When disasters strike in the United States, Republican evangelicals are quick to blame liberals and their wanton ways for bringing God’s wrath onto the land.

The reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell infamously blamed the ACLU, feminists and gays, among others, for the 9/11 attacks in 2001. John McCain’s Catholic-hating buddy Pastor John Hagee suggested that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans because God smote the city was set to host an annual gay event called Southern Decadence.

And yet — as we have noted here (and here, here and here — evangelicals are always silent when disasters hit them in their own backyards.

Rachel Maddow picked up on this theme on her MSBNC show last night, reporting that Cindy Jacobs — a self-proclaimed prophet and theocrat who pals around with Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Perry — has proclaimed that because Perry hosted a prayer meeting, which he called “the Response,” in Houston on Aug. 6, God has healed the state of Texas:

• The room full of tea baggers at last night’s debate in Florida did not cheer at references to executing people or letting the uninsured die, but they could not pass up an opportunity to hate on the gays. The crowd booed during a video question from an active-duty U.S. serviceman who said he was gay. “I guess we only respect the troops Republicans approve of,” wrote Digby. “Good to know.”
• The soldier’s question was put first to Rick Santorum, the infamous homophobe. His response was typically bizarre: “I would say, any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military.” (Tell it to the Marines, Rick.) David Weigel wrote, “The truly odious moment on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell — possibly the first ever booing of an active duty soldier at a Republican debate — will be remembered beyond [Santorum's] predictable attacks on the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t favor constant aggressive warfare.”
• “As with all the Republican debates,” wrote Jonathan Chait, at his new digs at New York magazine, “this one devolved into a contest to see whether Rick Perry or Mitt Romney could most persuasively paint the other one as reasonable.”
More after the jump »

Writing in Roll Call, Stan Collender, author of “The Guide to the Federal Budget,” calls out Republicans in Congress for rebooting their threat to shut down the federal government this fall by reopening the debate over the 2012 budget.

This move is especially irksome, says Collender, because the “House, Senate and White House all agreed to the spending level for fiscal 2012 when the president signed the Budget Control Act on Aug. 2, almost two months before the fiscal year starts.”

Rebooting shutdown threats now would appear to be political suicide. A spate of polls has found Congress’ approval ratings at all-time lows. For example, at the end of August, Rasmussen, which is notoriously in the bag for the GOP, just 6 percent of voters said Congress was doing a “good” or “excellent” job. (Five percent said “good.” Just 1 percent said “excellent”). Two-thirds said Congress was doing a “poor” job.

Nonetheless, says Collender, Republicans will be proposing a short-term continuing resolution, or CR, for the fall:

Democrats are pushing back on the Republican spin that raising taxes on the wealthy is “class warfare,” noting that, under the sway of the tea party, Republicans have been waging war on the middle class and poor, particularly on services for children and families, since they took control of the House in January:

Ryan Nickel, spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee’s Minority Staff, sent an email to Democratic press secretaries on Monday calling attention to dramatic cuts that Republicans have proposed to programs benefiting low- and middle-income Americans: “Are GOP cuts to WIC [Women Infants and Children], Pell Grants, Meals-on-Wheels, Low-Income Legal Services & Head Start ‘Class Warfare’?”

Some of the GOP cuts highlighted in the email:

More after the jump »

If the Tea Party has its way next year, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will become president of the United States. What we can expect from a Perry administration is a lavish inaugural, a medieval approach to science and religion, trickle-down economics and an approach to health care that places even basic medical care beyond the reach of most people, according to a report on NPR.

Only 48 percent of the Texans have private health insurance, and more than a quarter of the state’s population has no insurance at all — more than any other state. Perry has been governor for a decade, so the state of health care in Texas is a result of — let’s call it PerryCare.

Over the past eight years, citing budget constraints, Gov. Rick Perry and the Republican-controlled legislature have dropped hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and working-class Texans from the rolls of government-sponsored insurance like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Nearly 6.5 million Texans are now uninsured even though the majority of them have full-time jobs.

Premiums in Texas’ unregulated health insurance industry have soared by 105 percent over the past 10 years, according to the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. Texas employers have responded by raising employee deductibles, often dramatically, or by dropping their coverage entirely.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that support for the presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is imploding:

The survey, taken Thursday through Sunday, charts a GOP field that seems headed toward a showdown between Perry, with 31 percent backing, and Romney, at 24 percent.

The only other candidate in double digits is Texas Rep. Ron Paul, at 13 percent. Support for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann has plummeted to 5 percent.

Veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who resigned as Bachmann’s campaign manager earlier this month, says the results could signal “a drawn-out process” and extended primary fight between Perry and Romney, both of whom are likely to have ample money and other resources.

But for Bachmann, he says, “The only way she can get back in this race is to somehow win Iowa,” which holds the opening caucuses early next year.

It’s hard to know what has caused the collapse of Bachmann’s polling. It may well be that her base of hard-right, proudly ignorant Republican voters found that they prefer Texas Gov. Rick Perry over her because, well, he’s a man and she is not.

It’s also possible that she got caught telling one lie too many.

Towleroad:

At a tea party function in Boston, a sweaty, pacing, unshaven Andrew Breitbart says he sometimes dreams of civil war.

Breitbart is manic and occasionally incoherent in the video. He says he has been driven to violent fantasies about liberals only because he has been victimized by them. “‘Cuz I’m under attack all the time,” he says, citing an incident or incidents when “the tolerant call[ed] me gay” on Twitter. And, oh yeah, he gets death threats.

The left would like to initiate the war against him, he says, but they won’t because they know the U.S. military would side with him and the tea party. “I have people who come up to me in the military,” he says, “major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’ And so they [liberals] understand that. These are the unspoken things we know, they know.”

Transcript:

Earlier this summer, an annual report on wealth accumulation worldwide found that, despite the financial collapse of 2008, the ensuing Great Recession and the grindingly slow recovery we’re experiencing now, the number of millionaires in the United States has actually grown:

According to the annual World Wealth Report from Merill Lynch and Capgemini, the U.S. had 3.1 million millionaires in 2010, up from 2.86 million in 2009. The latest figure tops the pre-crisis peak of three million.

Merrill and Capgemini define millionaires as individuals with $1 million or more in investible assets, not including primary home, collectibles, consumables and consumer durables.

The wealth held by these millionaires also hit a record. North American millionaires had a combined wealth of $11.6 trillion, up from $10.7 trillion in 2009.

The number of Americans with $30 million is still slightly below the pre-crisis peak. In 2010 there were 40,000 North Americans with $30 million or more, up from 36,000 in 2009.

More after the jump »

Census chart updated by Pensito Review to show presidential eras

Last week, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty that found that the number of Americans living in poverty has risen to 15.1 percent, the highest it has been since 1983:

About 46.2 million people, or nearly one in six, were in poverty in 2010, compared with 43.6 million, or 14.3 percent, in 2009.

The statistics, contained in the report, titled “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage: 2010,” cover 2010, when U.S. unemployment averaged 9.6 percent, up from 9.3 percent the previous year.

Highlights:

More after the jump »

Income disparity increased dramatically over the period from 1983 to 2009, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Hillary Reinsberg at Mogulite parses the data:

1. Of the country’s total wealth gain, 40 percent was money made by the wealthiest 1 percent of people. Yes, 1 percent of people made 40 percent of the money.

2. The top 5 percent gained 80 percent.

3. So, the top 1 percent, on their own, made as much as the 4 percent just below them.

4. But still, the remaining 95 percent of the country made just 20 percent of the wealth gains.

5. The old saying, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” did unfortunately hold true. The wealth held by the bottom 60 percent dropped 7.5 percent.