More Mean-Spirited Nonsense From GOP

It's pretty obvious to anyone that the Republicans love rich people. When the rich bankers were in trouble during the Bush administration they came up with $700 billion to bail them out. They had help from Democrats on that, but their giveaways to the rich didn't end there. They helped Bush give an unneeded tax cut to the rich that ballooned the deficit, and then held small tax cuts for other Americans hostage to force a continuation of the huge tax cuts for the rich. They are now protecting subsidies for corporations (the same corporations that are making record profits) and demanding more tax cuts for the rich.

But it's only the rich that Republicans are willing to help. They have shown they want to hurt the elderly by abolishing Medicare and cutting benefits for Social Security. They would hurt children by abolishing the Dept. of Education and cutting Food Stamps (which feed over 20% of America's children). They would hurt workers by wanting to abolish work safety rules, unions,  and unemployment insurance, while continuing to encourage the outsourcing of American jobs. They would hurt the sick by repealing health care reform and destroying Medicaid. And they would hurt all Americans by abolishing the EPA and allowing corporations  to pollute our water and air.

Those things were already known, but now it seems like the Republicans want to remove any doubt anyone might have about their hatred for the common man. They have now decided that the government can't afford to help disaster victims (even though they think there's plenty of money for give-aways to the rich). Some, like Ron Paul, want to abolish FEMA altogether. Others want to hold disaster victims hostage so they can force further budget cuts.

Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) and other House Republican leaders are threatening to withhold disaster funding for the recent victims of Hurricane Irene unless Democrats agree to further budget cuts. And what do they want to cut. First they want to cut FEMA funding by 6% overall. Then they want to slash funding to equip and train first responders by 40% (on top of the 19% they have already cut).

These Republicans must have agreed with President Bush that "Brownie" did "a heck of a job" with the delayed and disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, because the kind of cuts they are proposing would help to insure that the federal response to future disasters would also be late and ineffective.

Surely they don't think they have the support of the American people for this kind of mean-spirited action. Americans have never begrudged helping their fellow citizens who are victims of a natural (or man-made) disaster. They know that they are not only their brother's keeper, but they may need that same kind of help some day. There are all sorts of disasters and no part of the country is immune from all of them.

And it gets even crazier. They also want to cut the funding for hurricane hunter flights from $29 million to $17 million (about 40%). This would make it much harder for the National Weather Service to predict the ferocity and direction of an impending hurricane in the future. The nutty part of this proposal is the fact that this modest expenditure actually saves America much more money than it costs. Think Progress says:

Since it costs $1 million per coastal mile for evacuation and preparation when a storm approaches, every mile that is not evacuated yields substantial savings for taxpayers. Estimates put the savings due to monitoring flights at $100-$150 million per storm, far outstripping the $29 million budget dedicated to the hurricane hunters.

Once again I am left to wonder, why do the Republicans hate ordinary Americans -- and common sense?