Feb
25
Supposed Conservatives
Filed Under American Politics | 9 Comments
As you all probably know, John McCain is being primaried from the right by a former Congressional Republican and talk radio host JD Hayworth.
For some unknown reason, JD Hayworth has become a darling of the right. For example, Rush Limbaugh, although not explicitly endorsing Hayworth yet, takes Mitt Romney to task for endorsing John McCain.
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole point of the conservative/tea-party movement to change politics for the better, to end corruption and the brown envelope under the table type of politics.
So in the red corner we have John McCain the champion of the fight against the corrupting influence of pork in Washington politics and in the blue corner is JD Hayworth who…
1. Is closely linked to corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In fact, he was the largest recipient of Abramoff campaign contributions:
The real issue for me, however, is that while John McCain has many problems, there’s no reason to believe Hayworth is the solution. As conservatives look to young leaders with fresh ideas, Hayworth is a step backward. For starters, he was heavily involved with former “super-lobbyist” Jack Abramoff. Although he later cooperated with federal investigators and was never found to have done anything illegal, Hayworth was the largest recipient of campaign money from the now-convicted Abramoff.
2. Hayworth is a supporter of big-government Bush programs:
Hayworth’s support of Bush’s big-government polices included voting for the No Child Left Behind Act; the paperwork- and red-tape-friendly (and business-unfriendly) Sarbanes-Oxley Act; the pork-laden 2005 highway bill that included the infamous “bridge to nowhere”; and, most expensive of all, a Medicare drug benefit that created more than $7 trillion in unfunded liabilities. What is more, his support for a monstrosity known as the 527 Reform Act, which was intended to close “loopholes” in McCain/Feingold, and which was arguably worse for conservatives than the original article.
3. Hayworth, according to wikipedia payed his wife nearly 30% of the PAC money he raised in the period 2001-2005, over $20,000 a year. This is one of the oldest tricks by politicians; pay the family member for their ’services’ and in my opinion, it’s tantamount to corruption. And if nothing else, it’s $20,000 a year that didn’t go to conservative causes.
From what I’ve read about him, JD Hayworth is exactly the type of politician that conservatives and tea-partiers should be going after, not supporting. It eats away at their credibility when they support big government, lobbyist friendly politicians. John McCain is far from perfect, but is it worth sacrificing conservative principles because McCain’s a bit dodgy on campaign finance and immigration? Personally I don’t think so. And as Hayworth is a birther, I have even more reason to support McCain in this fight. Hayworth is the type of conservative that gives conservatives a bad name.
Conservative energies should be focused elsewhere.
Nov
24
From Campaigning To Government
Filed Under American Politics | 3 Comments
How things change when you switch from an aspiring President to an actual President. Jim Geraghty notices an example of the change in outlook:
Last September, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said that despite some problems, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” You remember how Obama responded, right?
Now the Obama campaign has released an ad further pounding home the point. “Fundamentals,” a 30-second spot the campaign will only say is airing in “key states,” opens with yesterday’s grim news and nerve-racking music.
These words appear onscreen: “September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers Collapses. Markets In Turmoil. Job Losses At 605,000 For The Year. Foreclosures At 9800 A Day. And John McCain Says?”
The spot then cuts to video of McCain speaking yesterday.
“Our economy I think, still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he says.
McCain’s words then appear onscreen, with a question mark signaling incredulity added at the end. McCain is then shown saying the phrase over and over again as the ad asks, “How Can John McCain Fix Our Economy If He Doesn’t Understand It’s Broken?” The spot closes with a shot of McCain with President George W. Bush.
That was back when unemployment was 6.1 percent.
Today, with unemployment at 10.2 percent, President Obama said the U.S. economy has “core strengths.”
It’s right for Obama, as President, to talk up the economy, but if saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” was a sign of either incompetence or being out of touch then, is it not now? I think it’s safe to say that under Obama and despite his promises, nothing has changed in the way poliics is conducted and this is just an example of that.
Geraghty also quotes Scott Rasmussen speaking on how the unemployment figures relate to the timeline of recovering political popularity:
When bad news comes…consumer confidence tanks immediately . . . When good news comes in, it takes a long time before people believe it. . . . there is typically one indicator that drives perceptions. . . . in 2002, 2003 it was foreign affairs, then it became jobs for a little while, then it became gas prices. . . . now, the indicator is jobs. And it’s not going to take one good jobs report. It’s going to take 6 months worth of jobs reports before people believe things are changing.
Oct
24
Old Man Yells At Cloud…Again
Filed Under American Politics | 6 Comments
By Israel
Okay, the last time l posted about this l was joking but now l think that Republicans may have a serious image problem.
Once again, for the 15th time since the election, John McCain is on a sunday political show to respond to the Obama Administration.
This is the man who LOST the last election.
This is the man that so called “serious” conservatives do not believe is “one of them”.
Are they really happy about McCain being out there as the man giving the GOP’s message, whatever it is?
Again l say it, Kerry wasn’t booked onto the Sunday shows every 2.6 weeks after he lost to George Bush, and his election defeat was a lot closer than McCain’s.
The GOP need to have a serious look at themselves and wonder why John McCain is considered the best example of a Republican to continually be on the forefront speaking about the party’s agenda.
McCain is still not one of the minority leaders, he is still not the head of the RNC and the only thing he is doing right now is fighting net neutrality.
It’s a long time until 2012 and l understand that some would like to get ahead of the game, or sit on the shoulder of the leader hoping to gain momentum in the slipstream, but relying on the mid-terms while sitting back and doing nothing isn’t in my view the best option.
They can continue as l personally don’t see it working, but as we see Republican infighting with some of the supposed “leading lights” for the future as well as some of the minor players, it’s going to be interesting to see who will step up, but the continued exposure of a political failure cannot be that good for the GOP.
Oct
12
By Israel
Thus reads the headline from Steve Benen’s Washington Monthly piece where he notes that John McCain, failed presidential candidate, would be appearing on a Sunday political show for the FOURTEENTH TIME SINCE JANUARY 20TH 2009!!
As is pointed out by Benen working out the mathematics, John McCain has been on the television every 2.7 weeks to speak in opposition to the actual President’s agenda. What is truly impressive is the fact that while he is a sitting US Senator he is not the Senate Minority Leader which also means that he is not the House Minority Leader or RNC Chairman.
Senator McCain doesn’t sit as minority chair on any significant committee that l can think of or have heard about, he hasn’t authored any important bills in that time nor has he been in the forefront of any negotiations on the major legislations already passed, or the ones ongoing like healthcare reform, yet still for the fourteenth time he is asked onto a Sunday political show!!
How many times did we hear from John Kerry on Sunday shows after his defeat to Bush in the first nine months of Bush’s second term?
Granted that watching Kerry is equal to sitting through “Waiting For Godot” being performed by Seann William Scott and Chris Tucker while having a railway spike being slowly driven into your eye, but still the question has to be asked!!
The right may not want to acknowledge the fact that the media LOOOVVVEEESSSS them some John McCain, which has even led to an Urban Dictionary reference due to the incredibly chummy family barbecues, as well as providing him with his favourite donuts “with sprinkles!!” at the same time as doing hit pieces on his opponent.
It will be interesting to see how long this continues from the “liberal media”.
Jun
21
By Israel
While watching the news this week from the UK l have to say that l admire the rightwing media in the US for being consistent. Not right, just consistent.
Three things have happened this week and it’s hard to find more than a handful of reporting on them on the right wing side of the US news, expecially Fox (aided in most parts by Drudge and the right wing blogosphere) who, if these stories were about Democrats, would have them as banner headlines for the last week.
What are the three things? Well l can’t do them all justice here but here’s one of them.
Voter Fraud:
Before the election John McCain, when talking about voter fraud and ACORN, said that it would be “destroying the fabric of democracy” if they went unchecked. The insinuation was that because of ACORN millions of false votes would be counted for Obama, illegally handing him the election. They would have you believe that a group that pays people to register voters checks the names and, if it finds false ones on there reports it to federal authorities AS REQUIRED TO BY LAW, leading to the person involved being arrested, have actually taken these false names up to the polling booth and pressed a button/punched a card/pulled a lever and registered a vote. Whether the people going back up to vote again took a change of clothes and were wearing fake mustaches or eye patches doesn’t make the reports.
This has been one of the hot button topics of the right before and after the election. The rejection of the core principles, ideals, and the war-mongering reckless blood lust of regular conservatives and neo-cons is still hard for them to take. A community advocasy group with links to a president they dislike for reasons ranging far and wide, be they birther, christianist or McCartyite, gives them a great target, expecially when the media arm of the party and the reincarnation of Howard Beale decide to spend countless hours on something which was not only check into by the Bush administration, but led to a scandal when nine US Attorneys were dismissed for not going along with a blatent attempt of voter intimidation on false evidence.
Go to Factcheck.org and you find this:
Satterberg: [A] joint federal and state investigation has determined that this scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting.
Instead, the defendants cheated their employer, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN), to get paid for work they did not actually perform. ACORN’s lax oversight of their own voter registration drive permitted this to happen. … It was hardly a sophisticated plan: The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets looking for unregistered voters. …[It] appears that the employees of ACORN were not performing the work that they were being paid for, and to some extent, ACORN is a victim of employee theft.
