Since I am talking to republicans who live in Amherst County it is safe to guess your income is lower. Republicans make up about 60% of the voters in the county so it is within your power to access and stop this madness at the county level. How can we reach out and educate you to what the GOP has in mind for you. What delusional world have the words of tea party, republican and GOP dreamers taken you to? Wake up please, once you loose the benefits Eisnhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan fought hard for you to enjoy, you will be out of luck. Todays GOP is Ultra Right Hard Core Conservative and they do not represent normal people. They do not represent you, they pose a great danger to your lifestyle. Where our country goes from here is up to you. Use your mind. It is not impossible to see the GOP Plan and lets hope it can be stoped. The GOP is not talking about taking things from people in other states, You Are Included in the Benefit Losses.
ACVDN
Republicans have chosen Rep. Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, to respond to the president's State of the Union address tonight. In the civility intermission that has followed the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabby Giffords just outside Tucson, Ryan will no doubt be respectful, and sorrowful that he must dissent from the president's course. Don't be fooled.
Ryan is an Ayn Rand-quoting zealot, one of the Republican Party's self-styled "Young Guns." He's spent his adult life inside the Beltway, on the political right, with no experience in the world of business, labor, the executive branch or the private sector. Incubated in a right-wing think tank, writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William Bennett, he was elected to Congress at age 28. Ryan became the most loyal of loyal foot soldiers in the Congress presided over by Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert, a fact Ryan now glosses over as he describes those Congresses as "corrupt."
Ryan has been dubbed a Republican "thinker" by national reporters desperate to find someone they can praise in a party that was extreme before the Tea Partyers came to town. But, in fact, his rhetoric is a barely varnished echo of the ravings of Glenn Beck.
He accuses Obama of a "treacherous plan," saying that Democrats have a "hardcore-left agenda," and claims that Democrats are steering the country "very far left, very fast" - a direction he describes as "completely antithetical to what this country is about."
This sort of rhetoric, once scorned as sophomoric at best, is now common currency on the Republican right. While Ryan will be careful to avoid such language in the GOP response to the State of the Union, he'll reveal his ideological zealotry in the policies he will propose.
Most of those policies will come from Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future," a budget manifesto published last year that The Post's Ezra Klein aptly described as "nothing short of violent."
In a nation where the top 1 percent already captures 25 percent of the nation's income and possesses more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, the roadmap would give the richest households a new round of staggering tax cuts. It would reduce tax rates, eliminate taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, and abolish the corporate tax, the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax.
The respected Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, drawing on estimates of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, concluded that the average tax cut for the top 1 percent of the population (with incomes over $633,000) would be $280,000.
The richest one-tenth of one percent, who had incomes over $2.9 million in 2009, would pocket a handsome $1.7 million a year in tax breaks. Some of this revenue would be replaced by a value-added tax that would raise the cost of every good Americans buy,
ensuring that middle-income people would pay far more in taxes than they do now. Some would be made up by drastic cuts in health-care spending. Ryan's giveaway to the rich would also drive up federal deficits and debt.
Understanding the purpose of the "roadmap" is key to understanding Ryan. When he speaks of "fiscal responsibility,"
what he really means is that middle-class and working Americans will shoulder the responsibility of tackling debts and deficits, while multinational corporations and financial institutions will reap the benefits of favorable government policies and taxpayer-funded bailouts.
His plan would unravel employer-based health care by ending the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. It would eliminate traditional Medicare, eviscerate Medicaid, and terminate the Children's Health Insurance Program.
These would be replaced by a voucher system designed to lose value over time. Ryan would also use "price indexing" to
slash average Social Security benefits by 16 percent for those retiring in 2050 and 28 percent in 2080.
As head of the House Budget Committee - accorded what House Speaker John Boehner calls "stunning and unprecedented" power
to shape the budget - Ryan is leading the GOP's charge to cut $100 billion out of "non-security discretionary spending" this year - requiring cuts of 20 percent in everything from the FBI to cancer research, Pell grants for students, Head Start and grants to public school districts.
This is a recipe, given the country's faltering growth, for increasing unemployment and misery. Mitch McConnell sees this as the way to destroy Obama and for the Republicans to win the 2012 Preasidental election.
Ryan, of course, refuses to identify which programs would be cut, or how deep the damage would be. "I'm a budgeteer," Ryan says. "I just bring down the cap" - an utterly irresponsible description of budgeting, which is entirely a question of choosing priorities.
As a career politician steeped in the art of "framing" a poll-tested, focus-grouped message to make it palatable, Ryan will no doubt sound reasonable, invoking basic American values, promising that jobs, growth and opportunity will result if only we adopt his priorities. But don't just listen to State of the Union platitudes. Consider the record and the proposed policies. Beneath that shock of unruly hair is an ideologue with extreme notions that, if adopted, would endanger our future, and leave most Americans far worse off.
Martins Store Virginia, Amherst County
ACVDN thanks Katrina vanden Heuvel for this story.
Katrina vanden Heuvel has been The Nation's editor since 1995 and its publisher since 2005. She is the co-editor of Taking Back America—And Taking Down the Radical Right and editor of The Dictionary of Republicanisms.
She is also co-editor of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers and editor of The Nation: 1865-1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.
A weekly columnist for WashingtonPost.com, she is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on MSNBC, CNN, ABC and PBS and public radio. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Boston Globe and now in the Amherst County Virginia Democratic News. Her blog for the nation.com is Editors Cut .
Meadowview Hills Virginia News, Amherst County
Hey its up to you. These politicians have more money than God and they have sold heir souls to big business but your vote still belongs to you. All I'm asking is that you use your mind before you give your vote away. That is not a lot for one person to ask of another. If you will do that I will return the kindness by scrutinizing the bull crap on the Democrat side. Together we can make our country strong and great again. If we continue to play the GOP's say No to everything game there is no hope.
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News
