Credit: New York Times

On July 4, U.S. officials, foreign dignitaries and conservative luminaries gathered outside the American embassy in London to unveil a $1 million statue of Ronald Reagan. As it turns out, the timing was more than a little ironic. Because even as the Gipper was honored in Britain, it's increasingly clear he would have no place in today's Republican Party.

From Grover Norquist's anti-tax promise and the Republican Study Committee's "cut, cap and balance" pledge to the draconian anti-abortion oath of the Susan B. Anthony List, hardline conservative litmus tests are proliferating at a dizzying pace. And Ronald Reagan would have failed them all.

If a reanimated Ronald Reagan suddenly appeared in 2011, there is little question his GOP descendants would brand him a Republican In Name Only (RINO) and cast off him off into the wilderness. (As California Rep. Duncan Hunter put it, "a more moderate/former liberal like Ronald Reagan...would never be elected today in my opinion.") Here's why:

1. Reagan tripled the national debt
2. Reagan raised taxes 11 times
3. Reagan expanded the size of government
4. Reagan supported the "socialist" Earned Income Tax Credit
5. Reagan negotiated with terrorists in Tehran
6. Reagan sought to eliminate nuclear weapons
7. Reagan gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants
8. Reagan approved protectionist trade barriers
9. Reagan signed abortion rights law in California
10. Reagan eventually debunked AIDS myths Republicans continued to perpetuate

1. Reagan Tripled the National Debt
As most analysts predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

And that would be a big problem for Utah Senator Mike Lee and the Republican Study Committee now pushing the government-gutting "cut, cap and balance" plan. With its draconian limit on federal spending at 18% of GDP, President Reagan would have broken that promise every year he was in office. And the supposed great tax-cutter would have been in violation of the Constitution's new balanced budget amendment eight years running.

2. Reagan Raised Taxes 11 Times
As ThinkProgress noted, the inedible image of Ronald Reagan the tax cutter is "false mythology." (It is also worth noting that it was President Obama and not Reagan who delivered the largest two year tax cut in American history.) While Governor Reagan doubled California's state spending and signed the biggest tax hike up to that point, as President he raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan "a dear friend," told NPR, "Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration -- I was here."

His hagiographer Grover Norquist may be the man behind the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project to "to encourage the naming of landmarks, buildings, roads, etc. after the Gipper." But as he did with Oklahoma reactionary Tom Coburn, Norquist would have to conclude that the tax-raising Reagan "lied his way into office."

3. Reagan Expanded the Size of Government
Marking Reagan's 100th birthday earlier this year, Sarah Palin told the Reaganauts assembled by the Young Americans for Freedom, "We need to stop spending and cut government back down to size." If that's the case, her role model should be Democrat Bill Clinton and not Republican Ronald Reagan.

As USA Today pointed out five years ago, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, average annual federal spending dropped far more under Bill Clinton (-1.8%) than Ronald Reagan (-0.6%). And as Slate's Michael Kinsley explained ten years ago in marking Reagan's 90th birthday:

Federal government spending was a quarter higher in real terms when Reagan left office than when he entered. As a share of GDP, the federal government shrank from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent--a whopping one percentage point. The federal civilian work force increased from 2.8 million to 3 million. (Yes, it increased even if you exclude Defense Department civilians. And, no, assuming a year or two of lag time for a president's policies to take effect doesn't materially change any of these results.)

Under eight years of Big Government Bill Clinton, to choose another president at random, the federal civilian work force went down from 2.9 million to 2.68 million. Federal spending grew by 11 percent in real terms--less than half as much as under Reagan. As a share of GDP, federal spending shrank from 21.5 percent to 18.3 percent--more than double Reagan's reduction, ending up with a federal government share of the economy about a tenth smaller than Reagan left behind.

As the Gipper's biographer Lou Cannon aptly summed it up, "He was no Tea Partier."

Continue reading »

This weekend, Republicans marked the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan with speeches celebrating his small government philosophy, anti-tax fervor and hard-line foreign policy. But if Reagan was a GOP candidate today, he would doubtless fall victim to violations of his own 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." Because despite all of the right-wing hagiography, Ronald Reagan ballooned the national debt, repeatedly raised taxes, signed abortion rights legislation and negotiated with terrorists in Iran. For those and so many other perceived offenses, the GOP rank and file - and especially its purity-demanding Tea Partiers - would today brand a reanimated Ronald Reagan a Republican in Name Only.

Meet RINO Reagan:

1. Reagan tripled the national debt
2. Reagan raised taxes 11 times
3. Reagan expanded the size of government
4. Reagan supported the "socialist" Earned Income Tax Credit
5. Reagan negotiated with terrorists in Tehran
6. Reagan sought to eliminate nuclear weapons
7. Reagan gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants
8. Reagan approved protectionist trade barriers
9. Reagan signed abortion rights law in California
10. Reagan eventually debunked AIDS myths Republicans continued to perpetuate

1. Reagan Tripled the National Debt. As most analysts predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

Sarah Palin's revisionist history Friday notwithstanding, it was Reagan who put the United States on "the road to ruin."

