Tag: Republicans
How Will Boehner’s GOP-Tea Party Top Its First Disastrous Week in Power?
Now, with Speaker Boehner having scheduled a vote on the tea party’s signature issue, repealing the Affordable Care Act, a new poll finds that public support for the repeal has dropped to just 25 percent.
But first, here’s the week that was:
Verbatim
They are a special interest. End of story…and I’m not going to be held hostage by special interests.
— Gov. Paul LePage (R-Me), ungraciously declining an invitation from Maine’s chapter of the NAACP to participate in a Martin Luther King Day event involving black inmates at the state prison. The biggest surprise is not that tea party backed LePage might be racist, but that Maine has black people. Who knew?
Think It’s Bad in Your State? Visit Florida.
When you live in Florida, sometimes there’s just too much wacky to take in at one sitting. You have to just skim the surface because trying to go deeper would probably sink you.
Such is the case today, when a reading of the morning news brings so many little harbingers of doom. Read on for three examples.
- Look out innocent sea life! You’re what we call, “collateral damage.”
Boaters straying into restricted areas at Port Canaveral can soon expect to get a warning blast from the U.S. Coast Guard. The port is a test site for a new warning system to keep vessels out of security zones.
Officials would first try to radio an encroaching boat and give other signals to stop. If that doesn’t work, 12-gauge shotgun ammunition can be fired into the path of a boat. The plastic and aluminum projectile ignites after about 100 yards to create a burst of light and a loud sound.
But wait, there’s more.
Murkowski Poised for Palin Payback
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) found out what it was like to be shunned by her party during the 2010 election. While high-profile types like Sarah and Todd Palin backed tea bagger Joe Miller, Murkowski refused to cede her office after her initial primary loss, despite calls to quit from such GOP notables as Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), and of course, the quitter queen herself, Sarah Palin. Instead, Murkowski made history by winning as a write-in candidate.
Now all those Republicans who kicked Murkowski to the curb are finding out they might be in for a very long six years.
…Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski seems to be declaring political independence.
She cast a yes vote for all four of President Obama’s big legislative items in the lame duck congressional session: don’t ask, don’t tell; the tax cut compromise; the START treaty; and the DREAM act.
With the Senate almost evenly split in the coming session, a move to a more moderate position could make Murkowski a swing vote on any important issue.
So instead of being sidelined for not, as Palin put it, heeding “the will of the people,” Murkowski could be the highest profile senator since Joe Lieberman. Good going, Republican party!
N.Y. Jets Coach Apologizes After Tripping Florida Lt. Gov. Elect’s Miami Dolphins Son
Playing by the rules isn’t what Jennifer Carroll is known for. Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Elect is still trying to answer questions about her income, which shifted dramatically between the time she filled out her tax returns and the time she applied for minority and small business set-asides.
Carroll and Scott could take a lesson from Coach Alosi about owning up to your mistakes so you don’t keep repeating them
She’s also explaining her way out of charges of fraudulently presenting falsified documents. Carroll claims she rented an office already occupied by a private detective agency before the landlord the papers show she rented from had bought the building (but within the time frame she would have needed to prove her business was located in the county in which she was applying for…yes, minority and small business set-asides).
And she’s never addressed how her speeding tickets disappeared without her paying the fines once she became a state legislator.
So it’s a little ironic that the Miami Dolphins player who was tripped by New York Jets Coach Sal Alosi on Sunday was Jennifer Carroll’s son, Nolan.
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
…one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming. Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality…Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman…asked for “a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits.” My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too?
— Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist
Palin’s Viewers Can’t Stick With Things Either
68th
The rank of the reality show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” in its second episode. The premier ranked 10th for its week but the follow-up show pulled only 3.04 million viewers, or less than 1 percent of the population of the United States.
Why Palin Shouldn’t Run, as Told by a Conservative
Like many of you, we have been a bit dispirited since the midterm elections. But one thing cheers us, and that’s the thought of, as my Facebook friend put it, conservatives eating their own kind.
At the right-wing blog, TownHall, columnist Mona Charen lays out her reasons why Sarah Palin should not run for president, and by extension, why no one should vote for her.
The Republican nominee should be someone with vast and impressive experience in government and the private sector — and a proven record.
Charen: ‘Palin compares herself to Reagan. But Reagan didn’t mud wrestle with the press.’After the 2008 campaign revealed her weaknesses on substance, Palin was advised by those who admire her natural gifts to bone up on policy and devote herself to governing Alaska successfully. Instead, she quit her job as governor after two and a half years, published a book (another is due next week), and seemed to chase money and empty celebrity. Now, rather than being able to highlight the accomplishments of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, we get “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” another cheesy entrant in the reality show genre. She’d so much rather be out dog sledding than in some “dull political office,” she tells the audience. File that.
