BP is trying to shirk its responsibility to the people of the Gulf Coast once again….
Bacteria that attacked the plumes of oil and gas resulting from the Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico mainly digested natural gas spewing from the wellhead — propane, ethane and butane — rather than oil, according to a study published in the journal Science.
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Filed under U.S. Politics
The Christine O’Donnell campaign has paid at least $3,500 in consulting fees to a woman who appears to be O’Donnell’s mother, FEC filings show.
The two payments are made out to a Carole O’Donnell, the reported name of the Delaware Senate candidate’s mother, and list her address as Moorestown, NJ, where O’Donnell was reportedly raised and graduated from high school. E-mails to two representatives of the O’Donnell campaign for confirmation were not immediately returned.
The first payment, dated February 26, 2010, lists $500 for “bookkeeping and reporting.” A second payment, dated July 13, 2010, lists $3,000 for “financial consulting services.”
O’Donnell’s campaign finances have drawn intense scrutiny in recent days — she confirmed to reporters that she pays one half of the rent on a house she shares with paid campaign staffer David Hust with donors’ money, saying she uses it as a campaign office.
Donnell’s personal finances drew attacks from her defeated opponent Mike Castle as well. She reportedly was confronted by the IRS over her failure to pay back taxes and said on her website that she did not receive her college degree for over a decade due to unpaid student debt to Fairleigh Dickinson University. O’Donnell has said that her financial struggles hit home with voters struggling in the recession and said on her website that the IRS claim was a “computer error.”
According to Dave Levinthal, a spokesperson for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign money, payments to family members for services are not uncommon in politics but do merit an explanation from the campaign.
“Every case is different — if a candidate has a prodigious number of family members on the payroll bringing in tens of thousands of dollars it would probably raise a much larger red flag,” he said, “but even in a case like this the candidate one way or another should give the public a basic explanation as to why they’d want to employ a family member.”
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Filed under Politicians, Politics
Mario Piperni’s artwork is fantastic. I use it quite often on this blog. The political messages that they portray speaks volumes.
The talk has been about Christine O’Donnell’s victory in Delaware but another teabagger-backed nutcase who won on Tuesday was Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for next governor of New York. Paladino was criticized during the primary for having sent out numerous emails to friends and colleagues depicting images of bestiality, hardcore sex and derogatory and racial images of President Obama.
Now, in true Republican fashion, he puts forth his mix of lies, hate and idiocy in an interview with CNN.
“I’m talking about an Imam who made prior statements about bringing in sharia law to America, and having the Muslim community practice under the American constitution their sharia law,” Paladino said. “That’s not kosher for us.”
As for what he would do with the proposed Islamic community center project…
“We will go in there and we will put a restrictive covenant on the property and all of the property in the Ground Zero site.”
Then he defined what he meant by Ground Zero:
“Ground Zero for me is the extended site over which the dust cloud containing human remains traveled,” he went on. “That Ground Zero site will be protected in the memory of those who fell at the World Trade Center, as well as the memory of the thousands and thousands of soldiers — of American and Allied soldiers — that fell in the ensuing wars, and the 150,000 troops we still have over there defending our right to speak like this today.”
Lovely. So a cloud dust would now determine where anything Islamic can be built. The Party of Stupid just got stupider.
Filed under U.S. Politics
Image via Wikipedia
It’s been well established that Fox News is the media arm of the GOP. Palin has simply confirmed what has already been revealed…
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared on the O’Reilly Factor last night to defend Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell from intra-party skeptics like former Bush advisor Karl Rove, who said Republicans aren’t “going to be able to win” the general election with O’Donnell as the nominee. Palin advised O’Donnell to ignore the “political machine” and go rogue, just as she did on the 2008 presidential campaign, breaking away from “her handlers.” “Speak through Fox News,” Palin — a paid Fox News contributor — counseled her protégé:
PALIN: She’s going to have to learn very quickly to dismiss what some of her handlers want. Remember what happened to me in the VP. […]
So she’s going to have to learn that, yes, very quickly. She’s going to have to dismiss that, go with her gut, get out there, speak to the American people. Speak through FOX News and let the Independents who are tuning in to you, let them know what it is that she stands for, the principles behind her positions.
Watch:
Indeed, O’Donnell appears to be quick study of the Sarah Palin school of media dodging, telling the staff of MSNBC’s Morning Joe that she couldn’t appear because of “family” reasons, despite making the rounds on Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC the same day. And as Media Matters pointed out, O’Donnell thanked “a slew of Fox-tied supporters” in her acceptance speech for the nomination.
Filed under Sarah Palin
So much for “faith hope and charity” from the “Beckster…
Since First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled her Let’s Move! program to fight obesity, conservatives have portrayed the effort as a government assault on personal freedoms and liberties. After the administration released a report on obesity in May, Matt Drudge ran a headline saying, “White House seeks controls on food marketing” and on his Fox News show, Sean Hannity asked: “Does every American family need a dietitian appointed by the government to tell them that this food is going to make you fat and this food is not?” Yesterday, Glenn Beck joined the act, criticizing Michelle Obama for encouraging restaurants to “offer healthier versions of the foods that we all love.” He also joked that fat people should die:
BECK: When I heard this I thought, get your damn hands off my fries, lady. If I want to be a fat fat fatty and shovel French Fries all day long, that is my choice. But oh oh, not so fast anymore. Because now we have the new fact, whether you like it or not, we have government health care now. … You know those fat people sitting on their couches? And I mean really fat. I don’t mean not like me. I mean the people who’s skin grows into the couch. … I say let them die. I say punish the person who’s been bringing them the milk shakes that allowed them to eat and not get up off the couch. Am I too harsh?
Beck was being facetious, but obesity is, in fact, a killer. The Wonk Room examines the obesity epidemic and details what the White House plans to do about it
Filed under Glenn Beck
Keith Olbermann calls him “John of Orange.”
John Boehner: The Man with the Tan, posted with vodpod
Filed under Uncategorized
Jon Stewart’s take on Tuesday’s primaries.
Tea Party Primaries – Beyond the Palin, posted with vodpod
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Filed under Uncategorized
I wonder how long Karl Rove will be welcomed at Fox News?
Rusho Unloads on Karl Rove for attacks on O’Con…, posted with vodpod
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Filed under Uncategorized
Image via Wikipedia
When you’re the Mayor of D.C. and you’re out of touch with your constituents, the result is, you will not be re-elected. That appears to have been D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s problem.
One afternoon in late June, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty‘s political advisers invited their boss to a downtown conference room to report an unsettling development: Focus groups commissioned by the campaign were saying that Fenty’s leadership style was offensive and that he was oblivious to constituents‘ concerns.
If the mayor had any chance of winning them over, the prospective voters told the campaign, he needed to apologize for his actions.
Tom Lindenfeld, the mayor’s chief political strategist, proposed a cure, a one-page letter to be delivered to thousands of voters across the District, a letter in which Fenty would acknowledge mistakes and express remorse. He would promise to change.
“What is this?” the mayor said, reading the letter and tossing it away.
“The things you don’t do now will be much harder for voters to ignore later,” Lindenfeld told him.
The mayor slammed his hand on the table.
“I’m proud of my record,” Fenty shot back, according to Lindenfeld and two others present at the meeting. The mayor stood and walked out.
Across the decade in which he shot to the top of the city’s political pyramid, Fenty relied on unrelenting energy and a well-honed internal compass – his gut – to navigate three elections and the often treacherous complexities of running a big city. His instinct told him he could win a D.C. Council seat in 2000, even against a veteran incumbent. He was right. In 2006, he ignored the doubters who said he was too young at 35 and unaccomplished to capture the mayoralty. He was right then, too.
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Filed under Mayor Adrian M. Fenty
Image via Wikipedia
This is going to be interesting to watch. Will there be an implosion within the Republican party, resulting in a schism so wide that it might be irreversible?
Washington Post – Media Notes - Howard Kurtz
Conservative pundits are split on Christine O’Donnell’s victory, just as they were on her Delaware primary campaign. The question of the hour: What does it mean?With Karl Rove whacking away at her, several prominent commentators on the right are somewhere between distraught and distressed over the O’Donnell win, while others are angry at the Architect. Check out Michelle Malkin taking on her fellow Fox contributor:
“Rove came across as an effete sore loser instead of the supposedly brilliant and grounded GOP strategist that he’s supposed to be. Expect more Washington Republicans to start sounding like tea party-bashing libs as their entrenched incumbent friends go down.”
Former WSJer Tunku Varadarajan, in the Daily Beast:
The Tea Party has won its precious primaries. And I am stomping my foot as I write this, because that party has succeeded in handing American democracy back to the floundering Democrats.
In Delaware, Republican primary voters have delivered a gift to their opponents: the gift of near-certain re-election. Confirming the truth that primaries are but a sweaty, vulgar contest in which ideological bully boys stomp to the forefront, Republican die-hards have voted for “purity,” an elusive concept at the best of times, but in this context a vote for suicide.
Frum Forum also sees a dark day for the GOP:
The real action in this election cycle was in the Republican primaries, they are almost over, and we already know who won: (drum roll, please!) President Obama. American conservatives have suffered a crushing and lasting defeat. The center of gravity in American politics has shifted permanently and irreversibly to the left (and conservative ideology will eventually follow).
At Hot Air, though, Ed Morrissey blames the Republican establishment:
What does Mike Castle’s crash and burn among Delaware Republicans say about their party organization? After all, we have heard oodles of commentary about how Delaware Republicans are moderates who might get energized by the Tea Party but supposedly aren’t looking for conservative candidates. Instead, they convinced Castle to leave a relatively safe House seat instead of looking for someone who hadn’t backed a government takeover of the energy sector in cap-and-trade (in a coal-dependent region!) and co-sponsored the DISCLOSE Act. Perhaps had the GOP establishment listened a little more carefully to Delaware Republicans, who turned out relatively heavily in this election, they wouldn’t find themselves crying in their lattes this morning.
They stuck with a liberal, establishment candidate in a cycle where liberals and establishment figures are uniquely unpopular. Had the Republican leadership been in touch with Delaware Republican voters, they might have found a more suitable candidate for the popular mood, and would not have had to deal with Christine O’Donnell and her outsider bid. They have no one to blame but themselves.
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Filed under Right Wing Election Stratergy, Right Wing Extremism, Right-wing Media, RNC
