Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.
Mitt Romney’s past comments about dismantling FEMA and privatizing disaster relief have come back to haunt him as Hurricane Sandy begins to wreak havoc on the East Coast. Still, one Republican strategist, Ron Bonjean, agrees with him. On CNN Monday morning, Bonjean, a private consultant who advises GOP congressional leaders, defended Romney, suggesting that even talking about federal disaster relief is politically toxic:
Most people don’t have a positive impression of FEMA and I think Mitt Romney was right on the button. But I don’t think anybody cares about that right now. I think people care about whether or not their power’s on, whether or not their basement’s going to be flooded. And I think that if the president gets too far in front of this and something goes wrong, people are going to remember, hey, my power’s not out, and the president’s talking about FEMA. I’m not a real big fan of FEMA. That could sway their vote.
Sandy has already caused severe flooding in the Northeast, hours before the worst of the storm is projected to hit. President Obama has declared a state of emergency in 7 states and DC after several governors’ urgent requests for federal aid to combat the storm. Though Bonjean fails to make the connection between FEMA’s services and people worrying about their power going out, the agency has already dispatched emergency power teams to try to reinforce vulnerable power grids before the storm hits and provided hundreds of generators and other back-up power sources. Americans are unfortunately well-acquainted with the agency, despite Bonjean’s insistence that they “don’t care” about it; a recent study of FEMA data found that, since 2006, 4 out of 5 Americans have been affected by weather-related disasters.
No one wants government that is too big, that is just common sense. Conservative Republicans have take that to the wacko extreme, they just plain do not want government to work. Like Exxon, BP, chemical, mining and insurance companies always do the right thing and are never unethical or inefficient. To be a conservative takes tremendous powers of denial about reality.
After weeks and weeks of being pummeled by the Obama campaign for his business record, Mitt Romney is finally releasing response ads today. The response is that Obama is lying. ("How can we trust him to lead?" etc.) The ad cites articles by media “fact-checkers”: Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler and factcheck.org.
In an incredibly inconvenient piece of timing, the Boston Globe today also reports that Romney has been lying about when he left Bain Capital. This is utterly crucial. Both the fact-checking columns base their conclusions on Romney’s claim that he left Bain in 1999. Obama’s ads are misleading, both say, because they hold Romney accountable for things Bain did after 1999. The revelation that Romney was actively managing Bain renders both those judgments moot.
Here is the core of the Globe’s finding:
Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”
Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002.And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.
Romney has sworn he is telling the truth. Documents that he filed and signed prove he is lying. The issue now moves forward as something symptomatic of Romney's mental state and/or his moral sensibilities. Even without these revelations Romney has no real qualifications to be president. Now it seems that he lacks the moral integrity that was supposed to be one of his great character traits.
The Tea Party Caucus waged an all-out propaganda campaign against the AJA, decrying it as more stimulus and an example of big government. House Republicans obstructed the Jobs Act, refusing to allow it even to come to a vote. Senate Republicans used the much-abused filibuster to defeat it. But polls continued to favor the president, and as a result, Obama was able to force Boehner & Co. to pass a one-third cut in employees' payroll taxes and an extension of unemployment benefits.
And herein lies the rub: The GOP is touting a flailing economy, saying that Obama's policies are the cause of the malaise -- but it is Republicans who have deliberately orchestrated these outcomes by refusing to pass a signature, jobs-focused piece of legislation.
What is worse is that their destructive tactics disproportionately fall on the backs of African Americans, Hispanics, low-income earners and the poor. The GOP does not care -- since it calculates that disheartened citizens will be less motivated to go to the polls come November. And with new voter-id laws in place, the black and brown vote will be subject to a perfect storm of suppression that spells a win for Romney.
Republicans are betting on a premise that white working-class voters will become so frustrated with the economic slowdown that they will vote against the first African-American president and instead elect a rich white guy and private-equity magnate -- who notoriously destroyed companies while profiting enormously.
Fox News Inflates Impact Of Bush Tax Cuts. This story is related to the charts above. If tax cuts created jobs we should have more job opening than there are unemployed, but we do not. Tax cuts just put more money in the pockets of the wealthy. How many $75,000 cars do these wealthy slackers need? Not enough to keep the economy going for the middle-class.
Since Fortune published "The Truth about the Fast and Furious Scandal" on June 27, thousands of comments have been posted on Fortune.com either praising or vilifying the article. Among the questions often raised by critics of the article (including Sen. Charles Grassley) concern assertions that the ATF encouraged gun dealers to sell weapons to known traffickers. If the ATF was encouraging such sales, the argument goes, it would be proof that the agency had a policy to allow weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, the core contention in what is known as the Fast and Furious scandal.
In the six months of investigations that led Fortune to conclude that the ATF had no policy to intentionally permit weapons to be trafficked, we examined 2,000 pages of ATF records, Congressional reports and testimony, and interviewed 39 people involved in or knowledgeable about the case. That body of evidence shows the ATF did not have a policy of encouraging gun dealers to sell to traffickers. Until now, the alleged encouragement of gun-dealers has not been a central focus of the Fast and Furious scandal. As a result, we did not address those points in the article. However, given the interest in this question, we thought it was worth taking readers through the evidence on this point.
It should be noted at the outset that the Congressional committee investigating Fast and Furious has never claimed the ATF had any official, written policy to encourage gun dealers to sell to traffickers. No documents, emails, or testimony mentioned in Congressional reports show signs of an agency-wide policy, or even a policy within Phoenix Group VII, the unit that worked on Fast and Furious.
What the allegations in the Congressional hearings and reports boil down to are two specific situations. In one, as we'll see, the allegations are true -- but misleading and incomplete -- and in the second, the evidence is contradictory. It's possible that the Congressional investigators have other evidence, but these two episodes are the only ones that have surfaced to date.
Claim No. 1
In August 2010, after a successful wiretap led Phoenix Group VII to seize 114 weapons in a single month, an employee at a gun dealership informed Group VII supervisor Dave Voth that one of their chief suspects was looking to purchase 20 9mm pistols. Based on evidence it had gathered on the wiretap, the ATF had enough probable cause to immediately arrest the suspect if he purchased the weapons. So -- in the only such instance known to date -- Voth wrote back and asked the dealer to make this particular sale. Voth says he encouraged the sale so that the agents could arrest the suspect outside the gun dealership. In the end, however, the suspect did not make the purchase and the arrest did not take place. No evidence has emerged that Voth ever made such a statement to any other gun seller.
Claim No. 2
This allegation involves a gun store called Lone Wolf Trading Company and shifting assertions made by its owner, Andre Howard. ATF records and Justice Department correspondence show that Voth and federal prosecutor Emory Hurley met with Howard soon after Voth arrived in Arizona. According to those records, Hurley advised Howard that, obviously, he could not make illegal sales (which he wasn't), and needed to use his judgment regarding legal sales, but that the government would appreciate any information about the purchasers and the sales to aid the investigation. Lone Wolf cooperated with the ATF, according to agency documents, regularly providing records of gun sales and permitting the ATF to install a surveillance camera in the store.
Lone Wolf was in a sensitive position. From 2006 to 2011, it was the No. 1 seller in Arizona of weapons that were later found at Mexican crime scenes, according to ATF data. The store, which had been prominently mentioned in a Washington Post article on indiscriminate firearms sales, also sold the weapons found at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. On Feb. 1, 2011, six weeks after Terry's death, Howard released a press statement that defended the ATF: "These federal agencies," it noted, "conduct themselves in a very professional and proper manner…. Senator Grassley's office contacted us regarding 'any' impropriety by ATF and we have stated that their [sic] exists no indication to that effect." Howard went on to conclude that people should "stop pointing blame at either Federal or state agencies attempting to do their job" and instead "give them the tools to accomplish this monumental problem confronting them."
However, as the scandal heated up and the ATF was deluged with criticism, Howard revised his account and directed the blame at the agency. In September 2011, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was directed by ATF to sell guns -- as many as possible, regardless of the legality, and that selling so many guns made him feel "horrible and sick." This contention is the second element that backs the claim that the ATF encouraged gun dealers to sell to traffickers.
Fortune visited Lone Wolf in January and requested an interview. The owner declined, but denounced the ATF, accused its agents of murder, and said answers would more likely be found on Constitution Avenue, the address of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.
The totality of the evidence -- including the ATF and Justice Department documents that directly contradict Howard's revised position, and his own earlier defense of ATF -- undermines his subsequent claims. And neither the Lone Wolf case, nor the one episode in which Voth encouraged a gun sale in the hopes of making an arrest in the parking lot of the store right after the sale, support the assertion that the ATF had a policy to intentionally permit gun-trafficking to Mexico.
One can see why the gun seller would lie. It is not unusual for people to lie to save their a*s and in this case reputation among the more radical anti-American conservative community. Conservatives - see Iraq's nonexistent WMD and the Iran-Contra scandal - have never been big on taking responsibility for their criminal enterprises. Issa admits he has no evidence of wrong doing by ATF or the DOJ even though Attorney General Holder has handed over 100,000 documents. Not having found any evidence he has accused the AG of withholding information. An old political trick - you have not given me evidence to support the conclusion I would like to come to so you're a bad person. In the justice system - rather than Congress, Darrel Issa R-Ca would be held criminally liable for prosecutor misconduct, but since he is a Republican who heads a political committee, he can get away with just about anything. Congress and the media need to hold Issa accountable for the witch-hunt of AG Holder and the millions of tax dollars he has wasted on his wacky political game show.
Ashleigh, Ashleigh, Ashleigh. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) is what evil looks and sounds like.
This afternoon, CNN host Ashleigh Banfield took Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) to task over his comments concerning his opponent, Tammy Duckworth. Walsh responded with a condescending repetition of the host’s name that topped out at 93 times. ThinkProgress has the video, with the counter to confirm. Watch it:
