Valentine’s Day with the GOP
What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than by sending your special someone a pink e-card, covered in hearts, with a message from the president: “Hope you like this Valentine’s card, your grandchildren are paying for it.”
In the GOP version of My Funny Valentine and a way to raise some sweet cash, the Republican National Committee is poking some fun at the White House and its Democratic cohorts with GOPvalentine.com, and more than 30,000 of the snarky messages had been sent as of Friday morning.
The site boasts 18 card options, including “This card entitles you to one free hug full-body pat-down” with a photo of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and “Don’t censure this Valentine” with a photo of Rep. Charles Rangel, who was censured by the House of Representatives for ethics violations.
The media isn’t safe either. A card featuring Keith Olbermann, whose contract with MSNBC was terminated following a suspension for donating to Democratic candidates, reads “MSNBC just wants to be friends this Valentine’s Day.”
The one for incoming White House spokesman Jay Carney, a former Washington bureau chief for Time who left to become Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director, takes an even more pointed swing:
Remember Jimmy McMillan, 2010 New York gubernatorial candidate from the Rent is Too Damn High Party?
Trump sees China from the White House
Billionaire developer Donald Trump might like to be president. And if he were, he’d bring a hard view of China to the White House.
“I’d tax China,” he tells ABC News in an interview. “They laugh at us. They feel we’re fools. You know, they’re getting away with absolute murder. The products we used to make in this country, they’re making them in China. We’re rebuilding China.”
Trump, who set up an exploratory presidential committee in 1999, said he’ll decide on a 2012 White House run by June.
He doesn’t explain how he’d tax China — or whether taxing China would be any easier than taxing America. But he’s sure the United States can still call the shots, even if China has effectively become America’s banker by holding so darn much of the U.S. national debt.
“We have the cards because we’re the ones who are spending all of this money in China,” The Donald says. “I’ve had bankers over the years. I don’t think the bankers have the cards.” As for the presidency, Trump’s worth a lot and says he’d spend a lot to get elected: ”It could be fun because I’d like to see some positive things happen for the country.”
Democratic Senator John Kerry, who ran for president in 2004, is also worried about the U.S. falling behind China. But his main concern is the paralyzing grip of ideological tension in Congress, where a new class of fiscal conservatives seems hardwired to cut spending and taxes and the debt.
That, says Kerry, bodes ill for future U.S. investment in exciting new technologies like green energy and high-speed trains.
Donald most probably reckons that if George W can win two terms as a President, why ca’nt Donald? He should not challenge CHINA though, the Banker, for without money Donald would be no body and others no body like larry King would not invite him on the cable net work.
Keep it up Donald, you are not worst than the CNBC comedians!
Rex Minor
Maddow to Brown: Wrong, “I’m not running”
Political commentator Rachel Maddow is used to having her say. This time she used a full-page ad in The Boston Globe.
The popular liberal TV host came out swinging on Friday against the new senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, who has suggested in a fund-raising letter that Maddow will run against him in 2012.
“I’m not running against Scott Brown … It’s just not true. Honestly. I swear. No, really,” Maddow said in the ad.
Maddow, a Rhodes Scholar and the first openly gay anchor to host a prime-time news program in the United States, lives in Hampshire County in western Massachusetts.
“It’s standard now for conservatives to invent scary fake threats to run against,” Maddow said. “Senator Scott Brown’s only been in DC seven weeks, but he already seems to be fitting right in with how conservatives operate there.”
Maddow said the senator, who has declined to appear on her eponymous nightly show on MSNBC, did not try to verify rumors that she had been asked by the state Democratic Party to seek the seat held for almost 50 years by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
“He sent the letter all around the country, to the out-of-state conservative activists who provided so much of the funding for his successful Senate campaign,” Maddow said.
Maddow is a liability? A stunt by Maddow to get a bump in her ratings?
What about Scott Brown running misleading ads to raise money?
GOP = Got 0 Principles
McCain says he was misled, but not everyone agrees
John McCain says he was misled by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson into supporting the Wall Street bailout.
“We were all misled,” the Arizona Republican told NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend.
Misled in what way?
With the economy showing every sign of burning to the ground, McCain says Paulson told Congress the Bush administration wanted to buy up toxic mortgages blamed for the conflagration. But he turned around and gave the money directly to Wall Street.
“Whoever thought that we would, when we passed that, we would own General Motors and Chrysler, GMAC? I mean, it’s beyond what anyone had anticipated,” McCain said.
Dick Durbin, a leading Senate Democrat, confirms part of the story: Paulson’s initial pitch was for money to buy up bad mortgages; then the focus switched to Wall Street’s balance sheets.
Warren sees dark times if financial reform fails
Elizabeth Warren paints a disturbing picture of the realities facing the United States and the Obama administration as Americans claw their way clear of the worst recession since the 1930s.
Lobbyists for the financial industry have put the kibosh on market reforms that would aid the recovery. Banks, saved from Tartarus by taxpayer money, are using a free government guarantee against failure to rebuild profits and credit ratings, while either not lending to business or trying to milk American consumers of every dime they’ve still got.
“That’s our plan to rebuild the American economy. Think about it,” says the bespectacled Harvard professor who chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel set up to investigate the $700 billion banking bailout.
“What the government is doing right now is, it’s permitting a set of rules that says, in effect: ‘Hey, banks. We will lend to you at zero and you go out there and figure out what you can squeeze out of every American family. No new rules’,” she told MSNBC.
Why have the rules not changed? “There are very powerful interests that believe that they can profit from keeping status quo.”
Warren is seen as a front-runner to head President Barack Obama’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But the notion of a free-standing CFPA has emerged as a main obstacle to broader financial reform. Republicans fear such an institution could fall into the hands of people hostile to financial markets.
No question we are doomed without true financial reform. Efforts to date have been laughable. The time to clean up Washington has come. No more lobbyists. No more career politicians; the greater good is not being served.
Ron Paul: The Once and Future Conservative Favorite
Rep. Ron Paul today seems to be little more than a voice crying in the wilderness of Republican politics. But the Texas libertarian and 2008 presidential candidate may have a lease on the future of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, at the age of 74.
Paul, the big winner in the presidential straw poll at the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference, ascribes his victory to young people who don’t like the way the Republican establishment is handling things.
“Right now, I think there is a disconnect with the people, especially with the next generation,” he told MSNBC. ”They feel like the burden is being dumped on their shoulders and I think that’s what the vote represented, a lot of young people saying they don’t like what’s happening.”
The self-effacing congressman from southeast Texas got 31 percent of the 2,395 votes cast, leaving much bigger names way behind. Mitt Romney polled 22 percent vs. Sarah Palin at 7 percent and Tim Pawlenty at 6 percent.
“It’s hard to translate that into policy changes. But if we’re advocating changes that are right and proper, I’d say the young people are where you need to go,” Paul said. “When I go to the campuses, I come away very encouraged. When I go to the Hill … they won’t admit anything’s wrong.”
He believes establishment Republicans don’t really want to take steps like cutting federal spending or safeguarding civil liberties or undertaking fundamental changes in foreign policy.
Anyone think a Republican victory in November would make a difference? Paul says forget it.
I actually like Ron Paul a great deal. He is a major thorn in the side of Establishment Washington. He tells them things they know are true but don’t want to hear. Whether you agree with him or not, you know he is being straight with you, and that deserves respect.
A ‘Cougar’ may be stalking Bayh’s empty Senate seat
After rocking the house for decades, could Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Mellencamp rock the U.S. Senate?
Some Democrats think so and they’re trying to draft him as a possible replacement for departing Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh.
“Don’t laugh, O.K.? I’m very serious,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the left-leaning weekly magazine, The Nation, told MSNBC this week. “He’s a heartland son of Indiana.”
The Nation is polling online readers about possible Bayh replacements and lists Mellencamp as “Rocker and ‘farm aid’ concerts champion.” By contrast, Dan Coats gets the somewhat less dashing moniker: “Former Indiana Republican senator looking to regain his title.”
Meanwhile, a Draft Mellencamp ”movement” has set up shop on Facebook.
Conventional wisdom says Indiana is Republican turf by nature and many pundits expect Bayh’s Senate seat to turn a bright GOP red in November after its two-term Democratic hiatus.
Congress bracing for anti-incumbent anger among voters
By the look of things, the American public just might vote Congress out of office this November – Republican and Democrat alike.
But Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine sounds downright stoic, even as he admits that his own party could lose more than 28 House seats and four Senate seats.
Kaine says Democrats must accept voter anger as a fact of life in an economy that is recovering only slowly from the worst recession since the 1930s.
“Congress has to pay attention to it. But we also just have to acknowledge that in a tough time, there’s going to be a lot of dissatisfaction,” he told MSNBC.
How much dissatisfaction is a lot?
A new CNN poll says that 63 percent of U.S. voters want the bunch in Congress out of office. Only 34 percent say they can stay. Fifty-six percent say most congressional Democrats do not deserve to be re-elected, about the same number who say most congressional Republicans don’t deserve re-election either.
Corporate citizenship is at the root of this. Corporate entities are recognized as actual real human citizens. Because they have the rights of citizenship they can lobby congress. They push to advance their own agendas even at the expense of the general citizenry.
Politicians are simply people. They can be, and often are, tempted by the cash and perks of the corporate lobby. Stripping corporate entities of their citizen status will remove the corporate lobby from congress. Then the voice of the citizenry can be heard clearly again. Strike down corporate citizenship and give the government of the people back to the people.
Republican “blank page” challenges Obama
The next U.S. presidential election is more than 2-1/2 years away. But pollsters are already asking how President Barack Obama would stack up against a Republican challenger.
The results are favorable. But for whom? No one can say.
Obama is in a statistical dead heat against an unnamed Republican candidate, leading the challenger 44 percent to 42 percent, according to a Gallup poll with a 4-percentage-point margin of error. Gallup surveyed 1,025 adults Feb. 1-3.
Media pundits are divided about what the findings mean, or don’t mean.
Some say the data are meaningless except as a gauge of 2010 voter anger toward Washington and incumbents generally.
Others argue that the poll is good news for Obama if it means angry voters would give him the edge over an ideal Republican candidate.
Donny Deutsch, an advertising expert and TV personality who worked for the 1992 Clinton/Gore presidential campaign, says the numbers could spell opportunity for a Scott Brown-style political newcomer in 2012.
Brzezinski sees encouraging signs emerging from Haitian catastrophe
It might sound Pollyannaish coming from anybody other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hard-nosed intellectual who was Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. But he says the gigantic catastrophe in Haiti may suggest some good things about the state of the modern world.
“As I look at this tragedy and as I look at this enormous human suffering, I’m also a little bit encouraged by the symbolism of the collective global response,” Brzezinski said in an interview with MSNBC.
Help has arrived quickly not only from the United States, the country’s biggest and richest neighbor, but also from other countries including Brazil and China. That could be a hopeful sign of an emerging international template for responding to turmoil around the world, including in hot spots like Afghanistan.
“There is this surfacing in the international community of this sense of collective responsibility, of kind of shared appreciation of the obligation to help others. And that’s encouraging,” he said.
It could also be very good news in the long run for Haiti, which the United States had been trying to help stabilize before the quake hit this week. Actual stability would mark an unusual break in the country’s sad and violent history.
“The tragedy and the torture go back a long, long way, all the way to the days of the American revolution, almost,” Brzezinski said. “Since then, it’s been tortured by coups, violence, exploitation domestically, domination from abroad.”
Interested in the earthquake in Haiti and international response? Watch the PBS show Basic Black tonight at 7:30 p.m. for a LIVE panel discussion about the recent devastating earthquake in Haiti, as well as a discussion about the race for the late Senator Kennedy’s seat in the upcoming Massachusetts elections. You can watch on channel 2 in Boston, or online at http://www.basicblack.org. Be sure and comment in our chat, which is now live!
Gee, why can’t they be more creative in describing the debt they ran up? Oh, yeah, this is the debt they ran up.