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Health

Tea Party Hopes To Prevent Texas Lawmakers From Even Considering Giving Health Care To The Poor

By Sy Mukherjee on May 8, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Texas lawmakers have until midnight on Thursday to negotiate a deal on the 2014-2015 state budget before the current legislative session ends. But they may find themselves in town for a bit longer if some Tea Party lawmakers in the state House have their way and force a special legislative session over a Republican-backed rider regarding Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion — even though the amendment wouldn’t actually expand Texas’ Medicaid program, but simply “open the door to discussions with the federal government to expand health care coverage for the state’s poorest adults.”

The threats from Texas Tea Partiers make it even more unlikely than it already was that the Lone Star State will pass anything resembling a Medicaid expansion — or even future promises to simply talk about the issue — this year. As Texas Republicans — who introduced the rider — point out, the provision is simply a declaration that state and federal officials will discuss how to help the state’s poorest residents gain coverage in a way that hews to conservative, “free market principles” regarding health entitlements in light of upcoming cuts to safety net hospitals and Texas’ massive poor and uninsured population. But those arguments have failed to sway some in the Tea Party caucus, who view any talk of Medicaid at all as a sell-out to President Obama’s landmark health reform law:

“If the budget expanded Medicaid, conservatives in the House would vote the budget down,” said state Rep. Van Taylor, a Tea Party favorite from Plano. He said conservative Republican members of the House are “absolutely prepared to go to the mat” and return for multiple special sessions to prevent any semblance of Medicaid expansion.

State Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, said House Bill 3791, which he filed to present the Legislature with an alternative way to expand health coverage to the state’s poorest adults without expanding Medicaid, would probably not move out of the lower chamber by the House’s midnight Thursday deadline, therefore the rider was one of few — if not the only — remaining legislative vehicles for the Legislature to weigh in on the issue.

“If people took the time to read the rider they would recognize that it’s not a Medicaid expansion,” he said. “They would understand clearly that it is a lot of, frankly, conservative principles.”

In fact, HB 3791 — a GOP alternative to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion that would have covered Texas’ poorest by giving them subsidies to buy private insurance — was already doomed to fail in the House. This rider is simply a last resort that promises future negotiations on the issue. It actually also endorses extremely regressive approaches to expanding the safety net, including possibly block-granting the state’s Medicaid program. But, as the debate over Obamacare has become increasingly disconnected from reality, some members of the Texas Tea Party are willing to hold the state’s entire budget hostage over a measure endorsing policies that they have historically supported.

While this recent infighting is something of a new low in the Medicaid expansion debate, GOP hypocrisy regarding the health reform law certainly isn’t. Receiving federal funding in exchange for expanding and privatizing Medicaid programs — which the Obama Administration has signed onto — is usually a GOP-endorsed policy. In fact, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) struck a massive deal with federal officials in 2011 allowing him to move close to a million Medicaid beneficiaries into private, managed care. Perry heralded the move at the time, but has refused to accept an expanded version that same deal now that it’s a priority for the Administration and necessary for effective Obamacare implementation.

Only 35 percent of Texans living below 139 percent of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) are covered by the state’s Medicaid program. 43 percent are uninsured.

Justice

Five Conspiracy Theories 2016 Hopeful Ted Cruz Actually Believes

By Ian Millhiser on May 1, 2013 at 10:33 am

(Credit: AP)

On Wednesday morning, the National Review broke the news that tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is considering a presidential run, a scoop that should surprise no one who’s paid attention to his short Senate career. As Jonathan Bernstein explains, Cruz has spent his few months in the Senate alienating his colleagues by constantly trying to distinguish himself as the more-conservative-than-thou alternative to “establishment” Republicans. Such behavior makes no sense if Cruz is interested in building the coalitions necessary to legislate, but it makes perfect sense if he has his eyes set on winning a tea-soaked GOP primary in 2016.

If Cruz runs, he would give voice to the conspiracy-minded, John Birch Society wing of the Republican Party that the National Review’s founder fought so hard to purge several decades ago. Cruz is the Glenn Beck of the United States Senate, promoting new conspiracy theories just as easily as Mr. Beck adds new names to his chalkboard. Here are five examples of such theories that Cruz actually believes in:

  • George Soros leads a global conspiracy to abolish the game of golf. In a January 2012 article published on Cruz’s senate campaign website, the future senator argues that a twenty year-old non-binding United Nations resolution signed by 178 nations including the United States under President George H.W. Bush, is actually a nefarious plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” Cruz attributes this plot to a common tea party boogieman — “[t]he originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property.”
  • Communists infiltrated Harvard Law School. Almost three years ago, Cruz gave a speech to the tea party group Americans for Prosperity in which he claimed that revolutionary communists were a major presence on Harvard’s law faculty. According to Cruz, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz’s claims came as a big surprise to Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, a Republican who served as President Reagan’s solicitor general, who says that “I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government.’”
  • Islamic law threatens the United States. Echoing a common fear among very conservative politicians that Sharia law is somehow creeping into American life, Cruz told a senate candidate’s forum last year that “Sharia law is an enormous problem” in the United States. In reality, there are barely any examples of Islamic or Sharia law even being mentioned in American legal proceedings, and when it is mentioned it is typically because a contract, will or other document drafted by a private citizen invokes Sharia law, not because the court wishes to replace American law with something else.
  • Obama wants the immigration bill to fail so he can campaign on it in 2016. Cruz claims that “the reason that the White House is insisting on a path to citizenship” in the immigration bill making its way through Congress “is because the White House knows that insisting on that is very likely to scuttle the bill” giving Obama an issue to campaign on in 2014 and 2016. In reality, a path to citizenship was a key prong of the immigration bill President Bush supported in 2007. It’s also a major prong of the Gang of Eight bill — a gang which includes Republican Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). So if the path to citizenship is actually an Obama plot to give himself a campaign issue, Obama has some unexpected co-conspirators in this scheme.
  • George W. Bush led an assault on Texas’ “sovereignty.” Cruz’s first campaign ad touted his victory in a Supreme Court case permitting the state of Texas to execute a Mexican national, despite the fact that Texas violated America’s treaty obligations by not permitting this Mexican citizen “to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” President Bush objected to Texas’s effort to flout a treaty that even North Korea had honored when it detained two American journalists for five months in 2009. Cruz dismissed Bush’s objections as an intrusion on “the sovereignty of the States.”

    • If elected to the White House, Cruz is unlikely to step back from his penchant for Glenn Beck-style conspiracies. In an interview with Fox News Sunday just a few days after he became a senator, Cruz claimed that “I don’t think what Washington needs is more compromise, I think what Washington needs is more common sense and more principle.”

Election

The Tea Party Is Killing The Republican Party

By John Halpin, Guest Blogger on Apr 30, 2013 at 11:16 am

Researchers at William & Mary and the University of California-Davis somehow convinced nearly 12,000 FreedomWorks members to take a survey exploring their ideological and policy positions in order to analyze how the attitudes of the most ardent members of the Tea Party compare to those of other non-Tea Party aligned Republicans. The results must be sobering to the establishment GOP-types like Karl Rove and Eric Cantor trying to re-brand the party as slightly right-of-sane.

First, as the authors point out, Tea Party members and supporters now constitute a majority of the current Republican Party, not a minority faction.  Their study finds that two-thirds of Republican identifiers strongly support or support the Tea Party, slightly higher than the roughly half of Republicans who say they support the Tea Party in other public polling from NBC/Wall Street Journal.

Second, Tea Party supporters are much more politically active than other Republicans:

For example, in 2008 Tea Party Republicans performed 1.42 activities for the presidential and congressional tickets on average, compared with only .41 activities by non-Tea Party Republicans. In 2010, with only congressional races at the national level, Tea Party Republicans performed on average 0.68 activities versus only 0.12 by non-Tea Party Republicans. Tea Party supporters are responsible for almost all of the total campaign activity performed by party supporters on the Republican side.

Third, on every contentious issue from reducing environmental regulations and repealing Obamacare to taxes and even banning abortion, Tea Party supporters are far more right-wing than other Republicans. In fact, the authors of this study find that on some issues — “imports, abolishing the Department of Education, giving vouchers, and environmental regulation” – the ideological positions of non-Tea Party Republicans are actually closer to those of Democrats than they are to Tea Party Republicans. On top of these policy positions, Tea Party Republicans also reported much more favorable attitudes towards eccentric and extremist 2012 presidential candidates such as Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum than non-Tea Party Republicans, who viewed these candidates negatively.

