When Senators Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell voted against H.R. 4213: Tax Extenders Act of 2009, March 10, 2010, they voted against folks on Medicare, folks on Medicaid, the unemployed and folks on COBRA. Click here to see the roll call.
Jim Bunning And Mitch McConnell Voted Against The Elderly On Medicare:
Dot Med News The Senate voted Wednesday to delay the 2010 cut in Medicare physician reimbursement. The 21% reduction was to go into effect March 1 till a vote last Tuesday put it off till the end of March. Yesterday's follow-up means the cut will take effect October 1.
Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell voted to allow the 21% reduction Medicare physician reimbursement. Shame on them.
The Kentucky Senate race was getting quite boring. Leave it to eccentric, Looney Tune Jim Bunning to heat things up. One would like to think that the outgoing Senator who was shunned by the McConnell machine because he is a can or two short of a six pack decided to shake up this race but then you realize that well, Bunning is a can or two short of a six pack. However, his callous, uncaring and hypocritical "stand" earlier this week against the nation's unemployed has indeed ignited the Kentucky Senate race, which quite frankly was becoming a yawner.
By now everyone knows about the block Jim Bunning decided to put on unemployment benefits. However, this move did not just effect the unemployed. All across America many federal programs will furlough 2,000 other workers without pay and will indefinately end construction projects across the country.
When Jim Bunning blocked unemployment benefits for those who lost their jobs due to the economy he helped crashed I would have to say that most Republicans were pretty torn. I mean, Kentucky's Repubican Senate candidates were all for it, and stated so publicly but in the Republican leadership there seems to be a little angst. See, Republicans simply cannot afford to let the American people hear how they really feel, but deep inside they are all Jim Bunning.
Huffington Post Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, is single-handedly blocking Senate action needed to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits next month. Read more.
Working America According to Reuters,
attempts by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to move an
emergency unemployment aid extension in the Senate are being thwarted: Reid
had hoped to quickly pass a short-term extension of unemployment
benefits for more than a million people to ensure they are not
terminated at the end of February, but Republican Senator Jim Bunning
blocked it.
Policy advocates on Capitol Hill this morning confirmed that Sen. Bunning (R-KY)
is currently holding up an emergency measure to extend the expanded
federal support for unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidies set to
expire in three days.
A spokesman for Senator Bunning said this
morning that Bunning had objected to Senator Reid's unanimous consent
request to proceed on the measure, citing a dispute over how it should
be funded.
Kentucky's jobless rate, which exceeds the national average, increased to 10.7%
in December, the last month of available state statistics. Numerous
counties in Kentucky report unemployment rates of 13% or more, as can
be seen on this Washington Postinteractive map of unemployment rates by state and county. (click on the map to zoom in) Several counties in rural eastern Kentucky have jobless rates of 15% or higher, including Magoffin County at 21.4%. Read More
While I have been disappointed by the direction of this Administration one thing remains true. When they took office our country was disasterously close to a Great Depression. A Depression wrought by the irresponsible policies of greed enacted during the Bush years of being rubber-stamped by an uncaring Republican Congress. While I personally feel the stimulus did go far enough, the Looney Tunes on the right are now deeming the whole bill a failure. Yes, talking heads like Glenn Beck may bark like a dog, but the facts show they are just licking their own butts.
Want to know how bad the economy the Republicans crashed has been for America?? All one has to look at is the numbers for working families. Sadly, millions of American families are stuck with both breadwinners unemployed. Besides having a "lost generation" of young folks who cannot find a job, we also are quickly gaining a "lost generation" of parents that are unemployed.
Opinion America the land of the free and the home of the brave. Really? Brave, I don't think so. How can we consider ourselves brave when we let the Wall Street elite steal our money and then blackmail us to bail them out and we sit back and twiddle our thumbs like a bunch of wimps?
Reason.Com Just how much has household net worth dropped since the peak? Calculated Risk calls it $14 trillion, as does CNN, which refers to an "all-time high of $64.4 trillion in the second quarter of 2007."
New York Times Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed. Read more.
Today, another sign came across the board that the economic crisis is abating. Long touted as a way to attack the stimulus by every right-wing radio hatemonger and politician the unemployment numbers will depress many on the other side of the aisle. Glenn Beck will cry. Rush Limbaugh will call the press Nazis. However, they did not get the 10% unemployment they were dreaming of.
Exxon Ed Whitfield is as usual slightly confused. He seems to think he can have it both ways. His actions are reminiscent of the hypocrisy that is only known as Kentucky Republicanism. On one hand, he does not want his constituents to benefit whatsoever, but on the other hand he wants to complain about how much they do benefit.
As if we needed even more evidence of the failure of Kentucky's Congressional delegation which has included such visionless folks such as Mitch McConnell, Jim Bunning, Ed Whitfield, Geoff Davis, and Hal Rogers it has come across the wire. The consequences of their many years of rubber-stamping the failed Bush policies of spend, spend, and dole out Corporate welfare and de-regulation is now being felt.
If you wander around the fringes of economic discussion on these Interwebs, you may encounter sites extolling the wondrous virtues of the VAT. "If only we would adopt a massive VAT, our two decade long decline in manufacturing output would be gone, and we would be an exporting powerhouse once again." ... well, no, that would be a stereotyping of the argument. A real sample of the claims sound more like this, from tradereform.org:
I Squared R Element Company is in Akron, New York. It makes industrial heating elements which are used for many processes to make other things, including glass and computer chips. The company was the low bidder on a contract to export to China.
However, the company lost the bid. Why?
I squared R was told it did not include, in its bid, China's 10% customs duty or the 17% value added tax(VAT) that must be paid at the border.
All our goods pay a 17% VAT at the Chinese border. And the uninformed say we are a high cost producer. Chinese exporters also get a 17% VAT rebate, i.e. they get paid to export.
And, yes, I have picked out this quote to pick on VAT-uber-alles advocates, precisely because it focuses on the part of the argument that is simply wrong.
(Great relevant diary for discussion. - promoted by RDemocrat)
So there’s a lot of conversation out there about car dealerships being told they won’t be selling cars for Chrysler and GM any more.
The idea, we are told, is to save the auto manufacturers money by reducing the number of dealerships with whom they do business.
I don’t really know that much about the car business; and I really didn’t understand where these cost savings would come from, but I was able to have a conversation with the one person I do know who actually could offer some useful insight.
Follow along, Gentle Reader, and you’ll get a bit of an education at a time when we all need to know a bit more about these companies we suddenly seem to own...and about the closure of thousands of local businesses that will make the news about our bad job market worse.
If you wander around the fringes of economic discussion on these Interwebs, you may encounter sites extolling the wondrous virtues of the VAT. "If only we would adopt a massive VAT, our two decade long decline in manufacturing output would be gone, and we would be an exporting powerhouse once again." ... well, no, that would be a stereotyping of the argument. A real sample of the claims sound more like this, from 
