Tag: Tea Party
Aren’t All Black People Poor and Uneducated? Florida’s New Governor Thinks So
Florida’s new tea party governor, Rick Scott, didn’t make any friends when he met recently with 20 of Florida’s black state legislators.
The luncheon was billed as a get-to-know-you welcome to Tallahassee from Scott, who has barely been in town a month. But the political novice wasted no time in offending his guests.
In discussing his own humble origins, Scott implied that all black lawmakers grew up poor.
“I grew up probably in the same situation as you guys,” Scott said to the group of 20 Democrats. “I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.”
Rep. Betty Reed, D-Tampa, said she was offended by the remark…Afterward, she said, “He assumed that everyone [in the room] was poor and that can only be because you’re black.”
Rep. Joe Gibbons, D-Hallandale Beach, said Scott’s choice of words was unfortunate even if he was trying to “empathize” with the black caucus.
“Some of us might be from the projects, but we come from all spectrums of life,” Gibbons said.
Rick Scott on refusing to call the health care reform act by its proper name instead of “Obamacare”: ‘You know, when I’m on Fox, they never call it that.’
Scott of all people should know there are rich African Americans. He chose as his lieutenant governor former state Rep. Jennifer Carroll despite her ongoing problems in reporting her net worth. When she was not trying to win minority small business contracts, she said was worth about $23 million. When she was applying for the set-asides, she said it was only $2 million and explained she got her zeros and decimal places wrong. Either way, it’s doubtful the Florida legislature’s first black Republican woman can empathize with those in public housing.
Nor any longer can Scott, who didn’t spend $75 million of his own money to buy the governorship without the expectation of a hefty return on his investment.
House Energy Committee Has Become a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Oil Billionaire Koch Brothers
A partial list of recipients of Koch Industries “investments” in the 2010 midterm elections:
House Leadership:
- Speaker John Boehner, Ohio, $20,000
- Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Va., $20,000
- National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, Texas, $20,000
- House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp, Mich., $17,500
- House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, Wisc., $20,000
- House House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Darrell Issa, Calif., $12,500
House Energy Committee Republicans
Six of 22 donations to committee members by the Koch brothers:
- Chairmain Fred Upton, Mich., $20,000
- Chairman Emeritus Joe Barton, Texas, $18,000
- Rep. John Shimkus, Ill., $18,500
- Freshman Rep. Michael Pompeo, Kansas, $43,500
- Tea Partyist Rep. Morgan Griffith, Va., $5,000
- Tea Partyist Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Ill., $5,000
House Energy Committee Democrats
Two of of five donations to committee members by the Koch brothers:
- Rep. Mike Ross, Ark., $15,500
- Rep. Dan Boren, Okla., $13,500
(List continues below)
In the 2010 midterms, Californians rejected wealthy, self-funded candidates for governor and the U.S. senate at least in part because voters were leery of candidates who felt they could “buy” the election in order to achieve power. In the Florida governor’s race and the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race voters made the opposite decision. There is every reason the swing voters who put Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Ron Johnson into office will soon regret those votes, but at least these candidates were elected, as much as is possible these days, in the open by a fair vote.
But while no one was looking, oil billionaires David and Charles Koch — behind-the-scenes funders of the tea party astroturf mobs — and their front group, Americans for Prosperity spent a little over $41 million during the election, quietly buying dozens of members of Congress, lock, stock and barrel.
Since the elections, the Kochs have taken control of their latest acquisition — the House of Representatives — with their first order of business being a directive to House Speaker John Boehner to populate the House Energy Committee, which regulates their core business, with members beholden to the new bosses.
The Kochs hate publicity, and this maneuvering has been done with utmost secrecy. So it must have been unpleasant for the brothers and their minions in the GOP on Sunday when the Los Angeles Times published a story about their purchase of the energy committee on its front page above the fold:
The Reagan Legacy: Can We Talk?
While folks born from the late ’70s on reflect fondly on the 100th birthday of Pres. Ronald Reagan, I wanted to inject a little reality on the subject of the Gipper.
As someone who was already around when he was in office, I have a different view of the golden age conservatives now see as the greatest in our country’s history, except of course, for the halcyon days of 3/5ths personhood and what-not at our country’s founding. Reagan gave us:
- Voodoo economics, aka trickle-down economics, aka supply-side economics, aka tax breaks for the rich
- Tripling the national debt within two years (see “voodoo economics”)
- Just Say No
- Creating a new demographic of Americans: The Homeless
- A 4,370-piece set of dishes (19 pieces per setting), costing $209,508
- Bombing Libya and killing 60 people, including Leader Muammar al-Gaddafi’s 15-month-old daughter
- Ketchup as a vegetable in public school lunches
- Lt. Col. Oliver North
- Selling arms to Iran and using the money to overthrow the government of Nicaragua
- Using astrology to plan presidential trips, functions, speeches, etc.
GOP Continues to Spotlight White Males
Jeb Bush’s recent plea for his party to pay more attention to its Latino members seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Their selection of a white guy Midwesterner to perform the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address ignored rising star sunbelt Latinos, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will give the speech, which according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, will deal with economics.
“Paul Ryan has spent the better part of the last two years explaining exactly why the Democrat agenda has been so bad for jobs and the economy, and why we need to ditch the government-driven approach in favor of creative, common-sense solutions that put the American people back in charge.
Maybe Gov. Bobby Jindal’s poor showing reinforced the natural Republican inclination to stick with white guys
Republicans apparently noticed the economic crisis after the inauguration of Pres. Obama. It slipped past them when they were voting to allow Pres. George W. Bush to run up the deficit to unprecedented levels in order to wage war on a country that had not directly threatened us. They also must have been confused when they voted for Bush’s plan to spend $700 billion to bail out banks and other large corporations that had invested in mortgage-backed securities. Bush signed that Republican-approved law on Oct. 3, 2008.
Rubio, like Rep. Michele Bachmann (GOP/TEA-Minn.), plans his own State of the Union rebuttal for the benefit of his followers.
Verbatim
We’ve watched her morph from the hockey mom into a multi-media extravaganza that knocks on our door every day to sell something, without any invitation…The books, the reality TV, the family psycho-dramas, the never-ending internet “thought bubbles” could just be enough to drive even those who like her over the edge.
— Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst, in a column titled, “Why America is Growing Tired of Palin”
Palin Inspires Very Bad Songwriting
Oh my goodness.
Verbatim
They are a special interest. End of story…and I’m not going to be held hostage by special interests.
— Gov. Paul LePage (R-Me), ungraciously declining an invitation from Maine’s chapter of the NAACP to participate in a Martin Luther King Day event involving black inmates at the state prison. The biggest surprise is not that tea party backed LePage might be racist, but that Maine has black people. Who knew?
Breaking: Hey Right Wing, You Can Have Jared Loughner Back
Someone’s finally sorting out the mess that is Jared Loughner’s mind and discovering what most of us have suspected all along. Loughner has much more in common with rightwing extremists than with the political left. Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones explains what Loughner’s obsession with grammar means to people in the “sovereign citizen” movement, which among many other things, maps out strategies to avoid paying taxes.
Glenn Beck would no doubt be envious of the hairpin logic used by the “sovereign citizens”
Many of his seemingly random statements—on “grammar,” “the ratifications,” “the new currency,” and more—echo the teachings of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a right-wing school of thought alleging that Americans have been surreptitiously stripped of their God-given rights.
These are not random parallels, as I discovered in reviewing Loughner’s YouTube videos. In multiple instances, he uses the precise talking points sovereign-citizen theorists teach via a thriving cottage industry of books, websites, bogus legal companies, and seminars; one popular theorist, David Wynn Miller, told the New York Times that Loughner has “probably been on my website.”
