Ladies and gentlemen, let's meet our peacock feather hair extensions Republican panel! Leading off on the Senate side is Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, chief architect of the GOP's 'jobs plan.' If that's a plan for creating jobs, the Black Plague was a public health initiative. Let's take a look at its highlights, which we can call up from Sen. Portman's own website before you can say bring out your dead!
The plan's first statement is that we must "begin living within our means." That's coded conservative language for cutting government spending on things like police, firefighters, and teachers. \This part of the "jobs plan" includes a "balanced budget amendment," spending limits, and "spending cuts." That's three different ways of saying "let's create jobs ... by firing a lot of people."
Last year's Dodd/Frank bill is a first small step toward urgently-needed bank reform which the Republicans say it's too "costly" and "job killing." The total cost of unreformed banking in 2008 was tens of trillions in lost cheap feather hair extensions wealth, and tens of millions of lost jobs. What they're really saying is, "Wall Street spends billions of dollarson campaign contributions, and it would be too costly to lose them - too costly for us."
"ObamaCare" is the Republican code for "the health law we supported when it was first drafted by the American Enterprise Institute, and then it was proposed by our Senators as an alternative to what we then called 'HillaryCare', which we embraced when Mitt Romney passed it in Massachusetts, and which we then decided was intolerable when it passed during a Democratic President's term -- after which we affixed his name to it as a pejorative term."
That's what they mean to say when they say "Obamacare."
Unlike his Republican peers, Portman said recently that he'd be open to some "revenue enhancement." That phrase is Beltway code for "increasing taxes on the middle class so the wealthy aren't disturbed." Expect more of cheap hair feathers this "flexibility" in the weeks to come.
There's way too much in the wacky Portman plan than we can cover here, including a ban on any control of greenhouse gas emissions and lots of new international trade deals that'll create new jobs ... in other countries, by destroying millions more of them here.
If there's one common thread running through this grab bag of far-right wish list items, it's this: None of them create jobs, and most of them would destroy them by the millions. It's an antimatter jobs plan, produced in some alternative universe, and like anything made of antimatter it would cause a massive explosion if it touched anything in our world.
That's the bad news about Portman. Want the good news? He's the moderate Republican on the Committee. Two of the Junta's other members, Dave Camp and Jed Hensaerling, voted for the Republican Study Committee budget, a document that's the political equivalent of Ozzy Osbourne wholesale feather hair extensions biting the head off a live bat onstage
