Month: February 2013

Rand Paul Gives $600K to U.S. Treasury

Buck Banks

$600,000

Amount Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) gave to the U.S. Treasury, “taking the money he said he didn’t need from his office’s budget to make a tiny dent in the nation’s massive federal debt,” CNN reports. Said Paul: “We watch every purchase. We watch what computers we buy, what paper we buy, the ink cartridges. We treat the money like it’s our money, or your money, and we look at every expenditure.”

With Domenici’s Adultery Scandal, the C Street Christianist Cult Rears Its Ugly Head Again

Jon Ponder
Clockwise from the left: Michelle Laxalt in a recent photo, C Street cult headquarters on Capitol Hill, and Sen. Domenici in the 1970s

Former New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici admitted yesterday that in 1979, when he was 46, he had an adulterous relationship with the 24-year-old daughter of his colleague, then Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada. In a statement also released yesterday, Laxalt’s daughter Michelle said that she became pregnant as a result of the encounter, which she described as a one-night stand and a “mistake.” She said she raised the son, Adam Laxalt, now 34 years old, as a single mother.

They believe that morality is a secular construct — that morality is something made by man for little people like us, and that if you are part of God’s chosen … morality, ethics, these things don’t apply to you.
– Jeff Sharlet

Domenici and the Laxalts are all Republicans.

By keeping their secret for all these years, as Lauren Ashburn at the Daily Beast pointed out, both Domenici, who retired in 2009 and is now 80, and Michelle Laxalt, 57, benefited.

Domenici — New Mexico’s longest-serving senator — was able to hold onto his career, including being reelected five times. Michelle Laxalt became a Washington lobbyist, head of the Laxalt Corporation, which she founded in 1984, when her son was about five years old. She also served as a staffer for Republican senators, including Ted Stevens and John Warner, and worked on the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II presidential campaigns.

Because of his extremist positions on morality, it’s likely Domenici’s career in politics would have ended if his extramarital dalliance had come to light. In the Daily Beast, Asburn points to examples of pols whose careers were recently stymied when their affairs were made public, including N.C. Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and former Nevada Sen. John Ensign.

Both Sanford and Ensign are Republicans and, like Domenici, they are members of “the Family,” the infamous, high-powered Christianist cult that operates out of a house on C Street on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

[…]

Sullivan Says GOP Heading for Sequestration Trap Set by Obama

Buck Banks

I believe that is indeed Obama’s long game here. The precedent is the Gingrich government shutdown, which stopped his revolution in its tracks and gave Bill Clinton new political life. When cops are furloughed, when scientists complain about research cuts, when the military-industrial complex revs up its lobbying engines, I just don’t see how the sequester works politically for the GOP. It exists entirely because of their fixation on immediate austerity – despite the awful consequences that policy option has spawned in Europe.

— Andrew Sullivan, asserting that Republicans will suffer politically if the sequestration cuts go into effect on March 1.