This, of course, was a few flip-flops ago, back in the day when Charlie was a staunch Republican, or what passes for “staunch” with Crist, which means “Which way is the political wind blowing, and what’s in it for me?”
In a speech in Cleveland last week, Boehner (who is prone to hysterical public outbursts) attacked federal employees (like, um, himself?), saying “taxpayers are subsidizing the fattened salaries and pensions of federal bureaucrats who are out there right now making it harder to create private sector jobs. “If Boehner wants to contribute his salary and pension as a federal employee, which any objective observer would have to admit he does nothing to earn, to the IRS, he’s more than welcome.
As right-wing former Rep. Joe Scarborough put it, “It’s not reported. But so many Republicans tell me this is a guy that is not the hardest worker in the world. After 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock at night, he’s disengaged at best. And you can see him around town… Every Republican I talk to says John Boehner, by 5 or 6 o’clock at night, you can see him at bars. He is not a hard worker.”
Now, of course, Boehner is desperately seeking a promotion and a raise — the speaker makes $223,500 — but there’s no reason to believe he’d work any harder as speaker than he does now, coasting on the public dime.
In the wake of Tuesday’s primary in Alaska, the “lamestream media,” as Sarah Palin calls them, has been crediting Palin and a tea party group with driving the surge in support for GOP underdog candidate Joe Miller in his race against incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
What Beltway pundits do not mention, however, is that the tea party group that ran ads against Murkowski has been in the news this summer because of its racist activities — nor do they mention that the group may have financial ties to Palin, who has been engaged in a junior-high school level feud with the Murkowski family for years. Via OpenSecrets.org:
The Republican Party of Florida has tipped its hand and revealed its campaign strategy that will catapult Rick Scott into the governor’s mansion — simply recast the election from a choice between Scott and Democrat Alex Sink, and instead position Scott as running against President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
I know, it sounds unbelievable, but here it is in a press release sent Wednesday by RPOF Vice Chairman Debbie Cox-Roush, chair of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) Republican Party:
I am pleased to congratulate our Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Scott. The stakes are high this election cycle and electing a Republican to the Governor’s Mansion is an important part of our mission to keep taxes low and fight for less government and more personal freedom.
I’m energized by Rick’s commitment to conservative values and am looking forward to working with him and contrasting his new ideas with Alex Sink’s record of support for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
If you’re trying to decide whether to go trick-or-treating this year as either media phenom Lady Gaga or erstwhile fight attendant Stephen Slater, here’s a third alternative — oil-splattered BP rigger with a dead fish and wrench in hand. Pretty doggone clever, eh?
The outfit is the brainchild of New York-based Fun World, a costume-manufacturing company that has dubbed the getup the “Bad Planning” costume to fend off the trademark lawyers should they be attracted to the familiar green-and-yellow BP logo on the suit.
Nobody is expecting the oil company to send a deluge of cease-and-desist orders to the small costume company, though, as BP has enough bad press without stepping into a David-and-Goliath media mess with a little mom-and-pop costume company.
FLASHBACK: Here’s a clip of from CNN’s “Larry King Live” from 2006 in which Bill Maher outs Ken Mehlman during the live broadcast:
CNN edited out Maher’s mention of Mehlman’s name in the re-broadcast.
The fact that Ken Mehlman is gay was one of the worst kept secrets in modern politics — now he has come out of the closet in an interview with the Atlantic’s Mark Ambinder:
Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.
Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.
“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman told Ambinder. Mehlman also said his friends and family have been “wonderful and supportive,” and that coming out has made him a “happier and better person”
“It’s something I wish I had done years ago,” Mehlman said.
You and a few million others, Ken.
The recent news out of Kentucky was just awful,
They found the senator unconscious and horizontal.
And since his hospitalization,
There’s been little news about his condition,
But now everybody’s having a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell.
