Part I addressed the invasive and dangerous power and influence of billionaires Charles and David Koch and Rupert Murdoch and their powerful grip on the GOP, especially its tea party wing.
As we have learned from recent national media reports, barring Fox cable TV "news" of course, self-serving billionaires have invested millions of dollars in a single minded effort to support right wing causes, especially the tea party wing of the Republican party. The main goal of the pervasively powerful corporate potentates is to seek out and find political tools and loyal enablers that will carry their water.
The Republican Party has enthusiastically clicked its heels, while courageously stepping up to selflessly volunteer to serve the potentates of money, power and influence. In so doing the GOP also showed its unbridled willingness to throw everyday Americans into the ditch if such abandonment of constituents better serves the Party's corporate masters.
At least we can now understand the rationale for the Republican servants willful and stubborn obstruction of legislation that would fuel our economic recovery.
The GOP enabling shills have snapped to attention because the puppet masters have given its talking points to lawmakers ranging in rank from Mitch McConnell to John Boehner to half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, and TX Gov. Rick Perry the Secessionist. The billionaire ventriloquists that speak through the voices of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, understandably yearn for a return to the unfettered Wall St. days of W.
H/t to Disarray over at Daily Kos for the above video.
According to GOP Minority leader John Boehner, we the American people must work until we are 70 years old before we can draw social security benefits. Republicans also intend to impose perpetual tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy Americans.
The Republican Party that racked up a mind numbing deficit during the W. years is now obsessed about the growing deficit.
I guess the GOP lawmaker's teabagging ventriloquists have taken total control of the message machine now that the opposition party is in charge. This is especially true since most Democrats, though not all, are working on behalf of the American people.
Over the past several days GOP lawmakers have railed about cutting spending and all voted against extending unemployment benefits for the jobless based on the party's hypocritical and pretentious "grave" concern for the deficit. At the same time, Republicans in Washington are committed to continuing the W. tax cuts to the rich despite the fact that tax cuts would add to the deficit substantially, maybe to the tune of $100 billion.
Credibility apparently no longer matters.
Ronald Reagan Republican economists Alan Greenspan and David Stockman insist that continuing tax cuts with borrowed money could be disastrous. Stockman went as far to call the GOP economic strategy as
vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
Paul O'Neill, U.S. Treasury under W. Bush, essentially said the same thing. W. and Cheney, by the way, had fired O'Neill because he had the nerve to oppose Bush's hair brained tax cuts and war in Iraq. Maybe that is the time in which the GOP started its purge of moderate and sane Republicans.
John Boehner completly ignores the Republican economists and he continues to cry out for extending the Bush tax cuts while screaming about spending and the deficit at the same time.
President Reagan's former Office of Management and Budget Director, David Stockman, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Mr. Stockman chastises his party for its irresponsible and reckless fiscal policies.
Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
Not only does Mr. Stockman pin the blame for today's economic hardships squarely on Republican policies and ideologies but he also revealed the Republican Party has absolutely no intention of deviating from its present addiction to serial financial bubbles and Wall St. made havoc that have driven us into the present chasm. The Wall St. gambling casino practices, by the way, resulted in the biggest looting of the public purse in U.S. history. Do Republicans embrace the endless looting of U.S. taxpayers to bail out Wall St.?
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt - if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 - will soon reach $18 trillion. That's a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell's stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts - in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance - vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
President Obama has accomplished more in his first half term than any President since FDR.
This is why the Republican Party is screaming and howling day in and day out. The programs implemented by the Obama Administration will offer an economic life line to everyday American people. Some of Obama's policies have seriously inconvenienced big business and big insurance, too. And this why the Republican Party has been threatening to repeal health care and financial reform the second it can get control of the levers of power.
But we are not going to let Republicans take back the power are we?
For BP has messed with Texas. Again. God must be very angry at Governor Rick Perry. Maybe when the Governor blamed God for BP's disaster and then later, after Perry had stolen from Texas school children, he brought the wrath of heaven to Texas.
This past weekend tarballs washed up in Galveston on the Bolivar Peninsula at Crystal Beach.
About a dozen tar balls that washed ashore on Crystal Beach were identified Monday as oil from the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the first evidence that oil from the spill has reached the Texas coastline.
But it was unclear whether the oil from the blowout dropped off a passing ship or drifted nearly 400 miles.
Laboratory tests showed that the tar balls came from the BP Macondo well that blew out April 20, killing 11 crew members on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, said Coast Guard Cpt. Marcus Woodring, commander of the Houston-Galveston sector.
The handful of tar balls came ashore Saturday and a second wave amounting to about 5 gallons of oil was found Sunday scattered along 1½ miles of beach on eastern Galveston Island and Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, Woodring said. Laboratory results on the oil discovered Sunday are expected today, Woodring said.
Will Governor Perry pray for a miracle or will he parrot RNC talking points and blame the spill on the Obama Administration? Will he rail against the feds while gladly stuffing U.S. clean up funds into the state coffer? Will the Governor use federal money to actually clean up the spill or will he try to use fed bucks to cover his $18 billion budget shortfall? As we well know by now, Rick Perry excels at playing games with the evil doing federal government taxpayer dollars that he hates but loves to spend.
I wonder what Rick Perry and his Party of Partisan Misery will do to prevent future oil disasters in the U.S.?
If this is not proof that big oil owns the Texas Republican Party I do not what else is. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for President Obama's successful demand for $20 billion commitment from BP in order to help make reparations for those that have been financially devastated by the disaster. This includes fisherman who can no long fish for a living, the tourism industry and oil workers who are out of work b/c of the temporary ban on deep water drilling in the region.
Ol' Joe is obviously more worried about his own campaign coffer than he is the people in the Gulf region. Joe has received $33 million from big oil during his career in office.
God forbid should the government work on behalf of the American people.
What a shocker. Not. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle today 37 of the 64 judges in the Gulf region from Texas to Florida, have financial ties to big oil and gas.
Thirty-seven of the 64 active or senior judges in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have links to oil, gas and related energy industries, including some who own stocks or bonds in BP PLC, Halliburton or Transocean - and others who regularly list receiving royalties from oil and gas production wells, according to the reports judges must file each year.
As many of us already know, big oil and the energy industry has been buying politicians and judges for decades.
Those three companies are named as defendants in virtually all of the 150-plus lawsuits seeking damages, mainly for economic losses in the fishing, seafood, tourism and related industries, that have been filed over the growing oil spill since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. Attorneys for the companies and those suing them are pushing for consolidation of the cases in one court, with BP recommending Texas and others advocating for Louisiana and other states.
BP's devastating oil gusher has certainly opened a pandora's box of a systemic and pervasive lax regulation and oversight, little, if any accountability, crony capitalism, mind boggling corruption and criminal negligence that has pervaded our culture for decades. To learn that judges are part of this toxic anti-American brew should serve as a wake up call to all.
From the perspective of a conservative and economist.
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative and an economist recently wrote an article in Forbes Magazine entitled:
The Misinformed Tea Party Movement
It seems that the anti-tax crew knows very little about how much revenue the federal government receives from taxpayers.
Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses--a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people. (Survey results are here.)
Question 1: How much does the federal government receive in taxes as a percentage of the GDP?
Teabagger answer:
Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.
The facts.
According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.
The Republican Party is fighting to the death to kill health care reform. Thousands of sick, uninsured patients who are holding on by threads, are desperately waiting for help from Washington.
Each day that they obstruct HCR and play procedural games, Republican lawmakers are telling the sick they could not care less about them.
The Republican Party obviously operates in complete and total lock step with the health insurance industry.
Fat cat has called for an all hands on deck effort to block reform. Republicans are to use all means possible, including whopping lies if push comes to shove.
The recent GOP fabrication about the New England Journal Medicine claim that physicians are so terrified of health care reform that they would leave medicine if passed, is a total myth, compliments of none other than the right wing lying machine. God knows what other BS we will be hearing within the next few days from the right wing crazy machine.
And as far as the polls that indicate the public does not support HCR today are concerned, folks had the same opinion about the now hugely popular programs like Medicare and Social Security.
One also has to wonder how the questions are posed by the pollsters. I have been polled by Zogby on several occasions and I have read the questions.
Members of Congress should do what is right for the people and forget about themselves for a minute. We must rely on Democrats because as we well know, the Republicans have neither the courage nor the integrity to stand up for the uninsured. Indeed, if Repubicans were serious about health care reform, the GOP would have done something about it during all of the years the party was in control.
Why do Republicans want to start over on health care reform?
Of course we evil doing liberals know for absolute certain that Republicans would never, ever, hell would have to freeze over,crack down on a scam that rips off people but is good for business.
Houston's conservative readers in Houston did not want to know about the totally screwed temporary but really permanent employees as reported by Rick Casey. With all due respect to Casey, he is not exactly a flaming liberal pinko communist progressive.
Houston area conservatives tore into Casey because they did not like his article.
In response to a comment I had posted on Mr. Casey's online article, a conservative responded with the following.
....as far as jobs and benefits, the unemployment rate has increased dramatically since the Demos took charge of both houses of Congress and Presidency. this is because evil white old white guys, the Chinese who hold our debt and many others are scared of the Demos reckless spending that will soon bankrupt the country.
Hint: This dude watches FOX and listens to Rush.
I wonder where this guy was when then Vice President Dick Cheney said deficits didn't matter and he and Bush stuck an unnecessary war and tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans at the same time, putting all on our national credit card? All of a sudden Republicans are all but hysterical over the deficit. And yet when the Senate introduced a bill proposing a deficit reduction commission 7 Republicans who supported it voted NO when the President said it was a good idea. Talk about political bi-polar disorderly dysfunction syndrome. What is wrong with them?
The truth of the matter is, Democrats are really good at cleaning up Republican made messes. We know what it takes to rebuild a devastated economy and we know how to catch terrorist leaders. The Obama Administration has caught more Taliban terrorist leaders, by the way, in one month than the Bush Administration caught in 6 years. And U.S. troops seized a Taliban headquarters in Afghanistan today. Poor Dick Cheney must have fainted when he learned about this. He is running out of stones to throw at President Obama. So much for Democrats being weak on national security.
Will the Senator from Wal-Mart please yield to the Senator from Halliburton? The Congressman from Black Water has 5 minutes remaining before the Congresswoman from United Health may speak.
Mark your calendars, folks. January 21, 2010 is the day the radical and activist Supreme Court of the United States delivered the U.S. Democracy into the hands of the corporate sector and special interests groups. According to an article in the New York Times corporations, lobbyists and unions can now legally purchase their candidates of choice.
"We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you - whichever one you want,' " a lobbyist can tell lawmakers, said Lawrence M. Noble, a lawyer at Skadden Arps in Washington and former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission.
The decision yesterday will usher in unimaginable numbers of Swift Boat attack ads. Corporate fat cats can now threaten and bully politicians to do their bidding or else.
"It will put on steroids the trend that outside groups are increasingly dominating campaigns," Mr. Ginsberg said. "Candidates lose control of their message. Some of these guys lose control of their whole personalities."
"Parties will sort of shrink in the relative importance of things," he added, "and outside groups will take over more of the functions - advertising support, get out the vote - that parties do now."
In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
Many of those commenting on the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission have focused on the power-grab part. I agree with them. It was unnecessary for the court to go so far when there were several less-radical grounds available. It was audacious to seize the opportunity to overrule precedents when the parties had not pressed this issue and the lower courts had not considered it. It was the height of activism to usurp the judgments of Congress and state legislatures about how best to prevent corruption of the political process.
"If it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more," a wise judge once wrote. That was Chief Justice John G. Roberts -- back when -- and dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens rightly turned that line against him.
Who would have thought? In its true and hypocritical form The Party of No and Obstruction opposes President Obama's proposed fees on banks.
Dick Cheney must be hard at work at that printing press in his undisclosed basement.
Prominent Republicans are coming out in opposition to President Barack Obama's proposal for a $90-billion fee on large banks that took bailout money, a move that political observers say could force the GOP to choose between their traditional anti-tax position and populist anger over the bailout.
On Thursday, GOP Chairman Michael Steele declared that the bank fee -- which would be levied only on banks that took bailout money and have more than $50 billion in assets -- is "another tax on the American public."
The GOP is standing by fat cat the banker in yet another effort to oppose President Obama. Republicans demonstrate time and time again that they are willing to put politics ahead of working on solutions to solve the daunting challenges that we face on local, state and national levels.
Gov. Rick Perry must be worried that the citizens of Texas are going to lose their minds and turn state government over to the Democrats.
This week on the campaign stump, he proposed two state constitutional amendments based on the notion that we can't afford democracy.
One is that any state tax increase would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature.
Functionally this is already the case in the Senate, where everything but voter ID bills needs a two-thirds majority, but apparently Perry is concerned because Texas two years ago elected an uncomfortable number of Democrats and tossed autocratic Speaker Tom Craddick in favor of a speaker who will actually work with said Democrats.
Maybe Perry has become a great admirer of California, where a two-thirds requirement for passing a budget led to the state paying its bills with IOUs while the Legislature bickered and showboated.
Casey is spot on where California's woes are concerned. The state requires a two-thirds majority in order to pass tax increases. Of course since Republicans have an unholy aversion to taxes it is all but impossible to implement tax increases. Consequently schools go without funding and teachers lose their jobs. Class sizes increase and the quality of education thereby decreases. College professors in the University of California system had to take 8% cuts in salaries. Tuition and fees have increased to the point that it is very difficult for working and middle class students to afford a four year college education. There is no money to fix roads and bridges. The state's infrastructure will take a serious nose dive.
What is it with Republican Party? Does it utterly despise hard working and desperate Americans?
Is the GOP too stubborn, lazy or too dumb to wrap its head around a very complex bill? Or maybe reading is a very tedious and beyond boring act that takes time that could be otherwise spent playing golf or sipping martinis with health insurance lobbyists.
Hundreds of Americans die every month because they lack health care insurance. Do Republicans, including the self-serving,vindictive and tool for the health insurance companies, Joe Lieberman care?
Can obese pigs fly?
I did not think so.
Everyone is entitled to one's opinion but not to making up the facts.
Whether it is health care reform or the economic meltdown, Republicans refuse to realistically acknowledge the domestic disasters that confront us whether it has to do with thousands upon thousands of Americans who die because of lack of access to health insurance. Republicans are also unmoved by the thousands upon thousands of Americans who have lost their jobs, homes and everything they have worked so hard to achieve.
Check out how the Republican tools for health insurance lobbyists operate.
Witness a work in narcissism.
Oh, so, Republicans want to improve the bill? For whom? The insurance health care industry?
You betcha.
Oh, Joe, come on, be brave and come out of your Republican closet. Admit that you are a tool for the fat cat health insurance lobbyist. And so is your wife. Come on Joe, admit this is all about you and you don't give a rat's derriere about your constituents who will die sooner than they should because you care about your ego more than you do about the people who elected you.
Of course there is not a civil war brewing in the Republican Party. Someone just made it up. But a leading conservative has recently called the non-civil non-war an impending bloodbath.
After the havoc the Republican Party and its newly formed teabagger faction have wreaked on this country from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush and culminating with the horror of George W. Bush and his neocon policies, a bloodbath sounds just fine by me. Indeed, one is long overdue.
According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle, the teabaggers in Texas are fed up and want to throw all of the bums out. In Texas, the bums happen to be Republicans.
Even Rick Perry is a target of this group because he apparently is not conservative enough.
While it's too early to determine if the Tea Party movement will prove to be a durable political force, its candidates could prove a costly and unwanted distraction for establishment Republicans who would rather be aiming their fire at Democrats. Case in point: the GOP race for governor, where Tea Party ally Debra Medina of Wharton has announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom she dismisses derisively as "get-along-style politicians."
When I learn of the appalling and pervasive corruption that has overtaken our state and U.S. government, not to mention our society, I have to admit that I feel as if I've been punched in the gut and kicked really hard in the butt.
Just when we think we've heard the absolute worst of the very worst, inevitably something even more awful will emerge.
The recent exposure of the Bush Administration's pervasive corruption, the Bush Administration's lies, the ginned up war in Iraq, Halliburton's criminal overcharges, Blackwater that prides itself on offing innocent Iraqis, and its bribes to the Iraqi government to buy silence, the deregulated banks, sub prime loans, Wall. St. and its U.S. government enabled reckless gambling casinos, at taxpayer peril, thank you, the discovery of FOX News as the undeniable propaganda arm for the GOP, the self-serving teabagging front groups that pretend to be grassroots movements that use and abuse well-meaning and misled teabaggers, and on and on...It is enough to suck all of the breath out of my lungs.
What would St. Ronnie say if he knew? Gee whiz, what happened!? Or, I know it all sounds terrible and really scary, but in the end, all of the above will be really good for the American people. Trust me folks, there will be 25 chickens in every pot next year and a pony in every back yard. Be patient. Work harder. You don't have a job? You are not working hard enough, you lazy, shiftless bum! Go to the mall. Buy a house full of garbage you don't need. Just be happy and all of of our troubles will disappear.
But the grand old actor wizard and the master of deep deception has long since departed. And there is no St. Ronnie today who can sugar coat the awful and the scary.
What truly sends chills down my spine this time is the discovery that a group of Christian Republicans and Democratic U.S. lawmakers, thank you, seem to be on a crusade to turn our U.S. government into one that is "led by God."
Why does this imperative remind me somehow of the Taliban and the so-called God run governments Iran and Saudi Arabia?
It all starts with pro-slavery driven and unfettered corporate imperatives.
Liz Cheney, whose father served as one of the architects of two wars, one of which is unnecessary and which has broken us in terms of blood and treasure, and her father, who had also received five deferments during the Vietnam War, attacked President Obama for greeting our fallen soldiers at the Dover Air Force Base.
Only a Republican could turn a respectful and well-meaning Presidential act into an inappropriate or self-serving one.
How low can they go? Apparently the pit is bottomless, as readers will see later in the post.
Veterans over at Daily Kos have much to say about Liz Cheney and her father.
This President rocks. It's daunting to think about how many warehouses of socialist mops and vats of extra strength socialist Lysol we'll need to clean up Republican Texas.
Aside from the need for socialist mops, the really good news today is that it looks like we are getting closer to HCR that includes a public option. We have the AHIP (American Health Insurance Plans) to thank for this. According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times AHIP's threat to increase rates b/c it didn't like the Baucus bill backfired.
A Hatchet Job So Bad It's Good
It seems that a bunch of selfish greed mongering fat cats had become so desperate and crazed by the mere thought of losing one penny that the fat cats blew up the very building they were protecting.
Shall we cry 'em a river folks?
I didn't think so.
Meanwhile, there were other pressing developments today in the U.N and in the U.S. Congress:
Big thanks to the 44 Diaries for sharing this with us.
LBJ would use the term "peckers in pockets" when pushing through Medicare. According to the former President, he needed "peckers in his pocket" to make sure the bill passed. I imagine few Presidents have made abundant use of such colorful language as LBJ. It sure would be nice if we had him around today. Given today's political climate of hysterical drama queens and kings, LBJ's descriptions would no doubt be brutally hilarious and priceless.
Speaking of pocketed peckers, who is running the Senate healthcare mark-up today? Are our Senators working for us or are they working for insurance?
Today, on CSPAN our very own Senator John Cornyn shows us he is a pawn for the insurance industry. Cornyn likes things the way they are, meaning he does not care that Texas has the highest number of uninsured residents. And he has no intention of lifting a finger to change the plight of the untreated. Predictably Cornyn had tried to "grandfather in" insurance companies in order to protect their profits. According to Senator Rockefeller Cornyn's amendment also favored 46% of the population while it would work against 54% of the people. Is this the best Big John could do? What a stand up dude. Texas should be so proud. Fortunately his pandering amendment promoting the status quo failed 13-10.
Reacting to an amendment proposed by Sen. Jon Cornyn (R-Texas) during the Senate Finance Committee's markup of health care reform legislation on Thursday, committee member Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) called his colleague a pawn of the health insurance industry.
"This is a very, very important amendment and it's a very, very bad amendment," said Rockefeller. "If there's anything which is clear, it's that the insurance industry is not running this markup, but is running certain people in this markup."
Senator Cornyn, by the way, received $759,000 from health professionals, $350,000 from insurance, $222,000 from Pharma and $248,000 from lobbyists. A video clip of the exchange between Senators Cornyn and Rockefeller can be seen in the link above.
This morning on Pacifica radio a caller told her story about the plight of those without health insurance. Because of pre-existing conditions insurance for her family of 4 would cost a whopping $3200.00 per year with a $12,000. deductible, which means little very insurance coverage. She, like many folks, cannot afford it. When her 10 year old daughter badly sprained her arm, the trip to the ER and treatment came to between $1500.-$2000. This is beyond ridiculous.
This is why I have such contempt for the self-serving shills like the teabagger nut job below. They are doing all they can to make the lives of the woman who called Pacifica and others more desperate than they already are.
