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CBS puts the price tag at $1.5 million per vote… That is probably exaggerated and where that might have been the actual initial expense were one to account for all the high priced hours, acquired document fees, parking, etc for the information collected in the first vote, it would be safe to assume that most of the subsequent votes all draw from that original document…. and the expense would be less.
As all know by now, Obamacare helps we, the people, and in doing so costs the private insurance companies a little more in profit unearned. That essentially is what this whole battle is over. If the private insurance companies had from the get-go, said they were gung-ho into Obamacare, none of this controversy would have occurred at all. …
So according to CBS, the grand total, with 50 attempts to repeal, is now at $75 million of your dollars completely wasted over nothing… We still have Obamacare. The money was spent. It was therefore spent on nothing and Republicans in the House, are the ones solely responsible. Someone needs to be accountable for spending the exact same money when they knew very well it was to wasted and could go no further…. over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
(Yeah, it’s 50)
So when you legitimately complain that nothing is getting done to help you the public citizen, consider this: what $75 million would otherwise buy….
$150,000 jobs…. 500 per year
$75,000 jobs…. 1000 per year
$50,000 jobs…. 1500 per year
$35,000 jobs… 2142 per year
Fixed pot hole….. 250,000 at the high in estimate of ($300 per pothole)
Brand new high schools…. 3 3/4
Elementary schools…. 10
Rounds of ammunition…. 255 million
Roman Abramovich’s home …. 1
M1 Abrams tanks….. 8.74 tanks
Spent on Marijuana Prohibition….. 1.36 days
SNAP Benefits….. 8 hours 14 minutes worth
Operating a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier….. 70 days, 21 hours,
Amount applied to Protecting Endangered Species….. 3 years and 3 months
Speakers of the House….. 360 of them. (Vice Presidents too)
=====
Bottom line. We could have gotten a much better deal for the money spent. Everyone knew it was being spent on absolutely nothing. Yet Republicans spent every penny anyway… Remember this the next time they yelp about Keynesians spending government money on useless projects…
This was just a pure sad waste of your money. No ifs, No buts. No do overs…
It is up to you to hold the Republican Party accountable; the main stream media won’t….. Just wait until the next time some one dares complain about Obamacare in front of you…!
If this information were to ever get out, it alone could cause the House to turn blue in 2014……..
Graphs Courtesy of Washington Post
Everyone knows the Republicans are the party of “no” . However not many of you have seen the full effect these Republicans have caused.
Introducing Next Year’s Republican House Schedule… Number of days working; 10% fewer than 2013.
Between August and Nov. 4 — Election Day 2014 — the House will be in session 12 days. The chamber will be in session for 27 days between August and the year’s end.
No week longer then 4 days.
One month they work 4 weeks. All others are three weeks or less.
For all intents and purposes, it looks like since Republicans cannot win elections, they have chosen to be famous for being the most unproductive party ever assembled in the once great United States of America……
I’m sorry I couldn’t react to this in a timely fashion. As it is, some time has gone by, but perhaps that is good. It allows minds to focus on it without getting twisted by emotions… As it is, I have tried to strip all partisanship out of the evaluation, and simply look at it as one would two neutral sports antagonists.
Here is the Boehner quote….
“What the president said today was if there’s unconditional surrender by Republicans, he’ll sit down. That’s not the way our government works.” –
That is just wrong. Opening the government back up is now… “unconditional surrender”? From an inpartial viewpoint Boehner just lost the battle of public opinion. For now, anyone out of work is so because in Boehner’s own words, it would amount to unconditional surrender for Republicans.
All the past pointing fingers at the president are in one sentence proven to have no bearing. For if it were the president’s fault that the shutdown were occurring, the “unconditional surrender” would have to be on his side.
But opening the government back up, only hurts the Republican position. It doesn’t weaken the Democrats position one iota. Therefore Boehner just admitted full blame himself for the entire shut-down. By saying it was “unconditional surrender”, Boehner despite all his previous jabs, now implicates only the Republicans. The shutdown is indeed now the Republicans fault and Boehner just proved it….
Why is opening the government an “unconditional surrender” for Republicans? Because they caused it. They benefit from it. And if it goes away, they lose….
This is why the dead can’t be buried and the living can’t earn incomes. This will be why the entire global economy will crash with a drop 50 times more powerful than the Lehmann collapse… This will be why the other nations, China, Russia, North Korea, and the Muslim nations, will take advantage of our incapacity and make changes to geography completely undreamed of by today’s current Republicans. Gee! What a great time to eradicate Israel. Wow! When the USA is too incapacitated to help them…
All because the Republicans might lose if we open up government… Boehner himself let it slip: to open government would be “unconditional surrender.”
