Friday Reads

Posted: July 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , | 60 Comments

Good Morning!

I’m really glad it’s Friday and I’m wondering what the markets will be doing.  There’s more extremist nonsense coming out of the Congress in the debt ceiling and deficit debate. Let’s take a brief look at the headlines.

First, it appears that Pell Grants are under attack. 

House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare.

Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly appropriate $9 billion for Pell Grants in 2012 and another $8 billion in 2013.

There’s speculation that some of the teabots may have their districts cannibalized by an angry Speaker of the House in redistricting measures.

Jim Jordan’s open defiance of Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to solve the debt-ceiling crisis could cost the Urbana Republican his safe House seat in next year’s election.

Two Republican sources deeply involved in configuring new Ohio congressional districts confirmed to The Dispatch  today  that Jordan’s disloyalty to Boehner has put him in jeopardy of being zeroed out of a district.

“Jim Jordan’s boneheadedness has kind of informed everybody’s thinking,” said one of the sources, both of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity. “The easiest option for everybody has presented itself.”

Jordan’s rural 11-county district, which has a 60 percent Republican voter index, “is easy to cannibalize because it stretches so far,” the other source said.

Michele in Wonderland thinks the impasse on the debt ceiling is not an emergency.  Can some one please tell this woman to report to someplace where she can buy a clue or a brain or some sanity?

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann again brushed off warnings from leaders in both parties that the country would face disastrous economic consequences if the government fails to raise the debt ceiling by next Tuesday.

“I do not believe for one moment that we will lose the full faith and credit of the United States,” Bachmann said Thursday during a question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington.

Bachmann, a House member from Minnesota, has been a staunch opponent of the debt ceiling hike for months, saying the move poses no threat to the markets or to the American public and would only give President Barack Obama license to increase government spending.

Other insane Bachmann stories today including her defense of using Federal Loans for her own housing while lambasting the very agencies that helped her afford her house.  Evidently, it’s not welfare when she does it.

GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann (R) has been in hot water in recent weeks for personally taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government aid while denouncing the very programs she benefited from. Most recently, the Washington Post discovered that Bachmann and her husband signed for a $417,000 home loan backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac just weeks before she called for the two mortgage giants to be entirely dismantled.

Bachmann has been a consistently fierce critic of mortgage lending programs and has advocated abolishing the government sponsored mortgage enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet she took out the maximum possible loan from those programs to finance her family’s move to a lavish 5,200-square-foot home on a golf course.

Bachmann also wants to declare her family business’ “pray away the gay” discredited therapy practice put off limits.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) visited the National Press Club in Washington on Thursday for a speech and question-and-answer session. The GOP presidential contender’s remarks focused mostly on her opposition to raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances. She did field one question on an issue we’ve covered: reports that the Christian counseling clinic she co-owns with her husband tries to cure gay people of homosexuality. Bachmann has repeatedly dodged questions on the issue, and even gone so far as to cut off interviews with Iowa reporters who broach the subject; when I caught up with her outside the MoJo DC office recently, she was a no comment (literally, she didn’t say anything).

On Thursday, Bachmann was asked if she believes homosexuality is a lifestyle decision that can be cured. So, with her husband sitting to her left at the Press Club, how’d Bachmann respond? By dodging the issue entirely and declaring her spouse, her children, her foster children, and her business off limits:

The next interesting trial on TV should be that of Polygamist Cult Leader Warren Jeffs who is being tried for sex assault on a 12 year old girl.  Jeffs wants to act as his own lawyer.

Prosecutors said they have an audio tape of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs sexually assaulting a 12-year-old child, The Salt Lake Tribune reported on its websiteThursday.

The revelation came during opening statements on Jeffs’ trial on child sexual assault charges.

The prosecutor also said DNA evidence would prove that Jeffs fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl, the Tribune reported.

Earlier Thursday, Jeffs threw the trial into disarray when he fired his defense lawyers and demanded the right to represent himself, which the judge then granted.

“It’s not as easy as it looks on TV, Mr. Jeffs,” State District Judge Barbara Walther told him. “You’re on your own.”

Jeffs refused to answer when Walther asked him whether he wanted to make an opening statement, the Tribune said.

Jeffs, the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, is charged with child sexual assault and aggravated child sexual assault in connection with his “spiritual marriages” to a 12-year-old girl and a 14-year-old girl at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in remote west Texas.

There is also DNA evidence.

Here’s a great article from Alternet on how Wall Street broke the economy.   It’s an interview with Gretchen Morgensen on her new book.  Here’s a great conversation on how predatory lenders fed bad loans into Fannie and Freddie.

TM: After the S&L crisis, we were going to fix Fannie and Freddie, but things only got worse. When you ask the fox how to clean the henhouse…

GM: You make a good point about who’s to blame. Blame falls on both sides of the aisle in Congress. It’s not an either-or, Democratic or Republican issue, not a liberal or conservative issue — there’s enough blame to go around. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were primary movers in the push for home ownership. And there’s nothing wrong with that, owning your own home is a deep-seated wish in the American psyche. The problem was in the execution. You don’t lure people in who are unsophisticated, who don’t understand what they’re doing. You certainly don’t offer them the kinds of poisonous loans that were targeted to minority borrowers; low-income borrowers; first-time home buyers.

TM: Targeted by Fannie and Freddie or targeted by predatory mortgage lenders?

GM: This is where Fannie and Freddie step aside and the mortgage lenders step into the breach. Countrywide was Fannie Mae’s biggest provider of loans. A lot of the losses that taxpayers are footing at this moment came very late in the game, in 2005, 2006, mortgages that were really ugly and really poisonous. Fannie Mae led the way, pushing for home ownership, degrading underwriting standards, pushing for more relaxed lending standards. Then the predatory lenders take the ball and run with it because there’s so much money to be made.

TM: And because of Fannie Mae’s initiative, so little risk.

GM: So little risk. Fannie Mae was either guaranteeing the loans that Countrywide and other lenders were making or taking them into their own portfolios. The taxpayer was essentially taking on the risk. There is an unholy alliance between Fannie Mae, a government sponsored enterprise, and predatory lenders and Wall Street. Wall Street saw Fannie Mae creating pools of loans that they would sell to others to sell to investors. Wall Street took that ball and ran with it, issuing trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities bursting with predatory loans.

I’m glad to see her clarify the misunderstanding of the role of Fannie and Freddie in the mortgage meltdown.  It wasn’t their affordable housing role that created the bigger mess.  It was their lack of due diligence in investigating loans packaged by known predatory lenders and their managers who were dealing themselves quota bonuses.  Congress didn’t watch what they were doing either.  They just assumed they were following their mandate.

I’m happy to see that a Judge will allow a defamation suit against propagandameister Breitbart to proceed.  The suit was filed by Shirley Sherrod and dealt with the horrible edit job his site did to make her look like some kind of racist.  You may recall she used to work in the Department of Agriculture.

Last year, Breitbart published a video of Sherrod describing to an NAACP conference how she overcame her own racist attitudes. However, a video from that speech was deceptively edited to make it appear that she was describing how she used the power of the government against a white farmer.

She was fired from her post at the agriculture department within hours of the clip hitting Breitbart’s website, and for at least a day the world believed Sherrod was a racist who abused her power to harm a white farmer.

Once it became clear that was not the case, the government offered her the job back, but she declined. Even after a formal apology from the White House and an offer to talk to the president, Sherrod still refused.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took it a step further and offered her a position dealing with civil rights and discrimination issues at the USDA, but Sherrod declined and vowed to sue Breitbart over his deceptive prank.

The suit also targets Breitbart colleague Larry O’Connor and one other unnamed defendant.

Lawyers for the defense argued that the suit was invalid because it was triggered by a matter of “pure opinion,” not statements of fact.

So, that should give you something to think on this morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?  Please!  Share with us!

 

 

 

 

Breaking … Boehner Postpones House Vote on Debt Plan

Posted: July 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 13 Comments

House Speaker John Boehner has postponed a planned vote on his plan to raise the Federal debt ceiling by 1 Trillion in return for around 1 Trillion in spending cuts. Here is the official announcement to House members, from Think Progress:

**Members are advised that the House GOP Leadership has postponed the votes on the motion to recommit and final passage of S. 627 – Speaker Boehner’s Short Term Default Act (amending the Faster FOIA Act of 2011). Following general debate on S. 627, the House will consider the eight bills listed for consideration under suspension of the Rules.

Looks like he didn’t have the votes. From Talking Points Memo:

Despite a days-long push to force their conservative members into line, and sneak Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) debt limit bill through the House of Representatives, GOP leadership has postponed a scheduled vote on the legislation — a sign that their efforts have thus far failed.

This evening, members were alerted that Boehner and his leadership team were delaying the vote, which had been scheduled for 6 p.m.

According to TPM, it’s still possible the bill could come up for a vote tonight after other issues are dealt with. It sounds unlikely though.

I’ll update in the comments with anything else I find. Hope you’ll do the same.

Strauss-Kahn Accuser’s Words “Misrepresented” in Leaks to Media

Posted: July 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Violence against women, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Nafissatou Diallo

Just a short time ago, the woman who accused former IMF head Dominque Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her spoke briefly at press conference at a Brooklyn church.

“I’m here because I had people call me a lot of bad names,” Ms. Diallo said softly at the Christian Cultural Center on Flatlands Avenue. “A lot of things they said about me was not true.”

Before being introduced by Rev. A.R. Bernard, senior pastor at the center, Ms. Diallo, 32, dressed in a dark suit, rubbed her fingers together slowly, blinking often as she gazed out the windows of the lobby, past the bank of cameras and reporters.
“Me and my family, we are going through a lot,” she said. “We cry every day.”

She spoke for less than five minutes and was escorted from the podium when she finished without taking any questions; her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, and other supporters remained at the microphone and spoke with reporters.

Diallo’s attorney says that the Manhattan DA’s office either mistranslated or deliberately misinterpreted taped conversations she had with an Arizona prison inmate.

Ms. Diallo and her lead lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, spent much of Wednesday at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, where they listened to a recording of conversations Ms. Diallo had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizona jail after she said she was attacked. Law enforcement officials told Mr. Thompson and The New York Times last month that Ms. Diallo could be heard saying on the tape “words to the effect of: ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’ ”

But after listening to the recording on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson told reporters at a news conference that Ms. Diallo’s statements had been mischaracterized. He said that at no point did she raise the issue of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wealth or status in the way that prosecutors had described it. Rather, he said, the man she was speaking with, who initiated the calls to Ms. Diallo, remarked during one conversation that Ms. Diallo could stand to gain money from the case, but she quickly dismissed the idea and said it was a matter for her lawyer.

Thompson also noted that in the first phone call, Diallo’s description of what happened with Strauss-Kahn was

consistent with what she told investigators a day earlier. In sexual-assault cases, people who hear an early account of an attack are called “outcry witnesses,” and are often used to buttress the credibility of a person making an accusation.

“She told the guy that someone tried to rape her at her job,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview after his news conference. “She said: ‘I didn’t know who he was. We fought each other. Because he wasn’t able to take off my clothes, he put his penis in my mouth. He touched me. They took me to the hospital, and they arrested him.’ ”

The DA’s office said they could not comment on evidence in an ongoing investigation. But didn’t they already have quite a bit to say? Someone leaked negative information about Diallo to the media, resulting in Strauss-Kahn being released on bail while his accuser was treated like a liar and money-grubber. From CNN Justice:

The hotel maid who has accused the then-head of the International Monetary Fund of sexually assaulting her met Wednesday with prosecutors for at least seven hours….

