Tag: Darrell Issa
Trump Hurting Issa’s Approval Rating
10 points
Los Angeles Times: “A month after Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) won reelection in the closest congressional race in the country, the congressman got a warning that his next contest could be even tougher. An internal poll by Issa’s campaign showed a nearly 10-percentage point drop in his favorability ratings between mid-October and early December — and that one likely reason the lawmaker’s image took a hit was because of his support for President Trump.”
Issa: Our Poor Are Richer Than Their Poor
If you go to India or you go to any number of other Third World countries, you have two problems: You have greater inequality of income and wealth. You also have less opportunity for people to rise from the have not to the have.
— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the richest man in Congress, telling CNN that America has made “our poor somewhat the envy of the world.”
Takes One to Know One
Are you stupid?
— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), quoted by TPM, in his first question to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber at a hearing on Obamacare.
Seventh GOP Benghazi Investigation Finds No Criminality Or Malfeasance – Eighth Inquiry Is Underway
It was a classic Friday night news dump, and then some. Last Friday, which happened to be the Friday before the Thanksgiving holiday week, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released the findings of its investigation into the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. This was the seventh congressional investigation into the Benghazi attacks, by most counts — there have also been investigations by the FBI, the State Department and others. There is an eighth investigation underway in the House, and there will likely be more to come as Republicans take control of the Senate next year.
The Republicans’ motive for suppressing news coverage of the report is that, like the previous reports, it exonerates Pres. Obama and his administration, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of anything remotely criminal — which is to say actionable or, more to the point, impeachable:
Issa Takes Rhetorical Detour Down Trail of Tears
When an administration says ‘no,’ it’s no different than when Andrew Jackson marched Indians down the Trail of Tears, to their death.
— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), quoted by Politico, on the Obama administration’s transparency.
Calbuzz: ‘Why Isn’t Darrell Issa in Jail?’
Calbuzz, a go-to site for the inside dope on California politics, has been covering the corrupt and checkered political career of Rep. Darrell Issa since it began 15 years ago. Now Calbuzz asks a simple question: “Why Isn’t Darrell Issa in Jail?”
[We] keep wondering why our colleagues in the Washington press corps have not figured out the truth about this guy: he’s a thug…
Issa is a wealthy bully and proven liar with a checkered personal history featuring criminal and civil legal proceedings that involve car thefts, concealed weapons charges and allegations of insurance arson, among his other sterling qualifications for high office. A reasonable man might imagine a less wealthy person perched in Stony Lonesome rather than on the dais of a prestigious and powerful congressional committee.
None of Issa’s past, um, indiscretions are a secret, at least since May 1998, when Lance Williams, then of the San Francisco Examiner, began reporting on the guy. Given that his shady past was admirably re-collated by Ryan Lizza in a 2011 New Yorker profile, Issa’s lies and prominent roles in a long train of extra-legal abuses should be well known to esteemed Washington press hounds who spend their days smooching his expensively draped derriere.
The Calbuzzers provide a “Cliff’s Notes” sampler of Issa’s misdeeds. Here are four items from the list, go read the rest.
The Testimony Issa Suppressed: Self-Described Conservative Republican IRS Official Said He Initiated Extra Scrutiny on Tea Party
A U.S. Internal Revenue Service manager, who described himself as a conservative Republican, told congressional investigators that he and a local colleague decided to give conservative groups the extra scrutiny that has prompted weeks of political controversy.
In an official interview transcript released on Sunday by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, the manager said he and an underling set aside “Tea Party” and “patriot” groups that had applied for tax-exempt status because the organizations appeared to pose a new precedent that could affect future IRS filings.
Cummings, top Democrat on the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee conducting the probe, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that the manager’s comments provided evidence that politics was not behind IRS actions that have fueled a month-long furor in Washington.
“He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way toward showing that the White House was not involved in this,” Cummings told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
“Based upon everything I’ve seen, the case is solved. And if it were me, I would wrap this case up and move on,” he added.
Daft & Spurious: A Regular American’s Guide to the Tea Party’s Bogus Election-Year Scandal
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If you are as confused as other regular Americans about the “Fast & Furious” controversy that roiled the capitol yesterday, you should watch Rachel Maddow’s backgrounder from her MSNBC show last night — see above or click here.
“Very clearly, they made a crisis, and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.”
— Rep. Darrell Issa of California, one-time arson and grand-theft auto suspect, now the Republican Party’s chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
— Rep. Darrell Issa of California, one-time arson and grand-theft auto suspect, now the Republican Party’s chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
Maddow points to the bogusness of this controversy as just the latest example of the divide in the country today between the vast majority of normal Americans who are not compulsive Fox News watchers and those whose are.
The conspiracy theory had been incubating on Fox and in right-wing media world for over a year, she says, until yesterday when Republicans “tried drag it out into the mainstream to see if it could survive in the mainstream — see if it could survive outside the right-wing world in which it was incubated.”
The Fast & Furious conspiracy originated in March 2010, Maddow said, which was not coincidentally the same time that the Affordable Care Act passed in Congress. The passage of Obamacare sent tea baggers into fits of rage. They were most enraged about the law’s central feature — and its most conservative, pro-business element — the individual mandate.
The mandate — which was invented by the Heritage Foundation, a thimk tank so right-wing that it is a sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s show — would require every American to buy insurance, thereby delivering as many as 40 million new, paying customers to giant health insurance corporations.