You can see why this is likely to cause problems in a nation that voted twice to elect Barack Obama.  When you look at what the most active and passionate members of the Republican Party want in terms of policy and candidates, they are way outside of the mainstream of the political opinions of the rising majority of Americans who determine national elections.

Justice

Police Shut Down Protest Of NC GOP, Arrest 8 Members Of The Clergy And A Woman In A Wheelchair

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 30, 2013 at 10:30 am

North Carolina capitol police arrested 17 people yesterday after protesters gathered in front of the doors to the state senate chamber in an act of civil disobedience against the Republican-led state legislature’s agenda. The arrestees included eight members of the clergy, and a woman in a wheelchair that a spokesperson for The Advancement Project identified as Marty Belin:

(Credit: The Advancement Project)

The protest was led by the Rev. Dr. William Barber, President of the NAACP of North Carolina, who published an open letter to Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) and his fellow lawmakers outlining several motivations for opposing the GOP’s agenda. These include the lawmakers’ rejection of increased Medicaid funding — a decision “that stripped over a half million poor people of health care” — their move to “cut the tax credit for over 900,000 poor and working people, while giving a tax break to 23 of the wealthiest people in our State,” and a voter suppression law introduced on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Barber was also among the 17 protesters arrested yesterday:

(Credit: The Advancement Project)

Republicans currently control the state legislature for the first time since 1870, due in no small part to millions in election spending by a wealthy tea partier named Art Pope. In the few months since McCrory became governor last January, Republicans in North Carolina have pushed to transform the increasingly purple state into a laboratory for the tea party’s wish list. In addition to the issues flagged by Barber’s open letter, North Carolina Republicans introduced legislation mimicking the Florida law that led to six hour voting lines last November. They’ve tried to write lower wages into the state constitution. They’ve pushed a pair of bills making it easier for interest groups to buy and sell judges. And the Republican House Majority Leader even endorsed a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution, claiming that North Carolina was free to violate the Constitution’s ban on state-sponsored religion.

Justice

What We Miss About George W. Bush And The Neoconservatives

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 25, 2013 at 9:00 am


Today marks the official dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, an event that is already sparking reexaminations of the Bush legacy. In reality, Bush left office unpopular and he earned that unpopularity. President Bush presided over the near collapse of the American economy. He neglected a war that was thrust upon us to fight a war that he never should have begun. His judicial appointments consistently place conservative ideology before the law. And his administration flouted the laws banning torture. On the eve of President Obama’s first election, only 23 percent of Americans approved of Bush’s job performance.

More than four years later, Bush’s record of unnecessary wars and economic catastrophe speaks for itself. And yet, Republicans have largely decided that the lesson of his failed presidency is to tack even further to the right. In comparison to today’s GOP, George W. Bush appears downright moderate:

None of these nods to moderation can outweigh the battered economy Bush left behind, or the misguided war he prosecuted, or the legacy of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. But there is no need to lionize President Bush in order to recognize that he was a different kind of conservative than the purist ideologues that have come to dominate the GOP since he left the White House.

During the Bush years, the term “neoconservative” became little more than a pejorative thrown around to describe the kind of misguided thinkers that brought America in to the Iraq War. On domestic policy, however, neoconservatives were often the most sensible wing of the Republican Party. As neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz once explained, “the neo-conservatives dissociated themselves from the wholesale opposition to the welfare state which had marked American conservatism since the days of the New Deal,” and while they certainly wished to place limits on the scope of government, their limits did not rest on “issues of principle, such as the legitimate size and role of the central government in the American constitutional order.” In this sense, the neoconservative philosophy that dominated the Bush Administration was a sharp break from the conservatism of the early Twentieth Century that saw protecting workers and basic programs such as Social Security and Medicare as fundamentally anti-American and unconstitutional.

One unfortunate consequence of Bush’s failed presidency is that it appears to have also discredited the relatively sensible faction within the Republican Party that dominated the Bush Administration and created a power vacuum that even more virulent forms of conservatism could rush into. Both the Tea Party, with its calls to declare the progress of the Twentieth Century unconstitutional, and the rise of Paul Ryan, with his assault on the American safety net, are demonstrations of the much more radical forms of conservatism eager to fill the void left after Bush’s fall from grace.

Security

National Security Brief: Poll Finds Military Turning Away From GOP

By ThinkProgress on Mar 26, 2013 at 8:55 am


The latest annual poll conducted by the Military Times has found that nearly one-third of U.S. military personnel identified themselves as Republicans, down from almost 50 percent in 2006, the Washington Times reported.

