Today, the GOP House members metaphorically walk the plank.
For that they have both Paul Ryan and Donald Trump to thank.
They’ll vote before they know
Trumpcare’s score from the CBO.
Now there’s naught to do but watch their reelection prospects tank.
Here, less than 12 hours after seven people died, these SOBs, and that’s all I can call them, these SOBs didn’t even have the decency to table the vote.
— Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), slamming House Republicans who voted to cut funding for Amtrak a few hours after a deadly train accident in Philadelphia, TPM reports.
Of Americans say it’s a bad thing that the Republican party controls the House of Representatives, up 11 points from last December, soon after the 2012 elections when the Republicans kept control of the chamber, a new CNN/ORC poll finds. Only 38% say it’s a good thing the GOP controls the House, a 13-point dive from the end of last year.
Probably the most popular vote I’ve made, in this district.
— Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM), quoted by Salon, for his vote against John Boehner for Speaker. He adds that it’s received well: “Always applause, sometimes standing applause.
Yesterday, the House of Representatives pulled a bill from the floor for lack of votes — the sort of scrambling chaos that occurs routinely in the chamber where John Boehner presides like a trembling child monarch. But this defeat was different. The bill concerned the funding of housing and transportation programs, though its failure represented more than just a programmatic setback, or even a setback for the Republican economic strategy writ large, but the potential ruin of its entire posture toward Obama. Since taking control of the House two and a half years ago, Republicans have fomented a series of crises that seemed to have no end in sight, explicitly refusing to negotiate with Obama and implicitly denying his legitimacy as president. The crumbling of that wall is far from certain, but yesterday a wide crack opened up.
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), a physician, promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care ActAs Republicans in the House prepared to vote for the 33rd vote — we said it was only the 31st vote earlier and apologize for the error — the Los Angeles Times interviewed leading lights in the congressional GOP and have confirmed the obvious.The Republicans’ campaign promise in 2010 to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act was bogus. They don’t have the votes in the Senate to repeal it — and the president would veto it, even if they did — and when it comes to replacing Obamacare, they simply do not have a plan.
That fact becomes clear when you read the laughable excuse-making in these quotes from Republicans in Congress:
Number of floor votes in the House to repeal, defund or dismantle the Affordable Care Act since Republicans took control of the House in January 2011. They’ll vote to repeal it again on Thursday.
With some House Democrats planning to walk out today when House Republicans vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for no good reason, it’s instructive to look back to a similar moment in 2008, when then-Minority Leader John Boehner led a walk out over a vote to hold Bushies Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton in contempt for a legitimate reason: they refused even to show up for a hearing about Bush-Rove firing U.S. attorneys who refused to play along with Rove’s bogus voter fraud campaign.
To Boehner’s credit, at least did not cry, via Dave Weigel:
If you are as confused as other regular Americans about the “Fast & Furious” controversy that roiled the capitol yesterday, you should watch Rachel Maddow’s backgrounder from her MSNBC show last night — see above or click here.
“Very clearly, they made a crisis, and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.” — Rep. Darrell Issa of California, one-time arson and grand-theft auto suspect, now the Republican Party’s chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
Maddow points to the bogusness of this controversy as just the latest example of the divide in the country today between the vast majority of normal Americans who are not compulsive Fox News watchers and those whose are.
The conspiracy theory had been incubating on Fox and in right-wing media world for over a year, she says, until yesterday when Republicans “tried drag it out into the mainstream to see if it could survive in the mainstream — see if it could survive outside the right-wing world in which it was incubated.”
The Fast & Furious conspiracy originated in March 2010, Maddow said, which was not coincidentally the same time that the Affordable Care Act passed in Congress. The passage of Obamacare sent tea baggers into fits of rage. They were most enraged about the law’s central feature — and its most conservative, pro-business element — the individual mandate.
The mandate — which was invented by the Heritage Foundation, a thimk tank so right-wing that it is a sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s show — would require every American to buy insurance, thereby delivering as many as 40 million new, paying customers to giant health insurance corporations.
We’ve all been recruited to be on Madison Cawthorn Watch,
To keep up with when he’s lying or wearing lingerie and such.
It’s hard to take him seriously
When he just laughs deliriously,
When his friend videotapes his hand on Maddie’s crotch.
“Even if we cut some slack for Esper and all the others who served as honorably and conscientiously as they could until they were faced with either the dead end of resignation or being fired, the fact is that these men and women remained silent for far too long once they were out of government service. They held back important things that the American people and their elected representatives needed to know. They kept them as their own personal secrets, either out of some misplaced sense of bureaucratic propriety, or because they had a book deal and didn’t want to steal their own thunder from release day.”
“As Thomas settles into his fourth decade on the Supreme Court, his influence, even his control, is ascendant. Thomas began his career as a justice as a near outcast – an ideological fringe figure and a scarred veteran of a brutal confirmation fight. Today, he is a revered figure in the conservative movement, and he is watching ideas he championed from the margins turn into the law of the land.”
“Bill O’Reilly’s really talented. He’s more talented than I am… But I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick… built on perception that he is the character he plays… The moment that it’s revealed not to be true it’s over.”
— Tucker Carlson, on C-SPAN on September 13, 2003.
The percentage of roughly 450 total deadly political attacks in the United Sates committed by right-wing extremists in the past decade as counted by the Anti-Defamation League, according to the New York Times. The ADL found that 20 percent were committed by Islamic extremists and 4 percent by liberals.
“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, who refused to meet with the panel voluntarily,” the New York Times reports. “The committee’s leaders had previously been reluctant to issue subpoenas to their fellow lawmakers. That is an extraordinarily rare step for most congressional committees to take, though the House Ethics Committee, which is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by members, is known to do so.”
“In what may prove to be Florida’s last stand as a battleground state, Democrats are launching a $15 million voter organizing effort ahead of this year’s elections,” Politico reports. “Democratic candidates up and down the ballot — even those running in contested primaries — have agreed to pour in money that will be used to hire at least 200 organizers and open as many as 80 offices as part of a coordinated effort to pump up turnout across the state.”
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has dropped nearly 40 points among registered voters since 2020, when former Pres. Trump began packing the court with right-wing extremists. Overall confidence in the Court is down from 70 percent in September 2020 to 51 percent today. Among those who expressed no confidence in the court, the number has risen 19 points, from 7 percent in 2020 to 26 percent today.
Charles Gaba: “For the full year 2021, official Covid deaths ran more than three times higher in the reddest tenth of the U.S. than the bluest. This is something I’ve been tracking and writing about for nearly a year now, so while it’s pretty dramatic, it’s nothing new.” “What is new is the ‘other’ excess deaths in 2021: They ran a jaw-dropping twenty-one times higher in the reddest decile than the bluest… nearly 50 per 100K residents vs. only ~2.3 per 100K.”