Enjoy watching Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), who already looks like a fish on the pier that someone caught by mistake and didn’t throw back in time, go blank when Chris Wallace (on FOX News!) asks what the Republican alternative is to “Obamacare.”
But keep a couple of points in mind as you view.
Joy-Ann Reid is reporting that House Democrats, outgunned and outnumbered by House Republicans and Teabillies, will join the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in walking out on the contempt of Congress vote set to be held on our hero, Attorney General Eric Holder, on June 28.
Yes, with all the pressing issues before the country, which, if you listen to FOX News is about to collapse from same, House Speaker John Boehner found time to not only investigate Holder (but not his predecessor in the Bush administration who started the Fast and Furious program), but to stop everything and take a vote on whether the voluminous information Holder has supplied to date is sufficient. The problem is that what Holder has coughed up does not show criminal wrong doing on the part of the Obama administration. Boehner and his co-conspirators want more, even if the proof they need never existed.
The CBC:
Instead of focusing on job creation and other critical issues before this Congress, we have been asked to engage in a political stunt on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Our constituents elected us to do real work, not to engage in meaningless partisan activity.
For those keeping track, Pres. Obama announcing he will not enforce deportation of the narrow group of children and young adults defined by the Dream Act, which failed to get a filibuster-proof majority in 2010, is election year prostitution. But stopping the work of the House of Representatives to focus on a partisan witch hunt that, if anything incriminates Republicans’ gun lobby pals, is time well spent. Yeah, no.
Fortune magazine proves what everyone who doesn’t watch FOX News suspected: The congressional investigation into the Fast and Furious program is a partisan witch hunt, and much of the responsibility for the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has to go to the gun lobby, which blocks maintaining a database of firearms.
Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that [ATF Supervisor Dave] Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case…How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today…
“Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa’s committee.
…Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal.
Take a few minutes and read the whole piece.
Try to ignore the ad agency’s patting of itself on the back in this video — although they kind of deserve to. They explain the very different approach they used to reframe the issue in a space usually dominated by no-tax drivel. Bravo!
Because they can — and they know they won’t get called on it.
As Jon pointed out yesterday, Mitt Romney’s campaign has turned lying into something of a craft, if not an art form. But Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum offers an explanation why every time a politician tells a lie, he or she is likely to get away with it:
Politicians have increasingly discovered over the past couple of decades that even on a national stage you can lie pretty blatantly and pay no price since the mainstream media, trapped in its culture of objectivity, won’t really call you on it, limiting themselves to fact checking pieces like Kessler’s buried on an inside page. And because virtually nobody except political junkies ever sees this stuff, it doesn’t hurt their campaigns at all.
In fact, Sen. Bill Nelson’s a pretty stand-up guy.
Last week in Iowa, Mitt Romney criticized Pres. Obama for his purported runaway spending. “A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” Romney said, “and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve. This is not a Democratic or Republican problem. That fire could care less if you have a donkey or an elephant in your front lawn, it’s still coming for your house.”
But Romney’s basic assertion — that Obama administration economic policies have caused spending to grow faster than the policies of the last few presidents — is patently false:
The only one who doesn’t know what the goal of Bain Capital was when Mitt Romney ran it is, apparently, Mitt Romney. Tom Stemberg, the Staples guy himself, says Bain was not trying to create jobs but was instead trying to create wealth for its principals. Duh.
A top surrogate to Mitt Romney said making money — rather than creating jobs — was the primary goal of the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee when he was running Bain Capital LLC, saying he “acted responsibly” as chief executive officer of the private-equity firm.
“The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money,” said Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples Inc. (SPLS), in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital.” Bain also helped businesses grow, so “these things had redeeming social value, in addition to making Mitt and his investors a lot of money.”
Stemberg made the remarks to set the record straight in an ad perceived as negative toward Romney, which portrays Mitt as a corporate raider. While objecting to that spot, Stemberg gave $20,000 to the Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future to make negative ads about Obama.
Mitt Romney has famously said that “of course” he would have made the same decisions that led to the death of Osama bin Laden as Pres. Obama did. Obama, we will recall, elected to launch a Navy Seals attack without tipping off the Pakistani government because he had good intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts and no reason to trust the Pakistanis. Had the plan gone wrong, “of course,” we imagine Romney would have found much to fault.
We also know that in 2007, when he was running for president last, Romney echoed the sentiments of Pres. George W. Bush, who said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if we ever found bin Laden. Romney put it this way: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
Since Romney now says if he were president, he would have done exactly what Pres. Obama did, I think it’s a good time to list some of the other things that Romney would have done if he were the person who did them, which he is not.
The recent news out of Kentucky was just awful,
They found the senator unconscious and horizontal.
And since his hospitalization,
There’s been little news about his condition,
But now everybody’s having a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell.
