David Young The Epitome Of Today’s Republican Party

Retired teacher schools David Young on taxes (6 minutes) The sound is a little hard to hear so you may want to turn it up.

Iowa’s 3rd district has a tight contest going on and I am kind of at a loss to understand why. During his time in office, David Young has done little to help the people in his district. Instead, like nearly all Republicans of the past two decades Young votes for the think tank prescribed solutions to the problems that are created by Republicans and then goes back to his district to try to sell these bogus policies.

In the video above from last January, Young is trying to sell the huge tax cuts for the richest to some of his constituents. As you can see at least one of his constituents seems have a lot more knowledge about taxes than old Dave there. Frankly Young looks and talks like an old fashioned film-flam man. From the comment posted by Progress Iowa on the video:

“Susie Olesen, a retired teacher from rural Iowa, took Congressman David Young to school at his town hall meeting in Redfield, Iowa yesterday. Olesen accurately describes the TrumpTax scam bill that Young voted for, which would harm middle and working class Iowans. She corrected Young’s statements when he started to spin, and even proclaimed “geez, Louise” at the amount of money Young and Republicans are giving to big corporations who don’t pay their fair share.”

This is hardly the only example of Young trying to sell crappy policies to his district. After promising over and over he would not vote to end pre-existing conditions protections in health care, Young has voted over and over to end the ACA which would in effect also bring back pre-existing conditions clauses in health care insurance. Then he has the audacity to claim he favors keeping the pre-existing conditions protections in place. 

Can we talk about tariffs? Looks like that is something Young doesn’t want to do – talk about them. He is a Trump support from the get-go.

While Young claims he has not done anything to harm seniors, there is this to think about: With the tax cuts voted for by David Young exploding the debt like a fourth of July firework where does Young and his cohorts plan to get the money to just simply pay the interest on the national debt they are raising to such heights? Will Young and his cohorts admit their mistake and raise taxes back up to rates that would pay the debt down to reasonable levels?

Or would he and his party more likely look to stripping other programs to pay just the interest? Little doubt in my mind their answer would be to “reform” programs like Medicare and Medicaid and to finally “reform” Social Security so their buddies on Wall Street can finally get their hands on trillions of dollars to put in their casino.

Based on his record would you trust Young to guard current Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid or would you expect him to go along with his cohorts in raiding the safety net programs so they can continue to give HUGE tax cuts to America’s wealthiest and make the enormous interest payments they are accruing with those tax cuts?

I know when you look at it like that the answer seems simple. Young will continue to go along with Republican policy that is killing the poor and middle class. There are many other issues that Young will go along on and then come back and try to polish up the turd to sell to his district as a piece of art.

Thank goodness Young has a level headed opponent in Cindy Axne. Based on Axne’s record you can believe what she says. You can believe it when she says she will work to keep the pre-existing protections and also to expand access to healthcare for all. You can believe Axne when she says she will actually keep programs for the seniors. You can believe Cindy Axne when she talks about working to help small businesses and public education.

The deciding factor in this race should be who can you trust? Based on their records trust the one who has earned the trust in the past. Cindy Axne can be trusted and will work for all Iowans. Dvid Young will go along with whatever crap proposal Republicans are pushing today and then try to spin you into believing that it is good for you when it is not.

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Full Video: Hubbell vs. Reynolds

Reynolds tried repeatedly to bait Fred into the same old partisan dog fight but Fred wasn’t having it.

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Ankeny Voters!

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Loebsack Took On Federal Government To Help Veteran

“Reed Gillmor is a U.S. Marine Veteran from Davenport who served in the Vietnam War. During his time overseas, Reed was exposed to Agent Orange, a dangerous chemical agent that can cause a number of diseases, and caused Reed to become very ill.

Dave took on the federal government to make sure Reed received all the benefits he was due after risking his life to serve our country. He has always been committed to Veterans, and he will continue to serve our nation’s bravest while in Congress.”

Help keep this great ad on the air.  Click here to donate.

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How Trump Weaponizes Victimhood

Trevor Noah always has the most insightful commentary.

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Vote Out Republicans Today

Today is a great day in America.  You can do something today for  yourself, your family, your country.  You can vote to throw Republicans out of office today!   🙂

If you’re feeling distressed over the Republican congress rubber-stamping Trump’s unqualified, partisan appointees, such as Brett Kavannaugh who was Carl Rove’s right-hand political operative just a few short years ago,  today you can take action. You can help a lot by just voting to throw Iowa Republicans out of office.  You can cast your vote today against every Republican on the ballot and do the world a whole lot of good.

How many Republicans are too many?

Republicans now control all three branches of the federal government – executive, both houses of congress and the judiciary.  In Iowa, it is the same. Republicans control the governor’s office, the state house and the senate.  They have brought hard line partisan politics to our state resulting in chaos and disorder.  They have stripped health care benefits, reduced school budgets, done nothing about our polluted water, gave us a totally unnecessary vote suppressing voter ID law,  more guns, more politicians in the doctor’s office and on and on.

By giving tax breaks to corporations and corporatizing Medicaid, they are stealing from ordinary people and re-distributing Iowa’s wealth not just upward, but to out of state, inaccessible, bureaucratized companies.  They give fancy names and titles to what they are doing, making it all sound like it’s good for us.  They are the party of yesterday, yet they call what they are doing “modernization.”

Seriously, maybe you’ve  heard that both parties are the same or equally bad, but look at Donald Trump, Chuck Grassley, Joni Ernst and compare to 99% of other Democrats and believe your own eyes.

State legislatures and governerships are we the people’s firewall against total control by today’s Republicans.

This mid-term election, voting is imperative. Please don’t consider it optional.  Do it today!

Click here to get started if you are unsure about your voting status and have questions.

We cannot emphasize enough that this year NOT VOTING IS NOT AN OPTION.

Iowa Democrats cannot perform well in November with voter participation resembling that of 2010 and 2014. The party needs to mobilize at least 60 percent of registered Democrats, ideally closer to 65 percent.

With many polls showing President Donald Trump and key Republican policies are unpopular among independents, it’s also critical to identify and mobilize no-party voters who are inclined to support Democrats. As the table shows, turnout drops off much more among independents than partisans in non-presidential years.  – Bleeding Heartland

Starting today through November 5, all 99 Iowa county auditors’ offices will allow early voting during regular business hours.

If you have questions about your status, contact your county auditor’s office. They will be happy to help you.   You can click here to take you to the Iowa Secretary of State website where you can type in your county to find out how to contact your county auditor.

Make no mistake about it, Trump supporting Republicans will be out in force voting even if Dear Leader is not on the ballot.

This year, take care of yourself, your family and your country. Vote Republicans out of office across the state.

 

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Wealth, Taxes And Our Worshipping Of The Wealthy

There is a lot going on in that 30 second clip. The condescending sneer on Trump’s face. The obvious disdain for Clinton. Is it because she is telling the truth? Is it because he thinks women are at best, second rate humans? Is it because he knows that even as Clinton spoke, his gremlins from the Kremlin were hard at work making sure that when the counting was done, Trump would be president?

One could make a case that all of the above are true based on what has become painfully obvious in the past 20 months.

With the release of the New York Times story on the Trump family criminal tax fraud,     we also can put some sense around his snarky comment when he interrupted Clinton and stole some of her time to say he was “smart.”

Despite Trump’s extraordinary efforts to hide his financial information has and will continue to slowly drip out. Every little bit that drips out will reveal more and more that Trump is not “smart” but merely a crook. 

Some folks may think that only the “little people” pay taxes and when folks like Trump can get away with not paying taxes then all the better for him. However, when you look at fraud in another light it is plain and simply theft. Hillary Clinton points that out in that short segment. Paraphrasing what Clinton says is that when Trump pays zero, he is paying zero for the troops, zero for the veterans and zero for America’s schools.

This is not “smart.” Were he not now being investigated for fraud – huge fraud – he still thinks it is “smart” to give nothing back to his country while taking advantage of laws, norms and a justice system that has allowed him to thrive (although it seems “thrive” may be a stretch for Trump).

Which brings me to a couple of points. The first is America’s obsession with wealth and the characteristics we automatically assign to those who are wealthy. If someone is wealthy most Americans immediately think that person is smart or else he or she would not be rich. We are so enamored with the rich that we even give them more in the form of tax cuts for the wealthy that have and will continue to plunge this country into massive debt.

The cost of the tax cuts that have been enacted both at the state level in Iowa and at the national level will be borne for the most part by the poor and middle class. These costs will come in the form higher fees for what were once more reasonably priced services from the state or by having some services no longer available from the state. In those cases a person would either have to purchase such a service from a private company or do without.

One example of this became a national story eight years ago when a citizen in Tennessee who had not paid for fire protection had the local fire department watch his house burn down while they kept a neighbor’s house from burning down. The neighbor had paid the fire protection fee.  

This is a small example of where we may be headed. At the federal level the debt will get so big that paying interest on the debt will simply eat all our tax money. Say the Debt is $40 Trillion and the interest is 5% for the purpose of easy calculation. The interest will be $2 Trillion per year more than twice the bloated military budget. Cuts will be made and they will not be geared toward the political donor class.

At the state level, since the state can’t go into debt we will simply have more of what we have now, cuts to programs that hit the most vulnerable first and hardest. Cuts to education will continue thus degrading Iowa’s once proud public school system and more and more parents will be forced to figure out how to pay for private schooling. Post secondary education will soon be out of reach for most Iowans.

