House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in an interview Thursday that House Republicans will “get to the bottom” of an array of White House controversies, while emphasizing jobs as their public message.
“The Congress has the responsibility to get to the truth,” Boehner said. “Whether it’s Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the whole situation with The Associated Press, our committees are going to do their job to get to the bottom.”
Oh, I believe Boehner will “get to the bottom” all right, but not in a way anyone wants.
Meanwhile in the land of reality, as noted here from about a year ago…
With only 58 days left on the legislative calendar for the year, what did House Republicans debate for hours? Jobs, taxes, the debt or poverty? No.
When Republicans took over the House in January 2011 they asserted they would focus on jobs. Eighteen months later very few bills have been signed into law. The House GOP’s calendar features 151 weekdays off and 109 in session. With 58 days left in Washington from June to December, it’s instructive to see what issues get attention.
Though the country faces problems effecting millions, Republicans brought a bill to the floor this week making abortion based on the gender of the fetus a federal crime. Never mind that gender based abortions would appear not to be a problem in America — sponsors Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Chris Smith (R-NJ) had difficulty citing substantial evidence of such abortions sweeping the nation. Regardless, their bill made it to the House floor with no hearings and on very short notice.
“This is an important issue to the American people… that’s why it’s being brought to the floor,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). But a congressional reporter provided a different take. ”I spoke to a GOP aide today and was told ‘we have to feed our rank and file red meat every now and then,’” reported MSNBC’s Luke Russert.
And Rachel Maddow drove that point home even better in the video from here.
In addition, this tells us that Boehner “gave up” on construction last year, putting as many as 50,000 jobs at risk, which is part and parcel of doing nothing constructive on this issue, as noted here (actual economists weighing in as opposed to Beltway media talking heads). And it’s not as if the Dems have been sitting on their hands with this stuff; this tells us that the American Jobs Act that originated from the White House continues to languish in the U.S. House with no action, and this tells us that Obama’s job plan was criticized by Boehner and company before it was even released (lather, rinse, repeat).
Not that you’ll ever read any of this from “Tiger Beat on the Potomac,” as Charles Pierce calls it (and to think that these assclowns actually had the gall to contemplate a “pay wall,” as noted here).
Liberals hypocritically gave Obama a pass for furthering the same policies they condemned in 2008. Criticism from the left was half-hearted and muted, compared with their Bush-era indignation. On Gitmo, left-wingers rightly blamed the GOP for blocking closure but didn’t shame Obama into using his executive authority to shutter the pit.
Oh, right – President Hopey Changey forgot to wave his magic wand and make idiots in Congress who are afraid of their own shadows suddenly somehow come to realize that we have not one damn thing to fear if we get everyone out of GITMO who we’re presently holding there (removing one hell of a jihadist recruiting tool) and put them in Supermax prisons while they await a civilian trial, through which we have a better shot of obtaining a conviction than those stinking military commissions. And somehow that the fault of “liberals,” of course.
Continuing with Fournier…
Some progressives even tried to justify the Obama administration’s efforts to criminalize the work of a Fox News reporter. Would they be so blasé about a White House targeting MSNBC?
I guess I’m crazy, but I was always taught that it’s a lot more logical (and again, the name of the game here is to see that justice is served) to let legal matters take their natural course before we have the inevitable rush to judgment.
Anyway, I think this is a pretty good column from Geoffrey Stone of HuffPo on the James Rosen matter (he of Fix Noise), including the following…
In general, it is unlawful for one person to solicit another to commit a criminal act. If X persuades Y to kill Z, for example, X can be punished for criminal solicitation of murder. This is a broad principle that, we can assume, ordinarily would apply to Rosen’s apparently successful effort to persuade the source unlawfully to leak the classified information.
But is Rosen, as a reporter, exempt from the ordinary law of criminal solicitation? Does the First Amendment give a reporter a constitutional right to do what other citizens have no right to do? The claim, of course, is that unlike the situation in which X solicits Y to kill Z, Rosen’s solicitation was undertaken for the public good, because Fox News, after all, has a constitutional right to publish the information. There is, in other words, no good reason to give X a right to solicit Y to kill Z, but there is a good reason to give Rosen a right to persuade the source to disclose the information to him (even though it is a crime for the source to do so). Confused yet?
The problem with this argument is that, in interpreting the First Amendment, the Supreme Court almost never accepts such claims. For example, suppose someone walks down the street naked to protest laws against obscenity, or speeds to get to a political rally in time to give a speech, or refuses to pay his taxes so he can give larger contributions to his favorite political candidates. In all of these situations there is a speech-related reason why the actor wants an exemption from a law of otherwise general application, but the Court has consistently, and quite reasonably, rejected such claims.
Similarly, in the Free Press context, suppose a journalist commits an illegal burglary in order to obtain information about a possible scandal, or conducts an illegal wiretap in order to prove that a congressman took a bribe, or steals a sophisticated camera in order to take better photos for her website. In none of these situations will the journalist be able, under current law, to assert a First Amendment right to commit the criminal offense because she did so in order to be a more effective journalist.
So let’s investigate this matter to find out exactly what Rosen did or didn’t do, OK? And if he is exonerated, then I’ll join the line of individuals pointing out that the Obama Justice Department was completely and utterly wrong to go after him.
And by the way, if anyone on MSNBC had been accused of doing what Rosen supposedly did, I would say the same thing.
Obama kept Guantanamo because, like Bush, he discovered he couldn’t close it. He kept and boosted security measures, including increasing surveillance and expanding law enforcement powers, even though Bush was loathed for his draconian measures.
That kind of leads me to believe that Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History supported closing Gitmo, but didn’t (well, he did a bit depending on the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, or so he told us here).
The problem for me, though, is that the ruling, which held basically that the military commissions weren’t good enough, came down in June 2006, and Bush gave a speech three years later here in which he still opposed closing GITMO (typical).
But to hear Parker tell it, Dubya, in fact, “discovered” he couldn’t close it, maybe in the same way a thief “discovers” a bag of money when trying to rob a bank.
What exactly was that Pulitzer for again?
As chairman of the House’s State Government Committee, Metcalfe has convened a June 5 hearing into campaign-finance disclosure regulations, keying off the activities of Pennsylvanians for Accountability, a liberal group that has sponsored TV ads ripping Gov. Corbett’s record and targeted four GOP House members in vulnerable districts last year.
Metcalfe told The Inquirer he is interested in greater transparency in campaign funding, and believes that the group may have crossed the line.
…
Metcalfe should leave 501(c)(4) social welfare groups alone, argues the Pennsylvania Commercial Action Network, a grassroots conservative business organization that campaigns against what it considers excessive government regulation of private enterprise, and for lower taxes.
“Although we understand the public’s desire to peek behind the veil of private organizations, we believe a greater public good is served by protecting confidential speakers’ rights,” PaCAN’s managing directors, Matthew Balazik and Skip Salvensen wrote in a May 24 letter to Metcalfe.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
Oh, right – let’s not investigate liberal 501(c)(4) groups because it might not stop there, and conservative 501(c)(4) groups might get targeted also. Too funny.
What’s the matter, wingnuts – afraid your little “social welfare” scam would go up in a thicker cloud of smoke that the one curling out of Flush Limbore’s big, fat stogie?
And it’s not one bit surprising that Metcalfe would find himself right in the middle of something like this, for the following reasons…
Here, he sponsored legislation that would end mandatory payment of union dues as a condition of employment in PA (paving the way for so-called “right to work”). Here, he supported voter ID in PA, which, as the post tells us, is tantamount to a “poll tax.” Here, he protested a proclamation on Domestic Violence Awareness Month because it had a “homosexual agenda” (Huh? Oh, right – more “dog whistle” language). Here, Metcalfe presented his version of Arizona’s “illegal to be brown” law for PA. Here, he said that veterans who favor action on climate change are “traitors” (nice).
And returning to the Pennsylvania Conservative Action Network, I give you the following from here (in a story about the 2010 U.S. Senate election)…
The DSCC is a well-established fundraising organization. They have established donors and can raise money nationwide. PaCAN is a relatively new organization and fundraises primarily in Pennsylvania, but has already declared Joe Sestak as unfit for higher office.
Umm, yeah – “social welfare” only. That’s what PaCAN is about.
Sure.
A Washington advocacy group filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the IRS and top Obama administration officials on behalf of 25 Tea Party-related groups, marking the biggest lawsuit to date over the tax agency’s practice of targeting conservatives for additional scrutiny.
The 29-page lawsuit named Attorney General Eric Holder, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and several IRS officials — including Lois Lerner, the division director who refused to testify before Congress last week. The suit claims the constitutional rights of 25 Tea Party and other conservative groups were violated when tax workers singled them out for a drawn-out vetting process.
The American Center for Law and Justice is arguing that the Obama administration overstepped its authority and violated the First and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the Administrative Procedure Act as well as the IRS’ own rules and regulations.
“The whole timeline and the whole narrative that the White House has put forth does not hold up to the truth,” ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow told Fox News on Wednesday.
In its suit, the ACLJ wants the government to admit wrongdoing. The suit also seeks to protect the groups from future IRS retaliation as well as compensatory and punitive monetary damages.
For what, exactly? Hurt fee-fees?
Also, this tells us that the American Center for Law and Justice was established in 1990 by Pat Robertson, employs 50 people, and has an operating budget of $14,650,162 based on data from 2004.
Oh, but the Teahadists are “grass roots-based,” aren’t they?
And just as a reminder, here are some of their more stellar moments…
And finally…
(Funny, but I always thought that word was spelled with an “e.”)
Posted by doomsy 
The Liberal Doomsayer 