November 24, 2014

JOHN McBLAME: Chuck Hagel 'Was Up to the Job'

John McCain wasn't going to let the administration get away with its spin. Early Monday morning, before daylight in Arizona, Helene Cooper reported that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel would be stepping down, and that he was pushed. In a morning interview with NewsTalk 550, McCain struck back at the idea that Hagel was incompetent, or that he was the problem with the administration.





The incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee ticked off the crisis regions around the globe, from the ISIS-occupied sections of the Levant to China, and reiterated that Hagel was a good man who could not fix an Obama policy that was blundering and making the country weaker. "Believe me," said McCain, "he was up to the job." McCain's tone made it sound like he was defending the honor of a fellow Vietnam veteran against anonymous bureaucrats. Anyone who watched Hagel's confirmation hearings last January might be surprised to hear this. When Hagel was in his final term as a Nebraska senator, he vehemently opposed the Bush administration's Iraq strategy. He opposed McCain when the Arizonan argued, successfully, for a troop surge in Iraq. At the 2013 hearings, McCain lit into Hagel. "Were you correct or incorrect when he said the surge would be the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam?" asked McCain, as Hagel sputtered.


Now, McCain was separating Hagel from the Obama administration. You can see why. At the start of 2013, when Hagel was confirmed, Gallup could credibly run a story titled "Obama Rated Highest on Foreign Affairs, Lowest on Deficit." Voters were most bullish on Obama when it came to national defense (a 53 percent approval rating) and foreign affairs (46 percent, just barely under water). That matched up neatly with the 2012 exit polls; the very small number of voters who cited "foreign policy" as their top concern went for Obama over Mitt Romney in a 56-33 landslide.





cont'


http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-11-24/john-mccain-chuck-hagel-was-up-to-the-job

November 24, 2014

Elizabeth Warren BLASTS New York Fed President

November 24, 2014

Ronnie Reagan - 1948 Was The LAST TIME Ray-Gun Told the TRUTH

Dem President Gives Republicans HELL










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November 24, 2014

John F. Kennedy Campaign :JFK Accepting The LIBERAL PARTY NOMINATION In 1960.

November 24, 2014

Democrat BUSTS REPUBLICANS For Trying To BURY Benghazi Report That DEBUNKS THEIR LIES

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) busted House Republicans for trying to bury their own Benghazi report by releasing on the Friday night before the Thanksgiving holiday.


Transcript via CNN:



House Republicans tried to dump the report on a Friday night before a holiday in the attempt to bury it so that nobody would notice that their own committee did not find any evidence to prove their baseless conspiracy theories. Rep. Schiff was correct. If the House Select Committee on Benghazi finds no evidence of wrongdoing, that report will be released sometime before hell freezes over. Benghazi has become such an ingrained myth within the Republican Party that Sen. Lindsey Graham when straight Benghazi truther when confronted with reality on CNN. Benghazi is their great Republican hope for defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. It doesn’t matter to the GOP if 1,000 investigations find no wrong doing. Republicans will still try to smear Hillary Clinton with their Benghazi tall tales.


Republicans tried to bury their latest Benghazi black eye, but they failed. The American people have never bought into the scandal because their BS detector tells them that there is nothing to see here. Republicans don’t care that they sound crazy every time they mention Benghazi. They are convinced that they can win with a conspiracy theory, so reality be damned, and full steam ahead to a special investigation into Benghazi.




http://www.politicususa.com/2014/11/23/democrat-busts-republicans-bury-benghazi-report-debunks-lies.html

November 23, 2014

Jeb Bush’s REVERSE MIDAS TOUCH

Sure, lets elect but another privileged Bush business-lunatic to the presidency............




In 1986, John Ellis Bush joined the five-person board of directors of a new Swiss-owned bank with the fitting name of The Private Bank and Trust. The institution, which was described that year by the Miami Herald as a place “where the money of wealthy foreigners is managed — very discreetly,” served as a fee-based investment bank for wealthy, mostly-Latino investors. The newspaper detailed the firm’s extreme secrecy, noting that upon arriving at the bank, “the general manager or one of his aides will lead you to one of three sparsely furnished conference rooms and will close the door. Under the bank’s rules, officers must meet with clients in secluded offices, not at their desks, where outsiders could see confidential papers.” Bush, whose father happened to be the vice president of the United States at the time, received $1,200 for his board service before resigning in 1987 to become Florida’s state commerce secretary. Four years later, federal regulators seized The Private Bank. According to the St. Petersburg Times, the government determined it had been “making investments contrary to client instructions and putting funds in companies affiliated with or managed by the bank.” Bush defended his prior tenure, saying, “There were no financial problems for me to be aware of when I was a director.”

A “self-made man”

Eight years ago, Bush — best known by the acronym “Jeb” — departed from Florida’s governor’s mansion determined to boost his $1,288,000 net worth in the private sector. Since, he has made millions in corporate board fees, speaking gigs, and consulting payments — but, much like his tenure before getting into public life, has done so with a series of companies that have found their way into legal or financial quagmires. Jeb Bush has often been portrayed as a “successful businessman,” but ThinkProgress reviewed Bush’s current and past business record and found a great deal of controversy and struggle. In some cases, the companies have faced financial problems during or after his tenure. In others, people with whom he has had business dealings have ended up in legal hot water. While Bush’s corporate work has not always been publicly disclosed, a substantial percentage of that which has been revealed has proven problematic. Bush’s spokeswoman did not respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment. In 1994, Bush mounted his unsuccessful maiden campaign for Florida governor, promising an “entrepreneurial” approach to government and offering himself as a “self-made man.” When his Democratic opponent brought up his business record, Bush cried foul. But, a spokeswoman for incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles (D), who would narrowly narrowly prevail on Election Day, responded: “What [Jeb Bush] calls mudslinging is just shining a light on his past. His record is his business dealings.” Two decades later, as Bush reportedly considers a potential 2016 presidential run, he is once again focused on making money. In April, Bush’s spokeswoman told the New York Times: “Jeb Bush had a successful career in commercial real estate and business before serving as Florida’s governor. After eight rewarding years in public service leading the state, he is enjoying running his own business again.”


International Medical Centers

In 1992, as President George H. W. Bush was unsuccessfully running for a second term in the White House, Mother Jones did an examination of the his family and its business dealings. In looking into Jeb’s business relationship with Miguel G. Recarey, Jr., the International Medical Centers (IMC) president-turned-international fugitive, a former federal prosecutor told the magazine that “he considered two possibilities — Jeb was either crooked or stupid. At the time, he concluded Jeb was merely stupid.” According to the St. Petersburg Times, Recarey paid Bush’s real estate firm $75,000 in 1985, ostensibly for realty work. But IMC never actually purchased a building shown by Bush — who claimed he was unaware of Recarey’s previous arrest record and history of income tax evasion. Bush came to Recarey’s aid in a different way. Under a pilot program, IMC had received an temporary waiver from a rule limiting its maximum percentage of its receipts could come from Medicare and Recarey wanted to renew it. At his request, Bush — whose father was the U.S. Vice President at the time — agreed to contact the Department of HHS to encourage a “fair hearing” for the firm. Bush has repeatedly claimed that he only contacted a low-level official and sought no special treatment for his client. But two HHS officials testified in 1987 to Congress that Bush had in fact contacted then-HHS Secretary Margaret “Peg” Heckler. In 2012, Heckler herself told the Huffington Post that Jeb Bush had lobbied her and that it had weighed heavily on her thinking on the matter: “He was involved, and I know that his compassion and my sense of conscience and his, I thought, matched, and therefore I was positive, acting upon this.” Federal regulators shut down the insolvent IMC in 1987 and Recarey was indicted for Medicare fraud. He left the country before he could be arrested and remains an international fugitive. In 1998, Bush told the St. Petersburg Times he was not as gullible at 45 as he had been 13 years earlier: “I have to have better radar.”


Bush-El

After helping elect his father president of the United States, Jeb Bush teamed in 1989 with then-Moving Water Industries, Corp. (MWI) president and CEO J. David Eller, to create Bush-El. The eponymous partnership aimed to market MWI’s water pumps internationally. In 2002, the Miami Herald revealed that on one of Bush’s trips to Nigeria to help sell them MWI pumps in 1991, that company’s corporate pilot claimed he saw a suitcase full of cash — an apparent bribe for Nigerian officials. The pilot did not implicate Bush and a Bush spokesman noted inconsistencies in the claims. ”The governor was adamant he was not on an airplane with a suitcase full of cash,” the spokesman said, adding Bush was “unaware of any plane he was on with luggage on it full of cash.” Bush has reportedly said his involvement in the Nigeria effort was conditioned on a private loan being secured (as his father was president at the time and he wanted to avoid any appearance of impropriety). But the company instead went to the U.S. Export-Import Bank for the $74.3 million it needed for the deal. In 1998, after a whistleblower alleged “knowingly false or fraudulent claims” connected to that financing, the Department of Justice filed suit against MWI. The company has steadfastly denied the allegations, but was found liable by a jury last year and fined $580,000 (the MWI has appealed the verdict). Bush was not implicated and was never forced to testify in the case after a federal judge ruled him irrelevant to the case. Bush said later that the bad publicity from Bush-El had proven highly troublesome for him: “I made money. That’s the only benefit I can see… Otherwise, it’s been unmitigated grief.” While he said he took no money on the Nigeria deal, he made $648,250 on the Bush-El venture, between pump sales in other countries and selling his half-share in the partnership to Eller in 1994, prior to his gubernatorial campaign. An MWI company spokesman declined to comment for this story.






cont'

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2014/11/21/3591619/jeb-bush-business-failures/

November 23, 2014

THE NOTHING CANDIDATE: Same Mistakes As '08

~snip~

The discussion panels were closed to the press, but reporters assembled in a room down the hall and a steady stream of Clintonites visited to take questions. Most everyone dutifully noted that the Clinton candidacy was still just a hypothetical, but occasionally some activists slipped. Buffy Wicks, the executive director of the super PAC Priorities USA Action, started one sentence with “When Hillary Clinton decides to run…,” dispensing with the façade.* It was an odd event: reporters asked questions about Hillary Clinton’s plans and policy agenda to a group of people who knew as little as anyone about her presumptive campaign and its messaging. In that sense, the Ready for Hillary meeting was the perfect embodiment of the Democrats’ current Hillary problem: everyone in the party seems to be supporting her, and yet nobody can articulate exactly why. (I wrote for the magazine recently about Clinton’s seeming inevitability as a Presidential candidate.) The meeting came at the end of an eventful week—one that only underscored Clinton’s continued reluctance to explain what she might want to do as President. In Congress, the Senate debated two major issues: the Keystone XL pipeline and reform of the National Security Agency. Clinton remained silent about both.



As Secretary of State, Clinton was in charge of the process that will eventually lead to a decision about whether the Administration allows TransCanada to build its pipeline, which would transport crude oil from northern Alberta down to American refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. It has become a defining issue for U.S. environmentalists, and was one of the most politically charged and significant issues that Clinton faced during her time at State—and yet her memoir, “Hard Choices,” contains not a single mention of Keystone. When the Senate this week debated a bill to force Obama to build the pipeline—rallied by Mary Landrieu, the Democratic senator from Louisiana, who faces a runoff election in December—Clinton still had nothing to say. To be sure, the sensitive review process for Keystone is ongoing, and Clinton might feel that, by discussing her personal views, she would be prejudicing the outcome. Then again, if she has strong feelings one way or the other, shouldn’t she use her influence to affect the final decision?



~snip~

What does Clinton think of those reforms? She doesn’t say. She offers the usual platitudes about balancing security and liberty but gives no indication of whether she believes that the program under which the N.S.A. collects Americans’ phone records should be continued as is, modified, or scrapped. When the Senate killed the main N.S.A.-reform bill this week, Clinton remained silent. For months, she also maintained silence on immigration, but on Thursday, after the President announced that he would use his authority to prevent as many as five million undocumented immigrants from being subject to deportation, Clinton released a rare statement endorsing the proposal. She did something similar in August, when, after being pressured from the left, she spoke about the events in Ferguson, Missouri.



But, despite the clear remarks about Ferguson and immigration, Clinton’s views on many crucial issues remain opaque. She seems to be repeating the same mistake that she made in 2008, when the inevitability of her candidacy overwhelmed its justification. At the Ready for Hillary festival, Mitch Stewart, one of Obama’s top organizers in the 2008 contest, suggested that Clinton needed to be careful to develop a message and stick to it. He noted that she had failed to do that in the 2008 primaries. “Every six weeks, there seemed to be a new slogan, and there was nothing people could wrap their arms around,” Stewart said. But when he and others at the event were asked what that message should be, nobody really had any idea.







cont'

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/keystone-nsa-hillary-clinton-remains-quiet

November 22, 2014

Obama Schools WIMPY DEMS On How To Campaign On Immigration Reform

President Obama returned to the same high school that he spoke at in January, 2013 about immigration reform, and boy was he on fire, as was the crowd. As Rachel says, he is showing Democrats how they could have framed the message in the midterms to their advantage instead of running away from it. Republicans are in the same box today as they were before the election. With or without an executive order, they could have campaigned to pressure the House to pass the damn bill.



Instead they did stupid things like make ads reassuring voters they weren't in support of "amnesty," let the right wing define them and the issues, and ran tepid campaigns. Friday, the President made fools of them with a sweep of the pen and one speech. One of the funnier moments was when he told the raucous audience he told John Boehner he "would wash his car, walk his dog" if "only he would call the bill, because that's what a democracy is about."



I can only imagine what might have happened if Democrats hadn't turned into wet noodles and decided they should run away from immigration reform to satisfy Republicans' racist base.



Take a lesson for 2016, Dems. Don't sideline the President and don't pander to bigots.






cont'

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/11/obama-schools-wimpy-dems-how-campaign

November 22, 2014

LOL! Democratic Congressman LASHES OUT IN ANGER At GOP For Obstructing Immigration

A SPINE has the floor....................


Democratic Representative Jared Polis of Colorado, while delivering a speech on the House floor, erupted in sheer anger when the Republican Speaker Pro Tempore, Tea Partier Jackie Walorski, expressed her dismay at him for addressing the many immigration reform supporters who had sat in the House gallery to watch the proceedings. Enraged at the Madame Speakers sheer hostility towards those who traveled miles to have their voices heard, Polis rightfully erupted:



The Speaker then attempted to cut him off, but he prevailed and lashed out in full force against his obstructing colleagues on the right, leaving her speechless, blindly staring at the impassioned Democratic Congressman.



As the Speaker banged her gavel and accused Polis of being “out of order,” he continued to lambaste her and her colleagues for their obstruction, saying “Will the Speaker understand that the Speaker is preventing HR15 from coming to the floor” over and over again. Bottom line, it is a fact that the Republicans won’t allow a vote on the bill, because they know the Democrats and some Republicans would vote for it, and it would pass.




http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/11/21/democratic-congressman-lashes-out-in-anger-at-gop-for-obstructing-immigration-video/

November 21, 2014

Republican Birdbrain: Rand Paul LIKENS Obama Exec Action To Japanese Internment Camp Order

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) likened President Barack Obama's decision to take executive action on immigration to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order authorizing putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II. Paul made the comments on Friday, a day after Obama formally announced the executive actions, at the Kentucky Association of Counties conference in Lexington, Kentucky.




The video of Paul's comments were clipped by the Democratic-leaning opposition research shop American Bridge.



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rand-paul-barack-obama-executive-order-immigration-japanese-american-internment-camp