Think Progress: Rep. Gohmert bashes economist John Reilly: ‘He may go to M-I-T but he is an N-U-T.’
MIT economist John Reilly has come out and criticized Republicans for distorting his research on clean energy policy. GOP officials have been repeatedly misusing his work to claim that a cap-and-trade system would cost American families $3,100 in extra energy taxes each year. (In fact, the study actually says that any tax burden would be about one-fortieth of what Republicans claim.) Instead of responding to Reilly with facts, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) is now bashing the economist with ad hominem attacks in CNS News:Benen: NOT A GOOD SIGN....Anyone who thinks you can pay $3,100 to the federal government and thinks you can get that money back completely in services — like I said — he may go to M-I-T but he is an N-U-T.
Paul Krugman noted the other day, "Bobby Jindal makes fun of 'volcano monitoring,' and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack. What else did the right oppose recently?"Well, as it turns out, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) doesn't want to let the Senate vote on President Obama's nominee to head FEMA.
A Louisiana senator is stalling Florida emergency management director Craig Fugate's nomination as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Fugate had sailed through his nomination hearing and Monday cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee by a unanimous voice vote. Republican Sen. David Vitter said, however, that he'd blocked Fugate because of concerns he has with FEMA.
"I have a hold on the FEMA nomination because I sent a list of hurricane recovery questions and projects to FEMA, many of which have not been adequately addressed," Vitter said in a statement. "I'm eager to get full responses and meet with the nominee immediately."
Fugate, of course, was chosen to lead FEMA in large part because of his impressive work responding to hurricanes in Florida. His nomination has garnered bipartisan support and Fugate was supposed to be easily confirmed.
But Vitter, who is seeking re-election next year despite a prostitution scandal that undermined his "family values" agenda, isn't quite satisfied.
Given the recent history with Jindal and Collins, I guess this means we should be bracing for a natural disaster sometime soon.
College football=communism? May 1: GOP in Exile: Rachel Maddow talks about how Rep. Joe Barton, R-TX, compared the college bowl series to communism!
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BarbinMD (Daily Kos): Michael Steele: Obama A Media-Created "Magic Negro"
There are no depths to which Michael Steele will not sink:
CALLER: I wanted to bounce off to you my opinion of the press conference on Wednesday.
STEELE: Okay, go ahead.
CALLER: That was truly an enchanting evening, wasn't it?
STEELE: I was enchanted beyond words, to the point where I was enchanted.
CALLER: It's just like the LA Times said last year, or two years ago, he is the "magic negro."
STEELE: Yeah, he (laughs) ... you read that too, huh?
CALLER: Oh yeah, I read that too, and even when things go wrong, he still manages to come out smelling like a rose.
STEELE: Well, uh, yeah. And it's because he's getting unprecedented coverage and cover by the media that is of course, his creator.
Update: Thanks for the reminder, limpidglass (via Think Progress).
TP: A big theme on the panel today was how to get the GOP to embrace minority voters. Do you think that Mr. Saltsman’s CD that he released to the RNC members helps or hurts that effort?
STEELE: Oh it doesn’t help at all. Absolutely, it reinforces a negative stereotype of the party. [...] And so now we have a opportunity to step in the breach and clear that up and make sure that people appreciate and know that look, this is not representative of the party as a whole, this is not a direction that we want to go in or a system that we believe.
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Herbert (NYT): Out of Touch
Benen: THE FNC 'SNUB'...The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
It’s not a party; it’s a cult. I’m no fan of Arlen Specter, but if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be shoving him out the door and waving good riddance. This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.
It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.
Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire economy.
Trickle down. Weapons of mass destruction. Torture. Deregulation. You name it. The Republican-conservative know-it-alls of the past several years (all-too-frequently with feckless Democrats following closely behind) brought destruction and heartbreak to just about everything they touched.
And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.
It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.
When it came to looking out for the interests of ordinary working Americans, the party of just-say-no could hardly have cared less. Referring to the catastrophic ordeal of Detroit’s automakers, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, told us last November, “The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their problem.”
And Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top financial adviser during the presidential campaign, was enshrined in the foot-in-mouth hall of fame last summer when he said the country was experiencing “a mental recession.”
After awhile, it became all but impossible to overlook the madness of these true believers and the incalculable damage they had done to the country. Voters who hadn’t sipped from the Kool-Aid themselves couldn’t help but recognize that the G.O.P. was bizarrely detached from the real world.
It still is. In the place of constructive alternatives to Obama administration policies, it has offered increasingly hysterical rhetoric. Mr. Gingrich warned on television that the Democrats’ moves to stem the banking crisis “gives them the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship.”
Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, described President Obama as “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” And Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate, said of the administration’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
This is not a party that can be trusted with the leadership of the country. John McCain was ready to have Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and reportedly wanted Phil Gramm to be his Treasury secretary. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has the strategic sense and attention span that you’d expect to find in a frat house on Saturday night.
“I love the Oscars,” he told GQ. “I’m looking for who’s got what dress on, you know?”
All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.
On Wednesday night, President Obama held a prime time White House press conference, fielding questions from a variety of news outlets. It lasted about an hour, and is always the case, some news outlets didn't get a chance to ask a question. It's the nature of the process -- some folks are going to get left out. Better luck next time.And while it's not uncommon to hear some grumbling the morning after a press conference about one outlet or another feeling "snubbed," I can't recall the last time a news outlet whined as incessantly as Fox News is whining now about not getting called on during Wednesday's presser.
Soon after the event, Fox News was complaining. That's hardly odd. But 48 hours later, the carping was still going strong.
Chris Wallace, for example, whined yesterday about the president "boycotting" Fox News, because Fox didn't air the press conference the way the real networks did. (Is "boycott" really the right word here?) Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett said Friday the president deliberately sought "retribution" against the Republican network. Last night, Sean Hannity was outraged. Glenn Beck whined, "What a surprise. I mean how can the guy face Ahmadinejad but he can't face Fox?"
This is all terribly silly. For one thing, Fox News should be pleased it's even allowed to attend White House press conferences, as if it were a legitimate, professional news outlet. I've always considered it quite generous that the president's team doesn't just dismiss the network as a propaganda machine.
But more important is the fact that the network's incessant complaining overlooks recent history.
It's hard to suggest that Obama doesn't want to "face" Fox News, given that its White House correspondent, Major Garrett, was called on at the two previous prime-time news conferences. When Fox suggested that they were not being given enough access to Obama during last fall's presidential campaign, Garrett actually defended Obama. "[M]ay I point out Obama has done 5 interviews with me and one with Chris Wallace, one with Brit Hume and one with Bill O'Reilly," Garrett wrote in an e-mail obtained by Huffington Post.
Obama decided not to call on Fox News for one press conference, after having called on the network in the two previous press conferences. This is hardly grounds for days of on-air whimpering.
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