gop

In a stunning admission by GOP presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty, he informs us of what we already knew:

PAWLENTY: Well, anybody who’s going to run for this office who’s been in an executive position, or may run, has got some clunkers in their record. Laura, mine I think are fewer and less severe than most. As to climate change, or more specifically cap-and-trade, I’ve just come out and admitted it — look, it was a mistake, it was stupid. [...]

Everybody in the race, well at least the big names in the race, embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another. Every one of us.

As Think Progress points out:

Indeed, from Pawlenty to Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Mike Huckabee to Mitch Danlies to Sarah Palin, many of the leading contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination have reversed themselves on climate change to pander to their hard-right base over the past few years.

What I haven’t heard yet is why? Why have all these candidates flip-flopped? Is it just to appease their radical base, or do they have some of their own scientific evidence debunking global warming?

It has become even more obvious that the GOP 2012 hopefuls only political platform is to oppose President Obama. Enter Newt Gingrich on the Libya issue. On March 7th, the presidential hopeful had this to say about Libya.

Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. … We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening.

Fast-forward 16 days and you get this:

GINGRICH: The standard [Obama] has fallen back to of humanitarian intervention could apply to Sudan, to North Korea, to Zimbabwe, to Syria this week, to Yemen, to Bahrain. … The Arab League wanted us to do something. The minute we did something, the Arab League began criticizing us doing it. I think that two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a lot. I think that the problems we have in Pakistan, Egypt — go around the region. We could get engaged by this standard in all sorts of places. I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces.

And this guy wants to be President of the United States. He changes his positions as much as he changes wives!

Only two months into his tenure and one of the GOP’s golden children from the last election is already in a huge ethical investigation that is causing members of his own party to distance themselves from him:

Florida Rep. David Rivera, under an ethical cloud and facing an expanding investigation into his finances, is in a political squeeze from Republicans in Washington and Miami just two months into his congressional tenure.

Republicans are already privately floating the names of potential primary challengers to Rivera, and on Capitol Hill he’s found himself increasingly isolated as leaders try to distance themselves from his troubles back home.

The GOP isn’t innocent in this either. They were very well aware of the ethical questions surrounding Rivera during the campaign, yet they chose to ignore them. They didn’t care if they were brining in another scandalous scum; they only worried about numbers.

Yesterday the Ohio Senate passed SB5, a bill to strip public employees of their basic right to collectively bargain. This was after some very dirty tricks by the Senate GOP, including booting two GOP members off the committee because they opposed the bill.

What isn’t getting much attention is one little provision hidden in the bill:

Sec. 3101.01 of S.B. 5: ... A marriage may only be entered into by one man and one woman. Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state and, if attempted to be entered into in this state, is void ab initio and shall not be recognized by this state. The recognition or extension by the state of the specific statutory benefits of a legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is against the strong public policy of this state. Any public act, record or judicial proceeding of this state, as defined in section 9.82 of the Revised Code, that extends the specific statutory benefits of legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is void.

So declaring marriage as only being between a man and a woman, as well as stripping any same-sex benefits is part of balancing the budget?

In a single bill, the public gets a stark reminder of how much the GOP despises democracy. They get rid of people who don’t vote the way they like and then include controversial laws inside of another, totally unrelated bill. Actions speak louder than words and hopefully the people will remember these actions the next time we vote.

Nothing like a GOP scandal to start off the new congress. Rep. Christopher Lee (R-NY) has suddenly resigned from Congress following the news that he was sending topless photos to people he met on Craig's List. For full details of the story, check out Karoli's post.

According to Mike Stark the National Enquirer is set to release a story tomorrow about John Boehner and an affair he has been having with a lobbyist. The National Enquirer contacted Mike about reporting he did on the story last year.

This story will really hit home:

I wonder how well Boehner's zero-tolerance pledge regarding corruption will hold up when it comes out that several hundred paper-making jobs were lost in his district and he refused to do anything about it at the same time he was sleeping with a lobbyist for the printing industry that was very happy to get their cheap paper from China.

I live in the town that lost all those paper-making jobs. It has been devastating on this area and John Boehner didn’t do a thing to try and stop it. Now when it comes out that Boehner’s inaction might have been due to his action in bed, well that could cause serious problems.

Of course the biggest question will be how much merit this article gets. The right and the media only seem to believe the National Enquirer when it comes to stories about Democrats. When a story exposes the wrong doings of someone from the GOP, well then the Enquirer is just a tabloid again.

A new New York Times/CBS poll has some really interesting numbers when it comes to dealing with the budget. For example; 55% of respondents feel that cutting military spending is the right way to go, including 42% of Republicans, which was the winning cut for the GOP in the poll. That really goes against the budget proposal put out by the GOP yesterday.

Another interesting find is how Americans want to fix Social Security and Medicare. 48% feel the premiums should be raised on high-income recipients. That came in first, with raising the retirement age at second and with only 21% supporting it. Again, even the Republicans in the poll agree with raising the high-income premiums.

But most overwhelming is the results in the question “If you had to choose one, which of the following changes to Social Security benefits would you prefer in order to keep the program financially sound?”. Here are the results for that question:

Two-thirds of the respondents feel we should reduce the benefits on the higher income recipients. Again, a vast majority of Republicans also support this idea.

There has been a lot of talk that President Obama might be open to some sort of deal to cut Social Security benefits. Well that is a very bad idea:

President Barack Obama's apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it's killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.

That's the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.

Even more interesting is that the poll is finding the public not trusting the Democrats on Social Security as much as they did before, while the trust in Republicans is on the rise. During that time frame we saw Republicans going out to the angry town halls and saying that they would not touch Social Security. Of course those of us who really follow politics know that is far from the truth. This was just another example of “snake oil salesman” tactics by the GOP.

So hopefully we won’t hear the President talk about Social Security at the SOTU next week. If he does then he should lay out a plan to restore all the borrowed money to the system and legislation that will prevent lawmakers from using the money for anything they want. That is our money and it should be kept as such.