Courtesy of Think Progress:
Fox News’s Chris Wallace challenged House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and the GOP-controlled House for failing to pass key appropriations before the government runs out of money in September, demanding to know why the party is wasting time holding its 40 Obamacare repeal vote and pursuing other highly partisan partisan measures.
“Rightly or wrongly, none of the bills you passed is going to become law,” Wallace told Cantor on Fox News Sunday. “You have only passed four of 12 appropriations bills you are supposed to pass. We face a government shut down in the fall. Is this the best time to spend your time, passing bills that won’t become law?”
The 113th Congress left Friday for a five-week recess, after passing just 22 bills that were sent to Obama in the first eight months of 2013 -the smallest number in history. “You don’t have common ground with the president and you don’t have common ground with the Senate Republican leadership,” an exasperated Wallace told Cantor. “Aren’t we headed for a train wreck?”
You know it's like every so often Chris Wallace wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes that he is the son of Mike Wallace and that he is supposed to be a journalist.
Of course if this keeps up he will have to go to Roger Ailes office for "deprogramming" after which he will emerge bare chested and start running around the News Corps hallways screaming about how Benghazi is the new Watergate and Obamacare a plan straight from the fiery pit of hell.
I still enjoyed it though.
Chris Wallace would still like to work in Journalism after leaving Fox, apparently.
ReplyDeleteTheir allegiance is not to the American people.
ReplyDeleteIt's to the teabaggers in their heavily gerrymandered districts who will cheer them wildly in town hall meetings throughout the month when they proudly proclaim "AND I VOTED TO REPEAL OBAMACARE NOT ONCE, NOT TWICE, BUT FORTY TIMES!!!"
And they'll get even more cheers by pledging to vote to repeal Obamacare every week from now until it IS repealed (or these idiots finally figure out Obamacare is better than what we had before it was enacted).
It's like being slapped in the face with a wet towel, hearing a Fox News jounalist ask real common sense questions. Love the Geraldo analogy. That news channel IS schizophrenic.
ReplyDeleteLimbaugh, Hannity & Palin nose-dive
ReplyDeleteWhen one's enemies crash and burn, it's best to enjoy it.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/limbaugh-hannity-palin-nose-dive-article-1.1416494#ixzz2b6Wbxoj3
Thanks for the link. Poor Sarah, Sean, and Rush. Three of a kind.
DeleteEric Cantor’s lengthy interview yesterday on Fox News Sunday is really worth reading in full and pondering at some length. It perfectly captures why it’s looking more and more likely that we are genuinely headed for a government shutdown this fall.
ReplyDeleteIn the interview, Fox host Chris Wallace practically begs Cantor to have a reality-based conversation about the coming shutdown fight, the sequester, and Obamacare. Again and again, Cantor steers the conversation back into pure fantasy. As I noted here last week, it’s laughable that Republican leaders are surprised at the ferocity of the right’s demand for debt limit and government shutdown/defund Obamacare confrontations, since they have been feeding the base fantasies about Obamacare repeal and government spending for literally years now. Cantor’s interview offers no effort whatsoever to disabuse folks of the lies, distortions and misdirection that continue making sane discussion of any of this impossible:
1) Cantor claims the deficit is “growing” ( it isn’t), and asserts the coming debt limit fight is our chance to do something about it. But GOP leaders have already conceded the debt limit will be raised in the end, because not doing so will cause widespread damage to the economy. They need to stop deceiving their voters into believing the debt limit gives them leverage.
2) Cantor claims the House GOP is the “only one who has consistently engaged in trying to address the spending problem.” In fact, Dems agreed to $1.5 trillion in spending cuts in 2011. But Republicans refuse to level with the base about the concessions Dems have made and continue to offer — making any kind of discussion based on the same reality impossible.
3) Asked if Republicans are open to replacing the sequester, Cantor says they are, but floats the idea of replacing it only with entitlement cuts. Needless to say, a deal that includes concessions made only by one side is not a compromise and is a non starter. The failure to acknowledge this also makes this harder.
4) Asked by Wallace if Republicans are demanding complete “surrender” from Dems, Cantor, amazingly, claims there is some common ground: Obama has delayed the employer mandate, showing he admits Obaamcare is “flawed’; Republicans agree; so both sides should join in repealing the individual mandate!