So back to Donald Trump. Is he smart? Or is Mr. Trump and his ilk the class that steals the future of other citizens for their own profit? As a state and a country we hold some things in common, such as the environment, the education of the young, our health, our defense and a system of justice and the infrastructure for commerce that benefit all of us.

When Trump and others cheat the system or rig the system to their benefit they are not “smart.” They are stealing our future plain and simple.

Now to what Adam Smith had to say about our worship of the wealthy and despise of the poor a couple of centuries ago that still rings true today:

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”

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Sunday Funday: Lie-A-Minute Sanders Coming To Iowa

Talk about liars – Ladies and Gentlemen, Chuck Grassley.

Next Saturday our governor will play host to one of the greatest liars this country has ever seen when Sara Sanders comes to Iowa. Since Reynolds can’t tell the truth from a lie, she will be oblivious to Sanders’ true talent. Expect torrents of lies to spew forth as Sanders compares her boss, Dear Leader the First to historical figures such as Washington, Lincoln, Christ and even the big dude his own self, God. 

Sanders is a ‘Truth isn’t the Truth’ and ‘alternative truths’ kind of person. Sanders inherited her ability to be out of touch with reality from her father Mike Huckabee, a well known alternate reality dude.

Lordy, Lordy maybe I’ll just drink a little of that Kool-aid and get happy.

  1. States Rights! What state’s governor signed a bill enacting strict net neutrality for that state?
  1. More than 2400 what signed a letter stating Kavanaugh is not qualified to sit on SCOTUS?
  1. In a speech in Rochester, Mn., Dear Leader claimed Democrats wanted to do away with what aspect of the ACA?
  1. What Iowa congress member stated “‘you don’t know if you’re a harasser until you’ve been accused?”
  1. A year after it’s death dive into what planet, the Casino explorer’s final data was finally being revealed this week?
  1. The Republican congress allowed what bill critical to Iowa to lapse before its re-authorization deadline?
  1. A new law in California requires publicly traded companies to have what on their Board of Directors?
  1. Dear Leader was earning how much a year at age 3 through his father’s companies according to a story in the NYT?
  1. On October 7th 2001, what war began?
  1. Under the cover of the night over the weekend what group of people were moved from their homes to a tent city in West Texas?
  1. Ricin was found in a package sent to the Pentagon this week. Ricin is a poison that comes from what plant?
  1. What game show host gave a cringe-worthy performance as the moderator of a Pennsylvania gubernatorial debate Monday?
  1. What retired SCOTUS justice said that Brett Kavanaugh should not be placed on the Court this week?
  1. Dear Leader openly mocked what victim of attempted rape during a campaign speech in Mississippi Tuesday?
  1. What multi-millionaire Iowa politician applied for payments from the farm bailout money necessitated by Dear Leader’s tariff policies?
  1. In a most unusual weather event two category 5 storms were raging at the same time last week in what area of the world?
  1. More than 1400 people have been declared dead after a tsunami hit what country last Saturday night?
  1. 2:18 PM EDT Wednesday many Americans were shocked by what?
  1. Saturday October 11th, 1975 saw the premiere of what TV staple that still exists today and is known for its political humor?
  1. What famous entertainer and cousin to the Senate Minority Leader was arrested protesting the Kavanaugh nomination Thursday?

Answers:

  1. California
  1. Law professors
  1. The pre-existing conditions guarantees. Another lie from Dear Leader
  1. Steve King
  1. Saturn
  1. The farm bill
  1. At least one woman
  1. $200,000. 
  1. The War in Afghanistan
  1. Migrant children
  1. Castor bean
  1. Alex Trebek. He was booed by the audience
  1. John Paul Stevens
  1. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
  1. Chuck Grassley
  1. The Pacific Ocean – first time for two Cat 5s in the same ocean
  1. Indonesia
  1. Dear Leader’s national warning – it hit radio, TV and cell phones
  1. Saturday Night Live
  2. Amy Shumer

Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian friends tomorrow. We may be seeing you soon.

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Next Week Brings Absentee Voting And Gubernatorial Debates

Image (1) early-voting-begins-today.jpg for post 27211

Monday actually!

Things get real next week folks. Absentee voting begins next week here in Iowa. This year besides just being an opportunity to vote early, absentee voting also gives us the chance to verify that our registration is valid under the new voter suppression laws passed by the Republicans in the Iowa legislature a couple of years ago.

We have published this link many times before, but since things get real on Monday the link to the Secretary of State’s website may have more meaning this week. From the SoS website:

Any registered voter in Iowa may request an absentee ballot through their county auditor.

If you have any questions on voting this year or concerning your registration, call your county auditor during regular business hours (8AM to 5PM M to F).

Also next week we have the first of three gubernatorial debates. The first debate will be Wednesday, October 10th in Des Moines from 7PM to 8PM. As yet there has been no listing of television for the event. Since KCCI in Des Moines is listed as one of the sponsors of the event my guess is that they would carry it live. Hopefully some group will have a video posted to youtube shortly after the debate ends.

One last plea. There is now about 30 days left until the election. This is crunch time. Our candidates will need funds for the final push. Even more important than that is the need for volunteer workers. If you don’t know how to volunteer, perhaps the best thing to do is to contact county party leaders and get contact information from them for the campaigns in their counties.

You don’t want to be the person who wakes up on November 7th and wishes you would have done more.

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Trump Mocks Dr. Ford And All Women

Iowa’s Republican Congress Members Say Nothing

Note here that Trump is not only mocking Dr. Ford herself, but is also mocking a scared young 15 year old girl who feared – quite rationally – that a couple of drunken oafs could accidentally kill her. This is now the Republican Party. Until good people stand up to challenge him, Trump and Trumpism with all its ugliness and hate, is the Republican Party.

Every Republican member of congress has at a minimum been an enabler for Trump. Most have been with him side by side. Is this behavior that you want to reward with your vote? Steve King, right there with Trump. Young? In Trump’s back pocket. Blum? Right there with his arm around Trump.

Tuesday night when Trump was mocking Dr. Ford with a series of lies that are easily refuted, did a one of Iowa’s Republican leadership utter a syllable in Ford’s defense? How about our two top elected females- Reynolds and Ernst. Did anyone hear a peep? How about Grassley who is supposed to be overseeing a non-partisan hearing on the fitness of Kavanaugh? Did he stand up and call out the smears? Of course not.

And the three Republican congress members? Did they stand up to let their female constituents know that they – their representatives in congress –  would not let this kind of smear tactics stand? Haven’t heard a thing yet. They allowed half of their constituents to be smeared along with Dr. Ford by refusing to stand up and say this is over the line.

Dr. Ford is not on trial here, yet the president of the United States has taken it upon himself to ruin her life. By extension, he shows he would do that to any female. Iowa’s three Republican representatives did nothing to distance themselves from Trump’s crazy attacks. How would any Iowa woman ever feel that such representatives would ever have their back?

Is this the kind of representation Iowa women want? Be honest. I have many women in my life and I would expect that were they to call on their representatives they should be treated with the dignity and respect that any human being deserves. 

Yet it is very apparent that Iowa’s three Republican congress members who could have stood up to Trump and FOR women blew it when they had the chance. Any time after Wednesday noon was too late. Call Trump out or your are one with the sniveling coward who attacks women and tries to ruin their lives.

If Dr. Ford isn’t enough proof, how about Stormy Daniels? How about his “Grab them by the pussy” comment? There have been something like nineteen very believable accusations against Trump in recent years. Is that enough for women to say that “we are done with him and those who stand with him”?

Back in Iowa, Governor Reynolds has lined herself up with Trump, even while his tariff policies are reeking havoc on Iowa Farmers. One must assume that as the head of the Republican Party in Iowa, she sets the tone for the downticket races for state senator, and state house plus secretary of state, secretary of agriculture and state auditor.

Reynolds backs bad policy from Trump. She also stands by the horrible Medicaid policy bequeathed her by Terry Branstad. She has also created her horrid policy by signing policy that will drive the state deep in debt. Fiscal mismanagement seems to be Reynolds calling card. In her year and a half Iowa has plunged into debt. Reynolds doesn’t seem to understand why. 

As if bad fiscal policy isn’t enough, Reynolds also has another mark to be ashamed of when Iowa starts selling health insurance policies that bring back the wretched pre-existing conditions. Iowa will be the “laboratory” for going back to the old days when a trip to the hospital could bankrupt a family. Remember, Reynolds wasn’t the only player in bringing bad policy back. She had the help of every Republican state senator and Republican state representative. 

Just so we don’t forget labor. Who can forget when Republicans just surprised everybody by totally changing labor laws in one week from the time it peeked its ugly head out to the time when Terry Branstad had a secret signing ceremony for one person – Jared Klein of Koch funded Americans for Progress.

Mark your calendars. Republicans have one more shiv to stick to labor. That would be to totally redesign IPERS into a 401k. That would be a big payoff to their donors in the financial industry and a kick in the teeth to Labor. Thus while republicans try not to speak about changing IPERS you can bet that come early January changing IPERS will be JOB #1 – with Reynolds ready to sign it in a minute.

Lastly let us not forget how Iowa has seen our once proud public education system degrade from its once lofty status under Republican rule in the state house and governor’s mansion.

So think about your valuable vote. Do you want to condone Trump’s behavior by voting for those who support his every move? Will you support state government that support Trump’s tariff policies that will bankrupt many Iowa farmers?Do you want to support a state government that will enact policies that will continually bankrupt Iowa? That will enact policies that will put many state employees retirement in the hands of the casino called Wall Street? That treats our children’s education as a necessary evil?

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