Another Terrorist Group Announced Plans to Kill Americans

Last week another terrorist group announced plans to kill Americans, far more than Al-Qaeda or ISIS. The group then met to celebrate with their recently selected supreme leader, a prickly fellow known for rambling speeches exhorting his followers. No this wasn’t in a far off land, it was in Washington, D.C.

I’m talking about the House Republicans who voted for Trumpcare. The vote shows that Republicans like Lamar Smith and Paul Ryan are real American terrorists because they are guaranteed to have blood on their hands if the Senate Republicans choose to pass it. By repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act which provided expanded Medicaid and subsidies for health insurance purchased on the exchange they have endangered the health of 24 million Americans, thousands of whom will die and tens of thousands of whom will suffer bankruptcy while trying to stay alive.

Subsidies and Medicaid expansion aren’t the only parts of the Affordable Care Act that will get the axe under this legislation, coverage for pre-existing conditions is lost and lifetime caps are back. My friend Sean’s son, Navin, was born with a congenital heart defect which has already cost over a million dollars to treat. My wife has had five surgeries and spent months in intensive care and therapy in her 50 years. Well over a million dollars has been spent on her healthcare. Under Trumpcare both could be denied coverage for future medical expenses.

Some apologists claim that pre-existing condition coverage isn’t removed by the bill but that’s a lie because it allows states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act requirements and Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, has already announced plans to do so. Other states will surely follow and if your employer has operations in one of those states they’ll have the option of choosing to use the rules of whichever state suits their financial goals and if that means their workers get a poor quality insurance plan then too bad.

Trumpcare also allows states to waive the requirement that ill and healthy individuals pay the same rates and gives the states the option to setup high risk pools again. Having had my wife insured through the Texas high risk pool I can tell you the rates will once again be outrageous. There were years where we spent as much as 25% of my gross pay in healthcare. If I had earned a lower wage we could never have afforded it.

All this and more was done so that Republicans can give huge tax breaks to their biggest campaign contributors. Trumpcare provides $27 billion in tax breaks each year for the top 4.4 percent, people earning $250,000 a year or more. Donald Trump alone could save $30 million a year under the House bill.

The 217 men and women who voted for Trumpcare chose tax breaks for billionaires over the lives and health of their fellow American while claiming to be good Christians. With friends like these why are we worried about al-Qaeda or ISIS?

Congressional Republicans aren’t the only group to blame though, every one of you who voted for a Republican in 2016 is complicit in the suffering this will cause millions of Americans, young and old alike.

Published in the Seguin Gazette May 12, 2017

“Hands off Obamacare, Medicaid and Medicare”

On Sunday afternoon more than 20 people from New Braunfels and other parts of Comal County rallied in support of the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare outside Congressman Lamar Smith’s office. All the participants are worried that access to healthcare will be lost for themselves or family members or friends if Republicans in Congress pass legislation to dismantle the Affordable Care Act without even having a replacement for it.

It is widely understood that the Republican plan to convert Medicare to a voucher will jeopardize the health and lives of many seniors. The problem is there is no guarantee that they’ll be able to acquire comparable insurance even with higher premiums since many of those on Medicare are much sicker than the average population. Since insurers make their profits by avoiding the sickest people some will find healthcare unattainable.

Don’t forget that a significant fraction of Medicare participants, like my wife, aren’t retirees, they’re people who are totally disabled and frequently unable to acquire health insurance on the individual market at any price. Even the Texas high risk pool didn’t want her and pushed her off to Medicare.

Let’s not forget about Medicaid, Texas Republicans have already cut reimbursement rates for some of the most vulnerable children in Texas. Now those children can’t get the physical therapy and other services they need to be even remotely healthy or self sufficient.

Lamar Smith needs to be told “Hands off Obamacare, Medicaid and Medicare”.

Lamar Smith fulfills Upton Sinclair's quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Congressman Lamar Smith’s August 9 letter “Funding NASA” makes the spurious claim that climate change research is part of a partisan agenda. Nothing could be further from the truth. Global climate change is the single most important threat to the future of mankind.

97% of climate scientists, not to be confused with the local TV weatherman, say that humans are the cause of most of the coming global climate change and we have the power to mitigate it. If 97 aerospace engineers told you that the airliner you were about to board would likely crash on the next flight and 3 paid by the airline said it wouldn’t; who would you believe?