Now, one has to hope that this is mostly bluster and posturing. Indeed, it’s possible Republican leaders will quietly edge towards avoiding a government shutdown to defund Obamacare even as they continue to rail about the need to repeal the law, to avoid looking like squishes and Obama enablers. Indeed, Cantor kept steering the conversation back to Obamacare’s evils, even as he gingerly suggested conservatives and Republicans alike agree “we shouldn’t be for a government shutdown.” And Paul Ryan also talked down the idea of a shutdown confrontation yesterday.
But the tentativeness with which leaders continue to hint that a shutdown may not be the best idea — combined with the continued refusal to level with the base about the very things that are pushing us towards the abyss — doesn’t bode well.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/08/05/the-morning-plum-be-very-afraid-of-a-government-shutdown/
But the GOP Governors are pleading with the House not to shutdown the government, so I really think this will not happen. The GOP is getting close to life support, and we can expect a few kicks out of them, but they are finished. The lies are biting them in the ass, and about time. Hell, way past time!
DeleteThe Republican scheme to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act has deeply divided the right, and the fissures appear to growing deeper as the fight continues. For their part, those pushing for a shutdown still hope to shift the responsibility to the White House.
ReplyDeleteFormer Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, now head of the far-right Heritage Foundation, argued yesterday for example, "I wouldn't shut down the government. But if Obama wouldn't accept the funding bill for the government that fully funds the government because it didn't have his failed law in it, then he would be shutting down the government."
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who arguably got this ball rolling several weeks ago, told Sean Hannity something similar late last week:
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/05/19876524-the-wrong-way-to-play-the-shutdown-blame-game?lite
Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing.
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear, I’m not talking about policy substance. I may believe that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints, like the fact that you can’t cut overall spending without cutting spending on particular programs, or the fact that voting to repeal legislation doesn’t change the law when the other party controls the Senate and the White House.
Am I exaggerating? Consider what went down in Congress last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/opinion/krugman-republicans-against-reality.html?_r=1&
Eric Cantor reminds me of that little tattletale prick mama's boy that we all knew in elementary school. I just can't take him seriously.
ReplyDeleteWhen you organize a protest and only 6 people show, including yourself, your movement might be in serious trouble.
ReplyDeleteWaving a rather sad, given the context, but large “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, Juan Fiol, a Miami real estate broker and Marco Rubio protest organizer, wondered where everyone was. “It was supposed to be a big event,” he told Naples News, as he stood with the five other Tea Partiers to protest Senator Marco Rubio (R-FLA) for being a “back-stabber” and a “liar” over immigration reform. That desolate July protest must have stung.
Bitter feelings of betrayal have led activists to their next threat: They will sit out the 2014 election:
'The tea party is a loosely knit web of activists, and some are hoping to rekindle the fire with 2014 primary challenges to wayward Republicans. But many more say they plan to sit out high-profile races in some important swing states next year, a move that GOP leaders fear could imperil the re-election prospects of former tea party luminaries, including the governors of Florida and Ohio.'
Republicans need only look at how that same tactic turned out for Democrats in 2010 to know that is a disaster waiting to happen.
Republicans are now paying the piper for their 2010 gamble. Yes, it won them the House and gummed up Obama’s agenda, but it also made them wildly unpopular. Worse still, their own party has been taken over by the beast.
Even Republicans don’t like the Republican Party. A July ABC poll by Langer Research Associates showed that a stunning 52% of Republicans see their party as being on the wrong track with only 37% seeing it on the right track. In fact, for the first time since 1994, a majority of Republicans are dissatisfied with their party.
A July Quinnipiac poll demonstrated the Republican Party’s problem: Forty-nine percent of Republicans believe that the GOP is doing too little to compromise with President Obama, yet the Tea Party wants no compromise. The Tea Party consists of the most vocal supporters, the reliable turnout for off year election turnout. With an ever-shrinking tent, Republicans can’t afford to lose any support. After all, the ABC poll also revealed that only 21% of Americans surveyed identify as Republican.
Republicans keep trying to fool the Tea Party just like they fool voters; for example, they’re trying to sell Rubio’s immigration reform as border security. But the Republican Party bred and fed a particularly virulent strain of paranoia in order to turn the Tea Party against their own best economic interests and keep them misinformed. It was inevitable that at some point, that paranoia would turn on the Republican Party – and it looks like that’s beginning to happen.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/08/05/tea-party-turns-republicans-threatens-sit-2014.html
House Republican leaders have armed their members with their August recess talking point. If you hate government, it is all Obama’s fault.
ReplyDeleteThe AP reports, “House Republicans will take a carefully orchestrated, staunchly anti-Washington campaign to voters this month, blaming President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats for Americans’ unhappiness with government.” The AP story goes on to mention that it might be difficult for House Republicans to blame Democrats and Obama for everything being that they control the House of Representatives, but John Boehner’s spokesperson Michael Steel already had an answer for that, “We have control of only one-half of one-third of the federal government.”
The House Republican argument is that you hate the government because Republicans don’t control enough of it. This argument ignores the fact that most Americans are upset with Washington because there is no cooperation, and it is House Republicans who are behind the vast majority of the gridlock. Then there is the problem of the policies that House Republicans are advocating. John Boehner’s Circus of Dysfunction can only seem to agree on doing one thing, voting repeatedly to repeal Obamacare. That’s it. The House has wasted 15% of their time in session trying to repeal Obamacare.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/08/05/house-republicans-plan-spend-august-blaming-obama-democrats.html
When David Corn broke the Groundswell story last week, the general reaction among the politerati was a shrug and a giggle. Even influential NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen called it "no big deal."
DeleteBut audio of a May Groundswell meeting obtained by C&L from a source who wishes to remain anonymous reveals Groundswellers met with top Congressional leaders to lobby for a select committee endowed with subpoena power to investigate the White House. Lobbying may be too mild a term, since they really are plotting with those same leaders to invent very real scandals with very real investigations in order to sink the country into a mire of inaction and sabotage the remaining years of President Obama's term.
Messaging is a part of their activity, but there is also an entire set of marching orders and demands made by this group and granted by Congressional leadership. It isn't limited to the Benghazi 'scandal', and it may not be limited to Congress.
...The efforts of this group should not be marginalized, given that what they are saying is repeated in the halls of the House and the Senate on a daily basis. It isn't just right-wing crazy people being crazy. These are activists with contacts in high places who are using those contacts to strip people of their rights, to invent scandals to undermine the President at every turn, and to marginalize Hillary Clinton if she should choose to run in 2016. Those are just a few of their goals. They have power and they're not afraid to use it.
Group members are the water-carriers and action arm of the billionaires' tea party. Listen to the full 20 minutes of that audio, or read the transcript here to see just how destructive they intend to be.
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/groundswell-group-plotted-scandals-congress
Michael Steel is a liar. Republicans control the Supreme Court AND the House of Representatives. In controlling the latter, they actually control the entire Congress, because due to their sabotaging and obstruction, and because most bills must start in the House, they effectively control all of Congress as well. Thus, they control 2/3 of the federal government. They also control most of the media (the Fourth Estate), much of the military, the majority of state governments (and thus have successfully gerrymandered themselves into a position of perpetual federal control), and the majority of the churches (the Fifth Estate, and perhaps one of the most potent political organizing forces in today's America).
DeleteThe GOP is now threatening TV networks...
ReplyDeleteRepublican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus sent letters to CNN and NBC Monday morning, informing them that their production of proposed Hillary Clinton film projects could lead to the Republican Party refusing to partner with them on 2016 presidential debates.
Calling the networks’ actions “disturbing and disappointing,” Priebus warned that CNN’s “credibility as a supposedly unbiased news network will most certainly be jeopardized by the decision to show political favoritism” for Clinton, while “the credibility of NBC News, already damaged by the partisanship of MSNBC, will be further undermined by the actions of NBC Universal executives who have taken it upon themselves to produce an extended commercial for Secretary Clinton’s nascent campaign.”
http://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-warns-cnn-nbc-drop-the-hillary-movies-or-else/
Mike Wallace was a REAL journalist, Cris had a shot at honoring his dad's legacy, but he totally blew it by going to Fox News. Yeah, he's been "right" a few times but he's still a shill for fake news.
ReplyDeleteAny Teathuglican, especially Cantor, that speaks of attempts at bipartisanship in the Obama administration is full of shit. The only thing Cantor will succeed at doing is repealing Obamacare to win the Guinness World Record on obstructionist tactics. Their goal is to avoid social issues at all costs until the next election.
Cantor is more messed up than a soup sandwich. What the heck Virginia ?? Why do you vote for this piece and let him destroy America ?? That is exactly what he is trying to do . I say we boycott everything Virginia until they get this Cantor voted out...
ReplyDelete