(By Juan Cole)
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in giving her response to President Obama’s State of the Union message exemplified everything wrong with today’s Republican Party.
Ms. Rodgers spoke of being the first in her family to go to college. She also said she came to Washington “To grow the working middle class, not the government.”
She doesn’t seem to realize that colleges and universities deeply depend on government. She did an MBA at the University of Washington.
It is a great school. It is also the top-ranking public school for reception of Federal research funding. Without government funding and input, colleges and universities don’t thrive. And they are the chief ladder for working class people like herself and me into the middle class.
Rodgers has repeatedly voted to cut science funding. Deeply.
And while it is true that she was the first in her family to go to college, she chose to go to an unaccredited fundamentalist institution that teaches biblical literalism. She is welcome to her beliefs, but that isn’t an education in critical thinking, and her voting record and behavior show it. She had a great opportunity to open her mind and understand the world. She chose to close it, and now she is trying to close others’.
Her family emigrated to Canada for a while and worked there. They likely benefited from Canada’s health care system. Yet she has repeatedly voted to repeal the US Affordable Care Act.
Rodgers alleged that the Affordable Care Act costs jobs. The opposite is true. When she was challenged as to the basis for her charge, she did not answer.
She argued against any disadvantaging of Down Syndrome children (she has one) but did not note that Obamacare forbids denying treatment for pre-existing conditions.
As Sally Kohn noted, the GOP repeatedly has cut funding for Downs Syndrome research.
She worked on her family’s orchard as a youngster. But today’s farmers face no more pressing issue than climate change. California, you’ll note, just declared a drought, and while droughts are cyclical in the west, aridity is increasing because of human-caused climate change. Torrid El Nino years are likely to double in frequency with climate change.
Rodgers? She serves on the energy committee and has opposed government support for green energy while doing nothing to cut the billions in giveaways to Big Oil.
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Rodgers typifies a widespread American phenomenon, or so I observe from extended family: people who have a deep practical dependence on federal spending, and who benefit from federal programs, nonetheless express strong philosophical hostility to federal spending that does not benefit them personally and directly. This hostility is typically described in apoplectic and apocalyptic terms, driven by religious and/or cultural anxieties linked to ethnicity and language.
A younger version of Phil Graham.
Another reason why the 60 percent of people (according to CNN) who ignored both the SOTU and the response got it right.
Another prime example of GOP hypocrisy is Greg Abbott, the Texas Republican who is expected to succeed Rick Perry as governor.
Greg Abbott, who became a paraplegic after an accident, won a $10 million personal injury lawsuit, but has fought against the rights of Texans to sue in similar circumstances.
Abbott has used his position as Texas Attorney General to argue in court that Texas has sovereign immunity from the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“Abbott has used his position as Texas Attorney General to argue in court that Texas has sovereign immunity from the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
Maybe, with a little luck, he’ll follow through on Rick Perry’s threat to have Texas secede.
How the USA can allow such “education” to be accredited is a blight on any country.
“Never mind what I told you–you do as I tell you” – WC Field.
Cathy Rogers exemplifies what is wrong with the government today. The GOP picked someone who is a total moron douchbag hack to go on tv with a Republican response. All she could talk about was picking apples as a kid, her husband, her kids, and a bunch of syrupy, lovey-dovey crap. We are up crap creek without a paddle.