Now usually when one surrenders unconditionally, it is because he is getting pounded and can’t take it anymore. Although they are taking a pounding in the polls (28%), they aren’t the ones suffering. Federal workers, those businesses dependent upon the government, and those requiring the government to be open and running, are the ones getting pounded…
So it is really as if we launched a first strike against the Soviets, and when they launched back we used telemetry to divert all their missiles to Brazil… “ha, ha” we laughed. “Let all those suckers suffer; we aren’t surrendering… you have to surrender first!”
In this regard, Republicans are no better than Al Qaeda when using Iraqi school children as human shields. To paraphrase a recent phrase from TV and to make fun of Boehner’s orange skin color all at the same time, one could say… “Orange is the New Al Qaeda….”
To save face and stop this, all Boehner has to do, is say. “Every Republican is cut loose; vote your conscious or as your constituents back home would wish”… and put the clean bill on the floor.
There is a reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists. For if you let them go, they will do it all over again…. and keep on doing it, as many times as possible until you stop them.
Courtesy of Dallas Federal Reserve Bank
A very conservative bank, in a very conservative state, came up with a very conservative total on how much damage Republican policies cost the once great United States of America. $14 Trillion.
When even very astute conservatives blame their own policies for RUINING the financial health of this nation, one has no choice but to take notice.
$14 Trillion. How much is $14 Trillion? 7 years of total Government spending, INCLUDING all the entitlements involved with Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans Benefits. How much is $14 Trillion? $14 Trillion would pay off every mortgage existing now in the United States of America. It would pay off the entire student college loan debt fourteen times over! How much is $14 Trillion? it would pay down 7/8ths of the entire National Debt! How much is $14 Trillion? It is 7/8ths of our yearly GDP, seven eights of every single dollar spent per year in the USA by you, me, our rich uncles, our poor aunts, and our government….
That is how much the Bush Era cost America…. $14 Trillion.
So let’s look at this once touted Republican agenda.
Did the tax cuts work? No, they cost us $14 Trillion.
Did deregulating derivatives work? No, they cost us $14 Trillion.
Did less regulation of the financial sector work? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did funding two wars and Medicare Prescription Drug benefits by borrowing money work? No, they cost us $14 Trillion.
Did it work to give banks huge incentives to invest dangerously? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did it work to pass laws forbidding workers to strike? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did de-regulating oil hedge funds work? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did cutting back government spending work? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did removing limits to keep down the scalping of student loan interest rates work? No, they cost us $14 Trillion.
Does keeping minimum wage at low slave levels work? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did re-making our medical care into a for-profit system work? No, it cost us $14 Trillion.
Did subsidizing Halliburton with $39.5 billion work? No, they cost us $14 Trillion.
Did letting the rich get richer; forcing the poor to get poorer, work? No. It cost us $14 Trillion.
Just think. Back in 2001 when Republicans began pushing their tax policies, did you know that doing so would begin to cost us 8 years in our future, $14 Trillion? 7/8ths of our nation’s yearly output? If you read the Congressional Record from back then, the Democrats and the CBO certainly did, though their lowballs of $10 Trillion came in a little under. But it was rather obvious that tinkering with the Clinton dynamo would be risky, that things were working so well, that getting to the destination of having a national debt at zero ought to be achieved before we began going the opposite direction.
But Republicans always when given a choice, choose to respond to lobbyist’s entreaties of support, instead of looking for support from everyday normal American people, so those warnings were all for naught.
And unfortunately still are. Even after a conservative bank, in a conservative state, published their conservative estimate, that the Republican policies cost this nation $14 Trillion Dollars….
In their own words….
That primary cause back then, as well as today, is any policy Conservative! Especially those of the Tea Party!
Where do you draw the line? This piece will philosophically roam a little I’m afraid because there is no set answer, just an amorphous mess that defies confinement if that makes sense. If it doesn’t…. here is hoping it will near the end of this writing… 🙂
If you can’t guess what the image is in the heading, try imagining a horizontal volume control like what is displayed in most car radios these days. On it we have unlimited choices across the realm of what we can hear and we choose where we want to draw the line….
