Tag: GOP Hypocrisy

GOP’s Ryan Budget Would Add Up to $6 Trillion to Debt – And Yet GOP Won’t Raise Debt Limit?

Jon Ponder

In what Democrats called a political stunt, House Republicans voted in lockstep to oppose raising the U.S. debt ceiling last night.

“Let’s just increase the debt limit by the amount of debt it would take to accommodate Paul Ryan’s budget in the next decade. We can fight about the details later. No spooking the markets over this insanity.”
– What Pres. Obama should suggest to the GOP, according Matt Miller

Republican have done a masterful spin job on the debt-ceiling issue. Polls show that a majority of Americans say they oppose raising it, but it appears they have reached this conclusion based on misperception of the facts.

For one thing, raising the debt limit has nothing to do with future spending. It covers the indebtedness incurred in the current budget, the same budget that Congress — including the Republicans in the House — voted for.

That’s right. Republicans voted to raise the national debt a few months ago, now these same Republicans are demanding that the U.S. Treasury welch on the debt they charged to the national credit card.

Worse, not only have Republicans snookered the public into believe that raising the debt ceiling is tied to future spending, the GOP’s own budget for future spending — the budget bill that includes the the Ryan “Kill Medicare” proposal, the budget that Republicans in the House and Senate vote for — would raise the national debt by as much as $6 trillion.

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GOP House Judiciary Committee Resolves to Put ‘In God We Trust’ on All Federal Buildings – What Will That Cost?

Jon Ponder

art-in-god-sf-fed
Artist rendering of proposed GOP sign on the new federal building in San Francisco
Just four months ago the tea party Republicans won control of the House by campaigning on reducing the deficit and promising to focus on “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” But in the 12 weeks since they officially took over, what they have shown is that, despite their new “tea party” branding, this current batch is no different from the GOP pols who ran Congress in the Bush and Gingrich eras.

Like typical politicians, the tea party Republicans have not even bothered to deliver on their campaign promises. They have done nothing to create jobs — they haven’t even held a hearing on employment. And their approach to reducing the deficit is to cut programs that help the middle class, sick and elderly or that are counter to their right-wing ideology, while adamantly refusing even to discuss raising taxes on the 400 American families that control $1.27 trillion of the nation’s wealth — that’s $3.175 billion per family.

Instead, the GOP House has resorted to the same sort of ideological gimmickry that was their predecessors’ hallmark. Since they took control of the House in January, the tea party has:

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Huckabee Hypocrisy: Unctuously Forgave Palin’s Underage, Unwed Pregnant Daughter in 2008

Jon Ponder

Huckabee
Huckabee
Mike Huckabee, the ordained Southern Baptist preacher, former governor of Arkansas, Fox News host and father of a cold-blooded dog-killing former Boy Scout counselor, spent this week first lying about Pres. Obama’s family background, then attempting to walk back the first lie with more lies.

On Friday, he created yet more controversy by casting judgment on Oscar-winner Natalie Portman, 29, because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy:

HUCKABEE in 2011: One of the most troubling things is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet that boasts of, hey look, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having children and they’re doing just fine.

There aren’t really a lot of single moms out there that are making millions of dollars each year by being in a movie.

I think it gives a distorted image that not everybody hires nannies and caretakers and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and would not get health care.

Got that? Presumably liberal Hollywood actresses who get pregnant of wedlock, even though they are engaged to marry the baby’s father, as Portman is, are a corrupting influence on America’s youth.

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Something to Cry About

Jon Ponder

National Enquirer on Boehner's alleged affairs

The Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of the National Enquirer features a story alleging that GOP Speaker John Boehner has had adulterous dalliances “with at least two different women” in Washington.

Frankly, the article, which was leaked by the website Boy Culture, seems pretty thin. There’s a rehash of the story broken by Mike Stark, an openly liberal D.C. journalist, after Labor Day alleging that Boehner, 61, had had an ongoing affair with a printing industry lobbyist, Lisbeth Lyons, who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties.

From left: Debbie Boehner, Lisbeth Lyons, Leigh LaMora
From left: Debbie Boehner, Lisbeth Lyons, Leigh LaMora
The second woman mentioned in the Enquirer article is Leigh LaMora, a former press secretary to a Colorado Republican ex-congressman. While Boehner’s alleged dalliance with Lyons was recent, the tabloid says Boehner hooked up with LaMora at a party in 1997, when Boehner was 47 and LaMora was 32.

The speaker and his wife Debbie, a real estate agent in Ohio, have been married for 37 years and have two children. But there may be more here than a politician breaking a pledge to his wife. If the allegations are true, it appears Boehner’s affair smacks of corruption, according to Stark:

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Ayn Rand Was a Good Ol’ American Socialist – Just Like You, Me and 226 GOP House Members

Jon Ponder

art-gop-socialists-row

According to a new book “100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand,” by Scott McConnell, late in her life, Ayn Rand, the tea partyists’ anti-government patron saint, went on the government dole. That’s right, when the going got tough, Rand, the “every man, woman and child for him or herself” objectivist, author of “Atlas Shrugged,” the cartoonish libertarian bible that is the second-best selling book in the world, availed herself of good ol’ red, white and blue American socialism.

Any time the citizenry bands together to pool its resources to cover the costs of a community benefit — whether it is fire and police protection or other emergency services; public institutions like schools, hospitals and libraries; or infrastructure like streets and highways, bridges and tunnels, airports and harbors — that is, by definition, socialism.

According to McConnell, who is the founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute, a social worker he interviewed had helped Rand, who was known to the government as Mrs. Frank (Ann) O’Connor, and her husband sign up for government benefits in 1974, when Rand, a lifelong, two-packs-a-day smoker, was 69 years old and going broke from the costs of treating her lung cancer.

A freedom of information request confirmed that Ayn Rand, or Ann O’Connor, received thousands in benefits before she died eight years later. Efforts to confirm that Rand received Medicare payments were inconclusive, but, technically, Medicare is a part of the Social Security system so it is more likely than not that she did.

Here, according to the oral history, is how Rand justified her late-life conversion to socialism:

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Boehner’s Alleged Affair – and Gingrich’s Confirmed One – Go Unmentioned by the New Yorker – Yes, the New Yorker

Jon Ponder
Boehner, cover of Dec. 13, 2010, New Yorker
Boehner, cover of Dec. 13, 2010, New Yorker

Peter Boyer’s nearly 9,000 word profile of Speaker John Boehner in the New Yorker last month filled in a few gaps in what is commonly known about Boehner’s biography, but there was a notable item missing — the fact that just four months ago the Capitol was aswirl with rumors that Boehner was having an extramarital affair with a (female) lobbyist.

Similarly, in describing events that led to the ouster in 1998 of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Boyer omitted one of the central reasons — some would say the real reason — Gingrich was forced out: At the same time he was driving efforts to impeach Pres. Bill Clinton over a perjurious cover-up of an affair with a staffer, Gingrich was himself engaged in an affair with a congressional staffer, his current wife, Callista Bisek.

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Health Care Hypocrisy: New Anti-Reform Extremist Rep Has Meltdown Over Having to Wait 28 Days for Govt Health-Care Coverage

Jon Ponder

Incoming Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), health-care hypocrite
Incoming Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), health-care hypocrite
Here’s another shining example of the fact that the tea baggers who were elected to Congress this month are just retreads of the same old Republican hypocrites who led the country into its current quagmire.

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.

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Bagman Boehner Launders Bucks from Bailed Out Corporations into Donations to Tea Party Candidates Running Against Bailouts

Jon Ponder

Bagman Boehner
Bagman Boehner
You have to wonder what the tea party rank and file would think about the fact that their own anti-bailout, anti-government candidates are taking donations that are, arguably, derived from the same taxpayer bailouts they despise.

It’s also a shame that swing voters who are ready to put the Republicans back in charge are not aware that those Republicans have not changed one iota in the four years since they were fired by the American electorate. They are still completely in the tank for the mega-corps that want to turn the clock back to the free-wheeling days of the Bush era — to the same unregulated system that led to the economic collapse and the Bush recession.

Here’s how the laundering of the bailout donations works. First, Speaker Wanna-Be John Boehner and the GOP take donations from bailed out corporations:

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House GOPTers Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Sessions, Bachmann Voted with Pelosi over 50% of the Time

Jon Ponder
Top GOP Pelosi Votes
Leader Boehner 52%
Whip Cantor 57%
Chairman Sessions 57%
Chairman Pence 52%
Michele Bachmann 58%

The House Republicans’ “Party of No” strategy to obstruct legislation and drive up negatives for the Democratic leadership and the president certainly appears to have been successful. Every pollster out there is predicting that the GOP’s lazy, boozing, schmoozing leader, John Boehner, is set to become Speaker of the House in January.

On every issue that made news, the top GOPTers have hurtled themselves in front of any available camera to bellow, “NO, no, no and HELL no!” But, according to a new metric compiled by the Democrats, when it came time to register their vote, some of the most vociferous Republicans voted with the House Democratic leadership more than half of the time:

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CA Gov: Whitman’s Hypocrisy on ‘Whore’ Issue Evokes Laughter from Debate Audience

Jon Ponder

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/video.

The “Whoregate” controversy was front and center in the final California gubernatorial debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman last night. The controversy arose last week after the release of a secretly recorded conversation among Brown and his aides in which an adviser suggested attacking Whitman as a “whore” because she had sold out her own strong opposition to unions in order to receive a union endorsement.

The Whitman campaign has repeatedly portrayed the comment as a misogynist slur. But Brown came to the debate prepared and, in a single deft stroke, he managed to put the gaffe in context, undercut Whitman’s manufactured outrage and expose her as a hypocrite:

WHITMAN: So Jerry, it’s not just me, it’s the people of California who deserve better than slurs and personal attacks. That’s not what California is about. It is not our better selves. And I, um, think people know exact…I think every Californian, and especially women, know exactly what’s going on here. And that is a deeply offensive term to women.

BROWN: Well, can I just interject? Have you chastised your chairman, Pete Wilson, who called Congress “whores” to the public sector unions?

WHITMAN: You know better than that Jerry. That’s a completely different thing. The fact you are defending your campaign…

[Derisive LAUGHTER from audience.]

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