Leader or Party Hack? How Marco Rubio's Support for Veterans took a Back Seat to Budget Austerity

by Nomad

With the Alabama primary approaching, Candidate Rubio suddenly remembered US veterans. He makes a lot of fine promises and may have fooled a few people. But let's take a look at his record when it comes to supporting the troops.

Rubio's Recruits

In the lead-up to Alabama's March 1 primary, Republican Candidate Marco Rubio is pulling out his big guns in an attempt to recruit Alabama veterans. He will soon roll out the unimaginatively entitled "Alabama Veterans for Marco" according to a local paper.

Said a regional spokesman for the Rubio campaign:

"Our campaign is honored to have earned the support of these brave individuals who selflessly served our country...Throughout this campaign, Marco has not only highlighted what he has done on behalf of veterans, but stressed that we must improve the care that we offer them. We are proud that these heroic service-members will be a part of Marco's team to spread that message across Alabama."

Howard Koplowitz, writing for AL.com, pointed out that Rubio has enlisted a lot of brass too. Twenty-one Alabama veterans are reporting for duty, he writes, to boost Marco Rubio's presidential campaign.  

One group member and chairman of the group,  Marine Cpl. Don Fisher of Montgomery, cited Rubio's promise to reform the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) which has come under fire for the poor state of its hospitals.

However, one website, CorrecttheRecord, calls into question the image of Rubio as a defender of American veterans. When it comes to Republicans in the Senate, Rubio has been much more of a follower than a leader. And overall, the GOP's record on support for veterans isn't exactly a pretty thing to behold. 

VA Reform or Sell-Off?

When it came to Rubio's campaign promises to reform the VA, there's more than meets the eye. What he seems to be advocating is a form of privatization of the VA and then, turning around and calling it reform.

As often happens in Washington, it is quite  possible to reform an agency without improving it and it is possible to make matters worse. 

The Great Fire Sale of our National Heritage: Ted Cruz's Role in an Unconstitutional Land-Grab Scheme

 by Nomad

Did a top-dollar campaign donation from a pair of evangelical brothers have anything to do with Ted Cruz attempt to sneak in a historic land-grab? What do Bundy's and the Oregon occupiers have to do with the corporate takeover of public lands?

Back in July 2015, Republican candidate Ted Cruz's run for the White House was given a boost with a  contribution of $15 million, which was, at that point, the largest known donation to the 2016 presidential campaign. The donor of this campaign life-saver was a pair of billionaire brothers.
Surprisingly, the surname here is not Koch.

However, in many ways, the successful, blue-collar and religious Wilks brothers are a knockoff copy of the Koch brothers. The agenda is similar at the very least. Furthermore, both pairs of brothers have no problem working together if the prize is worth the taking. 

According to Forbes, they are called "undercover billionaires." Farris and Dan Wilks made their sizable fortunes through the fracking industry with the sale of their company Frac Tech to a group of investors led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund for $3.5 billion in May 2011. The Wall Street Journal provides some more info on the company.

Frac Tech employs hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to crack shale rocks for Exxon Mobil Corp., Chesapeake Energy Corp. and other big companies in their search for oil and natural gas.

At the time of the sale, Frac Tech reported 2010 profit of $368.7 million on $1.29 billion in revenue. The Wilks’ took in about $3.2 billion of the total $3.5 billion sale as reported by Forbes. The brothers reportedly owned 68% of the company so they are now wealthy -but not fabulously so, by Texas standards. Their estimated personal worth is $1.4 billion. Each. 

Or to put it another way, they are the small fry of the 1%, but they have more than enough green stuff to build a Christian empire with.

Judge Not: JEB Makes A Blunder About Questioning Another Person's Christian Faith

by Nomad

Although JEB's campaign has careened from mistake to mistake, this most recent one might have slipped past you. When it comes to judging other people's faith, JEB is now decidedly against it. However, that's not what he said only a few months ago. 

We are getting used to the Himalayan levels of Republican hypocrisy in this election. Sometimes it has been hard to keep track of every instance. 

Last night, I caught yet another one from the mouth of JEB. Or maybe it was just a typical Bush blunder. 

As you might have heard, Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Pope Francis got into a pointless and politically hazardous spat in the past two days. Always eager to avoid serious issues, the press pounced on it. Perhaps they were all hoping the big moment of Donald Trump's downfall had finally arrived. 

Income Inequality and North Carolina Health Care: A Tale of Two Extremes

by Nomad

Without the Medicaid expansion, health care for the poor of North Carolina has become a real problem.  Of course, you'd never know it by the looks of salaries paid to CEOs of  non-profit healthcare organizations. 

To put it bluntly, If you are poor in North Carolina, don't even think about getting sick.

  

The Tarheel State is one of 20 states that rejected Obamacare's optional Medicaid expansion. Governor Patrick Lloyd "Pat" McCrory and a Republican-majority legislature left healthcare coverage as it stood, covering some 1.9 million residents, around only a fifth of the state's population. 

Surviving in the Gap
Not everybody was happy with the arrangement. Advocates of the expansion claimed that another 500,000 people might have been added to the rolls, including tens of thousands of childless nondisabled adults.  

USNews reported last October that there was a good reason for this dissatisfaction. The states' Medicaid program is broken.

Bureaucratically antiquated and growing faster than state revenues, it has gone over budget in three of the past four years, and its taxpayer cost and total enrollment have both doubled over the past decade. Last year, it cost North Carolina taxpayers $15 billion, nearly a third of the budget and more than twice what the state spent in 2003.

At the end of 2015, Gov. McCrory signed into law a bill to reform North Carolina's overgrown and out of control Medicaid program.

However, this reform will take, by the official estimate, around four years to become fully implemented. Supporters claim that it will reduce existing spending by 2%, saving hundreds of millions every year. 

How accurate that is is anybody's guess. But one thing is clear, until then, the uninsured poor in the state are going to have to live with things as they are.