Throughout their all-out campaign to stop health care reform, Republican leaders have relied on questionable forecasts from the Lewin Group, a subsidiary of insurer UnitedHealth Group. Now, another study funded by UnitedHealth has some unwelcome news for the GOP braintrust: the red states they represent are the unhealthiest in the nation. Following on the heels of the Commonwealth Fund's 2009 Scorecard of state health care system performance, the United Health Foundation's report is just the latest confirmation that health care is worst where Republicans poll best.

As Forbes noted:

The annual ranking looks at 22 indicators of health, including everything from how many children receive recommended vaccinations, to obesity and smoking rates, to cancer deaths.

The diagnosis isn't pretty for Republicans committed to denying the health care their constituents need most of all. The 2009 rankings (above) reveal that nine of the top 10 healthiest states voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Conversely, 9 of the 10 cellar dwellers backed John McCain in 2008; four years earlier, the 15 unhealthiest states voted for George W. Bush for President.

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And the Democrats are doing what, exactly, about this? Do the Republicans want the economy to get worse, hoping it means they'll sweep the mid-terms? (As if we needed any further proof of their sociopathic mindset.)

While this piece is about California, it will apply to other states as well:

Few, if any, unemployed people will be able to get the full 20-week extension in jobless benefits because Congress delayed so long and failed to change a sunset provision, says a California Employment Development Department official.

As a result, most Californians — an estimated 285,000 long-term unemployed — will be able to qualify for only an additional 14 weeks of benefits, says Loree Levy, an EDD spokeswoman.

The legislation, which was approved by the House today, provides 14 weeks of additional benefits to all states. Those states with a jobless rate over 8.5% — California's is 12.2% — get up to 20 more weeks.

But instead of simply tacking on the additional weeks in one new extension, the bill sets up a Byzantine plan that adds two new extensions to the two previous ones before the last extension, referred to as FedEd, kicks in.

Congress previously extended FedEd from 13 weeks to 20 weeks, but included a sunset provision for the end of the year. If Congress doesn't change that provision, FedEd will revert to 13 weeks on Jan. 1.

So even if a person could start collecting on the latest extension today, the calendar will run out before that person can get all 20 weeks of benefits. As currently written, they will get one additional week for the second extension and, because their unemployment will carry into next year, 13 weeks of FedEd, for a maximum of 14 weeks.

As long as the Republicans continue this sort of mindless hatred and exploitation, they will continue to slide further into the political wilderness:

State Sen. David Schultheis said he didn't intend for a Twitter post accusing President Barack Obama of "flying the U.S. plane right into the ground" and ending with "let's roll" as a threat or a reference to United Flight 93, which crashed during the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The tweet stirred ire and some support for the Colorado Springs Republican, whose standard eschewal of political correctness has earned him criticism in the past.

Schultheis' full tweet Tuesday was: "Don't for a second think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. plane right into the ground at full speed. Let's roll."

This isn't the first time Schultheis has stepped in it. In 2007 the xenophobic Republican fought against a bill that would require all pregnant women to be tested for AIDS because the infected children would teach women not to be such sluts:

Schultheis voted in February against a bill requiring pregnant women to be tested for AIDS to prevent spreading the disease to the children. He said then that infected children would set examples for women against sexual promiscuity.

The senator railed in January against public service announcements in Spanish encouraging people to fasten seat belts. Read on...

If you'd like to contact Senator Schultheis and let him know your thoughts on the matter, here is his contact information. Remember...be nice.

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A gaffe, Michael Kinsley famously mused, is what results when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. And so it was Monday when Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch came clean about his party's scorched-earth opposition to health care reform being championed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Hatch acknowledged, as I've long argued, that the GOP is worried not that Obama's health care initiatives might fail, but that they might succeed.

As he did in his pivotal effort to block Bill Clinton's health care efforts starting in 1993, conservative strategist Bill Kristol warned his Republican allies then as now that that a victory for President Obama would earn his party the thanks of a grateful public and guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. In an interview with CNS Monday, Senator Hatch revealed that was his darkest fear as well:

HATCH: That's their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They've actually said it. They've said it out loud.

Q: This is a step-by-step approach --

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, "All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party."

Q: They'll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.

HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That's their goal. That's what keeps Democrats in power.

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From NOW on PBS--Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn't cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

Sadly, this is a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding strategy of delaying clean energy legislation:

• As Chairman Markey shepherded his American Clean Energy and Security Act through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Republicans employed multiple parliamentary tricks to — as Politico put it — “nitpick the bill into legislative oblivion.” Brian Beutler called these nefarious stall tactics, and noted that Democrats responded by hiring a speed reader.
• Last year during the debate over the Climate Security Act, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that the entire 491 page bill be read on the floor of the United States Senate. A strategy memo was leaked at the time detailing the Republican strategy for delaying the bill as much as humanly possible.

While this Republican obstructionism is not necessarily surprising, it is especially egregious this time. Here are a few things about this episode that struck me:

1. Despite the fact that Senator Inhofe has been working to orchestrate this obstruction for a week now, Republicans are pretending the effort is being led by the two moderate Republicans on the committee. Politico handled the stenography.

The Politco, acting as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party? Say it isn't so!

Can you imagine how much further we'd get in this country if we didn't have so many idiots in office?

Joe Sudbay posted this over at Americablog and I had to pass it along.

Remember Fox News' now-defunct Half Hour Comedy Hour? Not Funny. They just don't do cool, well. Case in point, teabagging rapper, Hi-Caliber. Forget about his fact-free, "patriotic rap," he just sucks. I'll let the C&L'ers pick this stinker apart in the comments. Anyone care to offer up a more appropriate rap name for this guy?

from Gary McCoy.

Happy Halloween from all of us at Crooks and Liars.

Open thread below...

The health care reform debate has been brutal. The insurance companies, right wing media and the Republican Party have spreading myriad lies and distortions about the public option and

From the department of You Can't Make This Sh*t Up:

Republican Rep. Tom Price, of Georgia, has introduced a House resolution that would, if passed, express the legislative body's "gratitude and appreciation" to Tea Party members who marched on Washington on Sept. 12 to "show their love of liberty and their grievance with recent government actions."

The proposed resolution is co-signed by more than 70 members of the House.

The proposed resolution would single for praise the "hundreds of thousands of American patriots, who refuse to sit idly by as the Federal Government advances skyrocketing deficits, taxpayer-funded bailouts, pork-barrel projects, burdensome taxes, unaccountable policy czars, command-and-control energy policy, and a government takeover of health care, came to Washington, D.C, to show their disapproval ..."

So let me get this straight...Price wants to pass a resolution that would praise anti-government, right wing extremists who want to overthrow their president? Really? If one single Democrat votes for this garbage, you can be sure we will call them out and ridicule them mercilessly.

Just to be clear, there weren't hundreds of thousands of people at that joke of a march on September 12th. And this was not an anti-tax march, this was a well funded hate-fest that was organized by Fox News and Glenn Beck.

You can read Price's entire resolution here. For added entertainment, click through to the original article and check out some of the comments. Didn't they learn anything from our Jon Perr's 10 Lessons for Teabaggers?

While the Obama White House, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Congressional Democrats debate among themselves whether the so-called "opt out" public health insurance option endorsed by Reid will be included in reform legislation, Minnesota Governor and GOP presidential wannabee Tim Pawlenty has already weighed in. Asked if he would "lead a charge" in his state to opt out, Pawlenty replied, "I think so because I don't like government run health care."

That's easy for him to say. As it turns out, Minnesota is the exception that proves the rule of red state socialism. An increasingly blue state with the 4th best health care system in the nation, the Land of 10,000 Lakes sends far more tax dollars to Washington than it receives in federal spending in return. But for Pawlenty's fellow Republican refuseniks, leaders of red states offering dismal health care and a beneficiaries of a one-way transfer of taxpayer funds from DC, opting out may not be an option.

In recent weeks, Texas secessionists and Georgia legislators have echoed Pawlenty's confused reading of the Tenth Amendment by endorsing a state veto over federal health reform mandates. But just in time for the debate over the merits of a state-by-state "opt out" of a national public health insurance option, the Commonwealth Fund has released its 2009 state health care scorecard. As in 2007, the data reveals the critical condition of red state health care. All of which could present Republican governors and legislatures with a dilemma: Will they refuse to offer lower cost insurance coverage for their residents by rejecting a system funded in part by blue state taxpayers?

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