Tag: Republicans

Last week it was reported that the US Secret Service allegedly tried to embarrass House Rep. Jason Caffetz (R-UT) by releasing information from his Secret Service file. John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” wonders why they are wasting their time when given enough time Republicans will embarrass themselves>

   OLIVER: That’s right. The Secret Service attempted to embarrass one of their biggest critics, Congressman Jason Chaffetz, by leaking his rejected application to join them, essentially behaving like the high school table of mean girls. […]

   And I don’t know what’s worse here. The fact that the Secret Service is so petty that they broke the law to embarrass Jason Chaffetz, or that they’re so stupid, they didn’t realize, if you want to embarrass Jason Chaffetz, just wait, and he will do it for you.

H/t Heather, Crooks and Liars

Like many of the past GOP gaffs, the truth about the real purpose of the House’s latest House Benghazi investigation as exposed when prospective Speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told that the Fox News’ Sean Hannity Benghazi investigation was intended to damage the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

McCarthy said Tuesday that Clinton would have remained “unbeatable,” had it not been for the committee.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee, what are her numbers today?” McCarthy told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “Her numbers are dropping, why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened.”

He then reiterated that to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the committee was part of a “strategy to fight and win”.  

“I’m willing to fight but I want to fight to win,” McCarthy said when asked about the call by some Republicans to force a government shutdown fight in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood.

McCarthy said he supports a “bottom-up” approach to leading, where Republicans first put forward their policies and plans, use committees to do the groundwork, and then let that effort result in winning a vote on a policy.

He pointed to the controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office — which has at times overshadowed her presidential campaign — as an example of how the process can work.

“When you look at the poll numbers of Hilary Clinton — they’ve dropped. Unfavorable is pretty high because people say they don’t trust her,” McCarthy said. “They don’t trust her because what they found out about the server and everything else. Would you ever have found that out had you not gathered the information from Benghazi Select Committee? So if we really want to be able to show what this Planned Parenthood has done … have the select committee get all the information, all the hearings. Win the argument to win the vote.”

The fall out from the Democratic side was immediate with demands that present Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) disband the committee:

In the letter, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and other Democrats said that McCarthy, who is in line to replace Boehner after the speaker retires, had revealed that the panel’s true purpose was political.

“We are writing to ask you to disband the House Select Committee on Benghazi after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent comments admitting that the Select Committee was put together to serve the political purpose of defeating Secretary Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential elections by hurting her in the polls, rather than conducting a serious investigation into a terrorist attack that killed four Americans,” wrote Reid, who was joined by Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.), Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Patty Murray (Wash.) and Barbara Boxer (Calif.).

“We should not disrespect their sacrifice by further politicizing this tragedy,” they continued.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spoke with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) about why the committee should be disbanded and a possible boycott by the Democrats on the committee.

Following Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s spilling truth , the Republicans are scrambling to deny it

Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said McCarthy should apologize, saying the California Republican made an “absolutely inappropriate statement.”

Speaker John Boehner, who is set to retire at the end of the month, sought to provide cover for McCarthy on Thursday. In a statement, he denied that the committee has anything to do with politics.

“This investigation has never been about former Secretary of State Clinton and never will be,” Boehner said. [..]

“I might have said it differently,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, told CNN. “Any ancillary political activity that comes out of it is, in fact, not the goal of the committee and is not what the committee is seeking to do.”

Added Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, “I totally disagree with those comments.” Asked if they could jeopardize his bid for speaker, the conservative Amash said: “I think it should be a concern.”

This is an elephant they aren’t going to get back in the bottle.  Everyone knows this charade has always been political. Republicans using the deaths of four Americans for political gain is bereft of any human decency.

Up date: A jovial John Boehner addressed the press, waking into the press room singing “Zippity Do Da.”