Prior meetings between the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, and prosecutors who are deciding whether to pursue charges against French financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn ended abruptly last month after Thompson accused Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance of “abandoning” her.

Prosecutors had disclosed credibility issues with Diallo, who is from Guinea.

[….]

Diallo’s attorney said the Sofitel New York employee wants to tell a jury what happened to her. “I want justice. I want him to go to jail,” Diallo told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that aired this week.

I give Diallo a lot of credit for coming forward publicly and revealing her identity. I hope Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance will let her have her day in court.

Thursday Reads

Posted: July 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: House of Representatives, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Morning! It’s iced coffee weather, I love it! Now let’s see what’s happening in the news.

In one of the most childish episodes in an incredibly childish debt ceiling debate, the House Republicans yesterday used a scene from a Ben Affleck movie “The Town,” to fire themselves up to burn down the U.S. economy. Here’s the clip:

Transcript:

Affleck: “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. We’re gonna hurt somebody.”

Friend: “Whose car are we gonna take?”

Yeah, they’re gonna hurt somebody, for sure. BTW, I noticed the media generally is leaving out that line about hurting someone. It must be some kind of oversight, right?

The Washington Post reported that

After showing the clip, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the most outspoken critics of leadership among the 87 freshmen, stood up to speak, according to GOP aides.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West replied, surprising many Republicans by giving his full-throated support for the plan.

However, a leading conservative lawmaker, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), said enough Republicans appear to oppose Boehner’s plan that it would not be able to pass the House on GOP support alone.

At Huffpo, Sam Stein got Ben Affleck’s response to all this.

in a statement his spokesperson provided to The Huffington Post, he suggested that Republicans use a different one of his movies next time they need to whip votes.

“I don’t know if this is a compliment or the ultimate repudiation,” said the actor, who is currently in Turkey directing and starring in “Argo,” an adaptation of the Tehran hostage crisis. “But if they’re going to be watching movies, I think “The Company Men” is more appropriate.”

That latter Affleck flick focuses on the plight of middle age men who have been laid off during the recession. (One of them, depressed about being unemployed, later kills himself.) Whether that message would resonate in the GOP caucus is anyone’s guess. But the likelihood is that McCarthy knows his members a bit better than Affleck. According to the Post, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla), one of the most intransigent Tea Party members of the Freshmen class, was won over by the gambit.

Good grief. Allen West is a complete dweeb. But “Tea Party activists” are “revolting against Boehner,” says Fox News.

“Boehner must go,” Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said in his blog on Wednesday, calling the speaker a “big government Republican” who “worships at the altar of massive spending.”

“We need a speaker who is a leader. We need someone with courage and vision. Boehner has none of those qualities. He is not a leader,” Phillips wrote. “John Boehner simply wishes to be the manager in chief of the welfare state. His vision of the GOP and the speakership involves golfing, drinking and not rocking the boat.”

But Tea Party-backed lawmakers on Wednesday stood up for Boehner, even though they prefer another plan – “cut cap and balance,” which would allows the nation to borrow $2.4 trillion more money in exchange for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That measure passed in the House last week but died in the Senate.

“My Republican leadership in the House is doing a great job,” freshman Rep. Joe Walsh said at a Tea Party rally Wednesday. “Imagine having to negotiate with Barack Obama. Imagine having to negotiate with Harry Reid. Give John Boehner, give Eric Cantor all the credit in the world.”

Um…. No comment.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/07/27/tea-party-activists-revolt-against-boehner-amid-debt-crisis/#ixzz1TMhRq1j3

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/07/27/tea-party-activists-revolt-against-boehner-amid-debt-crisis/#ixzz1TMhKTmqX

Let’s hear it for Sheila Jackson Lee.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security today about the radicalization of young Somali American Muslims by the al-Shabaab terrorist group, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said the committee should hold a hearing on “right-wing extremists” in the United States.

