Truth Wins Out -- GOP in Congress Sabotaged Obamacare Rollout -- Some GOP Governors Complicit

In fact, putting an excessive burden on the federal government was the explicit aim of the law’s opponents. “Congress authorized no funds for federal ‘fallback’ exchanges,” the Tea Party Patriots website noted as long ago as last December. “So Washington may not be able to impose exchanges on states at all.” The group went on to suggest that since Washington was not equipped to handle so many state exchanges, “both financially and otherwise — this means the entire law could implode on itself.  Todd S. Purdum, Politico

Anyone who knows me knows I have been blaming Republicans for the problems with Obamacare knowing some State Governors like Oklahoma's Mary Fallin, pulled back at the last minute.  It just made sense it would put an extra burden on the main site.  Lo and behold that is just what happened. 

The lowlife, underhanded GOP sabotaged the rollout of ACA and then criticized it for having problems.  Despicable, lying, overpaid, lazy, and arrogant Republican members of Congress are going to find out the Democrats they are dealing with today are not the rollover types and are willing to stand up to the lying GOP like Rep Pallone of New Jersey.  This may be one of the funniest exchanges I have seen from the House in a long time.  I applaud Rep Pallone for standing up and not backing down.  

The Wrecking Crew courtesy graphic is courtesy of Politicususa.com from Crooks and Liars which is a perfect description of today's GOP:

 

From Sarah Jones, Politicususa:

For weeks I’ve been wondering why no one is talking about how Republicans sabotaged the ACA rollout by refusing to implement state run marketplaces, and thus unexpectedly forcing all of that additional burden on to the federal website.

It reminded me of Republicans denying security funding for Benghazi and then blaming Obama and Clinton for the lack of security in Benghazi. The media were oddly uninterested in that alarming fact. 

But today, Todd Purdum at Politico exposed how Republicans sabotaged the ACA rollout. One small part of their plan was the rejection of the state run exchanges.

But also, Purdum points out, Republicans refused to fund the extra work on the website after the states refused to do their parts, leaving the administration to cobble funding together for Healthcare.Gov. Putting this extra burden on the website was a deliberate effort to cause the law to “implode” on itself.

When I saw the above on Politicususa, it all made sense and answered my questions on how the lowlife Republicans caused the problems and then blamed President Obama.  The theory was correct that the MSM was complicit with Republicans and hard right in the lies about the ACA rollout refusing to get to the heart of the problems and took to blaming the Obama Administration.  Daily we see the MSM reporting the GOP narrative on ACA as facts with some reporters actually saying it is not their job to determine the truth like Chuck Todd and Lisa Myers of NBC.  If a reporters job is not to report the facts, then he should go to work for Fox News where facts and truth rarely see the light of day.

The excerpted article by Politico is outstanding as Purdum put the facts together and shows how a real investigative reports works.  Great knowing there are still some around today -- his full article is well worth the read:

The Obamacare sabotage campaign 

By TODD S. PURDUM | 11/1/13 5:04 AM EDT Updated: 11/1/13 8:31 AM EDT 

To the undisputed reasons for Obamacare’s rocky rollout — a balky website, muddied White House messaging and sudden sticker shock for individuals forced to buy more expensive health insurance — add a less acknowledged cause: calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step. 

That may sound like a left-wing conspiracy theory — and the Obama administration itself is so busy defending the indefensible early failings of its signature program that it has barely tried to make this case. But there is a strong factual basis for such a charge. 

From the moment the bill was introduced, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress announced their intention to kill it. Republican troops pressed this cause all the way to the Supreme Court — which upheld the law, but weakened a key part of it by giving states the option to reject an expansion of Medicaid. The GOP faithful then kept up their crusade past the president’s reelection, in a pattern of “massive resistance” not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. 

But the bitter fight over passage was only the beginning of the war to stop Obamacare. Most Republican governors declined to create their own state insurance exchanges — an option inserted in the bill in the Senate to appeal to the classic conservative preference for local control — forcing the federal government to take at least partial responsibility for creating marketplaces serving 36 states — far more than ever intended. 

Then congressional Republicans refused repeatedly to appropriate dedicated funds to do all that extra work, leaving the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to cobble together HealthCare.gov by redirecting funds from existing programs. On top of that, nearly half of the states declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal funds, as the law envisioned. 

Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law. And congressional Republicans sent so many burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits gearing up to help consumers navigate the new system face-to-face that at least two such groups returned their federal grants and gave up the effort. When the White House let it be known last summer that it was in talks with the National Football League to enlist star athletes to help promote the law, the Senate’s top two Republicans sent the league an ominous letter wondering why it would “risk damaging its inclusive and apolitical brand.” The NFL backed off. 

The drama culminated on the eve of the open enrollment date of Oct. 1. Congressional Republicans shut down the government, disrupting last-minute planning and limiting the administration’s political ability to prepare the public for the likelihood of potential problems, because it was in a last-ditch fight to defend the president’s biggest legislative accomplishment. 

“I think my Republican colleagues forget that a lot of people are enrolling through state exchanges, rather than the federal exchange,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) noted last week. “And if it wasn’t for the fact that many Republican governors, including my own,” failed to set up state exchanges, “then we wouldn’t be putting so much burden on the federal system.” 

In fact, putting an excessive burden on the federal government was the explicit aim of the law’s opponents. “Congress authorized no funds for federal ‘fallback’ exchanges,” the Tea Party Patriots website noted as long ago as last December. “So Washington may not be able to impose exchanges on states at all.” The group went on to suggest that since Washington was not equipped to handle so many state exchanges, “both financially and otherwise — this means the entire law could implode on itself.” 

Excerpt:  Read more at Politico  

The way some of the media is attacking President Obama over ACA shows how much they are in bed with the GOP.  For years we have heard that the MSM is liberal when he fact they are controlled by mostly conservative organizations who frankly don't like the President because he doesn't do favors for the wealthy like Republicans.  President Obama actually cares about regular people not just the top 2%.  

For years I have been told by some Republicans to blame the opposition for what you are doing.  My reaction was to say you have to be kidding because you will be found out but they weren't.  They even defunded ACORN after it had been destroyed.  How much of the voter fraud attributed to ACORN came from the GOP?  

At least the answers are out about ACA and once again just like Benghazi, the fault lies with the lack of GOP funding ACA websites while they blame Obama and the Democrats.  Politico and Politicususa made my day with these revelations.  About time someone tells the truth because you are not going to get it from much of the MSM who are too lazy to investigate anything except where their next meal is coming from and who they can get to pay for that meal.

RNC Chair Priebus backs 'Grand Theft Election" Changes to Electoral College

How do Republicans Plan to commit "Grand Theft Election?"

How the Republican election-rigging plan works 

This Republican Plan would reallocate electoral votes so that a maximum of two electoral votes would go to the overall winner of several key blue states. The lion’s share of the state’s electors would then be allocated one by one to the presidential candidate who won each individual congressional district. (see Figure 1) Thus, in a blue state such as Michigan—which President Obama won by nearly 10 points in 2012—Gov. Romney would have received 9 of the state’s 16 electoral votes because he received more votes than the president did in nine of the state’s congressional districts. In other words, the Republican candidate would receive more than half of the state’s electoral votes despite being overwhelmingly defeated in the state as a whole 

Cashing in on gerrymandering 

The Republican Plan does not just apply one set of rules in red states and another set of rules in blue states—it also takes advantage of profoundly gerrymandered congressional maps in order to stack the deck even more for Republican presidential candidates. In 2012 Democratic House candidates received nearly 1.4 million more votes than their Republican counterparts. Yet Republican candidates currently hold a 33-seat majority in the House, due in large part to the fact that Republican state legislatures controlled the redistricting process in several key states. Indeed, Republicans were so successful in their efforts to lock in their control of the House of Representatives through gerrymandering that Democratic House candidates would have needed to win the national popular vote by more than 7 percentage points in order to receive the barest majority in the House. Republicans aren’t particularly shy about touting the success of their gerrymanders either: The Republican State Leadership Committee released an extensive memo boasting about how they used gerrymanders to lock down GOP majorities in the House.

Not only has the RNC but would bet Karl Rove and Koch Brothers come up with a plan to put a Republican in the White House in 2016.  They to win by changing the rules of the game based on their extreme gerrymandering in states the GOP won in 2010.  By all accounts, there is no way they should have won control of the Governor's office and State Legislatures in places like MI and PA.  How much voter fraud was involved?

For years I have been buying into the Democrat voter fraud koolaid but lo and behold, it is mostly in the Republican Party as I have learned over the past year.  It took a combination of a horrible candidate with Romney, Rove way over stepping, and the Koch Brothers Tea Party and Americans for Prosperity to wake me up what was happening with the GOP going way hard right, cheating, and lying.  The lies coming out against President Obama by the conservative media made me join Republicans for Obama.  Most had no basis in fact as I learned the more I researched.