One soldier attributed the numbers to the Tea Party. “It may have to do with the rise of the Tea Party movement,” said a Marine lieutenant colonel who described himself as conservative.

“Republicans kind of used to be seen as the party that took care of the military,” said one Army sergeant first class. “But recently, there’s a feeling that that has kind of shifted, and I don’t think people feel that the party is really looking out for the military the way it used to.”

In other news:

  • The perception of GOP infighting on foreign policy continued on Monday as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gave a speech in Kentucky, home state of Sen. Rand Paul (R), whom many Republicans have clashed with recently because of his isolationist views. “Every single time that nations have retreated from the world, every single time this nation has retreated from the world, we have paid for it in the long run,” Rubio said. “We have paid for it dearly.”
  • The AP reports: The United States is training secular Syrian fighters in Jordan in a bid to bolster forces battling President Bashar Assad’s regime and stem the influence of Islamist radicals among the country’s persistently splintered opposition, American and foreign officials said.
  • Reuters reports: A Syrian opposition leader, taking Syria’s seat at an Arab summit for the first time on Tuesday, said the United States should use Patriot missiles to protect rebel-held areas from President Bashar al-Assad’s airpower.

    • Election

    How The American Political Debate Uses (And Abuses) History

    By John Halpin, Guest Blogger on Mar 14, 2013 at 12:43 pm

    Does the Tea Party use or abuse history?

    Every era has its historical debates. Yet divergent views of the past — from both the left and the right — seem to be colliding at a rapid clip in the age of Obama.  Given the inevitable confusion this causes among Americans, here is a modest proposal: both progressives and conservatives should agree to a set of informal standards for fairly and accurately employing historical interpretations in our contemporary ideological debates.

    Nietzche’s famous essay on the subject, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” (in his Untimely Meditations), put forth the idea of a “trinity of methods for history” – what he labeled monumental, antiquarian and critical history. Nietzche writes:

    If a man who wants to create greatness uses the past, then he will empower himself through monumental history. On the other hand, the man who wishes to emphasize the customary and traditionally valued cultivates the past as an antiquarian historian. Only the man whose breast is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any price has a need for critical history, that is, history which sits in judgment and passes judgment.

    Nietzche believed there were good uses and poor uses of history to help shape and guide “the living.” For example, holding up strong models of leadership from the past can easily degenerate into “mythical fiction” (like the rising nationalism of the late nineteenth century) while proper reverence for past values and ideas can lead us to make old customs and political beliefs “immortal.” In both cases, the misuse of historical memory inhibits people in the present from making necessary adjustments to balance old ideas with new ones. Similarly, with critical history, Nietzche writes, “A person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it.” This is a useful and necessary process. But it can also be “dangerous” in that we risk denying the past and replacing it with “weaker” ideas in the present.

    The left’s focus under Obama has mostly been on versions of monumental history. There were many debates among progressives during the first term about whether Obama was living up to the boldness of the New Deal and the Great Society in addressing the nation’s economic challenges, advancing civil rights, fighting climate change, and dismantling Bush-era war policies. Michael Tomasky summarized and critiqued these arguments quite well in his 2010 Democracy article, “Against Despair”:

    Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that.

    In Tomasky’s view, progressives were guilty of turning our past successes into myths that failed to acknowledge the limits of progressive power, the structural deficiencies of our constitutional system, and the limits of Barack Obama himself, thus leading to unwarranted despair and apathy.

    In an example of a more critical historical method on the left, Sean Wilentz and Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick have been duking it out in The New York Review of Books over the latter’s book and ten-part Showtime series, The Untold History of the United States. Wilentz argues that Stone and Kuznick are purposefully “cherry-picking” history to make a case against the policies of United States from Truman and the Cold War to Bush and Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stone and Kuznick, in turn, claim that Wilentz is misusing history himself in order to justify the hawkish and imperialist views of politicians he supports like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

    It’s all a bit confusing and flush with details that require lots of fact checking but the debate raises important questions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy and the current stands of the Obama administration on Bush-era policies like torture and drones.

