GOP Corruption and Obstruction

Originally Posted by magerette
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R.Alaska)is saying $75 mil is all the money BP should have to pay on an X-billion dollar oil spill clean-up operation of their own screw-up—because higher damage caps would keep those Mom and Pop drillers out of the Gulf…and what a disaster for small biz that would be. Guess some bailouts by big government are just fine for taxpayers to bankroll…
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem…e_industry.php

Full credit on this bit of crook-hood. I'm all for protecting the mom-n-pops, but somehow I doubt you've got too many wildcatters putting down deep ocean drilling rigs. The price tags on those rigs seem just a tiny bit salty for a small company.

Sometimes politicians seem to forget people don't *have* to automatically believe them. This isn't a repub phenomonon either—both sides are just rampant with this stuff (-see my Ben Nelson comments.) It's like they're so immersed themselves in BS, lying and doublespeak that they think everyone will just smile and nod and not notice.

Not to go all treehugger on you, but if I were representing the people of Alaska, I'd be a little more nervous about the new deepwater rigs that are being considered for drilling this summer(NYT) off the Alaskan Coast—where like, the ice moves a lot, the place can't be reached months of the year at a time by ships, and some of the worst storms in the arctic happen.

Can you imagine the "clean-up" effort we'd see here if they can't do it in the Gulf?

Could someone explain this to me: John McCain wants to give Barack Obama the power to detain anyone, including American citizens, indefinitely without charges or due process, at his sole discretion. WTF? And whatever happened to that constipation thingy you were supposed to have?

[ http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s3081/show ]

Shame on you. There's a big difference between "indefinitely" and

Allows the detention and interrogation of such individuals for a reasonable time after capture or coming into custody.

And let's take a look at exactly what sort of "innocent citizen" we're talking about here:

1) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners;
(2) has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(3) was a part of al Qaeda at the time of capture.

Not exactly dragging people out of the nunnery here.

Where I come from "reasonably" is Political for indefinitely. Since you can claim 30 years is reasonable as long as you don't have too much shame in your body (and remember that we're talking about politicians).

Übereil

Originally Posted by dteowner
And let's take a look at exactly what sort of "innocent citizen" we're talking about here:
Not exactly dragging people out of the nunnery here.

Except that the bill allows detaining people suspected of engaging in any of those activities. IOW, Saint Barack can simply decide that he suspects Mr. D.T. Eowner of Indiana of collaborating with Al Qaeda, and whoops! off you go into a black hole, with no safeguards whatsoever.

That's no different in principle from what Stalin did, when his system allowed similarly disappearing people suspected of being saboteurs. Suppose St. Barack gets whacked and Hillary gets a coronary. That would put Nancy Pelosi in charge. Would you trust her with that kind of power?

Oh, and, here's something else ex-Soviet citizens would find eerily familiar: [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010…tes-us-history ]

Originally Posted by Prime Junta
Oh, and, here's something else ex-Soviet citizens would find eerily familiar: [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010…tes-us-history ]

Iz pretty stupid what's going on there, but I notice there wasn't much complaining from the left when history was rewritten to omit all the race riots that tended to crop up shortly after King left town, since that didn't fit in with the heroic nonviolent picture y'all wanted to paint. It's not like this is a new or strictly right wing phenomenon.

This goes just a bit farther than under-reporting something you don't want to talk about (which I think was your point above.) It's totally bringing a political agenda into the schools to influence future voters. IMO, it should be illegal to give that much power to the Board of Education anywhere, or allow it to do what they're doing in Texas, and I have a pretty good idea it may be completely unconstitutional as well.
Some more on the story here:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem…tin.php?ref=mp

You don't appear to have seen the way MLKJr is treated in textbooks these days. Omission is omission, whether it's not talking about slavery or not talking about riots.

I'm not in any way endorsing the thumpers doing their silliness (I agree that they're violating church/state seperation), but I do think it's inaccurate to color it as uniquely rightie behavior.

Originally Posted by dteowner
Iz pretty stupid what's going on there, but I notice there wasn't much complaining from the left when history was rewritten to omit all the race riots that tended to crop up shortly after King left town, since that didn't fit in with the heroic nonviolent picture y'all wanted to paint. It's not like this is a new or strictly right wing phenomenon.

You know, dte, it'd be nice to hear something from you one of these days that's not "you do it too."

It'd be nice to hear all the world-savers admit they're down there in the pigshit with us and skip the hypocritical self-righteous screaming. I guess we'll both go home unhappy, eh?

Seriously, though, is it really an invalid response to give Chicken Little a prozac and say, "Same shit, different day, little camper"?

There would be a lots of chickens lobbing pills across the road. Has too much potential for massive roadkill.

Just to balance out the scales after dte's post on Blumenthal in the lefty thread(—man you're fast) we have a repub resignation in Indiana:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100518/…ongress_souder

I put it in the corruption thread because he's resigning due to an affair with a staffer. As a party guy, he waited to put in his resignation til after getting the primary nomination, so the party can nominate his replacement without a special election.

The mystery is why resign over an affair? No one else in his party has(Ensign, Vitter and Sanford and the Appalachian Trail, etc, all much higher profile, have brought us no resignations.. Looks like they thought this guy couldn't squeek by in the general and eased him out.

Wait— theres more(!)and it almost needs to be in the political humor thread:

Souder and mistress recorded video on importance of abstinence (Talking Points Memo)

You can't make this stuff up. The lady in question is quite the young hottie for a repub staffer, too.

Originally Posted by magerette
The mystery is why resign over an affair? No one else in his party has(Ensign, Vitter and Sanford and the Appalachian Trail, etc, all much higher profile, have brought us no resignations.. Looks like they thought this guy couldn't squeek by in the general and eased him out.

The guy's positioned himself as a "holier-than-thou" in the past. Once the lid was off this scandal, he didn't stand a chance even if the infraction is pretty mild by Washington standards. His district includes a couple cities that are solidly democrat, but most of his turf is very rural conservative, including a fair bit of Indiana Amish/Menonite country. Those folks won't be as forgiving of indiscretions.

I'd say his delay was that he thought they'd be able to bury the problem, more than avoiding a special election.

Thanks for the insider view. The Amish/Mennonite factor explains a lot, even the neck-breakingly two-faced abstinence promo.


I normally don't regard sexual fandangos as being as serious or ethically off-base as other corruption stuff, but I can see how in his case, unlike the other three candidates for Club Resignation from more sinfully-apathetic areas, this could be major. You would think guys like this would be able to restrain themselves, or at least not fish off the company pier, because this stuff always comes back to clobber you when the 'romance' fades, and nobody can clobber you politically like a political op.

The whole affair thing never really made sense to me, anyway. I can't afford the one I've got—why would I want another one on the side?

So the guy is a moralizing hypocrite of the worst kind, but also incredibly stupid or did he really think he could get away with it?

In general, though, I also don't think one's bedroom life should be an issue in serving, but of course if his political strength was based on preaching morals, then I guess he should say sayonara.

A reminder of the danger of rightie terrorists.

May 31 marks the one-year anniversary of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who was shot to death on a Sunday morning in his church in Wichita, Kansas by an anti-choice zealot.
He often wore a button on his lapel that featured his motto, “Trust Women.”