The House Republicans’ “Party of No” strategy to obstruct legislation and drive up negatives for the Democratic leadership and the president certainly appears to have been successful. Every pollster out there is predicting that the GOP’s lazy, boozing, schmoozing leader, John Boehner, is set to become Speaker of the House in January.
On every issue that made news, the top GOPTers have hurtled themselves in front of any available camera to bellow, “NO, no, no and HELL no!” But, according to a new metric compiled by the Democrats, when it came time to register their vote, some of the most vociferous Republicans voted with the House Democratic leadership more than half of the time:
As lying politicians go, few can top Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann. But she outdid herself on Friday — in front of an annual meeting sponsored by a Christian-oriented hate group, no less — when she claimed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had spent $100,000 of taxpayer money on booze.
At the Values Voter Conference, sponsored by the anti-gay activist group Family Research Council, in Washington, Bachmann took the podium and made this outrageous statement:
BACHMANN: “Unlimited credit cards for our elected leaders have become an in entitlement. like Speaker Pelosi, who has been busy sticking the taxpayer with her $100,000 bar tab for alcohol on the military jets that she’s flying.”
Facts sourced below but here are the basics:
Pelosi does not drink. (Bachmann have confused Pelosi with Republican Speaker Wanna-Be John Boehner who is famous in the capital for doing nothing but boozing, schmoozing and playing golf with lobbyists.)
Bachmann’s lie is based on propaganda from two right-wing outlets with zero credibility, Judicial Watch and World Net Daily.
The original “research” looked at expenses official government trips called “congressional delegations” or CODELs, in which members of Congress go on fact-finding tours and inspections.
Judicial Watch deceptively did not compare Pelosi’s spending with her predecessor’s. Speaker Hastert’s spending was slightly higher.
— CBS News estimates of crowd size at Mormon Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington on Aug. 28, based on work commissioned by CBS from AirPhotosLive. The company uses photos taken from tethered balloons shot at the peak of the crowd, which are then broken into 2-D and 3-D grids, and the individuals counted.
Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands
— Figure quoted by NBC Nightly News
More than 100,000
— ABCNews.com
Crowd Attending Beck Rally Estimated at Over 500,000
— FOX News headline
As low as 300,000 and as big as 650,000
— Glenn Beck on FOX News Sunday
“We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today – because we were witnesses.”
–The number of Americans (18 percent) who mistakenly think Pres. Obama is a Muslim, according to a Pew Research poll conducted before his comments on the Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan. A Time Magazine poll taken after his comments showed 25 percent of Americans now think Obama is a Muslim.
Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg and many similar sites, you can vote for the stories you want to see featured prominently, or in this case, those you want “buried.” As AlterNet reported:
It’s easier to tell you what the group is against than what it’s for: Obama, progressives, diplomacy, health care reform, immigrants, science, the separation of church and state, acknowledgment of human-induced climate change, the government, pro-choice protections, public schools, and higher education. They also claim to believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist, and that he was born in Kenya.
Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content).
The immensity of the impact is commensurate with the reach of Digg. Again, according to Alternet:
It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site…Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”
“They have to lift the liability cap,” said [Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.]. “But if I was the head of BP, I would let the signal get out there — ‘We’re not going to be chumps, and we’re not going to be fleeced.’ And they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t have to be fleeced and make chumps to have to pay for perpetual unemployment and all the rest — they’ve got to be legitimate claims.
Bachmann is now trying to back away from her comments. “I said that I was concerned that Washington, the Obama administration, could use it as a permanent ATM,” Bachmann insisted to the Pioneer Press. “I want to make sure everyone knows I’m not a shill for BP.” She also recently went on CNN where she similarly made clear that she believes “BP clearly is at fault” for the oil spill. “I’m not here to shill for BP,” she said, adding nevertheless that President Obama may try to use the escrow account as a “permanent ATM card.”
The time to return Census forms has come, which makes this an ideal moment to revisit Michele Bachmann’s call to conservatives not to turn in their forms.
Partial Transcript:
Bachmann: Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up and put the Japanese in internment camps.
In his column in January, our Dr. Democrat — who agrees with Bachmann only in the sense that that it would be best for the country if only smart people filled out the census — offered five reasons conservatives are not returning their forms, translated into Teabonics for their convenience.
If you have conservative friends, feel free to email these five reasons not to fill out the census to them:
1. Obama and the entire Democrat Party support the Census, which is sufficient cause for suspicion among Tea Party activists on all other issues.
