Conservatives Hear Voices

Pat Robertson is a Mulehead - who does not know much about Haiti or French history. Robertson a member of an elite family and graduated from Washington and Lee University, where, ironically he was a history major. More here Pat Robertson Cites Haiti’s Earthquake As What Happens When You ‘Swear A Pact To The Devil’

Massachusetts Senate candidate Scott Brown hears voices too. It appears they're evil. That Brown cannot differentiate between good and evil is typical of most conservatives. Why Does Republican Senate Candidate Scott Brown Hate Rape Victims?

In 2005, Brown pushed to allow doctors and nurses to turn away rape victims from Mass. emergency rooms if they didn't want to give rape victims emergency contraception.

Scott Brown Media Welfare Queen and Liz Cheney Fraud

Fox News provides MA Sen. candidate Brown a forum to raise funds and misinform

In recent days, Scott Brown, the Republican nominee in the special election for the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat, has made numerous appearances on Fox News to raise funds for his campaign, solicit volunteers, and peddle misinformation. In the wake of the November 2009 elections, Fox News provided airtime to GOP and conservative candidates, and its on-air personalities celebrated and shilled for them.

What Fox is doing is unethical if not in outright violation of campaign finance laws. Brown needs the media welfare to overwhelm voters with lies to win and in typical Republican noise machine fashion, Fox is happy to play pimp.

Editor suggests group Liz Cheney fronts is bogus

The editor of a prominent progressive magazine has suggested that Liz Cheney's political pressure group may be a bogus front that gives news networks an excuse to put the younger Cheney on TV.

The only reason that Liz Cheney makes it on the news talk show rounds is that "she's Dick Cheney's daughter," and her political pressure group is little more than an excuse "so that there is some putative reason, other than being Dick Cheney's daughter, to put her on the TV," Nation Washington editor Chris Hayes told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

"There is no earthly reason that anyone should be listening to Liz Cheney on anything, other than the fact that she is the progeny of an alleged war criminal," Hayes told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Monday night.

Hayes said it's virtually impossible to track down what the younger Cheney's political pressure group, KeepAmericaSafe.com, has been doing and spending.

"I‘m trying to find on the Internet if there is any tabulation of actually how many points ... they‘ve purchased of advertising, because it‘s very unclear how much they‘ve actually spent and where. And that‘s incredibly hard to come by. I couldn‘t find it anywhere," Hayes said.
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This isn't the first time that Cheney's group has been accused of being a fraud. In October, radio host Bill Press said that the group is "a total media creation."

M's Cheney is not expert on anything, nor has she ever held public office yet the "liberal" media takes down everything she says and reports it as news like good little stenographers.

Why The Senate is Dysfunctional

Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution - by Thomas Geoghegan

About the Senate, a college professor of mine used to say, "One day, the Supreme Court will declare it unconstitutional." He was joking, I think.

But the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended.

This change to the Constitution was not the result of, say, a formal amendment, but a procedural rule adopted in 1975: a revision of Senate Rule 22, which was the old cloture rule. Before 1975, it took two-thirds of the Senate to end a filibuster, but it was the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" filibuster: if senators wanted to stop a vote, they had to bring in the cots and the coffee and read from Grandma's recipe for chicken soup until, unshaven, they keeled over from their own rhetorical exhaust.

For the record, nothing like Senate Rule 22 appears in the Constitution, nor was there unlimited debate until Vice President Aaron Burr presided over the Senate in the early 180os. In 1917, after a century of chaos, the Senate put in the old Rule 22 to stop unlimited filibusters. Because it was about stopping real, often distressing, floor debate, one might have been able to defend that rule under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says, "Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings."

As revised in 1975, Senate Rule 22 seemed to be an improvement: it required 60 senators, not 67, to stop floor debate. But there also came a significant change in de facto Senate practice: to maintain a filibuster, senators no longer had to keep talking. Nowadays, they don't even have to start; they just say they will, and that's enough. Senators need not be on the floor at all. They can be at home watching Jimmy Stewart on cable. Senate Rule 22 now exists to cut off what are ghost filibusters, disembodied debates.

As a result, the supermajority vote no longer deserves any protection under Article I, Section 5 - if it ever did at all. It is instead a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders' intent.

Here's why. First, the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments. With so many lawyers among them, the founders knew and operated under the maxim "expressio unius est exclusio alterius" - the express mention of one thing excludes all others. But one need not leave it at a maxim. In the Federalist Papers, every time Alexander Hamilton or John Jay defends a particular supermajority rule, he does so at length and with an obvious sense of guilt over his departure from majority rule.

Second, Article I, Section 3, expressly says that the vice president as the presiding officer of the Senate should cast the deciding vote when senators are "equally divided." The procedural filibuster does an end run around this constitutional requirement, which presumed that on the truly contested bills there would be ties. With supermajority voting, the Senate is never "equally divided" on the big, contested issues of our day, so that it is a rogue senator, and not the vice president, who casts the deciding vote.

