Wonkbook: This is what it looks like when the Republican budget strategy falls apart 1AUG13

THE repiglican / tea-bagger obstructionist remind me of Egypt's muslim brotherhood. Full of deceptive rhetoric, once in office they are unable to govern, leaving their constituents no better off, and generally worse off than they were before. The only ones to profit from their election are the rich and powerful. This from the Washington Post is on the total failure of the repiglicans and tea-baggers to move their fanatical regressive agenda through Congress. The question is how long those who were duped into electing them are going to tolerate their unproductive antics in Congress? 
Question of the day: Who said this?
“Thus I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration -- and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts -- must be brought to an end."
Nancy Pelosi? Steny Hoyer? Chris Van Hollen?
Wrong. That was Hal Rogers, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Appropriations Committee, after the aptly named THUD bill failed on the House floor (notice how I didn’t say it “landed with a thud”, or something similar? You can thank me later.)
“THUD,” in this case, stood for Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. It’s the bill to fund those parts of the government through the next year. The cuts needed to be deep to hit the Ryan budget’s target. Too deep, as it turned out. The bill was pulled off the floor as support collapsed around it.
This is what it looks like when the Republican budget strategy collapses.
THUD’s fall comes days after House Republicans were supposed to release the Labor, Health and Human Services bill, which required cuts 19 percent beneath sequestration’s levels. The bill didn’t materialize.
It comes after House Republicans passed defense and veteran’s appropriations at higher levels than sequestration permitted — necessitating deeper cuts elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Republicans are breaking with Mitch McConnell to back appropriations bills that reach pre-sequestration levels — bills that House Republicans have already dismissed.
Budget politics have an odd rhythm. The budget proposal comes early in the year, and its cuts are vague. It mostly just sets broad targets for different categories of spending. The appropriations bills come later in the year, and that’s where cuts need to get specific.
Republicans endorsed the vague outlines of Ryan’s budget early in the year. But now they’re realizing they can’t pass the documents that make those cuts specific — they’re simply too deep. But they can’t back out of the Ryan budget, either. The result is a mess — although one that may make at least a few Republicans, including Hal Rogers, more eager for a face-saving budget deal in the fall.

Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash & Paul Ryan Acknowledges Requesting Federal Money From Program Funded By Obamacare 5&7SEP12

CAUGHT red handed and still the lyin' paul ryan campaign team tries to lie, deceive and manipulate their way out of another example of their blatant hypocrisy. He says it's OK to use federal funds for health care when provided by the bush administration but not when provided by the Obama administration, yet that is exactly what he did. The report from The Nation, including the letter from lyin' ryan's congressional office requesting the funding follows this from ThinkProgress .....

By Tara Culp-Ressler

Earlier this week, the Nation uncovered the fact that Paul Ryan — who has voted with his party to repeal President Obama’s health care law over 30 times — requested Obamacare funds for his Wisconsin district in 2010. However, after the news broke that Ryan sought to fund a new community health center with federal money provided through health care reform, his campaign was quick to retort that grant program has nothing to do with supporting Obamacare because it was created under former President George W. Bush.
Bush did create federal grant programs for community health centers during his presidency. But now that Obama is in office, that initiative is funded through Obamacare, which provides $11 billion to expand community health centers. When Ryan requested the funds in 2010, they represented money that Obama approved — under a law that Ryan has referred to as “Washington’s reckless spending spree.”
As the Huffington Post points out, it’s difficult to understand the distinction between Ryan’s support for Bush’s health care spending and his opposition to the exact same health care spending under Obamacare:

But the response from Ryan’s spokesman also raises a question about the candidate’s philosophy on federal spending on health care: Why would he consider dollars approved by Bush to be a good use of money, but funds approved by Obama to be bad?
“Don’t dumb things down,” [Ryan's spokesperson] suggested to HuffPost. “You think he’s opposed to all federal spending on health care? Health care spending makes up a significant portion of his budget.”
On the specific program in question, related to community health centers, Buck said Ryan was merely supporting a constituent. “It’s casework,” he said. “As a general principle he’s not going to turn away his constituents who come to him for help based on his own views of a program.”

Ryan is not alone in his hypocrisy. A laundry list of Republican lawmakers have suggested scrapping Obamacare only to replace it with the exact same health reform measures. When health care reform is acceptable under Republicans but unconstitutional under Obama, GOPers expose themselves as putting partisanship over policy.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/09/07/811241/paul-ryan-bush-obamacare/?mobile=nc

Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash

Lee Fang 

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is barnstorming the country, promising to repeal every provision of the Affordable Care Act if the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected. But a letter he wrote to the Obama administration may undermine this message.
On December 10, 2010, Ryan penned a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services to recommend a grant application for the Kenosha Community Health Center, Inc to develop a new facility in Racine, Wisconsin, an area within Ryan’s district. “The proposed new facility, the Belle City Neighborhood Health Center, will serve both the preventative and comprehensive primary healthcare needs of thousands of new patients of all ages who are currently without healthcare,” Ryan wrote.

The grant Ryan requested was funded directly by the Affordable Care Act, better known simply as healthcare reform or Obamacare.
The letter, among several obtained by The Nation and The Investigative Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request, is a stark reminder that even the most ardent opponents of Obamacare privately acknowledge many of the law’s benefits.
Federally funded health clinics have long provided a broad range of vital medical, dental and mental health services to underprivileged communities across the country, regardless of a persons’ ability to pay. To meet the goal of expanding coverage, the Affordable Care Act provides for a sweeping expansion of such clinics, including $9.5 billion for operating costs to existing community health centers and $1.5 billion for new construction.
In public, Ryan has cultivated a profile as one of health reform’s most outspoken critics. He savages the Affordable Care Act as an example of “Washington’s reckless spending spree,” as “irresponsible,” and has warned repeatedly that it would place the “federal government squarely in the middle of health-care decisions.”
Explaining his “philosophical difference” with Democrats, Ryan told ABC News this summer that he would seek to repeal the “entire law” because healthcare rights come from “nature and God,” not the government. He expressed dismay that the Supreme Court upheld the law during the interview.
Despite Ryan’s quiet support for an Affordable Care Act clinic grant in his district, the Wisconsin congressman’s promise to repeal Obamacare would undermine the law’s five-year plan to rapidly grow the health clinic system in America by withdrawing the necessary funds. The so-called Ryan Budget plan would also decimate other federal support for health clinics, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Before Republicans broadly agreed upon a strategy of opposing any health reform proposal embraced by President Obama, the party once supported access to healthcare using clinics. The Bush administration requested and received modest increases in federal health clinic funding over the years. Now, however, the GOP has made opposing the entire Affordable Care Act a central plank in its platform, and virtually no lawmakers have been willing to praise it while speaking to the media.
Ryan isn’t alone in shaking his fist at health reform with one hand while extending an open palm behind closed doors.
As I reported over a year ago, even Congressman Hal Rogers, a conservative Representative from Kentucky, and former Senator John Ensign, a rising star in the Republican Party before he resigned in disgrace, wrote letters asking for health reform grants while calling for absolute repeal. Rogers called health reform “socialistic” and a “monstrosity.” Nevertheless, he requested Obamacare funds for a nursing clinic in rural Clay County. The money, Rogers said in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, would “provide critical care in an area in extreme need of access to adequate healthcare.” Ensign recommended an application for a physician training grant made possible through the Affordable Care Act.
Rogers and Ryan have voted to repeal all of the Affordable Care Act on multiple occasions in the last two years.
“I don’t know what’s the bigger sin,” says Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman who championed health clinics as a supporter of the Affordable Care Act. “The hypocrisy of asking for funding from a program while seeking to repeal it, or that the Republicans have been so much more committed to hurting the president than to helping people that something as uncontroversial as funding for community health centers must be requested in secret.”
Perriello is now counselor for policy at the Center for American Progress, where I previously worked as a political blogger.
An outline of the health reform “replacement” legislation advanced by Mitt Romney and Ryan, mostly centered on proposals to gut state and federal health insurance regulations by allowing insurance providers to sell coverage across state lines, makes no mention of health clinics.
In addition to undercutting his political message about health reform, the letter may also add to an emerging narrative that Ryan has a double standard when it comes to critiquing major Obama policy achievements. Shortly after Romney announced that Ryan would be joining him on the Republican ticket this year, the Boston Globe revisited a story showing how Ryan quietly lobbied the Obama administration for stimulus grants. Ryan voted against the proposal and denounced it to the press without disclosing his requests for stimulus cash.
Ryan first denied responsibility for the stimulus grant requests, but later confessed that his office had sent the letters.
Republicans have praised Ryan for his willingness to embrace unpopular cuts to government programs and for being a “consistent conservative.” The fact that Ryan has privately pleaded with the Obama administration for government grants from the president’s signature policy accomplishments, however, could unravel that conceit.
UPDATE: Brendan Buck, a spokesperson for the Mitt Romney campaign, responded to this story by claiming that this "grant program was created by President Bush, not Obamacare. This... type of misinformation is what you get from gotcha reporting on liberal blogs." Ryan's letter directly requests money from the HRSA-11-017 New Access Points program announced in August of 2010. This New Access Points grant program that Ryan requested money from is funded fully by the Affordable Care Act, a fact made clear on multiple government websites. The claim that Bush "created" this program is also unfounded. Federally-funded health centers were created through the Public Health Services Act, legislation signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.  New Access Point grants have existed well before the Bush administration came to office.
For more on fact-checking Paul Ryan, read Eric Alterman’s column this week.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169757/exclusive-paul-ryan-quietly-requested-obamacare-cash 

House Republican Spending Cuts Target Programs For Children And Pregnant Women 9FEB11

HERE it is, the first real outline of the immoral, anti-children, anti-family, anti-pregnant women budget cut proposals from the hypocritical gop and tea-bagger representatives in the U.S. House. For a group of politicians who love to stand before their electorate thumping their chest (former rep chris lee r NY doing it with his shirt off?) proclaiming their commitment to family values and the Christian foundations of our nation, it would seem they have decided to forget and ignore the teachings of Christ and Christianity about the least among us. I have a question for these people, what do you think Jesus would cut from the federal budget....spending on weapons systems and war or programs for the poor, the widow, women and children?
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) last week released the House Republicans first round of proposed budget cuts, laying out about $32 billion in overall cuts, but without naming any specific program reductions. Ryan has been justifying his refusal to name a specific program that he’d cut from the budget by punting to the Appropriations Committee. “[Naming specifics] is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road. So I can’t tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down,” Ryan said.
Today, the Appropriations Committee — chaired by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) — released the specific cuts that House Republicans are proposing to get below Ryan’s cap. Of course, the cuts consist of reductions to common GOP bogeymen like the National Endowment for the Arts and Amtrak. But the House Republicans have a preoccupation with cutting programs that affect women and their babies. For instance, the GOP proposed:

– Cutting $758 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which amounts to about a 6 percent cut to a program providing food assistance to low-income women and their infants.
– Cutting $210 million from Maternal and Child Health Block Grants, which amounts to about a 33 percent cut in a program giving low-income pregnant women, mothers and their children access to health care.
– Cutting $27 million from the Poison Control Center, which would essentially eliminate a program supporting local poison control centers and funding a hotline directing residents to their local poison control office. Poisoning disproportionately affects children, with half the exposures at the National Poison Control Center last year occurring to children younger than six.

The House Republicans second-largest cut is to community health centers ($1.1 billion). In 2008, about one-third of community health center patients were children.
In the grand scheme of deficit reduction, these cuts will do absolutely nothing, but they will have extremely detrimental effects for those who depend upon the targeted programs. This shows the folly of the GOP’s approach to budgeting, which leaves huge parts of the federal budget immune to cuts (like the Pentagon), while taking an axe to non-defense discretionary spending. These cuts outlined above total about $1 billion, while simply retiring (and not replacing) one carrier battle group and its aircraft wing would save $1.5 billion.
“Make no mistake, these cuts are not low-hanging fruit,” Rogers said in the statement. “These cuts are real and will impact every District across the country — including my own.” While they may impact every district, they certainly don’t spread the pain equally.