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.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
“The man is afraid of the voice of the people and that the people understand and know what he’s doing. He’s trying to stifle the ability of journalists to let the people of America know what’s really going on with their government.”
— “Kamala Harris called President Donald Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House ‘absolutely abhorrent,’” The Wrap reports.
“Not one of them is trained in technical skills. Not one research PhD, as opposed to China, where half the cabinet is science and technology PhDs. We’re led by grifters and fools.”
— Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, on X, on President Trump’s 35-person cabinet.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far… The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
— Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), breaking with President Trump in a direct-to-camera video.
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
A new Fox News Poll finds 71% of voters think the Trump administration lacks a clear strategy for ending the Iran War, including 95% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent say U.S. military action against Iran was the wrong decision, while just 37% say it was right.
“The Trump administration last year spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave for federal workers as part of its plan to shrink the government and save taxpayers money, according to a new estimate by a congressional watchdog,” CNN reports.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