The procedural filibuster effectively disenfranchises the vice president, eliminating as it does one of the office's only two constitutional functions. Yet the founders very consciously intended for the vice president, as part of the checks and balances system, to play this tie-breaking role - that is why Federalist No. 68 so specifically argued against a sitting member of the Senate being the presiding officer in place of the vice president.

Third, Article I pointedly mandates at least one rule of proceeding, namely, that a majority of senators (and House members, for that matter) will constitute a quorum. Article I, Section 5 states in part that "a majority of each shall constitute a majority to do business." Of course, in requiring a simple majority for a quorum, the founders were concerned about no-shows for a host of reasons - not least of all because the first legislators had to travel great distances by stagecoach.

But the bigger reason for the rule was to keep a minority from walking out and thereby blocking a majority vote. In Federalist No. 75, Hamilton dismissed a supermajority rule for a quorum thus: "All provisions which require more than a majority of any body to its resolutions have a direct tendency to embarrass the operations of the government and an indirect one to subject the sense of the majority to that of the minority."

It would be illogical for the Constitution to preclude a supermajority rule with respect to a quorum while allowing it on an ad hoc and more convenient basis any time a minority wanted to block a vote. Yet that is essentially what Senate Rule 22 achieves on any bill that used to require a majority vote.

So on the health care bill, as on so many other things, we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states - just over 10 percent of our population - can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

Conservative media dubiously compare Reid's controversial comments to Lott's support of segregationist Thurmond

Flashback: Bush Also Threatened To Withhold Loan Guarantees From Israel - Another example of it is OK when conservatives do it.

What Does Scott Brown of Massachusetts Stand For?

What Does Scott Brown of Massachusetts Stand For? He is a George W. Bush Republican

Just like George Bush, he claims to be a compassionate centrist but is in fact a ferociously partisan Republican. "I have a history of working as an independent thinker and voter having over 6,000 votes and working across Party lines ..." he told WGBH's Emily Rooney in 2009 . Rooney swallowed the claim in the interview, but the Coakley campaign checked the facts and found that Brown has voted with the Republican leadership 96 percent of the time. Last week, true to form, he announced that if elected he will be the "41st Senator".

If no one else likes Brown or his promise to return us to the good old days of Bush and Cheney, it probably does not matter to Brown. His ego is what leads him, he likes himself so much he posed nude for Cosmopolitan, Senator Is the Centerfold

Scott Brown Receives Special Deal In Financial Reform Bill, But Still May Vote Against It

As the conference committee reconciling the House and Senate versions of financial regulatory reform went through its marathon 20 hour negotiating session on Thursday night, an exception to the Volcker rule — which prevents banks from trading for their own benefit with federally insured dollars — was added at the behest of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). The exception, which was pushed by large Massachusetts-based financial firms State Street Corp. and Mass Mutual, allows banks to invest up to three percent of their capital in risky hedge funds and private equity firms and to continue managing those funds.

These exemptions could undermine the effectiveness of the rule, as State Street is a great example of a financial firm that specialized in relatively benign financial practices, but then became systemically important by building up a huge amount of credit risk and engaging in risky trading. Ultimately, it needed to be rescued by federal intervention.

Of course, when he was first elected, Brown said that there would be “no more closed-door meetings or back-room deals by an out-of-touch party leadership.” And now, Brown isn’t even certain that he will vote for the reform bill because of a tiny bank tax levied to cover the cost of the law’s implementation:

    On Friday, Brown questioned a provision added to the bill late in negotiations that would charge large banks and hedge funds a fee to generate as much as $19 billion to help cover the cost of the bill. “My fear is that these costs would be passed onto consumers in the form of higher bank, ATM and credit card fees and put a strain on lending at the worst possible time for our economy,” he said in a press release. “I’ve said repeatedly that I cannot support any bill that raises taxes.”

First, it’s worth putting this bank levy in perspective. As Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, pointed out, “the fee is approximately equal to 0.01 percent of projected GDP over the next decade. If it is fully passed on by financial institutions to customers will cost people an average of $6 a year.”

But more importantly, Brown’s deal strikes at the very heart of the Volcker rule. As former Federal Reserve Chairman and Obama administration adviser Paul Volcker said, “allowing a bank to invest in a speculative fund goes against the very intent of the bill as we seek to define those activities that are worthy of government protection.”

Brown could have stepped up and decided to put the American public first, but like a petulant child refused. Brown, relishing his role as the deciding vote, decided to look out for the sleaze bags on Wall St.

Conservatives Are the Elmer Fudds of National Security

Former CIA agent: Bush made intelligence problems worse

Former CIA agent: Bush made intelligence problems worseA former CIA field officer says the Bush administration's reforms of the intelligence community have made it more difficult to prevent terrorist operations.

