Year: 2010

Republican Senators Killed Health Care for 9/11 First Responders at Behest of GOP Lobbying Group That Advocates Offshoring American Jobs

Jon Ponder

Think Progress:

[Senate Republicans’] brazen obstruction … took some victims last week when they used another filibuster to block the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010. Named after a New York City policeman who died from health complications, this legislation that provides health care to 9/11 first responders and emergency workers who suffered illnesses from working at Ground Zero.

Not one Republican senator came to the floor to explain why the desperately needed, fully paid-for compensation didn’t deserve to pass. When Fox News’ Don Imus pressed Sen. John Thune (R-SD) for an explanation, Thune said the tax cuts are a bigger priority because “there is a deadline.” And when first responders came to the Senate to advocate for the bill yesterday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) actually called the Capitol police on them to prevent a sit-in.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., found a new depth for his loathsomeness when he trivialized the bill:

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‘Tis the Season to Add to the Landfill

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25

Percent increase in solid waste disposal during the holidays. From giving parties to wrapping and unwrapping gifts and discarding their packaging, to traveling and the attendant bottled water and snack containers that go along with travel, to tossing old stuff that new stuff replaced…Americans throw away about one-quarter more at this time of year compared with the rest of it.

New Poll Refudiates Palin’s Boast About Beating Obama

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22

Number of points by which Pres. Obama would lead Sarah Palin were the 2012 election held today, according to a new NBC/Wall St. Journal poll. Despite the reality star’s recent boast that she could beat Obama, 55 percent of those surveyed said they would support the president, while only 33 percent would vote for Palin. The number refudiates Palin’s claim, and represents a surge toward Obama, since a poll earlier this month gave him only 8 points over the former partial-term governor.

Unemployment Continues to Fall — Ahead of House Republican Majority

Trish

420,000

Number of new unemployment claims submitted last week, making it two weeks in a row that new claims dropped. The figure needs to get to about 400,000 to declare a recovery but at its height during the past year, 500,000 claims were the norm. The incoming Republicans in the House will no doubt claim credit for the recovery already in progress.

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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Ten Percent of Muslims Are Terrorists? That’s the Population of Iran, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon and Somalia – Combined

Jon Ponder

The latest anti-Muslim propaganda coming from the Republican Party’s Fox network is a suggestion by the network’s resident Mormon televangelist Glenn Beck that 10 percent of Muslims worldwide are terrorists.

GLENN BECK: What is the number of Islamic terrorists? One percent? I think it’s closer to 10 percent, but the rest of the PC world will tell you ‘oh no, it’s minuscule.’ Okay, well, let’s take you at your one percent. Look at the havoc of one percent of Muslims causing on the rest of the world!

This claim is so ridiculous that it stands as a tragic indictment of our times that it even has to be addressed. But, just in case it comes up at family events over the holidays, here goes.

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Rules Are for Small People, Speaker Boehner Will Smoke Wherever He Pleases in the Capitol

Jon Ponder

art-boehner-smokeRight-leaning Politico.com ran this item last week about incoming House Speaker John Boehner:

John Boehner isn’t speaker yet, but he already seems to be playing by his own rules.

The Ohio Republican was spotted puffing on a cigarette in the Capitol on Thursday afternoon, smoke billowing around his head, as he presided over a GOP steering committee meeting in the Capitol Visitor Center.

That would be a violation of a House rule that prohibits smoking in public rooms in the building.

A profile of Boehner in the New Yorker suggests that the new speaker smokes around two packs of cigarettes a day. And based on his family history with smoking, it’s unlikely Boehner will quit anytime soon:

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Cheney Was Referring to the Bush Tax Cuts When He Said, ‘Reagan Proved Deficits Don’t Matter’ – But Even Bush Had Doubts about Them in 2002

Jon Ponder

O'Neill, Cheney
O'Neill, Cheney
Eight years ago this month, George W. Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, was asked to resign. O’Neill, the former CEO of Alcoa, had made a couple of gaffes, including one that temporarily caused a run on the dollar. But it was his opposition to the administration’s plan to give tax cuts to the wealthy — O’Neill worried the cuts might cause the federal deficit to balloon out of control — that got him canned.

Not long after O’Neill left office, author Ron Suskind wrote a book about O’Neill’s tenure as Treasury secretary titled, “The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.” The book made headlines when it was published in late 2003, because, in it, O’Neill became the first high-ranking official from the administration to say publicly that war with Iraq had been a top objective of the Bush administration from the outset, and that the Sept. 11 attacks had merely provided a pretext for the invasion.

“Haven’t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut’s gonna do it again. Shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle?”
– Bush in 2002

(It was also around this time that Ron Suskind reported on a conversation he’d had with an anonymous senior White House aide — now universally thought to have been Karl Rove. “The aide said that guys like me,” Suskind wrote, “were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which [Rove] defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”)

But the other controversial revelation in Suskind’s book was about the Bush administration’s reckless decision after the 2002 midterms to go for a second round of tax cuts for the rich. In a January 2004 article about the book, Julian Borger wrote in the Guardian:

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