Jackson Lee used much of her allotted five minutes to question panelists with expertise on radicalization about the alleged hacking into telephones of 9-11 victims by the now-closed News of the World tabloid in England.

“I would add to that, that I would like to have a hearing on right-wing extremists, ideologues who advocate violence and advocate, in essence, the terrorizing of certain groups,” Jackson Lee said.

Yay Sheila!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a cold case that had been solved after 50 years, the abduction and murder of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph in Sycamore, IL. Yesterday Maria’s body was exhumed to allow for modern tests to be run.

Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, a former neighbor of the victim’s, was charged this month in her slaying.

Officials say they exhumed the body in hopes that modern technology will help their murder case.

McCullough, 71, a former police officer who was living in the Seattle area, waived his extradition rights and was released Wednesday to Illinois authorities. He arrived at the jail in DeKalb about 4:50 p.m.

Family members said they agreed to the exhumation, but it was difficult to face.

“Although the events are very difficult and very unsettling, we understand the necessity for these things and we are in complete agreement and thankful for the way that this case is being handled,” said Charles Ridulph, 65, Maria’s older brother.

Finally, there may be justice for Maria and her family.

At the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan has the “dish” on CNN’s obnoxious replacement for obnoxious Larry King, Piers Morgan. Piers denies he was ever involved in phone hacking when he worked for the News of the World, but Sullivan says Piers is l-l-l-l-lying.

The Texas ACLU is planning to organize a “family, faith, and freedom” event to compete with Governor Rick Perry’s “Christian” prayer rally.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas announced Wednesday they would be partnering with Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) to host an alternative to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

“Gov. Perry’s decision to sponsor a ‘Christians-only’ prayer rally is bad enough. That he turned to an array of intolerant religious extremists to put it on for him is even worse,” said Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“This event unites us in our conviction that government should have no favorite theology and that it must always strive to ensure that all citizens – Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and others – are full and equal partners in the public square.”

The event, called “Family, Faith and Freedom” be held Friday evening August 5, one day before the start of the “The Response,” an evangelical Christian prayer rally in Houston.

Good idea. Well that’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?

Architect of Bush Torture and Spy Policies is Tea Party Point man at Heritage Foundation

Posted: July 27, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Republican politics, Surreality, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, voodoo economics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

David Addington

Wow, these ultra-right-wingers are like zombies. They never stop, they never die. They just keep popping up again and again where you least expect them.

Remember David Addington? He was the secretive, publicity-shy legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2001-2005. Later, after Scooter Libby was forced to step down because of his involvement in the Valerie Plame outing, Addington replaced him as Cheney’s Chief of Staff from 2005-2009.

Addington was heavily involved in designing the Bush administration’s torture and NSA wiretapping policies. In addition, his was the legal mind behind Bush’s hundreds of signing statements and generally was a powerful force in the Bush administration’s efforts to expand executive power.

You’d think someone who had been involved in such execrable behavior would have the good grace to slink away and never be heard from again, but that’s not how it works with these psychopathic types. Today, according to The National Journal,

Addington has taken on a new role as enforcer of tea party dogma during the intensifying partisan bickering over the debt ceiling. From his perch as the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for domestic and economic policy, Addington is throwing verbal thunderbolts at House Speaker John Boehner’s current debt-ceiling proposal, which he argues will pave the way to tax increases.

The merits of Addington’s arguments about the need to oppose Boehner’s proposals are in some ways less interesting than the simple fact that Addington is the one publicly making them. Addington kept a low profile during the Bush years, granting no interviews and largely shunning lawmakers from either party. But he wielded enormous power behind the scenes, helping Cheney craft the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program and most of its detention initiatives.

Critics of those policies say they’re horrified by Addington’s reemergence onto the public stage.

