Mitt Romney Archives - Page 3 of 13

It’s A Trap!

Bobo is the yapping dog that latches onto the bumper of what he only thinks is a moving car…the Wingnut House Caucus the symphorophiliacs found in J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.

Glenn Beck’s Independence, USA!

Frank Zappa called it “Centerville,” Homer Simpson calls it Springfield, Glenn Beck calls it “Independence.”

A House Built On Sandy

Breezy Point, Queens, after Superstorm Sandy blew through.

With urgently needed relief for the victims of Superstorm Sandy ignored for over two months by the Rethug led 112th House of Representatives , the 113th sworn in this week managed to pass just $9.7 billion of the $60 billion the Democrat led Senate had already approved, with 67 Rethugs voting no.

In contrast, $62 billion worth of relief for Hurricane Katrina was signed into law within 4 days from the time it first made landfall. Even so, it took a firestorm of protest from such conservative stalwarts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Rep. Steve King (R-NY) to force a vote. King went so far as to threaten switching parties if Speaker John Boehner didn’t immediately put it on the floor. Da Boner has promised to schedule a supplemental authorization by Jan 15.

So, what’s been the holdup? A combination of resistance from the likes of David Koch‘s American For Progress, who object to the whole notion of the social compact and the costs of being our brother’s keeper when the need arises; and a hypocritical regional, red state prejudice against the liberal Northeast. Lee Fang from The Nation explains the Koch connection:

Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. Hurricane Sandy was the second most costly in American history, leaving 100 lives lost, over $50 billion in devastation and tens of thousands of damaged or destroyed homes. Legislative efforts to help those who survived Hurricane Sandy’s wrath will reach a major stumbling block.

Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote”—meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last night. There is some legitimate criticism with aspects of the legislation, including the fact that some of the money will go to non-Sandy related reconstruction efforts in disaster areas.

For AFP, however, the whole bill must die and victims of the storm deserve no help from the government. Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.”

Easy to say when the guy who signs your paycheck is worth over $30 billion. Crooks and Liars addresses the redneck issue:

Rep. Rush Holt came to the floor and said what many are thinking: They dropped the ball because the disaster happened in a blue state. He’s not the only one to think so:

Jamil Smith@JamilSmith Wonder if the House would adjourn without even voting on Hurricane #Sandy relief if it had hit red states the hardest. Having my doubts.

This could possibly be the most despicable non-act of Congress ever. Howie Klein has more on one of the tea party idiots in New Jersey who is probably dancing a jig right now:

Among the Koch whores in the House GOP threatening to disrupt the aid are right-wing hacks in New York (like Staten Island’s corrupt Mafia-related Michael “Mikey Suits” Grimm) and New Jersey’s worst extremist ideologue Scott Garrett. Long Island Congressman Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has been handling the bill, is worried that if the money doesn’t get approved while he’s still chair, Texas hate-monger Michael McCaul— the richest member of the House and an anti-tax fanatic— will kill it. Many Republicans still fighting the Civil War look at this as an opportunity to deal a painful blow to the hated Northerners.

Which would be a fitting postscript to the movie Lincoln. And tying the two objections together, Fang continues:

It seems particularly cruel that the Koch political machine would use its vast network of paid activists and professional operatives to kill this bill. For one thing, this is David Koch’s community. From his Upper East Side apartment, Koch lives only a subway ride away from the devastation in Red Hook. Notably, Koch’s group gave away free gasoline during the election in a wide-scale anti-Obama stunt, yet had nothing to give to the victims of the storm. Now, Koch, one of the richest men in the world, is actually trying to take something away from them.

[…]

The other tragedy of Koch’s decision to target Sandy aid is that his company is one reason we will increasingly face extreme weather events like hurricanes, flash floods, droughts and fierce storms. The Koch brothers, David and Charles, sit atop one of the world’s largest privately held conglomerates. Koch Industries is a sprawling company with interests in commodity speculation, timber, oil refining, ethanol production, chemicals, pipelines, consumer products, and fertilizer, among others. The Koch empire, by one estimate, has an annual carbon footprint of 100 million tons. Not only does Koch’s business contribute to climate change through massive carbon emissions, as Greenpeace reported, Koch is the largest financier of climate denial political organizations and media groups. (As an aside, unlike AFP, Greenpeace ignored partisan politics and sent many of its workers to Queens to assist with relief efforts.)

And lest we forget, during the primary debates Willard called for the elimination and privitization of FEMA:

In sum, Willard argues it’s immoral to saddle our children with the bill for restoring the infrastructure that they will have to depend on. Better to leave them with this.

Exceptional American Doucherism

Rethugs vote to throw the world’s disabled over the cliff

Tales From The Benghazi Crypt Keeper (Update)

Crypt Keeper John McCain says: “Hello, Boils and Ghouls. Welcome to my nightmare.”

Is it just US (Urantian Sojourn), or is John McCain becoming a decrepit parody of himself?

Just as he has never gotten over being tortured by the North Vietnamese, manifest in his ‘bomb the hell out of ’em’ knee-jerk response to nearly every foreign policy crisis, he will never get over losing to The Black Man in The White House.

Early in President Obama’s first term, McCain beat the war drums on Iran. During the Arab Spring, he demanded that our default response be to arm every opposition group in sight, despite the fact that many of them are Islamic fundamentalists with Al Qaeda sympathies. The strategy of “leading from behind” that operated so effectively in overthrowing Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi, costing not a single American life, makes McCain’s wrinkled and liver spotted skin crawl right off his malformed skeleton. (That skeletal malformation was the result of a crash landing he endured after being shot down over heavily populated Hanoi by the Vietnamese during one of his 23 bombing sorties.) This is a guy who really, really enjoys the smell of napalm in the morning.

Not surprising then that he would immediately jump all over the Benghazi tragedy. Instead of waiting for a thorough investigation of how and why four brave Americans lost their lives (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen (ret.), is conducting one such investigation for the State Department), McCain accused the Administration of a political cover-up, supposedly to preserve President Obama’s national security cred in the run-up to the election. Killing Usama bin Laden had effectively neutered what had been a major GOP political advantage, national defense. Given that they had thoroughly tanked the economy under George W. Bush, they had little left to hang their hats on.

A few weeks later, Obama won the election in an electoral landslide and the popular vote by nearly four percentage points. At that point, you would have thought that all the election year cover-up hype would have died a natural death. Not so, when the ever-vengeful McCain catches the scent of blood and feces in the air.

(Perhaps his shattered dreams of being appointed Secretary of Defense in a Mitt Romney administration added fuel to his always simmering anger. How would someone with McCain’s psychological profile confront the loss of an opportunity to do more than just sing “Bomb, bomb, bomb…Iran”? Hadn’t Romney’s biggest donor, Sheldon Adelson, who contributed a record $70 million after saying he would spend whatever it took to defeat Obama, made the price of his support a war against Iran? Thus did another fevered McCain ambition turn to ashes in his hands.)

Instead of confronting Obama directly over the Benghazi snafu, McCain focused his fire on UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the hapless messenger sent out by the White House to explain the ever developing understanding of the events of 9/11/12. (Funny how the Obama proxies subjected to the most vicious Rethug attacks have all been Black, namely Rice, Eric Holder and Van Jones). In his continuing pogrom against all things Obama, McCain was joined by two fellow Rethug senators, his BFF, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-Maine). Together, The New Three Amigos reacted to every subsequent intelligence community disclosure with suspicion, if not downright hostility. (See our earlier reports here and here.)

For instance, when former CIA Director and Republican rock star, David Petraeus, confirmed the White House account of how Rice was dutifully relaying talking points provided to her by the intelligence community, they were left sputtering and reaching for a new line of attack. They soon seized upon the difference between the classified and unclassified versions of the talking points. The unclassified version given by Rice omitted mention of Al Qaeda, and instead tenuously identified the proximate cause as “extremists” reacting to an anti-Muslim YouTube video that had spurred riots around the Muslim world, a theory later deemed untrue, despite testimony eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

The McCain reputation assassin team geared up and leaped into action, once again accusing the White House of altering the talking points for political purposes. And once again, they were shot down by the intel community who said that they had approved the unclassified version in order to protect sources and methods, and for legal reasons “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Undeterred, The Benghazi Crypt Keeper nursed his conspiratorial golem back to life from his own withered man boob, claiming that were still “fifty questions” he wanted answered. Hoping to finally put the issue to rest, Rice traveled to The Russell Senate Building Tuesday, accompanied by the interim CIA Director, Michael J. Morell, to personally answer whatever questions the Amigos might still have.

When the interviews were over, the Amigos immediately flocked to the Klieg lights and tv cameras,where they proceeded to double down on their shoot the messenger campaign. McCain said that he would be “very hard pressed” to support her expected nomination to succeed Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State. And Dear Lindsey had the line of the day when he confessed “Bottom line, I’m more disturbed than I was before.” (Ahem, Lindsey. Your lacey Freudian slip is showing.) Former Amigo Joe Lieberman (I-CON) was also paid a visit but he took a different tack, saying that Rice “told the truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Rice and Morell continued their visits to The Hill Wednesday, stopping by to see Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking minority chair of the; and Bob Corker (R-TN), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Corker picked up the baton and dutifully continued the party line criticism of Rice. Collins unexpectedly opened up a new line of attack, implying that Rice might have also been responsible for the bombings of the Kenya and Tanzania embassies in the mid 1990s when she was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the Clinton administration. One is entitled to ask: If Collins really considers that such a burning issue, why didn’t she bring it up during the January 2009 floor debate that preceded Rice’s unanimous Senate approval as Ambassador to the UN? Prolly because Rice ‘s old job involved policy, not security.

“Questions, questions– vee still have questions!” An endless series of questions, most or all of which have already been answered, as Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show Wednesday evening. All of which leads us to our own question: Just what the hell is all this sturm and drang really about?MORE. . .“Tales From The Benghazi Crypt Keeper (Update)”

Is It Over For Grover?

In a front page story Tuesday titled For Tax Pledge and Its Author, a Test of Time, the NY Times meditates on the prospects of Grover “Poopy Head” Grover following the decisive defeat of the GOP in the 2012 presidential elections.

The article begins thusly:

Next to the oath of office, it has been perhaps the most important commitment that Republicans in Congress can make. It is called simply “the Pledge,” and its enforcer is such a fixture in the party that he is known simply by his first name, Grover.

But the pledge and its creator, Grover Norquist, a 56-year-old conservative lobbyist, have never before faced a test as they do now. The federal deficit stands at $1 trillion. The social safety net continues to grow — and, in the case of Medicare and Social Security, remains hugely popular. And unless the two parties can agree on a fiscal plan before Jan. 1, hundreds of billions of dollars of tax increases will go into effect automatically, meaning that Congress does not even need to act for taxes to rise.

The combination means that Mr. Norquist, whose long record of success is a rarity in Washington, finds himself in a tricky spot. Some top Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner, are saying they now agree with Democrats that the government must collect more tax revenue. Others have gone so far as to break with Mr. Norquist publicly.

By Mr. Norquist’s count, 219 House members — enough for a majority — and 39 senators have committed to the pledge. But some of those members who signed on, many of them years ago, have started to back away, apparently leaving him several votes shy of the majority he would need to block any tax increase.

The last broad-based tax increase the Rethugs supported was 22 years ago, signed into law by George H.W. Bush. So it may be a bit early to write his political epitaph.

For instance, mid-term elections like the one coming up in 2014 historically favor the losers of the previous presidential election. And Citizens United will continue to pump ungodly amounts of money into GOP campaigns. Presumably, the 43 billionaires who supported Mitt Romney will know better than to naively dump all their money on political hucksters like Karl Rove and Dick Armey.

Nonetheless, exit polls from Nov. 6 show a growing majority of voters supporting tax increases on the rich to help bring the deficit under control and to preserve vital safety net programs for the poor and middle class. While I don’t believe I’ve ever before quoted John McCain clone Lindsey Graham favorably, he did state the obvious when he told the Washington Post: