If this is not proof that big oil owns the Texas Republican Party I do not what else is. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for President Obama's successful demand for $20 billion commitment from BP in order to help make reparations for those that have been financially devastated by the disaster. This includes fisherman who can no long fish for a living, the tourism industry and oil workers who are out of work b/c of the temporary ban on deep water drilling in the region.
Ol' Joe is obviously more worried about his own campaign coffer than he is the people in the Gulf region. Joe has received $33 million from big oil during his career in office.
God forbid should the government work on behalf of the American people.
I would like to remind the drill, baby, drill and deregulate, baby, deregulate crew and the Texas Republican whiny boy politicians that is there is a reason why we blame Hitler for World War II.
The Republican Party and its decades long held belief in an unrestrained free market ideology and its crusade to deregulate all federal oversight agencies holds the lion's share of responsibility for the present devastation of the economies of the Gulf region. The economic carnage, thanks to reckless and unfettered deep drilling oil practices, include the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Texas.
Maybe the Texas Republican imperative to drill, baby, drill was not such a good idea after all.
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson,(R),top aide to former Secretary of State, Colin Powell (R), squarely laid the BP oil disaster at the feet of Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration.
Col. Wilkerson must be the only Republican left in the GOP who will take ownership of and responsibility for the actions and/or inaction of his irresponsible and reckless party.
Rick Perry and the Texas Republican Party will find every opportunity possible in an effort to bash and vilify the big bad federal government whenever opportunity knocks. This imperative becomes especially loud and shrill during an election cycle.
But when no one is paying much attention Rick Perry and the Texas GOP will predictably grovel, beg and crawl all the way to Washington on their knees, if necessary, in a desperate effort to find bucks to cover up Perry Co.'s fiscal incompetence, its aversion to taxes, its tax scheming and history of ignoring the interests and needs of the people of Texas.
The self-serving, pocket stuffing and desperate Texas state officials and politicians, called upon their loathed Big Daddy the Fed to pay for a project that Perry's busted and broke state cannot possibly fund.
The effort to fix a dangerous and congested rail intersection near downtown Fort Worth known as Tower 55 may finally be on track.
Texas Department of Transportation officials said Thursday that they will formally endorse an application for federal funding for the Tower 55 project, a $93.7 million proposal to modernize crossings often used by children on the way to school.
What would the Republican lawmakers do were it not for Big Daddy the Fed? Who would bail them out of their self-imposed messes?
What a shocker. Not. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle today 37 of the 64 judges in the Gulf region from Texas to Florida, have financial ties to big oil and gas.
Thirty-seven of the 64 active or senior judges in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have links to oil, gas and related energy industries, including some who own stocks or bonds in BP PLC, Halliburton or Transocean - and others who regularly list receiving royalties from oil and gas production wells, according to the reports judges must file each year.
As many of us already know, big oil and the energy industry has been buying politicians and judges for decades.
Those three companies are named as defendants in virtually all of the 150-plus lawsuits seeking damages, mainly for economic losses in the fishing, seafood, tourism and related industries, that have been filed over the growing oil spill since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. Attorneys for the companies and those suing them are pushing for consolidation of the cases in one court, with BP recommending Texas and others advocating for Louisiana and other states.
BP's devastating oil gusher has certainly opened a pandora's box of a systemic and pervasive lax regulation and oversight, little, if any accountability, crony capitalism, mind boggling corruption and criminal negligence that has pervaded our culture for decades. To learn that judges are part of this toxic anti-American brew should serve as a wake up call to all.
Russell King, a former conservative, describes the stunning moral bankruptcy that pervades and drives today's conservative movement. His sustained attack is comprehensive and devastating.
As well as snarkingly hilarious.
King threw the kitchen sink, the bathtub and the toilet with its sewer pipe intact at the Republicans and conservatives. He nailed them for hypocrisy, hyperbole, hatred and the Republican penchant for historical inaccuracy.
King also charges his former party and its ideology with cowardice, irrationality and irresponsibility.
Now the advice. You're going to have to come up with a platform that isn't built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.
Your party -- the GOP -- and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irrepsonsible and irrational. Worse, it's tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some expamples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.
A recent Harris Poll shows why the Republican Party should rename itself.
In a survey by the same organization a year ago, Obama edged out Jesus as the figure most often named a hero by Americans. Now 24 percent of Republicans, and 14 percent of Americans overall, believe he might be the adversary of the Christ.
Other findings in the poll of 2,230 people conducted by Harris Interactive from March 1 through 8:
Two thirds of Republicans -- 67 percent -- and 40 percent of Americans overall, believe that Obama is a socialist.
A majority of Republicans -- 57 percent -- and 32 percent overall believe that Obama is a Muslim.
45 percent of Republicans, and 25 percent overall, believe that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president."
38 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent overall, say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did."
"The very large numbers of people who believe all these things of President Obama help to explain the size and strength of the Tea Party Movement," Harris Interactive says in a release.
Former Rudy Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon, whose polemic Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America inspired the poll, writes at the Daily Beast that the results "clearly [show] that education is a barrier to extremism:"
The Associated Press, Houston's Channel 2 News and The Houston Chronicle reminded readers and viewers that the very same Republicans who oppose current health care reform had, in 2003, supported an expansion of Medicare. Unlike the Democrats today with HCR, Republicans in 2003 had no plan to pay for the Medicare expansion just like they had no plan to pay for the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy. All were charged to our, our childrens', our grandchildrens' and our great grandchildrens' credit cards.
This is certainly a new twist with the mainstream media given its tactic sympathy and support of the GOP over the years. As we know, since at least 9/11, the media has given pass after pass to George W. Bush and his irresponsible and devastating crusade in Iraq, his Administration's culture of corruption in Washington and the failure of the Department of Justice to meet some of its judicial responsibilities. The media failed to disclose that non-partisan federal agencies had been invaded by partisan hacks and had been turned into political arms for the RNC.
It is nice to see that the media has, hopefully, returned to the task of real reporting.
Democrats are troubled by the inconsistency of Republican lawmakers who approved a major Medicare expansion six years ago that has added tens of billions of dollars to federal deficits, but oppose current health overhaul plans.
All current GOP senators, including the 24 who voted for the 2003 Medicare expansion, oppose the health care bill that's backed by President Barack Obama and most congressional Democrats.
The Democrats claim that their plan moving through Congress now will pay for itself with higher taxes and spending cuts and they cite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for support.
By contrast, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House in 2003, they overcame Democratic opposition to add a deficit-financed prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The program will cost a half-trillion dollars over 10 years, or more by some estimates.
With no new taxes or spending offsets accompanying the Medicare drug program, the cost has been added to the federal debt.
That's right you so-called fiscal conservatives. Just shove more debt on the backs of middle class taxpayers.
The irresponsible Republicans rationalize their behavior in 2003 as DOH! We didn't know we would bust the nation's piggy bank so quickly. And, Vice President Dick Cheney assured us deficits don't matter because Ronald Reagan had said it was so.
Some Republicans say they don't believe the CBO's projections that the health care overhaul will pay for itself. As for their newfound worries about big government health expansions, they essentially say: That was then, this is now.
Six years ago, "it was standard practice not to pay for things," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "We were concerned about it, because it certainly added to the deficit, no question." His 2003 vote has been vindicated, Hatch said, because the prescription drug benefit "has done a lot of good."
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said those who see hypocrisy "can legitimately raise that issue." But he defended his positions in 2003 and now, saying the economy is in worse shape and Americans are more anxious.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said simply: "Dredging up history is not the way to move forward." She noted that she fought unsuccessfully to offset some of President George W. Bush's deep tax cuts at the time.
Last Sunday, on Meet the Press, Kay Bailey Hutchison spewed one whopper after another about the recently passed Senate health care reform bill. KBH spouted the same fear mongering myths as had John Cornyn in his recent newsletter to his so-called constituents. Kay and John's grotesquely misleading talking points are also a clone of what John Culberson (TX7-TeabaggerR) stated in his pricey and slick brochure.
This week alone I have been bombarded by snail mail and electronic mail from my Texas lawmakers mentioned above. Sadly and outrageously, all of the letters and brochures are filled with nothing but fear mongering tactics and blatant lies.
From Hutchison:
After hearing from constituents over the last several months, some members of Congress have now learned that using the term "government plan" elicits a strong negative from voters (because you have been scaring voters about government for years.) so they have now latched onto a new way to describe the same thing: a co-op. Texans should not be confused by this new packaging of the same idea. The co-op is a back door to a government takeover of our health care. (Really? According to whom? You?) The co-op would be started with federal funds, and it remains unclear whether or not taxpayer dollars would be used if the co-ops begin to fail. The Administration has tried to bail out the banking, housing and auto-industry. Would the co-ops be next?
Wow. Let's talk about an exercise in deceitful fear mongering. This is the first time I have heard about a co-op that would replace the public option and would ultimately become single payer health care. This would be a true dream come true for the American people.
But it ain't going to happen.
Because if a single payer, universal health care reform bill had been introduced there is no way in hell that Republican enabling Lieberman and the three sell-out Democrats known as Blue Dogs would have ever in their dreams voted for the Senate HCR Bill. Like Cornyn and Hutchison, Lieberman and the Blue Dogs serve as major pimps and go to bitches for the insurance industry.
Kay Bailey Hutchison should also remind herself that banking, housing and the auto-industry collapsed under her and her Party's watch. Like most Republicans Kay Bailey has always been in favor of dismantling every living regulatory legislation and she has never supported government oversight, transparency nor checks and balances of any sort.
Based on the mail I have read from Senators Hutchison, Cornyn and my U.S. House Rep. John Culberson, it is obvious that the Republicans are repeating the same lies over and over. The cover of Culberson's brochure reads:
HEALTH CARE TAKEOVER
.
The brochure shows a stethoscope lying on a flag draped on top of a building called:
INSURANCE
A couple of Culberson's bullet pointed lies:
2.5% tax on all individuals who do not purchase government run health care.
8% tax on businesses who cannot afford to purchase government run health care.
Notice how the Republicans frequently use the term government run. They do this to attach a negative and fearful meaning of government. The intended message? The evil government will take over one's life and control one's destiny. The Republican Party has spent years demonizing government run anything b/c they'd rather have the sharks, i.e. their cash cow donors, on Wall St.,in corporate America and the insurance industry to remain permanently in the driver seats.
Let's take a peek at Republican and other pimped out lawmakers willingness to enable corporate greed and corruption.
First up, Culberson's lies. His are only the tip of the iceberg.
Hey dude, I am one of your constituents and quite frankly you are full of stupid nonsense. It is stunning to me that you would include me and other progressives in your district among your special interest groups and deluded teabaggers. I'd venture to suggest that you will have an election challenge in the very near future.
According to Culberson's brochure.
The uninsured should 1. don't get sick or 2. if you do, die quickly.
The Democratic leadership bill, H.R. 3962 costs over $1.2 trillion; contains $729.5 billion in new taxes, adds 111 new offices to the government (jobs anyone?); and creates, expands and extends 43 entitlement programs. (There they go again with their entitlement obsession. Apparently the only ones who are entitled to be entitled are Republicans.) Now here is a really huge whopper: The bill also prohibits the sale of private insurance after 2013; cuts more than $150 billion from Medicare; and exempts members of Congress from the public options but no one else.
If Culberson had really read the bill instead of dancing with teabaggers he would have known that his claim about prohibiting private insurance is a bald faced lie. It is outrageous for Culberson to think he can willfully insult the intelligence of so many of his constituents with such stupid nonsense.
What Republicans are not telling us is the fact that HCR will cut the deficit by $127 billion, coverage will be extended to 94% Americans, 31 million more than have coverage today.
What the heck is wrong with that?
Remember those evil doing non-existent WMDs in Iraq? And Iraq's non-existent ties to Al-Qaeda?
The GOP is promoting health care reform as if it is a WMD. It is one that exists only in their heads.
Senator John Cornyn, by the way, ran an ad during a commercial break, extolling the virtues of the status quo.
Here we go again. Yet another Republican sells his/her soul to the devil for the money. It's all about the money. It is always about the money. Cornyn receives $1.6 million from his big ol' sugar daddies in insurance.
My U.S. House Rep (Houston) never fails to embarrass the living daylights out of many of his constituents. That would be those of us who are not invited to Culberson's orchestrated town hall meetings.
GOP Playbook, Chapter I: When you don't like the question posed by a journalist or if you simply can't handle it, change the subject.
Chapter 2: If the journalist won't let you change the subject, ties you into a pretzel and if you fall into his/her trap, attack the interviewer's network.
What happens when none of the above works?
Play dumb.
Or
Throw a tantrum. Look like a deer caught in the headlights because you really, really believe your own fabricated spin.
Caught Red Handed. Sen. Grassley Voted for "Death Panels" in 2003
Oh those lying liars and the lies they tell.
According to Amy Sullivan at Time many of the very same death panel liars voted in favor of end-of-life counseling in 2003.
You would think that if Republicans wanted to totally mischaracterize a health care provision and demagogue it like nobody's business, they would at least pick something that the vast majority of them hadn't already voted for just a few years earlier. Because that's not just shameless, it's stupid.
Yes, that's right. Remember the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, the one that passed with the votes of 204 GOP House members and 42 GOP Senators? Anyone want to guess what it provided funding for? Did you say counseling for end-of-life issues and care? Ding ding ding!!
(Bottoms Up, y'all. Watch your livers. - promoted by boadicea)
Well, it is easy to tell it's September.
BBQ smoke hangs thickly in the air, the rain is getting cooler than it usually is in the summertime, and the Mariners are securely in last place.
And it is also time to return to school. For the new voter about to enter (or return to) College, all the crazy living can make you forget about important things, like...oh, I don't know...maybe an election or two.
To make sure this does not happen I'm going to put College and Politics together to create this year's first...wait for it...synchronized Sarah Palin drinking game.
So start pairing up your shotglasses, find the Scotch tape, and when you get back I'll tell you how it works.
By W. Gardner Selby | Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 01:48 PM
Texas Gov. Rick Perry's memoir of his childhood as a Boy Scout will be out in February, he says, but it won't be limited to fuzzy vignettes explaining his designation as an Eagle Scout.
Perry, slated to field the 2007 Distinguished Citizen Award from the Boy Scouts of America Capitol Area Council in Austin Tuesday night, suggests in remarks written for the occasion that values of faith espoused by the Boy Scouts are increasingly under fire.
He casts his book on scouting as planting his flag in a battle to defend values.
Now, "more than ever," his prepared remarks state, "scouts and their supporters need all the strength we can get."
Saying critics have attempted to expunge the Pledge of Allegiance, U.S. currency, government buildings and "even the scouting oath from any mention of God," Perry describes the Boy Scouts as being a listening post on the perimeter of the front lines in a simmering war on values.
He says of his book: "It is my attempt to clearly state the importance of scouting values and more clearly draw the battle lines in this vital conflict.
"With it, I hope to let the world know that this conflict isn't just an intellectual exercise; it is a battle for the very future of our country."
Well, fellow Koasians, I think we should help Goodhair with his book, as I suspect there are some "values" he may have overlooked. You know the values he ,apparently ,really lives by.
Yesterday I showed you the evidence that The Texas Miracle, reforming public education using High Stakes Testing was a crock of crap, swimming in sea of shoddy practices whose intention I claimed was to destroy public education. Today, we survey the real and immediate crisis of the public schools