2. Many libertarians believe the Census should not be under government control, not just because it is bona fide socialism, but also because, unlike private industry, government is inept. Who knows what mistakes the government has made in censuses over the past two centuries? Libertarians believe the Census should be outsourced to a private company with experience collecting data, like Equifax, Experian or other credit reporting companies, which hardly ever make mistakes.
3. According to World Net Daily, the popular conservative news site, Obama seized control of the Census from the Commerce Department within weeks after he assumed the presidency. The fact that the 2010 Census will be taken under the direction of the Obama White House worries Rep. Bachmann, who has raised concerns that Americans’ personal data could end up in the hands of ACORN. What ACORN might do with it is anyone’s guess.
4. Bachmann also pointed out that the government has used Census information in the past to round up Americans and force them into concentration camps. She cited the example of the internment of thousands of patriotic Americans of Japanese descent by FDR’s Democrat socialist government during World War II.
5. The Obama administration has already put patriots on notice that it will fine anyone who refuses to submit to the Census. However, boycott supporters say that if the government can’t round up 20 million illegal aliens, how could it possibly find millions of real Americans who boycott the Census because they choose to exercise their rights to be free of government intrusion?
BONUS VIDEO: Here is Bachmann trying to out-crazy Glenn Beck last year on whether conservatives should fill out the forms:
Hypocrisy red alert: If you listen to her rhetoric, it sounds like Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., believes socialism is antithetical to democracy. She has repeatedly equated health-care reform with socialism — even though the public-option is dead, and the “reform” bill passed by the Senate delivers 30 million new customers, by force of law, to the health-insurance industry.
It’s still socialism to Bachmann, however. “Right now, we are looking at reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom,” she said in remarks to a right-wing club in Minnesota this month. “And we may never be able to restore it if we don’t man up and take this one on.”
This is nothing new. Here’s what she said in March, for example:
“If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism,” she said. “But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.”
Michele Bachmann: I think people have no idea what’s coming down the pike. This is the crown jewel of socialism… This is socialized medicine and like I said … this is the crown jewel of socialism… It’s unconstitutional.
“It isn’t within our lifetime that we’ve gone to socialism,” Bachmann said. “It’s within 18 months!”
But that’s what Bachmann says. But look past the rhetoric at what Bachmann does, and it’s quite a different story.
Bachmann — the most prominent Tea Bagger in the House — is among the top recipients of socialist government handouts in Congress, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States.
In 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices.
According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized — or “socialized” — businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse…
Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her personal stake in the family farm is worth up to $250,000. They also show that she has been earning income from the farm business, and that the income grew in just a few years from $2,000 to as much as $50,000 for 2008. This has provided her with a second government-subsidized income to go with her job as a government-paid congresswoman who makes $174,000 per year (in addition to having top-notch government medical benefits).
Comrade Bachmman is not the only right-winger in Congress who has gobbled up freedom-killing gubmint money. Take, for example, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa:
[Grassley], who warns his constituents of Obama’s “trend toward socialism,” has seen his family collect $1 million in federal handouts over an 11-year period, with Grassley’s son receiving $699,248 and the senator himself pocketing $238,974. Even Grassley’s grandson is learning to ride through life on training wheels, snagging $5,964 in 2005 and $2,363 in 2006. In the Grassley family they learn early how to enjoy other people’s money.
Sen. Grassley railed against government intervention in the health care market, telling The Washington Times, “Whenever the government does more … that’s a movement toward socialism.” As the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, he ought to know, especially because the government has done more for him and his kin than for Americans struggling with high medical bills and mortgages. Even the free-market think tank the Heritage Foundation criticized Grassley on his deep connections to farming interests and his stubborn lack of transparency. (Emphasis added.)
Grassley even admitted that he’s a closet socialist on C-SPAN earlier in December:
GRASSLEY: For the first 16 years I made $3,000 every other year as a state legislator. Now do you expect me to live on $3,000 every other year? No I was a factory worker for 10 years and I was a farmer for that period of time and I farm with my son now. So if you’re trying to make a case that I’ve lived off the public tit all these years, I think you’re saying correctly in the years I’ve been in the Congress but not the years before I came to Congress.
And then, via Truthdig again, there’s Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas:
[His] family has been on the government take for at least the past 11 years, pocketing some $500,000. The senator recently held a “prayercast” with Michele Bachmann to beseech God to kill health care reform as soon as possible because it would bring an evil socialist spirit into America.
The Truthdig report also cites Blue Dogs Dems who have lived on the socialist tit, so to speak:
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who was instrumental in killing the public option in the health-insurance reform, has received $250,000.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who threatened to join the filibuster to kill reforms if they included provisions to help poor people, has recevied $750,000 over 10 years.
Truthdig’s Yasha Levin sums it up this way:
That’s just the way the game is played these days. Republicans and conservative Democrats bitch and moan about the allegedly Marxist underpinnings of universal health care and do everything they can to deny struggling Americans access to social services. Meanwhile, many of them profit off taxpayers in a massive welfare program… According to 11 years’ worth of Environmental Working Group data that tracks $200 billion in subsidies, the wealthiest 10 percent of “farmers” have collected 75 percent of the money. That’s exactly the kind of socialism that Rep. Bachmann and her elite ilk like.
Much made over the back room deals made to “buy” the votes of Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Ind., Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and others. It will be interesting to see if the revelation that these conservatives politicians are on the public dole will get any play in the corporate media.
To hear Trump talk, he’s the only one
Who’s ever stood trial for crimes he’s done.
But instead of courtroom drama,
We get Trump in his pajamas,
That’s how he earned his new nickname: Don Snoreleone.
“This week has been a howling vortex of suck for the MAGA movement and Donald Trump. Imagine a black hole in the profound interstellar vacuum in the cold emptiness of space, drawing all matter and energy into its brutal singularity, an ineluctable and final journey into nothingness. … That’s the GOP this week. It’s been bad and will get worse.”
“I am not resigning. And it is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs. It is not helpful to the cause, it is not helpful to the country, it does not help the House Republicans advance our agenda, which is in the best interest of the American people here — a secure border, sound governance – and it’s not helpful to the unity that we have in the body.”
— Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) on the “resign or be fired” ultimatum from the GOP’s Freedom Caucus just 174 days into his tenure as sp[eaker, reported by Punchbowl News.
“Trump’s head slowly dropped, his eyes closed. It jerked back upward. He adjusts himself. Then, his head droops again. He straightens up, leaning back. His head droops for a third time, he shakes his shoulders. Eyes closed still. His head drops. Finally, he pops his eyes open.”
— Law360 reports from the second day of Donald Trump’s “hush money” criminal trial.
“Functionally, Chris Sununu is as active a part of Trump’s campaign as Matt Gaetz or MTG, or any of the other MAGA freaks. And it seems not to bother him that these people would poleaxe him if given a second’s chance. It seems not to bother him that his political career is over. He’s not just willing to exit public life on his knees—he’s eager to do it. … In the end, it doesn’t matter if Sununu is a mountebank, a coward, or a fool. Those three characters are equally pernicious. … What matters is that the rest of us understand that it is the Chris Sununus of the world who make this ongoing authoritarian attempt possible.”
“He’s f**king crazy! The press often will ask me if I think Donald Trump is crazy. And I’ll say it this way: I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution. But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out!”
— New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R), quoted by the Associated Press two years ago. Sununu is now backing Trump for president.
Punchbowl News: The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] raised $45.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, outpacing the NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee] by $12 million. That’s the DCCC’s best quarter of the 2024 cycle and includes a $21.4 million March haul. This is a massive show of force for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.The DCCC has $71.1 million on hand. Compare that to the NRCC, which has $45.2 million on hand.
A new Harvard Institute of Politics poll of voters under age 30 finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump 56% to 37% among likely voters. Pollster John Della Volpe: “For a Democrat to comfortably win the Electoral College, he or she needs to win 60 percent of the youth vote. Biden and Obama, ’12 and ’20, won 60 percent. Obama got 66 percent in ’08. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton got 55 percent. Biden is in the mid-50s. Can you improve that to get to 60 percent? It’s within reach.“
Financial Times: “In another troubling sign for Republican fundraising efforts, Trump has 270,000 fewer unique donors than he did at the same stage of his 2020 White House run. His campaign and affiliated political action committees got money from 900,000 donors from July 2023 to the end of the first quarter of 2024, down from 1.17 million four years earlier.”
New York Times: “Of the 96 possible jurors brought into the room, more than 50 raised their hands to say they couldn’t be fair. They were immediately excused.”
“Nationwide, homicides dropped around 20% in 133 cities from the beginning of the year through the end of March compared with the same period in 2023. … Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump,” the Wall Street Journal reports.