Conservative Two Faced Hypocrite of the Week Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) - Thinks Government Subsidized Education is OK for Him, Not for American Moms

Conservative Two Faced Hypocrite of the Week Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) - Thinks Government Subsidized Education is OK for Him, Not for American Moms

To avoid a government shutdown at the end of 2011, Republicans succeeded in their campaign to cut the federal Pell Grant program by effectively kicking up to 100,000 low-income students off the rolls.

Last week, Arkansas constituent Kelly Eubanks, a college student who has two jobs and two children, confronted her Congressman, Rep. Steve Womack (R), at a town hall meeting over his attack on the program she now relies on. But instead of any explanation, Womack lashed out at Eubanks, telling her to pay her own way by “joining the military” like he did. After refusing to answer her question, he finally just asked her to “be quiet and listen.” Blue Arkansas reports:

    According to Kelly and a handful of other witnesses, Womack happily retorted that it wasn’t the federal government’s job to pay for education (he’s doing this in a college town mind you) and then quickly added that he paid for his education by joining the military, apparently suggesting that the mom of two do the same and totally oblivious I guess to the fact that it was, in fact, the federal government that paid for his education then. Well Womack tried to skirt the rest of Ms. Eubanks question and she proceeded to try and get him to address the discrepancy she pointed out. Well at this point, according to Kelly and several other people that were in the room, Womack blew a gasket.

    He skirted the rest of my question and I called him out on it.. he ended up getting pissed off.. and screaming at me.. “are you going to be quiet and listen”, [Eubanks said.]

    According to Kelly, some of his aides came up and tried to get the mike from her, but she held her ground and kept her cool, insisting her congressman answer her question.

Watch KHBS news coverage of the town hall:

The irony here, as Campus Progress’ Emily Wood notes, is that Womack actually attended college on taxpayer money by joining the National Guard. But instead of acknowledging that fact, he dodged the issue and had the mike taken away from Eubanks. Eubanks attended the town hall with the hopes of understanding Womack’s view. “I thought maybe meeting him and asking him why he’d vote to hurt students but protect Big Oil interests, face to face, would get me a real answer,” she told the Arkansas Times. “I really thought maybe he could explain it somehow. I did not think he was a heartless or arrogant person going in to this, but I definitely do now.”

Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) is just one of your typical smiley faced fascist hypocrites otherwise known as a conservative. Government is here to serve the arrogant elite like him, not American moms who are trying their best to improve their lives and that of their children. The fanatics like Womack are destroying America from within. Taking down the educational opportunities that are frequently the only path to a better life - especially sine it has been the policy of conservatives not to attach any strings at all to those jobs big corporations that help Womack get into office, sent to Asia. Womack might be a good citizen we just need to figure out what country he is a good citizen of. It sure isn't the USA.

What Does Mitt Romney Want to Talk About in "quiet rooms"

What Does Mitt Romney Want to Talk About in "quiet rooms"

The GOP primary keeps getting funnier. Just as Newt Gingrich was telling a South Carolina Romney supporter “I agree with you” that attacking Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital career could help Democrats on Wednesday, his friendly Super PAC “Winning the Future” released the long version of its hit piece “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.” I thought MoveOn did a bang-up job last week with an ad profiling a pair of older Kansas City steelworkers left jobless thanks to Bain; this ad is so slashing MoveOn might have thought twice about releasing it. If you haven’t seen it, it’s here. Clearly, Gingrich is trying to have it both ways: Mollifying wealthy GOP donors horrified by his attacks on capitalism while continuing to bloody Romney. We’ll see how well it works.

Romney continues to insist Democrats, as well as some of his GOP rivals, are practicing “the politics of envy,” and on NBC Wednesday made what might be his dumbest remark yet. Asked whether there was ever a fair way to discuss income inequality, the GOP front-runner replied:

    I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

Maybe Mitt wants to confine talk of inequality to “quiet rooms” because he’s seen the Pew Research Center data showing that Americans think conflict is growing between rich and poor.  Two-thirds of Americans see that conflict, up 50 percent since 2009. While African-Americans are still more likely than whites to see that conflict, the percentage of whites who agree tripled. Credit Occupy Wall Street for hiking consciousness about the gap between rich and poor, but credit the GOP for creating the conditions that allowed income inequality to soar, and the top 1 percent to gobble up 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

A sly Sarah Palin called for Romney to release his tax returns on Sean Hannity’s show last night, to Hannity’s seeming distress. Palin defended Rick Perry’s “vulture capitalism” attack even as Hannity kept trying to get her to declare it unfair. She’s gone rogue again! We can only dream that Romney releases his tax returns. I think he’s less scared about showing his staggering wealth than revealing the scandalously low tax rate he pays, given how much of his income comes from investment and is thus subject to lower capital gain taxes. (I’m sure we’d also learn a lot from the tricks Romney’s accountants use to keep his effective tax rate even lower.)

Palin also demanded that Romney substantiate his claims to have created 100,000 jobs while at Bain, calling it a “come to Jesus” moment. What is she up to? Her snow-machine-driving husband Todd endorsed Newt Gingrich last week, to great derision, but it did raise questions about what the nominally neutral ex-V.P. nominee is thinking. She’s not thinking good thoughts about Mitt Romney, that’s for sure.

Meanwhile, the man who foisted Palin on the world, John McCain, today accused Romney’s anti-Bain attackers as supporting “communism.” But BuzzFeed recalls that in 2008, McCain himself attacked Romney’s Bain days. “He presided over the acquisition of companies that laid off thousands of workers,” McCain complained back then, and campaign manager Rick Davis told the National Journal:

    “He learned politics and economics from being a venture capitalist, where you go and buy companies, you strip away the jobs, and you resell them. And if that’s what his experience has been to be able to lead our economy, I’d really raise questions.”

 Below is the video a conservative PAC is running against Romney:

President Obama Announces Initiative to Help Stop Exporting American Jobs

President Obama Announces Initiative to Help Stop Exporting American Jobs

The White House announced Wednesday that it would step up its efforts to improve the economy by encouraging both U.S. and foreign companies to generate more jobs at home of the sort that have been shipped overseas or lost to foreign competitors, a process being called by the new buzzword, "in-sourcing." Included in those efforts will be tax breaks and $12 million in new resources for the SelectUSA initiative begun last year:

    “Since day one, this Administration has been focused on encouraging investment and job creation here at home,” Vice President Biden added. “The business leaders coming here from across the country today have looked at the facts and concluded what the President and I have been saying all along: that America is the best place in the world to do business and create jobs.  We’re calling on other companies to follow their lead and bring jobs back to America—jobs that provide middle-class families not just with a paycheck, but with a fundamental sense of dignity.”

The process of "out-sourcing" has for many years contributed to the off-shoring of millions of American jobs to foreign companies and the shuttering of businesses coast to coast. The practice has hit U.S. manufacturing especially hard as emerging nations have taken advantage of an intensification of globalization, which encourages a relatively free flow of goods, services, capital and financial capital across international boundaries but maintains more or less strict immigration laws.

As a counterpoint, in-sourcing seeks to reverse the flow of jobs with government policies that encourage businesses, both U.S. businesses and foreign ones, to invest in the States. Those policies can include not only tax breaks but also tax disincentives for those who continue sending jobs overseas.

The White House announcement was made in conjunction with an in-sourcing forum that brought 14 large and small U.S. companies to meet with President Obama and discuss what kinds of policies might work to encourage the generation of jobs here instead of abroad. The 14 were Ford, DuPont, Otis Elevator, Intel, Siemens, ThyssenKrupp, Rolls Royce, Master Lock, Lincolnton Furniture, GalaxE Solutions, AGS, KEEN, Chesapeake Bay Candle and NOVO 1.

This might be all for nothing since conservatives are doing everything they can to increase the number of unemployed before the election to try and make the president look bad.

None of the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates Are Serious About Deficit Reduction or Stopping Redistribution of Wealth to the Wealthy

None of the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates Are Serious About Deficit Reduction or Stopping Redistribution of Wealth to the Wealthy

The 2012 Republican candidates are largely in lockstep when it comes to economic policy, wanting to give huge tax cuts to the rich and corporations while doing next to nothing to boost consumer demand or help the middle class and the unemployed who have been battered by the Great Recession. In fact, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, the average tax cuts received by the richest 1 percent of Americans under the Republican plans would be 270 times as large as the cut received by the middle class:

    The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.

Perry wins the award with a tax cut for the richest 1 percent that is 270 times larger than his middle class tax cut, while Gingrich’s is 190 times larger. Santorum and Romney pull up the rear with tax cuts for the rich that are 100 times larger than the cuts for the middle class, while CTJ did not analyze Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul’s plans. (CTJ uses a current law baseline, rather than a current policy baseline, to calculate its cuts. Using a current policy baseline, millions of middle class families would see a tax increase under Romney’s plan.)

CTJ also noted that “the cost of the tax plans proposed by Republican presidential candidates would range from $6.6 trillion to $18 trillion over a decade.” Therefore, “even the meager tax cuts that would go to low-income and middle-income taxpayers under these plans would almost surely be offset by the huge cuts in public services that would become necessary as a result.”

The conservative field of candidates are classic example of robbing Peter to pay Paul, or putting a little more money in one pocket of the middle-class and taking it out of the other. One of the results of progressive taxation is that a little bit of the extraordinary wealth accumulated at the top goes back to help pay for bridges, roads, medical research, firefighting equipment, public universities and so forth. All of those things and more will suffer even more budget cuts. For what? So multimillionaires and billionaires can hoard even more unearned income than they already have.

If Rick Santorum is God's Candidate than God Loves Corrupt Pathological Liars

If Rick Santorum is God's Candidate than God Loves Corrupt Pathological Liars

Behind the sweater vests, the faith and family, and the self-definition as a congressional reformer lies another Rick Santorum. This Rick Santorum favors big business, curries favor from lobbyists, and helped to bind the Washington influence industry to the Republican Party while serving in Congress.

Beginning in 2001, after Republicans seized control of Congress and the White House, then-Sen. Santorum (R-Pa.) began hosting Tuesday morning meetings with a select group of lobbyists. These meetings were part of a larger plan -- originally launched in the 1990s by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), conservative activist Grover Norquist and others when the GOP retook the House of Representatives after 40 years of Democratic control -- to pressure lobbying firms and trade associations to dump their Democratic lobbyists and replace them with Republicans. Named after the Washington business corridor famous for housing lobbying firms, the K Street Project was aimed at installing a permanent Republican majority in Washington.

Journalist Nicholas Confessore explained Santorum's role in the K Street Project in a 2003 Washington Monthly article: "Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each [top lobbying job] is filled by a loyal Republican -- a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors."

This wasn't just backroom chatter. There were real direct effects on policy. When Jack Valenti, the longtime chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, retired, Republicans led by Santorum and DeLay sought to pressure the trade group to hire a Republican. The MPAA ultimately replaced Valenti with former Clinton administration Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, deeply offending leaders of the K Street Project.

Santorum brought up the Glickman hire at a closed-door Republican caucus meeting and was quoted in a 2004 Roll Call article saying, "Yeah, we had a meeting and, yeah, we talked about making sure that we have fair representation on K Street. ... I admit that I pay attention to who is hiring, and I think it's important for leadership to pay attention."

Later in 2004, the Republicans in Congress voted down $1.5 billion in subsidies for the movie industry. Grover Norquist told Roll Call at the time that the movie industry's hire of Glickman was one of the reasons Republicans scuttled the subsidies. "Hollywood has recently expressed contempt for the Republican leadership in the House, Senate and White House," Norquist said.

The MPAA did ultimately hire a Republican for another top position, and many other big influence-industry jobs started to fall into the hands of partisan Republicans. A 2003 Washington Post article reported, "A Republican National Committee official recently told a group of GOP lobbyists that 33 of 36 top-level Washington positions he is monitoring went to Republicans."

These new jobs provided partisans with a direct line to client funds -- that is, contributions from corporate executives and political action committees -- to funnel to the Republican candidates of their choosing. In some cases, these trade associations ran issue advocacy campaigns to support GOP policies or to attack vulnerable Democratic lawmakers.

Running for reelection in 2006, Santorum leaned heavily on this new fundraising base. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Santorum received $496,683 from Washington lobbyists, the most of any candidate during that election cycle. Over his career, Santorum received $731,937 from lobbyists in Washington.
If the K Street Project's goal was to turn Washington's lobbying world into a petri dish of movement conservatism, it backfired. The project's real outcome was to strengthen the connection between the Republican Party in Washington and the business community at large. The business-backed influence industry gained new power over the GOP lawmakers -- and it paid off. Pharmaceutical companies won big in the prescription drug expansion of Medicare, energy company lobbyists wrote most of the 2005 energy bill, and legislation was filled with earmarks requested by the influence peddlers.

The tight ties binding business, lobbyists and the Republican Party became one of the key gripes of the Tea Party movement as it rose to action in 2009 and 2010. Former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has decried "crony capitalism" and called lobbyists "symptomatic of the greater problem that we see right now in Washington." Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) referred to lobbyists as a "distinctly criminal class" in his 2010 run for the Senate.

Matthew Continetti, conservative writer and former editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote a book about the corrupting influence of lobbyists in the Republican Party, "The K Street Gang," back in 2006. In a National Review interview, he explained, "Many lobbyists place the private over the public interest and the economic interests of a client over the national interests of the American people. This contributes to the degradation of public-spiritedness and national identity, and should trouble anyone concerned about American politics and American civic life."

Indeed, by 2006, the K Street Project was a national scandal. Two of its best-known participants, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and DeLay, had been indicted for other crimes -- Abramoff for corruption and DeLay for money laundering. Santorum distanced himself from the project, stating in February 2006, "We don't have a K Street Project. ... I have never called anybody or talked to anyone to try to get anybody a position on K Street with one exception, and that is if someone from my office is applying for a job and an employer calls me."

But one month later, after the temporary, scandal-induced hiatus, Santorum restarted his lobbyist gatherings. He lost his reelection bid later that year by a whopping 18 percentage points, partially due to his role leading the K Street Project.

Rick might be the "values" candidate if you have the values of a gangster, which most conservatives do. If conservatives really cared about corruption in Washington or at the state level there would hardly be any. Conservatives ignore corruption because if they can get what they want using corruption, that justify the corruption. never mind that they are as usual destroying America one piece at a time.

Conservative Republican ALEC-Linked Group Revealed As Attacking Average American's Most Fundamental Rights

Conservative Republican ALEC-Linked Group Revealed As Attacking Average American's Most Fundamental Rights

Last month, Maine voters delivered a major rebuke to Gov. Paul LePage (R) and the Republican-held legislature when they approved a referendum restoring election day voting registration rights in the state. Earlier this year, state legislators passed a bill repealing the state’s 38 year-old law allowing citizens to register at the polls on election day.

Tens of thousands of Mainers responded by petitioning for the matter come to a referendum. Issue 1 was one of the most-anticipated votes on election day this year, with pundits watching closely to see how citizens would react to the Republican-led war on voting, which ramped up in states across the country this year.

Recognizing the referendum’s importance, voting rights opponents poured money into the campaign to repeal election day registration. In fact, just two days after the state’s campaign finance reporting deadline, a secret conservative donor funneled $250,000 into the race, allowing the No On 1 campaign to make significant TV ad buys in an inexpensive media market.

Per state law, however, the identity of donors must be revealed within 45 days after the election. In fact, the entire $250,000 worth of late money came from a single source: the American Justice Partnership.

The AJP is a conservative legal organization based not in Maine, but in Michigan. On their website, the group states they are fighting against “the scheming George Soros money machine” which is “trying to sabotage your right to vote,” a claim apparently made without a hint of irony. Though the AJP doesn’t disclose where its funding comes from, the Bangor Daily News notes that it has partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the past, a group that has been instrumental in the proliferation of voter ID laws across the country.

The AJP’s secret $250,000 contribution ultimately accounted for over 78 percent of all the money raised by the No On 1 campaign. In other words, over three-quarters of the funding for opponents of election day registration in Maine came from Michigan. (This money was then used to run ads decrying “outsiders from other states” who were influencing the Maine election.) With Mainers of all stripes explaining to ThinkProgress why they cherish having the option to register at the polls on election day, it’s not altogether surprising that the predominance of financial support for No On 1 came from out of state.

Though AJP’s website correctly warns that “Your right to vote is at stake”, it’s groups like AJB and ALEC that are threatening that right in the first place. Maine voters stood up to the influence of voting rights opponents in November, however, passing Issue 1 by an overwhelming 61-39 margin and restoring election day registration in the Pine Tree State.

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has lashed out at the Obama administration’s taxpayer subsidized grants to clean energy start-up companies. “The U.S. government shouldn’t be playing venture capitalist,” wrote Romney in October. “The very process invites cronyism and outright corruption.” But public records show that Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, repeatedly persuaded the government to play venture capitalist when it came to its own portfolio of companies.

News outlets have recently focused attention on Romney’s history as a businessman at Bain, which he founded in 1984. What hasn’t been reported, or fully explained by the candidate, is how Romney often got ahead in the private sector by using government help.

The likely GOP nominee made much of his estimated $250 million fortune buying companies, reorganizing them, and selling them for a profit. Though Romney, whose only government experience is his one term as Massachusetts governor, is quick to claim that he turned around investments using sound management and data-driven strategies, he does not mention one aspect of his success. Bain Capital owned companies that padded their profits using millions in public subsidies. In other cases, firms owned by Bain employed K Street lobbying firms to pursue lucrative government programs.

Gosh, are you as shocked as I am. Conservatives say they are all self-made, pulled themselves up by their own boot straps types and always get ahead by hard work. here we have Romney, just one among many conservatives who used big government, de facto tax payer subsidized money, special favors and inside contacts to get ahead - kind of like the Russian mob.

Starting in 2007, Bain Capital began retaining various  lobbying firms to pressure lawmakers to keep open a loophole that allows much of the earnings by private equity managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than the top income bracket of 35 percent. Given Romney’s profit-sharing retirement deal, the campaign to extend the loophole, which still hasn’t been closed, likely boosted the candidate’s fortune. (Romney has refused to release his tax return, leaving questions about his income.)

As Romney pillories Obama for using the government to fix problems in society (health reform, the auto bailout, etc.), he invites a closer examination of his own career. A balanced view of the Romney record shows he has never had any qualms about government help when it came to his own bottom line. Whether through hiring insider lobbyists or funneling taxpayer subsidies to his companies, government assistance has been part and parcel to the rise of Romney.

Is Romney's middle name Marx or Mao or Gov'mint Welfare Baby. He and his comrades are the ones who fed at the trough like pigs and bankrupted the country. Isn't that just the kind of twisted immoral crook America needs as its next president. You know, since G.W. Bush is ineligible to run again.

Vote For Romney The Choice of Conservative 17th Century French Aristocracy

Vote For Romney The Choice of Conservative 17th Century French Aristocracy

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

    TODD: Do you think Citizens United was a bad decision? [...]

    ROMNEY:Well,I think the Supreme Court decision was following their interpretation of the campaign finance laws that were written by Congress. My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately and the creation of these independent expenditure committees that have to be separate from the candidate, that’s just a bad idea.


It’s not entirely clear from this interview that Romney understands what happened in Citizens United. That decision emphatically did not follow any “interpretation of campaign finance laws that were written by Congress.” Rather, Citizens United threw out a 63 year-old federal ban on corporate money in politics. Citizens United was a case of five conservative justices deciding they knew better than America’s democratically elected representatives, and it was not a case of judges following the law.

More importantly, however, Romney’s proposal to allow wealthy donors to give candidates whatever they’d “like to a campaign” is simply an invitation to corruption. Under Romney’s proposed rule, there is nothing preventing a single billionaire from bankrolling a candidate’s entire campaign — and then expecting that candidate to do whatever the wealthy donor wants once the candidate is elected to office. Romney’s unlimited donations proposal would be a bonanza for Romney himself and the army of Wall Street bankers and billionaire donors who support him, but it is very difficult to distinguish it from legalized bribery.

As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that [those candidates are] going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.

 Romney thus believes that corporations are people. If corporations are people that means Prince Romney believes money and free speech are one in the same. Those with the most money get the most free speech. Romney would have been a great French monarch.

The Desperate Mitt Romney Tells Lies About President Obama Instead of Attacking His Sleazy Opponent Newt Gingrich. No Wonder Mitt is Falling in The Polls

The Desperate Mitt Romney Tells Lies About President Obama Instead of Attacking His Sleazy Opponent Newt Gingrich. No Wonder Mitt is Falling in The Polls

Here's something Mitt Romney is being firm and consistent on: lying about the Obama administration's record on regulations. Monday in New Hampshire, Romney said:

    The level of regulation in America, every the regulators, the government, come up with new regulations. And they send them out. The rate of regulatory burden has increased four-fold since Obama has become president. Four times the amount of regulation coming out per year as in the past. And so businesses say, ‘gosh, I’m not sure I want to invest in America.’

Of course, both the claim about the increase in regulation under Obama and the claim about the resulting effect on business are false, but it's not the first time Romney has gone there. Think Progress takes us through the sorry history:

    When Romney made the same claim during an interview with NPR in September, NPR asked the Romney campaign for verification, at which point the campaign was forced to admit that “the Governor misspoke.”

    Instead, the Romney camp told NPR that new regulations under Obama are twice what they were under President George W. Bush. Trouble is, that’s not true either, as Bloomberg News pointed out:

        Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

    Later on during the event, Romney claimed that, according to an official government report, regulations costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion annually.

You guessed it: That's not true either. Just a fraction of a percent of layoffs have been attributed to regulation under Obama, and more than one study, including an OMB estimate, have found that the economic benefits of major regulations outweigh their costs, sometimes by a large margin. Never mind that regulations keep us safe on the job and give us clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. But while the specific numbers Romney spews on this will probably change, I think we can count on him to be unwavering and neither flip nor flop in his basic commitment to falsehood.

I'm not sure how simply repeating the word regulation over and over again became an attack tool by elitist conservatives. You have rules for your kids so they do not misbehave. Regulations are just rules for business so they don't misbehave or they at least do so less often. Mining regulations save miners' lives - when mining companies adhere to them. You think driving on our highways is dangerous now, try scraping the regulations and see how safe it is simply to get from point A to Point B. Conservatives continue to deal with problems with childish and simplistic answers to complex problems. Not one of them should be reelected until the conservatives movement grows up and becomes responsible adults.

America Haters at Fox News Hosts Pollster Who is Paid To Make Up Smears About Health Care Reform

America Haters at Fox News Hosts Pollster Who is Paid To Make Up Smears About Health Care Reform

You may recall GOP pollster Frank Luntz's recently released a 28-page memo, "The Language of Healthcare 2009: The 10 Rules for Stopping the 'Washington Takeover' of Healthcare," which is intended to help conservatives defeat President Obama and congressional Democrats' health-care reform initiatives.  As we've noted over the past two weeks, Fox News has provided a forum for the Luntz talking points while Politico hyped his memo and downplayed a progressive pollster’s pro-health care reform memo.

Well, now it seems Luntz doesn't want anyone asking who paid for his "10 rules" memo.  Via Huffington Post's Sam Stein:

    Conservative communications guru Frank Luntz has written the playbook for GOP opposition to the Obama administration's health care proposal. His plan, which is heavy on framing the president's proposal as a government "takeover," is already popping up in statements from top congressional Republicans and on Fox News, despite the fact that no Democratic legislation has been proposed.

    But when it comes to discussing who funded his messaging, the wordsmith Luntz is notably devoid of words. Asked about his funder in an interview with the New York Times Magazine to be published on Sunday, Luntz was close-lipped:

    Q Who paid you to write the health care memo?

    A It's not relevant.

    Q A pharmaceutical company?

    A No pharmaceutical company was involved.

Riiiiiiight, it's not relevant who paid for the memo – a memo with talking points now being parroted by Fox News and other conservative media outlets and figures.  I know it may be a bit of a stretch to expect Luntz to understand that this is an issue about his credibility as a pollster – if he has any left – but it's the right thing to do.

 Luntz was one of the so-called experts used by the anti-American conservative movement to spread the falsehood about health care reform being socialism. That was found to be one of Poltifacts lies of the year. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your point of view, health care reform or the ACA was a free market solution.

Conservatives and The 1 Percent Have Violated America's Most Basic Tenets

Conservatives and The Elite 1 Percent Have Violated America's Most Basic Tenets

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.

That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.

Back in 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day – three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime.”

But Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford’s auto workers into customers who could afford to buy Model T’s. In two years Ford’s profits more than doubled.

That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.

The basic bargain is over – not only at Ford but all over the American economy.

New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

1929, by the way, was the year of the Great Crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

The full essay is at the link. Conservatives and their supply-side economics ( which some Democrats have also bought into over the last three decades) have not quite brought back the economics of the pre-Civil War plantation, but they have brought us closer. There is till a healthy middle-class, but half of America, about 52% are wage slaves. They can work hard year in year out and their chances of getting ahead are much slimmer then the chances of their grandparents. We have this America because conservatives want all the money that was produced ultimately by labor in the hands of the very wealthy. In America wealth is power. Why does the incredibly wealthy Rupert Murdoch use the Wall Street Journal and Fox News to spread absurd propaganda about health care reform, the minimum wage and the social safety net ( Medicare). Because they want the fruits of America's labor going to the top, not to workers. Power follows the money and conservatives want the American people to be as powerless as possible.

How Private Banks Caused the Economic Crisis

The CDO Daisy Chain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The CDO Daisy Chain (Guide to graphic above)

Here's how the Wall Street Money Machine worked in the run-up to the financial collapse: Banks created CDOs from mortgage-backed securities. Banks often retained the large top portion, called the "Super Senior." The bottom portion, or "Equity," was often sold off to hedge funds. The middle portion, or "Mezzanine," often went into new CDOs. The main buyers of those new CDOs were once again the banks.


How Private Banks Caused the Economic Crisis

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown -- collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created -- and ultimately provided most of the money for -- new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.

Individual instances of these questionable trades have been reported before, but ProPublica's investigation, done in partnership with NPR's Planet Money, shows that by late 2006 they became a common industry practice.

An analysis by research firm Thetica Systems, commissioned by ProPublica, shows that in the last years of the boom, CDOs had become the dominant purchaser of key, risky parts of other CDOs, largely replacing real investors like pension funds. By 2007, 67 percent of those slices were bought by other CDOs, up from 36 percent just three years earlier. The banks often orchestrated these purchases. In the last two years of the boom, nearly half of all CDOs sponsored by market leader Merrill Lynch bought significant portions of other Merrill CDOs.

ProPublica also found 85 instances during 2006 and 2007 in which two CDOs bought pieces of each other. These trades, which involved $107 billion worth of CDOs, underscore the extent to which the market lacked real buyers. Often the CDOs that swapped purchases closed within days of each other, the analysis shows.

There were supposed to be protections against this sort of abuse. While banks provided the blueprint for the CDOs and marketed them, they typically selected independent managers who chose the specific bonds to go inside them. The managers had a legal obligation to do what was best for the CDO. They were paid by the CDO, not the bank, and were supposed to serve as a bulwark against self-dealing by the banks, which had the fullest understanding of the complex and lightly regulated mortgage bonds.

It rarely worked out that way. The managers were beholden to the banks that sent them the business. On a billion-dollar deal, managers could earn a million dollars in fees, with little risk. Some small firms did several billion dollars of CDOs in a matter of months.

"All these banks for years were spawning trading partners," says a former executive from Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, a major insurer of the CDO market. "You don't have a trading partner? Create one."
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The executive, like most of the dozens of people ProPublica spoke with about the inner workings of the market at the time, asked not to be named out of fear of being sucked into ongoing investigations or because they are involved in civil litigation.

Keeping the assembly line going had a wealth of short-term advantages for the banks. Fees rolled in. A typical CDO could net the bank that created it between $5 million and $10 million -- about half of which usually ended up as employee bonuses. Indeed, Wall Street awarded record bonuses in 2006, a hefty chunk of which came from the CDO business.

The self-dealing super-charged the market for CDOs, enticing some less-savvy investors to try their luck. Crucially, such deals maintained the value of mortgage bonds at a time when the lack of buyers should have driven their prices down.

But the strategy of speeding up the assembly line had devastating consequences for homeowners, the banks themselves and, ultimately, the global economy. Because of Wall Street's machinations, more mortgages had been granted to ever-shakier borrowers. The results can now be seen in foreclosed houses across America.

The incestuous trading also made the CDOs more intertwined and thus fragile, accelerating their decline in value that began in the fall of 2007 and deepened over the next year. Most are now worth pennies on the dollar. Nearly half of the nearly trillion dollars in losses to the global banking system came from CDOs, losses ultimately absorbed by taxpayers and investors around the world. The banks' troubles sent the world's economies into a tailspin from which they have yet to recover.

The banks did what we usually see in sitcoms where the character uses one credit card to make payments on another and yet another credit yard to pay another and so forth. Similar to a Ponzi scheme. It is not in the interests of citizens who support and open and healthy capitalist free market system to try and shift blame for what these super big banks to the working poor. Such thinking and myth making only makes it more likely there will be another collapse. As a matter of fact since conservatives in Congress have fought to keep new financial reforms from actually being acted on, the banks are back to buying and selling CDOs.

Conservatism Down The Rabbit Hole - America deserves better from its business leaders: Making a profit shouldn't be the only bottom line

Conservatism Down The Rabbit Hole - America deserves better from its business leaders: Making a profit shouldn't be the only bottom line

Do corporations have a social responsibility to be decent, upstanding citizens? Is there a moral imperative that the likes of Bank of America, General Electric and Apple should boost employment, refrain from contributing to inequality, or restrain themselves from despoiling the environment, simply because those are the right things to do?

If you spend even a cursory amount of time investigating this question, you will speedily find yourself reckoning with the answer delivered four decades ago by the economist Milton Friedman: A most emphatic no.

In “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” originally published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1970, Friedman, the arch-deacon of free market economics, declared that any businessman who thinks a corporation should take “seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else” was “preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism.”

    Busi­nessmen who talk this way are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades … In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

The great irony of Friedman’s hard line is that in 1970, his words probably sounded much more extreme than they do today. Despite decades of lip service to the idea of “corporate social responsibility,” the notions that corporations do best when most untrammeled by regulatory constraint or that they should only be guided by a desire to generate the maximum return on investment for their shareholders are now bedrock ideological fixations of the contemporary Republican Party.

In fact, one could well argue that we are currently closer to Friedman’s utopia than during any other period in living memory. The Supreme Court has vastly loosened restrictions on corporate spending on the political process, trade policy has supported a decades-long trend toward foreign investment, offshoring and outsourcing, corporate taxes are at a historic low, and even the worst financial crisis in decades has hardly resulted in more than a slap on the regulatory wrist for the guilty parties.

America had at least five decades of that shrill, pompous and self-righteous messaging from conservatives about "values". Where are they? America keeps waiting and getting screwed over by the "values" party. Maybe they meant they had the values of despots, plutocrats or Medieval monarchs. When is middle-class America going to wake up and stop getting the shaft from people who think think values are the same thing as economic tyranny.

America Hater Newt Gingrich Has Ethics. They Just Happen to Be Abominable

America Hater Newt Gingrich Has Ethics. They Just Happen to Be Abominable

The GOP presidential primary is a lot like a kindergarten t-ball game: When it comes to being in first place, just about everybody gets a turn. And now, congratulations, Newt Gingrich: It’s your turn!

Steve Kornacki wrote about the Public Policy Polling survey that found Gingrich is following in the footsteps of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain as the Republican flavor of the week. Gingrich benefits from three things: A lot of Republicans can’t stand Mitt Romney, Cain and Perry have shamed themselves in public, and by contrast, he’s had no bad debates. So far he’s come off as smart and affable, trying to rally his rivals against the big, bad media that’s trying to get them to fight.

Since Gingrich has mostly been in single digits, far back in the polls, his rivals have humored him and ignored his liabilities. That’s about to change, and Gingrich, like Perry, Cain and Michele Bachmann before him, will likewise wither under the hot sun of political scrutiny. The seemingly affable professor and author is a hothead with many political liabilities and almost as many enemies. He’s committed so many political and ethical transgressions that his baggage has baggage.

Gingrich is probably best known for serving his wife with divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer surgery, so he could marry his mistress, whom he later divorced to marry a staffer. But he’s also probably the only politician, who when you’re asked “What’s the worst thing he’s done?” has done a lot of things that rival leaving his cancer-stricken wife for his mistress. For most people in the world, in fact, that would be the hands-down worst act ever; for Gingrich, it’s just not that clear-cut (h/t Jamie Kilstein).

For instance, he’s the only House speaker in American history to be disciplined by Congress for ethics violations.  In 1998, he paid a $300,000 fine after he was found to have been misusing his tax-exempt foundations for political gain.

OK, those have to be the two worst things, dumping his wife who had cancer for his mistress, and congressional ethics sanctions, right?

But wait, but there’s more:

    Shutting down the government in 1995 at least partly because President Clinton allegedly snubbed him by seating him in the rear of Air Force One on a flight home from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. No, really, he told reporters the “snub” was “part of why you ended up with us sending down a tougher continuing resolution.”
    Advocating that the children of welfare recipients be taken away from their parents and raised in orphanages.
    Leading the drive to impeach Clinton over lying about adultery when he was himself lying about adultery, cheating on his wife with a staffer, Callista Bisek, who became his third wife.
    Insisting President Obama suffers from “a Kenyan anti-colonial mindset” like his Kenyan father, even though he barely knew his Kenyan father.
    Denouncing Paul Ryan’s radical budget (that was actually smart) as “right-wing social engineering,” then flip-flopping and warning that “any ad which quotes what I said Sunday is a falsehood.”
    Railing against Obama’s alleged “class warfare” when he’s run up a $500,000 tab at Tiffany’s.
But my all-time favorite Newt Gingrich “worst” was the time he blamed the horrendous case of Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother( a Republican who was having an affair with her Republican father-in-law) who murdered her young sons in 1994, on Democrats. Smith, you’ll recall, first blamed her son’s drowning deaths on a black man who supposedly car-jacked her, but it turned out, she did it herself. Just before the 1994 election, in which his party swept back into power, Gingrich said:

     I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That’s the message for the last three days.

Two days later, Gingrich defended his comments by insisting he’d been saying the same thing for years: that Democratic rule had frayed the moral fabric of the country: “We need very deep change if we’re going to turn this country around.” Asked directly if he was saying electing Republicans could stop killings like Smith’s, he said flatly: “Yes. In my judgment, there’s no question.”

He later blamed the Columbine and Virginia Tech killings on liberals, too.

America has never been perfect, but its "moral" fabric has always been in most danger by conservatism. Conservatism - forget the names of the political parties Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives were in both parties until the 1980s - has always been the biggest threat to America. Conservatism by its very nature is anti-American. Conservatism as a movement has more in common with the ultra-nationalism of the Japanese leading up to WW II. Gingrich fits in perfectly. he believes in a dog-eat-dog culture and economy. He believes America should be ruled by the elite and voting rights given only to those who believe in the far Right agenda.


Scott Walker recall, Day 1, by the numbers and you can download a Walker recall form here. Beware of false recalls conservative nuts who will throw your recall petition in the trash.

Conservatism Has Become The Cult of Ayn Rand

Conservatism Has Become The Cult of Ayn Rand

Many have commented on the remarkable callousness fashioned by this Republican presidential field. Most prominently, Herman Cain maintained that the poor and unemployed are responsible for their own plight; Ron Paul claimed that people who refrain from buying health insurance but become debilitated should not be bailed out by government healthcare—they should just die instead, his audience helpfully suggested (or hollered, rather); and just about all the candidates have recommended ever harsher, ever more absurd measures to keep out poor immigrants on our border with Mexico: double fences, electric fences, even soldiers with ‘real guns and real bullets,’ as Herman Cain put it.

What’s driving this show of meanness? You might say it’s just what the electorate—or some loud part thereof—wants. It seems like there are some seriously angry voters out there these days, and I’m sure the recession is taking a toll on people’s patience and generosity. And yet, I suspect this is no fleeting trend, but something with deeper ideological roots. In short, I sense Ayn Rand.

Rand has always had a good following, but her popularity has surged in recent years as conservatives repeatedly invoked her to counter Obama’s “Socialist” agenda. She has an impressive roster of conservative devotees: Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ron Paul. Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul quoted Ayn Rand at length during a congressional committee meeting this past year—to argue against government mandates for energy efficient light bulbs, of all things. Congressman Paul Ryan, the rising star from Wisconsin who drafted the Republican’s celebrated plan to slash the federal budget, reportedly urges all his staffers to read her works.

This is a powerful fan-base, and many have feared the consequences of Rand’s influence. I think we are seeing it now, for there are clear strains of her venom in the excesses of the Republican candidates—and beyond. Her trademark callousness is increasingly evident throughout our political discourse regarding the poor and vulnerable of society. The congressional super-committee charged with agreeing on a trillion dollars in federal deficit reduction is reportedly contemplating cuts to food stamps, while Republicans remain steadfast that taxes not rise on the rich. This, as the recession lingers and poverty rates soar, and we witness the greatest concentration of wealth among the rich since the 1920s. The Republican stance is mind-boggling in these circumstances—but Rand would certainly approve; indeed, she might favor far worse. Consider:

In her popular novels, Rand glorifies ambitious, fiercely independent individuals who soar and succeed by virtue of their own resources and willpower alone. It’s her ode to individualism that captivates her fans. Also the simplicity of her world view, I suspect: Rand’s is a Manichean universe populated by a few great souls on one side, and the inept masses on the other; the masses would perennially muddle in their own misery if not for the exceptional creativity and bravery of a few to do great things, and it’s up to the masses to keep out of their way. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand declares “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.” Upon little reflection, Rand’s reasoning is obviously specious. Who on earth rises to the top without the help of someone, anyone at all? Indeed, luck plays an important role in a person’s success, too—if you evaluate it honestly, that is. Rand’s thinking is a pleasant enough fiction for those at the top of the heap, but it’s wholly improbable, naïve—and rude.

Pry a little further, however, and Rand’s thinking quickly becomes quite cruel. In a 1967 article entitled “Requiem for Man,” Rand issues a scathing rebuttal to Pope Paul VI who dared suggest that capitalists must be mindful of global wealth disparity and the sufferings of the poor, and recognize a social obligation to help the unfortunate (the Vatican has notably issued similar remarks in a recent statement on the global financial crisis). Rand slams the Pope for urging us to show brotherly love to poor 3rd world “savages." To the contrary, she declares, when civilized man “discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions” he should not feel pity, but “a burning stab of pride” for “the achievements of his nations and his culture…” Amazingly, Rand fails to acknowledge how much the civilized nations have prospered at the expense of the global poor thanks to imperialism. Would she have us applaud the imperialists for their opportunism and exploitation?

In Rand’s view, the poor are better subject to our derision than compassion. What they want, what the Pope calls us to be sensitive to, are perfectly despicable needs: “The inhabitants of the world [that the Pope’s encyclical] proposes to establish are robots tuned to respond to a single stimulus: need—the lowest, grossest, physical, physicalistic need of any other robots anywhere: the minimum necessities, the barely sufficient to keep all robots in working order, eating, sleeping, eliminating, and procreating, to produce more robots to work, eat, sleep, eliminate, and procreate.” Her message to the millions starving in the world: your needs are not worth our consideration; just die why don’t you.

I’ve long wondered why—or how—Rand’s disciples conveniently, miraculously, ignored her heinous conclusions. It’s time Rand was seen for what she is—no glossing over it. Clearly, it’s not acceptable for our political leaders to be associated with her thought. Conservatives—any of her disciples indeed—have a clear choice: marginalize her work accordingly, or explain how a vision of radical individualism such as Rand’s does not lead to hate. A lot could be gained by the latter. At the very least, it might reveal the appropriate boundaries of our individualism, and make us more thoughtful to the vulnerable among us.

Firmin DeBrabander is Chair of Humanistic Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Conservatives or Republitarians are like children who fall in love with superheroes like the simplistic ones Rand portrays in her fictional novels. In the real world we grow up and realize we're not cartoon characters and never can be. The rabid Right never grows up. They hold on to childish notions or delusions they got theirs without any help or any luck or any of the infrastructure a civilized society provides via taxes.

Why Do Republicans Hate American Families - Senate Republicans Kill the Democrats' Infrastructure Jobs Bill

Why Do Republicans Hate American Families - Senate Republicans Kill the Democrats' Infrastructure Jobs Bill

Senate Republicans, again, filibustered a component of President Obama's jobs bill, the Rebuild America Jobs Act. In any other world, it would have passed 51-47, but this is a Senate, so a majority vote means that the bill dies. Go USA!

This bill had $10 billion to establish an infrastructure bank, a proposal that has received plenty of Republican support in the past, as well as $50 billion in immediate funding for roads, bridges and airports, something else Republican Senators have supported in the past. When they were just blowing hot air. When it wasn't the nation's infrastructure and economy at stake.

The measure would have been funded by a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than a million dollars a year, or about 1/500th of American citizens, who would have seen an increase of about 1/217th in their tax bill. Just in case you were left with any doubt over whether Republicans stood with the 1 percent or the 99 percent.

12:46 PM PT: Sens. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman voted with the Republicans (I know, you're shocked). The Republican version of the bill, which really didn't have anything m
Senate Republicans, again, filibustered a component of President Obama's jobs bill, the Rebuild America Jobs Act. In any other world, it would have passed 51-47, but this is a Senate, so a majority vote means that the bill dies. Go USA!


12:46 PM PT: Sens. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman voted with the Republicans (I know, you're shocked). The Republican version of the bill, which really didn't have anything much to do with jobs, failed 47-53.