“To see this person who led the country into legal and moral disaster resurface as a respected commentator is somewhat galling,” said Ben Wizner, the litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “Addington was as responsible as anyone else for the U.S. becoming a torturing nation. He has done damage to the U.S. that will take decades to reverse.”

Indeed. Especially because we’ll have to wait until President Obama leaves office before much reversing takes place–if it ever does. But I digress. Addington’s new role is to help keep the Tea Party Caucus in line while undercutting House Speaker Boehner. How very very interesting. At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait called it “Hot Republican-On-Republican Action.”

The internecine fighting among conservatives over the Boehner plan has much of the same ideological and stylistic feel of a late 1960’s feud pitting left-wing factions that favor immediate violence against those seeking more time to radicalize the masses. The less-extreme faction clearly has the better of the argument, yet the overwhelming impression is the sheer fanaticism of the whole political subculture.

Is it possible this GOP infighting could be helpful to our side? Addington’s greatest concern about the Boehner plan is that it includes the “committee” that we have been calling “Catfood Commission II.” Addington fears that because this group will have the power to write legislation that cannot be amended and must be voted on up or down, they might end up proposing new taxes. Now I never thought of that possibility! Here’s Addington blogging at the Heritage Foundation website on Monday:

The second step in the [Boehner] plan is a set of recommendations from a new dozen-member joint select committee of Congress. The committee’s recommendations to Congress would not be subject to amendments and would get a straight up-or-down vote. The plan directs the committee to propose reductions in the deficit by at least $1.8 trillion over 10 years. The government runs a deficit when it spends more than it takes in from Americans as taxes, and the government has run deficits in most years for decades. As always, there are two ways to reduce a bloated government’s deficit — the right way of cutting spending and the wrong way of hiking taxes. While the second step of the Boehner plan may produce some useful spending cuts, the second step also allows the Committee to propose raising taxes as part of its unamendable, fast-track legislative package. Thus, the second step greases the way for tax hikes.

As you can imagine, taxes are anathema to Addington.

Tax hikes in a weak economy slow economic growth and kill jobs. As students of American history (or the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) know, enactment of the tax hike known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act during the Great Depression hurt the already weak economy and made unemployment worse. Job-killing tax hikes in the current weak economy, as millions of Americans go without jobs and the unemployment hovers above 9 percent, will have a similar effect. However good the intentions of the drafters of the Boehner plan may have been, the plan sets up America for higher taxes and fewer jobs. Conservatives should continue to fight plans that either hike taxes now or set America up for tax hikes in the future.

Now wait a minute. I know Dakinikat will have plenty to say about that last paragraph–if she can get away from all the student exams and papers she’s grading. But I’ll take a crack at it even though I am not an economist.

Tarriffs are not equivalent to income taxes. The Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act was raised tarriffs so high that our trading partners retaliated with their own tarriffs, leading to dramatic decreases in U.S. imports and exports. Now that is a job-killing tax. That is not the same thing as restoring the tax rates on the rich to Clinton administration levels and perhaps making the children of the super-rich pay a little more in estate taxes. As Dakinikat is fond of saying, if cutting taxes led to job creation, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. The Bush tax cuts would have taken care of everything.

Addington summed up his insane economic theories in another post, written in response to President Obama’s speech on Monday night.

Americans sent a message in the election of 2010 — cut the size and cost of government. Conservatives must act now to drive down spending on the way to a balanced budget, while protecting America, and without raising taxes. Forget the McConnell, McConnell-Reid, Coburn, Gang-of-Six, Boehner, and Reid plans. Go with the American plan — cut government spending, deeply and right now, for the good of the country.

Man, he’s looney-tunes!

Anyway, I think it’s just fascinating that Addington is leading the charge against the Boehner plan and pushing for an even crazier one. Addington has a history of accomplishing a great deal. What he accomplished was evil, of course, but he showed himself to be highly competent and efficient, unlike President Pushover. This battle could be really entertaining. I’m hoping for a major Republican meltdown.

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