Since the Tea Party revolution that helped the Republicans take over the leadership of the House of Representatives in 2010, that body has slipped into chaos with the hard line right wing refusing to compromise  with the more moderate members of their own party. That chaos had now reached its head. Unable to get any compromise from the Tea Party caucus, Speaker of the House John Boehner has announced his resignation from his leadership position and his seat at the end of October.

Speaker John A. Boehner, under intense pressure from conservatives in his party, announced on Friday that he would resign one of the most powerful positions in government and give up his House seat at the end of October, as Congress moved to avert a government shutdown.

Mr. Boehner, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning.

“The first job of any speaker is to protect this institution that we all love,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement released later. “It was my plan to only serve as speaker until the end of last year, but I stayed on to provide continuity to the Republican conference and the House. It is my view, however, that prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable damage to the institution. To that end, I will resign the speakership and my seat in Congress on Oct. 30.”

Mr. Boehner, 65, from Ohio, had struggled from almost the moment he took the speaker’s gavel in 2011 to manage the challenges of divided government and to hold together his fractious and increasingly conservative Republican members. [..]

It will be up to a majority of the members of the House now to choose a new leader, and the leading candidate is Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, who is viewed more favorably by the House’s more conservative members. The preferred candidate among many Republicans, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has said he does not want the job.

While he appears to have the support at the moment, there are those who are opposed to Rep. McCarthy so that is not exactly a done deal. Remember the part of the definition of the chaos theory is

Small differences in initial conditions … yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.

As Minority Leader Nancy Peolsi (D-CA) said when she heard the news, this is “a stark indication of the disarray of House Republicans.”

Yesterday another Republican thew his hat onto the GOP Presidential candidate clown car, billionaire real estate magnate Donald Trump. In a rambling disconnected speech that was panned by both the right and left media pundits, he managed to insult China, Mexico and the intelligence of most voters. Trump made Jon Stewart’s night but what was really the topper was former Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert’s response to The Donald.

Sporting a Trump-style hairdo, Colbert was rolled to a podium in “a giant human trashcan” to announce he would still be hosting the “Late Show.” But mostly, he just rambled for more than six minutes, mimicking Trump’s own rambling speech.

“My mouth still has more to say,” he said as he babbled on about China, Mexico, lunch, bicycle racing, card tricks, hats and more.

“I agree with Donald that America is dead — buried in a coffin, in salted earth with our enemies pissing on it and laughing” Colbert said. “And Donald Trump is the only man who can — excuse me, I’m just moved — I’m physically moved by the knowledge that Donald Trump is the only man who can dig up the corpse of that nation and marry it.”

At one point, he literally foamed at the mouth.

Last week the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch as the 83rd Attorney General after a 5 month delay. She was sworn in on Monday by Vice President Joe Biden. The reasons the Republican majority made for the hold on her confirmation were baseless and revealed just how dysfunctional the congress really is. Using the fight over abortion provisions in an human trafficking bill that Democrats found untenable, looked more like hostage taking than politics. Ms. Lynch had sailed through her other confirmations with unanimous bipartisan support. She has a history of being tough on political corruption and police brutality. She famously prosecuted the New York City Police officers who had brutally abused Abner Louima and was investigating the officer involved in the choke hold death of Eric Garner last year.

But the one really good reason the Republicans had to not confirm her was never mentioned by them or the media, the banks. As the article by William K. Black, a  professor of economics and law, discusses, “(Ms.) Lynch’s failure to prosecute HSBC and its officers exemplified a real Obama scandal, the effective end of the rule of law for criminal bankers.”

GOP opposition to Lynch was a missed opportunity

By William K. Black, Al Jazeera

The Republicans’ failed tactics against Loretta Lynch reveal the big banks’ hold on both parties

The reason Lynch was such a godsend to the GOP never appeared in the Times article: HSBC. The biggest bank in Europe and the most disreputable large bank in the world, HSBC was the subject of the most important case Lynch ever handled. It demonstrated that Lynch’s “formidable reputation as a prosecutor” is undeserved, making Republican opposition to her nomination legitimate. More important, her failure to prosecute HSBC and its officers exemplified a real Obama scandal, the effective end of the rule of law for criminal bankers.

Lynch’s sweetheart deal with HSBC, her indefensible reactions to the bank’s failures to comply even with the sweetheart deal and the bank’s continued commission of thousands of felonious transactions after the sweetheart deal offered Republican leaders the ideal circumstances to attack the Obama administration. The Republicans did not need to suddenly develop investigative skills and honest congressional reports. The Democrats, Lynch’s appointee as HSBC’s monitor and the whistleblowers have done all the heavy investigative lifting for the GOP. The ultrashort version is that HSBC and its personnel were caught red-handed having laundered over $1 billion for Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel – one of the most violent cartels in the world – and helped Sudan and Iran violate U.S. anti-terrorism and anti-genocide sanctions with impunity. This was all documented in a Senate investigation by former Sen. Carl Levin – a Democrat and Congress’ most respected and competent investigator – in a report that the Republicans could have joyfully quoted. The bank was found to have engaged in massive efforts to aid and abet tax fraud. HSBC’s monitor discovered that the bank was not complying with even the sweetheart nonprosecution agreement that Lynch negotiated. She nevertheless failed to prosecute any of the numerous felonies at HSBC outlined in the Levin report.

Remarkably, the supposedly liberal New York Times and GOP leaders have something in common: Both refused to mention HSBC as a key reason for rejecting Lynch’s nomination. What the GOP’s embarrassingly self-destructive strategy for opposing Lynch proves is that even when the Republicans have the perfect opportunity to embarrass the Obama administration and highlight one of its largest scandals – the failure to prosecute a single bank officer who led the most destructive epidemics of financial fraud in history that caused our Great Recession – the Republicans refused, lest they upset their leading source of political contributions. The approval of the Lynch nomination demonstrates that bipartisanship does exist on Capitol Hill: when it favors the big banks and their lobbyists

Prosecuting these bank criminals was too hard for former AG Eric Garner, it obviously will be for AG Lynch, as well. The banks not only own congress, they own the White House and the Department of Justice.  

During the 2014 midterm election cycle, the Koch-funded group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) backed a bevy of extreme conservative candidates and helped send top Koch cronies (and veterans) Joni Ernst and Tom Cotton to the U.S. Senate. Scarcely a couple months into the 2016 cycle, CVA has released a report recommending that much of the U.S. Veterans Administration be privatized, an extreme policy position that would jeopardize the care received by millions of our nation’s veterans.

Last month, CVA’s Fixing Veterans Health Care Taskforce released its final report suggesting “policy reforms” for the VA, namely that the VA’s health care system be converted into an independent, nonprofit corporation and advocating for the creation of a private insurance option for veterans. Additionally, new enrollees into the proposed system would face tougher enrollment standards. According to USA Today, a whopping one-fifth of future veterans would not be eligible for care under CVA’s proposed system. It’s no wonder then that the American Legion has come out against the plan, as did Paralyzed Veterans of America, and that “most veterans service organizations skipped” the rollout of the CVA’s final report, according to Stars & Stripes Magazine.

Most veterans organizations don’t support CVA’s privatization plan, and it has the potential to negatively impact some 20 percent of future veterans. So what explains CVA’s release of what Stars & Stripes calls a “radical” plan for the VA? Consider that CVA received a whopping $5.5 million from the Koch brothers’ “secret bank” – Freedom Partners – in 2013. The Kochs have advocated for education reform by way of abolishing the federal Department of Education and campaign finance reform vis-à-vis doing away with the FEC. So it’s disappointing, but not surprising, that a Koch group’s vision of VA reform is to privatize most of the agency charged with caring for our nation’s veterans.

Koch favorite and presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio has already endorsed the extreme CVA plan. Will the rest of the Koch cronies follow suit and contradict the position of most veterans service organizations?

The idea of privatization through vouchers is also supported by two other GOP presidential contenders: former Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). The right wing would like nothing more than to dismantle the entire social safety net for everyone.

In a two part segment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted how the right wing was quietly working to privatize segments of the Veterans Administration through vouchers for health care outside the system.

In the second segment, she speaks with Robert McDonald, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, about the importance of the VA in the American health system, how the VA is improving after recent scandals, and political challenges from conservatives interested in privatization.

Founder of VoteVets.org Eric Solz pointed out in an article for Huffington Post that the voucher system would undermine funding to the VA and shuttle veterans into a system that is not equipped to handle their special needs.

The scandal that rocked the VA over excessive wait times to get care and excessive backlogs in processing claims was terrible. It was also a problem that was, literally, years in the making. Before Secretary Eric Shinseki, not a single VA secretary, Democrat or Republican, tried to get the VA to move to a modern, computerized system. And the VA never prepared for the influx of veterans when we launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to overstretched facilities cooking their books to avoid punishment.

There is no doubt that veterans shouldn’t have to rely on the VA for everything. But what Republican candidates, backed by the Koch-brothers-funded Concerned Veterans for America, talk about is the beginning of the end of the pact we make with our veterans to give them the care they need. What they want is the privatization of veterans’ care: Fight for your country and get a voucher.

What this would do is severely underfund the department, leaving veterans out in the cold when it comes to many of their service-connected injuries. For example, VA centers are often equipped to deal with amputations and traumatic brain injuries in a way that a local doctor or hospital might not be. But if we voucherize the system, local VA centers and hospitals would be forced to shutter their doors. For veterans in need of specialized care — both physical and mental — they may not have an able caregiver to turn to in their area.

Furthermore, the VA, despite the bad press, continues to far outpace private care in national customer satisfaction surveys. Veterans like the care they get at the VA. A lot. Closing the VA is the first step toward ending other popular programs like Medicare. In fact, that’s what this whole fight is about.

In remarks on foreign policy before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, potential 2016 GOP presidential hopeful, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush attempted to distance himself from his brother President George W. Bush and his father, Pres. George H. W. Bush, insisting that he is “his own man.”

He pretty much stumbled and fumbled, even with the telepromter, and, quite obviously isn’t ready for prime time on foreign policy.

One way he unmistakably resembles his father and brother is in his apparent discomfort with a prepared text. He appeared far more at ease answering questions than delivering his speech, which he read quickly, without the authority he has often shown when discussing domestic issues.

Still, his responses were not mistake-free: When he sought to attack President Obama, he inflated the number of Islamic State fighters, saying in his remarks that there were 200,000. A spokeswoman for Mr. Bush later clarified that he had meant to say 20,000. At another point, he pronounced Boko Haram, the Islamist militant group based in Nigeria, as “Boku Haram.”

Mr. Bush said his formative experience on foreign policy had come not from watching his brother or father serve as commander in chief, but as a 20-something working and starting a family in Venezuela, and then as the governor of a state actively involved in foreign trade.

He recalled how many times he had visited Israel (five) and noted that he had “forced” himself to visit Asia four times each year.

Despite explaining how his biography differed – he recalled the high price of Pampers in Caracas – Mr. Bush is benefiting from the former presidents Bush.

As bad as his appearance was, the real problem is that someone forgot to tell his staff that it might not be a good idea to release the list of foreign policy advisers that Jeb has decided to be on his team.

The list represents the full spectrum of views within the Republican foreign policy establishment – from relative moderates, including former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III, to staunch neoconservatives such as Iraq war architect Paul D. Wolfowitz.  [..]

Among Bush’s announced advisers are several viewed as staunch defenders of the CIA, including former director Michael V. Hayden, who came under heavy criticism in a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report about the agency’s interrogation techniques.

Just as telling were those missing from the official list.

Although former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is at least as close personally to the Bush family as anyone on the list – and has consulted with the former Florida governor – the absence of her name suggests that he is sensitive about being seen as a carbon copy of his brother.

Click on image to enlarge

The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree or that far from his older bother.