Conservatives think it is more important the economy be dragged down to make Democrats look bad than it is to do what is best for the country. Modern conservative Republicans are not patriots as much as they are right-wing zealots who only care about their radical agenda. to make America look like half like a third world country and the other half gated communities where the bankers and elite live.

Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS

Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS

Perhaps the most significant mainstream supporters, though, are the only two most Americans have heard of. “Despite the Times’s finger-wagging that the movement is often muddled and misinformed, none of that is the point. The point is justice,” writes self-help guru Deepak Chopra, who visited Zuccotti Park and led meditations to help protesters turn “anger into awareness.” Suze Orman, who has made millions telling feckless consumers how to pay down debt and live on a budget, sounds like she’s channeling Naomi Klein: “To deride the movement because it has yet to formulate a well-delineated platform says plenty more about the critics than the protestors,” she wrote in the Huffington Post. “Revolutions tend to be messy, especially in the early going. The unholy alliance of much of Congress, K Street and Wall Street that has set the agenda from day one of the financial crisis is simply trying to protect its turf by casting aspersions on the ad hoc nature of the movement to date. I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything less. After all, there’s no way they could stage a substantive rebuttal based on facts.”

 After the New Deal, essentially starting Reagan America embarked on that great experiment known as trickle down or voodoo economics. That didn't work out so well for a middle-class that had enjoyed annual growth under New Deal policies. Time to correct course, start rewarding work instead of wealth.

Alleged ‘Skills Gap’ Takes Spotlight Off Who’s to Blame for Massive Jobs Shortageby Roger Bybee

Perhaps far too much attention has been devoted to the government role in job creation and retention, when American CEOs need to demand more from their employees and from the U.S. educational system to solve the jobless problem over the long term, this narrative suggests.

But in reality, this whole “Education, Training, and Skills” narrative serves to divert attention from the massive shortage of jobs and Corporate America's misdeeds to “failing” teachers and supposedly under-educated workers. Corporate America has failed to produce virtually any net gain in U.S. jobs since 1999; the period was the only decade when U.S. employment grew by less than 20 percent.

In short, the Education, Training and Skills "frame” on our economic problems plays several useful functions for the CEOs and the rest of the richest 1 percent. It takes the spotlight off CEOs' decisions to wipe out decent-paying job opportunities. As Gordon Lafer writes in The Training Charade,

    Workers are encouraged not to blame corporate profits, the export of jobs aboard, or eroding wage standards—that is, anything that they can fight—but rather to look inward for the source of their misfortune and the seeds of their resurrection.

Everyone, especially conservative loons like Herman Cain, Rick Perry and the conservative bloggers want America to blame anyone except corporate America for unemployment.

Something Devious Going On - Why Is Darrell Issa (R-CA) Ignoring Bush Era Fast and Furious Type Program

Something Devious Going On - Why Is Darrell Issa (R-CA) Ignoring Bush Era Fast and Furious Type Program

As House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) continues to try to pin the flawed "gun walking" tactic employed in Operation Fast and Furious on the Obama administration, it's becoming increasingly clear that problems with ATF's Phoenix division date back at least into the Bush era.

TPM has obtained the documents relating to another Bush-era ATF operation (on top of Operation Wide Receiver) which deployed the "gun walking" tactic. The development was first reported by Pete Yost of the Associated Press.

In fact, ATF officials wrote in 2007 that the gun walking tactic had "full approval" of the U.S. Attorney's Office being run by an interim Bush appointee and that the U.S. Embassy in Mexico was "fully on-board."

Under DOJ policy, illicit arms shipments are supposed to be intercepted whenever possible. But the emails show that just like in Operation Fast and Furious, official planned to allow guns to "walk" across the border and into Mexico in an attempt to identify traffickers higher up in the operation (rather than low ranking "straw purchasers," who are difficult to prosecute thanks to the lack of an anti-trafficking gun law).

On Sept. 27, 2007 -- when the Justice Department was reeling from the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- ATF agents in Phoenix and Mexico were conducting partial surveillance of suspects who purchased numerous weapons at a federally licensed firearms dealership.

After they watched the group purchase 19 weapons on Sept. 21 and 24 and additional weapons on Sept. 27, they watched as the weapons crossed the border into Mexico.

"Phoenix AZ ATF agents observed this vehicle commit to the border and reach the Mexican side until it could no longer be seen," ATF assistant director Carson Carroll wrote in a Sept. 28, 2007 email. "We, the ATF (Mexico) did not get a response from the Mexican side until 20 minutes later, who then informed us that they did not see the vehicle cross."

A few days later, William Newell -- the ATF official in charge of the Phoenix division -- tried to assure colleagues that everything would be okay.

"I know you have reservations but please rest assured that this will go as planned, as allowed per MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) with Mexico, with full approval of the USAO (confirmed again late this afternoon), and will have big payoffs for us and the Department in addresing (sic) Mexico's concerns that we (US) aren't doing enough to address their concerns," Newell wrote in an Oct. 4, 2007 email. "Trust me, I'm with Gov't."

"Wow, I feel so much better," William Hoover, the ATF Assistant Director for Field Operations wrote in an email the next morning.

Hoover's emails lay out all the questions that congressional and Justice Department investigators are examining about Fast and Furious.

"This is a major investigation with huge political implications and great potential if all goes well. We must be very prepared if it doesn't go well," Hoover wrote in a Oct. 5, 2007 email.

"I would like to discuss the following: Have we discussed the strategy with the US Attorney's Office re letting guns walk? Do we have this approval in writing? Have we discussed and thought thru the consequences of same? Are we tracking south of the border?" Hoover wrote in the email.

Current Attorney General and Obama appointee Eric Holder was investigating the Bush era gun walking program. So a fair minded American has to ask themselves who Issa is making it sound as though all this gun walking is some how Eric Holder's fault. Gosh do you think this is yet another political witch-hunt by right-wing conservatives that has about as much substance as Rush Limbaugh's brain. Maybe, just maybe Issa is also trying to distract attention from his own corruption - American Family Voices asks for investigation of Issa.