One thing Rick Perry is consistent about it, he is a national disgrace. Rick Perry toped Rick Sanchez's list you don't want to be on. Perry continues to misconstrue his stance on federal money and the budget and that got Rick Sanchez rightfully riled up.
As Wayne Slater succinctly wrote, "CNN's Rick Sanchez calls out Rick Perry for denouncing all things Washington while taking $22 billion in stimulus money to balance the state budget. Perry finds himself on the List You Don't Want To Be On."
Rick Perry is a national disgrace and is basically lying to his base to earn political points. No Texas Governor has taken more money from the federal government ever. Rick Perry brags about not taking $500 million to help people in Texas while taking $22 billion to cover up his gross mismanagement of the Texas budget. With an $18 billion shortfall expected for the next session, how will Governor Perry fulfill the requirement of balancing the budget when he won't take federal money? Since Perry has never offered a set of solutions to this, I would expect a Norquist style drowning of all social programs.
If not, he is going to have to take money from the federal government again. Or he is going to have let the Texas default on it's obligations. In either case, Perry has put Texas on the wrong path and continues to mischaracterize his position on federal money. He supports it when it saves him but opposes it when it's an election year.
I wonder if Perry's supporters would be okay demanding the Governor give back the $22 billion Perry used to balance the budget in previous bienniums. Somehow I doubt it.
When lawmakers oppose transformational health care reform or lie about it by calling it a "government run program" that will create death panels and impose tax-payer funded abortions, they show cruel contempt for many of their constituents. These lawmakers are especially heartless toward those who are suffering from lack of decent health care. And those who will go bankrupt in attempt to get well. Politicians who rail against health care reform are most likely shilling for the insurance companies.
Anti-reform politicians prove that they approve of the insurance company death panels that do indeed exist, as we can see below.
To learn who is contributing to your U.S. elected officials, go to OpenSecrets.org.
During her career, Senator Kay Bailey "government take-over" Hutchison received $937,340 from the health professional industry. She has received $257,849 from health care professionls this year alone. My U.S. House Rep. (TX-7 Houston) John Culberson received $10,600 this year from Pharma and Health Professional groups.
A for-profit health care system run by monopolies with no competition is wrong. It is immoral, un-American and undemocratic. For some, it is also a death sentence.
Speaking of Honorary Texans (as they are right now on the Big Orange)...our most recent honoree, Mr. Sean Hannity, is proof positive that good solid hypocrisy can only improve Glenn Beck's chances for getting this award:
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, our troops are fainting and vomiting because they cannot get enough water.
Dick and Rush, the masters of hate, deception and lies don't care about the troops. They have no clue about such suffering because both begged to be bailed out of military service during a mandatory draft.
Former aide to Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson knows all about draft evading Cheney. Wilkerson tells Cheney to shut up and go away.
10:19: Senator Leahy: this is one of most important hearings Judiciary Committee this year. OLC wrote predetermined and premeditated legal opinions that authorized torture. That OLC so misused its authority is one of the fundamental breakdowns in the rule of law. Leahy describes the latest memos' horrors. Leahy cites American exceptionalism and hypocrisy: we would never permit these techniques against Americans. Cites idea that president is above the law. In this country no one is above the law. Leahy still wants a "bipartisan commission." Two weeks ago, Leahy says, he invited Judge Jay Bybee to come testify. Leahy "wishes" he would. (Doesn't this committee have the power of subpoena and the power of inherent contempt?)
(Really solid post w/ lots of videos. - promoted by Phillip Martin)
First, from the Texas wing of The Party of Torture and Tax Cuts.
Senator John Cornyn, prominent member of the Party of Torture and willing player in the Bush Administration's
Journey to Depravity must think Democrats are quaking in their boots because, according to The Huffington Post he attempted to bully and blackmail them on the torture issue.
Cornyn apparently prefers to sweep the recent revelations of torture under the rug. That or pin the blame on Democrats who served on the Foreign Intelligence Committee at the time, and/or stick it to low level military and CIA officers at the bottom of the torture chain of command.
If Democrats insist on probing the Bush administration's program of detainee torture, they'd better be careful, a senior Senate Republican said Tuesday, because they might find blood on their own hands as well.
"To sit quietly and to let this happen and then to come back later and say people ought to be prosecuted criminally, not just here in the United States but perhaps internationally, to me is inconsistent, to say the least," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Lately we have been hearing a lot of squawking and screeching emanating from the conservative right wing about a revolution.
This is rather perplexing given that we recently had an election in which the elected President won rather substantially without the need for voter caging, voter suppression, election fraud, recounts, recount shut downs, lawsuits and the Supreme Court. Nor was it necessary to bring in the likes of a Swift Boat attack machine and a corrupted Secretary of State (R-OH) to deliver a win in a razor thin, close election.
And despite all of the problems we face in these dire and stressful times the President's approval ratings remain in the 60's. Today it is at 67%. Today an ABC/Washington Post poll also reveals 65% trust President Obama to handle relations with Muslim nations.
So, what is the problem? Why is a revolution necessary now?
Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is also one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
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.
For the last few weeks we have been listening to wall-to-wall coverage 24/7 about the flamboyant governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, and pay-to-play politics. As we all know by now the Illinois governor is charged with criminal conspiracy for attempting to sell President Elect Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat. Rod Blagojevich is clearly another crooked and arrogant politician who thinks he is above the law. But at least this one found himself impeached by the Illinois House.
It is nice to know some states have lawmakers who have an ethical spine where such blatant corruption and beyond the pale pay-to-play politics are concerned. Too bad Texas is sorely lacking in this area. But one has to remember the Party that is running the state at this time, although not all Democratic politicians would receive A's in ethics and integrity departments either.
When the Blagojevich scandal broke, several of the cable TV talking heads and pundits appeared especially outraged by pay-to-play politics and so I promptly sent off an email to MSNBC and CNN and suggested that if they are so livid about pay-to-play, they ought to send their research staff down to Texas to see how it works in a state where purchasing elections and pay-to-play is business du jour. Apparently other folks from around the U.S. contacted the media with the same request. Chris Matthews of Hardball responded with a chart that listed the most offending states. Texas is among them.
Today is my son's birthday. He is working for the Obama campaign as a field organizer in southwestern Va. This diary is written in honor of his birthday and for his hard work on the campaign trail.
What is it about Republicans and their knack for choosing unqualified and bungling candidates on the top or bottom of their tickets?
It appears that 2008 is no different from 2004 in terms of choices where the worst of the worse of Republican candidates are concerned. History will prove, in no uncertain terms, that W. is the worst president in recent times. His ratings are plummeting downward, especially since the financial melt down on Wall St. Whether Republicans care to admit it or not the GOP delivered three extraordinary calamities since 2000: 9/11, Iraq and the Wall Street crash of September 29, 2008.
Is John McCain really a different kind of Republican? Let's hear what CNN's Jack Cafferty has to say about McCain and the current financial disaster on Wall St.
