The Great Republican Memory Lapse

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz & Sarah Palin join angry Tea Party
protesters to rally against deficit spending in 2013 

Smug Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan are preening with gooey self-satisfaction after the House passed what may well be the single most absurd piece of legislation in American history.

One that's more like a con job.

It's remarkable to watch Republicans literally tripping over themselves to pass what they're laughingly calling a "tax reform bill" that's going to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the federal deficit.

Remember back in fall of 2013 when Republicans and their perpetually-riled-up Tea Party base were literally raging against the federal deficit as if it was the manifestation of evil and a harbinger of the Apocalypse that would end life as we know it?

Who can forget the epic theatrical hypocrisy of Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee joining the bubble-headed right-wing political has-been Sarah Palin at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. on a chilly October Sunday four years ago (pictured above).

Just days after taking to the Senate floor to deliver one of the longest filibuster's in American history to rail against the Affordable Care Act (during which he famously read Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs & Ham"), Cruz joined a group of angry Tea Partiers and anti-Obama veterans at the World War II Memorial to rail against the fact the U.S. Park Service closed it because of the government shutdown.

Never mind that it was Cruz himself who'd intentionally helped to engineer the 17-day partial shutdown of the federal government by working with an obstructionist do-nothing Republican-majority House of Representatives (led by former Speaker John Boehner), and conservative political groups like the Heritage Foundation.

The Republican House famously included "poison-pill" provisions in their appropriations resolution bill to fund the government for fiscal 2014 that would have defunded or delayed implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Ex-Speaker John Boehner takes heat from the media
during the 2013 government shutdown

That essentially (and purposefully) made it impossible to pass an appropriations bill since the Senate at the time was controlled by Democrats.

As we've all been reminded of in the past few days, the House and Senate must reconcile their differences on a piece of legislation in order to get a bill passed by both chambers and sent to the desk of the president to be signed into law.

Remember, Republicans could have simply passed a clean appropriations bill to keep the government running in back in the fall of 2013.

But Boehner chose ideology over the best interests of the American people and famously caved in to pressure from the extremist right-wing "Freedom Caucus" and Tea Party zealots of his own party.

He even sank to taking to the floor of the House to peddle the ludicrous fiction that the Affordable Care Act was "killing American jobs"; it actually wasn't, that was a lie.

So instead of doing their jobs and passing a spending resolution, Republicans basically held the government hostage by refusing to remove the ACA repeal so it could pass in the Senate.

As the editorial board of the New York Times observed back on October 1, 2013 as the shutdown began, locking thousands of federal workers out of their jobs and closing essential government services for millions of Americans, it was a moment that defined John Boehner's failure as the Speaker of the most unproductive House of Representatives in American history.

Mostly because conservatives, unsettled by the presence of an intelligent, two-term African-American in the White House, simply despised President Obama.

Remember the $1.7 trillion added to the U.S. deficit
because of the 2nd Iraq War? Republicans don't

Amidst the turmoil of their 2013 deficit hysteria, Republicans conveniently seemed to forget that their own president, George W. Bush, was responsible for at least $1.7 trillion of that debt because his failed war in Iraq was never paid for in the federal budget.

So not only did hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens and thousands of U.S. and coalition service men and women loose their lives, "Dubya" put the whole thing on the American credit card.

Conservative's self-serving situational outrage over the federal deficit should serve as a warning sign to the American people - a reminder of the Republican Party's willingness to use deficit spending like some kind of prop to suit their ideological needs and financial desires.

As we've seen this week, the Republican Party has a giant memory lapse, and they've shown a willingness to bounce back and forth on the deficit like a ping-pong ball.

Four years ago they were railing against President Obama for his call for over a $1 trillion in infrastructure spending because of their concerns about what it would do to the federal deficit.

And they refused to do anything about it.

(Incidents like the Flint Water Crisis and the horrific Amtrak train derailment in Pierre County, Washington on an overpass on Monday that killed three and injured at least 100, serve as chilling reminders that Republican refusal to act on much-needed infrastructure repair has had deadly consequences.)

A collapsed section of I-10 between California and
Arizona in 2015

So when when President Obama was in office, they opposed authorizing $ 1trillion of the taxpayer's money to conduct long-overdue repairs on the nation's infrastructure (roads, bridges, tunnels, airports etc.) that affect the lives of all Americans.

Just a few years before that they allowed Bush to spend almost $2 trillion on an ill-advised war in one of the most destabilized countries in the world.

The one NOT responsible for the 911 attacks by the way.

But as we've seen recently under Trump, Republicans rushed to pass a bloated, confusing 500-page legislative behemoth that will enrich already-cash-loaded American corporations and the small fraction of the nation who count themselves among the 1% (and of course the Trump and Kushner families) with no public hearings and no meaningful studies of how it will impact the U.S. economy.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) didn't even get to score the much-talked-about tax bill properly, and most Republicans gleefully passed it without even bothering to read what's in it - even though it raises taxes on the middle class and poorest taxpayers.

Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, the 4th wealthiest U.S. Senator who owns vast holdings in real estate, admitted not having read it as he tried to deflect criticism over the fact that he magically reversed his opposition to the bill after a provision was inserted at the last-minute last Friday.

A provision that will allow folks like him and Trump to save millions in taxes on "pass-through" income they receive from the s-corporations where they keep their real estate holdings.

What, me worry? "Corker Kickback" namesake
Tennessee Senator Bob Corker

Corker's lame assertion that he had no idea the provision was added to the tax bill is laughable considering that just a couple months ago Corker was one of Trump's biggest critics, famously telling CNN reporter Manu Raju:

"The president has great difficulty with the truth. On many issues."

Evidently the president isn't the only one...

Remarkably, the Republican tax bill doesn't do anything Trump promised it would do when he was running for office in 2015 and 2016.

You can't fill out your taxes on a form the size of a post card, it didn't cut the tax brackets down to three, it doesn't eliminate sketchy loopholes for corporations and the 1% - and it raises taxes on the same working class white voters who filled Trump rallies and bought "Make America Great Again" hats.

As columnist and author Charles Blow observed in the opening sentence of his latest op-ed published in this morning's New York Times:

"With their tax bill, Donald Trump and the Republicans are raiding the treasury in plain sight, throwing crumbs to the masses as the millionaires and billionaires make off with the cake." 

Amazingly, many mainstream media news outlets (including NPR) keep referring to this as a "win" for Trump.

Just wait, once he signs this mockery of American principles into law and Republicans, their 1%-er billionaire donor base and corporations have all had a chance to cash in on their flagrant looting of the U.S. Treasury, there'll be another collective Republican memory lapse.

And when the automatic spending cuts their legislation mandates begin to kick in, phony deficit hysteria will return just in time for Republicans to set their sights on cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - gutting bedrock social safety net programs to further enrich a small privileged few.

Throwing crumbs to the masses - just in time for Christmas.

The Big Republican Nothing

People gather at a makeshift memorial in Vegas

Sometimes it almost seems like the Republican leadership that currently controls the House of Representatives lives in some kind of parallel universe.

A kind of nonsensical ideological haven in the middle of a bubble located light years from where most average Americans try to eek out an existence wherever they live, work, retire, or go to school.

In that universe a simple truth is denied.

64-year-old Stephen Paddock used a weapon of war to kill 59 people and injure 500 others on Sunday night.

But he wasn't on a field of battle, for three days he was ensconced in the corner suite on the 32nd floor of a hotel with 23 different firearms (including semi-auto and fully automatic rifles with scopes set up on tripods) and hundreds of rounds of ammunition - some of which he used to fire at innocent people attending a country music festival.

The current Republican-majority Congress, the legislative branch of the federal government empowered and tasked by the Constitution to draft laws on behalf of the American people, made it easier for that to happen.

As the editorial board of the New York Times wrote in a blistering, mostly visual op-ed yesterday:

"477 Days. 521 Mass Shootings. Zero Action From Congress."

If you haven't already seen it, click the link above and take a quick look at the calendars covering 2016 and 2017 with the days where at least one mass shooting took place in America marked off.

It borders on madness when you consider that the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as "four or more people injured or killed in a single event at the same time and location."  

Paul Ryan, Speaker of Platitudes?

Millions of Americans and people from around the world are expressing outrage and complete bafflement that U.S. law allows individuals to purchase and own semi-automatic weapons that can easily be updated to fire fully-automatic for less than $100.

In response Republican Congressional leaders are doing what they usually do after innocent Americans lose their lives to senseless mass shootings.

Absolutely nothing.

As Rebecca Shabad reported for CBS News earlier today, after Republicans holed up in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill, "Mr. Zero Action" himself, House Speaker Paul Ryan, emerged to take questions from the media.

When asked what Congress has done to help protect American people from the wave of mass shootings that have taken place across the U.S. during the time that Republicans have controlled the House, like a kid caught lying to the teacher about reading the homework assignment when he clearly hadn't, Ryan began pontificating about mental health reform.

"One of the things we've learned from these shootings is often underneath this is a diagnosis of mental illness."

It's remarkable that less than 48 hours after Stephen Paddock killed 59 and injured 500, these Republican right-wing nutjobs were able to offer a "diagnosis of mental illness" of a fairly wealthy guy with no criminal record without an investigation having been nearly completed.

Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock

Despite the fact that his own brother told reporters Paddock was a normal guy who enjoyed gambling, and even sent his mother cookies, and the New York Times reported that Paddock meticulously planned this heinous attack.

Right down to strategically placing video cameras at various places outside the hotel suite so he could observe anyone approaching the room picking a corner suite with a perfect sightline to the concert taking place in a field nearby.

Doesn't exactly sound like a raving maniac who bursts into work at lunch and starts shooting.

But I wouldn't exactly put a whole lot of faith in the piercing psychiatric insight of the Republican Congressional leadership.

After all these are the same clowns who still haven't been able to offer a "diagnosis of mental illness" of Donald Trump's crazy ass after 8 months of relentless chaos, rampant idiocy and stunning lack of major accomplishments in the White House.

Speaking of President Useless, his pointless comments in the wake of the shooting have been about as comforting as a crazed raccoon with rabies inside your sleeping bag.

His ordering flags flown at half-mast and trite "warm condolences" to the families of the 59 people killed is little more than pointless lip-service to the millions of people fed up with Republicans solemnly shaking their heads and offering their "thoughts and prayers" after innocent people get mowed down with guns and they do nothing about it.
 
Remember, Congressional Republicans cut government funding for research into gun violence - think about that - before the shooting on Sunday they were preparing to vote on the NRA-backed SHARE Act which would make it easier to transport silencers across state lines and not classify some armor-piercing rounds as armor piercing rounds.

El Presidente Loco in Puerto Rico

The White House response then veered into extra bizarre and tone-deaf mode.

Trump and his obstinate one-note White House press secretary Sarah Sanders both dutifully touted the GOP Party Line on Monday by politely hinting that they won't be doing dick about passing meaningful gun control.

Sanders had the gall to get teary-eyed.

Then Trump flew down to Puerto Rico where he made an even bigger ass of himself.

Seriously, what kind of incompetent brain-dead asshole flies down to a U.S. territory where 95% of the people still have no electricity, access to safe water or steady food supplies and says "You've thrown our budget a little out of whack. We've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico."??

Then starts tossing rolls of paper towels to people like some inebriated dimwit fan with court-side seats lumbering onto the floor to shoot foul shots at the halftime of Knicks game.

The silence from the National Rifle Association after Sunday's mass shooting has been deafening -
there's been almost total radio silence on their normally active social media pages.

Remarkably, the same Website that touts the NRA as "Freedom's Safest Place" is apparently too chickenshit to open their mouths about the fact that a guy busted open a hotel window and started killing and injuring people with a machine gun.

But they've got the gall to have an article titled "Capital of Denial: How Much Longer Can D.C. Continue to Ignore the 2nd Amendment?"

James & Nelba Greene with a photo of their daughter 
Ana at a press conference in Sandy Hook, 2013

The NRA leadership occupies that same parallel universe where the Republican Congressional leadership lives.

Devoid of compassion, bereft of common sense, enraptured by the 2nd Amendment like it's a false god.

After James Eagan Holmes threw teargas canisters into a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and shot twelve people and injured 70 back on July 20, 2012, the Republican-majority Congress did nothing.

Five months later, after 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed his own mother then drove to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary and shot and killed 20 innocent six and seven year-old children and six adults on December 14, 2012 - the Republican-majority Congress did nothing.

Last year on June 12, 2016 after 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded 58 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida - once again, the Republican-majority Congress did nothing.

In fact, if you recall, three days after the Pulse shooting, outraged Democrat Senators including Connecticut's Chris Murphy took to the floor of the Senate to filibuster for 15 straight hours to express their outrage that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn't even allow gun control legislation to come to the floor for a vote.

Like thousands of Americans I stayed up watching the filibuster speeches on C-Span, I called Murphy's Senate office late that night to express my support - and I could hear the phones ringing off the hook.

It was a brief, shining moment of hope that was dimmed by a Republican Senate leadership that is content to ignore the will of the American people because of the millions of dollars of direct political contributions they get from the NRA, as well as the unchecked millions in dark PAC money the NRA is able to funnel to the GOP in exchange for their turning a blind eye to the epic of gun violence taking place across the U.S. 

Today is my birthday, and I hate to start off the month of October on such a somber note, but I'm pissed - and like a lot of Americans I'm tired of Republicans hiding from their responsibility to pass reasonable gun control measures to keep us safe.

In a week when the American people needed real leadership from the party that controls Congress and the White House, we got a big fat nothing from a bunch of do-nothing obstructionists content to dwell in a parallel universe.

Republican Jesus & Roger Marshall's Compassion

Republican Rep. Roger Marshall

Well it's Friday and it's been awhile since I've given out a George Lincoln Rockwell Award in recognition of those individuals whose actions or words best exemplify the heartless spirit, toxic ideology and pseudo-intellectual hypocrisy of the infamous founder of the American Nazi Party.

It was my intention to bestow this honor collectively upon the individuals responsible for the ongoing nationwide slew of bomb threats and vandalism targeting Jewish community centers, synagogues, schools, cemeteries and even senior centers. 

But authorities are still trying to identify the degenerate anti-Semitic cowards responsible.

So this week's winner is the distinguished Kansas Republican Congressman Roger Marshall.

Now to be perfectly clear, by awarding this man the Rockwell, in no way am I suggesting that he is an American Nazi.

He won the award because his comments reflect a rigid, narrow-minded ideology, and his cold-heartedly categorizing an entire class of Americans as "others" simply because they exist on a different part of the economic spectrum than he does.

Even amidst the flurry of bipartisan outrage this week over the release of the new healthcare bill, cooked up by congressional Republicans determined to repeal the Affordable Care Act out of their lingering spite and deep-seated contempt for President Obama, Congressman Marshall's comments to STAT News stood out.

He became the target of criticism this week by politicians, citizens, and the media after he had the gall to invoke Biblical scripture to justify a Republican healthcare bill that will make it more difficult for the poor and working class to have health insurance.

Wisdom from President Jimmy Carter

And will by some estimates strip an estimated 18 to 20 million people of their healthcare by removing Medicare subsidies.

As reported by multiple media outlets this week, including the Washington Post, Marshall told STAT:

"Just like Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with us,'...There is a group of people that just don't want healthcare and aren't going to take care of themselves." 

Paraphrasing Jesus to justify stripping people of their healthcare is about as low as it gets.  

And this, of course, from a practicing obstetrician who claims to be pro-life and now receives comprehensive healthcare that is paid for in full by American tax payers.

Oh and speaking of Marshall's concern about those who "aren't going to take care of themselves".

The first-term Congressman representing the 1st District of Kansas was elected this past November with the support of a consortium of powerful Kansas agricultural interest groups (and the political action committees and lobbyists they bankroll) with the assurance that he will protect the billions of taxpayer dollars that go towards crop insurance and farm subsidies.

So in Marshall's mind, individuals receiving billions in taxpayer dollars for healthcare is wrong, but Kansas farmers receiving billions to subsidize the Kansas agricultural industry is OK?

Situational ethics at its finest.

Speaker Ryan and his trojan horse tax cut

This from the same Republican Congress trying to pass a healthcare bill that will make accessing healthcare more expensive for people who aren't fortunate enough to receive it through their employer - and one that conveniently comes gift wrapped with a $600 billion tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.

Jesus never said "screw the poor and working class" as the GOP have with their new healthcare bill; and with just about every other piece of legislation that congressional Republicans have tried to pass this year.

For a political party that spends so much time ranting against Muslims based on the argument that America is a Christian nation, Republicans support an awful lot of initiatives that seem to run counter to actual Christian values.

Let's not even get into the conduct and words of the vulgar compulsive liar who calls himself president.

In order to justify unpopular policies that enrich the few and further disenfranchise those people conservatives dismissively classify as "others", remarkably some Republican politicians like Congressman Roger Marshall, have even conjured up their own fake "Republican Jesus".

Not the Jesus found in the pages of the New Testament - but an unrecognizable one devoid of compassion, charity and unconditional love for others.

Weirdos In Wisconsin: Defending the KKK, Odd Sheriffs & Walker's Revenge

How're those charter schools working Gov Walker?

These are truly strange times we are living in.

Depending upon how you voted back on November 8th, yesterday's Electoral College vote confirming Donald Trump's victory was either a cause for celebration, or a depressing reminder of the current state of American democracy.

Bill Clinton was clearly not pleased.

In Wisconsin, where Tea Party puppet Republican Governor Scott Walker's very first state budget back in 2011 included $800 million in cuts to public schools while expanding charter school vouchers for Milwaukee students, an African-American teacher was recently relieved of her teaching duties at the Business and Economics Academy of Milwaukee after she sent a letter to parents of her seventh grade students explaining a class assignment for them to write an essay defending the Ku Klux Klan as a persuasive writing assignment.

Now I don't know that charter school teacher personally or anything, nor am I a teacher, but you can teach persuasive writing to seventh grade students without having them think up ways to defend a white supremacist terrorist organization.

Seriously, between her highly inappropriate classroom assignment and the unhinged right-wing Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke's recent call for people to take up "pitchforks and torches" against the federal government, the White House, the Department of Justice and what he calls "big media", black folk in Wisconsin got some strange-ass ideas.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke

If you thought Sheriff Clarke's bizarre right-wing spiel at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland earlier this summer was out there, take a couple minutes and watch some of his demented rant against the amorphous evil of big media.

Which, in the sheriff's eye, includes the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC - I'm guessing the First Amendment just isn't really his thing.

If you watch that video clip, remember this guy is the Sheriff of the fifth-largest city in the American mid-west.

Either he seals himself in a hermetic chamber and binge watches Fox News while listening to Alex Jones at night, or he's a got a serious man-crush on Arizona's xenophobic soon-to-be ex-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

You heard about Arpaio's Fake News Extravaganza press conference last Thursday when he tried rekindling the long-debunked Birther Theory?

Yup, now that Sheriff Joe's incessant hate-mongering has lost him his Sheriff's badge, he's resorted to proving that President Obama's birth certificate is fake - equal parts pathetic and strange.

But getting back to Wisconsin, in case you were wondering, Gov. Scott Walker's loopy brand of dehumanizing conservatism has only gotten weirder since he was one of the first presidential hopefuls to be bounced from the 2015 Republican Clown Car.

Scott Walker's hit-list includes the gray wolf. Really.

As Sophia Tesfaye reported in an article on Salon.com today, Walker sent a letter to Donald Trump requesting that the federal government loosen regulations to allow his state the autonomy to drug test food stamp recipients, increase premiums on Medicaid and legalize the hunting of the almost-extinct gray wolf.

Did Walker send his Christmas fantasy list for Santa to Trump by mistake?

Has Scott Walker reached the point where hunting the endangered gray wolf into extinction is a "freedom" to be cherished?

Does the gray (or timber) wolf represent some kind of existential threat to Walker's brand of way-off-the-ranch conservatism?

As Defenders of Wildlife's gray wolf fact-sheet notes, these amazing creatures play an important role in keeping the ecosystem in balance that scientists are just starting to fully understand.

Mankind almost killed them all off in the 1930's and they're just now starting to repopulate their species and return to habitats they once thrived in, so maybe Walker wanting to let people kill them all is just some kind of heartless and petty f*** you to animal rights activists?

Or perhaps Walker thinks he can score some cheap points with Trump by requesting the right to hunt one of North America's most endangered species in order to please the fake news-Tweeting Trump-spawn Donald Jr. and Eric - who like to flaunt their manhood by posing next to photos of endangered species they kill.

Regardless of his motivation, Gov. Walker still comes off as a spineless nincompoop from the same state that gave us tax cut fetishist Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump's newly appointed White House Chief of Staff, former RNC Chair Reince Priebus.

Like I said, strange times - and equally strange Republican men.

Bernie vs. Hillary, the Democratic Establishment & Delegate Math

If the increasingly-heated tone of comments fired back and forth between the two leading Democratic candidates over the past couple days is any kind of indicator, it's clear that there's a lot at stake with the upcoming New York Democratic primary on April 19th.

It's been awhile since a presidential primary in the state of New York was this relevant to the White House aspirations of both parties.

As nationally-recognized Democratic political figures,both Hillary and Bernie lay claim to deep ties with the Empire State, and there's little doubt they're both feeling the pressure to win bragging rights for notching a victory in the media capital of the world.

The delegate count is obviously important, but the prestige factor is in play too as both Bernie and Hillary can arguably view New York as a "home" state considering Bernie was raised in Brooklyn and Hillary is a former New York senator who's called Westchester home for 16 years.

Hence the colder-than-normal exchanges between the two as of late.

It's not quite a "war of words" yet, but in the past week the verbal attacks and soundbites from the two remaining Democratic front runners (and members of their respective campaigns) has begun to veer into a much more "gloves off - politically ruthless" kind of territory.

Hillary & de Blasio joke about "CP Time" Saturday night

It remains to be seen whether Hillary's taking part in what some have perceived as an awkwardly-timed racist joke between her and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio at the Inner Circle Dinner on Saturday night will really impact Hillary's chances in the NY primary.

But according to the results of a recent Monmouth University poll , Hillary currently leads Democratic primary voters over Bernie 51% to 39%

For the record, I don't know if you heard about the joke, but I don't see it as racist.

Black people do openly laugh and joke about "colored people time" or CPT, (or BPT) and we generally have a sense of humor about it, but frankly a white politician joking about it in the middle of a heated presidential primary season probably wasn't the best strategic move. Just sayin'.

Overall Hillary obviously still has a significant delegate lead, and her clear advantage in Democratic "super delegates" who've pledged to support her presents a real problem for Bernie.

But she's lost seven straight primaries and arguably (for the moment at least) the momentum has shifted to his campaign.

Where did the love go?

Unfortunately for Bernie, the battle for New York's delegates isn't the only uphill battle he has to climb to reach the nomination.

Hillary is a highly-intelligent and shrewd politician, and her recent comments about Bernie's stance on immigration and gun control will definitely resonate with some Democrats who are still on the fence.

Hillary's efforts to begin to attack Bernie on his core issues, like banking are going to have an effect - especially in New York.

As Mark Binelli observed in a March 9th article in Rolling Stone titled Hillary vs. Bernie Sanders: The Good Fight', thus far Bernie and Hillary have distinguished themselves from their Republican counterparts by engaging in actual policy discussion that's been substantive and revealing about what their ideas for the presidency and the direction for this nation will be in the next 4 years.

Republicans on the other hand, who were already deeply divided before the 2016 presidential campaign even started, are headed towards an epic implosion; a trajectory that hasn't been helped by their frequently-buffoonish televised presidential debates over the course of 2015 - 2016.

Paul Ryan announces he won't seek the presidency in 2016

House Speaker Paul Ryan running around the country giving policy speeches and waving the flag of party unity in what some journalists have described as his "mirage campaign" is not only too little too late to address the unwelcome disastrous monster that Donald Trump's campaign has become for the GOP.

It's also further evidence of subdivisions within the conservative voting bloc in America

Earlier at the gym today, I watched some of Ryan's press conference announcing that he won't seek or accept the GOP nomination for president and it was about as anti-climatic, predictable and uninspiring as his unrealistic budget proposals.

All that manufactured "suspense" is political theater. As for his speaking in front of all those perfectly-folded American flags, Ryan is running for the 2020 presidential nomination, and today's press conference was about distancing himself from Trump and Cruz, who are both about as popular with establishment Republicans as Jimmy Carter.

Ryan's efforts to stand up for Republican principles should have been done last summer when Trump was degrading Mexicans and preening like a nincompoop - too little, too late.

And that goes for the conservative billionaires who're now pouring their greenbacks into anti-Trump efforts - where the Hell where they last summer when Trump was making a laughingstock of the Republican brand?

Anyway, I digress.

DNC Chair & Hillary-backer Debbie Wasserman Schultz

To wrap up, I like Bernie but he's got a tall order in front of him.

Members of the Democratic establishment, like DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz who's currently in a race to keep her Congressional seat in for Florida's 23rd District, clearly prefers Hillary and that's affecting his grass roots campaign efforts in ways that the public doesn't always see.

For example, my sister is doing a lot of volunteer work for the Sanders campaign at their Brooklyn headquarters in Gowanus. She told me the Democratic party blocked Bernie's campaign from opening offices in the South Bronx and in Queens.

Last weekend my friend Geoff sent me this link to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog which breaks down the details of the delegate math that the Sanders campaign is facing - if you take a look at the analysis, it's sobering for Sanders and his millions of supporters.

There's no two ways about it. momentum is good, but from here on out Bernie is going to have to win key upcoming primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the big kahuna California - and he's going to have to win them big.

After all, Hillary has been in this game before and she's only just started bringing out the big political artillery - her master politician husband Bill Clinton.

The former president remains hugely popular in the eyes of Democrats and it's another advantage that's going to be hard for Bernie to match; even if he is able to score a big endorsement from someone like Oprah or Bruce.

For now he's got a tough fight in front of him in New York and it's going to be a challenge for him to keep his campaign focused on the issues and avoid the temptation to get personal and go after the more sordid corners of Hillary's track record.

