Eric Cantor: Another Dishonest Republican

While much of the media is focused on the scandals involving Governor Mark Sanford R-South Carolina and Senator John Ensign R-Nevada, they should not exclude taking a look at Eric Cantor. Tauted to be a GOP rising star just as was Sanford and Ensign, the Virginia congressman regularly appears in the media ranting and raveing about the need for "fiscal responsibility". I say he's a hypocrite like so many of other dishonest Republicans.

Yes, I said HYPOCRITE! How else to describe someone who's a leading critic of President Obama's Recovery Act and joins his congressional colleagues to urge Virginia's Department of Transportation to apply for stimulus money for high-speed rail? If that isn't two-faced, what is?

Katrina vanden Heuvel explores the depth of Cantors lies in a recent posting on the Nation Editor's Cut Blog:

"He's also a demagogue: "Millions of jobs will be crushed by the Administration's policies." Say what? The stimulus may have been too small and overemphasized tax cuts, but it's helped states, including his own, with longer unemployment benefits, expanded food stamps and subsidies for people who've lost jobs to extend their health insurance. It's also kept teachers in the classroom, cops on the street and got workers rehired. Hours after Cantor delivered the GOP's weekly radio address blasting the stimulus, Vice-President Biden announced that $1.5 million of the bill's money would go to the Richmond Police Department to retain officers. And $20 million is going to Chesterfield County, a suburb of Richmond, to help 275 teachers from being fired. Virginia's working men and women should remember that Cantor fought hard to cut a provision in the stimulus bill that was designed to help low-income workers.

... But Cantor & crew don't care about creating jobs. They want to spin the debate about the economy so their party, which has absolutely nothing to offer working people, games the 2010 midterm elections."

The congressman doesn't only distort the truth when it comes to the economy, filling his messages with what John Nichols calls "demagogic and alarmist rhetoric about out-of-control government spending and federal debt. He appears to be raiding the federal treasury in order to fund his partisanship. Cantor does not appear to have any problem with the government funding his political projects".

Earlier this year, with as much fanfare as a beaten party can muster, congressional Republicans launched an initiative to "rebrand" their party as something voters might actually find appealing. Cantor and his compatriots called their project the National Council for a New America. While that project has yet to come up with anything "new" in the way of policy or vision, the Republican political initiative is up and running -- that's as at a cost to the federal government. The council is being run out of Cantor's congressional office, and the anti-corruption group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is asking why.

This week, CREW filed a complaint with the House Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) against Cantor and requesting an investigation into the National Council for a New America. CREW's complaint: The Republican council ought not be run out of Cantor's congressional office when it has an exclusively political purposes. John Nichols asks the right question in his recent post "Congressman Eric Cantor r-Unethical": "And the congressman's constituents need to ask why, at a time when Cantor says the federal government does not have the money to pay for healthcare and education, it seems to have more than enough money to pay for the congressman's politicking."

Republicans such as Eric Cantor value their own political ambitions more than the welfare of the people they represent. They don't feel remorse or guilt that their leadership under President Bush caused this situation that the current administration inherited. They obviously have no intention of contributing to solutions in lieu of the "just say No" strategy or their more recent push "to go slow and kill" any pending legislation that the Democratics might be considering.
What I don't understand is why are we still listening to people who broke the back of the middle class, engineered the largest redistribution of wealth upwards to the very rich, and now dare to attack fairly modest government-led efforts to help working families weather this economic crisis and to extend affordable health care to all who want it?

In a must-read Nation article, "A Jobless Recovery" (July 13), Leo Hindery Jr. and Leo Gerard lay out a set of common-sense proposals for a job-led recovery.

"We can either focus our economic recovery efforts on creating full employment for the 150 million workers who are not part of the top 0.2 percent and on rebuilding the country's manufacturing base. Or, as we have been doing for nearly three decades, we can concentrate on policies that mostly just benefit the incomes of the wealthiest 300,000."

Least I forget another interesting fact, The congressman's wife, Diane Fine Cantor, is a Managing Director in a division of Emigrant Bank a subsidiary of New York Private Bank & Trust Corp. which was one of 47 private banks to receive bailout cash under the Troubled Asset Relief Program in exchange for preferred shares.

Is it any wonder I fill slightly sickened when I hear Eric Cantor talking out of both sides of his mouth?

Sources : "Editor's Cut" and "The Beat" Blogs, The Nation, and Wikipedia

Prayer for the President

Lord,
We pray for optimum health, mental clarity, spiritual and political prosperity for President Barack Obama. We pray that what he lacks in political 'experience' Your Holy Spirit’s supernatural wisdom and power makes up for it.

We also pray that when his enemies come upon him they will stumble and
fall; and that no weapon formed against him will prevail. We pray that your
love will fill his heart to the end that 'Your will'is done through him.




We pray mightily for his protection. As we plead the blood of Jesus over him and his family, we ask you to dispatch
legions of angels to protect him from all hurt, harm,
danger,and from all accidents and incidents
as he is your child and the President of these
United States of America .

We thank and praise you for the prayers of the righteous, and for answering our sincere prayers.

In Jesus' Name,
AMEN.

Obama the "Alien"

I'm getting really ticked off by the rising "birther" movement. While watching several news shows last night, lengthy sessions of the shows covered a town hall meeting held by Rep.Mike Castle, R-DE which was totally disrupted by a "birther". For those unfamiliar with the term "birther", the name is associated with those who foster the position that our president, Barack Hussein Obama, is not a natural citizen of the United States. Therefore his election is not "legal" since he would not meet the constitutional requirements for holding the presidency.

After denouncing President Obama's as an alien, the "birther" yelled and screamed that she was an American, that her father served in WW II, and that she wanted her country back. She then lead the group in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. (Although the Congressman who sponsored the meeting calmly stated that the president was a citizen, his remarks went virtually unheard.)

Some right wingers are attempting to make this a major issue in the Republican effort to discredit the president however and whenever they can. Last night on Larry King, Liz Cheney was asked whether she supported this really desperate and outrageous lie being fostered by the craziest of the crazies in the Republican Party and she flat out couldn't say she doesn't support it, or that it has been proven untrue by his documented birth certificate, verified by Hawaii, which King showed on the air.

Then there was California GOP Rep. John Campbell's appearance Tuesday on "Hardball." Campbell, who has co-sponsored a bill requiring future presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates, gets a beat-down from Chris Matthews: "What you're doing is appeasing the nutcases" Matthews tells him, and later, "You are feeding the wacko wing of your party."

An article in The Daily Beast reported Lou Dobbs support of the "Birthers".

CNN and radio host Lou Dobbs is taking the "birthers" mainstream, with his own signature, xenophobic touch: Dobbs wondered aloud on his radio show whether President Obama might be "undocumented"—a word Dobbs typically reserves for the illegal immigrants he rails against nightly. "I'm starting to think we have a document issue," Dobbs said. "You suppose he's un—no, I won't even use the word undocumented, it wouldn't be right." Dobbs agreed with a caller that Obama's presidency could be "illegal."

Dobbs is a CNN anchor and managing editor for Lou Dobbs Tonight. He is an editorial columnist and syndicated radio show host. Dobbs once described himself as a "lifelong Republican," but has stated that he has switched to being an unaffiliated independent populist, as he no longer openly supports any party.

Here is what I don't get. How is the Republican Party and it's spokespeople allowed to repeat and repeat, or wink at a outrageous lie on national media and not get shouted down? How is Lou Dobbs allowed to get away with this on CNN? Why doesn't the Daily Beast, instead of just reporting this lie, flat out state the facts that it is a lie and Dobbs is a lier?