Speaking to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Jack Rice, now an on-air personality at Air America radio, said the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center and the office of the Director of National Intelligence in the years after the 9/11 attacks means that information is being shuffled around too many different offices and agencies.

"The problem with that is sometimes you may not get the context of that information," Rice said. "So they only get pieces of it. When you break this up into so many moving parts -- and there are already incredible numbers of moving parts -- you sort of misunderstand how the entire process works. So now they're having to cobble it back together, and try to come up with an answer, and they're still failing at that."

Olbermann cited a 2005 essay (PDF) by National Counterterrorism Center Deputy Director Russell Travers, which argued that the Bush-era reforms "severed the collection of the data from the analysis of the data."

"Are we on the road to 'fixing' intelligence, or are we at risk of making it worse?" the essay asked. "In truth, either outcome is entirely possible."
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Rice also said the Bush administration wasn't "as concerned about quality" of information. "Hence, they were willing to waterboard somebody 183 times in one month."

Rice cited the phenomenon of "garbage in, garbage out" -- if your intelligence is faulty or misunderstood, you can't take proper steps to ensure security.

Conservatives are hoping to win the 2010 mid-term elections so they can return government to the good old days of incompetence. Like the average school yard bully they talk tough, but lack the moral backbone and intelligence to lead. The mission of modern conservatism is to keep people afraid and make government not work for the common good.

Rep. Mike Castle(R) Has No Integrity Takes Credit For Over $5 Million In Stimulus Funds He Voted To Kill

Rep. Mike Castle(R) Has No Integrity Takes Credit For Over $5 Million In Stimulus Funds He Voted To Kill

Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE) has staggered to the right, voting against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the stimulus), financial regulation reform, the recent jobs package, and health reform. Running for the U.S. Senate this year, Castle has cast aside his image of a GOP moderate and joined his conservative colleagues in their reflexive opposition. But despite his right-wing voting record, Castle is attempting to drum up positive media coverage by claiming ownership over one of the progressive measures he voted to kill.

In the past two weeks, Castle has blasted multiple press releases publicizing stimulus funds awarded to his state. In his most recent release, he not only calls the money “imperative,” but in “announcing” the funds, he tacitly claims credit for securing them:

Washington | January 7, 2010 – Delaware Congressman Mike Castle announced today that $5,230,610 has been awarded to the State to assist families and individuals in need. [...] “As we face the coldest season of the year, it is imperative we provide those programs serving Delaware’s most disadvantaged families and individuals with the resources necessary to house, feed, and protect those in desperate need,” said Rep. Castle. “These grants, totaling more than $5 million, will help the invaluable organizations and programs which are working to help the homeless, hungry, and those facing economic hardship throughout the State.”

Nowhere on the release is the source of they funds or the word “stimulus” mentioned. But the stimulus Castle opposed is the source of the “imperative” funds he now champions:

– The Castle release announces $4,735,313 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Continuum of Care program. According to the HUD website, the Continuum of Care initiative is enabled through $1.5 billion in money authorized by the stimulus.

Castle is the kind of two faced double talk Conservative, America can do without.

Hope Mike is enjoying that government subsidized health care courtesy the tax payers of America.

Report Clears ACORN of all False Accusations by Hannah Giles, James O’Keefe, Andrew Breitbart

Glenn Beck Economics Nitwit and Serial Liar

Glenn Beck Hate Mongering Of The Day: Obama And Progressives “Want To Intentionally Collapse Our Economic System”

Glenn Beck spent yet another day yesterday (1/5/10) ignoring terrorism (and the opportunity for yet another Fox News personality to blame President Obama for the failed Christmas attack and call for racial profiling) in order to mount another self-serving monologue transparently designed to prove he did not deserve the “2009 Misinformer of the Year” award he obsessed about the day before (which, ironically, was riddled with falsehoods and misrepresentations) . So instead of hate mongering about Obama for national security, Beck accused him and progressives of actively working to bring about “the destruction of our monetary system.” Ironically, Beck told at least one big whopper of a falsehood while he was at it. With video.

Beck called the show “America’s Transformation: Beyond A Reasonable Doubt.” The unmistakeable suggestion was that progressives are guilty and he is not.

Beck began by saying there are people, and he made it clear he meant progressives, “who want to intentionally collapse our economic system.” He started to ratchet up the hate mongering by saying, “Progressives don’t speak the same kind of language that you and I do. Economic justice – that’s Marxism. It’s taking from the haves and giving to the have nots.”

Beck makes $3 million dollars a year for a) being a conservative clown, b) being a nitwit that wraps his garbage in fake patriotism, c) a media whore who'll say anything to make money from viewers he hopes are as loony and ignorant as he is, or d) he makers an honest living making a valuable contribution to society such as being a nurse, carpenter, truck driver, engineer, etc. If you answered a,b, and c you're correct. America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

Mr. Beck has lucked into a job where he does little work in exchange for millions of dollars, the least he could do is a little research and adhere to that commandment about not bearing false witness.