Politics of Ethics
When an ethics panel’s out to destroy ya,
Why waste good money on a lawyer?
‘Cause when you’re Charlie Rangel,
You’ve got to play every angle —
Just walk out, because ethics probes bore ya!
Month: November 2010
Health Care Hypocrisy: New Anti-Reform Extremist Rep Has Meltdown Over Having to Wait 28 Days for Govt Health-Care Coverage
Via right-leaning Politico.com:
A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-[health-care reform] platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan takes a month to kick in.
Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist [from] Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 — 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.
“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange. The benefits session, held behind closed doors, drew about 250 freshman members, staffers and family members to the Capitol Visitors Center auditorium late Monday morning.”
“Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.
Verbatim
I don’t think that she enjoyed governing.
— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), in a CBS News interview, explaining why she won’t support a Sarah Palin presidential bid. Murkowski apparently isn’t alone among Alaskans. A new Public Policy Polling survey shows Palin in fourth place behind Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney in a potential Alaska presidential primary.
The Extreme Center
Congress has launched into lame-duck tedium.
They’re grooming the freshmen and feeding ’em.
But one thing’s for certain
In a Congress this partisan —
It’s doubtful they’ll ever reach a happy medium.
No Honeymoon: Public Approval of GOP Midterm Win Is Down 22 Points from Approval of Dems’ Win in 2006
Swing voters gave Pres. Obama and the Democrats in Congress less than 22 months to resolve the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the 1929 financial meltdown that took nearly a decade to resolve.
Now polling suggests they’ll give incoming GOP House Speaker John Boehner an even shorter honeymoon, if he gets one at all.
These voters demand instant gratification, and poll data suggests that Boehner and his caucus, which will include dozens of tea-bagger political neophytes and clueless amateurs, will have a very few months to put the economy right.
As has been noted here before, in the run-up to the midterms, poll after poll showed that Republicans in Congress were the least popular political entities among voters. Their disapproval ratings were consistently higher than the Democrats, sometimes by double-digit margins. And yet, at the same time they were expressing their disdain for Republicans in Washington, poll after poll showed that non-aligned voters were committed to putting them back into power.
Exit polls from Nov. 2 showed that, generally speaking, 95 percent of Democrats voted for Democrats and 95 percent of Republicans voted for Republicans. However, no-party voters tilted to the GOP by roughly a 60/40 margin.
And now that the dust is settling from Election Day, it appears that less than half the public is happy that the GOP is back in power, a significant drop from the nearly two-thirds who were happy in 2006 when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, according to a new poll from Pew Research:
GOP Tax Plan Costs $36.6 Bil More Than Dems’ – Swing Voters, You’ve Been Had
Here’s more proof that this “new” crop of Republican leaders in Washington — Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, DeMint and the rest — are the same Bush rubberstampers whose stealthy war on the middle class in the 2000s transferred more of the nation’s wealth up from the nation’s entrepreneurial class to the GOP’s corporate sponsors and their friends, the idle rich, and whose policies caused the economy to crash in September 2008, barely a month before they were turned out of Congress by the voters.
Households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011.
This year they managed to fool swing voters into believing they have changed — that they are against deficits, against spending, against big government — but as this chart clearly shows, their hidden agenda has not changed:
A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year — and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation’s millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.
New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.
Here’s a chart so simple that even a tea bagger can understand it, followed by an explainer segment on the chart from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show:
John McCain on Repealing DADT: Gay People Aren’t Fit to “Live, Eat, Sleep, or Fight’ Alongside Straight Service Members
If you’re wondering what very poorly disguised homophobia sounds like, check out John McCain. And a little newsflash for the senator: no amount of “studying” and holding hearings will turn back time. The world has changed, Pops, and your opinion of gay people, which apparently includes the idea that they are inherently less able than straight people to control their sexual urges (maybe like the situation you’re more familiar with, being married to one woman but screwing another?) and force themselves on straight people who are not interested in them, is sheer biogotry. And one last thing: I wouldn’t want to live, eat, sleep, or fight alongside you either.
