Teabagger and Christian Reconstructionist Sharron Angle pulled a trifecta yesterday. She ran an ad accusing Harry Reid of voting to give Viagra to sex predators. Even Mike Huckabee came to Reid's defense. She then topped this by telling people in Nevada that whole regions of American are now under Sharia law. Her example was Dearborn , Michigan where there is a large Muslim community, notably Iraqi refugees. And an interview with her pastor played the Mormon card on Harry Reid, saying he was a member of a multimillion dollar cult and owed his allegiance to Salt Lake City. Mitt Romney take note. This all led to Bill Raggio, the Republican leader of the Nevada's Senate, to endorse Harry Reid because of Sharron Angle's bizarre views on politics.
Blame it on the Black Guy. Republicans are trying to whitewash their own record on the economy by blaming the current situation on Barack Obama. The racist overtones to this debate are hard to miss. Now, Republicans are crafting an excuse if they don't sweep the elections--it's Michael Steele's fault. A majority of RNC members have openly come out and said that the DNC is better run and that Michael Steele is a disaster at a time the party can make enormous advances. This runs with the early accusations of the mortgage meltdown by conservatives on black homeowners. I'm proud and I'm White and I'm not responsible for anything. That's cool! I could get into that for myself. I'll draw up a list of scapegoats later this morning.
Should the American Chamber of Commerce register as a foreign agent? The backlash on the Chambers' gazillion dollar ad campaign against Republicans continues. The one item that actually makes the foreign agent registration appear a normal procedure is the revelation that the Chamber sends Issue alerts to their foreign members so that they can use the Chamber to lobby for or against our bill in Congress. As we've seen from the preliminary revelations, state oil companies and banks are their members and now it's been revealed that companies owned by the Chinese government are also members of their Chinese branch. If you're directly trying to affect legislation, that's lobbying, which the Chamber does, but if you're doing it for a forign country you have to be registered as such. This issue is not going to go away anytime soon.
Does anyone remember during the Cold War the spy scandal around the American Russian Trade Organization? It was used first as an NKVD front and then later by the KGB.
If you get bashed one day and your public answers don't satisfy the hunger for news, maybe it's best to lay low. But today, the Chamber has announced it will sue the Obama Administration for the regulations it is implementing through the health reform and wall street reform bills. While they are doing that, the Chamber will be hosting several state banks from the Gulf at a meeting here in Washington.
The Democrats have picked the foreign money story up and just run with it. It has morphed into Karl Rove travelling to Libya and Saudi Arabia to pick up cash for the election. Who knows whether it's true or not.
President Obama raised the larger issue of foreign money at the Bowie State rally yesterday, warning that our whole democracy was at risk and that Republicans and independents should be concerned. He told the audience that this would make it harder for representatives to fight special interests when the money put against them is infinite. "It will change the country we live in forever". He's right and that's the point of the whole exercise.
One member of the Chamber was not pleased by all this publicity--one Rupert Murdoch of the partly Saudi-owned, Dubai-based News Corps. His answer to questions was "I thought the $1 million was anonymous." Then Rupert slipped further when he said his contribution to the Republican Governors Association was because of his friendship with John Kasich, who is running for Governor in Ohio. This made Governor Strickland's day as he pounded Kasich over the head with both the Chamber and Murdoch contribution.
The Chamber attack ads ,which are accelerating, deflect their real reason for some of their attacks. For instance, former Admiral Joe Sestak, who is running against Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, is being slammed by the Chamber for voting for TARP and the stimulus package. That's very strange since the Chamber lobbied both for the bank bailout and the stimulus package. But some of the Chambers foreign and American oil companies might not like the Sestak's cap-and-trade legislation. Otherwise, their ad blitz doesn't make any sense.
If you see Democrats voting for massive cuts in Medicare, that's Karl Rove's work. Maybe this is paid with by Libyan money. Who knows? But that's the reason the donors must be identified.
It's bad enough that special interests by Congress but with the next Congress it'll be tough to know whether foreign governments bought it.
At least some Republicans know how to turn a good dime and take a fall. Carl Palladino, who is going down to certain defeat to Andrew Cuomo in New York, has played his zaniness just right. All of his campaign finances are paid to companies he owns or to people who rent space from him. So far, he's been able to launder some $2.2 million from his campaign to his own businesses. That's the way to do it. Down home corruption, not this jetset stuff. Carl Palladino, Man of the People.
The Republican candidate for Georgia Governor is doing the same thing, but he's over-billing his campaign for the planes he rents from himself. It was too conspicuous that the local papers called him out on this.
The Chicago Tribune had enough with Rep. Mark Kirk. They endorsed the Democrat in the Senate race even though they had endorsed Mark Kirk every other time he ran for office. They complained that they didn't know who he was anymore or what he believed.
Christine McDonnell, who is a constitutional scholar because of her short course at the Claremont Institute, not college, claims that "from her deep study" the health reform bill is unconstitutional. And if Congress repeals it and Obama vetoes it,Hillary Clinton will run because she has seen many Hillary for President ads.
Well, her deep study apparently didn't impress the Detroit district judge who ruled that the individual mandates in the healthreform bill were constitutional. This was a big preliminary win for the Obama Administration.
Maybe the Cooch will back off. Our distinguished Attorney-General is suing on healthcare reform but he is too pre-occupied right now with suing the University of Virgina and attacking climate scientist Michael Mann. You have to ask yourself what is behind everyone doubing down on their positions, even when they have already been shown to be wrong. The will to ignorance seems to be growing.
"Macaca man", George Allen met with Senator Cornyn about running against Jim Webb for Virginia Senator in 2012. Talk about a snoozefest.
The teabaggers really, honestly are going to go after Olympia Snowe in Maine when she seeks re-election in 2012. I hope she has the courage if she loses to run as an independent.
Meanwhile in Connecticut, Joe Lieberman is in the low 20s in approval and would lose to the Democrat in 2012. If the Senate is very close, look for Jolting Joe to switch sides. It's unlikely for endangered Democrat Ben Nelson because his state has a deep Republican bench.
The President vetoed an innocuous sounding bill, which virtually slipped through the deadloocked Snate without debate. It was a bill that would force other states to recognized local notarization from another jurisdiction. Clever. This was casually mentioned to two Senator by notaries who were in town for a professional organization. And the Senators complied. Problem--it would have led to more mortgage foreclosures and helped the banks who are only holding pieces of mortgages that were already slices and diced and sold as derivatives. The old American way is for a lender to present the whole mortgage and declared its due. But in the case of millions of homes this is no longer possible. So the banks need to scramble around to justify foreclosures when they no longer have the paper.
Showing posts with label Carl Palladino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carl Palladino. Show all posts
Friday, October 8, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Forget the Hope and Change--Vote the Criminal Class
The post below was a celebration of IDS'15th anniversary and a thank you to all the human rights activists who have donated their time and ideas generously over the years. It also carried my thoughts on my 60th birthday. Since it was written on another computer, I guess it got scrambled by the National Security Agency. The long and short of it is that I now should be called by the Swahili honorific Mzee. So from now on , Mzee McColm if you please. No more Senor Bruce.
A follow-up note about Karl Rove's appearance at Oberlin. Rove has very strict clauses in his speaking contracts that any who might disrupt his speeches must be removed or he personally will leave and you have to pay. So one person sought to make a citizens' arrest and was himself arrested. Protestors were disrupted beforehand based not on the First Amendment but Karl's contract. He basically forces his host to break the law. Anyone remember what used to happen if someone in a George W. Bush audience asked him a hostile question, even politely. They were bodily removed and arrested. That's Karl's signature.
I was planning to attend the One Nation Rally at the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday at noon. But, should I? Glenn Beck has gone all chalkboard on this one showing that the organizers are all devotees of V.I. Lenin and want to takeover America for Marxism. Since Organizing for America is urging people to attend, Beck wants Obama to denounce socialism and Marxism once and for all. Apparently, Beck didn't hear President Obama in his Wisconsin speak address this criticism of his policies. I haven't been accused of being a Marxist or Socialist for decades so to bring things full circle I'm going and hope everyone who is able can.
But there is an alternative for this year's mid-terms. The nation has a chance to vote for a unique type of candidate this year--the thoroughly criminal. Forget that corporations are pouring anonymous millions into front organizations, forget that the Koch Brothers are trying to buy whole states, including California, forget that the GOP now has a 6-1 funding advantage in terms of advertising. This is your chance to vote for a criminal. And they are everywhere. The criminal profile allows a certain authenticity, a roughness that shows the person isn't a slick politician. With teabagger types, the public can sympathize with their financial difficulties because they are just like you and I, except we would be in jail. We have the run-of-the-mill grifter type like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. We have the Northeast quasi-mobster like Carl Paladino and we have the amazing corporate criminal type like Florida's Rich Scott. The array this year is truly amazing.
Carl Paladino has made Youtube fame with his beef with New York Post veteran, Albany editor Fred Dicker, where he threatens to take Fred out. Fred may have been out of bounds because he went to interview Paladino's "love child", whom Paladino openly accepts and even campaigns with. Paladino has a superstar staff. One senior official is a woman who was forced to quick her government job because she was siphoning off public funds to private businesses. Another was Michael Boomberg's manager for a $1,000,000 GOTV effort the first election and just walked off and bought a house with the money. Another just got out of prison for a DUI accident. But Carl is going to "clean up Albany". Carl received notoriety with his racist e-mails photoshopping President Obama as a pimp and First Lady Michelle Obama as his prostitute. But his more egregious e-mails were discovered by reporters in Buffalo--hard core porn streams to business colleagues and political cronies.
Rick Scott in Florida is also one for the record books. When he beat Bill McCollum in the Republican primary, Bill would not endorse him, saying "I don't know why he isn't in jail." Scott, the CEO of a hospital chain, had to be removed--of course with about a $20 million golden parachute--after federal authorities caught his company in the largest Medicare fraud case in history. The company was forced to pay over $1.1 billion in fines for the crime. But, the kicker is that the criminal part of the case continued all the way until about one month before the elections. Scott in secret testimony is alleged to have invoked the 5th Amendment over 100 times. Then the man has the chutzpah to declare his candidacy for Governor a few weeks later.
Ron Johnson, who is against all government subsidies for business except for his own, testified in Wisconsin against a bipartisan child abuse bill, which would have extended the statute of limitations on pedophilia. He testified as a business man and community leader concerned that law suits would put constraints on many good organizations. Missing was that he was sitting on the Catholic Diocese Board, which was concerned with a rash of cases emerging against priests involved in child abuse. Apparently, this did not involve just one priest, who eventually went to jail, but a bunch through the Green Bay Diocese. He's running against Russ Feingold as the non-politician.
Joe Miller from Alaska first started his grifter act in Kansas where he received farm subsidies. Then he moved to Alaska and applied and received hunting and fishing licenses for the indigent. These are meant for people who must fish and hunt for their daily food and might be excluded because of the limited number of regular licenses. Joe at the time was a lawyer making $70,000 a year. Joe is mandated by law to file with the Federal Elections Commission a statement of his personal income or face upwards of $70,000 in fines. He was supposed to have done this last year but so far he hasn't. Joe also wants to eliminate Social Security. His father survives on Social Security. But you can say Joe knows how to game the system. I personally think he doesn't believe a word he says.
Christine O'Connell makes my own higher education look pretty bad. She's amazing--she has a master's from Princeton, went to Oxford and studied constitutional law at Claremont. And this was all before she even received her B.A. a few weeks ago. I wonder if she's for Sharia Law. Unfortunately, all said institutions issued strong denials of her educational prowess. Apparently she went to none of the above except Farleigh Dickinson. But this makes her more authentic--we all want such an education but we can't afford it. So just make it up. Apparently, she also made up a multi-year law suit on sex discrimination against a conservative organization. This eventually got John Fund to condemn her for lying to him. But John had no problem with her using campaign funds to pay her rent, her mother, her bowling games and her personal gas. "I have no problem with that," John said, invoking the new high standards of conservatives. Now, Christine's own pseudo-Christian non-profit is in jeipardy of losing its legal status because it failed to submit the usual legal papers to the state--and that's a very lax state. But remember Glenn Beck says Chris Coons, the Democrat, is a Marxist.
Meg Whitman has joined the criminal class--probably years before. At her losin debate effort against Jerry Brown, she opined that the law should crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The next morning her former housekeeper filed suit for damages saying that Queen Meg knew she was illegal for over nine years. Whitman fired her just before she announced she was running for Governor. This all has made the Whitman campaign go Glub,Glub, Glub.
Sharron Angle, who already has made record books for her John Birch views, wants to eliminate government healthcare programs. One slight problem, she is covered by her husband's healthcare plan he got as a government employee. In fact Sharron's main source of income is her husband's goverment pension. Also her father gets both Medicare and VA benefits.
Rand Paul with his bogus medical credentials had a little problem at Dairy Queen the other day. He was supposed to answer questions from local voters but was startled when he saw they were local union guys. He bolted to the car and refused to answer questions. What they wanted to know was how he could suggest a $2,000 deduction for Medicare, when everyone in that neck of the words depended on social security and Medicare.
The avoid questions m.o. makes sense. If you only have to report to the major corporations, why should you have to answer questions from a bunch of voters or , worse, journalists. This is the beauty of the Roberts Court decision on Citizens United. You don't have to disclose the source of your donations and you really don't have to campaign. Just buy alot of air time and make up all your credentials. Want to go to Oxford or Cambridge. Why not? The corporations don't really care what you say. There is a beauty to this.
David Plouffe was on NPR today explaining the real stakes in this election. He did a superb job. But I think the Obama people are making a mistake about Republicans wanting to turn back the clock to the last administration. They want to turn the clock back to the 1890s.
Read another analysis of the House races by a NYU poli sci professor who ran all his computer scenarios and came up with the Democrats keeping the House.
The polling data shows that all the races except in the headline contests in California are tightening up. That good news for Democrats in some places and bad news elsewhere. The Senate will be touch and go throughout the evening.
I am mortified that I got one question wrong on the Pew Survey on Religion. Top scorers were atheists, agnostics, Jews, Mormons, mainstream protestants, then the less knowledgeable evangelicals and Catholics. Catholics were the least savvy in terms of the quiz, even getting their own doctrines wrong. This survey drew all sorts of dismay from pundits. But as someone this morning wrote--the Surveys shows that Americans are more knowledgeable about religion than history or science. Scary.
My wife's note on my birthday card was that she was amazed that she has known me since the age of 21. I find it incredible also but then we are really people of Traditional Family Values instead of the phonies who don't know their own religion.
For the record, I may embrace my inner Teabagger and declare that I am Dr. R. Bruce McColm, expert in Neuroscience. I always liked neuroscience and believe it will yield amazing discoveries in the near future. So why not get ahead of the curve. If Glenn Beck can be a Doctor of Humanities and he lacks all semblence to the humane, why not.
A follow-up note about Karl Rove's appearance at Oberlin. Rove has very strict clauses in his speaking contracts that any who might disrupt his speeches must be removed or he personally will leave and you have to pay. So one person sought to make a citizens' arrest and was himself arrested. Protestors were disrupted beforehand based not on the First Amendment but Karl's contract. He basically forces his host to break the law. Anyone remember what used to happen if someone in a George W. Bush audience asked him a hostile question, even politely. They were bodily removed and arrested. That's Karl's signature.
I was planning to attend the One Nation Rally at the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday at noon. But, should I? Glenn Beck has gone all chalkboard on this one showing that the organizers are all devotees of V.I. Lenin and want to takeover America for Marxism. Since Organizing for America is urging people to attend, Beck wants Obama to denounce socialism and Marxism once and for all. Apparently, Beck didn't hear President Obama in his Wisconsin speak address this criticism of his policies. I haven't been accused of being a Marxist or Socialist for decades so to bring things full circle I'm going and hope everyone who is able can.
But there is an alternative for this year's mid-terms. The nation has a chance to vote for a unique type of candidate this year--the thoroughly criminal. Forget that corporations are pouring anonymous millions into front organizations, forget that the Koch Brothers are trying to buy whole states, including California, forget that the GOP now has a 6-1 funding advantage in terms of advertising. This is your chance to vote for a criminal. And they are everywhere. The criminal profile allows a certain authenticity, a roughness that shows the person isn't a slick politician. With teabagger types, the public can sympathize with their financial difficulties because they are just like you and I, except we would be in jail. We have the run-of-the-mill grifter type like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. We have the Northeast quasi-mobster like Carl Paladino and we have the amazing corporate criminal type like Florida's Rich Scott. The array this year is truly amazing.
Carl Paladino has made Youtube fame with his beef with New York Post veteran, Albany editor Fred Dicker, where he threatens to take Fred out. Fred may have been out of bounds because he went to interview Paladino's "love child", whom Paladino openly accepts and even campaigns with. Paladino has a superstar staff. One senior official is a woman who was forced to quick her government job because she was siphoning off public funds to private businesses. Another was Michael Boomberg's manager for a $1,000,000 GOTV effort the first election and just walked off and bought a house with the money. Another just got out of prison for a DUI accident. But Carl is going to "clean up Albany". Carl received notoriety with his racist e-mails photoshopping President Obama as a pimp and First Lady Michelle Obama as his prostitute. But his more egregious e-mails were discovered by reporters in Buffalo--hard core porn streams to business colleagues and political cronies.
Rick Scott in Florida is also one for the record books. When he beat Bill McCollum in the Republican primary, Bill would not endorse him, saying "I don't know why he isn't in jail." Scott, the CEO of a hospital chain, had to be removed--of course with about a $20 million golden parachute--after federal authorities caught his company in the largest Medicare fraud case in history. The company was forced to pay over $1.1 billion in fines for the crime. But, the kicker is that the criminal part of the case continued all the way until about one month before the elections. Scott in secret testimony is alleged to have invoked the 5th Amendment over 100 times. Then the man has the chutzpah to declare his candidacy for Governor a few weeks later.
Ron Johnson, who is against all government subsidies for business except for his own, testified in Wisconsin against a bipartisan child abuse bill, which would have extended the statute of limitations on pedophilia. He testified as a business man and community leader concerned that law suits would put constraints on many good organizations. Missing was that he was sitting on the Catholic Diocese Board, which was concerned with a rash of cases emerging against priests involved in child abuse. Apparently, this did not involve just one priest, who eventually went to jail, but a bunch through the Green Bay Diocese. He's running against Russ Feingold as the non-politician.
Joe Miller from Alaska first started his grifter act in Kansas where he received farm subsidies. Then he moved to Alaska and applied and received hunting and fishing licenses for the indigent. These are meant for people who must fish and hunt for their daily food and might be excluded because of the limited number of regular licenses. Joe at the time was a lawyer making $70,000 a year. Joe is mandated by law to file with the Federal Elections Commission a statement of his personal income or face upwards of $70,000 in fines. He was supposed to have done this last year but so far he hasn't. Joe also wants to eliminate Social Security. His father survives on Social Security. But you can say Joe knows how to game the system. I personally think he doesn't believe a word he says.
Christine O'Connell makes my own higher education look pretty bad. She's amazing--she has a master's from Princeton, went to Oxford and studied constitutional law at Claremont. And this was all before she even received her B.A. a few weeks ago. I wonder if she's for Sharia Law. Unfortunately, all said institutions issued strong denials of her educational prowess. Apparently she went to none of the above except Farleigh Dickinson. But this makes her more authentic--we all want such an education but we can't afford it. So just make it up. Apparently, she also made up a multi-year law suit on sex discrimination against a conservative organization. This eventually got John Fund to condemn her for lying to him. But John had no problem with her using campaign funds to pay her rent, her mother, her bowling games and her personal gas. "I have no problem with that," John said, invoking the new high standards of conservatives. Now, Christine's own pseudo-Christian non-profit is in jeipardy of losing its legal status because it failed to submit the usual legal papers to the state--and that's a very lax state. But remember Glenn Beck says Chris Coons, the Democrat, is a Marxist.
Meg Whitman has joined the criminal class--probably years before. At her losin debate effort against Jerry Brown, she opined that the law should crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The next morning her former housekeeper filed suit for damages saying that Queen Meg knew she was illegal for over nine years. Whitman fired her just before she announced she was running for Governor. This all has made the Whitman campaign go Glub,Glub, Glub.
Sharron Angle, who already has made record books for her John Birch views, wants to eliminate government healthcare programs. One slight problem, she is covered by her husband's healthcare plan he got as a government employee. In fact Sharron's main source of income is her husband's goverment pension. Also her father gets both Medicare and VA benefits.
Rand Paul with his bogus medical credentials had a little problem at Dairy Queen the other day. He was supposed to answer questions from local voters but was startled when he saw they were local union guys. He bolted to the car and refused to answer questions. What they wanted to know was how he could suggest a $2,000 deduction for Medicare, when everyone in that neck of the words depended on social security and Medicare.
The avoid questions m.o. makes sense. If you only have to report to the major corporations, why should you have to answer questions from a bunch of voters or , worse, journalists. This is the beauty of the Roberts Court decision on Citizens United. You don't have to disclose the source of your donations and you really don't have to campaign. Just buy alot of air time and make up all your credentials. Want to go to Oxford or Cambridge. Why not? The corporations don't really care what you say. There is a beauty to this.
David Plouffe was on NPR today explaining the real stakes in this election. He did a superb job. But I think the Obama people are making a mistake about Republicans wanting to turn back the clock to the last administration. They want to turn the clock back to the 1890s.
Read another analysis of the House races by a NYU poli sci professor who ran all his computer scenarios and came up with the Democrats keeping the House.
The polling data shows that all the races except in the headline contests in California are tightening up. That good news for Democrats in some places and bad news elsewhere. The Senate will be touch and go throughout the evening.
I am mortified that I got one question wrong on the Pew Survey on Religion. Top scorers were atheists, agnostics, Jews, Mormons, mainstream protestants, then the less knowledgeable evangelicals and Catholics. Catholics were the least savvy in terms of the quiz, even getting their own doctrines wrong. This survey drew all sorts of dismay from pundits. But as someone this morning wrote--the Surveys shows that Americans are more knowledgeable about religion than history or science. Scary.
My wife's note on my birthday card was that she was amazed that she has known me since the age of 21. I find it incredible also but then we are really people of Traditional Family Values instead of the phonies who don't know their own religion.
For the record, I may embrace my inner Teabagger and declare that I am Dr. R. Bruce McColm, expert in Neuroscience. I always liked neuroscience and believe it will yield amazing discoveries in the near future. So why not get ahead of the curve. If Glenn Beck can be a Doctor of Humanities and he lacks all semblence to the humane, why not.
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