After all, the ultimate goal for Democrats is to win the White House and challenge for the Senate; a cause that won't be helped by using the kind of ammunition on Hillary that Republicans will surely be firing in the fall.

Monster On the Loose & Paul Ryan's Memory Issues

It's Super Tuesday, the most important state primary / caucus day of the 2016 presidential race with a prized cache of delegates from thirteen different states up for grabs.

But there's a monster loose in the Republican party and "establishment" Republicans from House Speaker Paul Ryan, to former two-term Republican New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman are grabbing their pitchforks and desperately trying to rally conservative villagers.

It's somewhat puzzling to listen to Paul Ryan use the influence of the Speaker's Chair to insist that there's no room for bigotry in the Republican party while repudiating Donald Trump for his reluctance to distance himself from endorsements from the KKK and other white supremacist organizations like Stormfront.

As political observer and essayist Chauncey DeVega observed on his blog Indomitable earlier this afternoon, Ryan seems to have forgotten the GOP's open embrace of the "Southern Strategy" as a means to attract white voters in America by preying on racial prejudices, ingrained fears and ignorance.

Trump is doing the exact same thing that Republicans have been doing since George Wallace and Barry Goldwater in the 1960's, and now "establishment" conservatives are calling him out for it?

House Republican Speaker Paul Ryan

I certainly can't recall Paul Ryan expressing any indignation over Republican governors and state legislatures around the country enacting repressive "voter ID laws" that have and are creating un-Constitutional barriers to vote for thousands of African-American, Hispanic, legal immigrants, young people and the elderly.

Remember back in March of 2014 when Ryan ignited a nationwide firestorm when he blamed high poverty rates in urban communities on a "culture" of laziness "in our inner cities."?

As the former House Budget Chairman, Ryan's draconian 2012 Congressional budget proposal could arguably be called intentionally racially and socioeconomically biased for the $5.3 trillion in cuts to medicare, medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance that he proposed - bedrock antipoverty programs that would have had disproportional affects on poor and low-income blacks, whites, Hispanics and Native Americans alike.

Ryan's proposed budget cuts in 2012 also called for 33% cuts in education, employment, job training and social services, arguably ideological bigotry in it's purest form.

Today's Republican party establishment has come to rely on thinly-veiled "code words" about race to press the buttons of their voter base on an as-needed basis.

So I think Ryan's righteous indignation over Trump today is less about race than it is the shift in the power base that makes the Republican elite so nervous; a man like Trump who doesn't need someone's money scares the shit out of GOP power brokers.

David & Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson

If it wasn't for the hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money that conservative rainmaker billionaires like Charles and David Koch and Sheldon Adelson have poured into the nation's political process like some kind of toxic sludge over the past eight years, one could almost generate a measure of sympathy for extremist conservatives now that the ideological monster they created is loose.

Almost.

When it served their needs, many conservatives were happy to watch their monster run around and wreck things.

Back in President Obama's first term, when enraged Tea Party Birthers were intoxicating themselves on loony theories about the President being some kind of Islamic- socialist who wasn't born in America, Republicans watched their monster with glee and goaded it on.

They even fed it by bankrolling the Tea Party and supporting right-wing media to further enrage the conservative base into a state of almost-perpetual hysteria.

But unfortunately for the Koch bothers and their like-minded billionaire ideological-brethren, they thought their money gave them control over the monster.

It didn't. And Donald Trump was smart enough to understand how the monster thinks very early on in his campaign.

He learned to please the monster and tell it things it likes to hear, now he controls it and establishment Republicans are learning too late that the monster they spent years creating to do their bidding doesn't listen to them anymore.

It's loose, and Republicans don't know how to get it back; they're not even sure if they want it back.

Some Republicans, like Chris Christie, once despised the monster and fought against it.

But now they serve it instead.

Christie's craving for the national media spotlight was strong, but the hope of a potential political opportunity was enough for Christie to put the monster ahead of his political reputation.

Which, as Jennifer Rubin wrote in a blog for the Washington Post, is now ruined beyond repair.

But that's part of the monster's allure, it lies and destroys.

To me the most frightening part of the classic 1931 film 'Frankenstein' (adapted from Mary Shelley's novel) starring Boris Karloff, isn't when Dr. Frankenstein brings the monster to life in his lab.

It's the terror that ensues amongst the villagers when the monster escapes and runs amok.

