Republican’s persistence of eternal tax breaks and preferential treatment to a tiny percentage of the population is absolute, but what really drives them to excitement is robbing the people of their assets; a goal from which they have never wavered. In their never-ending quest to eliminate the government, a conservative tactic is attacking successful and popular programs with a view toward bankrupting, and eventually eliminating them. Republicans’ greatest enemy is not Democrats or liberals, but any successful government program that eviscerates their argument that government is bad and worth shrinking, if not entirely eliminating. Two of the most successful programs in America’s history is Social Security and Medicare because they are funded by every American who works which is why Republicans are hell-bent on robbing and bankrupting them.

Every American who has ever held a job funds Medicare and Social Security with their payroll taxes, and yet the GOP refrain is they are entitlements that must be reined in to save the economy and reduce the deficit. Republicans have spent no small amount of time attempting to convince Americans that if the people do not allow Republicans to steal their retirement and healthcare accounts they paid into throughout their working lives, then all is lost and the nation will collapse under the crushing debt brought on by Social Security and Medicare. What has been the bane to Republicans is that the people will not comport politicians stealing their assets, and both Social Security and Medicare are assets that belong to the people.

Republicans cannot understand that the American people are compassionate toward their fellow citizens and approve, by a large margin, of using money from their retirement and healthcare pool to care for the least fortunate among us. In fact, during the campaign, 87% of Americans believed helping the poor should be a top or important priority of government, and President Obama’s re-election bears out that statistic. They also believe by a 72% to 28% margin that millionaires paying a lower tax rate than their employees is a much bigger problem than 47% of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes. Republicans however, oppose helping the poor and in fact, spent all of 2011 and 2012 attempting to steal their assets despite just having secured a two year extension on Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. In a deal at the end of 2010, President Obama extended the Bush cuts in order to extendunemployment benefits and a payroll tax holiday for working Americans. Republicans responded during the 112^th Congress with a budget, the Path to Prosperity, which cut taxes on the wealthy, privatized Medicare, and contained Draconian spending cuts that affect 98% of the American people. Although for the next year-and-a-half and up to the election the people rejected more gifts to the rich and cuts to their assets, but the GOP is holding firm to tax cuts for the rich, eliminating middle class tax exemptions, and Draconian cuts to social programs.

One wonders why Republicans are adhering to an agenda they know is a recipe for economic failure and why their solution to every economic problem entails tax cuts for the rich and robbing Americans of their assets, and the only reasonable conclusion is their decades-old ideology of handing the people’s assets to the rich coupled with their not-so-subtle shift toward libertarianism. The Republicans’ agenda is the Koch brothers, Heritage Foundation agenda of transforming America, and the government, into a corporatist ruled nation allowing Wall Street, corporate banking interests, and the insurance industry free reign to take every last bit of wealth from the 98% and hand it over to wealthy bankers and industrialists. If Republicans can cut Social Security and Medicare into insolvency, Americans will scramble to make up their losses as Wall Street and insurance industry customers. The GOP’s intent has been privatizing the government for years, and underfunding successful and popular programs is the logical step towards handing control of those programs over to Republican campaign donors while the people struggle to survive.

Conservatives and their legislative arm, the Republican Party, have no intention of backing down from their ideology of greed and hate, and it will lead to either an economic collapse which plays into the hands of the wealthiest Americans, or a nation of struggling peasants who lost everything to a sick and evil ideology. The tragedy is that Republicans are more than willing to see America suffer a deep recession, fall into total disrepair, and experience massive unemployment as long as they achieve their ultimate goal of stealing everything from 98% of the population and giving it to the rich.

http://www.politicususa.com/republicans-recession-abandon-rich.html

Congress needs to wake up. The Republicans are a lost cause,but Democrats need to see the light before its too late.Why would they even listen to these thieves:

CEO's Who Can't Manage Their Companies' Retirement Plans Want to "Fix" Social Security

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Nov. 27, 2012 7:42 AM PST

Corporate chief executives who get involved in politics often invoke their business bona fides as a superior guide to fixing the nation's problems. The CEO's behind the latest "Fix the Debt" campaign are no exception. The top dogs at more than 90 American corporations—ranging from Honeywell's David Cote to Loews' James Tisch— have signed on to the coalition to press Congress to rein in federal spending, particularly on entitlements, and to balance the nation's books. The anti-debt coalition would like to see big cuts in Social Security benefits and an increase in the retirement age as a "fix" for the program.

Of course, American political leaders should always take the advice of rich businessmen with a grain of salt (and here they are almost uniformly men), especially when the remedy also includes big corporate tax cuts, as the "Fix the Debt" coalition is advocating for. But also, in this case, it's fairly clear that there's nothing about being a CEO that makes one especially well-equipped to dictate massive changes to the nation's collective retirement plan. Indeed, the CEO's behind the "Fix the Debt" coalition come from companies with rather dismal records of managing their own retirement plans.

Consider this: According to a new report from the Institute of Policy Studies, the 71 publicly held firms in the coalition have "a combined deficit of more than $100 billion in their employee pension funds." As with Social Security, these companies' retirement plans don't have enough money in them to pay out the promised benefits to the company workers. That's not because the companies don't (or didn't) have the cash. On the contrary.

One of the largest companies participating in the "Fix the Debt" campaign is GE, which in the 1980s had a $24 billion pension fund surplus. But GE and other big companies like it found ways to siphon money out of the fund to use for other things, like restructuring deals. GE also failed to contribute any money to the fund for 24 years. By 2009, GE's pension fund had a $22 billion deficit. Rather than draw on some of its cash reserves—some $85 billion currently on hand—GE last year decided to simply close the fund to new participants, forcing them into the sub-par 401(K) system.

Meanwhile, GE's CEO, Jeffery Immelt, hasn't skimped on his own retirement funds. He has a pension worth more than $47 million, plus another $5.3 million in deferred compensation coming his way, a nest egg that would translate into a monthly pension payment of about $292,000 for the rest of his retired life, according to IPS. By way of comparison, the average monthly Social Security check is $1,237.

IPS also includes in its report some staggering statistics about the state of the private sector's retirement planning that suggest some of these companies' retirement policies are one reason American workers are so reliant on the very safety net that the "Fix the Debt"ers want to slash. Here are a few:

• Percentage of Fortune 100 firms offering traditional pensions to employees in 1980: 89
• Percentage of Fortune 100 firms offering traditional pension for employees in 2012: 11
• Percentage of Fortune 100 firms operating such plans for CEO and other executives: 79
• Percentage of private sector workers having traditional pension at work in 1980: 83%
• Percentage of private sector workers having traditional pension at work in 2011: 15%
• Percentage of current full-time American workers in their 50s that have neither 401(K) nor traditional retirement plan at work: 44%
• Percentage of Americans with no retirement assets of any kind: 34%
• Estimated amount of retirement savings necessary (beyond Social Security) to provide $25,000 in annual income during retirement years: $500,000

That rocket scientist Rick Scott in FL did that, and it ended up costing the state more than it saved. But he got to further humiliate people on assistance programs, so I'm sure he's doing the happy dance anyway.

The Republicans need to do something radical for them,"Put the Country First":

The Republican Obsession With Obstructing Obama is Endangering the Country

By: RmuseNovember 30th, 2012

The spectrum of behaviors characterized by abnormal mental or behavioral patterns manifest as violations of normalcy, including a person becoming a danger to others, is a broad definition of insanity. Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” and his definition aptly describes the Republican Party for the past thirty years. However, since President Obama won re-election three weeks ago, members of the GOP in Congress have gone off the rails, and the consequences to the government, and 98% of the people, represents a clear danger to the nation’s fragile economic recovery. Even though the election proved voters rejected Republican obstructionism and loyalty to the wealthy, they are digging in their heels and threatening tactics they used over the past four years as if the people demanded they continue making government unmanageable.

When S&P downgraded the country’s credit rating last year, they said “America’s governance was becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable,” and blamed Republicans for using “the statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default as political bargaining chips to resist any measure that would raise revenues.” S&P recognized that sequestration leading to the so-called fiscal cliff was “a fallback mechanism designed to encourage Congress to embrace a more balanced approach to deficit reduction,” but they understood Republicans were intent on letting the “2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place.” The Republican proposals beginning the day after the election informed that S&P recognized what many Americans have witnessed for the past four years and that is the Republicans will continue obstructing any attempt to increase revenue that includes raising taxes on the rich. In fact, they are still pushing Romney’s tax plan for fiscal cliff negotiations that include reducing tax rates for the wealthy and closing tax loopholes for the middle class.

In an effort to unblock the logjam in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid is proposing changing filibuster rules to disallow Republicans from obstructing bills from even coming up for discussion, and it prompted Speaker of the House John Boehner to pre-condemn a change to the filibuster by threatening that, “Any bill that reaches a Republican-led House based on Senate Democrats’ heavy-handed power play would be dead on arrival.” However, there have been bills that did pass the filibuster prone Senate Republicans, like keeping tax cuts for 98% of Americans and 97% of small businesses, that House Republicans refuse to bring up for a vote, or discussion. Republican obstructionism is not dependent on Senate procedures, but on giving preference to the wealthy and opposing any Administration or Democratic measure regardless if it helps create jobs, boost the economy, or reduce the deficit.

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner presented President Obama’s proposal for avoiding the fiscal cliff Republicans voted for last year, and Republicans dismissed it with extreme prejudice because it is not austerity with more tax cuts for the rich. The President’s proposal adheres to the kind of broad framework of the deal Boehner wants with an upfront deficit-reduction “down payment” that cancels automatic tax increases and spending cuts while still signaling seriousness on the deficit, and a second stage giving Congress the opportunity to work on overhauling the tax code and social programs to secure more deficit reduction next year. Still, it does not include reducing taxes on wealthy and corporations’ while drastically cutting social safety nets and spending on infrastructure. Boehner said, “The Democrats have yet to get serious about real spending cuts,” and that “no substantive progress has been made in the talks between the White House and the House over the last two weeks. Listen, this is not a game, jobs are on the line, the American economy is on the line. And this is a moment for adult leadership.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “They took a step backward, moving away from consensus and significantly closer to the cliff,” which is simple code for not proposing severe austerity to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy that, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), will not reduce the deficit.

In the CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook for Fiscal Years 2012 – 2022, it says if Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of the year, then the projected deficit will shrink from $1.1 trillion to $196 billion; an 82% reduction over the next six years. As a result, an increase in tax revenues combined with spending cuts will nearly halve the deficit in 2013, reducing it to $585 billion. They also claim that because the Bush-era tax cuts were never paid for, they will remain 60% of the deficit through 2019 because the country is still paying on borrowed money to benefit the wealthy.

There are signs that some Republicans realize the election was a repudiation of Republicans and their persistent obstructionism and refusal to help all Americans, but the majority are still of the mindset that preventing economic progress will “make President Obama a one-term President.” The Republican hatred of President Obama transcends economic policy and permeates their entire reason for living. The recent statements by some Senate Republicans that they will not confirm anyone the President nominates to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has nothing to do with the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans and everything to do obstructing President Obama. Their opposition to any Administration proposal is not founded in sound economic or foreign policies, but their insane obsession with preventing the President from working for the American people.

Last year’s S&P report was correct in its appraisal that Republicans have made governance less stable, less effective, and less predictable, and one may have thought the election signaled that their intransigence on balanced deficit reduction was not acceptable, but they learned nothing whatsoever. In fact, they immediately trotted out Willard Romney’s tax plan, made Paul Ryan point-man on fiscal cliff negotiations, and assailed the President for not putting the Affordable Care Act on the table as a means of deficit reduction; anything to prevent raising tax rates on the wealthiest 2% of income earners. Their obsession with protecting the rich is more than just a form of mental illness; it is hazardous to this country’s economic health the American people cannot survive as long as they continue making governance less stable and effective.

President Obama gave Republicans a proposal that cuts the deficit, cuts spending, creates jobs through infrastructure improvements, and preserves tax cuts for 98% of the population and 97% of small businesses. Republicans countered with Romney’s austerity plan and greater tax cuts for the wealthy, and they show no signs of relenting despite the looming fiscal cliff. Americans cannot tolerate another four years of Republican obstructionism just to benefit 2% of the population, or Draconian cuts to social safety nets that tens-of-millions of Americans depend on for basic survival. It has come to the point that Republicans are not doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, because they are doing the same thing they have for the past four years and expect the same results of making governance impossible, and unfortunately for America, their insane obsession with obstructing the President is a danger to economic recovery and 98% of the population.

http://www.politicususa.com/republican-obsession-obstructing-obama-endangering-country.html