Stephan: This is what Republican political whoring looks like. And thanks to those Congressional Republicans you are getting screwed weekly or monthly by Big Pharma.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the Senate’s most expensive whores Credit: Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call / Getty
For months now, President Biden’s ambitious economic and social justice reforms have been whittled down and whittled down again. Each time a major policy package is put together, with hopes that it can pass with only 51 Senate votes via the budget reconciliation process, it ultimately runs afoul of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Last week, desperate for concrete policy achievements to lay before voters before the midterm elections, the Democrats settled on a dramatically smaller package of reforms, centered around lowering pharmaceutical drug prices for Medicare consumers, that the two recalcitrant senators appear more willing to sign off on. Then, a few days later, on July 27, after months of obstruction, Senator Manchin announced that he will now support a scaled-down version of Build Back Better that would still include both hundreds of billions of dollars of climate change legislation investments and also the health care package that is near and dear to his heart. Provided that
Eugene Scott and Mike DeBonis , Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: Speaking as a veteran I must say I do not see how any veteran can vote Republican. I just don't know what to say to a man or woman veteran who votes against their own wellbeing, and yet I know millions will.
Comedian Jon Stewart voices his anger at Republican senators July 28 after they stalled a bill aimed at giving greater health-care access to U.S. military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Credit: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a bill to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits weeks after the measure initially sailed through the Senate with 84 votes, angering Democrats, veterans groups and comedian Jon Stewart, a leading proponent to aid the community.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, was particularly incensed by the turn of events. Tester, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), other lawmakers and Stewart on Thursday morning joined veterans outside the Capitol — who originally came to Washington to see the bill pass — to assail the GOP.
“It just makes the gut punch that more devastating,” Stewart said, given the number of veterans who came to Washington hoping the bill would pass. “Their constituents are dying.”
“This is a disgrace,” he added.
The bill would significantly change how the Department of Veterans Affairs cares for veterans who […]
Stephan: From my own research, and everything I had read in the academic literature, over 15 years ago I became convinced that what I have called the psychophysics of politics was what the Republican Party had decided to use to create their base. I got to this by watching what the oligarchs, like the Koch brothers, who control the MAGAt cult had been funding in science. This is how Trump and his orcs, and the oligarchs created MAGAt world. At one level it was very smart, in terms to protecting and advancing democracy it was evil. (Go to the SR archives and search on the Psychophysiology of Politics, or click through to the citation listed here, and read the paper on which this report is based. Citation: Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28392301/
President Donald Trump joins Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, Louise Gorsuch, and others in prayer in the Green Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., following the President’s announcement of Judge Gorsuch as his nominee to the Supreme Court, Tuesday January 31, 2017. Credit: Official White House / Shealah Craighead
A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs […]
Stephan: What demonstrates the power of the psychophysiology of politics being used by the Republicans is things like this. You would think that no voter would support a senator who made sure they paid multiple times more for their drugs than they would pay in any other country. And yet the Republican voters in Idaho vote for a man who is a whore of the pharmaceutical industry; a man who makes sure their drug costs are the highest in the developed world. And his whole party is doing the same to the people in their states. It is amazing really.
Republican US Senator Mike Crapo a pharmacy industry whore speaks during Senate Finance Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC Credit: Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty
Republican lawmakers are working behind closed doors to convince the Senate parliamentarian—the chamber’s unelected rules arbiter—to tank Democrats’ watered-down but still potentially impactful proposal to require Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small number of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies.
Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, a major beneficiary of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash, admitted as much in remarks to reporters on Tuesday, saying that he and his GOP colleagues are “going through line by line, literally, making objections” in private meetings with the Senate parliamentarian, who is tasked with offering advice on whether reconciliation provisions comply with chamber rules.
Under the Senate’s Byrd Rule, every provision of a reconciliation package must have a direct, not “merely incidental,” impact on the federal budget. Democrats contend their Medicare proposal meets that requirement, citing the Congressional Budget Office’s recent estimate that the plan would save the federal government $290 billion over 10 years.
Stephan: Here is yet another example of the truth of the Republican Party, and how powerful the psychophysiology of politics can be. How could there possibly be a Jew who would vote for Mastriano? And yet, I predict, there will be thousands of them. Just not enough I hope for him to beat Fetterman.
MAGAt candidate for governor of Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano. Credit: US Army
A top ally for the Republican Party’s nominee for Pennsylvania’s governor has now explicitly said that Jews should not be welcome into the American conservative movement unless they convert to Christianity.
The Jerusalem Post reports that Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right Gab social media website that Mastriano has used to promote his campaign for governor, said recently that he believes American conservatism should be for Christians only, and that conservatives should reject right-wing Jewish figures such as Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin.
“We don’t want people who are Jewish,” he said. “We don’t want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country. We’re not saying we’re going to deport all these people or whatever. You’re free to stay here. You’re not going to be forced to convert or anything like this because that’s not biblical whatsoever. But you’re going to enjoy the fruits of living in a Christian […]
