"Please Judge, I Am an Orphan"

I've used this joke hundred times to illustrate pure chutzpah: A guy murders both of his parents and then pleads for leniency because he is an orphan.

And that's kind of what we have with fulltime Republican moron Luis Lang in South Carolina, who couldn't be bothered to get Obamacare coverage when it was available (i.e., within the three-month open enrollment period) because it was "socialized medicine" and he prided himself on being able to pay his own medical bills.

Yeah, and as the Bible has it, "Pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." (Yes, that's the real quote, not the oft-quoted and pithier but erroneous, "Pride goeth before a fall.")

Now he's sick with diabetes-related blindness issues and is whining because he doesn't have coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The Daily Kos has the whole story, and it's not a pretty one:

All seemed good until this February when a series of headaches led him to the doctor. Tests revealed that Lang had suffered a series of mini-strokes tied to diabetes. (It's not clear to me from the piece whether Lang knew he had diabetes earlier or whether that was the diabetes diagnosis as well.) He also has a partially detached retina and eye bleeding tied to his diabetes. The initial medical care for the mini-strokes ran to almost $10,000 and burned through his savings. And now he can't work because of his eye issue and can't afford the surgery that would save his eyesight and also allowing him to continue working.
I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but this is exactly why people buy insurance in the first place. The whole concept is that you shell out several hundred dollars per month when you're not sick or injured so that you'll have your medical bills covered in the event that you become sick/injured. He made a gamble that he'd never become so sick/injured badly enough that he wouldn't be able to afford 100% of the cost...and it finally caught up with him.

In fact, this is exactly the hypothetical scenario which Ron Paul was asked about during one of the GOP primary debates back in 2012 (the infamous "Let Him Die!!" moment).

Now the dickhead has the gall to blame Obama and the Democrats because he made some stupid -- no some idiotic -- choices and finds himself holding the shitty end of the stick.

Instead of blaming the real culprits, the Republicans in South Carolina who "don't want none o' that god damned soshulazzed med'cin", he's flailing out at the very people who, had their advice been followed, would have alleviated his situation.

Because, again, if the ACA hadn't been passed, their situation would be...well, exactly the same as it is now.
In fact, it would be worse because without the ACA, even if his income does pick back up again, pre-ACA insurance companies would still refuse to touch him with a 10-foot pole, whereas under the ACA he at least has a shot at getting covered if he can stick it out for another 8 months.
This, of course, leads to the most jaw-droppingly honest look at the conservative mindset I've seen in months:
 “(My husband) should be at the front of the line because he doesn’t work and because he has medical issues,” Mary Lang said last week. “We call it the Not Fair Health Care Act.”
Astonishing.
"Screw you, everyone else!! We spent years helping enact policies which shaft the poor, and even deliberately blew off taking steps to help ourselves if we ever fell on hard times, but now that we need help, everyone else should get the hell out of the way and move us to the front of the line."

So much for the Party of Personal Responsibility. I guess we couldn't really expect anything else.

Except this: He's started an illiterately-written GoFundMe page (no, I won't link to it, thank you) begging for money to help with the medical bills. And it is likely that many bleeding-heart liberals will donate to it, because by and large we don't want even assholes like this to suffer.

And the final kicker will be when he thanks all of his Republican friends for their donations that show up Obamacare for the nightmare that it is.

You can fix ignorant, but you can't fix stupid. At this point I'm leaning towards the Tea Party "Let Him Die" Solution. I know that sounds cold and hard-hearted, but come on...

Okay, not really. Even assholes deserve to live. Even Republican assholes.

Minimum Wage and the Real Job Creators

Every single time the topic of raising the minimum wage comes up, the Republicans chant the same mantra: “It will cost jobs!”

Never mind that multiple studies over many years have shown that to be a totally bogus myth. As we all know, when it comes to Rethug dogma the “truthiness” of something doesn’t really enter into the equation.

I worked various jobs in the administration and delivery of Unemployment Insurance benefits for 30 years, and in that time I never met anyone who became unemployed because the minimum wage increased. Not one. Ever.

I did find some employers who extravagantly claimed that the small boost in the minimum wage drove them into bankruptcy and forced them to close their businesses. But even a casual examination of those businesses revealed that things like poor management or gross mismanagement, inadequate capitalization and non-competitive pricing were the real culprits.

Another article of faith for the Republicans is that business owners are the “job creators”. But are they really? Did they, for example, take those massive tax cuts and corporate welfare payments and create more jobs with the money like they said they would do?

No, they did not. Because they are not the real job creators.

We live in a nation whose economy is based on consumption. That means that, unless people are seeking to buy what you are selling, you are not going to sell it and so you are not going to produce more of it. Goods, services, widgets -- you name it. The demand has to be there.

And what that really means is that people need the money in their pockets before they can go out and buy what they want. It’s the people that spend the money who are the real job creators. They are the demand, the demand drives production and the businessman answers the upsurge in demand with more production, and people get hired to produce. That businessman is not a job creator. He is a job facilitator, doing his own job to meet the demands of the marketplace. As more people are hired, there is more money to spend in the whole economy, and therefore even more demand, which creates more jobs, and so on.

Give a rich person even more money and he will squirrel it away in some tax-free offshore account. Give a person who is making minimum wage more money and you won’t see her opening that super-secret bank account in the Cayman Islands. No, you will see her spending it on the goods and services that she needs and driving the economy.

This is simple. Economics 101. So why don’t Republicans “get it”? Are they that disconnected from reality? It sure looks like it.