Media Outlet Refuses To Run Republican TV Ad Filled With Misrepresentations Of Clean Energy Bill
Media Outlet Refuses To Run Republican TV Ad Filled With Misrepresentations Of Clean Energy Bill
This afternoon, Roanoke television station WDBJ-TV, announced they will be refusing to air a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad attacking freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), citing factual inaccuracies. The NRCC had been planning to run television ads against Democratic members of Congress, like Perriello, who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation that passed last week. After receiving information about the factual inaccuracies in the ad, the station pulled it from rotation.
For any objective observer, the the ad is pulled out of thin air. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.” According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day. An EPA estimate of the bill found similar results, projecting the cost to be about $80 to $111 per a year.
Still refusing to accept reality, the Republican leadership is instructing its members to lie about the clean energy economy bill:
– Last week, Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) posted a message erroneously claiming that clean energy legislation will amount to “a national energy tax of up to $3,100 on all Americans.”
– Republican leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) posted on his website that the clean energy bill will cost “$3,100 a year,” then modified that number to “$3,000 per household per year.”
– Republican conference chair Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), not to be outdone, claimed the clean energy bill would be “over $4,000 a year.”
All the numbers cited by Republicans are at least seventeen times the highest possible projection by the CBO and EPA.
Clearly, Republicans opposed to the clean energy bill seem willing to justify their opposition using outright falsehoods. But fortunately, at least some stations are not willing to propagate it.
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Why are Palin, Perry and Jindal refusing to talk to Biden about the stimulus?
In a new article, Time’s Michael Scherer describes how Vice President Biden has been aggressively reaching out to mayors on the their use of stimulus money. “My rear end is on the line just like yours,” said Biden on a recent conference call with five mayors and county executives. “I’m the guy in charge of this deal. So if this doesn’t work, it’s me.” In a follow-up blog post, Scherer reveals that Biden has talked to “dozens of mayors and 47 of the 50 state governors about the Recovery Act”:
One interesting fact that didn’t make it into the story. Since March, Biden has talked, usually in conference calls, to dozens of mayors and 47 of the 50 state governors about the Recovery Act. The three governors who have not yet been on the line, though they have been invited: Alaska’s Sarah Palin, Texas’ Rick Perry and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal. You can draw your own conclusions.
DeMint Inadvertently Concedes That Public Health Insurance Option Won’t Take Over The Market
DeMint Inadvertently Concedes That Public Health Insurance Option Won’t Take Over The Market
A leading right-wing argument against offering a public health insurance option as part of any health reform initiative is that such a plan would drive private health insurance companies out of the market. The health insurance lobby group AHIP called a public option “potentially lethal” to their industry. Similarly, Republican Conference Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said in May that adding a public plan would be akin to asking mice to compete against an elephant. “There wouldn’t be any mice left after a while,” he insisted.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) recently used this talking point himself in arguing against a public option for the National Review. Yesterday, however, DeMint appeared to inadvertently offer an example that demonstrates that the notion that the public plan would drive out competition is false. On Bill Bennett’s radio show, DeMint called blocking health care reform the top Republican priority, arguing that of all the items on President Obama’s legislative agenda, it would be the hardest to reverse. To support his point, he offered “government schools” — public education — as an example. “You can never, with another piece of legislation, change it,” DeMint said:
DEMINT: I think the biggest issue is health care. I think if they succeed in a government take over of health care the situation may be irreversible. It will be like government schools. I mean you can never just, with another piece of legislation, change it.
Listen here:
DeMint’s example of education is instructive, not because it is hard to repeal, but because it’s a prime example of successful public-private competition. Indeed, while state and local governments own and run the public education system — to a much greater extent than either Obama or members of Congress are suggesting with a public health insurance option — private schools are competing against the government and thriving in this country. Further, such competition actually improves outcomes. As the conservative Hoover Institution found, competition between public and private schools “improves achievement for both public and private school students and decreases the amount spent per pupil.”
As Joseph Hacker explains, such public-private competition works well not just in education, but in many other sectors of the U.S. economy:
In many areas of American commerce, private and government programs comfortably co-exist. FHA insured loans and non-FHA loans, Social Security and private pensions, public and private universities–all have long thrived side by side. Each side of the divide has strengths and weaknesses, but in every case the public sector is providing something the private sector cannot: A backup that’s there if and when you need it; a benchmark for private providers; and a backstop to make sure costs don’t spin out of control.
Igor Volsky recently explained the actual impact of having a competing public plan, writing, “In an environment where private plans are forced to compete with a new efficient public program, inefficient, over-bloated insurers will go out of business, but private plans with good networks of providers or better services will continue attracting new enrollees.” Jonathan Cohn has more on the effects of public-private competition.
Kurtz: Can African-American women objectively cover Michelle Obama?
In his column today, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz devotes his column today to the question of: “Does Race Play a Role in Coverage?” He readily admits that “no one raises questions when an Irish American male reporter covers a pol named Murphy,” but that doesn’t stop him from writing a 1,600-word article raising questions about black women:
Rachel Swarns of the New York Times and The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan were among those herded behind the rope Monday. They and the other main beat reporters — Newsweek’s Allison Samuels, Darlene Superville of the Associated Press and Politico’s Nia-Malika Henderson — have something in common: They are all African American women. [...]
Whether racial and gender identification produces a gauzier, more favorable portrayal of Obama is perhaps too early to judge.
As Adam Serwer observed, “You would never ever see a media critic like Kurtz questioning the ability of white men to cover other white men objectively, or for that matter the ability of white men to cover women or people of color, despite the fact that if newsroom coverage were to be affected, it would be by the prevailing cultural biases of the better represented population in the newsroom.”
Michael Scheuer: Obama Doesn’t Care ‘About Protecting This Country’
Earlier this week, former CIA operative and torture apologist Michael Scheuer appeared on Fox News, where he told Glenn Beck (who nodded in agreement), “The only chance we have” to repair our national security apparatus “is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.” Yesterday, on Alan Colmes’ radio show, Scheuer made similar comments about the national security stance of the U.S., saying that he doesn’t believe that President Obama wants to protect the country “if it costs him votes”:
COLMES: You don’t think the President of the United States, Barack Obama, cares about protecting this country.
SCHEUER: No, I don’t. Because I don’t think he realizes what the world is like outside the United States. [...]
COLMES: You don’t think he wants to protect the country?
SCHEUER: I don’t think he can, sir. [...]
COLMES: He doesn’t want to protect the country?
SCHEUER: Not if it costs votes.
Listen here:
A number of progressive bloggers castigated Scheuer for his remarks on Beck’s show. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, however, expressed disappointment in Scheuer’s comments and hoped that he was “being taken out of context,” citing his respect for Scheuer’s previous national security work. Unfortunately, it appears that Scheuer meant what he said.
Rove: Obama ‘Has Carried Pre-Packaged, Organized, Controlled, Scripted Events To A New Height’
Rove: Obama ‘Has Carried Pre-Packaged, Organized, Controlled, Scripted Events To A New Height’
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove went on Fox News this morning and attacked President Obama’s health care town hall meeting yesterday as “pre-packaged, organized, controlled, [and] scripted,” adding that the Bush administration would never have done something so audacious:
ROVE: This White House has carried pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted events to a new height, and they’re getting away with things that in any previous White House, the media would have eviscerated the press secretary and the White House for it.
Watch it:
ThinkProgress contacted a White House spokesperson who said that at yesterday’s health care town hall event in Virginia, half of the tickets were given out by the school (to “students, faculty, staff, as well as members of the health community from the area”) and the other half by the White House (”grassroots activists and people involved in the issue in the area”). The spokesperson then explained how questions were chosen:
The President posted a video on YouTube several days ago, saying respond to this video with questions for me on health care, and we got hundreds, and all of those are online. So in terms of the videos that were selected, anyone can look at the range and see which ones we did and didn’t select. That’s fully transparent. They’re all up on YouTube; they were all up yesterday on our website.
Because YouTube doesn’t actually have a voting function, our new media staff took videos that were rated highly by other users and selected, from among those, questions that represented the range of things being asked. So a lot of people in the progressive community still want a single-payer system, so the first question was from a single-payer advocate. We took a question from a Republican member of Congress, Mike Burgess, about medical malpractice reform.
The spokesperson then noted that there were also questions taken from people who were following along on Twitter and Facebook. When asked whether these questioners or audience members were pre-screened for their political ideology or whether they agreed with the President, the spokesperson replied, “Absolutely not.”
Of course, pre-screening for political ideology is exactly what the Bush administration did.
In March 2005, people seeking tickets to a Social Security event were quizzed about their support of President Bush and his Social Security plan ahead of time. In April 2005, Bush’s security detail threw out three people from an event in Colorado because they had a bumper sticker reading “No More Blood For Oil.” White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that if there’s any evidence people might “disrupt the president,” they “have the right to exclude those people from those events.”
Bush even screened the assembled group of soldiers he would meet in Iraq during a 2003 Thanksgiving visit: Soldiers had to fill out a questionnaire asking whether they supported Bush.
Transcript: More »
Bolton: ‘Targeted force’ is the ‘only option’ for Iran.
Bolton: ‘Targeted force’ is the ‘only option’ for Iran.
In his third op-ed on Iran in a major newspaper in the last month, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton wrote in the Washington Post today that the time is right for Israel to launch an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:
Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.
Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. [...]
Those who oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons are left in the near term with only the option of targeted military force against its weapons facilities. Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people.
Despite his suggestion that now is time for an attack, in reality, it’s always a great time to attack Iran if you’re John Bolton, considering he never passes up an opportunity to use turmoil in the Middle East to suggest war with Iran.
Bye-Bye Ali Frick.
Bye-Bye Ali Frick.
ThinkProgress recently bid farewell to our dear friend and colleague, Ali Frick. For nearly two years, Ali passionately devoted her energy to delivering consistently interesting, insightful, and high-quality posts for ThinkProgress. Around the office, she was always brimming with exuberance, driven in equal parts by her strong desire for progressive reform and her anger at right-wing distortions and lies. A look at some of her greatest hits:
Right-Wing Apoplectic Over Pixar’s WALL-E: ‘Malthusian Fear Mongering,’ ‘Fascistic Elements’ [Link]
REPORT: Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed [Link]
McCain Takes Bold Stance On Torture: ‘We Cannot Ever Torture Any American’ [Link]
Freshman Rep. Cao: ‘I Hope That The GOP Will Not Tolerate’ Extreme Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric [Link]
‘El Rushbo’ Endorses Himself For President: I Have ‘The Qualifications’ As Clinton’s ‘Real Co-President’ [Link]
Chris Matthews Stumps Right-Wing Radio Host: ‘Tell Me What Chamberlain Did?’ ‘I Don’t Know’ [Link]
O’Reilly creates a ninth day of Hanukkah. [Link]
G. Gordon Liddy On Sotomayor: ‘Let’s Hope That The Key Conferences Aren’t When She’s Menstruating’ [Link]
Rep. Culberson Offers Incoherent And Illogical Stance On Gay Marriage [Link]
Ali will be attending Yale Law School in the fall. We wish her the best of luck in the next chapter of her life. She’ll always be (the most spirited) part of our team.
Gay sailor found dead on military base in a suspected homicide.
Yesterday, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the body of openly gay Seaman August Provost was discovered in a guard shack at Camp Pendelton. A “person of interest” in connection to the suspected homicide is now being held in the Navy brig at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. According to Provost’s sister, he had recently complained to his family that “someone was harassing and bothering him.” According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Provost likely didn’t report the harassment because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:
The Navy would not comment on whether Provost’s orientation had anything to do with the death.
“While ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ is in place, anybody in the military who is a homosexual has no place to go to get assistance or counseling,” said Ben Gomez of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group for gays in the military.
(HT: Raw Story)
Washington Post reportedly selling health care lobbyists and CEOs access to its journalists, Obama officials.
Washington Post reportedly selling health care lobbyists and CEOs access to its journalists, Obama officials.
The Politico reports that the Washington Post, for a price of $25,000 to $250,000, is “offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, non-confrontational access to ‘those powerful few’ — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.” While the Politico notes that on-the-record events and conferences are becoming a trend in the newspaper industry, this type of closed, pay-for-access event raises serious ethical concerns. The flier for the event, titled “Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans? The reform and funding debate,” reads:
Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth [...] Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama Administration and Congressional leaders […] Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. [...] Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 […] Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post [...] An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. [...] July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m.
In recent weeks, the Washington Post has editorialized against a public option as a part of health care reform. Defending the status quo of a private insurer-dominated system, the Post wrote, “A public plan is not necessary to maintain a competitive market in health insurance.”
Saddam Hussein Considered ‘Security Agreement’ With U.S. To Counter Threat From ‘Fanatics’ In Iran
Saddam Hussein Considered ‘Security Agreement’ With U.S. To Counter Threat From ‘Fanatics’ In Iran
Yesterday, the National Security Archive released declassified FBI reports detailing both the bureau’s interrogations and “casual conversations” with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to the documents, Hussein told FBI agent George Piro (one of only a few agents who spoke Arabic) that he let the world believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he feared appearing weak to what he considered his country’s real threat, Iran:
Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. … Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. [...]
“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”
Saddam “felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from ‘fanatic’ leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a ‘security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.’” If that could not happen, only then, he said, would Iraq reconstitute its WMD programs.
Piro revealed to CBS’s 60 Minutes last year that Saddam “didn’t want to associate” with Osama bin Laden and viewed him “as a threat to him and his regime.” The new documents expound on Saddam’s distrust of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, whom he called “a zealot”:
Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot…that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”
When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and numerous members of the Bush administration repeatedly cited the (now debunked) threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD program and Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to Al-Qaeda as the main justifications for launching the invasion of Iraq more than six years ago. The U.S. could end up spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and today, 130,000 U.S. troops remain there, 4,321 have died (4,639 total from coalition forces), and more than 30,000 have been wounded. Over 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion while millions have been displaced.
ThinkFast: July 2, 2009
ThinkFast: July 2, 2009
The U.S. economy lost a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, according to a new Labor Department report out this morning. Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent, the highest rate in 26 years.
“Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years,” according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, “involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.” This travel spending “is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001.”
In the first major push in the U.S. military’s new counteroffensive strategy, “[t]housands of Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops moved into Taliban-infested villages with armor and helicopters early today” in Helmand province. The goal “is to clear insurgents there before the nation’s Aug. 20 presidential election.”
The U.S. military is reporting that “insurgents have captured an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan.” The soldier, missing since Tuesday, “wasn’t taking part in the major military operation launched in the southern Taliban stronghold of the Helmand River Valley.” Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the military is using “all our resources to find him and provide for his safe return.”
Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) urged the 60 members of the Democratic Caucus to support cloture on legislation that would reform the nation’s health care system. “I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster,” he said.
New Budget Estimate Of Public Plan Proves It Lowers Cost And Covers More Americans
New Budget Estimate Of Public Plan Proves It Lowers Cost And Covers More Americans
A couple of weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary score of the health care legislation under consideration in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The bill was estimated to cost $1 trillion over 10 years, while reducing the number of uninsured by “only” one-third. As many informed bloggers noted at the time, the cost estimate was incomplete because the legislation that the CBO reviewed did not contain language about a public health insurance plan or an employer mandate.
Nevertheless, Republicans seized on the opportunity to engage in merciless political attacks, citing the incomplete CBO score as proof that health care reform is not worth doing:
John McCain: “[The CBO estimate] should be a wake up call for all of us to scrap the current bill and start over in a true bipartisan fashion.”
John Boehner: “[T]he public option would cost over $1 trillion, and would cause 23 million Americans to lose their private health care coverage.”
Lindsey Graham: “The CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan.”
The HELP Committee has since added language for a public plan option to its legislation, as well as an employer mandate provision. The AP reports the new results:
The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. [...]
The [employer mandate] provision is also estimated to greatly reduce the number of workers whose employers would drop coverage, thus addressing a major concern noted by CBO when it reviewed the earlier proposals.
In other words, the addition of the public plan dramatically reduced the overall cost of the bill and ensured coverage of almost all Americans. So what excuses will McCain, Boehner, Graham, and other Republicans offer now? Their attacks were not only found to be baseless, but their concerns about the costs and coverage have also been addressed.
Rove twitters: Obama officials are ‘ingrates.’
Rove twitters: Obama officials are ‘ingrates.’
Earlier today, former Bush White House adviser Karl Rove expressed his irrational irritation with the Obama White House on his Twitter page, writing the “Ingrates speak,” before linking to a post by Commentary Magazine’s Jennifer Rubin:
The post Rove linked to asks whether White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gives “credit to President Bush for the foresight and determination to see the surge through and deliver the results we saw this week.” The answer was “no.” Rubin then went on to lament the White House’s inability to “celebrate America’s accomplishments.”
Gingrich On Private Health Insurance Companies: ‘They Have It Done Well’
Gingrich On Private Health Insurance Companies: ‘They Have It Done Well’
Newt Gingrich, one of the de facto leaders of the Republican Party, gave an interview to ABC Medical editor Dr. Timothy Johnson last week to discuss health care reform. Gingrich predictably went into scare-mongering mode, making arguments against measures that aren’t even part of the debate. He said the U.S. should not adopt a “single national health system” such as in Canada or the UK. “If I have to choose between my doctor and a government bureaucrat, I have zero doubt which one I want,” he said. Of course, no such choice is being offered.
But Gingrich also touted the success of private health insurers. When Johnson noted that it is insurance companies that are coming between patients and needed care, Gingrich claimed, “If you don’t like your current insurance company, you can change insurance companies.” He later argued that private insurers have done “well”:
GINGRICH: They have it done well. And the fact is, overall, 71 percent of Americans are relatively satisfied with the health insurance.
JOHNSON: But we have 46 million uninsured.
GINGRICH: Right. And we have — you know, that means you also have 260 million insured.
Perhaps Gingrich hasn’t been paying attention to how private insurance companies have been doing it. They continually deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions and drop coverage for many who have insurance (and have paid monthly premiums) when they become ill. In fact, just this month, the CEOs of the nation’s top three health insurers told a House committee that they would continue the practice of canceling medical coverage for sick policy holders, a controversial measure called “rescission.”
Moreover, many of those who have health insurance really aren’t “insured” from the financial burdens of rising health care costs. A national study released this year found that while medical debt contributed to 62 percent of the bankruptcies in 2007, 78 percent of those bankruptcy filers had health insurance but “still were overwhelmed by their medical debt.”
Perhaps because he hasn’t had to shop around for health insurance for quite a while, Gingrich doesn’t know that it’s not that easy to just “change insurance companies” if you’re unhappy with your current provider. Aside from the fact that insurer consolidation has resulted in limited choice and higher profits for insurers, those seeking insurance on the individual market face higher costs, as the Commonwealth Fund has noted:
Insurance in the individual market is often impossible to obtain or unaffordable. Nearly nine of 10 people who explored obtaining coverage through the individual market never bought a plan, citing difficulties finding affordable coverage or being turned down.
If private insurance companies have “done well” and a public plan is no option, how does Gingrich plan to reform health care?
Republicans On House Census Subcommittee Rebuke Bachmann’s Fearmongering As ‘Illogical’ And ‘Illegal’
Republicans On House Census Subcommittee Rebuke Bachmann’s Fearmongering As ‘Illogical’ And ‘Illegal’
As ThinkProgress has repeatedly pointed out, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has been bragging about the fact that she plans not to answer Census questions this year, which is a violation of federal law punishable with a fine up to $5,000. Bachmann has been mocked by Stephen Colbert and criticized harshly by the largest Minnesota newspaper for her conspiratorial stance.
Now, in the latest rebuke of her off-the-wall claims about the Census, three out of the four House Republicans on the subcommittee that oversees the Census have released a statement calling her boycott plan “llogical, illegal and not in the best interest of our country”:
“Boycotting the constitutionally mandated Census is illogical, illegal and not in the best interest of our country,” Reps. Patrick McHenry (N.C.), Lynn Westmoreland (Ga.) and John Mica (Fla.), members of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Achieves, said in a statement Wednesday.
“[A] boycott opens the door for partisans to statistically adjust Census results,” the trio’s statement said. “The partisan manipulation of census data would irreparably transform the Census from being the baseline of our entire statistical system into a tool used to wield political power in Washington.”
According to Roll Call, the three Republicans “approached Bachmann privately over the past few weeks and asked her to stop the boycott,” but “decided to go public because Bachmann appeared unfazed by their request.” Bachmann pushed her boycott plan on Monday in an interview with Sean Hannity.
Census officials have been meeting with Bachmann to try to talk her down from her illogical concerns. CongressDaily reports that McHenry even “showed her printed census materials in the attempt to dispel her fears.” But she remained skeptical. A GOP source said, “As long as Fox News keeps calling, she’s going to keep going.”
Steele: Democrats ‘basically hijack elections at their whim.’
Steele: Democrats ‘basically hijack elections at their whim.’
On his radio show last night, Hugh Hewitt asked RNC Chairman Michael Steele what he planned “to do to prevent strategic chicanery” of Democrats voting in open Republican primaries in 2012. Misunderstanding the question, Steele replied that he agreed with Hewitt that election fraud was a “frightening concern” because he believes that Democrats can now “basically hijack elections at their whim”:
HEWITT: What are you going to do to prevent strategic chicanery of the sort that you and I both know MoveOn.org and Code Pink and the rest of them are very capable of doing?
STEELE: Well, you know, I think you raise a very important and frightening concern here, and that is the Democrats have spent the last six to eight years building in place an infrastructure to allow them to basically hijack elections at their whim.
Listen here:
Steele claimed that Democratic secretaries of states are working with ACORN in a way “that basically land locks these elections in such a way that they basically walk out of the election with the votes that they need.” He added that “they have activities by groups like an ACORN, or individuals like George Soros through their funding, to help them augment the taking of these elections.”
Transcript: More »
Dick Armey: Obama ‘May Be The Greatest Economic Illiterate’ Of Any Modern President
Dick Armey: Obama ‘May Be The Greatest Economic Illiterate’ Of Any Modern President
In this month’s episode of Rep. Walter Jones’s (R-NC) TV show, Washington Watch, Jones hosted Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader and current chairman of the right-wing astroturf group FreedomWorks. About halfway through their conversation, Jones suggests that President Obama could have benefited from taking several months off in the beginning of his presidency to study public policy with “experts.” Armey disagrees, saying that Obama has no interest in “understanding of how the world really works” and warning that Obama “may be the greatest economic illiterate of any president of modern time”:
JONES: I was hoping that Mr. Obama…would say to the American people, “You know, these problems…are so complex that I’m going to take the first two or three months, I’m going to bring in certain people from different parts of the country who are experts with this and this and that. And then I’m going to try to come back to you the American people the first of April with some ideas and plans for this country.” … I wish he had just maybe taken a little bit of time and try to analyze some of these deep seeded problems. [...]
ARMEY: I think with this president its even worse than that. He is more interested in income redistribution than he is in prosperity. … He’s got a whimsical notion of how things ought to turn out. Without any understanding. Economics is a very deep and complex discipline of understanding and I’m afraid we have a president right now who may be the greatest economic illiterate of any president of modern time. Not that he’s not capable of understanding. But I don’t believe he cares to understand.
Watch it:
Armey’s own views on the economic crisis are often dictated by his lobbying interests. He has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration’s creation of the toxic asset relief program (TARP) in his capacity at FreedomWorks. But despite that, Armey’s lobbying firm DLA Piper has represented several of the greatest beneficiaries of TARP and other government interventions in the last year: AIG and Merrill Lynch. As Pat Garofalo writes, “it’s a safe bet that DLA Piper wasn’t enlisted to push for tougher regulations or more stringent capital requirements.”
As the Obama administration works to devise effective and nuanced regulations to prevent a financial crisis like that of last fall’s from recurring, Armey is advocating more of the same tired deregulation ideas that set the American economy up for failure in the first place. “We want to end burdensome government regulation and rely on the marketplace as an efficient regulator of business activity,” Armey’s FreedomWorks website states.
Inhofe: No disrespect, but Franken’s a ‘clown.’
Inhofe: No disrespect, but Franken’s a ‘clown.’
On the same day the Minnesota Supreme Court declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of the state’s U.S. Senate election, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) welcomed his newest colleague to the Senate by referring to him as a “clown.” In the course of predicting that the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill would be “dead in the water” upon its arrival in the Senate, Inhofe extended an unprofessional greeting to Franken. The Tulsa World reports:
“I’ll tell you what a lot of people are thinking, and that is it looks like things are going to be over and we are going to get the clown from Minnesota,’’ he said.
“They are not going to get more than 35 votes.”
Asked if he was referring to Al Franken as the clown from Minnesota, Inhofe confirmed he was.
“I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I don’t know the guy, but … for a living he is a clown,’’ the senator said.
“That’s what he does for a living.’’
Franken was a professional comedian — not a “clown” — while working on the cast Saturday Night Live. But now he’s a U.S. senator…just like Inhofe. And unlike Inhofe, he’s been a political commentator, the author of best-selling political books, and host of a nationally-syndicated radio show on Air America.
In coup aftermath, Hugo Chavez seen as the ‘George Bush of Latin America.’
In coup aftermath, Hugo Chavez seen as the ‘George Bush of Latin America.’
The New York Times reports today that, despite Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s attempts to portray the U.S. as the instigators of last weekend’s coup in Honduras, the Obama administration appears to have out-maneuvered him. Obama “firmly condemned the coup, defusing Mr. Chávez’s charges,” and leaders of other Latin American countries and media outlets seemed unwilling to accept Chávez’s portrayal of “Washington as the coup’s possible orchestrator.” Chávez’s unpopular and belligerent rhetoric inspired Venezualan opposition party Acción Democrática to dub him the “George Bush of Latin America“:
Mr. Obama’s nonconfrontational diplomacy seems to have caught Mr. Chávez off balance. “Chávez is beginning to understand that he’s dealing with someone with a very different approach than his predecessor,” said Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy research group. …
Mr. Chávez’s threats of belligerence in Central America led one opposition party here, Acción Democrática, to issue a statement on Monday that was full of irony: “Hugo Chávez has become the George Bush of Latin America.”
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