Frontline of the Class War: Emergency Rooms, Moral Objections, and Romney's Olympics

The Republicans are right, there is a class war going on in this country. And they're the ones waging it against the middle and working class:

• In case you were wondering if having the far right fall out of love with her would make Ann Coulter a better person, it hasn't: "We have socialist health care, they're called Emergency Rooms."  Now of course the funny thing about that is, as long as we're all still agreeing that ERs need to treat everyone who comes in (it won't be long till the Right abandons this one), then it's much much cheaper for society to provide everyone with free preventative care than wait until they need an ER.  Which would make socialized medicine the smart capitalist thing to do.

• Fox's Eric Bollingis upset about the foreclosure settlement helping out "deadbeat homeowners."  Now putting aside all the cases of systematic fraud and abuse committed by the banks including forging records, who in their right mind thinks it's better to throw families out onto the streets than cut into the banks profits just a little?

• Here's a nice look at how Republicans have been playing the media with the "Small Business" line, and how their definition of a small business and yours probably don't look anything alike.

• So Republicans have their own solution to this birth control conundrum: simply allow any employer to object to any medical procedure being covered by their health insurance plan.  Among other things this would mean: "an insurer or an employer would be able to claim a moral or religious objection to covering HIV/AIDS screenings, Type 2 Diabetes treatments, cancer tests or anything else they deem inappropriate or the result of an “unhealthy” or “immoral” lifestyle. Similarly, a health plan could refuse to cover mental health care on the grounds that the plan believes that psychiatric problems should be treated with prayer."  And that's before you get to employers who realize that claiming a "moral objection" is a great way to cut down on their health insurance premiums.

• Romney can't seem to get anything right, driving a foreign manufactured car in an ad intended to help smooth things over with Detroit.  Meanwhile, Santorum has just released 4 years of tax returns showing that he pays more than double the rate Romney does.

• But hey, it's not fair to judge Mitt Romney on his spectacularly bad campaign, or even his time in public office.  In fact, he's specifically told us not to, and instead we should focus on his business experience (though not the parts where he chopped up the corpses of companies and sold them off at the expense of employees), and more specifically how he saved the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics.  Which given that it now turns out cost a billion more than the '84 Los Angeles Games and $600 million more than the '96 Atlanta games, and appears to consist mostly of "pork barrel spending" probably means that Romney isn't going to want us to talk about them for much longer (also that he's not a very good businessman).  But it probably does help explain why 2/3rds of Americans think that Romney favors the Rich over the Poor and Middle Class.  Which also explains why he thinks "that entrepreneurs should ask their parents for money instead of using loans from the federal government."  Everyone's daddy ran GM right?