Of course there is not a civil war brewing in the Republican Party. Someone just made it up. But a leading conservative has recently called the non-civil non-war an impending bloodbath.
After the havoc the Republican Party and its newly formed teabagger faction have wreaked on this country from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush and culminating with the horror of George W. Bush and his neocon policies, a bloodbath sounds just fine by me. Indeed, one is long overdue.
According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle, the teabaggers in Texas are fed up and want to throw all of the bums out. In Texas, the bums happen to be Republicans.
Even Rick Perry is a target of this group because he apparently is not conservative enough.
While it's too early to determine if the Tea Party movement will prove to be a durable political force, its candidates could prove a costly and unwanted distraction for establishment Republicans who would rather be aiming their fire at Democrats. Case in point: the GOP race for governor, where Tea Party ally Debra Medina of Wharton has announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom she dismisses derisively as "get-along-style politicians."
It seems that certain members of the Republican Party, specifically former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, created mechanisms by which very wealthy Americans could cheat Uncle Sam by hiding their incomes in off shore tax havens. Unfortunately for Joe and Jane the Taxpayers (that would be you, clueless Republican tea baggers, and me), we are the go to folks who have to pony up the mind numbing shortfall.
Apparently there is no end in sight to the Bush Administration and its Republican Party's pillage and looting of every existing piggy bank whether it is that of the federal government, Republican dominated states and local governments, the private sector including formerly revered and respected banks and investment firms, corporations and small businesses. The insatiable and pervasive tentacles of reckless irresponsibility, greed and corruption spread like a lethal and uncontrollable cancer.
Diarist Muzikal203 over at Daily Kos uploaded a video clip of Keith Olbermann's rant on tax evaders last night. Olbermann has every right to howl about this. We all should be doing the same.
This is a work in progress, folks. The updates follow at the bottom.
Next time a politician extols the virtues of trickle down economics put your hands over your ears and yell NO, NO, NO. Whether they know it or not, any politician who pitches the spin that unfettered fat cat wealth will trickle down to the masses is lying. Nothing is trickling anywhere. The fat cats are not spending their gazillions. They are hiding and hoarding their money for themselves.
It seems that the biggest fat cats of them all in this country and others, those who despise paying their taxes above everything else, have found safe havens in which they have hidden their treasures from the feds. A once renowned Swiss bank helped them do it. The whistle blower who outed the scheme at a U.S. Senate hearing last July, had feared for his life. He now lives in a
witness protection program. The article reveals how the Senate hearing had all of the trappings of a Mafia movie.
Kieber, declared a fugitive by Liechtenstein, is living in an undisclosed location, reportedly as part of a witness protection program, after providing information to government officials in England, Germany, the United States and other countries on their citizens who hid billions in wealth through the bank. The German government has admitted to paying him millions for the data.
In his videotaped testimony, Kieber described stumbling across the bank's secrecy schemes while working on a document conversion project several years ago.
"Going through thousands of documents. . . I got the very clear picture" of the "tricks" employed by the bank to help clients dodge tax collectors, creditors, even "international law enforcement agencies," he said.