Now Republicans want to steal the Presidential election in blue states with allocating electoral votes to their gerrymandered Congressional districts while keeping red states the same -- no change.  Words despicable, underhanded, cheating, unethical, and jerks come to mind.  In order to make it work, the Koch Brothers RNC Chair Priebus had to have all battleground states on board but his grandiose plan to steal 2016 has suffered two setbacks in Battleground states -- one in Virginia and now in Florida.

Looks like the RNC Chair Priebus plan to steal the Presidential election in Virginia at least is now failing as Republican Senators and now Governor McDonnell is saying no.  Yet this Koch Brothers bought and paid for Chair was reelected to head the RNC.

Virginia state Sen. Ralph Smith (R) said today that a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election by changing the way electoral votes are counted is a “bad idea” and that he would oppose it. Smith joins state Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel (R-VA), who told ThinkProgress earlier this week that “I am generally not in favor right now of the bill and it’s very unlikely that I will vote for it in full committee or the Senate floor.” As the Virginia Senate is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Smith and Vogel’s opposition is likely sufficient to kill this election-rigging scheme in this state.

Update
Now that it’s clear the bill is dead in Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has announced he opposes the move.

Another Battleground State, Florida, has weighed in with its Republican Speaker of the House Weatherford opposing the idea:

Florida, the largest swing state, won’t go along with changing the Electoral College if Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford has any say (and he has a major say).
“To me, that’s like saying in a football game, ‘We should have only three quarters, because we were winning after three quarters and the beat us in the fourth,” Weatherford, a Republican, told the Herald/Times. “I don’t think we need to change the rules of the game, I think we need to get better.”

Fellow Republican leader, Senate President Don Gaetz, wasn’t favorable to the plan either. He said he would prefer a more progressive proposal: abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote. Said Gaetz, “The farmer standing in his field in North Dakota should be just as important as the factory worker in Ohio.” 

Will PA, OH, MI, and WI go ahead with their plans or has the outcry by not only Democrats but a lot of Republicans making them stop and think?  Know that this will be the last straw for many Republicans if this is adopted including this one.  Will not stay in a Party that cheats right before our eyes and that is exactly what we are seeing.  They don't even try to hide it anymore but come right out and say it.

As for the Democrats fighting this action, they need to make sure that Majority Leader Harry Reid is no where near their plans to stop this Grand Theft Election after he caved to Minority Leader McConnell on the filibuster.  You want to know how dumb Reid looks, McConnell's campaign sent out a fundraising email:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) campaign is touting what it characterizes as the senator's work to stop filibuster reform in a new fundraising pitch that proclaims, "We beat the liberals. 

"A group of the Senate's most liberal senators, fueled by left-wing groups like MoveOn, have been pushing a dangerous scheme to change the rules of the United States Senate and fundamentally alter the checks and balances of our system," the email, written by campaign manager Jesse Benton, reads. 

He goes on to declare that McConnell "stopped that scheme dead in its tracks."

Benton adds that McConnell "is willing to work with his colleagues across the aisle when it is in the best interest of Kentucky and our country," but warns that doing away with the filibuster would allow what he characterizes as the worst excesses of liberalism to flourish.

"Can you imagine what the left might cook up with that kind of unchecked power? We’d be sure to see a litany of new anti-coal regulations, tax hikes, anti-Second Amendment bills, forced unionization bills and crazy new deficit spending. And that would just be the tip of the iceberg," he writes. 

He goes on to make a plea to "help me give him a little pat on the back right now" by way of a small donation.

Have said for a long time that I thought Harry Reid was bought and paid for by not only the Mormon Church, but NRA and oil and gas.  Looks like the NRA might have pulled some strings to get Reid to back off having a talking filibuster which was fine during the Reagan years but now Senators don't have to talk just put a hold on something.  Harry Reid sold out and now looks like a fool.

We need new leadership in Congress from both parties as the group we have in charge today are not working for the American people but to line their campaign coffers and pockets the way it looks.  They are so afraid of being primaried or removed from leadership they will do anything to keep their job tossing the American people under the bus.

In 2014 think long and hard before voting for anyone even near the Tea Party or someone who has been in office for years.  We need new, honest people to run for seats in Congress who are not bought and paid for before they get to DC and will not be influenced by lobbyists if there are such candidates out there with the nastiness of today's elections.  We can make it happen if we work together to support better candidates and make sure they have all the on the ground support they need.  We can defeat the bought and paid for candidates with honest men and women.  Now is the time to start finding their candidates and offering your support.

It is time for real change and it starts with 2014!