Most of the scientists claiming that human caused global climate change is a hoax are paid for by the very industries contributing the most to the problem. These are the same people using the same techniques to obfuscate scientific truth who stymied action on leaded gasoline and the connection between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Learn the truth about how industry has poisoned our environment and our political system, read “Merchants of Doubt” by Professor Naomi Oreskes and historian Erik Conway.

Why are our tax dollars subsidizing highly profitable corporations?

Roughly half of all fast food workers use some form of public assistance, Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance. 68 percent of fast-food workers are single or married adults who aren’t in school, 26 percent are raising children. Big companies that pay minimum or near minimum wage to their mostly adult employees are responsible for a high percentage of people on government assistance.

If you’re one of the 49 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes then you are being taken advantage of by Mike Duke, CEO of Walmart, and other top executives because you’re subsidizing their profits to the tune of $7 billion every year. That’s what it takes to pay for the public assistance relied upon by their employees. McDonald's subsidy alone is worth $1.2 billion a year, which equates to more than a fifth of its 2012 profits.

If you think you pay too much in federal taxes ask Congressman Lamar Smith why he allows your tax dollars to subsidize the profits of big corporations like McDonald’s, Walmart and Papa John’s. If you think your state taxes are too high ask Senator Donna Campbell why she isn’t working to make highly profitable companies pay their employees enough that they don’t qualify for public assistance.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to stop subsidizing their profitability by raising the minimum wage so that anyone working a full time job didn’t need our tax dollars to pay for health care, food and rent?

Lamar Smith, a latter day Ebenezer Scrooge

Here we are in the midst of the season of giving when churches, the Marines and police departments across the nation make special efforts to help the less fortunate and yet Congress led by wealthy men is taking away needed assistance. I’m talking about men like Lamar “Scrooge” Smith voting to reduce food stamps and failing to continue extended unemployment benefits for those who’ve lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

There are more than 47 million Americans facing hunger today and yet congressional Scrooges have cut $40 million from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program which means 4 million Americans, many of them children, will have less to eat. Food Banks are already unable to keep up with demand this shameful cut will only make things worse.

Extended unemployment benefits are next on the chopping block and the excuse the Scrooges offer is the ridiculous claim that unemployment insurance benefits discourage people from looking for work; but the reality is that there are at least three unemployed people for every job opening. Even if every open job were filled today 65% of the currently unemployed would still be without a job. How many of us would sit back and accept even the maximum $1800 a month benefits rather than take a job that pays even half of our former salaries? That barely covers my health care bills and groceries; where would mortgage payments, utilities and gas for the car come from?

Lamar Smith advocates for Soviet style political interference in science

Lamar Smith hasn’t learned a thing from the Soviet Union’s dalliance with political interference in science. In the 1940’s Trofim Lysenko was an agronomist who became director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. He used political pressure to direct agricultural scientists and farm policies that ruined farm productivity for decades before he was finally discredited. Smith wants to revisit Communist style control of science here in the U.S.

While Smith’s immediate target seems to be political science research that he doesn’t agree with he is a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist which believes that sickness is an illusion caused by mistaken beliefs, and that the sick should be treated by a special form of prayer intended to correct those beliefs, rather than by medicine. Will that non-sense lead him to advocate for eliminating funds for medical research?

Smith’s bill would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. His bill would also start a process to determine whether the same criteria should be used by every other federal science agency. Do we really want a bunch of lawyers deciding what is worthy of scientific research?

House Republicans taking hostages once again

Congressmen Quico Canseco and Lamar Smith conspired with the rest of the House Republicans to give their constituents and 160 million Americans a lump of coal this Christmas by choosing not to pass the payroll tax cut extension and unemployment insurance benefits extension. What may be even worse though is they also chose not to pass the bill that would have prevented Medicare from cutting doctors’ reimbursements by a whopping 27% starting January 1. Remember this is a bill that passed the Senate 89-10 with support from both Sen. Cornyn and Sen. Hutchison.

What will our seniors like me do when in need of medical care while House Republicans hold us hostage for political gain? Like any other hostage taker Canseco and Smith don’t care.

Stopping online piracy or stifling the internet, you decide.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) recently introduced of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US House of Representatives. It sounds great, at least it does until you actually read some of the provisions in it.

 Without ever appearing before a judge or setting foot in a courtroom the owner of copyrighted material could shut down any website's online advertising programs and block access to credit card payments. The police can’t search your house without a warrant from a judge but a company can stop you from earning a living just by filing a document with the Clerk of Court.

Under this ridiculously broad bill, you can be found in violation if the core functionality of your site "enables or facilitates" infringement. Bye bye YouTube, so long Flickr and Shutterfly or any website that allows users to post text, photos or video. That means this newspaper’s website too my friends. Heck the entire internet enables or facilitates infringement.

Is this really the road we want to be on, do we really want just anyone to be able to shutdown nearly any website on a whim?

Why aren't tax breaks for working stiffs the same as tax breaks for millionaires?

President Obama has proposed to extend the payroll tax cut for low income Americans. Since the TEA Party acronym stands for “taxed enough already” you’d think that TEA Party Republicans would jump on that and agree with the President for a change. You’d think wrong.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) told the AP “It's always a net positive to let taxpayers keep more of what they earn, but not all tax relief is created equal for the purposes of helping to get the economy moving again.”

Rep. David Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said he also opposed the 12-month tax cut because it would cost the government about $120 billion next year if it were renewed.

According to the Washington Post the Bush tax cuts amount to about $130 billion per year so I guess that means Republicans will now be against renewing those too. Why aren’t we hearing Lamar Smith and Quico Canseco coming out in favor of either continuing the payroll tax cuts or not renewing the Bush tax cuts? Is expecting logical consistency too much to ask?

It looks like Smith, Canseco and Hensarling never saw a millionaire tax break they didn’t like.

Thanks TEA Party Republicans

We all owe a debt of gratitude to TEA Party Republicans like Quico Canseco and Lamar Smith who trashed America’s historically sterling credit rating and caused a 630 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Their sheer petulance over what is normally a simple housekeeping measure that has been passed dozens of times during both Democratic and Republican administrations, notably 19 times under Reagan alone, has added further drag on our already fragile economic recovery.

Taxpayers will foot the bill for higher interest rates on our national debt while simultaneously losing billions in the stock market which will undoubtedly lead to further job losses as Americans have less money to spend. All this is brought to us by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who promised to do everything in his power to make sure that President Obama doesn’t get re-elected.

So thank you Lamar Smith and Quico Canseco for showing America just how spiteful the TEA Party Republicans can be before the next election so we have our eyes wide open when next we vote.

Dismantling the Social Safety Net - A Republican Theme

Not only do Lamar Smith (R-TX) and the Republican Party want to destroy Medicare which provides guaranteed health care to millions of American seniors, now Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has filed a bill to dismantle Social Security as well by turning it into a privatized system. Sessions calls it the SAFE Act but it should be labeled the UNSAFE Act due to its failure to protect seniors by ensuring that they have enough income to avoid poverty in their last years. Just think the benefits guaranteed by our current system would instead become bets in the casino known as Wall Street.

I don’t know about you but my private investments in mutual funds still haven’t fully recovered from the losses caused by the Great Recession. Let’s not forget that these are the same folks who also believe that Wall Street is over-regulated even though we’ve had to jail Bernie Madoff and numerous others for stealing from investors who will never receive full restitution. Even Alan Greenspan now admits that lax regulation of Wall Street didn’t work.

Do you want to trust the financing of your last years to that bunch of sharks? Are you willing to risk having nothing at 78 years old?

Lamar Smith responds in the SA Express News and my response

Smith's letter:
A recent letter to the editor wrongly accused me of wanting to end Medicare. That is false. The House budget would save Medicare to ensure it is available for future generations. We know that if we do nothing Medicare will become insolvent in 10 years, according to recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

Under this budget proposal, anyone 55 or older would keep their current Medicare system for the rest of their life. And for those 54 and under, the Medicare system would be saved by providing retirees with the ability to choose from a menu of government-supported options.

For the sake of our seniors, we cannot afford to wait to fix Medicare's impending insolvency. Those who oppose the House budget have not proposed any solutions of their own.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/article/Your-Turn-May-28-2011-1399243.php

My response:

Congressman Smith’s letter published May 28 falsely states that he’s protecting Medicare when in fact he’s ending it for anyone 54 and younger. While a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, calling a voucher program Medicare is disingenuous at best. Mr. Smith fails to inform us that the program he voted for will only pay a fixed amount to private insurers who can charge any amount they want for any level of coverage they to choose to offer and deny coverage to anyone they wish all in the name of making a profit.

I hope regular readers will note that he didn’t bother to respond to the question posed in the original letter. “I’m 44 years old and can’t get private coverage now due to several medical conditions; what insurance company do they think will want to cover me when I’m 67?”

There are any number of ways to address the projected funding shortfall including raising premiums, raising co-pays and forcefully prosecuting Medicare fraud. Mr. Smith needs to understand that handing us steaming longhorn droppings and calling it roses doesn’t make it roses.

My 7th grade daughter's letter to the editor

When me and my dad were driving back from school on Friday my Dad told me the terrible news that the House of Representatives failed to pass a bill that would help protect girls my age all over the world from being forced into marriages. As a seventh grader I can’t even imagine what is must be like for girls my age or younger to be forced to marry men as old as my dad and have their children soon after.

I don’t understand why after every member of the Senate voted to pass the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act – S. 987 our local Congressman Lamar Smith voted against it. Mr. Smith claims to be “pro-life” but seems to think it’s “OK” for young girls to die when their bodies aren’t strong enough and ready to have a baby? Why doesn’t he care?

I later found out that some people lied and said that bill would have funded abortions, but anybody can read the bill, which is less than six pages long, and see that it’s not true. Lamar Smith was either too lazy to read the bill or he just doesn’t care about kids because we can’t vote.

Lamar Smith and Republicans want to hide those who support them

Congressmen Ciro Rodriguez and Charlie Gonzalez have voted for the DISCLOSE Act which would require that those who pay for campaign ads be identified in those ads and they have pledged to support several measures designed to return power to the people. They’ve promised to support amending the Constitution to protect America from unlimited corporate spending on our elections, because elections should be won and not bought. The promised to support the passage of the Fair Elections Now Act, providing public financing to candidates who are supported by small donors so they can compete with corporate-backed and self-funded candidates. They’ve also pledged to support passage of lobbyist reform legislation to end the overwhelming influence of corporate lobbyists

How have Lamar Smith and the Republicans voted and what have they pledged to do? Every single Republican in the senate voted against even debating the merits of the DISCLOSE Act. The House Republicans pledged to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires that will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars. They’ve promised to roll back regulations on big oil and Wall Street, the same industries that killed American workers, polluted Gulf of Mexico fisheries and wrecked out economy putting millions of Americans out of work. They’ve pledged to strike down rules reining in credit card lenders and insurance companies.

Why should any Texan support Republicans in November?

What do Obama is a closet muslim, terrorist babies, social security broken and a mosque in Manhattan have in common?

Last Friday, a Republican National Committee woman, Kim Lehman, said about President Obama “… he personally told the muslims that he IS a muslim, read his lips."

Senator John Cornyn recently said the mosque issue would haunt Obama come November. Cornyn says "This is not about freedom of religion."

Texas legislator Debbie Riddle claimed in a CNN interview that there is a nefarious international conspiracy by immigrants to cross the border illegally, while pregnant, to give birth without insurance, to then cross the border back again, so that 21 years later they can send their child back again to do us harm.

Congressman Lamar Smith calls for privatization of Social Security claiming that it is broken even though the bi-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that Social Security has a surplus of $2.5 Trillion that is estimated to grow to $3.8 Trillion in 2020.

What do all these “issues” have in common? They are pure and simple attempts to divert the public’s attention from the reality that the Republican Party has no solutions to the real problems of America especially the lack of job creation. They don’t have any new ideas and the old ones like tax breaks for millionaires have proven not to work during both the Reagan and Bush administrations. While some claim Texas has suffered less than other states that’s only partially true since we have a higher percentage of low and minimum wages jobs than just about anywhere else in the country. Remember that in November.

The debate over Social Security offers a clear choice between fear and reality

Here we are on the 75th Anniversary of Social Security with polls showing that there is considerable support for the program which most believe to be an American institution. The same polls show that most Americans would rather increase their contributions to ensure that benefits will not be cut now or for future generations. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting it to reduce the federal deficit; which only make sense because Social Security isn’t contributing to the deficit in the first place. The bi-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that Social Security has a surplus of $2.5 Trillion that is estimated to grow to $3.8 Trillion in 2020.

Our congressman, Lamar Smith, is a member of the Tea Party Caucus which is supporting HR 4529 which calls for privatization of Social Security. He wrote, "With this account, they will be able to build a "nest egg" for their retirement that cannot be taken away by the government and can be handed down to their children." The Employee Benefit Research Institute recently published a study showing that on average 401k’s lost about 37% in 2009. What if Lamar Smith was successful in his efforts to invest your Social Security savings this way, what would happen to your retirement when the next financial bubble bursts?

If you believe as do most Americans that Social Security is important to the people of this nation then the choice is clear Lainey Melnick should be our next representative to the United States Congress.

Guns vs. Butter in earnest

Our federal legislators are currently considering a budget for next year that imposes a spending freeze for most domestic programs yet somehow there's money to spare when it comes to nuclear weapons pork. The budget requests $7 billion for nuclear bomb making capacities, a $1 billion increase over last year's budget for the same programs and an astounding 40% jump over average annual spending, after adjusting for inflation, on nuclear weapons during the Cold War era.

The budget has hundreds of millions for new bomb plants that would enable the U.S. to increase its capacity to create new nuclear weapons in the future. A new plutonium facility in New Mexico to enable a huge increase in the production of radioactive cores for nuclear weapons is just one example of several proposals in the budget. This piece of pork will cost taxpayers $225 million in the coming year and about $4 billion by the time construction is complete.

While the president is working with the Senate to ratify the New Start Treaty which would reduce the threat of nuclear war, we don’t need to be building capacity to make more nuclear bombs. Just as importantly, we shouldn’t be spending money on unneeded weapons when we can’t balance our budget without cutting domestic spending in areas such as education and alternative energy that would create jobs now and be investments in our future.

Congressmen Lamar Smith and Henry Cuellar need to know that we want to invest in our future not our past.

Lamar Smith's hypocrisy continues - $485 million for a jet engine the Pentagon doesn't want

Congressman Lamar Smith makes much of the deficit on his campaign website referring to it as “a mountain of debt for our children to pay” then going on to say “which why is Congressman Smith voted against the stimulus”. Unfortunately his hypocrisy is showing because he voted to keep $485 million in the Defense Appropriations bill that pays to continue to develop a jet engine that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says the military doesn’t want. This is an alternate engine for the Lockheed built F-135 Joint Strike Fighter which already has an operational engine from Pratt & Whitney. According to Rear Admiral Mike Manazir, the Navy doesn’t want an alternate engine as it “would deploy only one type of engine in its JSFs that go to sea to optimize logistics and supply chains.”

I don’t know about you but if the Pentagon doesn’t want a piece of military hardware I think that’s a pretty good indication that we don’t need it. Smith’s vote amounts to corporate welfare for the GE/Rolls Royce consortium that is developing the engine. I might be able to understand his vote if the engine were being built in his district but it isn’t so he can’t claim local jobs are at stake.

If the deficit is so important to Mr. Smith why is he voting to spend nearly half a billion dollars unnecessarily? According to the logic he espouses on his website that money should go to reducing the deficit.

Elections should be won, not bought

About 30 members of MoveOn.org, Common Cause and the League of Women voters held a rally in support of the Fair Elections Now Act at Congressman Lamar Smith’s San Antonio office Thursday afternoon. We were there to let the Smith know that we “the People” believe that elections should be won, not bought.

The Fair Elections Now Act would provide public financing of congressional campaigns to candidates who voluntarily participate. This bipartisan bill creates an alternative to big special interest money in politics by allowing congressional candidates to run a viable campaign on public funds and unlimited small contributions from ordinary citizens.

Just think, if our legislators weren’t beholden to unions and corporations for campaign contributions they could actually work for the citizens who elect them. Maine has been incredibly successful with a similar plan for state level legislators with about 80% of them participating in the plan.

Don’t you think that banking reform would be much easier to pass with strong consumer protections and regulations that would prevent the need for future bailouts if our legislators weren’t, as Senator Dick Durbin put it, “owned by the banks”? If you want Congress to work for you and not special interests call your representative today and urge him to co-sponsor the Fair Elections Now Act, HR 1826.

Lamar Smith's Pants are on Fire

In Lamar Smith’s article in Wednesday's San Antonio Express-News he offers tort reform as the solution to the high cost of medicine. Tort reform is a red herring. Only from 4 to 7 % of those injured by malpractice even bring suit due to the high cost of litigation. Medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, we have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. Even if we eliminated malpractice insurance costs entirely it won’t substantially reduce the cost of health care in America.

Despite Congressman Smith's contention that Texas Tort Reform has brought back doctors and reduced costs; insurance companies did not drop their rates because of tort reform, instead the state’s insurance commissioner forced them to drop their rates. Shortly after the passage of the Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform Act of 2003, two major Texas insurance carriers requested increases in malpractice insurance rates. One, the Joint Underwriting Association, filed for a rate increase of 35 % for doctors and 68% for hospitals. Malpractice insurance rates did not increase only because the state insurance commissioner denied the request.

Contrary to the claims that defensive medicine drives up costs and tort reform would reduce the practice the CBO found that on the basis of existing studies as well as its own research, savings from reducing defensive medicine would be very small.