Responding to the Daily Beast report on Lou Dobbs, "connie" tells us all we need to know:
Blog response from “Connie”
This conspiracy to make Obama president, in spite of his illegal alien status, is so deep that way back on August 13, 1961, the Honolulu Advertiser printed a birth announcement in their vital statistics section that reads:

"Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6035 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4."

So anybody with any sense can see that they either (a) instigated this conspiracy back in 1961, plotting even at that early date to put an African citizen in the White House in 2009, or (b) they switched babies, in which case the plot still originated in 1961.

And that's how far the birther loonies are williing to go in their argument. The article announcing Obama's birth in Hawaii is fact. His birth certificate has been authenticated by the State of Hawaii and that, too, is fact.

CNN's Rick Sanchez did a bit of public service announcement on Tuesday, reading President Obama's birth certificate on air for all the skeptics out there.


Responder "Angel81" adds the following thoughts:
Why should we assume that he wasn't born in Honolulu as his birth certificate says? Why should we demand to know every last detail about his birth just to verify that he's American, when we don't do the same of every other presidential candidate?

Oh, right. It's because his father was African and he has a funny name. Also, we don't like his politics, and since we can't thwart his agenda through legitimate, democratic means, we're going to try and do it through cowardly, backdoor means.

Obama has already told you guys, that he comes from Krypton and his father was Jo-el. He came here for, truth, justice and the American way. He can leap from tall buildings, he's more powerful then a locomotive ect, ect. What more do you nut bags want?

Did you know that there was controversy about the status of the 2008 Republican candidate for president, John McCain? McCain birth is well documented because his dad was a big military mucky muck. He was born in Panama. McCain technically is not a "natural born citizen." He was born 6 months BEFORE the law went into effect regarding Panama. Obama, in fact got his mentor from Harvard to present the case to Congress to get McCain approved to run for POTUS. There was an official act of Congress in March 2008 to waive the regulations and accept McCain as a legal "natural born" citizen.

Barack Hussein Obama is the POTUS. May he "live long and prosper" and lead this nation to security and prosperity. "Birthers" be damned!

The Party of NO? The Party of Hate!

As the ranks of the Republican party shrink and become more concentrated with right-wing extremists, hate-mongers and racist are becoming the voices and the faces of the Republican Party of the twenty-first century.

Couldn't be right you say? Must be wrong you think. Sorry to say, there’s a pattern from the GOP leadership and grassroots that supports this position. First, let's go back to the 2008 presidential campaign. There are many examples available to prove the point, i.e. the Obama "Waffles" pictured above and the "Obama Bucks" pictured here.


As recently as three weeks ago, former South Carolina State Election Director and Richland County GOP Chairman Rusty DePass “joked” on his Facebook page that first lady Michelle Obama was descended from a gorilla which had gone missing from a local zoo.


Days later, Tennessee state legislative aide Sherri Goforth emailed out an image labeled “Historical Keepsake”—showing august portraits of all the presidents of the United States, ending with a pair of googly-eyes peering out from a black background to symbolize President Obama. When confronted, the aide to State Senator Diane Black said only that she regretted sending the image to the wrong email list and from her government address. She was “reprimanded” by her supervisors but not otherwise punished (a forced furlough at Memphis’s National Civil Rights Museum would have been an inspired penalty). And of course, all this has taken place after Chip Saltzman’s bid to be RNC Chairman was derailed by his decision to mail out a parody CD featuring the song “Barack the Magic Negro.”



More recently, we have the tale of Audra Shay, accused of endorsing racism hate and bigotry on Facebook. Shay, a 38-year-old Army veteran, mother, and event planner from Louisiana had been endorsed by her governor, Bobby Jindal (R-LA)
to chair the party's committee of Young Republicans. The Daily Beast and other media outlets spotlighted Shay's Facebook exchanges which highlighted her racist inclinations. John P. Avlon, the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics wrote several articles for The Daily Beast about Shay's internet exchanges. His conclusions are quoted as follows:

Collectively her comments are products of an increasingly common GOP mind-set I call Obama Derangement Syndrome, the right-wingers’ version of a virulent strain of obsessive presidential hatred that many liberals exhibited during the Bush years. Symptoms include comparing the president to Hitler and ascribing to him every evil and unconstitutional intention imaginable. It is accompanied by the belief that such a partisan fever is patriotic.

Avlon likens Shays LOL responses and her blantant racist remarks to "the online equivalent of nervous laughter, the kind of passive response to racist jokes that may have once been considered acceptable in pool halls and country clubs of the past." He continues to caution Republicans. "In the Internet era, it offers indelible evidence of acquiescing to something evil in our politics. There is a fear-based paralysis, a lack of moral clarity, which is in direct contradiction to their historic role as the Party of Lincoln."

Shay's responses were pale compared to those from RNC Chairman Michael Steele,through his communications director Trevor Francis who stated simply but firmly, “This type of language is inappropriate, and is not representative of the views of the Young Republicans.”

Well, the Young Republicans expressed their views by electing Shay in a vote of 470-415, effectively endorsing hate, racism and bigotry as the now and future platform of the GOP.

While this pattern of racist remarks goes unchallenged and without consequence by Republican "leadership", one Young Republican objects to such negatives from his Party. “There is a culture war going on inside the Republican Party,” says Lenny McAllister, a co-founder of HipHopRepubicans.com.

“It seems like some of us Republicans are taking our conservative message, mixing it with personal prejudices and racist views, and calling it patriotism,” says McAllister. “You can cover cyanide with chocolate, but you still can't call it candy.”

Elections in 2010 and 2012 will tell the tale of the voter's response to the GOP's message.

Sources:
The GOP's Young Hatemonger
by John Avlon
The Daily Beast, July 10, 2009

The GOP's Day of Reckoning
by The Daily Beast
July 12, 2009

Bullying Behind GOP "Racist" Win
by John Avlon
July 12, 2009

Rachael Maddow and The Disappointed Left

A few weeks ago, Rachel Maddow appeared on the Charlie Rose Show and announced that "The President has disappointed the left,". She offered specifics saying “on the war, on healthcare, on economic [policy]… on civil liberties and on civil rights". Spinning off her appearance on the show, the question floated to the public was ‘Does Rachael Maddow speak for the Left?”. While that question sparked lots of interest, it let me know that conservatives weren't the only ones disenchanted with Barack Obama. My resulting question is who or what’s the left and why are they disappointed with the President?

First let me introduce Rachel Maddow to those of you who aren’t familiar with her. Maddow earned a degree in public policy from Stanford University in 1994. At graduation she was awarded the John Gardner Fellowship. She was also the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at Lincoln College, Oxford. In 2001, she completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree (styled a DPhil) in political science from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis is titled HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons. She was the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes scholarship and the first "out" Lesbian to host a prime time news television show. For the first time in the more than ten years MSNBC has been on the air the network has moved ahead of CNN in primetime and in the key 25-54 year old demographic, in large part due to Maddow taking over the 9pm Monday through Friday spot where she now regularly beats Larry King in the key demo and often in overall ratings.

I watch the Rachael Maddow Show nightly. I hear her pushing for specific and immediate action on a variety of issues: repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, support for same sex marriage, health care reform, energy policy changes, climate change initiatives, investigation and prosecution on torture issues, and more. I also hear the slightly veiled disappointment with some of the president’s actions or lack of action in recent events. Since I know that Rachael represents a certain constituency, I guess this is might be my view to thoughts and opinions from the left.

In my opinion, Obama has been confronted with so many problems, all at once, that most people should be able to sympathize with the sheer difficulty of the challenges facing him. Surveys indicate that 90 percent of Democrats approve of Obama's job performance (that's from the latest Quinnipiac survey; other polls have recorded even higher figures). African-Americans give Obama an approval rating of 94 percent. Seventy percent of Hispanics think Obama is doing a fine job. Voters under thirty-five maintain the wide-eyed idealism that supposedly swept Obama into office. These issues are big, complicated problems that do not seem amenable to easy solutions or quick ideological fixes. The changes he promised will take time to achieve.

There seems to be growing concern over the president's plans to meet the country's challenges. Recent poll numbers indicate that 45% percent of voters believe that President Obama lacks a "clear plan for solving this country's problems" in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. Since a February CNN poll, that number has risen nine points while those who believe Obama does have a plan to solve the nation's problems has dropped from 64 percent to 53 percent.

Naturally everyone doesn’t agree with my position of confident loyalty to Barack Obama. Some attitudes reflect an increasingly rising tide of disappointment and frustration, and even a sense of anger and betrayal, about Obama. “I voted to end wars of aggression and to get a health care plan in this country that works for ME. I didn't vote to bail out banks and crap on auto workers. I didn't vote for "bi-partisanship" with the weasels in the GOP but to set this country straight.”

Progressives and left-leaning Democrats (if not self-identified radicals who want the system overthrown) are in an overwhelmingly pragmatic mood. The lessons of the Bush era are not easily forgotten. Eight years of colossal ineptitude and corruption, a President who consistently insulted their intelligence, and a leader who seemed completely out of his depth on just about every issue imaginable. This is the legacy that guides the nations’ thoughts, judgments, and reactions to each of Obama’s actions and decisions. (It should be noted that even after the enormous failures of the Bush era, rightist politics still enjoy popular support.)

Wondering who the Leftists and Progressives are? Eyal Press, a Nation contributing writer, labels progressives in a recent “The Notion” blog:

“people who favor a single-payer universal health-care system, have attended antiwar demonstrations, believe catastrophic global warming is imminent, support shutting down Guantanamo immediately, champion full equality for gays and lesbians, and perhaps supported John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primary before finally coming around to Obama.”

Obama is not an ideological leftist, clearly, but nobody who has listened to his speech on race or his speech in Cairo can doubt his moral seriousness, his thoughtfulness, his uncanny ability to strike the right tone even when (precisely when) addressing freighted, divisive issues. Many progressives understandably see their country's first African-American President as a unique, in many ways transformative figure, and the vast majority probably find themselves rooting for Obama and appreciating him, even when they don't fully agree with what he's saying.

One blogger response comment let’s you know where I stand:

“Considering the mess he was handed (biggest recession since 1930s, 2 wars, Iran, N. Korea, etc) I am going to give more than 5 months, before I judge his presidency.”

Link to the Rachael Maddow interview at:
http://charlierose.com/view/interview/10400

Update: Gov. Mark Sanford

Update on post dated July, 2009, "Mark Sanford: Another One Bites the Dust"

Fellow Republicans have censured South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford after he left the state last month on a secret trip to Argentina to meet his mistress. 22 members of the party's executive committee voted to reprimand Sanford; 10 called for his resignation; nine voted to support him. The vote has no bearing on Sanford's ability to remain in office.

In a statement, Sanford says he appreciates the party's position and will continue to work to earn back its trust. The governor also has repeatedly said he will serve his remaining 18 months in office.


"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

BBQ on White House Lawn

Thought you might like to see what the president is doing that is not reported in the news.



Barack hosted a bbq on the south lawn of the White House for Juneteenth celebration young men from local schools to highlight the importance of fatherhood and mentorship to their families and their communities.....gotta love him!!!!!

Now tell me this President isn’t the people’s President. He doesn’t miss a beat. His critics say he a celebrity but he is real people. I'm happy that he so good at what he does and that he hasn’t let them get to him, no matter what is being said. You have to respect his strength and endurance, particularly in view of all the balls he's juggling. Remember he’s a Harvard graduate, so he is a smart cookie. Celebrating Juneteenth (the day the slaves were freed) on the White House lawn...I bet you that will never happen with another President.



I bet this the 1st time anybody ever q'd on the White House lawn!!!!! Don't you just love it. I c u Barack!