Tag: Republican corruption
Price Wasted $341k on Unapproved Travel
$341,000
“Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services, repeatedly violated government travel rules and wasted at least $341,000 by billing taxpayers for his use of chartered jets and military aircraft,” the New York Times reports. “The inspector general examined 21 trips in which Mr. Price had used chartered aircraft, military aircraft, commercial aircraft or the fleet of planes equipped for use by the president and vice president. He found that 20 of the 21 flights did not comply with federal requirements.”
With Mulvaney, Money Talks
“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
— White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, quoted by the New York Times.
EPA’s Pruitt Uses Four Email Addresses
4
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt “has used four separate agency email addresses since taking office, according to Senate Democrats and an EPA official, prompting concerns among agency lawyers that the EPA has not disclosed all the documents it would normally release to the public under federal records requests,” the Washington Post reports.
Chait: ‘Corruption, Not Russia, Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability’
Read Jonathan Chait’s takedown of the Trump gang’s malfeasance at New York Magazine.
Cruz Failed to Disclose Campaign Loan from Goldman Sachs
$1.1 million
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “improperly accounted for loans he received from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. during his 2012 campaign, saying the funds were his own personal contributions to the Senate race,” Bloomberg reports. “The finding, released on the FEC website, marked a rare instance of agreement among the agency’s five commissioners, who voted unanimously that the $1.1 million of loans from the banks should have been disclosed to voters.”
Don’t Do the Crime Unless Your Girlfriend Will Do the Time
Some people would call it chivalry, some people call it sexism — that the man should come forward and not let the woman do time on his behalf.
— U.S. District Judge Robert Scola, quoted by the Miami Herald, who gave former Rep. David Rivera’s (R-FL) friend, Ana Alliegro, a one-year jail sentence.
Obama Thwarts GOP Political Hostage-Taking with Recess Appointment of Richard Cordray to Head Consumer Watchdog Agency
If you’re just checking in on Washington politics after the holidays and the Iowa caucuses, you’re likely hearing that Republicans in Congress and their throught-masters at Fox are in a spittle-spewing rage over Pres. Obama’s recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Board, or CFPB, watchdog agency.
After successfully blocking the nomination of Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate and Harvard professor who had been appointed to set up the CFPB — and who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts — last year, Senate Republicans tried to stop Cordray’s appointment during the current recess by briefly gaveling the Senate in and out of pro forma sessions every day. Obama went around this and appointed Cordray by using a precedent set by Republican Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who, in 1903, filled more than 160 administration positions while the Senate was on break for less than a day.
Republicans were holding the Cordray nomination hostage in order to extort a major overhaul of the laws that would, in essence, defang the watchdog agency. The Republicans’ objective was to ensure that their corporate sponsors in the financial industry would be able to continue to rip off consumers, including the constituents of these hostage-taking Republicans senators, legally, as they had been when Republicans controlled Congress, the Judiciary and Executive branches during the Bush administration.
Under the sway of their minority tea-bagger base, Republicans used political extortion multiple times last year to push the national and world economy to the brink of collapse. Their motives then were simply to create havoc. The extortion over the Warren and Cordray nominations has a different goal, says Jonathan Chait:
Beck Fails to Out-Victim Massa in Interview – Earlier Had On-Air Spat over Massa with Malkin
Glenn Beck’s interview with former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) was a huge embarrassment — his first indisputable failure since he misspelled “oligarch” in September.
Beck apparently went into the interview believing that Massa would finally provide evidence of the Democrats’ purported “culture of corruption” that Beck and Michelle Malkin have been flogging but can’t seem to prove. If horse-trading for votes in Congress is corrupt, then Congress has been steeping in corruption for centuries. And these same soulless right-wing propagandists were largely silent about Bush-era corruption allegations against Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and their approval of torture techniques; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his DOJ hive of inept Christian law school grads; betrayers of national secrets Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby; convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff; twice-indicted former House Minority Leader Tom DeLay; Rep. J.D. Hayworth, now running against Sen. John McCain in Arizona; and convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham, just to name a few.
But Massa was not only unforthcoming on corruption, much to Beck’s dismay, he pulled the floor out from under Beck by trumping him on the foundational hypocrisy of Beck’s ideology — hypocrisy he shares with Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and the rest — that victimhood is a sign of weakness in liberals but a supreme virtue in themselves and their fellow travelers on the right.
Here’s Michael Scherer at Time:
Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. “I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring,” Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. “Do you realize my family is at stake?” he said. “You’ve got a little scandal with your children in college. I’ve got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I’m not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me.”
…But in Massa, Beck found a sort of liberal doppelgänger, a mesmerizing train wreck of a man who was impossible to undercut in the classic fashion. To many conservative allies of Beck, it probably didn’t come as too much of a surprise. In recent days, prominent Republicans like Bill Kristol had expressly warned Beck and others about coming to Massa’s defense just because he was alleging dirty tricks by the Obama White House. “We shouldn’t get into the business of being pro-Massa just because we are antihealth care,” Kristol said Monday on Fox. The ruling talk-radio king, Rush Limbaugh, spent much of Tuesday making clear that he would not be tied to Massa, after spending much of Monday praising Massa’s revelations about Democratic Party politics. “Anybody who embraces this guy is in big trouble,” Limbaugh said…
The conservative blogger Michelle Malkin called into [Beck’s radio] show to tell Beck he was making a mistake. “This guy deserves 60 minutes of our time, really?” Malkin asked.
Beck would not budge. But as those 60 minutes came to an end Tuesday afternoon, the rabble-rouser seemed to recognize that he had fallen into a trap. The Beck big top has room for only one carnival barker at a time. “I think I have wasted your time,” Beck said, staring into the camera at an audience he once spent weeks telling about fanciful FEMA prison camps. “I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time.”
Here’s the audio of Beck and Malkin squabbling over the Massa interview:
