President-elect Joe Biden campaigned aspirationally on a vision of uniting a country many see as severely, if not hopelessly, divided. After all, while Biden amassed over 80 million votes, the most votes ever tallied by any candidate in a presidential election in U.S. history, Trump hauled in the second-most votes ever, finding the support of…
Last May 15, the House passed a sweeping $3 trillion relief package that would provide another round of stimulus checks for Americans, extend unemployment benefits, broaden the social safety net, and, of great importance, provide relief funding to states. States, of course, and local governments for that matter, are taking a huge hit. Not only…
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has fit right in with the Trump administration, treating her government position as opportunity to enrich herself and serve her own narrow ideological interests at taxpayer expense. Given her role in supporting (or not) the public school systems on which the majority of American families depend to educate their children, she…
Back in 2004, Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas? elevated the state as the textbook case of how the Republican party has been able to leverage a platform of conservative social values to sway the electorate to vote against its economic interests. Railing against abortion, affirmative action, big government, elitism, political correctness, and…
“We have the ability to help people who truly need it the most. We have the ability to make a decision today that will save lives — potentially thousands.
It seems completely illogical that the state can argue that a reduction in education funding was necessitated by the downturn in the economy and the state’s diminishing resources and at the same time cut taxes further.
“What is the best way to decimate a community? Deny its people access to healthcare.†“What is the best way to decimate a community? Shut down its largest employer.†These questions were asked and answered by Tim Egan, CEO of Chicago’s Roseland Community Hospital, last Sunday, January 15, as he opened his comments at a…
In a normal political environment, a national candidate seeking a model of what their proposed policies would produce would certainly choose a winner. However, this is no more a normal political environment than an elephant is quantum-sized, and the state of Kansas is no more an economic winner than Donald Trump is a quiet and thoughtful deep thinker.
Kansas GOP calls public schools government schools to imply they indoctrinate children and interfere with individual’s free choice.
‘If Governor Brownback won’t reconsider any of the tax cuts, he will have to figure out for himself how to balance the budget.”
The Kansas bill creates private school savings and funding programs by diverting public education funding to private and religious schools
The GOP has given up on governing and instead dedicated itself to aggressively redistributing wealth to the top at the expense of the rest
Brownback’s new ploy would make it possible for the Republican legislature to impeach any judge who goes against Republican dogma
Starting a new job can be an exhilarating experience, especially when that new position is at the wishes and consent of millions of voters. However, for Louisiana’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), whatever exhilaration might exist at being chosen to run the state likely turned to fright and despair when he realized just how…
Ohio’s John Kasich and Sam Brownback of Kansas are just the latest Republicans to use abortion to distract their residents from bad policies
Only 18 percent of Kansans are satisfied with Governor Sam Brownback, despite electing him twice to be their governor.
Evangelical Republicans hate America with religious passion because the Founding Fathers did not create a Christian theocracy
After a record-setting tax hike on the poor and middle class and truly Draconian social service cuts, the state is so broke that Brownback and Republicans had to resort to issuing a certificate of indebtedness to prevent the state from complete financial demise.
Not only have the wheels started to come off democracy everywhere Republicanism reaches, but they have sold the damn wheels.
Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill into law that eliminates the state’s entire judicial system if the Supreme Court rules against an ‘administrative law’ Brownback’s Republicans passed to neuter the judiciary and end the state government’s separation of powers.
Kansas’ Republican legislators are all but admitting their precious trickle down experiment was not only a failure, it is a scam. In fact, although not quite stating “our only economic policy is a scam to enrich corporations and the wealthy,” just admitting they have to raise taxes to plug gaping revenue holes and more recently, that income inequality is a problem in America, is just as good.
With the state budget forecast to have a 400 million dollar shortfall, Kansas Republicans are finally acknowledging that the massive GOP tax cuts approved under Governor Sam Brownback have not generated the revenue Republican lawmakers promised. The right-wing Kansas Legislature is now contemplating the unthinkable — raising taxes to plug the budget hole. The legislature…
Kansas has received its share of attention for its epic trickle down failure typical of conservative economics, and it is duly warranted. However, the governor of Kansas has not been tapped by the Koch brothers as their preferred Republican presidential candidate for 2016. That distinction goes to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who has his state’s financial demise keeping pace with Kansas for the top Republican economic failure.
Kansas’ religious Republicans are so intent on proving they will go to any length to protect a fetus that they passed legislation for the National Right To Life movement outlawing a medical procedure to ban abortions at 14 weeks after fertilization.
Brownback’s Republicans have imposed an inordinately cruel measure to steal taxpayer money from welfare recipients and hand it to the banking industry under the guise of putting an end to their blatantly luxurious lifestyles and help them get off welfare and enter Kansas’ non-existent private job market.
The Kansas legislature is about to pass a bill that is a piece of paper-hate directed at the poor. Hate primarily driven by Brownback, who, during his tenure as governor has seen the numbers of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program SNAP or food stamps) recipients, drop from over 40,000 to just under 15,000.
Republicans claim businesses love and demand the conservative economic agenda, but according to states like California and Minnesota that is a blatant lie.
Because Republicans depend on “the widespread ignorance of objective reality,” their fascist threat to democracy is only succeeding due to the abundance of ignorance and gross stupidity of America’s uneducated citizenry. Subsequently, Republicans are building on their success and slashing education funding at a record pace to produce an entire population of stupid conservative voters.
Because they own most of the Republican state’s governors and legislatures, it is there that the Kochs’ ideology is doing the most damage that their GOP surrogates are unrepentant about.
Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana is facing a 1.6 billion dollar budget shortfall next year, and comparable deficits for the years to come.
Since most Americans are not like the Kochs, Republicans came up with a devious plot to garner support for taking things like good wages, employment benefits, sick leave, overtime pay, and pensions from those that have them.
