Reagan, top, and RollinsLast week, all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions — who will become chairman if Republicans take the Senate this year — signed a letter demanding that special prosecutor be assigned to investigate the Sestak offer.
Rep. Darrell Issa, the laughingstock California pol in line to assume chair of the House Oversight Committee if Republicans win control of the House in the fall, has repeatedly compared the Sestak offer to Watergate, which is to say impeachment.
Fox News is giving the Obama impeachment the same wall-to-wall coverage it gave to promoting the tea bagger mob rallies last summer — in part to divert attention from the Gulf oil disaster, which is a result of the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration and the Republican Party, which the network serves:
Well I didn’t know she has big biceps like me. But you know I don’t pay any attention. This is just politics … You know I laugh at all those things.
— California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), in a forthcoming Fox & Friends interview, responding to a Steve Poizner (R) attack ad which seeks to compare Meg Whitman (R) to the muscle-bound Austrian.
It’s a tale of greed, hubris, dumb shrewdness and more greed and hubris for good measure. For months we watched the slow downfall of Jim “Big Jim” Greer, former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida (hereafter referred to as the Piggy Bank). Greer hit bottom Wednesday when Florida state agents and Osceola County deputies came to his “posh Oviedo mansion,” as the Orlando Sentinel described it, and arrested him as he was shaving.
A statewide grand jury indicted Greer, 47, of Oviedo, a bedroom community of Orlando, on four counts of grand theft and one count each of money laundering and running an organized scheme to defraud. All are felonies. He was being held today at the Seminole County Jail on $105,000 bail and if convicted could get up to 75 years in prison.
Greer was forced to resign his chairmanship in February under pressure from the party establishment with whom he was at odds over his endorsing then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Mel Martinez. Party right-wingers are backing in the Senate race former speaker of the state house Marco Rubio, whose horizontal ideological slide to the right has mirrored Greer’s vertical ethical freefall.
Greer had been handpicked by Crist to head the state GOP organization three years earlier:
Asked about Greer’s arrest at an unrelated press conference this morning, Crist said: “I think it’s obviously disappointing and surprising. I have faith in our judicial system.” He added that he didn’t feel “complicit” in anything Greer may have done.
Seminole County Jail Inmate Jim GreerJim Greer, ex head of the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) and huge Gov. Charlie Crist supporter (and vice versa) was arrested today on six counts of fraud for funneling money from GOP donors for his personal use.
The indictment is likely to shake up the Florida Senate race. Gov Crist, running without party affiliation, is a personal friend of Greer’s, instrumental in his chairmanship, and continued to support him after calls began for his resignation. Former House Speaker Marco Rubio, along with other Florida Republican politicians, has been paying back money he received from the party under Greer.
Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who is also a Naval Reserves Commander Another U.S. Senate “trophy seats” targeted by Republicans — this one is the Illinois seat once held by Pres. Obama — appears to be a less-certain pick up now that the Republican frontrunner in the race, Rep. Mark Kirk, has been outed as gay.
The other two trophies are the Nevada seat currently held by Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Delaware seat formerly held by Vice Pres. Biden. While Biden’s seat will likely flip to liberal GOP Rep. Mike Castle (one of the first Republican pols to be shouted down by tea baggers at town hall meetings last summer), Reid’s 12 Republican opponents, including “chicken woman” Sue Lowden, seem to be imploding one by one.
Kirk has held a single digit lead over Democrat Alexi Giannoulias in early polling. But even before he was outed yesterday by Mike Rogers, editor of BlogActive in Washington, D.C., the Kirk campaign was reeling from the revelation that Kirk, who is an officer in the Naval reserves, has claimed on more than one occasion to have received a commendation that in fact he’d never been awarded.
Update: Today Kirk’s campaign has acknowledged another misstatement about his service. A bio erroneously stated that Kirk served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In fact, Kirk was serving in the United States at the time, so he actually served during, not in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
If Republicans take control of Congress, Issa will chair the committee that will investigate the Obama administration. He has indicated that he is eager to impeach Pres. Obama, even if the issue is as insignificant as Rahm Emanuel’s job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak.
I want to see my president not in a suit in Washington, DC. I want to see him down on the Gulf Coast, not just for a day of photo shoots, but on the job, leading the effort. When he’s not there, I want Joe Biden there, I don’t want him in Africa going to a soccer game. Let’s show some leadership.
— U.S. Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL), Charlie Crist’s handpicked Senate placeholder … at least that was the original plan.
Carly FiorinaSupport for Tea Party’s DeVore Nearly Doubled to 16% After Sarah Palin Endorsed Fiorina
With the California primary election in less than a week, the race to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken a harrowing turn for Republicans. It appears that failed former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina now has an insurmountable lead over former Rep. Tom Campbell. The Campbell campaign reportedly ceased television advertising as of June 1.
In the 2000 U.S. Senate race, Campbell lost to incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein by 19 points, but Democrats considered him to be much more electable against Boxer this year than Fiorina, a self-financed political novice who was fired from Hewlett-Packard after a scandal that included allegations she wiretapped members of the HP board of directors.
Interestingly, in the month or so since right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin dissed the tea bagger candidate Chuck DeVore by giving her kiss-of-death endorsement to Fiorina, his polling has almost doubled, from 9 percent in early April to 16 percent now.
It’s hard to prove that Palin’s endorsement of Fiorina — whose gaffes as a McCain-Palin surrogate often dominated headlines in the 2008 campaign — has helped DeVore. It’s just as likely he’s gotten a bump among extreme right-wing voters from a web ad in which he compared himself to Jack Bauer, the lead character in the Fox terror-porn series “24.” […]
Now Joe McGinnis might seem half-baked,
Though he did it for journalism’s sake.
But he found on locatin’
Next door to the Palins
Good fences do not good neighbors make.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