    On the right, the uses and abuses of history have focused more on antiquarian and critical methods. The most obvious example of the antiquarian method is the Tea Party. Jill Lepore’s, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, (reviewed here by Gordon Wood) explains how the Tea Party turned the founding into a quasi-religious like moment that is “sacred” while documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments.”

    Since the first election of Obama we’ve also seen a drumbeat of conservative academic and lay historians using the critical method to attack the legacy of FDR and progressivism, and by extension, the policies of Obama who is cut from the same ideological cloth.  Amity Shlaes’ attempted takedown of the New Deal and subsequent promotion of the wonders of Coolidge-nomics is one strand of this type of history. Glenn Beck and others have promoted another strand that argues the original Progressive movement — and its contemporary manifestation — is a subversion of the Constitution and an aberration from historical norms.  Progressives tend to view these critical uses of history as over-the-line and “factually challenged” (as Newt Gingrich famously labeled Michele Bachmann during the presidential primaries), but it is certainly necessary and important for conservatives to put forth their version of the nation’s past for Americans to evaluate.

    Both ideological sides use history for their own purposes often in legitimate and honest ways. But can we objectively determine who is doing better and worse when it comes to abusing history? Probably not. Progressives and conservatives could, however, agree to some criteria for evaluating the use of historical claims in our contemporary discourse. One, are these claims factually correct ? Two, are these claims fair interpretations of both past and current events and do they adequately account for competing evidence? Three, is the aim of these claims primarily to advance our understanding of the past and present or to advance an ideological agenda?

    Based on these proposed standards, when the left says Obama hasn’t been bold enough or is too imperialist is history being used or abused? When the right says Obama is undermining our founding values and pursuing federal actions that failed in the past are they using or abusing history?

     

    LGBT

    NOM Highlights Gay Man Opposed To Marriage Equality (Who Married A Woman)

    By Zack Ford on Mar 8, 2013 at 3:19 pm

    Doug Mainwaring

    The National Organization for Marriage believes its arguments against marriage equality if they come from people who are actually gay, which is why it is more often highlight “gays against gay marriage.” Today, NOM highlights just such a story from Doug Mainwaring, who believes it’s “possible to oppose same-sex marriage based on reason and experience.” Of course, NOM doesn’t bother to mention any of the details that distinguish Mainwaring’s experience from people who actually identify with the LGBT community, nor the fact that he’s sung this tune plenty of times before.

    Mainwaring’s narrative echoes many ex-gay testimonials, particularly in his abstention from gay sex, choosing instead to have non-sexual philia love friendships with men. In fact, he married a woman with whom, despite a temporary divorce, he still lives and raises a family. He has repeatedly written and testified against marriage equality for same-sex couples, but not just because of his trite “kids need a mother and a father” argument — Mainwaring believes the “liberal intelligentsia” is trying to dismantle marriage altogether. Such paranoid perceptions of liberal views are perhaps unsurprising; Mainwaring is co-founder of the National Capital Tea Party Patriots in Maryland.

    His own words demonstrate just how far removed he is from the reality of LGBT  families. Here’s how he describes his despair at the thought of raising his kids with another man:

    Over the last couple of years, I’ve found our decision to rebuild our family ratified time after time. One day as I turned to climb the stairs I saw my sixteen-year-old son walk past his mom as she sat reading in the living room. As he did, he paused and stooped down to kiss her and give her a hug, and then continued on. With two dads in the house, this little moment of warmth and tenderness would never have occurred. My varsity-track-and-football-playing son and I can give each other a bear hug or a pat on the back, but the kiss thing is never going to happen. To be fully formed, children need to be free to generously receive from and express affection to parents of both genders. Genderless marriages deny this fullness.

    Mainwaring’s shallow perception of what constitutes intimacy, including what he is even capable of showing, demonstrates how unqualified he is to discuss same-sex marriage and families. He has clearly carried an anti-gay stigma with him throughout his entire life and has just as narrow an understanding of the lives of gays and lesbians as his fellow opponents of equality. NOM’s attempt to somehow drive a wedge within the gay community is pitiful, if only because Mainwaring in no way represents it.

    Health

    Marco Rubio: I’ll Vote To Shut Down The Government Unless Obamacare Is Completely Defunded

    By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 8, 2013 at 12:50 pm

    During an interview on conservative host Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio program Thursday night, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined fellow Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in demanding that a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year include provisions to defund Obamacare in its entirety.

    Over the course of the program, Rubio parroted the usual litany of wild — and widely debunked — conservative hysteria about the dire consequences that Obamcare will have on American businesses and the U.S. health care industry, asserting that he would only vote to avert a government shutdown if Obamcare implementation is halted completely:

    HEWITT: Senator Rubio, the continuing resolution is headed your way. How is this stacking up as Act III of the spending drama?

    RUBIO: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that’s where we’re headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem… But here’s what I’ve said about this continuing resolution. Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund Obamacare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence, if they get a continuing resolution and we can get a vote on that and pass that onto the bill, I’ll vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent, and that’s defund this health care bill, this Obamacare bill, that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy. You’re already starting to feel the outer edges of that… I already am running into businesses that are planning next year on not hiring people or laying some people off so they don’t have to meet these mandates. Others are going to push their employees off of their private plans that they offer and onto these exchanges, driving up the cost for the public. So this is going to be an implementation disaster. It’s going to hurt our economy severely. And we’re not spending enough time talking about that.

    Later on, Hewitt asked if Rubio would settle for partially defunding Obamacare — specifically, by repealing a provision levying a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices — in exchange for funding the government. Rubio replied, “I don’t know if that alone would be enough” to secure his vote for the continuing resolution, but that he “certainly would support that amendment.”

    Defunding the health reform law would devastate tens of millions of Americans who would no longer receive federal subsidies for purchasing health insurance or have expanded access to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. It would also fly in the face of public opinion, since the majority of Americans believe that implementing Obamacare should be a “top priority” in their state. And contrary to some Republicans’ claims, a government shutdown would be a decidedly bad development for essential government services and the American economy at large.

    Security

    Number Of Radical Anti-Government Groups ‘Reached An All-Time High’ In 2012, Report Finds

    By Ben Armbruster on Mar 5, 2013 at 1:58 pm

    The Souther Poverty Law Center released a new report on Tuesday finding that “the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012″ and that the number of hate groups has remained at “near record levels” of more than 1,000. The group is calling on the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to increase the amount of resources devoted to tracking and combatting domestic radical anti-government groups.

    The SPLC says the number of “Patriot” groups (of which, 321 are militia groups) is up 7 percent from 2011 and up an incredible 813 percent since 2009. (The SPLC defines Patriot groups being comprised of conspiracy theory-minded individuals who believe the federal government is run by secret “globalists” aimed at taking away American freedoms and establishing a global world order based on socialist principles; and defines a Militia group as a paramilitary wing of the former.)

    “These numbers far exceed the movement’s peak in the 1990s, when militias were inflamed by the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 assault rifle ban,” an SPLC press release states.

    SPLC Senior Fellow and lead author of the report Mark Potok said there are two main reasons why the numbers of Patriot and militia groups have skyrocketed since 2009: the election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama (which includes the coinciding nation-wide demographic changes) and fears compounded by the economic crisis and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. Adding fuel to the fire, Potok said in a press call on Tuesday, is Obama’s reelection and the debate on gun regulation after the shooting massacre in Newtown, CT in January.

    “This is the fourth straight year of really explosive growth of Patriot and militia groups,” Potok said. “We’ve never seen this kind of growth in any group that we cover.”

    SPLC President J. Richard Cohen sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking that their departments increase resources to combat the problem.

    “In January,” the letter says, “a former Tennessee police chief who conducts weapons training for law enforcement threatened in a video posted on YouTube to ‘start killing people’ if President Obama uses his executive power to enact gun control measures.” Cohen adds that “the resources devoted to countering domestic hate and radical antigovernment groups and those they may inspire do not appear commensurate with the threat.”

    Indeed, DHS stripped down its domestic terrorism unit after Napolitano ordered a 2009 report on domestic right-wing extremism withdrawn because of significant political backlash from mainstream conservatives.

    Daryl Johnson, the 2009 DHS report’s lead author who subsequently wrote a book chronicling his experience at DHS and its lack of focus on domestic extremists, said on Tuesday in light of SPLC’s new report that he “can’t imagine what it will take for DHS to recognize this growing and dangerous threat within the homeland,” adding that the report “should raise a red flag and cause concern.”

    “As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” Cohen said in the SPLC’s press release, which adds: “In October 1994, the SPLC wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno about the growing threat of domestic extremism; the Okla- homa City federal building was bombed six months later in the country’s deadliest act of domestic terrorism.”

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