Quit Picking on the Republicans

gopher

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Republican Steve King's massive rally against immigrants draws about 50 people:






PHOTOS: Hardly Anyone Showed Up To Steve King's Anti-Immigration Reform Rally | ThinkProgress



Yet another brilliant effort to attract Latino voters for Republicans
 

gopher

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LePage is heard to say Obama 'hates white people'

Two Republican lawmakers confirm that the governor made the remark at a fundraiser last week.



LePage is heard to say Obama 'hates white people' | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram




Gov. Paul LePage last week told a group of Republicans that President Barack Obama “hates white people,” according to two state lawmakers who heard the remark directly.
Gov. Paul LePage was heard to say that President Obama "hates white people" at a private fundraiser last week.
2013 Press Herald File Photo / Gabe Souza

The governor made the comment during a Maine Republican Party fundraiser on Aug. 12 at the home of John and Linda Fortier in Belgrade. According to the invitation, the fundraiser was billed as a “meet and greet” with LePage and his wife, Ann LePage, and also as an opportunity to meet Rick Bennett, the new state party chairman.
Two Republican lawmakers confirmed the comment when asked directly by a Press Herald reporter, but asked that their names be withheld for fear of political retribution. Each said LePage talked about how Obama could have been the best president ever if he highlighted his biracial heritage. But, LePage said, the president hasn’t done that because he hates white people.
“Yeah, he said it,” said one lawmaker. “It was one little thing from a speech, but I think most people there thought it was totally inappropriate.”
Bennett, who was elected in July to succeed former Maine Republican Party Chairman Richard Cebra, did not return multiple calls for comment about the story Monday.
Two other lawmakers who attended the event – Reps. Alex Willette of Mapleton and Larry Dunphy of Embden – said that if LePage made the comment, they didn't hear it.
“I didn’t hear him say anything like that,” said Willette, who added that he spent most of the event trying to raise money for his candidacy for the 2nd Congressional District seat.
Dunphy said the governor made some brief, informal remarks but he doesn’t remember hearing anything about the president hating white people.
Peter Steele, the governor’s director of communications, said he couldn’t comment because the fundraiser was not official business. He referred questions to Brent Littlefield, the governor’s senior political adviser, who also would not comment and was not at the event.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Maine is one of the least racially diverse states in the country, with a black population estimated at 1.3 percent, according to the U.S. Census.
One of the lawmakers who confirmed the comments said he supports the governor’s policies but is tired of being asked to defend controversial statements.
LePage has a history of making inflammatory comments that have sometimes overshadowed his policy achievements.
In September 2010, before he was elected, he told a group of fishermen at a forum, “As your governor, you’re going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying 'Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell.’ ”
In January, shortly after he was sworn in, he declined an invitation to attend an event hosted by the NAACP in Portland. When asked what he would tell them if they questioned his decision, LePage replied, “Tell them to kiss my butt.”
In July last year, he compared the Internal Revenue Service to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.
In June, he accused Maine Assistant Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson of being “the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline.”
University of Maine political scientist Mark Brewer said that if the governor did, in fact, say that Obama hates white people, it would top the governor’s list.
“It’s a ludicrous comment,” Brewer said. “But does it hurt him? Given that it’s Paul LePage, I don’t necessarily think so. There will be a big uproar from some, but the general reaction will be, 'There he goes again.’ ”
Brewer said even though the public has been desensitized by LePage’s long list of inflammatory statements, the governor “shouldn’t get a pass.”
 

Tecumsehsbones

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LePage is heard to say Obama 'hates white people'

Two Republican lawmakers confirm that the governor made the remark at a fundraiser last week.



LePage is heard to say Obama 'hates white people' | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram




Gov. Paul LePage last week told a group of Republicans that President Barack Obama “hates white people,” according to two state lawmakers who heard the remark directly.

Musta been a REALLY slow news day.


