They Aren’t Congressmen, They Just Play Them On TV. No, Seriously.

Constitution?

What Constitution?

If you needed any more proof that the GOP reading the Constitution aloud in Congress is merely political theater, well, here you go:

Two House Republicans have cast votes as members of the 112th Congress, but were not sworn in on Wednesday, a violation of the Constitution on the same day that the GOP had the document read from the podium.

The Republicans, incumbent Pete Sessions of Texas and freshman Mike Fitzpatrick, missed the swearing-in because they were at a fundraiser in the Capitol Visitors Center. The pair watched the swearing-in on television from the Capitol Visitors Center with their hands raised.

And yes, beyond the obvious problems with this, you read that correctly:

The pair watched the swearing-in on television from the Capitol Visitors Center with their hands raised.

There is no provision in the Constitution for a remote swearing-in by television. On Thursday, Fitzpatrick was one of the members who read the Constitution from the dais.

You can read more of the stupidity and hypocrisy of these two here from the Huffington Post.

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LeMieux Whines: No Tax Cuts? Then No Unemployment Benefits!

I don’t know about you, but every day I am stunned by the amount of hypocrisy and misinformation that we hear from the Republican Party. Granted, politicians are known to stretch the truth on occasion, but this is different. Ever since President Obama was elected, the GOP have all but launched attack after attack, blocked every form of legislation, and tried to bring government to a halt. Merely because they lost the 2008 election.

Lots of Republicans are getting their twisted messages out to their constituents is by bombarding them with repetitions of misinformation via Twitter. (Kind of like Sarah Palin, but most of them can spell and form sentences.) In other words, they lie on a mass scale.

Here’s just one of the latest examples. If you’re one of the countless unemployed in the state of Florida, or even elsewhere in the country, and about to lose your unemployment benefits, you have this guy in part to thank:

Sen. George “Stand-In” LeMieux (R-FL).

Why? Well, let’s let him explain:

That’s right. He cut off unemployment benefits because he didn’t get what HE wanted: the Bush tax cuts. Of course he calls them “tax hikes” to misinform. It sounds better than saying you’re giving those who make $250,000 or more a year a tax cut.

His reasoning:

“While we’re all certainly sympathetic and want to work to make people go back to work — my home state of Florida certainly suffering with very high unemployment — we need to know how we’re going to pay for it so we don’t put this debt on our children and grandchildren.”

Funny thing, although not at all surprising, LeMieux doesn’t say anything about how he’ll pay for the Bush tax cuts for the rich does he? There’s a good reason. I hate to keep posting this chart, but since they keep calling tax “cuts” tax “hikes” I’ll put it up again:

That’s what the Bush tax cuts do to the deficit.

As Sen. Stand-In said,

“we need to know how we’re going to pay for it so we don’t put this debt on our children and grandchildren.”

Give George LeMieux a call and ask him how he would pay for those tax cuts here.

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Oil And Hypocrisy Don’t Mix

Discussions about the BP oil spill disaster are starting to get heated with lots of finger pointing and blame is being placed everywhere. The most egregious sniping coming from the self-proclaimed “Drill Queen” and oil-lust spokesperson Sarah Palin, who came out with the laughable statement that Obama was too close to the oil industry as reasoning for the slow clean-up. Her comments got attention because they were so ridiculous, and once again she illustrated the depths of her hypocrisy. But she is by no means alone.

I heard about Palin’s latest comments when they came up on “Morning Jackass Joe” yesterday, a show known largely as a huge example of hypocrisy in action. Yesterday was no different.

In the past week or so while Joe Scarborough was doing his tired “What is Obama doing wrong, and how wrong is he doing it?” act, he was busy handing out blame for the oil spill. He’s gone on and on about how badly he thinks it’s being dealt with, namely because he claims that the government isn’t doing enough. Never mind that he preaches almost on a daily basis that “Big Government” is bad and “Free Markets” are good, he now professes “outrage” over “inaction” by the government in dealing with BP.

He’s one of a tired and long list of those who don’t want government interfering with private business, and yet when something like this happens, they blame the government and not the company or the industry itself. In their minds, little or no regulation by the government is the ultimate goal.

Well, congratulations are in order for Joe and his “Free Market” pals. Goal reached! The oil industry has been so de-regulated that this oil spill, and the mess that we are only beginning to grasp is a result. As for cleaning it up and stopping the leak? Well, they didn’t think that part of the plan through, it seems.

Not that Scarborough hasn’t had words for BP too, he has. He complains how bad this disaster will be “back home in Pensacola, FL.” He’s right. I was there a couple of weeks ago and it was already causing problems then. But there’s one thing Joe doesn’t mention during his angry rants. While he brags on nearly a daily basis about “when he was in Congress” and “what we did back in 1994″ he’s left one thing out. He can’t just lay blame with the government and BP.

Why? Because “when he was in Congress back in 1994,” along with many others, he was the recipient of donations from BP. So, while he’s playing the “blame game” he criticizes others for doing, he might want to “look in the mirror” as he suggested someone else do this morning.

Scarborough has a lot in common with Sarah Palin. Those who take donations from, and side with the oil industry shouldn’t throw tar balls at others when rigs blow up and the oil starts flowing.

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$134 Haircuts, Liquid “Lunches,” Rubio Says “Charge It!”

It looks like there’s even more questionable charges on that GOP American Express card bill of Marco Rubio’s. He claims that many were party expenses, but that’s just a bit hard to swallow.

For instance, a charge of $134, which might seem like a minimal charge, but not so much considering it was for a visit to an upscale Miami barber.

While Rubio claims that he repaid all the personal expenses he charged in 2007 and 2008, an amount of $16,052, there were periods during that time that he didn’t repay everything. The GOP picked up the tab for $93,566 in charges including $4,000 for repairs to the Rubio family minivan and a rental car for five weeks. These charges are raising eyebrows even from members of Rubio’s own party.

Asked whether the party should release credit card records to clear the air before the 2010 election, former state party chairman Tom Slade on Thursday said, “Hell yes.”

“We should not under any circumstances attempt to make this not totally transparent,” Slade said. “We’ve got to take a hit for it because we have mismanaged money that people gave us and used it for purposes they did not intend it to be used.”

Rubio’s campaign adviser is attempting to explain away at least some of the charges, but even that seems a bit ridiculous:

Rubio’s campaign adviser, Todd Harris, explained some charges Thursday that were picked up by the party. A $765 charge at Apple’s online store was for a “hard drive to store political files.” Purchases at Winn-Dixie for $53.49 and Farm Stores in Miami for $78.10 were for “soft drinks.” Two bills from Happy Wine in Miami were for “lunch,” though one of the charges is listed in a party report as “beverages.”

So Rubio is charging the GOP for “liquid lunches” from a wine store?

Harris said a $368 car rental in Las Vegas in 2007 was to meet a donor. Asked for the name of the donor, Harris snapped: “I didn’t ask, and it’s not your or anyone else’s business.”

In a written statement to the Times/Herald on Wednesday, Rubio said the state party agreed to pay half of his insurance deductible to cover damage to his car at a political event in 2007. He said the party also signed off on a rental car in Miami for five weeks that cost $2,976.

The family minivan was damaged, and repaired at the GOP’s expense because the damage occurred at a political event? So by that logic, would all auto related charges be covered too because all Rubio’s actions are perpetual “political events?” Loose description anyone?

Many have called for an investigation into the Republican Party of Florida’s credit card scandals recently, and not just Rubio’s. Unfortunately, Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum (who is also running for Governor to replace Charlie Crist) is not all that interested.

Attorney General Bill McCollum, the Republican front-runner to replace Crist as governor, said of releasing the credit card records: “To open this at the present time could compromise a criminal investigation.”

Rubio has claimed he paid back some of the expenses “out of an abundance of caution” as if he thinks it might not be necessary, but rather he’s doing everyone a favor by paying back some of the bill. He’s actually more outraged by the fact that this came out in the first place, and he’s accusing the Crist campaign of leaking the information, to which Crist has responded, saying he knows nothing about it.

“What matters to me is that the people have the right to know how people spend their money, how they comport themselves, how they conduct themselves, before they put themselves up for public office,” said Crist, who did not have a party credit card. “It’s happened to the speaker. He apparently doesn’t like it. That’s too bad. Welcome to the NFL.”

I don’t think we’ve heard the last of it either.

The IRS limits tax-exempt organizations like political parties to spending money only on influencing elections. Rubio did not make monthly payments to American Express and made no contributions to the bill during one six-month stretch in 2007, records show.

Miami lawyer Ben Kuehne, an election law expert who has represented the Florida Democratic Party, said some of Rubio’s expenses “sound incredibly personal, not political.”

“This is party money. Not the elected officials’ money,” he said. “The person using the card shouldn’t be the one who determines whether it is business or personal. From a legal point of view, there are red flags all over the place.”

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HCR Proposal: “Too Long! Too Short! No Pony!”

I had planned to write this morning about the latest excuses the Republicans might come up with to continue to try to block any legislation in the next round of the long-suffering Healh Care Reform negotiations.

My intent was to try to find some humor in the situation, since the past year of following every move of the HCR bills has, quite frankly, almost made me ill. I hadn’t written about it in a while because I didn’t want to. As many others, I’ve been burned too many times and was afraid to start it all over again with the recent hubbub.

My first thought concerned everyone’s favorite Orange House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Tanning Bed). Since he last complained that the bill was way too long, I was going to write that he would probably now say the plan, at only 11 pages, would be much too short.

Well, little did I know that he would beat me to it! Upon sitting in front of my computer this morning, I gazed upon the TPM website, and there he was in all his glowing spray tanned glory along with the words: TOO SHORT!!

From TPM:

A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner today ridiculed President Obama’s health care proposal because it’s too short.

“The White House’s ‘plan’ consists of an 11-page outline, which has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office or posted online as legislative text. So they want to reorganize one-sixth of the United States’ economy with a document shorter than a comic book, and they’re complaining that they can’t find our plan on their own website? C’mon,” said the spokesman, Michael Steel, in an email to reporters.

Remember last October, while lugging around a giant stack of papers, which he dropped with a loud “thud!” for dramatic affect, and claimed it was “1,990 pages of bureaucracy?”

“The best way to get a sense of what Speaker Pelosi’s takeover of health care looks like is to actually look at it. Just shy of 2,000 pages, it runs more than 620 pages longer than the government-run plan Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993,” Boehner said.

Sadly, when Boehner now says the proposal is just too short, he isn’t trying to be funny. He is merely a desperate little man, who apparently has no clue how silly this makes him look. I can hardly wait until the meeting this Thursday. Boehner will probably burst into tears on camera, and whimper “We wanted a pony!”

Or did he already say that before I finished typing this post?

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Rep. Bill Young: “GOP Stimulus Hypocrite Club” Member

Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) was honored in a special tribute Saturday night at the annual fundraiser for the Republican Party of Pinellas County. There had been rumors circulating recently that he might retire and not seek reelection after 40 years in office, but that ended Saturday night when he announced that he would indeed be running again. One of the reasons he gave was because of his wife:

“Beverly told me that if I didn’t run, she was going to,” Young said. So he thought, “maybe I better stay on the job.”

Ouch? Not sure what exactly that means…….

Young told the crowd of about 500 that he wasn’t trying to be coy about his decision whether to run for re-election. He simply doesn’t believe in long campaigns or even in raising campaign money during non-election years.

What a guy. He went on to brag to the crowd about his record, specifically defending the designation of the Republican Party as the “Party of No” and he vowed to continue the fight against “radical left” ideas:

After confirming his plans to run again, Young alluded to the fact that Republicans have been derided as “the party of no.” He said he would continue to fight “radical left” ideas.

“I voted against the bailout, and I’m going to do it again,” he said to applause.

“I voted against the stimulus, and I’m going to do it again,” he added.

“I voted against the government takeover of our health programs, and I’m going to do it again.”

Oh no! Those crazy radical ideas again! Jobs! Health care! Stimulus money! When will the horrors end? Why must this poor man continue to fight the good fight! It’s been 40 years! If only he didn’t have to take a stand against these radical policies! There is just NO REST for the weary. What sacrifice! Why, he voted against the stimulus not once, but twice!

Roll Call Vote #46

Roll Call Vote #70

See?

Unfortunately he left something out. Perhaps his speech writer has also been on the job too long at 40 plus years, because Young actually DOES like at least one of those “radical left” ideas. You see, he’s another in a long list of GOP stimulus hypocrites who say no to the stimulus in public, vote against it on the record, and then scramble to reap the benefits when it suits them. Young isn’t even shy about it. He has a virtual guide for opportunities to take advantage of federal stimulus money right on his website:

Beneath all those “Stimulus Funding” links it says the following:

The above websites detail opportunities for businesses to take advantage of federal stimulus money made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The President’s, the State’s, and the City’s websites primarily serve as portals to help direct users to specific opportunities.

He’s a radical! Who knew?

As for the “radical” health care legislation, why there’s a statement about the complexity of it all, and more links for information on that as well. There’s also lots of information on his support for biomedical research, and bone marrow donor programs. Not exactly anti-health care issues there either, C.W.

Maybe after 40 years on the job it’s hard to keep track?

Maybe not.

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Yet Another Bush Family “Blast” From The Past

Maybe it’s the weather, but the Wing-Nuts seem to be flocking to Florida like Snowbirds from the north. Last week Floridians had to endure a tour of Sarah Palin nonsense in Daytona Beach.

This week it was the Bush clan. Not just Jeb, who never really leaves us for long, much like the line from the movie “What About Bob?”:

“BOB’S NOT GONE. HE’S NEVER GONE!” opens door to sheepishly smiling Bob, “SEE!?”

Unfortunately, our “Jeb-Bob” is far from harmless like the one in the movie.

So Jeb made an appearance in Naples this time, and he brought along Dad and brother Dubya. They came to speak for money (of course) starting at $200 a pop. (I for one am stunned there’s still a market for these guys.) I certainly hope ticket holders got what they paid for.

But hey, why don’t you be the judge? Would you pay to hear this s…stuff? Below are some choice quotes to illustrate just a bit of the “Bush brilliance” George W. “dazzled the crowd” with. Don’t be shy, pick your favorites!

When Angle asked George W. Bush what the biggest change had been in his life since leaving the White House, he responded: “Traffic jams.”

“Life in the White House is incredibly comfortable.”

He said it was amazing to go from “100 miles to zero.” He quipped how now domestic policy means taking out the garbage.

Gotta jump in here for a minute. Is it me or does he sound like he’s “Going Gump?” Almost expect him to say something like “Policy is like a box of chocolates….” But I digress.

“I’m through with politics,” he said. “I had my run. I gave it my all.”

Pardon one more teeny tiny editorial comment here: THANK GOD FOR THAT! Not for lack of trying, but you didn’t quite give it your all because THE GLOBE IS STILL SPINNING, if barely.

On the question of problems with his lack of bipartisanship? Well, that was the war’s fault:

“It’s hard,” George W. Bush said. “Nobody wants war.”

On federal spending and the deficit, and stop me if you’ve heard this one, 9/11′s fault:

Bush said when he was in office it was hard to keep federal spending down when “we got attacked,” referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that toppled the World Trade Center towers.

On his War Of Choice (I’ll reluctantly restrain myself here):

“I met a lot of families of the fallen.”

“I believe in the universality of freedom.”

(Deep breath…calm…)

And finally, because Jeb is every bit as “deep” and his brother George, one last insightful chestnut from our former Governor:

Jeb Bush said he didn’t have it nearly as tough as Florida’s governor. “Being governor was a blast,” he said.

Yes and it was a “blast” for all of us too Jeb. A blast to the economy, a blast to jobs, a blast to education…so many blasts, so little space to archive and write them all down.

I can only assume that Daddy, George H.W. Bush was probably spending his time still weeping somewhere off in a corner…..

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Fake GOP Census Is Back For Another “Count”

The Grand Obstructionist Party is back at it again with the fake census campaign mailers this week in Florida and they’re turning up in Democratic mailboxes as well as Republican, also like the last time. Before it wasn’t clear if that was a careless oversight, a mistake, or deliberate. This time it seems clear it’s the latter of the three.

The “questions” have gotten more negative and downright ugly, and of course they still ask for lots of cash and would still like you to send them a check to “cover the cost of tabulating” their survey, whether you donate or not. (Are you racing for a pen and your checkbook out of pure pity? I didn’t think so.)

For those who do write that check, they also have one last new survey question at the end of the form:

SPECIAL QUESTIONS FOR RNC MEMBERS ONLY (Your gift today makes you a member in good standing of the RNC.)

As of right now, which Republican (if any) do you prefer (or are leaning towards) as our official GOP nominee for President in 2012?

• Haley Barbour
• Mitch Daniels
• Jim Demint
• Newt Gingrich
• Mike Huckabee
• Bobby Jindal
• Sarah Palin
• Tim Pawlenty
• David Petraeus
• Mitt Romney
• John Thune
• Other____________

Decisions, decisions. While they aren’t too surprising, there seem to be a couple new names on that list.

Too bad  that these two aren’t listed:

• Is That The Best You Can Do?
• You’ve Got To Be Kidding

Because I think those two both have a good shot at the nomination.

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