Tag: Tea Baggers

N.Y. Jets Coach Apologizes After Tripping Florida Lt. Gov. Elect’s Miami Dolphins Son

Trish

tripping
NFL/CBS photo

Playing by the rules isn’t what Jennifer Carroll is known for. Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Elect is still trying to answer questions about her income, which shifted dramatically between the time she filled out her tax returns and the time she applied for minority and small business set-asides.

Carroll and Scott could take a lesson from Coach Alosi about owning up to your mistakes so you don’t keep repeating them

She’s also explaining her way out of charges of fraudulently presenting falsified documents. Carroll claims she rented an office already occupied by a private detective agency before the landlord the papers show she rented from had bought the building (but within the time frame she would have needed to prove her business was located in the county in which she was applying for…yes, minority and small business set-asides).

And she’s never addressed how her speeding tickets disappeared without her paying the fines once she became a state legislator.

So it’s a little ironic that the Miami Dolphins player who was tripped by New York Jets Coach Sal Alosi on Sunday was Jennifer Carroll’s son, Nolan.

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With Boehner’s Pick of ‘Prince of Pork’ to Chair Appropriations, GOP’s Tea Party Base Is Starting to Get It – They’ve Been Had

Jon Ponder

Speaker-Elect John Boehner and the incoming GOP House leadership (which, it should be noted, is the same as the leadership in the current Congress and practically the same as the old “borrow and spend, spend, spend” House leadership under Bush) announced its picks for committee chairmen this week — and one of these in particular — the choice of Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, the “Prince of Pork,” to lead the Appropriations committee — is not playing well within the party’s tea bagger base.

In just the last two years, Rep. Rogers has requested $246 million in earmarks for his rural Kentucky district.

And rightly so. The general indictment of the tea parties — their political Achilles heel — is that the entire movement is predicated on rank hypocrisy about government spending.

From the elderly tea baggers who shouted “Get the government out of my Medicare!” at the town hall meetings in 2009 to the Republican pols who voted against the Stimulus but then rushed home to pose for photo ops handing out giant Stimulus checks to fund projects in their districts — and from the incoming tea bagger members of Congress who spewed spittle about the evils of “Obamacare” to get elected but who are now eagerly bellying up for their taxpayer-funded Cadillac health insurance plans to the tea parties’ current support for the GOP’s billionaires’ tax break even though it will blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit over the next ten years — tea baggers don’t have a lot of credibility left.

If they want to keep up the pretense that they really are for fiscal thrift, they should get up off their couches and work up some of their trademark poorly spelled signs to protest Boehner’s appointment of a guy like this to run the most influential House committee on spending:

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Verbatim

Trish

I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged and The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself.

Aaron Sorkin, playwright and screenwriter, answering Palin’s Facebook update in which she challenged the legitimacy of critics of her killing and dismembering a caribou on her reality show. Sorkin added, “I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun…That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there’d be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully.”

‘Oh You Thought I Was Including My Tea Party Self in That Whole No Earmarks Thing? Nah’

Trish

What’s more hypocritical than a born-again homophobe with a same-sex “escort?” How about tea party politicians criticizing government spending while requesting all they can get for the folks back home? The National Journal:

Advocate: ‘It’s disturbing to see the Tea Party Caucus requested that much in earmarks. This is their time to put up or shut up.’

According to a Hotline review of records compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the 52 members of the caucus, which pledges to cut spending and reduce the size of government, requested a total of 764 earmarks valued at $1,049,783,150 during Fiscal Year 2010, the last year for which records are available.

“It’s disturbing to see the Tea Party Caucus requested that much in earmarks. This is their time to put up or shut up, to be blunt,” said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste. “There’s going to be a huge backlash if they continue to request earmarks.”

In founding the caucus in July, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said she was giving voice to Americans who were sick of government over-spending.

“The American people are speaking out loud and clear. They have had enough of the spending, the bureaucracy, and the government knows best mentality running rampant today throughout the halls of Congress,” Bachmann said in a July 15 statement.

And who had the most requests? Not Bachmann, but probably someone from a large population state with plenty of constituents, right? Wrong. How about a guy from Mon-frickin’-tana which, with just under a million people, is ranked 44th in residents in the country?

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) takes the prize as the Tea Partier with his name on the most earmarks. Rehberg’s office requested funding for 88 projects, either solely or by co-signing earmarks requests with Sens. Max Baucus (D) and Jon Tester (D), at a cost of $100,514,200. On his own, Rehberg requested 20 earmarks valued at more than $9.6 million.

The full list of tea bagger earmark for the past year is here.

Happy Birthday, Jon Stewart!

Trish
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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www.thedailyshow.com
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In honor of one of the only people who lets us answer the question, “Is it just me or…?” with, “No, there are others who get it. We are not alone!” we offer this clip. One viewer called this performance the greatest rendition since Tina Fey did Sarah Palin. We agree, and wish Jon Stewart a very happy birthday today!

Dear Tea Party: If You Stand for Anything, You Must Demand That Your New Members of Congress Refuse Their Govt Health Coverage

Jon Ponder

photos-tea-bagger-obamacare-signs

What the tea party wants, the tea party gets — at least for now.

On Monday, the tea party spooked one of the Senate’s biggest old bulls, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, into doing a full 180 on earmarks. He has agreed to stop Republican senators from tapping funds for roads, hospitals and other projects in their states, despite the risk that comes with failing to bring home the bacon when the next elections roll around.

Why is it okay with the tea party that the politicians they voted for on Nov. 2 based on their opposition to socialist health coverage will, in February, become recipients of the same socialist coverage they were elected to oppose?

Also on Monday, tea party leaders resorted to bullying their own newly elected members of Congress — not over earmarks or anything related to policy — but rather to force them to attend a tea-party indoctrination seminar in Washington that a tea party group had inadvertently scheduled to conflict with a long-established freshman orientation session hosted by the Claremont Institute. The tea party leadership did this by publishing the members’ personal contact info in an email blast to their followers, urging the tea bagger rank and file to call the new members and browbeat them into skipping the Claremont event in favor of the tea party seminar.

(As a tactic, unleashing the mobs on your own members over a scheduling snafu smacks of political amateurism — especially when it would have been arguably easier to apologize for the mistake and reschedule the event. For one thing, bombarding members of Congress with crank calls over such a trivial matter not only risks alienating them, it uses up precious political capital. What will tea party leaders do get the members’ attention when something more important than a seminar comes up — kidnap their dogs, send letter bombs?)

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Sen.-Elect Paul, GOPT-Ky: You Are All Corporate Serfs – Bow Down

Jon Ponder

We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone.

– Sen.-elect Rand Paul, GOPT-Ky, who received millions in anonymous donations, possibly from foreign corporations, funneled to him by the U.S. Chamber, introducing the new paradigm of the tea bagger era: “You are all corporate serfs. Bow down.”

Vote, Even If It’s for Moderates. Hell, Especially If It’s for Moderates!

Trish

Here’s a great video produced by Progress Florida, but worth watching even if you live elsewhere. Remember folks, they are turning out the base this election. As Democrats and progressives, we can’t prove that the only way to get us to vote is to also appeal to our most extreme views. If you’re not enthusiastic about supporting moderate or even conservative Democrats, then you can’t complain when Republicans and tea baggers continue to trot out their most extreme candidates, the ones least likely to get anything helpful done in Washington or state capitals. Now go vote.