Horror in San Bernardino & The People's Interests

Some of the hundreds of people evacuated from the scene of the shooting  

These latest mass shootings in California have left me feeling baffled, angry and disillusioned.

Not just at the killers themselves for perpetrating the slaughter of at least 14 people at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA.

But also at the unwillingness of the current Republican majority in Congress to use their lawmaking authority to draft a single bill that would put more stringent federal background checks in place to prevent the wrong people from purchasing guns - and make it easier for law enforcement to track those who sell weapons used in the kind of horrific slaughter that took place earlier today.

A majority of American citizens have been calling for reasonable gun control legislation since well before Columbine and Sandy Hook - and yet here we are. Again.

There's so little known about the shooting beyond the death toll as I'm writing this (the LA Times is reporting that one of the killers is a U.S. citizen) so I'm just going to agree with the President's comments earlier that politicians around the nation have a moral obligation to do more to prevent this kind of mass murder - and that it's going to have to come from the local and state level.

Useless. Thanks for the moment of silence Mr. Speaker.

This do-nothing Congress is basically a write-off when it comes to taking any kind of legislative action in response to events like this.

They're owned by the NRA, beholden to a tiny group of pissed-off right-wing extremists who despise the very government they were elected to serve (we see you Freedom Caucus) and take a perverse stubborn pride in being functionally and politically impotent.


Newly-elected Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (pictured above) has shown little interest in doing much of anything when it comes to taking the lead on drafting and passing significant bi-partisan legislation that actually has a snowball's chance in Hell of being signed into law.

When asked during a recent 60 Minutes interview whether or not he intended to try and move any gun control legislation through the House, the increasingly-feeble looking Speaker offered up this lame-ass standard Republican response to citizens demands for gun control laws:

“I haven’t thought of proposing gun legislation, I think the big problem we have is enforcing the law as we have on the books right now,”    

News flash Mr. Speaker, those laws ain't cutting it.

Instead, in keeping with the Republican tradition of prostituting themselves to the slightest whim of the NRA, Ryan's brilliant proactive solution to the epidemic of gun violence in this country is to publicly back a mental health bill sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy.

Unfortunately that mental health bill is the same shitty piece of legislation the GOP offered up as a response to the shootings in Sandy Hook - back in 2012. (Cue sound of crickets chirping).

New Jersey Governor-in-Absentia Chris Christie has been using that exact same "enforce the existing laws on the books" cop-out line for months during his presidential campaign whenever he's asked about gun control.

Christie recently stunned New Jersey voters when he decided to veto a bill passed by the state legislature with strong bi-partisan support that would have made it mandatory for anyone convicted of domestic abuse to turn in any firearms to the local police or sell them within 48 hours - and provide proof to a judge.

But in a rebuff to Christie that reflects his growing unpopularity with people in his own state (and you wonder why he's rarely here) the NJ Senate, who recently voted to override Christie's veto of a another popular gun control bill, are set to vote to override Christie's veto of the domestic abuse firearms bill sponsored by Democratic Assemblywoman Gabriela Mosquera.

As a child Mosquera spent time in a shelter for battered women because of her father's abuse against her mother - so her support for the bill isn't just about simplistic political pandering as the veto was for Christie.

If the override of the veto goes through, it would be the first time the Democratic-majority legislature has used an override to pass a bill into law over the governor's objections in NJ.

It says a lot about Christie's plummeting popularity and I think it's also a good illustration of what President Obama was talking about earlier today when he said that gun control laws need to come from the local and state political level, not Congress.

By the way, you've likely heard Christie's pontificating on how much he supports the police and his using that die-hard support as an excuse to trash the Black Lives Matter movement right?

Well consider this. That first gun control bill passed by the NJ legislature that Christie vetoed?

As NJ.com reported, it "calls for including police in the judicial process of deciding whether people with a documented mental illness may expunge this from their record in order to obtain a gun permit."

So Mr. "I support the police" used his power as governor to veto a bi-partisan bill that would have allowed police officers to have a say in deciding whether someone with a documented mental illness could conceal that when trying to buy a firearm.

Yes, his decision is as absurd as it sounds.

That's why Christie's veto, little more than a transparent attempt to wheedle some political support for his flagging presidential campaign from the NRA, was over turned.

This isn't Texas, it's New Jersey, and the folks here, Republican or Democrat, expect their politicians to represent their interests.

And as we've seen from what happened in Colorado and California and recent days, reasonable gun control legislation is most definitely in the interests of the people of this nation.

A rather simple truth that's lost on some presidential candidates.