Category Archives: National Politics

Cruzing Back to the ’50s ► Presidential Politics Post

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Now that narcissistic Senator Ted Cruz, (R) God’s Country, has thrown his halo into the presidential ring, the knives on all sides have come out.

There’s a lot of hate for Cuban-Canadian Cruz on the Left. It’s hard not to overlook how this crazy MoFo shut down the government when he didn’t get his way to abolish Obamacare. Of course, he was standing on the Constitution because that’s exactly how the Founding Fathers would have wanted it. The Founders weren’t into compromise either and started an entire revolution so as to not bend their knee to the King. Same thing here, ‘cept no shots were fired.

Before he shut down the government, this crackpot stamped his foot through an actually 21-hour filibuster as a political stunt and to beat Rand Paul’s earlier 15 hour filibuster. [For a short period standing on your feet and looking foolish for hours on end was all the rage.]

It’s not just the Left that has it out for Cruz. Representative Peter King, someone in his own party, had a few choice things to say to CNN about Cruz:

“To me, he’s a guy with a big mouth and no results,” the New York Republican told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview on “The Situation Room.”

“We have very, very complex issues facing the country today, and he goes out of his way to oversimplify,” King said of Cruz. “Ted Cruz may be an intelligent person, but he doesn’t carry out an intelligent debate. He oversimplifies, he exaggerates … he doesn’t provide leadership and he has no real experience.”

Whether you’re on the Right, or the Left, there’s no denying that the shutdown left a bad taste in everybody’s mouth when all the costs were added up. According to The Full Cost of the Government Shutdown:

Financial ratings agency Standard & Poor’s reported this week the 16-day U.S. government shutdown costs delivered a massive $24 billion hit to the U.S. economy.



Standard & Poor’s said the shutdown equaled some $1.5 billion a
day and “shaved at least 0.6% off annualized fourth quarter 2013 GDP
growth.” Moody’s Analytics reported similar numbers, saying the
shutdown cost $1.4375 billion per day, for a $23 billion wallop to U.S.
gross domestic product.



“The bottom line is the government shutdown has hurt the U.S.
economy,” Standard & Poor’s said in a statement. “In September, we
expected 3% annualized growth in the fourth quarter because we thought
politicians would have learned from 2011 and taken steps to avoid
things like a government shutdown and the possibility of a sovereign
default. Since our forecast didn’t hold, we now have to lower our
fourth-quarter growth estimate to closer to 2%.”

While taxpayers shudder, comedians from the Maine to Hawaii rejoice. They know their paycheques won’t be ending any time soon. Fresh out of the gate was Jon Stewart, whose paycheque, ironically, will be ending soon.

The truth of the matter is Ted Cruz is a so scared of what
people think of him, he renounced his Canadian citizenship. This means that once he’s charged with a crime, which “some people say” is just a matter of time, he has cut off his escape route. He’ll have to apply for asylum in Cuba instead.

Despite his vehement and never-ending objections against Obamacare — and renouncing his commitment to Queen Elizabeth — he has never
reimbursed the Canadian Health Care System for his birth.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: NNS Head Writer Headly Westerfield has sworn an oath to
Queen Elizabeth, including her heirs and assigns, that he would not vote in the
elections of another country. But that doesn’t mean he can’t make fun of
them.]

But, it’s not the country of his birth that disqualifies Cruz from the nation’s highest office. My PoliticusUSA colleague Becky Sarwate asks the musical question, Ted Cruz In Unelectable, So Why Is He Running For President? And, she answers with:

In a piece entitled Ted Cruz Hopes Early Campaign Entry Will Focus Voters’ Attention, writers Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times
quote longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney as saying, “It’s the
shiny object principle. He wants to be first, get in the conversation,
not show any doubt or hesitation.” If there are two things at which Cruz
excels, it is the use of shiny objects to distract constituents from
real issues and a refusal to second guess himself. Thus the announcement
bore a fitting similarity to the man making it.

After capturing the
zeitgeist and the ire of lawmakers from both parties during October
2013’s partial government shutdown, GOP rainmakers no less authoritative
than longtime Arizona Senator John McCain labeled Cruz’s pointless
stoking of the House, “a fool’s errand.” New York Republican Congressman Peter King
minced a few less words in observing, “My sound bite is to say he’s a
fraud…I start with that, and then I go on. It takes me two or three
minutes to explain it.”

The Ted Cruz Coloring Book is not satire, it just feels that way.

Yesterday, while this Dominionist was giving his announcement speech at Liberty University, a school with its own sordid history of Racism and Homophobia, some of those potential Cruz cultists were clearly not with the program. How Rand Paul Supporters Provided Awkward Backdrop for Ted Cruz’s 2016 Announcement is worth a laugh, too:

Several students wearing “Stand With Rand” shirts made their way into seats directly behind Cruz on stage this morning. The students’ shirts were blurry yet visible in many of the shots during Cruz’s speech.


 The “Stand With Rand” campaign was launched by Sen. Rand Paul’s team during his filibuster of U.S. drone policy in the spring of 2013. Paul’s filibuster lasted 13 hours and was the longest in recent memory. That is, until Cruz stood on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours to discuss defunding Obamacare in September of the same year.

You can see there’s already bad blood between Cruz and Paul supporters. Pass the popcorn! However, What college students are saying behind Ted Cruz’s back, is even funnier:

Making such a major announcement on a college campus might seem like a
risky move for a conservative like Cruz, but Liberty University is no
ordinary college. Founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell in the early 1970s, the
school was recently listed as one of the top ten most conservative colleges in
the country. The odds of Cruz’s announcement speech being interrupted
by liberal protesters were about as low at Liberty as they would have
been at CPAC, the annual conservative conference. Cruz’s choice of venue
also allowed him to send social conservatives a message while visibly
appealing to young people.


Nevertheless,
college kids are still college kids, and mandatory Monday morning
assemblies are still mandatory Monday morning assemblies. Yes, that’s
right: Attendance at Cruz’s speech was mandatory for all Liberty
students.


As you might expect, anonymous local messaging app Yik Yak soon filled up with comments from Liberty students mercilessly mocking Cruz.

The truth of the matter is that Ted Cruz is the first one in the Clown Car. He’s not a serious candidate and the Not Now Silly Newsroom refuses to take him seriously. He’s a sideshow to the main event, which will culminate in the next president elected in 2016. While the results are far too important for circus sideshows, let’s all agree to find our laughs where we can get them. Ted Cruz is a joke from top to bottom.

This is the first Presidential Politics Post as the Not Now Silly Newsroom cranks up its 2016 election coverage.

How Mitt Romney Didn’t Build That

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At the end of August Rolling Stone published an article called “The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney,” by Tim Dickinson. The article made the rounds, but had dropped off my radar when I was reminded of it again. I was alerted to a HIGH-LARRY-US parody video — that captures this explosive story — called “King of the Dole.” Now I am trying to help the creator make it go viral.



Now that it’s the morning after the second Presidential debate, as all the pundits decide who won and how much Mendacious Mitt lied, it’s worth taking a look back to see how Mitt Romney’s entire reputation for his self-proclaimed business acumen is based on a lie. To put it bluntly: He didn’t build that and knowing what actually happened shows Romney’s entire presidential campaign is predicated on a pack of lies.

In the Rolling Stone article Dickinson digs deeply into the early days of Bain Capital and outlines an act of what can only be described as blackmail to keep it afloat, leaving taxpayers on the hook for more than $10 million. While it’s a complicated financial story, Dickinson offers this pithy summary:

[T]he legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney’s initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had “no value as a going concern.” Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC, the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers, out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

The timeline of Romney’s involvement in this story begins in October 1990, when Bill Bain appointed Romney as managing director of Bain and Company.  The company was struggling to stay afloat, in debt to the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation for $30 million, and Romney was tasked with turning things around. 

However, it didn’t go so well for Romney. By March 1992, an internal FDIC memo noted that Bain’s financial condition was as dire as ever, and that its “operating performance had deteriorated.”

As summarized by CampaignWatch.org:

In 1992, while Romney was managing director, Bain and Company was in debt to the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) for $30 million. Nevertheless, in April 1992, Romney approved lavish bonuses for Bain executives, which helped bring Bain close to bank­ruptcy months later.

Romney then threatened the FDIC in 1993 with doling out more executive bonuses unless it forgave $10.7 million of Bain’s debt. The FDIC capitulated, concluding that Bain had “no value as a going concern” and “would otherwise fail.” The Romney campaign has refused to answer media questions about these disclosures and documents.

Aside from the part about the FDIC bailout, this wasn’t a whole lot different from Bain Capital’s normal modus operandi: 1). Buy a company; 2). Load it up with debt; 3). Take out all the profits in management bonuses; 4). Allow it to go bankrupt once Bain stripped the carcass clean. Only this time it was Bain Capital’s parent company about to go under, which would have rocked investor confidence. So it had to be saved.

While Romney took a government bailout to save Bain, he has no problem pretending he “built that.” The hypocrisy wouldn’t be so quite so egregious were it not for a few, more recent, facts:

During the lead-up to the Republican Convention Fox “News,” which has proven over the years to be a subsidiary of the Republican Party (or leader, take your pick), took a remark by President Obama out of context by falsely editing a video to make it sound as if the president said small business owners didn’t build their own businesses. A full reading of his remarks show that the president was talking about infrastructure — roads, education, the internet, fire departments, etc. — that help businesses succeed. After Fox “News” promoted its false narrative, the Republicans decided to build a whole night of its convention around the false quote. In other words, Mitt Romney didn’t even build the false narrative; it was a Fox “News” lie.

Long after this election is over, flip flops and lies will be the legacy of Mitt Romney’s campaign. On a variety of issues Romney has had more positions than the Kama Sutra, So many that his wife Ann has had to come out and deny it as recent as yesterday. And the lies? Steve Benen of the Rachael Maddow Show has been keeping track in a weekly series called Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. He’s already up to Volume 38 and it shows no signs of ending, unless election day is definitive.

However, if one wants the perfect metaphor for the entire Romney-Ryan campaign, one need go no further than Paul “Ayn” Ryan’s actions earlier this week. According to news articles all over the innertubes, Lyin’ Ryan “ramrodded” his way into a Youngston, Ohio, soup kitchen for a Photo Op, where he pretended to wash dishes that were already clean. The president of the local St. Vincent De Paul Society says Ryan’s actions could jeopardize its funding, as they are an apolitical organization.

Clearly after a secret recording was released in which Mendacious Mitt denounced 47% of the population as takers (Ryan put the figure at 30%), the campaign has been doing everything in its power to burnish the ticket’s street cred with that 47% of ‘Merkins. Yet the spending cuts the ticket is proposing would hurt the poor the most, the same people who are helped the most by a soup kitchen.

That’s why the video above resonated with me. In a quick 2 minutes and 13 seconds it says what took paragraphs and hundreds of words to say, and it’s a lot funnier besides. The whole Romney-Ryan campaign is built on a house of cards and the lie that Mitt Romney “built that” at Bain Capital is simply untrue. He didn’t even build his most famous lie. Watch the video again and sing along.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be ► Vice Presidents We Have Known

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It seems only fitting this morning, after last night’s Vice Presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congresschild Lyin’ Ryan, to remind people that on this day in 1973 President Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to replace Spiro Agnew as VP. Agnew was forced to resign ahead of pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to charges that he accepted bribes as governor of Maryland and tax evasion before becoming Nixon’s one-breath-away-from-the-presidency pick as Veep.

After Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford, who had been a Congressman, was elevated to the office of the presidency, despite having not been elected to either office.

“Some people say” that Ford’s massive gaffe during the Presidential Debate against Jimmy Carter doomed his reelection. There are others that say it was his own clumsiness, or perception thereof, that doomed his reelection. Then there’s a whole passel of people who blame Chevy Chase’s portrayals of Ford on Saturday Night Live as the reason Ford wasn’t reelected. I’ve never listened to those “nattering nabobs of negativity” because I’ve always believed Ford lost reelection because he pardoned Richard Nixon.

This turn of events made Gerald R. Ford the only appointed President of the United States, until George W. Bush in 2000.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be ► Ronald Reagan Cracks A Joke

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President Ronald Reagan and his Vice President
Dateline August 11, 1984 – Ronald Reagan, famed for his highly-tuned sense of humour, made a funny while doing audio levels for a radio broadcast. Get ready to LOL.

Oh! Stop!! My!!! Sides!!!!

It should never be forgotten that Reagan presided during the Iran-Contra scandal, when he PERSONALLY approved a plan to sell arms to Iran, which just a few years earlier had held 52 ‘Merkins hostage for 444 days, and may have been the deciding factor in President Jimmy Carter losing re-election. Reagan famously said he would never negotiate with terrorists. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Schultz were against the deal. Yet, in the end, there can be no other reading: Reagan traded arms for hostages.

However, it didn’t stop there. Less than half of the $30 million Iran paid for the 1,500+ missles ever made it back to ‘Merka. The rest was diverted to the Contras, Nicaragua rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government, or the Junta of National Reconstruction. This fund diversion was only discovered during Attorney General Ed Meese’s investigation of the arms-for-hostage deal. It turned out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, of the National Security Council, had passed the missing money on to the Contras. Because this had been done under the aegis of National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter, North assumed Reagan also knew. This has never been proven but it caused some comedians (most notably me) to ask, “What did the President forget and when did he forget it?” According to PBS:

Speculation about the involvement of Reagan, Vice President George Bush and the administration at large ran rampant. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh investigated the affair for the next eight years. Fourteen people were charged with either operational or “cover-up” crimes. In the end, North’s conviction was overturned on a technicality, and President Bush issued six pardons, including one to McFarlane, who had already been convicted, and one to Weinberger before he stood trial.

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Meanwhile, enjoy these photographs of Reagan throughout his long life.

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Mitt Romney Is A Spineless Wimp Who Would Do Anything Or Say Anything To Become President

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Mitt Romney wearing his “magic underwear.”
There’s a lot to dislike about Mitt Romney. However, at the top of the list is the fact that the
Etch-A-Sketch candidate has no backbone. This week Mittens threw his own spokesman on security
issues under the bus. Richard Grenell was the subject of a Reich Wing Freak Out because he’s…shhh!… a homo,
who lives as an openly Gay man.  There
was the usual
shitstorm with the usual suspects, including Bryan Fischer, of the horrible
American
Family Association, known nationwide for its intolerance. Mittens reacted
to the controversy by asking Grenell to seek other employment.
Here’s the real joke, tho’. When Fischer found out Grenell
had been fired, he called it a “huge
win” for the religious right. Then, the very next day, Fischer did his own pivot and started criticizing Romney for listening to him in the first place:
[I]f Mitt Romney can
be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk
show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese?
How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if
he can be pushed around by a yokel like me?
Watch: