Tag: GOP Hypocrisy
Prominent Republican Propagandist Indicted for Voter Fraud
Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative commentator and best-selling author, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D’Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate’s campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment…
D’Souza was charged in the indictment with one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and one count of causing false statements to be made.
Federal law in 2012 limited primary and general election campaign contributions to $2,500 each, for a total of $5,000, from any individual to any one candidate.
The Senate candidate was Republican Wendy Long, who ran unsuccessfully against incumbent New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2012.
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Will the GOP Candidate in 2016 Run on an Anti-Obamacare Platform?
Is the Republican nominee for president in 2016 really going to run on a platform of taking health coverage away from 24 million Americans? Especially after the Republicans ran in 2014 on ensuring that Americans can keep their health plans?
— Avik Roy, writing in Forbes.
Ted Cruz Is Covered under His Wife’s Goldman Sach’s Gold-Plated Health Insurance Policy
$40,000
Annual cost of health-insurance premiums paid by Goldman Sachs to cover Canadian Sen. Ted Cruz (TP-Texas) and his family. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is the managing director of the Houston branch of Goldman Sachs, which received a $12.9 billion payout from the government’s bailout of AIG in 2008. The New York Times reported in 2009 that Goldman Sachs’ plans for executives and managing directors are worth $40,000.
Big Government Republicans Enacted 42 Anti-Choice Measures in 25 States Last Year
Total Anti-Choice Measures Enacted in 2012:
- 25 states enacted 42 anti-choice measures in 2012.
- Arizona enacted the most anti-choice legislation in 2012, with four measures. Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wisconsin each enacted three anti-choice measures.
- Since 1995, states have enacted 755 anti-choice measures.
McCain Admits That Republicans Are Filibustering GOP Nominee for Defense Because He Spoke the Truth about Bush
Sen. John McCain committed a classic Washington gaffe yesterday — he inadvertently told the truth about his party’s motives in filibustering the nomination of Republican former Sen. Chuck Hagel are petty and vindictive:
McCAIN: But to be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there’s a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people — people don’t forget that. You can disagree but if you’re disagreeable, then people don’t forget that.
Hagel was wrong about Bush — he was the worst president, not since Hoover, but from James Buchanan or possibly Franklin Pierce, of whom Bush is a direct descendant through his mother, Barbara Pierce Bush. Even that is being polite. By every metric for measuring presidencies, Bush was the worst president ever. For example, he left office as the most unpopular president in the history of polling.
But seriously, as with their brinkmanship on the economy, rather than putting the interests of the United States first, Republicans are once again playing politics even at the risk of hobbling the leadership of the United States military and weakening national security. They have also made filibustering presidential nominees a standard practice from now on.
McConnell’s Embarassing Stunt: Forced to Filibuster Himself
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) introduced legislation to raise the debt ceiling on Thursday, apparently with the intent of showing that even Democrats would not support such a bill.
However, McConnell’s plan backfired after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called for a vote on the legislation, which would have given the president the authority to raise the federal debt ceiling on his own. The top Senate Republican was forced to filibuster his own bill.
“What we have here is a case of Republicans here in the Senate once again not taking ‘yes’ for an answer,” Reid said, after McConnell announced his filibuster. “This morning the Republican leader asked consent to have a vote on this proposal, just now I told everyone we were willing to have that vote — up or down vote. Now the Republican leader objects to his own idea. So I guess we have a filibuster of his own bill, so I object.”
McCain Goes Off When a Reporter Asks Why He Skipped a Hearing on Benghazi to Hold a News Conference to Complain about Lack of Info on Benghazi (Transcript)
On Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., Sen. John McCain of Arizona and his two top lieutenants in the Senate’s Obama Derangement Caucus, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (who has replaced Sen. Joe Lieberman, now retired, in the caucus) held a news conference in which they demanded the convening of a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi earlier this year in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three presumed CIA agents were killed.
“I’m not gonna comment on how I spend my time in the Senate.”
– McCain to reporter
– McCain to reporter
According to the Associated Press, “The three Republican senators argued that numerous questions about the attack remain unanswered, among them what Obama’s national security team had told him about security in Libya, what steps were taken by Clinton and the roll [sic] of the U.S. military.”
But at the same time McCain was promoting Fox News-driven conspiracies about Benghazi to reporters in one part of the Capitol, he was supposed to be participating in a hearing on the attacks by the administration before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that was underway in another room in the building. McCain is a senior member of the committee.
In Politicizing Benghazi Attack, Republicans Ignore Their Own Terrible Security Record – 9/11 Happened on Their Watch, As Did Seven Attacks on U.S. Diplomatic Sites Overseas
The Fox News-generated hysteria among Republicans over the government’s handling of the Benghazi attacks relies heavily on the assumption that Fox viewers have incredibly short memories. Watching Fox present this issue, you might quickly assume that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was unique — that nothing like it had ever happened before. You might also assume that, if there had been other similar attacks in the past, American patriots and their representatives in Washington would be entirely justified in politicizing the attacks and using the failures that led to them, whether real or imagined, for partisan gain.
In the wake of the attacks on their country on Sept. 11, 2001, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.
In reality, of course, there have been many attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates — more than 40 in the past half century, according to The International News, a newspaper based in Pakistan.
The chart above from Mother Jones, for example, shows the frequency of attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites over the past 40 years. What Fox would like to erase from its viewers’ memories is that, as the chart shows, there were many attacks on U.S. missions overseas during the administration of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. It is crucial to Fox’s politicizing of Benghazi to make those attacks disappear down the memory hole, because there is an inconvenient fact associated with them: In the wake of the seven or more attacks on American overseas interests on Bush’s watch, Democrats did not politicize them the way Republicans are politicizing Benghazi today.
In particular, no Democrat ever suggested forming a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attacks during the Bush era, like the one Republicans are demanding now.
There was one full-scale investigation — the one that looked into the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which were the most egregious national security failure in U.S. history — but that investigation was outsourced to a bipartisan commission controlled by Republicans.
Speaking of 9/11, Republicans need to be reminded that after the attacks that September day, Democrats rallied around George W. Bush, a president they rightly viewed as an illegitimate Supreme Court appointee, because, in the wake of the attacks on their country, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.