2. Reagan Raised Taxes 11 Times
As ThinkProgress noted, the inedible image of Ronald Reagan the tax cutter is "false mythology." (It is also worth noting that it was President Obama and not Reagan who delivered the largest two year tax cut in American history.) While Governor Reagan doubled California's state spending and signed the biggest tax hike up to that point, as President he raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan "a dear friend," told NPR, "Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration -- I was there."

3. Reagan Expanded the Size of Government
On Friday, Sarah Palin told the Reaganauts assembled by the Young Americans for Freedom, "We need to stop spending and cut government back down to size." If that's the case, her role model should be Democrat Bill Clinton and not Republican Ronald Reagan.

Continue reading »

Our very own Murray Waas broke the story:

In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.

Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.

So he hired an attorney -- not because he wanted to sue anyone; on the contrary, the shy African-American teenager expected his insurance was canceled by mistake and would be reinstated once he set the company straight.

But Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, ignored his attorney's letters, as they had earlier inquiries from a case worker at a local clinic who was helping him. So Mitchell sued.

In 2004, a jury in Florence County, South Carolina, ordered Assurant Health, part of Assurant Inc, to pay Mitchell $15 million for wrongly revoking his heath insurance policy. In September 2009, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the lower court's verdict, although the court reduced the amount to be paid him to $10 million.

By winning the verdict against Fortis, Mitchell not only obtained a measure of justice for himself; he also helped expose wrongdoing on the part of Fortis that could have repercussions for the entire health insurance industry.

It turned out that Fortis/Assurant had a policy of targeting every customer with an HIV diagnosis for a fraud investigation where the company would search for any pretext to drop the policy.

Rescission--or the practice of dropping insurance policies at the time when customers need them, namely, when they become ill--is widespread and insurance companies are unapologetic for doing so.

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

Nevertheless, the judges involved in this case called Assurant/Fortis' actions in targeting specifically HIV patients "reprehensible." It is also a policy that will end with the health care reform bill.

The Jed Report: I like Russ Feingold, but WTF! And I thought this guy, or maybe this guy, was the the Douchebag of the Week.

Balloon Juice: How the politicization of that patronage mill we laughingly call the Department of Justice could hurt Obama in November.

David E's Fablog: At the International AIDS Conference, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged nations “to follow Mexico’s bold example and pass laws against homophobia.”

Whiskey Fire: And you shall know us by the rolling of our eyes

TPMCafe: Somebody should drive a stake through the heart of the WaPo's coverage of economics, especially the Federal budget. The atrocities continue below...

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Pedaling stupid...They love the 'elitist' meme but only for the black guy...WaPo calls out uppity Obama, later admits bungling his quote, but won't run retraction...Broderella mistakes Ted Stevens for the Prince of Peace...Media stenos gobble up 'Race Card' spin...Poli-tech 'reporter' for the Moonie Times...FBI obtained reporters' phone records...Things they didn't report...What you should know about the Associated Press...CNN anchor (Mrs. Dan Senor) scoffs at hearings critical of her husband's former employers....The Scum Also Rises...CNN uses selective breeding advocate as a source for "Black in America" series...MoDo hits bottom, keeps digging...The Real News Network...

Connecting.the.Dots: V.P. for saving the planet

Facing South: Gulf Stream Coach - the politically connected company handed a $500 million federal contract to manufacture trailers for Hurricane Katrina victims knew its product was contaminated with dangerous levels of cancer-causing formaldehyde in early 2006. But they failed to notify residents or take any action to protect them.

Petrelis Files: AIDS exec gets a pay raise, then cuts food and supplements to patients.

Shakesville: Onward HMO soldiers, marching as to war

Newshoggers: If the only tool one uses is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: The "gas tax holiday" and objective journalism...Crude Reporting..Obama moves right, pundits cheer...Har Har Har...Maybe someday, Maureen Dowd won't write something juvenile enough to make Annals...Zzzzzzzz: get ready for CNN's exciting convention coverage...Can we stop with the "liberal media" trope now?...Bypassing the Corporate Media...Jane Mayer shines some light on The Dark Side...Tom "six months" Friedman is angry because the world hates us...Shut up!...Judy Miller in a tent...

That's a head-to-keyboard sentence if I've ever heard one. Pam's House Blend:

Good god. Perhaps all that work on Liddy has caused something to snap. Out of all the people to try to honor in an Act dedicated to fighting AIDS, Elizabeth Dole spits in the face of LGBTs by proposing the now-dead Jesse Helms be added to the "Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008." Here's the Congressional Record:

SA 5074. Mrs. DOLE submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by her to the bill S. 2731, to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2009 through 2013 to provide assistance to foreign countries to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows: On page 1, line 5, strike ''and Henry J. Hyde'' and insert '', Henry J. Hyde, and Jesse Helms''.

Why is this so unbelievably wrong on so many levels? Because of what Jesse Helms said about AIDS:

Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God says it all: Jesse Helms, the man who in 1987 described AIDS prevention literature as "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up."

Jesse Helms, the man who in 1988 vigorously opposed the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS research bill, saying, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

Jesse Helms, the man who in 1995 said (in opposition to refunding the Ryan White Act) that the government should spend less on people with AIDS because they got sick due to their "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."

I don't know about you, but I smell a Worst Person in The World award going to one Liddy Dole for this crushingly insensitive move.

Bluegal wrote up a little bit about The Mother's Day Project last Sunday, but I wanted to learn more. As someone with a background in visual arts and knowing that through art, humanity has confronted some of our most painful facets, long before we've had the distance and ability to discuss it otherwise, I've participated in the power of this kind of communal project before with the AIDS Memorial Quilt. I thought (and hoped) that The Mother's Day Project could similarly engage some C&L readers and asked project founder Threading Water if she would contribute a guest post to C&L to tell us more about her project, and the desire to honor and acknowledge the human cost of the war:

The Mother’s Day Project is not – as the name would suggest – a cross-stitch sampler of aprons and biscuits and babies and other sentimental iconography associated with mothers and motherhood. Truth is, The Mother’s Day Project is only marginally about mothers, despite its nod to the traditions of home-based needle arts.

Volunteers from 37 states, five countries and three continents, are stitching the names of female members of the Coalition Forces who have died in Iraq. Each stitched name is returned to me to be joined into an embroidered fabric collage panel that will become part of a larger memorial. Additionally, each participant is asked to learn something about the woman whose name they receive and to write about their experience as a Project participant.

The purpose of The Mother's Day Project is to draw attention to the human cost of the Iraq War. While the parameters of the Project focus on women who have lost their lives serving as part of the Coalition forces in Iraq, it is not meant to exclude recognition for others who have lost their lives as a result of this war. Male soldiers, Iraqi men, boys, girls, infants and women have died in the thousands. They are all worthy and deserving of our attention. But, how does one grasp these devastating numbers, many of which are the result of underreporting and best guesses?

• 105 women soldiers

• 4,389 military deaths

• 8,257 Iraqi security forces deaths

• 29,978 wounded US soldiers

• 435 contractor deaths

• 42,096 Iraqi civilian deaths

Continue reading »

In his latest NYT column, Nicholas Kristof returns to a subject he’s covered before: the unwarranted deriding of evangelicals.

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade.

I can appreciate Kristof’s point, but this is unpersuasive. First, the Huckabee comparison is flawed. Judging Clinton on her gender is ridiculous. Judging Obama on race and ethnicity is offensive. But when Kristof hears people disparaging Huckabee at cocktail parties, I suspect he’s hearing people mocking Huckabee’s ideas — which deserve to be fair game in the midst of a presidential campaign.

After all, the former Arkansas governor has been pretty far out there on the fringe. He rejects modern biology. He thinks wives should "submit graciously" to their husbands. He’s equated homosexuality with bestiality. He’s publicly endorsed “quarantining” AIDS patients; he’s boasted that God is directly helping his presidential campaign; and he’s said that if a man and a woman live together outside of marriage, they’re engaging in a “demeaning ... alternate lifestyle.”

And if the intelligentsia ridicule these beliefs, they’re guilty of “intolerance” and “scorn” for the faithful? It’s the moral equivalent of racism and misogyny? I don’t think so.

Addressing California's 14 billion dollar deficit, Ahnold is a one-trick nightmare.

For everyone living in CA like myself, Governor Schwarzenegger's State of the State earlier this year was reprehensible. You can see it here.

We now have no way out except to face our budget demons. It does not raise taxes, it cuts the increase in spending and it cuts that spending across the board. As governor, I of course see first hand that the consequences of cuts are not just dollars but people. I recently brought leaders and advocates of various communities into my office to tell them about what we face financially. I had to look them in their eyes and tell them. I mean talking about fiscal responsibility sounds so cold when you have a representative for AIDS patients or poor children or the elderly sitting across from you. It's one of the worst things about being governor---yet, fiscal responsibility like compassion is a virtue because it allows the necessary programs in the first place.

Steve Lopez of the LA Times wrote a great piece about the Governor and said that we're basically in the same situation that California was in when the Davis recall was instituted.

Only a year ago, Gov. Schwarzenegger was telling us we were in good shape financially, with no need for a rainy day fund. Now he says the wolf is at the door. He's planning to lock the gates at 48 California state parks and beaches. And give get-out-of-jail-free cards to tens of thousands of prisoners statewide. And slash school budgets.

These and many other draconian horrors have been proposed by the governor who rose to power on three main recall promises: No more gaping budget holes. No more reckless borrowing. No more out-of-control fundraising and caving in to special interests. Is it time for Total Recall: The Sequel?

From Gambia Series V at the photoblog "The G8", winner of this year's Best Photography - Post Processing Award from The Photoblog Awards.

G8:

"Four eyes - one destiny.
Of the children that die under age of five:
* In Kenya 35% die of aids
* In Namibia 48% die of aids
* In South Africa 50% die of aids
* In Zimbabwe 50% die of aids
* In Botswana 64% die of aids

It is time to get angry, time to do something. We can no longer sit back and say "that is awful, somebody should do something". It is our world. It's our responsibility."

Open Thread below....