Of course none of this will slow down the likes of Glen Beck and this week at ACORN’s 39th Anniversary he sent Fox News “producer” and professional Glee Club Member Griff Jenkins, a man so poor at civics he actually thinks that the US 1st Amendment means that when he asks a question people HAVE to answer him to loiter outside wearing what looked to be his dad’s tux, and standing on a piece of carpet he seemed to have picked up at a flea market, to do the usual peice of quality Fox “journalism” by ambushing people going in and asking them loaded biased questions. There was also bit of an “ahh, bless!!” moment when a left wing blogger tried his hand at fox style “reporting” but due to the fact that he hadn’t been trained in the dark arts of the Sith by the masters at Fox it didn’t go as well as he hoped.
So while all this was going on with ACORN a man named Mark Anthony Jacoby, who owned a company called Young Political Majors (YPM), plead guilty to voter fraud and in a plea deal was sentenced to three-years probation and 30-days of community service. The thing l haven’t yet mentioned is that Jacoby and YPM are actually REPUBLICANS.
Brad Freidman of the Bradblog has been keeping tabs on this tale of actual voter fraud and has the full details of it along with other cases of voter fraud including the case of Paul Bishop in Clay County, KY and the new case of alledged voter fraud by Anne Coulter who may not have an ex-boyfriend in the FBI to help her this time.
The Jacoby story was printed in the LA Times last tuesday and Friedman wrote this about it:
“Jacoby and Young Political Majors were hired by the California Republican Party to head up their voter registration efforts in the state. Jacoby had been arrested for Voter Registration Fraud last October, smack dab during the media’s orgasmic heights of last year’s phony GOP ACORN “Voter Fraud” hoax, even as Fox “News” (and the other news outlets who similarly fell for the scam) were going wall-to-wall with their unsupported insinuations about voter fraud by ACORN, Democrats and Obama.”
So the question is, WHERE WERE FOX NEWS AND GRIFF THE EXPERT TEABAGGER AND PREPPY BOYWONDER FOR THIS? They could have flown him to California to do the report and still got him back in time to air the mothballs out of his dad’s suit to stand outside and do his Kabuki dance at the ACORN thing.
An actual real case of voter fraud, something they have been screaming about for months and none of them, not Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Dobbs, Malkin or the other Helen Lovejoy’s on the right have seen fit to report on this. Not even Senator McCain, who was the first to raise alarm about this before the election has made a comment.
In reality this is par for the course for republicans. As l wrote above, there were three stories to pick from this week, all of which failed to register in the so-called “Liberal Media”.
Somehow the guilty plea in a real case of voter fraud, the story of an adulterous affair by yet another self-rightous “religious” family values conservative (but this time without the added element of gay sex, bathroom stalls or diapers) or the murderous activities of Shawna Forde a member of a group lauded by Dobbs, Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly (who said of them, “Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups.”) have somehow failed to be mentioned by ANY of them.
All you can hear are the sounds of crickets chirping.
BTW if you are wondering why l chose the voter fraud story over the other two, expecially over the hypocrisy of O’Reilly who spent a lot of the last few weeks complaining about the lack of coverage over the murder of Private Long, yet has spent very few minutes on the Forde murder story, the simple fact is that Griff Jenkins really REALLY annoys me. To quote the late, great Douglas Adams “he has a smile that makes you want to hit him in the face with a brick”.
Watching him at the Democratic Convention last year helps bring me out of the funk i’ve been in for the last few days almost as much as these do.
Jun
16
Joe Biden In 2016
Filed Under American Politics | 4 Comments
Not too much to worry about though, he is a serial primary loser. However, I’m sure if he does win the 2016 primary, as he will be 74, two years older than John McCain in 2009, the Democrats won’t object to videos like this one being run against him:
And they won’t object to the GOP setting up websites like www.thingsyoungerthanjohnmccain.com
And they won’t object to a Republican senator questioning his age like strong Obama supporter Claire McCaskill did:
Last month, Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat and a supporter of Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama, said McCain’s age and skin cancer history were fair game as a campaign issue. “We’re talking about a reality here that we have to face.”
And we won’t see any objections to a conservative equivalent of moveon.org publicising a video which says:
And if skin cancer doesn’t get him (McCain), consider the risks of aging, Craft says: “The list of diseases that just get more common with age – Alzheimer’s cardiovascular disease, stroke, arthritis – he has a lot of them. I’d like to know what tests are being done to see if he has any others.”
And we certainly won’t be panicked into thinking that a VP candidate is only a heartbeat away from the Presidency will we.
We won’t see any of those things from the left because when prejudiced against age, it’s only right to be consistent in your prejudices.
NB. That is a funny video mind.
May
26
95% Of The Time
Filed Under American Politics | 7 Comments
This seems to be a favourite Obama talking point.
When Obama criticised John McCain as supporting George W Bush 95% of the time that was seen as being a bad thing.
In the White House’s talking points for the Sotomayor nomination was this line:
In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time
So now agreeing with the Republicans 95% of the time is a good thing?
Barack Obama – Changes his mind 95% of the time!