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Washingtonpost.com By Harold Meyerson, Thursday, June 2, 12:28 PM

If you think it is Rep. Paul Ryan’s gutting of Medicare that is pulling the Republicans down, you need to think bigger. The House Budget Committee chairman’s proposal to convert Medicare into a private insurance-voucher plan is indeed a political calamity for the GOP, as the results of last week’s congressional special election in Upstate New York showed. But it’s far from the only disaster that the party has visited upon itself.

For even as Republicans have imperiled themselves on the national level, they also seem to be committing political hara-kiri in one statehouse after the next. Republican governors who took office this year or last — the ones as determined as Ryan to do a wholesale rewrite of America’s social contract — have approval ratings that we normally associate with strains of bacteria. What’s more, they’re tanking in many of the swing states that will be key in next year’s presidential election.

In Florida, only 29 percent of voters told the Quinnipiac pollsters last week that they approved of Gov. Rick Scott’s five-month tenure in office, during which Scott has endeavored to slash business taxes — already among the nation’s lowest — while also reducing spending on schools and cutting care for the developmentally disabled. He also tried to end unions’ ability to collect dues through an automatic paycheck deduction (a proposal that lost when some Cuban American Republican state senators opposed it on the grounds that they detected a whiff of Fidel Castro’s suppression of independent unions). A stunning 57 percent of Floridians disapprove of Scott, and by a margin of 54 percent to 29 percent, the state’s voters deem the budget that Scott and the Republican-controlled legislature enacted to be “unfair” to people like them.

Things are looking just as bad for the GOP’s new crop of Midwestern governors. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, whose proposal to curtail collective bargaining for public employees triggered a nationally watched eruption of protest, would now lose in a recall election to either of two Democrats: former senator Russ Feingold, whom he trails by 10 percentage points (52 percent to 42 percent, in a survey by Public Policy Polling released last week), and former Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett (whom he defeated for governor just last November) by a margin of 50 percent to 43 percent.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, unlike Walker and Scott, is a seasoned political veteran, but in his first months as governor he has overreached as drastically as they did. In another Public Policy Polling survey last week, Kasich’s approval rating was a bargain-basement 33 percent, while his disapproval rating had risen to 56 percent. Voters in the PPP Ohio poll were asked if they intended to support the referendum likely to appear on this November’s ballot that would repeal the Kasich-backed law sharply limiting collective bargaining rights for public employees. Ohioans said, by a 55 to 35 percent margin, that they’d vote to repeal it.

And so it goes in state after state. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder had a 33 percent approval rating, against a 60 percent disapproval rating, in a May survey that also found that 71 percent of Michigan voters thought poorly of his budget cuts to public schools, and more than 60 percent opposed his proposed tax reductions on business. A May survey of New Jersey voters by Fairleigh Dickinson University pollsters found that Gov. Chris Christie’s favorables had slumped to 40 percent, while his unfavorables had risen to 60 percent.

Admittedly, it’s a tough time to be a governor, in an economy in which being a governor means having to whack some popular programs. But the Democratic governors of the nation’s two biggest blue states — California’s Jerry Brown and New York’s Andrew Cuomo — both have approval ratings higher than their disapprovals. In a poll released Wednesday from the Public Policy Institute of California, Brown had a 42 percent approval rating, against a 24 percent disapproval rating; Cuomo, in a Marist poll from May, had 54 percent of New Yorkers calling his tenure either good or excellent, 31 percent fair, and just 6 percent poor — truly astonishing numbers for a govenor in the midst of a recession. In contrast to their GOP counterparts, neither Cuomo nor Brown has proposed stripping public employees of meaningful union representation, though both have sought and obtained cutbacks to public programs. The Los Angeles Times/USC Dornsife poll also shows that Californians support Brown’s plan to retain higher tax rates rather than further decimate public schools.

But the Republican governors — like Ryan and his fellow Republicans in Congress — have pursued a more radical course that sharply disadvantages most Americans. Even worse, they have sought to enact their agendas without warning their constituents. Republicans did not run last year on a platform of ending collective bargaining, slashing school budgets and gutting Medicare — in essence, favoring society’s most powerful at the expense of everyone else — yet that’s precisely what they’ve done since gaining power. That’s not merely bad policy; it’s bad faith — and bad news for Republicans’ electoral prospects.

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yeah, there's fair and balance reporting...

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but it fits in with the narratives that last years runaway elections were just a flash in the pan - an anomaly - and that the days of hopenchange are back again. if the republicans are their own worst enemy, it's by not presenting a unified front, and arguing with conviction for their policies. instead, they're caving to the media and the mediscare tactics that have, again, worked. oh and of course the NY26 election is a sign of the wave of support that's coming for democrats next year. all this despite the fact that peloski, reid, obama, and the rest of the democrats have taken us from a ditch to a cliff.

the republicans are taking a beating because they are out in front of the issues, actually proposing reforms, while the democrats are content to offer nothing of their own, sniping from the shadows. such heroes they are. we're in such better shape now than when they took control.

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Originally Posted by Dødherre Mørktre:
but it fits in with the narratives that last years runaway elections were just a flash in the pan - an anomaly - and that the days of hopenchange are back again. if the republicans are their own worst enemy, it's by not presenting a unified front, and arguing with conviction for their policies. instead, they're caving to the media and the mediscare tactics that have, again, worked. oh and of course the NY26 election is a sign of the wave of support that's coming for democrats next year. all this despite the fact that peloski, reid, obama, and the rest of the democrats have taken us from a ditch to a cliff.

the republicans are taking a beating because they are out in front of the issues, actually proposing reforms, while the democrats are content to offer nothing of their own, sniping from the shadows. such heroes they are. we're in such better shape now than when they took control.

Do you not remember what the republicans did before they took the House?  At least the Democrats try to do something.

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Originally Posted by Bryant Platt:

Do you not remember what the republicans did before they took the House?  At least the Democrats try to do something.

what is this "something" they're trying to do? cripple america as an economic and geo-political power? well, mission accomplished. of course the republicans were voting no to the policies pursued by the left. while the rest of the world has been pulling back from massive government spending and involvement, the democrats were in high gear, pushing legislation through, by any means (tricks) necessary, like the atrocious healthcare bill, which has been found not to lower healthcare costs, but to increase them. the bill wasn't even REALLY written, every section was left to the discretion of the secretary of health and human services. the bill has been handed over to the bureaucrats to iron out the details.

good god man, do you not see the debt that obama and the democraps have incurred? more than $3T in obamas 2 years alone. they weren't even passing budgets for crying out loud. now, you don't have to like the republicans - hell i get fed up with them too - but surely you can't have amnesia as to what the democrats have done to this country.

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I see a lot of articles like this. They are fear mongering. Instead of laying out just what Ryan's plan does, it rips it apart verbally. Lay out the plan and let us see how good it is.

I wish they would have done that to Obamacare.

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Originally Posted by Mark Simmons:
I see a lot of articles like this. They are fear mongering. Instead of laying out just what Ryan's plan does, it rips it apart verbally. Lay out the plan and let us see how good it is.

I wish they would have done that to Obamacare.

this is what they do EVERY SINGLE TIME the republicans propose entitlement reform. they've learned that if they just sit back and scare people, and lie about whatever proposal is on the table, that it's a political winner for them. meanwhile, they're just perpetuating the fantasy that despite all of the warnings of programs going belly up, we can just keep everything the same and everything will be fine. shhh, go back to sleep now voters, everything's fine. it was just a bad dream about those evil republican hate mongers who just want to throw granny off a cliff. GAG!

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Originally Posted by Mark Simmons:
I see a lot of articles like this. They are fear mongering. Instead of laying out just what Ryan's plan does, it rips it apart verbally. Lay out the plan and let us see how good it is.

I wish they would have done that to Obamacare.

And all the talk of "death panels" etc during the health care debate was impartial and unbiased analysis/commentary as opposed to fear mongering?

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Originally Posted by Kieran Colfer:

Originally Posted by Mark Simmons:
I see a lot of articles like this. They are fear mongering. Instead of laying out just what Ryan's plan does, it rips it apart verbally. Lay out the plan and let us see how good it is.

I wish they would have done that to Obamacare.

And all the talk of "death panels" etc during the health care debate was impartial and unbiased analysis/commentary as opposed to fear mongering?

i dunno bout that, but it was actually accurate.


Although administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama's health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration's goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating "high cost, low-value treatments," by "implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt," and by "directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers."

The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works." To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.

In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it. The existence of such a program in the United States would not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as "too expensive."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358233780260914.html

we also have obama on record as saying this:



maybe you should just take a painkiller for your heart, and basically just go die old lady. you've leeched off of the system long enough, it's time to check out. sorry MFer...