Day: December 10, 2010

Verbatim

Buck Banks

While I am very sympathetic to those who passionately support the repeal, as a Senator of just three weeks, I have not had the opportunity to visit and hear the full range of viewpoints from the citizens of West Virginia.

— Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), the only Democrat to vote against a procedural motion to repeal the law banning gays from serving in the military. But after the vote, The Hill reports Manchin “blasted out a statement apologizing to anyone angered by his vote and said he believed the policy ‘probably should be repealed in the near future.'”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Caught Lying Again – This Time about Her GOP-Style Death Panels for the Poor

Jon Ponder

Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer made news earlier this year when she claimed that the deserts in her state were littered with headless bodies — corpse of the victims of bloodthirsty illegal aliens who were crossing the border to wreak havoc on Arizonans. And though that claim was proven to be false, she never admitted she had lied.

In an interview on with Greta Van Susteren on Fox this week, Brewer has been caught lying again. This time, she has falsely claimed that Arizona is continuing to pay for life-saving transplant operations for state residents who can’t afford them:

GOV. JAN BREWER: It’s part of the Cadillac program that Arizona has. Even your private insurance don’t cover a lot of those procedures. A lot of those transplants are being provided in the state of Arizona.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: By the state of Arizona or privately?

BREWER: By the state of Arizona. We provide heart transplants, liver, kidney transplants, pancreas and kidney.

OLBERMANN: The state is absolutely not providing a liver transplant to Francisco Felix or a heart transplant to Randy Sheppard.

Rough transcript from MSBNC:

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With Boehner’s Pick of ‘Prince of Pork’ to Chair Appropriations, GOP’s Tea Party Base Is Starting to Get It – They’ve Been Had

Jon Ponder

Speaker-Elect John Boehner and the incoming GOP House leadership (which, it should be noted, is the same as the leadership in the current Congress and practically the same as the old “borrow and spend, spend, spend” House leadership under Bush) announced its picks for committee chairmen this week — and one of these in particular — the choice of Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, the “Prince of Pork,” to lead the Appropriations committee — is not playing well within the party’s tea bagger base.

In just the last two years, Rep. Rogers has requested $246 million in earmarks for his rural Kentucky district.

And rightly so. The general indictment of the tea parties — their political Achilles heel — is that the entire movement is predicated on rank hypocrisy about government spending.

From the elderly tea baggers who shouted “Get the government out of my Medicare!” at the town hall meetings in 2009 to the Republican pols who voted against the Stimulus but then rushed home to pose for photo ops handing out giant Stimulus checks to fund projects in their districts — and from the incoming tea bagger members of Congress who spewed spittle about the evils of “Obamacare” to get elected but who are now eagerly bellying up for their taxpayer-funded Cadillac health insurance plans to the tea parties’ current support for the GOP’s billionaires’ tax break even though it will blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit over the next ten years — tea baggers don’t have a lot of credibility left.

If they want to keep up the pretense that they really are for fiscal thrift, they should get up off their couches and work up some of their trademark poorly spelled signs to protest Boehner’s appointment of a guy like this to run the most influential House committee on spending:

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