Day: May 7, 2012

Traitors to Their Country: After Crashing the Economy in 2008, GOP Leaders Conspired to Obstruct Recovery in January 2009

Jon Ponder

Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich
In journalist Robert Draper’s new book on the 112th Congress, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” he describes a dinner meeting among top Republicans on the day of Pres. Obama’s Inauguration, Jan. 21, 2009. The purpose of the meeting that day — the same day George Bush, whose policy failures they had been supported in lockstep, flew out of Washington as the most unpopular president in the history presidential polling — was to lick their wounds and to plot their comeback.

On hand were disgraced former GOP Speaker, Newt Gingrich, Republican pollster/propagandist Frank Lutz, GOP propagandist Fred Barnes as well as senior Republican elected officials, including Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada and Bob Corker of Tennessee, as well as Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia, Kevin McCarthy of California, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Dan Lungren of California and others. (Then-Minority Leader John Boehner was not there — he and Luntz are not speaking.)

Four months earlier, the financial markets had melted down plunging the U.S. economy into its worst freefall since 1929. As they were meeting in January, the United States was suffering its worst job losses in a month in 34 years. Over 3.5 million jobs had been lost in 2008, nearly 2 million of those losses had occurred in the three months prior to the GOP fatcats’ elegant dinner meeting. And there was no end to it in sight.

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Schwarzenegger Calls Out GOP’s Right Wing

Buck Banks

Being a Republican used to mean finding solutions for the American people that worked for everyone. It used to mean having big ideas that moved the country forward. It can mean that again, but big ideas don’t often come from small tents.

— Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), writing in the Los Angeles Times, saying the “extreme right wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn’t meet its strict criteria.”