Year: 2010
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Caught Lying Again – This Time about Her GOP-Style Death Panels for the Poor
Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer made news earlier this year when she claimed that the deserts in her state were littered with headless bodies — corpse of the victims of bloodthirsty illegal aliens who were crossing the border to wreak havoc on Arizonans. And though that claim was proven to be false, she never admitted she had lied.
In an interview on with Greta Van Susteren on Fox this week, Brewer has been caught lying again. This time, she has falsely claimed that Arizona is continuing to pay for life-saving transplant operations for state residents who can’t afford them:
GOV. JAN BREWER: It’s part of the Cadillac program that Arizona has. Even your private insurance don’t cover a lot of those procedures. A lot of those transplants are being provided in the state of Arizona.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: By the state of Arizona or privately?
BREWER: By the state of Arizona. We provide heart transplants, liver, kidney transplants, pancreas and kidney.
OLBERMANN: The state is absolutely not providing a liver transplant to Francisco Felix or a heart transplant to Randy Sheppard.
Rough transcript from MSBNC:
Einstein’s Brilliant Observation about Twitter
The greatest thing about Twitter is that you can quote something and totally make up the source
-Albert Einstein, via Steven Winterburn.
With Boehner’s Pick of ‘Prince of Pork’ to Chair Appropriations, GOP’s Tea Party Base Is Starting to Get It – They’ve Been Had
Speaker-Elect John Boehner and the incoming GOP House leadership (which, it should be noted, is the same as the leadership in the current Congress and practically the same as the old “borrow and spend, spend, spend” House leadership under Bush) announced its picks for committee chairmen this week — and one of these in particular — the choice of Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, the “Prince of Pork,” to lead the Appropriations committee — is not playing well within the party’s tea bagger base.
In just the last two years, Rep. Rogers has requested $246 million in earmarks for his rural Kentucky district.
And rightly so. The general indictment of the tea parties — their political Achilles heel — is that the entire movement is predicated on rank hypocrisy about government spending.
From the elderly tea baggers who shouted “Get the government out of my Medicare!” at the town hall meetings in 2009 to the Republican pols who voted against the Stimulus but then rushed home to pose for photo ops handing out giant Stimulus checks to fund projects in their districts — and from the incoming tea bagger members of Congress who spewed spittle about the evils of “Obamacare” to get elected but who are now eagerly bellying up for their taxpayer-funded Cadillac health insurance plans to the tea parties’ current support for the GOP’s billionaires’ tax break even though it will blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit over the next ten years — tea baggers don’t have a lot of credibility left.
If they want to keep up the pretense that they really are for fiscal thrift, they should get up off their couches and work up some of their trademark poorly spelled signs to protest Boehner’s appointment of a guy like this to run the most influential House committee on spending:
Lame Name Games
The Right: “Obama is a socialist!”
The Left: “Obama is a corporatist!”
But in this endless game of “Yo Mama,”
Match point goes to Obama:
“Me? I’m just a political pragmatist.”
Happy Birthday to Buck!
We at Pensito Review pause to wish our very own social media guru, Buck Banks, a very happy birthday today!
Verbatim
I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged and The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself.
Aaron Sorkin, playwright and screenwriter, answering Palin’s Facebook update in which she challenged the legitimacy of critics of her killing and dismembering a caribou on her reality show. Sorkin added, “I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun…That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there’d be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully.”
Verbatim
It has become a widely-noticed habit of yours to concede or to adopt both the Republican terms of policymaking and Republican policies and programs … For many of your 2008 voters, this will indeed be the last straw for any active support they might have considered providing you.
— Ralph Nader, in a letter to President Obama, attacking his tax cut deal with Republicans.
Out with the Old Bush, In with the Old Bush
If you, like me, have been having a kind of deja-vu-all-over-again creepy feeling watching the Republicans swagger all over Capitol Hill in the wake of the midterm elections, it’s justified, according to Daniel Larison, writing (critically, actually) in The American Conservative:
One of the stories some conservatives told themselves in 2010 was that the Tea Party movement had succeeded in getting the Republican Party “out from under Bush.” Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now.
Larison goes on to elucidate the basic conundrum the GOP is getting itself into vis-a-vis the Tea Party — pander to that whack-job base to get the votes, then ignore the tea baggers’ concerns:
It is certainly true that the Tea Party movement opposes tax increases, but it is also supposed to be interested in bringing public debt under control. The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.
