Delaware Watch is committed to an alternative–progressive analysis of Delaware’s politics, history, culture, environment and economy.
"It's class warfare and my class is winning." Warren Buffett
The value of any commodity, ... to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Book 1, chapter V.)
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works....(Barack Obama)
The Republicans lie that Obama hasn't lowered the taxes of the vast majority of Americans has taken seed. The Republicans are proof that if you tell a lie long enough in time the public will come to believe that it's true. This is what happens when regaining power is more important than integrity.
Only 12 percent of the public say that the Obama administration has lowered their taxes since coming to office, despite the fact that the White House's stimulus package cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, a new opinion survey found.
In addition, the CBS/NYT poll found that 24 percent of respondents said that their taxes had actually increased under the Obama administration -- which is, again, not true. Fifty-three percent said their taxes stayed the same.
It turns out that the lying that Congressional Republicans have been doing about National Security matters is legion. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow chronicles more lies by more Republicans. Newt Gingrich is but one instance.
Well, Newt Gingrich has told another whopper. This time he was caught in short order. His lie was clearly intended to smear Obama. Apparently, these right-wing lunatrons feel they are entitled to simply invent facts to achieve their rhetorical aims.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, leveling harsh criticism against the Obama administration.
After Gingrich assailed the administration for reading Miranda Rights to Detroit undie bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Stewart drew a comparison to something that happened under George W. Bush.
"Didn't they do the same with Richard Reid, who was the shoe bomber?" he asked the Republican icon.
"Richard Reid was an American citizen," insisted Gingrich.
Reid is actually a British citizen of Jamaican descent.
At the end of the show, Stewart realized that Gingrich had falsely claimed the shoe bomber was an American citizen and noted that to his audience.
I have always thought that many of the politicians and would-be politicians in the tea party movement were nothing more than outright opportunists. But if you want evidence, notice how the tea partiers have turned on one of their own:
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who is considered by some to be the "father of the Tea Party movement" faces three opponents in the March Republican primary, the Dallas Morning News reports.
"The Tea Parties have awakened a lot of everyday people here and across America," Tim Graney, one of Paul's opponents, told the Morning News. (link)
All of Paul's primary opponents are associated with the tea party movement and they constitute "more [primary challengers] than he has faced in the past six primaries combined" (link).
The Paulites must be experiencing political shock. He isn't loved by the tea party movement. He is an outsider. One has to laugh.
Isn't Paul kooky enough for the tea partiers? What is their problem with him?
The newspaper reports that Paul's challengers say he is too focused on national ambitions and that he has has not voted in support of federal aid for his district. They have also criticized his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (link)
In other words, Paul isn't enough like a conventional Republican. That shows you what the tea party is really all about: it's a movement supporting conventional Republican positions. It's not really about Independents. That's just window dressing.
Let's say for the sake of argument that the Congressional Republicans are correct. That the Obama stimulus is bad for the economy, that it won't create jobs and it will not work. Wouldn't it follow that these Congressional Republicans wouldn't want any of the stimulus funds given to their state? How, then, can this be explained?
Sen. Christopher S. Bond regularly railed against President Obama's economic stimulus plan as irresponsible spending that would drive up the national debt. But behind the scenes, the Missouri Republican quietly sought more than $50 million from a federal agency for two projects in his state.
Mr. Bond was not alone. More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government's many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.
The letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, expose the gulf between lawmakers' public criticism of the overall stimulus package and their private lobbying for projects close to home. (link)
And why did Senator Bond want these toxic funds for his state?
In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Mr. Bond noted that one project applying to the USDA for stimulus money would "create jobs and ultimately spur economic opportunities."
It would what? Create jobs? Spur economic opportunity? But Senator Bond isn't the only federal legislator who admits privately what he denies publicly. Remember Rep. Joe Wilson who yelled "You lie!" to President Obama during his speech to Congress last September? He voted against the stimulus bill, but guess what benefit he hopes to gain from the stimulus funds for his congressional district.
Rep. Joe Wilson, South Carolina Republican who became famous after yelling, "You lie," during Mr. Obama's addresses to Congress in September, voted against the stimulus. Nonetheless, Mr. Wilson elbowed his way into the rush for federal stimulus cash in a letter he sent to Mr. Vilsack on behalf of a foundation seeking funding.
"We know their endeavor will provide jobs and investment in one of the poorer sections of the Congressional District," he wrote to Mr. Vilsack in the Aug. 26, 2009, letter.
At times this kind of hypocrisy from the Congressional Republicans has a short time frame:
On Feb. 13, 2009, Sen. Robert F. Bennett, Utah Republican, issued a statement criticizing the stimulus — but two days earlier, he privately forwarded to Mr. Vilsack a list of projects seeking stimulus money.
"I believe the addition of federal funds to these projects would maximize the stimulative effect of these projects on the local economy," he wrote.
Isn't that interesting? Just two days before Senator Bennett was—publicly—certain that the stimulus package wouldn't work. Two days later—privately—Senator Bennett had his hand out and praised that "stimulus effect" that the funds would provide. And on and on it goes: Congressional Republicans who publicly opposed the stimulus bill, privately endeavoring to have their states and districts benefit from it. What explains this dissonance? I believe the explanation for their hypocrisy is simple, in spite of their attempts to justify it. These Congressional Republicans are liars. They took a public position for political purposes that was contrary to their privately held beliefs. They knew that the stimulus package would create and save jobs. They simply lied publicly about what they knew. But when they thought no one would find out, they expressed their privately held belief that the stimulus package would be helpful to their states and districts. There is no nuance here. Just lying. Just publicly denying what is good and helpful as part of a strategy to regain political power. In other words, just anti-social behavior.
When Democrats criticized President Bush regarding national security concerns, their patriotism was questioned by Republicans. My, how things have changed with a change in administrations:
President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism adviser said Sunday that lawmakers and others are using national security to score political points and defended the handling of the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner.
Deputy national security adviser John Brennan complained that politicians, many of them Republicans, were unfairly criticizing the administration for partisan purposes and second-guessing the case with a "500-mile screwdriver" that reaches from Washington to the scene of the abortive attack in Detroit. (link)
When the Republicans had an opportunity to voice concerns when the cameras weren't rolling, they were mute:
Brennan said he had personally briefed top GOP lawmakers on Christmas night about the arrest of accused bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and that none of them raised objections….
Among those he said he briefed were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio; and the top Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan.
It's only when the cameras are rolling that they complain, which demonstrates they are politicizing their national security "concerns."
Republicans have been outspoken in criticizing the administration for treating Abdulmutallab as a civilian and reading him his rights.
Perhaps a picture will help the dimwits see that the Obama stimulus has stopped the hemorraging of the economy which began under George W. Bush:
See. Unemployment grew under Bush during the last year of his presidency and has steadily declined during the first year of the Obama presidency. Only fools and the benighted disagree.
Tea bagger Republican candidate for the US Senate (Illinois) Patrick Hughes lost his primary bid in a landslide that was so large it can only be regarded as a repudiation of his reactionary, tea-bagging orientation:
Mark Kirk handily won the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate from Illinois, defeating his closest challenger Patrick Hughes by a landslide.
With 98% of precincts reporting, Kirk led with 56% of the vote to Hughes's 19%. (link)
The next time tea baggers or tea bagging fellow travelers "predict" that tea bagging candidates will sweep the elections in November 2010, just repeat "56 percent to 19 percent" and then laugh uproariously in their benighted faces.
Want to know what's driving the current US budget deficit? The largest factor isn't Obama's economic stimulus or TARP. By far the largest single factor is the Bush tax cuts that mostly benefited the wealthy:
Those tax cuts need to be rolled back from the wealthy now. You can't pay your bills without income.
Sarah PAC, Sarah Palin's political action committee, raised more than $1.4 million in the second-half of 2009, according to the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza. That figure brings the group's fundraising haul to $2.1 million for 2009.
But it's in the expenditures that things get interesting:
The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had her political organization spend more than $63,000 on what her reports describe as "books for fundraising donor fulfillment." The payments went to Harper Collins, her publisher, and in some instances to HSP Direct, a Virginia-based direct mail fundraising firm that serves a number of well-known conservative politicians and pundits.
Sarah PAC spent another $8,000 on colorful bookmarks designed by a Nashville-based event branding firm. And her committee paid her publisher $20,000 for what appears to have been the cost of sending her personal photographer and another aide along on her book tour.
Let's see how this works. In part Sarah Palin uses the money she gets for her PAC (money that is supposed to go to political candidates) to buy copies of her books—books for which she is paid royalties. Unless she received no royalties for those books, things look very fishy.
And how much did political candidates receive from the Sarah PAC? Less than the total of what was expended on the "books for fundraising donor fulfillment."
She donated $64,600 to candidates and party committees.
"Governor Palin is providing tremendous leadership as the Tea Party movement and constitutional conservatives strive to take our country back," Rand Paul said in a statement. "Sarah Palin is a giant in American politics. I am proud to receive her support."
Paul also acknowledged that he "has received a generous donation from Governor Palin's PAC."
Palin, Tea Partiers, and another Paul. The kooks run together.
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