Oh, sorry. Let me get on track. . . I am OUTRAGED at this unwarranted and unprovoked attack on Jesus Superman Obama!
 

gopher

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Article on how Republicans helped create the mess we see today in the Middle East:


The Moment the US Ended Iran’s Brief Experiment in Democracy | Common Dreams


Published on Tuesday, August 20, 2013 by TruthDig.com
The Moment the US Ended Iran’s Brief Experiment in Democracy



by Robert Scheer
Sixty years ago this week, on Aug. 19, 1953, the United States, in collaboration with Britain, successfully staged a coup in Iran to overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh that a newly declassified CIA document reveals was designed to preserve the control of Western companies over Iran’s rich oil fields.
Mohammad Mossadegh in front of the Straight of Hormuz, as seen from the international space station. (NASA/WikiMedia Commons)
The U.S. government at the time of the coup easily had manipulated Western media into denigrating Mossadegh as intemperate, unstable and an otherwise unreliable ally in the Cold War, but the real motivation for hijacking Iran’s history was Mossadegh’s move to nationalize Western-controlled oil assets in Iran. According to the document, part of an internal CIA report:
“The target of this policy of desperation, Mohammad Mosadeq, [sic] was neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility as he was so often pictured in the foreign press; however, he had become so committed to the ideals of nationalism that he did things that could not have conceivably helped his people even in the best and most altruistic of worlds. In refusing to bargain—except on his own uncompromising terms—with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he was in fact defying the professional politicians of the British government. These leaders believed, with good reason, that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital to their national interests.”
There you have it, the smoking gun declaration of the true intent to preserve high profits and cheap oil that cuts through all of the official propaganda justifying not only this sorry attempt to prevent Iranian nationalists from gaining control over their prized resources but subsequent blood-for-oil adventures in Iraq and Kuwait. The assumption is that “the best and most altruistic of worlds” is one that accommodates the demands of rapacious capitalism as represented by Western oil companies.
Tragically, the coup that overthrew Mossadegh also crushed Iran’s brief experiment in democracy and ushered in six decades of brutal dictatorship followed by religious oppression and regional instability. If Iran is a problem, as the United States persistently and loudly insists, it is a problem of our making. Mossadegh, who earned a doctorate in law from Neuchatel University in Switzerland, was not an enemy of the American people; he was an Iranian nationalist who as the CIA’s own internal report concedes was preoccupied with the well-being of his people as opposed to the profitability of Western oil interests.
The CIA report derides the Western media’s acceptance at the time of the coup of the demonization of all actors on the world stage that fail to follow the approved script provided by the U.S. government. As the report notes, the “complete secrecy about the operation,” breached only by leaked information, made it “relatively easy for journalists to reconstruct the coup in varied but generally inaccurate accounts.”
Without conceding responsibility for misleading the media, the report says “The point that the majority of these accounts miss is a key one: the military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [sic] and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government. It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed. TPAJAX (the operation’s codename) was entered into as a last resort.”
Parts of the formerly top secret report, an internal CIA study from the 1970s titled “The Battle for Iran,” which detailed the CIA-directed plot, have been revealed previously. But the section disclosed Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive is, as the archive’s research director Malcolm Byrne writes in Foreign Policy magazine, the first time the CIA admits to “using propaganda to undermine Mossadegh politically, inducing the shah to cooperate, bribing members of parliament, organizing the security forces, and ginning up public demonstrations.”
All of these actions were described in great detail by veteran CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt in a lengthy interview with me for the Los Angeles Times in 1979. Roosevelt is confirmed in the newly released documents as having the leading role in planning and executing the coup. In the interview, Roosevelt revealed his part for the first time, but instead of celebrating the success of the venture, he cautioned that it had set a terrible example.
As I summarized the conversation in the story that appeared on March 29, 1979: “Roosevelt said that the success of the operation in Iran—called Project AJAX by the CIA—so inspired then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Dulles wanted to duplicate it in the Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia and Egypt, where he wanted to overthrow President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Roosevelt said that he resisted these efforts and finally resigned from the CIA because of them.”
Roosevelt, as he recounted in his memoir published five months after our interview, came away from the coup he engineered with serious concerns about the efficacy of such ventures. But unfortunately it became the model in Vietnam, Guatemala, Cuba, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and other countries, where the full official record is apparently judged still too embarrassing for our government to declassify.
 

gopher

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Drunken Republican Says It Was Gay Marriage That Made Him Operate Vehicles Under The Influence



Shannon Barber August 20, 2013 5:22 pm

There is no shortage of indiscretions when it comes to politicians these days, and here is yet another. However, this one didn’t seem to learn his lesson the first time, which makes things even worse… for him, at least.

Meet Rep. Don Dwyer (R-MD). He pleaded guilty just a little while ago to operating a boat while drunk. The crash that resulted from that debacle resulted in injuries for seven people, including a five-year-old-girl. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the boat was named “The Legislator,” showing that Dwyer is, if nothing else, obnoxiously arrogant.

Now, he is making headlines again, only this time it was a car he was operating while intoxicated, not a boat. The car’s tags and registration were also expired, The Huffington Post reports. Luckily, this time, no one was hurt. Dwyer was stopped on Route 100 at about 12:45 AM this morning, due to erratic driving. According to the police report, he appeared glassy-eyed, with slurred speech. He also reportedly failed three field sobriety tests. The hearing for the boating incident is scheduled for October 25 of this year.

The real doozy comes when we examine the supposed reasoning or the drunken boating. Dwyer was interviewed by the Capital Gazette, in which he attributed his behavior on the boat to his own marriage falling apart, and to his feeling “betrayed” by fellow lawmakers who backed marriage equality legislation in Maryland. Dwyer said to the Gazette:


“I felt a tremendous amount of pressure in my family. You take those personal issues add betrayal on the professional side, and it really gets to be overwhelming.”





Drunken Republican Says It Was Gay Marriage That Made Him Operate Vehicles Under The Influence -
 

Tecumsehsbones

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Embracing misinformation on Obama

By Dana Milbank

A poll of Louisiana Republicans released last week contained some strange news for President Obama: Twenty-nine percent of them said that he was responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina — in 2005.

This was slightly more than the 28 percent who said President George W. Bush was to blame. An additional 44 percent thought it over but just weren’t sure.

This is a preposterous notion. Everybody knows Barack Obama couldn’t have been responsible for the Katrina response because he was in Indonesia in 2005, learning about his Muslim faith in a madrassa. He had moved to Indonesia directly from his home country of Kenya, stopping in the United States just long enough to fake the moon landing.

When I read a report about the poll on the Talking Points Memo Web site, the first thing that came to mind was the famous campaign-trail quotation from the man who actually was president in 2005: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning.”

Evidently, they is not, at least not in Louisiana. Yet ignorance alone does not account for this bizarre finding.

The Katrina result, from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, is somewhat suspect because it is from an automated, push-button polling method. Yet the finding, if unscientific, is revealing: It shows that a substantial number of Republican voters will agree to something they know to be false if it puts Obama in a bad light.

The Katrina question is consistent with the many surveys finding an appalling amount of misinformation embraced by the electorate. Seven in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. One in five thought that Obama was Muslim. In another famous poll, Americans were three times more likely to be able to name two of the seven dwarfs than two Supreme Court justices.

Earlier this year, Public Policy Polling found disturbingly high levels of belief in UFOs and aliens, and the believers were bipartisan: Twenty-two percent of Mitt Romney voters said Obama was the Antichrist, and 13 percent of Obama voters said the government allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur.

But Obama’s presidency has provoked a particularly steep rise in the proportion of Republican conspiracy theorists. A Pew poll last year found that 30 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of conservative Republicans thought Obama was Muslim — roughly double than thought so four years earlier. Gallup polling in April 2011 found that 43 percent of Republicans thought Obama was born in another country.

Obama conspiracy theories have flourished in the Deep South, where wealth and educational levels are both low. This makes sense: Where voters are least informed, they are most susceptible to misinformation peddled by talk-radio hosts and the like.

For this reason, voters in reliably Republican states, which tend to be poorer, with lower test scores, are more vulnerable to misinformation. To use one measure, the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress test of eighth-grade reading, all but one of the top 10 states were in Obama’s column in 2012. Of the 19 doing worse than average, 14 were red states.

This is what makes the Katrina question so interesting. Certainly, Louisianans are on the low end of the education rankings, fifth from the bottom in math and third-to-last in reading. But this question got around the ignorance question by asking Louisiana Republicans about a topic they know intimately.

All but the most clueless had to know that Obama, a first-term senator in 2005, was not responsible for the botched storm response that Louisianans experienced up close and personally. It’s a notion so demonstrably false that they wouldn’t have heard anybody arguing for it on Fox News or talk radio. Yet 29 percent of Republican primary voters (the sample size was 274) reflexively endorsed the falsehood.

Why?

“Obama derangement syndrome is running pretty high right now among a certain segment of the Republican base,” Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, told me. “There’s a certain segment of people who say, ‘If you’re going to give me the opportunity to stick it to Obama, I’m going to take it.’ ”

In other words, a large number of that 29 percent who said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response knew that he wasn’t but saw it as a chance to register their displeasure with the president. Obama has driven a large number of Republican voters — Jensen puts it at 15 to 20 percent of the overall electorate — right off their rockers. And to that, there is only one thing to say.

Heckuva job, Barry.

Dana Milbank: Embracing misinformation on Obama - The Washington Post
 

gopher

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Republicans, Over the Cliff



Republicans, Over the Cliff | The American Conservative




Peter Suderman speaks for me:
What Republicans have right now is a lot of talk. What they don’t have is a workable legislative strategy. Not on Obamacare. Not on the debt. Not on tax reform, the unsustainable entitlement state, or on any of the big domestic policy issues that Republicans say they care about, or that actually confront the nation today.
Part of coming up with a plausible strategy is going to be recognizing that right now, the GOP is the minority party in Congress, and that there are limits to what it can meaningfully accomplish until that changes.
They are a barking-mad pack of ideologues, is what they are. I haven’t written much about the Obamacare thing because I don’t follow policy closely. As far as I know, Obamacare is a bad idea. But here’s the thing: it’s the law. It was passed, signed by the president, and upheld in the Supreme Court. There is no way the House Republicans, or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, is going to overturn it. The best they can do is to delay it. And then what? Guess what: the 2012 elections were their last, best chance to overturn Obamacare, and the country didn’t go for it.
There are other battles to fight. These guys are taking the government and the economy to the brink of crisis, and for what? For the sake of rebel yells and the Lost Cause? Larison:
This approach places great value on zeal and combativeness and isn’t very concerned with success. For that reason, it won’t produce the desired results at an acceptable political price. Cruz has railed against Republican defeatism, but in practice Cruz has made himself the leader of what one might call the defeat caucus.
Here’s Josh Marshall, making a good point:
Right now you might theorize that ‘Obamacare’ has somehow become such an idee fixe on the American right that some sort of cataclysmic confrontation is inevitable. But that theory doesn’t really hold up because for the previous two years it was austerity and dramatic fiscal retrenchment that merited threatening to default on the federal debt to deal with.
For all the ubiquity of political polarizing and heightened partisanship, no honest observer can deny that the rise of crisis governance and various forms of legislative hostage taking comes entirely from the GOP. I hesitate to state it so baldly because inevitably it cuts off the discussion with at least a sizable minority of the political nation. But there’s no way to grapple with the issue without being clear on this single underlying reality. Sufficient evidence of this comes from 2007 and 2008 when Democrats won resounding majorities in Congress and adopted exactly none of these tactics with an already quite unpopular President Bush. This is the reality that finally brought Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of DC’s most arbiters of political standards and practices, fastidiously sober, even-handed and high-minded, to finally just throw up their hands mid-last-year and say “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
More:
It has become so pervasive that I believe it’s lost on many of us just how far down the road of state breakdown and decay we’ve already gone. It is starting to seem normal what is not normal at all.
That’s it, I think. When I think of the Republican Party, I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness. I know I’m very much a minority among conservatives in this, but the behavior of Congressional Republicans pushed me out of the party two years ago, even though I almost always vote Republican, or withhold my vote. I am not a liberal, and do not want to vote for liberals, especially on social policy. But I told a Louisiana conservative friend the other day that the Congressional Republicans are making me consider the previously unthinkable: throwing my vote away by voting for a Democrat in the special election next month to replace my GOP congressman, who just resigned to take another job. The GOP candidates in this local race are hot and heavy to overthrow Obamacare. I think about how poor this district is — 26 percent of the district lives in poverty, making it one of the poorest Congressional districts in America — and how badly we need jobs and economic growth, and I think: What kind of world do these people live in?
By the way, political analysts rate the Louisiana 5th district safe Republican; my frustration with the GOP candidates is almost certainly a marginal phenomenon. You could probably put all the conservatives in this district who are fed-up with this mess on my front porch, and still have room for the tuba players from the LSU Tiger Band. Still, there it is. I’m considering voting Democratic not because I believe in the Democrats, but because it has gotten to the point where they don’t unnerve me like the Republicans. As poor as our district is, these guys would make our economic situation even more parlous by shutting the government down to overturn what in any stable political environment would have been a settled law?
Consider one of Russell Kirk’s ten canons of conservative thought:
Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.
What are the probable long-run consequences of shutting the US Government down over Obamacare? Do the Congressional Republicans care? Do they care what kind of damage they are doing to the ability of Congress to legislate effectively on all kinds of matters? The damage they are doing to the economic stability of the United States? This kind of brinksmanship might — might — have been defensible during the Obamacare fight, but today? I can’t see it. I can’t see any good coming out of this, at least any good that stands to outweigh the bad.
I regret to say how much it disappoints me to see Sen. Rand Paul being so near the center of this drama. At TAC, we don’t have editorial meetings and decide who our political BFFs are, but it will be obvious even to a casual reader that Rand Paul’s ideas find favor among our writers, in large part because of his leadership on foreign policy and civil liberties. I don’t know what my colleagues think of his part in the Obamacare defunding debacle, but I’ve watched it with dismay, not because I’m a particular fan of Obamacare, but because it seems like such a pointless, wasting cause. I’ve been thrilled by Sen. Paul’s leadership on foreign policy, so it’s especially disappointing to watch him waste so much capital on this lost cause.
Then again, as Ross Douthat wrote in a great column a couple of weeks ago:
Here’s the good news for Republicans: The party now has a faction committed to learning real lessons from the 2012 defeat, breaking with the right’s stale policy consensus and embracing new ideas on a range of issues, from foreign policy to middle-class taxes, the drug war to banking reform.
Here’s the bad news for Republicans: The party also has a faction committed to a reckless, pointless budget brinkmanship, which creates a perpetual cycle of outrage and disillusionment among conservatives and leaves Washington lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next.
Here’s the strange news for Republicans: These two factions are actually one and the same.
Douthat says Rand Paul is the politician to watch because he seems to get that in order to move the party in new and useful directions, you have to be able to talk to the base. In that sense, his having Ted Cruz’s back on the anti-Obamacare crusade could be strategically wise. Cruz is catching all the heat on the Senate side, while Paul is avoiding the spotlight, while shoring up his credentials with the base.
Maybe that’s what’s going on. I’ll try to be hopeful. Still, there’s no doubt in my mind who is responsible for the government shutting down: the GOP. I’m with John Avlon:
Divided government used to work—it created the Marshall Plan, civil rights legislation, and all the accomplishments of the Reagan era. Independent voters like me have traditionally voted for divided government in the hopes that it would restrain any one party’s impulse to ideologically over-reach by imposing common sense checks and balances. But divided government now looks like dysfunctional government. And despite the political security created by the rigged system of redistricting, Republicans may suddenly find the congressional midterms a referendum on their ability to get things done. The scorecard is ugly on that front, providing yet another reason for Democrats to accept a government shutdown, however painful.
There is the sense that maybe the stark stupidity of this conflict will break the hyper-partisan fever consuming our nation’s capital. Republicans are realizing that the angry conservative populist forces they empowered to achieve power have turned on them and are now actively restricting their ability to be taken seriously as a governing force. When President Obama sees negotiating with Iran as a more reasonable option than negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling, we are through the looking glass.
… It is pathetic that is has come to this: a great power that cannot agree on practical ways to keep its government functioning.

Right. The Republicans cannot govern. These people aren’t conservatives. They are radicals. What on earth would Russell Kirk say if he were alive to see this?










That's right folks - even the AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE publication admits it!
 

gopher

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New low! Congress, GOP popularity tanks amid shutdown





New low! Congress, GOP popularity tanks amid shutdown — MSNBC






Approval for Congress and the GOP hit all-time lows this week as the government shut down after lawmakers could not agree on a budget.
A mere 10% of Americans–the smallest approval rating for Congress in history–said they approve of Congress’ accomplishments, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll released Monday. Disapproval of federal lawmakers reached 87%.
Just 17% of the country–the lowest approval rating in Quinnipiac University’s polling–approved of the way GOP lawmakers are dealing with current issues, and 74% disapproved, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday. That has ticked down two points from the August Quinnipiac results.
 

gopher

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24 Policies That Republicans Supported BEFORE They Were Against Them





24 Policies That Republicans Supported BEFORE They Were Against Them -




Since President Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, Republicans have reversed their stances on many different policies and beliefs. Here are 24 of them.
1. Health Care Mandates) Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act by Democrats, Republicans widely supported the idea of an individual health care insurance mandate, Newt Gingrich being perhaps the chief supporter. Republicans have always preached about how people need to take responsibility for themselves, and now that a law exists that makes people take responsibility, the GOP is rejecting it simply on the grounds that President Obama and the Democrats passed it.
2. The Nuclear START Treaty) Republicans shamelessly filibustered the ratification of the Obama START Treaty for quite a period of time and criticized it tremendously and continue to try and find ways to circumvent the treaty today. What Republicans conveniently forget is that Ronald Reagan, the man that Republicans worship like a God, negotiated the very first START Treaty which was signed by yet another Republican, George H. W. Bush in 1991. That treaty expired in 2009 so President Obama negotiated a new one to continue the Reagan legacy. But since President Obama negotiated this treaty, Republicans retreated from Reagan’s policy faster than the decade it took to create the START Treaty in the first place.
3. Dream Act) Immigration reform has been touted by Republicans for decades now. Reagan granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in the 1980′s. Most recently, Republicans worked on immigration reform under the Bush Administration and failed. President Bush and Senator John McCain both supported immigration reform and were willing to cross the aisle to work with Democrats, most notably Edward Kennedy. All of that work and bipartisanship ceased after the 2008 Election. Staunchly opposed to President Obama and anything his administration supports, Republicans turned their backs on immigration reform in favor of militarizing the border and laws that violate the civil rights of Hispanics. Obama’s Dream Act would do much that Reagan would approve of, but Republicans refuse hear anything of it.
4. TARP) Republicans supported TARP when they helped pass it in response to the economic collapse in 2008. President Bush even signed the legislation into law. But since it’s been up to the guiding hands of President Obama to deal with TARP, Republicans have since revoked their support and have been highly critical even as they take credit for it when presenting stimulus checks to their local constituents. The fact is, TARP is successful because President Obama oversaw it and Republicans hate that fact.
5. Bail Out of Auto Industry) Republicans once supported this too but abandoned it once President Obama called for it. The auto industry is a vital manufacturing sector that supports millions of American jobs and Republicans WANTED the industry to fail simply because President Obama wanted the bail out. If it had failed, Republicans would have blamed President Obama for not supporting the American auto industry. The bail out has been a resounding success with most of the money plus interest paid back to the taxpayers. Mitt Romney has since tried to take credit for the idea because it has been so successful.
6. Israel Going Back To Pre-1967 Borders) Many Presidents have suggested this, even George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. But once President Obama repeated it, Republicans immediately denounced the President and threw their support to Israel’s President. This action by Republicans is totally unprecedented. It is reprehensible for American politicians to support a foreign leader more than the American President. Imagine if the Republican Party had overtly supported Hitler over FDR during World War Two. The only reason Republicans are rejecting President Obama’s plan is because they cannot bring themselves to endorse any idea he suggests, even if it is a Republican one.
7. Gun Control) Republicans overwhelmingly reject any and all gun control measures today. Which is very strange considering Ronald Reagan himself supported the Brady Handgun Act. But, it’s still true. Republicans did indeed support gun control measures in the past. It’s different now. Today’s intolerant, prejudiced, and extremist Republican Party is only against gun control now because they believe there needs to be a war against liberals and minority groups. It’s all about fear and war.
8. Public Education) Even the Founding Fathers believed in education for all. Every Republican President in United States history has been supportive of the public education system in this country. Ronald Reagan campaigned on axing the Department of Education but not only did he NOT eliminate it, he amped up its budget. It is only now that President Obama seeks to improve the education system that Republicans are against public education. When President Bush sought to improve public education, Republicans were on board but now that Obama is President, Republicans have decided that all public schools are evil liberal institutions that must be destroyed.
9. Infrastructure Spending) Republicans have always believed in strong infrastructure, until now. Republicans used the power of the federal government to build the railroads in the 1860′s and 1870′s, the Panama Canal in the beginning of the 20th century, and the interstate highway system in the 1950′s. Yet when President Obama called for new infrastructure spending to improve America’s crumbling roads and bridges and to improve our rail lines, Republicans immediately reversed their long-held belief in a strong American infrastructure. Why? Because they hate President Obama and oppose everything he believes in, even if it was once a part of the Republican platform.
10. Child Labor Laws) This one is surprising. Republicans were the ones that championed child labor laws in the first place. Starting in 1852, in the once Republican state of Massachusetts, child labor laws have been fought for by both parties. The only opponent of child labor laws has traditionally been big business. Republicans tried to pass a Constitutional amendment in 1924 and it didn’t succeed. It wasn’t until Democrats passed the Fair Labor Standards Act that child labor laws became federal law. Republicans oppose child labor laws now because of their deep ties with corporations. The goal of the corporate world is to find cheap labor and because President Obama is against huge corporations, Republicans must stand with the corporations, even if that means killing child labor laws.






... more ....
 

gopher

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Honest Republican talks about the role played by today's Republicans and Tea Baggers:



Sen. John Danforth talks about Washington, Republican Party





Sen. John Danforth talks about Washington, Republican Party | ksdk.com






ST. LOUIS (KSDK) - A former Missouri senator is speaking out about the shutdown and has a message for current lawmakers.
Republican Sen. John Danforth describes Washington today as "completely broke," and he says the Tea Party is "trashing" the Republican Party.
Sen. Danforth is one of several former senators and representatives who have signed an open letter to lawmakers as part of an organization called Fix Our Debt. It is a bi-partisan group of former lawmakers demanding both parties make hard choices to reduce the nation's $17 trillion debt.
Sen. Danforth's criticism of those currently running the government is certainly bi-partisan, too. He blames, not just the Tea Party, but senate Democrats and the president for drawing what he calls, "no compromise, red lines."
The Fix Our Debt organization of former lawmakers has some fairly specific suggestions and dire warnings for lawmakers.
We have posted our entire interview with Sen. Danforth.

It can be found to the left of this story.