The GOP has concocted a religion that has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with what you do with your reproductive organs
Even though most Republican governors are wary of going all-in on tax cuts for the rich and corporations like trickle-down failure Kansas governor Sam Brownback, they are going all in to raise taxes on their poor and middle class residents to avoid putting any “financial strain” on their wealthiest donors and their corporations.
Brownback’s latest trickle down approach to make up for gross revenue shortfalls “crippling the state’s finances” include cutting classroom funding for schools by another $127 million, cutting state payments to pension funds by $446 million, and stealing about $350 million from the state’s transportation department funding.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback touted his trickle down tax cutting experiment would produce a bonanza in jobs, revenue, and economic growth the entire nation would marvel at and cause the rich no pain. Of course, the results have been exactly the opposite.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s attempt to make his state a model for Tea Party governance has ended in abject failure.
It is amazing that Republicans who could not pass any legislation last year, spent the first four days of the 114th Congress stealing from women, retired and disabled Americas, large corporations’ employees, and various government departments and the Executive Branch.
There is nothing as evil, mean-spirited, and pathetic as a mature adult who sees firsthand that something is inherently dangerous to other human beings and should be prevented at all costs, and yet wishes they could do the same thing. Last year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, like all Republicans, witnessed the complete economic devastation…
Now that Republicans control both houses of Congress, Americans should brace themselves for a serious Koch-style assault on revenue and government agencies. Last year, Mitch McConnell told Kansas Governor Sam Brownback that Republicans were panting to enact a Koch-Kansas economic assault on America that Brownback imposed by giving the rich monumental tax breaks at…
This is the class war billionaire Warren Buffet admitted his class was winning, and if any American doubted that the Kochs or Wall Street would stop at robbing retired people’s incomes to satisfy their absolute greed, they are fools
Paul Ryan is quietly working behind the scenes to make sure the next head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congress’s objective eye in all matters concerning fiscal policy, is an ardent proponent of the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity economic agenda.
The sad fact is that the stupidity that drove the results of the midterms is not reserved to the Republican base, or Democratic voters would not have stayed home in a repeat performance of the devastating 2010 midterms.
According to Georgia Republican Senate candidate David Perdue, his only reason for serving is to prosecute Democrats and President Obama because he does not approve of the “direction of this country.”
Dutifully, Republicans have stepped up to meet their base’s demand to be corrupt, and dishonest, and it is evident in the preponderance of Republican governors under investigation for all manner of corruption.
Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Rick Perry, Rick Snyder, and others, are ideological and religious extremists, and their hate, win or lose, does matter.
McConnell is anxious to lead the Senate and join House Republicans in enacting Brownback’s Koch brother model at the national level.
During a debate with his Democratic gubernatorial opponent last week, Koch loyalist Scott Walker took the time to insult Wisconsin workers he claimed are responsible for being stuck earning poverty wages.
Democrats have a living, breathing example of privatizing Medicare, and frankly everything in the Path to Prosperity budget, that has done nothing Republicans promise and everything Democrats warned will come to pass. If he has accomplished nothing else, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has given Democrats and all of America a preview of precisely what a Republican Congress will do to America.
A Kansas district court ruled on Wednesday that the Democratic Party does not need to name a Senate candidate to take on incumbent Republican Senator Pat Roberts. This decision opens the door for independent candidate Greg Orman to face Roberts in a head-to-head battle.
It is beyond dispute that Republicans take advantage of their supporters’ stupidity, and Brownback must believe Kansas voters are the stupidest people in the nation
The chest-thumping and boasting that we heard from the GOP earlier in the year about the likelihood of the party taking over the Senate has quieted down dramatically in the last few days as bad news keeps spilling in for Republicans.
The pattern is unmistakable; Republicans are ill-prepared to manage finances or an economy whether it is at the state or federal level and the reason is always the same; they oppose any measure to bring in any sources of revenue.
Over the past six years after every election, a relatively common question is why do so many Americans dependably vote against their own self-interests. Despite poor white people in southern red states barely surviving on slave wages, welfare, food stamps, and no adequate healthcare, they routinely vote for Republicans openly campaigning on driving their constituents deeper into poverty.
Democrat Paul Davis leads Republican Sam Brownback 47-41 in the latest poll, as voters express their dismay with Brownback’s policies.
It is beyond question that after over thirty years, the Republican “trickle down” economic experiment continues providing the same empirical data and living results of starving government of revenue, depressing economic growth, increasing debt and deficit, and retarding job creation.
Missouri Republicans are stupider than congressional Republicans because they carefully studied Kansas Republicans’ economic policies that created a budget nightmare for the state and its people.
The FBI investigating a lobbying firm that is close to Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for running a pay to play scheme involving access to the governor.
A new PPP poll finds that voters disapprove of Sam Brownback’s job performance. He trails Democrat Paul Davis in his bid for re-election.
The Kansas Senate decided on Friday that they would kill the legislation that was passed earlier this week by the state’s House of Representatives.
The Kansas House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a piece of legislation crafted to legalize anti-gay segregation under the guise of “religious liberty”
In the wake of Rmuse’s story about heartless Republican cuts in the House a closer look at what young ‘life’ really represents to Republicans
The Republican Party is so damaged that even in deep red state Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback is trailing Democrat Paul Davis 43%-39%.
Republicans are taking steps to shred the Constitution they claim to love and declare they were laws unto themselves by way of nullification.
There are those who say the mood of the nation toward gays and women’s rights are changing for the better, yet the far right is forging ahead to restrict their rights.
The new front in the Republicans class war is just getting underway as governors are proposing new tax schemes that raise taxes on the poor to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans have enlisted religious fanatics to forward their dangerous agenda by instilling fear that Democrats are waging a war on religious freedom.