Newsroom - Video/Audio: Bernie Sanders - U.S. Senator for Vermont. Verified/US Congress - Abonnements... Grover Norquist's Budget Is Largely Financed by Just Two Billionaire-Backed Nonprofits. For the Ages. We're going to have a piece on this shortly. But in case you weren't watching Fox News over the last 45 minutes or so, something for the ages just happened. Shortly after Fox and everyone else called Ohio and the election for President Obama, Rove staged a live TV mutiny.
He insisted that the Ohio call had been premature and then forced Fox's Megan Kelly to make an SNL like walk through the Fox building and confront the network's official number counters with Rove's objections. I'm sure I saw a thought bubble over the numbers guys' heads that said "What the f*$k are you guys doing here? " But the guy calmly explained to Kelly that yes they were quite certain that Obama had defeated Romney and it was over.
This full Fox News network meltdown continued for a while. So basically at this point Barone is like half grief counselor, half hostage negotiator trying to get Rove through Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief. Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown. It was supposed to be a "killer app," but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done more harm to Romney's chances on Election Day—largely because of a failure to follow basic best practices for IT projects. Called "Orca," the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado. Instead, volunteers couldn't get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information.
The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack. As one Orca user described it to Ars, the entire episode was a "huge clusterfuck. " Here's how it happened. The real scandal of Tom DeLay - May 9, 2005. Monday, May 9, 2005 Posted: 12:14 PM EDT (1614 GMT) WASHINGTON, D.C. (Creators Syndicate) -- Forget the freebie trips across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Forget the casinos and the allegedly illicit contributions -- they represent only degrees of avarice. To grasp the moral bankruptcy of the public Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, you only have to know about Frank Murkowski and Saipan.
Today, Frank Murkowki is the governor of Alaska, but from 1980 to 2002, he was a conservative Republican senator from Alaska. How conservative? But as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski became furious at the abusive sweatshop conditions endured by workers, overwhelmingly immigrants, in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, of which Saipan is the capital. Among the manufacturers that had profited from the un-free labor market on the island were Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne. But one man primarily stopped the U.S. Ask Free Enterprise Fund: Why Aren’t Sex Slaves Featured in Your Ads? Elizabeth Warren vs. Wall Street | Rolling Stone Politics.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Scott Brown Begs David Koch For Money. Rep. Bachus faces insider-trading investigation. The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative agency, opened its probe late last year after focusing on numerous suspicious trades on Bachus’s annual financial disclosure forms, the individuals said. OCE investigators have notified Bachus that he is under investigation and that they have found probable cause to believe insider-trading violations have occurred. (Washington Post investigation: Capitol Assets) The case is the first of its kind involving a member of Congress. It comes at a time of intense public scrutiny of congressional ethics, with the House passing legislation Thursday to tighten rules against insider trading by lawmakers. The impetus for the legislation, a version of which passed in the Senate a week earlier, came from a “60 Minutes” report and a book mentioning Bachus’s trades, “Throw Them All Out,” by Peter Schweizer. Omar S.
Most of his investments are for less than $10,000, and almost all involve options rather than stock purchases. Anti-immigrant Republican congressional candidate outed by his Mexican boyfriend!!! Anti-immigrant Republican congressional candidate outed by his Mexican boyfriend!!! “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!” Sir Walter Scott wasn’t talking specifically about self-proclaimed “corruption fighter” Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, AZ, but he could have been all the same. Babeu’s the strident, rightwing, bald-headed blowhard who’s neck and neck with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the contest to see which of them can get the most “Hey, look at me!” Media attention for being the most hateful racist hard-ass in Arizona law enforcement. He was in John McCain’s “border patrol” campaign ad in 2008. Uh… not so fast… We all know what this sort of idiotic attention-seeking did for Arpaio, who is the subject of a major Justice Department investigation that already looks so incredibly gnarly that Arpaio’s dumbass is obviously toast..
*Sputter* *cough*... Believe that if you are really gullible... Paul Babeu’s a lot of things! Dennis Kucinich and “wackiness” Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich was defeated in a Democratic primary by Rep. Marcy Kaptur after re-districting pitted the two long-term incumbents against each other. Kucinich’s fate was basically sealed when the new district contained far more of Kaptur’s district than his. His 18-year stint in the House will come to an end when the next Congress is installed at the beginning of 2013. Establishment Democrats have long viewed Dennis Kucinich with a mixture of scorn, mockery and condescension. The Prospect article also praises as “great” a snide, derisive Washington Post piece which purports to “highlight some of the particularly bizarre facts about” Kucinich.
Revealingly, two days after the Prospect article crowned Kucinich “among the wackiest members of Congress,” TPM featured this article, the day after Eric Holder advocated the view that the President has the power to target American citizens for execution without charges: I find this unpersuasive on multiple levels. Paul Ryan’s Influence on the G.O.P. One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off well-rehearsed critiques of the new President’s policies and America’s lurch toward a “European” style of government. Ryan’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed like a man in a hurry.
Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to explain his opposition to Obama’s newly released budget, he replied, “I don’t have that much time.” Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. “I think you’re obligated to do that,” he said. Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash. Share Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is barnstorming the country, promising to repeal every provision of the Affordable Care Act if the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected. But a letter he wrote to the Obama administration may undermine this message. On December 10, 2010, Ryan penned a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services to recommend a grant application for the Kenosha Community Health Center, Inc to develop a new facility in Racine, Wisconsin, an area within Ryan’s district.
“The proposed new facility, the Belle City Neighborhood Health Center, will serve both the preventative and comprehensive primary healthcare needs of thousands of new patients of all ages who are currently without healthcare,” Ryan wrote. The grant Ryan requested was funded directly by the Affordable Care Act, better known simply as healthcare reform or Obamacare. In public, Ryan has cultivated a profile as one of health reform’s most outspoken critics. U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign.
Amidst reports that Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital with funds from investors tied to 1980s Salvadoran death squads, his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting foreign policy briefings from a man who actively covered-up some of the worst atrocities committed by those same death squads. The GOP's vice-presidential candidate also earned his political stripes working under neoconservative Republicans who funneled billions in U.S. aid to those military hitmen. Though the war in El Salvador was just one chapter in history, Romney and Ryan's relationship with that war may provide a snapshot into their worldview. Between 1979 and 1992, an estimated 75,000 people were killed in the conflict in El Salvador and countless others were "disappeared" or displaced, an astonishing number for a country the size of Massachusetts.
Recent reports suggest that some of the same members of the Salvadoran oligarchy that backed the death squads gave Romney the startup funds for Bain Capital. Our Guide to the Best Coverage of Ron Paul and His Record. Ron Paul’s tiny-government ideals have become increasingly relevant. Here’s our guide to some of the best reading on the Texas Congressman. Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul speaks at the Iowa Straw Poll on Aug. 13, 2011, in Ames, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) This is the latest installment in a series of reading guides on 2012 presidential candidates.
Three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul is consistently disregarded by the media, a point made recently by comedian Jon Stewart and confirmed by a Pew Research Center analysis of news coverage. But the 76-year-old Texas Republican congressman's tiny-government ideals have become increasingly relevant to the national debate. The basics: The best place to start is a 2001 Texas Monthly profile by Sam Gwynne, who explains why Paul remained such a viable Republican congressional candidate despite his refusal to toe the party line. Overview of his record as a congressman: Characterizing Ron Paul's supporters: