Showing posts with label Harry Reid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Reid. Show all posts

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Political Satire: Mitch McConnell still the asshole even after Obama


Mitch Mitchell-The epitome of hypocrisy
Many Republican Senators, featuring Mitch McConnell at the head of the list, have made it their goal, actually a crusade, to put the good of America on the back burner with the sole purpose to stand in the way and defeat anything the Democrats propose. The movement became a monster under McConnell as the minority leader in the Senate in 2009. His quote was: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” A single-minded promise to screw the country in order to stop a great President from doing great things. They did.

But Barack Obama was elected to a second term, so now how do we get rid of Mitch McConnell? Legally, of course. With this in mind, I would like to suggest that McConnell immediately retire from the Senate and enter a monastery to atone for his sins against the former President. If he won't go willingly, maybe Harry Reid could be talked into shanghaiing him from the Congress subway system, then delivering him to the abbey. After all, Reid is a former boxer. I know this would never happen but can't you see it now?

First of all, you would have to explain to McConnell what atone means.

Second, none of the Monks would have anything to do with him. Naturally.

Third, McConnell would refuse to enter the monastery if there were any black monks; force needed

Fourth, he would fight to block any...well, just about anything that comes up within the walls.

Fifth, all the lies he tells in the monastery must stay in the monastery. Denied.

Pipe dreams? Yes, but this is what Progressives do with this kind of President and Congress.

The real story...



Sunday, December 13, 2015

Justice Antonin Scalia should be Donald Trump's running mate


Senate minority leader Harry Reid said it best, "The only difference between the ideas endorsed by Trump and Scalia is that Scalia has a robe and a lifetime appointment. Ideas like this don't belong on the Internet, let alone the mouths of national figures." This is in reaction to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's comments re. admission practices at the U. of Texas:

"There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them."

NBC News quoted Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus who called the comments "disgusting, inaccurate, and insulting to African Americans."

If we ever wondered just how deep seated racism is in America, here is a prime example from the highest court in the land, coming from an individual that is supposedly well educated, though perhaps that is no cornerstone for common sense. Scalia should resign his seat on the Court and this demand should also be coming from fellow colleagues on the Court. 

Monday, February 25, 2013

Will the US Senate fix the Washington mess?


I did a post on Wednesday of last week, “How to fix a broken U.S. Government,” which emphasized the importance of negotiating, a lost art from the days of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson.  During those periods, an old hand at the job, and Johnson and Rayburn were not only well-entrenched but also well respected, could talk to his or her fellow legislators and somehow come to a reconciliation that was favorable for both side.  This mastery of politics has been gone for, let me see, at least as far back to when George W. Bush became president.

Mitch McConnell
So far the GOP hasn’t recovered from an election they thought they would win, and Sen. McConnell has never retreated from his statement to make Obama a one-term President, which obviously failed.  Joe Palermo said following the 2012 election, “McConnell now promises the next best thing: Continue to abuse the filibuster as no Senate minority in American history has and gum up the works while demanding total capitulation on Obama's part before any bill can escape the clutches of his icy, deadening hand.”  In Washington things never seem to change.



So with McConnell as the Senate Minority Leader, how is it that Ira Shapiro thinks this dysfunctional body can fix Washington?  He says the consensus is already formed and that politics under president Obama’s second term will continue to be polarized.  But he wants a “rejuvenated” Senate to be the nation’s mediator.  Somehow I can’t see Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and Mitch McConnell coming together on any major issues, except maybe gun control.  Reid has refused to back Obama on the assault weapons ban.

Democrats do have control of the Senate and won 25 out of 33 elections in 2012, which Shapiro reads as a reaction to GOP extremism and obstructionism.  The question is whether this trend can continue with momentum leading through the 2014 elections where the incumbent President’s party traditionally loses seats in Congress.  Palermo’s article was over three months ago but now Shapiro says the country is in need of responsible adult leadership, something sorely lacking in both houses of Congress. 

Harry Reid
Shapiro the optimist thinks, “The Senate is the only realistic partner to the president in seeking constructive solutions to the nation's challenges on guns, climate change and immigration.”  I hope he is right because, aside from the economy and jobs, these are the three most important issues facing the United States.  And in continued optimism he believes the majority of the Senate is serious about facing the challenges of the country.  On the other hand we are just four days away from the $1.2 trillion in budget cuts that many say will paralyze the U.S.

Lyndon Johnson, along with Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen and Howard Baker are cited in Shapiro’s article illustrating a quality of leadership lost on today’s Senate.  Although Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell didn’t create the current political barricades in the Senate, it has certainly flourished under their watch.  Will they eventually retire having failed to accomplish the demands facing Congress today, or will they emerge finally as leaders who figure out that it is necessary to negotiate, not constantly call checkmate?  The ball is clearly in their court.

Friday, October 26, 2012

More Mormons for Obama than you might think

Romney asks, which side yoday?
A June 2012 Gallup poll found that 84% of Mormons are for Mitt Romney, 13% for Barack Obama.  Based on a total figure of approximately 5.4 million Mormons living in the U.S., the President has a solid constituency of around 702,000.  A Seattle group, Mormons for Obama, says that Romney does not represent them.  They are progressive-minded Mormons, not officially affiliated with the LTD Church, who question Romney’s stand on gay marriage, health care and religion.

And then there are Mormon feminists who feel they can exercise their women’s rights and still be devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Aimee Hickman, co-editor of Mormon feminist magazine Exponent II felt Romney’s remark about the “binders full of women” indicated his approval of powerful women around him.  But disagrees because the candidate still thinks women were meant primarily for domestic issues.

Feminist Mormon Housewives blogger Lisa Butterworth says of all the Mormon feminists she knows, none are going to vote for Romney.  An Exponent II unscientific poll recently found that Obama leads Romney in the upcoming election 72 to 30 votes.  Yet Andrea Alexander from Windham, NH said that she is socially liberal but fiscally conservative.  I could not determine just how big this group of feminists is but right now Romney can’t afford to lose any female votes.

Joanna Brooks, senior correspondent for ReligionDispatches.org and author of "The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith," said in Belief Blog that she wanted some “hard truths” and Obama did marginally address the following:

“This recession is fundamentally different than other recessions, and there are no short-term fixes.”

“Our old strategies for managing Middle Eastern conflict through military intervention or propped-up dictators don’t work. And there is no easy way forward.”

“The only thing the $3 trillion Iraq war produced for the United States was a mountain of debt and a legion of disabled Americans.”

“We need to have a serious discussion about Social Security.”

“Debts don’t get paid down without adjustments in revenues.”

Senate Majority leader and Democrat Harry Reid, a Mormon from Nevada, met with Mormon Democrats after the Charlotte convention and acknowledged there was pressure from the Mormon community to vote Republican.  He says his son was confronted at a new school by a classmate, when learning who he was, exclaimed that he didn’t know Mormons could be Democrats.  It’s not a joke the Senator said, and he’s been trying to change that for 30 years.

Mormon Democrats:

Jordan Morales, a Mormon Boise state student, learned his progressive page on Facebook was causing a real problem with LDS friends.  The whole thing even got “messy” when these friends started arguing with his mom.  All this comes at a time when Mormon Democrats are “trying to convince the rest of their church that Mormon teachings are more closely aligned with Democratic principles of social welfare and care for the needy, than conservatism's individualist ideal.”

It almost sounds like a revolution within the Mormon Church, much as I view the revived progressive movement that is going on in this country in a cycle that has determined that the conservative crusades of the last several years are not working.  Nothing from the financial to the social programs the GOP has tried has worked.  The U.S. economy almost tanked, millions are out of work, foreclose has become common and the middle class is listed among the homeless.

Unfortunately Mitt Romney wants to return the country to the policies of George W. Bush and others like him, and because of the big money Republicans favor he has been able to convince enough people that he is right to run a tight election race.  But there are factions who see through this like blacks, Hispanics and women.  In all likelihood, many Mormons will do the same on election day.
     
See my earlier blog on the major Utah newspaper that endorsed President Obama here.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Has the 2012 Presidential Campaign hit bottom yet?

Probably not, since Senate Majority leader Harry Reid’s most recent thunder-bolt on Mitt Romney’s taxes is still in the forefront of the election fight.  Word is that the GOP is in a bind over trying to explain away Reid’s accusations, giving them too much credibility, or ignoring them and assuming the assumption of guilt.  It seems that Reid has a creditable source that claims that Romney did not pay any taxes for 10 years.  Romney denies this; Reid stands by his statement.


Nevada Senator Harry Reid
Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer claims the whole thing stems from a weekly meeting of Pres. Obama’s senior campaign adviser David Axelrod with Senate Democrats, including Harry Reid.  Spicer says it wasn’t a coincidence that later that day, Reid made his statement to the Huff Post.  But the Huff people countered saying it interviewed Reid days before Axelrod's visit, making any influence from the top Obama official's Capitol Hill visit impossible.

Reid’s chief of staff, David Krone insists that the Senator’s source is creditable.  He says he knows the person and would have stepped in and said something to Reid if not.  Mitt Romney tells Harry to put up or shut up on his source.  Reid says this whole thing can be solved by the candidate releasing 12 years of tax returns, like his father George did in 1967, setting a precedent that most presidential candidates have followed for years.  Obama says it’s between Reid and Romney.

Video on the battle between Reid and Romney:

But why is Romney refusing to release any additional years of taxes if he has nothing to hide.  That is, if there are any tax returns to release.  John McCain says Romney released over 20 years of tax returns to him when vetted for vice president; does that alone establish the fact that he did pay taxes?  McCain adds that he saw nothing that would have disqualified him as a running mate.  This also comes from the man who chose Sarah Palin over Romney for VP.

The elder, George Romney
Edward Kleinbard and Peter Canellos are well known, respected law scholars and tax experts and they comment: “Either Romney has an unresolved father figure issue, or he has some special reason not to follow a tradition established by his father.”  They claim by his actions, “…Mitt Romney appears to have exempted himself from the proud bipartisan tradition of presidential nominees displaying genuine financial candor with the electorate.”  We must admit, it does look suspicious, considering also Bain Capital and all his foreign investments.

Kleinbard and Canellos charge that it isn’t current tax returns that will reveal the information necessary to judge the man, it’s what he did on his taxes in the past before he decided to run for president that matters.  And they think that a man with his financial stature should certainly have avoided “tax skeletons in his closet.”  K & C take it further in stating that basing Romney’s finances on only one return leaves the American public with “troubling” results.

When talking about the 2010 return, K & C say that “…when combined with his FEC disclosure, reveals red flags that raise serious tax compliance questions with respect to his possible tax minimization strategies in earlier years.”  These include Romney’s Swiss bank accounts, a $100 million IRA that had “remarkable” growth, a question of gift tax on family trusts, the 2010 tax return itself, and Romney’s “extraordinarily low effective tax rate.  This limited loophole costs the U.S. billions of dollars annually.

And even if Harry Reid is wrong, and he has said he cannot confirm the charge that he has made, there is still something wrong with Mitt Romney’s tax picture.  On the surface he seems like an honest person; after all, he is Mormon.  Howard Hughes hired only Mormons to attend him in his later years because he said they were honest, you could trust them.  It would seem that the only way we will know if we can trust Romney is if he releases more tax returns.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Tea Party massacred on payroll tax decision

Senate majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) has brought the Tea Party to its knees once again.  He beat Sharon Angle, a TP favorite, for his Senate seat in Nevada just a year ago, and now he backed House Speaker John Boehner, backed by radical TPers, into a corner on the payroll tax bill until they had to lose face and give in to what had been the right thing to do all along.  The only upside to this whole bizarre episode is that the American public is finally seeing the real color of these right wing fanatics.

President Barack Obama signed the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut this past Friday, a victory for himself over a Tea Party that has targeted the President since its inception and his inauguration.  Independents and moderate Republicans should view this as an example of how Democrats and progressives in general can champion tax cuts.  Also included in the bill are a continuation in jobless benefits and a delay in decreased Medicare payments to doctors that could seriously affect Seniors.

Apparently Boehner, who was originally in favor of passing the two-month deal worked out by Senate Democrats and Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, caved to the TP lunatics led by head maniac Eric Cantor (R-VA) House Majority Leader.  Some have even questioned whether it is Cantor or Boehner leading the House, and if it’s Cantor, then, up until last Friday the Tea Party had definitely been in control. 

Political analysts view this defeat and turmoil leading up to the showdown as significantly hurting the GOP in their backbone Republican philosophy of tax cuts at any cost.  It clearly shows that when it comes to the wealthy, there is absolutely no concession on taxes, but they are willing to sacrifice the middle-class and lower income groups on the basis of demanding a year’s extension over the two-months that was finally passed.



Jon Summers, who was instrumental in Reid’s win over Angle, thinks that things will go much the same way at the end of the two-month extension as it did last Friday.  Democrats are on a roll and they will get what they want in February of 2012.  Harry Reid has already predicted that the Tea Party, spawned in hard times, will just fade away as the economy improves.  In the second phase of the payroll tax cut fight, even more damage could be done to the GOP by TPers that place extreme right ideology over their country.

If you want to know who to blame, you can take a look at the list of Tea Party caucus members here, led by presidential hopeful (?) Michele Bachmann, along with some other good info on the group by Wikipedia.  The list is a blueprint of House representatives and Senate members, some of which are running for office in 2012, that we progressives want to give the boot.  This is also the gang

that is apparently enraged at John Boehner after caving to Democrats last Friday.

When Congress reconvenes in January and the fireworks start, it will be interesting to see who is on the offensive and who is on the defensive.  If the Democrats and all progressives alike don’t take advantage of their current momentum to slay the ultra conservative dragon, the elections of 2012 could well be a complete toss up.

Monday, December 19, 2011

House Speaker Boehner freaks out on payroll tax cut. Is Tea Party to blame?


Speaker John Boener
 It was a slam dunk with a vote in the Senate of 89 to 10 to pass the two-month extension on the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits, also including a deal on the Keystone XL pipeline.  But House Speaker Boehner caved to the Republican caucus that Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer described as “…a small group at the extremetry to dictate every move this nation makes.”  This sounds like Tea Party extremists to me, and once again Boehner has reneged on an agreement.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor
Everyone involved agreed it wasn’t the best and should have instead been a plan to carry these programs through for a full year.  But Boehner had earlier left it to Senate leaders to come up with a deal, one that even Republican Mitch McConnell was in favor of.  But conservative extremists, apparently led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, turned their wrath on Boehner who once again changed his mind and went with the flow.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Schumer question Boehner and the GOP’s ability to lead.

Reid has said repeatedly that the Dems. have supported the two-month deal because “that was the best we could get.”  A statement that seems to reflect a combination of the willingness to negotiate with Republicans—completely contrary to the latter’s refusal to raise taxes—and some degree of weakness that must be turned around soon if progressives are to win control of this country.  It has to start from the top down and we haven’t seen much of that from President Obama.

It is also clear that the GOP is insisting on including the pipeline issue in any payroll tax legislation because they back the oil industry as is the case with any big business.  This, even though there is some credible concern by environmentalists and the state of Nebraska where the pipeline is scheduled to cross.  But politics aside, it is incomprehensible that conservatives would make this demand in light of its opposition possibly scuttling the passage of the whole payroll tax bill, just to support the corporate world.

 

So what can you expect if the payroll tax bill is not passed?  A cancellation of the program means that individuals will pay from $700 with a salary of $35,000 to $2,341 if you earn $110,000 and up, the maximum.  But there are some questions re. just how much a continuation will spur the economy.  There are those who believe, because it takes such a broad sweep in income, there is not enough emphasis on low and middle-income households which are most likely to do the most spending in the marketplace.

But this whole fiasco is just another example of a dysfunctional government that has now taken on a life of its own.  These morons in Congress walk around in a state of denial, in delusions of grandeur actually believing what they are doing is right.  Power is king and being reelected the only goal of their actions.  However, if they think this goes unnoticed, the Pew Research Center shows discontent with Congress at record levels.  Right now two-thirds of voters believe lawmakers should be voted out of office in 2012.  Amen!

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