Category Archives: Teapublicans

America’s Most Centrist President.

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In history, no president has ever nominated more than two members of the opposing party to his cabinet…until President Obama.

While Republicans call Obama an extreme liberal, a socialist, a communist, and worse, the president continues to nominate Republicans to important posts. He nominated Ray LaHood as Secretary of Transportation, Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary (although Gregg later withdrew his name from consideration), John Huntsman as Ambassador to China and John McHugh as Secretary of the Army. He also nominated Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. (Although Gates is a Republican, he changed his registration to independent in order to give the appearance of impartiality.)

And that was just the first term.

So far in his second term, President Obama has nominated Republicans Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and James Comey as Director of the FBI. That’s a total of seven Republicans nominated for important positions in his administration. And there may be more to come.

If that’s not the definition of a centrist, I don’t know what is.

By comparison, Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated two members of the opposing party over three terms. Eisenhower nominated one for each of his terms. John F. Kennedy nominated two, Nixon one, Carter two, and Reagan nominated one who later switched affiliations to become a Republican. George H.W. Bush nominated no members of the opposing party. And both Clinton and Dubya nominated one apiece.

So if, according to Teapublicans and their right wing media whores, President Obama is pushing an extreme liberal agenda on Americans, he’s had a whole lot of help from conservatives.

It’s Difficult To Disprove A Negative.

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Whenever someone accuses the government of a scandal, it’s almost impossible to disprove it. That’s because the accusation makes headlines. The truth doesn’t.

Nobody understands this principle better than Teapublicans.

When Bill Clinton was elected to the White House, he was forced to disprove a constant wave of scandals created by the GOP. Now it’s President Obama’s turn. That’s why we’ve seen a flurry of scandalous accusations about Fast & Furious, drones, Benghazi, the IRS, and NSA.

The headlines have been damning – based on outrageous claims by Rep. Darrell Issa, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Speaker John Boehner, Sen. Mitch McConnell and others. The truth has been less interesting.

For example, Issa made claims that Fast & Furious was a large scale gun-running operation overseen by Attorney General Eric Holder. The reality is that it was a small localized operation by a unit of the ATFE frustrated by Arizona’s lax gun laws and the inability to prosecute straw buyers.

Issa and others made the sensational claim that the president and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored the danger to diplomats in Libya then covered up their failures. The reality is that Ambassador Stevens twice rejected increased security and the talking points released by Susan Rice were crafted by the CIA and mid-level State Dept. officials.

Teapublicans claim that IRS scrutiny of Tea Party organizations seeking nonprofit status was orchestrated by the White House and President Obama. The truth is, the IRS director was a Bush appointee and, according to testimony by an IRS supervisor in charge (who is, incidentally, a self-described conservative Republican), the scrutiny of Tea Party groups was not ordered by the administration and was not politically motivated.

Teapublicans and many Democrats claim that NSA collection of data demonstrates that President Obama is an authoritarian fascist operating in defiance of the 4th amendment of the Constitution. The truth is, the NSA program began immediately following 9/11 and the Obama administration reigned it in, eliminating warrantless wiretaps and clearing the collection of data through the FISA court and Congress. Interestingly, the people of Europe were aware of our program long before Snowden’s revelations and the overwhelming majority approve of it.

All of this proves that, now that our press is driven by ratings and sensationalism rather than a desire to inform, unscrupulous politicians can take advantage of it. And no politicians are more unscrupulous than today’s Republican Party.

“Private Eyes” Given A Whole New Meaning.

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Recent revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping on phone records, emails and Internet history have been used by some politicians to attack President Obama. Really? He not only inherited these programs from Dubya. By most accounts, he placed new restrictions on them.

Whatever the case, government spying on American citizens should be openly debated by all Americans and our representatives. Only the American people should decide how much privacy we’re willing to sacrifice in exchange for the prevention of terror attacks.

But while the media and Washington have been focused on each new revelation of the NSA program, several aspects have been relatively ignored.

One is that those collecting the information are not government agents or employees. They’re private companies. Edward Snowden was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, which is a publicly traded, for-profit corporation that has sucked up billions in revenue from government agencies such as the Department of Defense, all branches of the U.S. military, U.S. Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Treasury, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Security Agency.

As a result of the political right’s fascination with privatization, companies like Booz are now handling many of the tasks the government used to. The belief, although not proven, is that awarding government contracts to such companies will save money.

Apparently, it also makes information related to these tasks less secure.

Not satisfied with revealing aspects of the secret program, Edward Snowden has told the South China Morning Post that the US has been “hacking Hong Kong and China since 2009.” Great! So after turning many American citizens against their own government, Snowden is now attempting to turn other nations against it, too.

Another surprising aspect of the Snowden leak is that Booz Allen Hamilton was paying him a salary of $200,000! This is a 29-year-old who dropped out of high school, dropped out of the Army, and possesses a GED. According to his social media sites, his real expertise is playing video games.

Finally, after revealing classified information about what he considered to be US government abuses, Snowden moved to China, saying that he admired Hong Kong for its commitment to free speech! (Perhaps he should talk to a few of my Tibetan friends about China’s commitment to free speech. He can find many of them in Chinese prisons.)

Not surprisingly, all of this has made Snowden a “hero” to the tinfoil-hatted Glenn Beck. Upon reading an account of Snowden’s revelations and his flight to Hong Kong, Beck tweeted “I think I have just read about the man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero.”

On the other hand, Richard “The Dick” Cheney scurried out of his hidey hole and pronounced Snowden a “traitor.”

For me, this poses a real dilemma. If Beck praises someone as a hero, I can usually count on that person being a lunatic. And if the black-hearted Cheney calls someone a traitor, I can usually count on that person to be the opposite.

So now what am I to believe?

A Fine Example Of An Arizona Conservative.

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Last Tuesday, a federal jury convicted former Arizona Congressman “Slick” Rick Renzi on 17 counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy, extortion, racketeering, money laundering and making false statements to insurance regulators. He was acquitted on 15 other felony charges because some evidence was ruled inadmissible.

I was especially interested in the outcome of the case, since the Republican’s conviction confirmed my character judgment. You see, Renzi represented my congressional district, and I became convinced of his corruption after my very first exposure to Mr. Slick. Indeed, only months afterward, rumors of Renzi’s abuse of power began to surface.

Renzi was indicted on charges that, while in office, he tried to force a mining company to purchase a former business associate’s land as part of a federal land exchange for copper mining. When the mining company balked, he engineered another federal land swap that included a payment of $4.6 million for land owned by James Sandlin, who then paid Renzi $733,000 for his help.

Renzi was also charged with embezzling more than $400,000 of customer premiums from his insurance business in order to fund his 2002 congressional campaign.

“Former Congressman Renzi’s streak of criminal activity was a betrayal of the public trust and abuse of the political process,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in a statement released after the verdict. “Mr. Renzi now faces the consequences for breaking the laws that he took an oath to support and defend.”

Sadly, Renzi’s conviction isn’t the end of political corruption in Arizona. But it’s a start.

Scandalrama!

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As the Teapublican House, led by witch-hunter-in-chief, Darrell Issa, looks under every rug and in every nook and cranny for dirt on Fast & Furious, Benghazi, Tea Party applications for non-profit status, the NSA, and anything else that can be used as a hammer against the Obama administration, the real work of Congress languishes.

The House still has not resolved the federal budget and the debt ceiling. It has not yet brought sanity to the nonsensical sequester cuts. It has not proposed a single bill to create jobs and lower unemployment. It has not proposed a bill to rebuild and modernize our infrastructure. It has not yet passed a bill to reduce or eliminate the waiting time for veterans’ benefits. It has not yet passed an immigration bill.

The House has not considered tax reform to eliminate loopholes that would prevent multinational corporations to stash cash in offshore tax havens. It has not passed a bill to end the senseless gun violence. It has not passed a bill to close loopholes in background checks or to control the straw buyers who provide guns to gangs and drug cartels. It hasn’t even proposed a solution for climate change caused by increasing CO2 emissions.

Teapublican congressional representatives have largely ignored all substantive issues. Instead, they have focused on trumped-up “scandals,” the repeal of “Obamacare” and a myriad of restrictive social issues all revolving around women’s vaginas. As always, they seem fascinated by the “evils” of sexual orientation and the rights of the unborn.

Meanwhile, they ignore the rights and the needs of the already living.

Post Racial America?

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On the anniversary of the murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, his wife, Myrlie Evers-Williams, was interviewed on Politics Nation with Rev. Al Sharpton. Although acknowledging that much has changed since that day 50 years ago, Myrlie Evers-Williams said, “Jim Crow is still alive and it’s dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, instead of a white robe.”

I believe that statement to be all too true.

Despite the fact that we have a president of African-American heritage, there are still racist attacks. As pointed out by Evers-Williams, on the night that President Obama was re-elected, there was rioting on the University of Mississippi campus. Across the country, Tea Party rallies have displayed racist representations of President Obama along with the battle flag of the Confederate States of America. Teapublican-dominated legislatures have put in place voter ID laws designed to suppress minority votes. African-Americans are arrested at a rate many times that of white Americans for drug use. As a result, our prisons are over-flowing with minorities. Teapublican politicians are determined to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, which is often the only medical provider in minority neighborhoods. And African-Americans are still arrested for “driving while black” in some cities and neighborhoods.

Post racial? I don’t think so.

Certainly, we have come a very long way since June 12, 1963. But we have a very long way to go until we have ended racism in the United States.

How Quickly We Forget!

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A new poll by Gallup has found that 49 percent of Americans now view President George W. Bush favorably, while 46 percent view him unfavorably. Assuming that the poll is more accurate than Gallup polls from the 2012 election, it would seem to indicate that 49 percent of Americans are either uninformed, misinformed or blissfully ignorant. The only other possible explanation is an epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder!

What exactly did Dubya do that could be considered good?

Was it the fact that he used his brother’s position as governor of Florida to steal the 2000 election? Was it his failure to pay attention to pre-9/11 warnings of a terrorist attack? Was it his campaign of lies and misinformation leading up to the Iraq War? Was it his apparent disinterest in completing the mission in Afghanistan? Was it his administration’s failure to regulate our nation’s largest financial institutions leading to an economic collapse? Was it his policies that led to the loss of millions of jobs? His bailout of the too-big-to-fail banks?

Was it Dubya’s embrace of “extraordinary renditions,” torture, no-bid contracts to military suppliers, or warrantless wiretaps? Was it his administration’s failure in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Was it his administration’s embrace of the oily executives who control our nation’s energy policies?

Yes, by all means, let’s sit back and, through the haze of fading memories, fondly remember those halcyon days of incompetence, corruption and abject failure.

Rx For Economic Depression And World War.

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Last week, the Romney-Ryan campaign released its plan for the transition of power from the Obama administration had they won the 2012 election as they expected. Titled the Romney Readiness Project 2012, the 138-page report reads more like a plan to destroy our nation than to lead it forward.

Among the recommendations were 20 percent across-the-board tax cuts for individuals and 10 percent cuts for corporations. The plan also recommended eliminating labor agreements in federal contracts, eliminating regulations on Big Coal and Big Oil, repealing “Obamacare” while quietly maintaining its cuts to Medicare, cutting Medicaid by offering block grants to states, and “voucherizing” Medicare.

As for foreign relations, the report recommended restoring military funding to pre-sequestration levels, confronting China’s trade policies and designating it as a currency manipulator, sustaining troop levels in Afghanistan beyond 2014, asserting US military might in Syria, and confronting Russia over human rights and its support of Syria and Iran.

In other words, Romney would have dramatically cut revenues while greatly increasing expenses (And you thought Teapublicans were concerned by deficits!).  At the same time, he would have tried to bully other nations, including some of our allies.

By re-electing President Obama, we very likely dodged a bullet…literally!

Darrell Issa Has Long Been An Expert On Lies And Corruption.

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It seems that Rep. Darrell Issa sees lies and corruption everywhere in the Obama administration; Fast & Furious, Benghazi, IRS and AP. Yet after months of “investigations” Issa has yet to find any evidence of White House involvement in these scandals.

In fact, to use the term “scandal” is a misnomer.

So why is Issa so intent on seeking evidence of corruption when even members of his own party say there is no there there? Aside from the obvious political motivation to discredit the president, it may be because Issa has walked a rather shady path in his own life. Indeed, few are more inclined to expect to find corrupt activities than someone who has committed many of his own.

To wit, Issa lied about his military record. He was indicted by a grand jury for the alleged theft of a Maserati. After being stopped for driving the wrong way on a one-way street, he was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of an unregistered firearm. He was indicted a second time for grand theft auto, but the prosecution dropped the case.

Issa’s personal fortune stems from Steal Stopper, a company he obtained through foreclosure when its founder missed a payment on a $60,000 loan. But the company’s offices and factory were destroyed by fire. A fire investigation found that the fire had started in two places aided by an accelerant such as gasoline. Interestingly, Issa was accused of increasing the fire insurance policy by 462% just a few weeks earlier and of removing computer equipment containing accounting and customer information prior to the fire.

Suspicious of an apparent arson, the insurance company paid about one-tenth the insured amount, which still was enough to provide Issa with a tidy profit. Issa later rebuilt the company and sold it to a California-based maker of car alarms making himself wealthy.

And this is the guy who, as Chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is now in charge of Congressional investigations? It would seem that if Issa is serious about finding corruption, he’d be more successful by investigating himself.

New Poll Finds 33 Percent Of Americans Are Batcrap Crazy!

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A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Americans view Rep. Michele Bachmann unfavorably while 33 percent had a favorable view of one America’s most ignorant and batcrap crazy politicians!

That tells us less about Bachmann than American voters.

Keep in mind, this is the woman who confused John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy; who believed “the shot heard ’round the world” for American independence took place in Concord, New Hampshire; that the slave-owning Founders “worked tirelessly to end slavery;” that an overabundance of CO2 in our atmosphere is harmless; that the Census is a government plot to round up dissenters; that Congress is full of communists; that evolution is just a theory.

During her six years in office, Bachmann has had only one bill passed by the House – the repeal of “Obamacare” – and none signed into law. Indeed, even fellow Minnesota politician, Tim Pawlenty described Bachmann as having “a legislative record of offering failed amendments.”

That’s being kind.

As leader of the Tea Party delegation in Congress, Bachmann presided over the most destructive element in US history. She is the leader of the misguided, the uneducated, the uninformed, the misinformed and the heavily armed. She and her colleagues measure success by how much legislation they can block; how completely they can destroy safety nets for the poor and the vulnerable; how completely they can undermine education; how thoroughly they can destroy our own government.

She and her Tea Party parasites even held hostage the faith and credit of the US Treasury, causing the US to lose its AAA bond rating for the first time in history. And, even though she has announced that she won’t seek re-election, she’s not done. She still has more than a year to cause further obstruction and destruction.

And she has the support of 33 percent of Americans??? God help us.