I was reminded of this by a soon to be famous video about Seattle’s schools standing up to Kafkaesque craziness the wealthy and corporate America are foisting upon education. The video starts out with a teacher giving this analogy….
It is as if a mechanic’s boss told his mechanic to put on an inferior brake instead of one the customer had requested. The customer will not take off the wheels to inspect. The mechanic says those brake shoes have problems, they fail. they could kill. The boss says, that’s just hype. They work in China all the time. Put them on….
Now look at the scale above…… In a child’s world of right and wrong we would all expect the mechanic to say “that was wrong” and refuse to do it…. So what if he loses his job? A child would say he should still not do what was wrong and cause someone’s death… But how many of you have had to do what the boss wanted because you were in no shape to state otherwise?
That is where the sliding scale begins to come in play…. If the mechanic refuses, and boss comes out and says, “leave right now, You were insubordinate and I just fired you”…. his spouse is going to say…”What, now we have no money. Why didn’t you just put the damn things on!” His parents are going to say..” Kid, sometimes an adult has to make adult decisions. It doesn’t matter what right or wrong is; it matters what right or wrong is for you. Sorry, can’t help you”. His future job interviewer is going to say; “your former boss said he fired you for insubordination and you have a no re-hire attached to your name. Sorry, can’t hire you.” And your drinking buddies are going to say; “Oh as soon as you left, he got Jacobson to put those cheap brakes on anyway. You lost your job for nothing…” The arbitrator at your unemployment hearing is going to say “We found the charges of insubordination substantiated; repeal denied.”…. No job. No money. Hungry family.
So standing up for what is right really doesn’t pay in today’s corporate controlled world, now. Does it? It is good story, but works lousy in real life.
So on the slider above, where would you fall? Where would you be? If you try to act like you would refuse to do wrong, you are probably a liar. If you swear you will always do the right and moral thing, you are naive, and probably also a liar. If you insist you would stand up to that boss, you are a simpleton who really doesn’t know much about life, and don’t need the job to survive.
So on the slider unit above, if the far left is standing up for what is right and immediately refusing and the far right is willingly follow the bosses direction right away… which would be you?
Probably for the most part you would be somewhere in the middle, you will say so if you are being true to yourself… You would probably argue once, twice, or maybe three times against it, and you might agree in theory, but in work, not follow through with that agreement, or you might just say “ok boss” and then still install the good brake pads.
But if you did, what about the next time. What about the discrepancy in inventory? Sooner or later it will catch up to you… And then you’ll be fired.
Or you could decided that you follow orders and if your boss made such an order, all results would have to fall on him and not you, and if anyone was to be liable and get caught up if any harm came out of it, it would be him; so you would follow his command and install the inferior parts…
If you are trying to figure out a way to win this, to come up with a perfect spot on this horizontal dial whether it is the far right, far left, center, middle right, middle left, sadly there isn’t a right way… For depending on which way you view the problem, both are right…. As you go to the right, you look bad from the left. As you go to the left, you look bad from the right. If you are in the middle, you look bad to both, just not as bad as the others at the far end of the spectrum…
There is no way to win.
Except to have the boss never ask you to substitute cheap parts instead of ones ordered by the car’s owner….
That is the trick.
Now here is what we are being asked to do.
- Lower our standards of education for all students.
- Eliminate tuition for all veterans returning from Afghanistan.
- 125,000 individuals and families put at risk of becoming homeless
- 100,000 formerly homeless people might be removed from emergency shelters or other housing arrangements
- Defer maintenance and leave highly necessary staff vacancies open.
- Because rents are so high, many of these families may, quite literally, find themselves out on the street.
- Significant cuts, including ones that deliver hot meals to the elderly and another that helps pregnant women.
- Cuts to the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children known as WIC, which provides food and baby formula for at-risk families. 775,000 low-income women and their children might lose access to or be denied that aid because of the mandatory cuts…
- Cuts to programs that aid children with special needs; job-training programs that help unemployed people find a new career; foreclosure prevention services; and programs that help 150,000 veterans every year make the transition into the nonmilitary work force.
- Reduction in jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed..
- Cut 20% of every military person’s pay.
And why are we being asked to do this? So the financier’s of the Republican Party like the brake business owner, can make more money……
But this time we do have a choice…. We hire and fire the boss…. Should we fire the Republican bosses? And replace them with those who have still carry American morals, and not third world ones?
Where do you want your children to see you, when they look at the sliding moral scale above?
“If you deprive the military of the ability to train, the ability to have flight hours for our pilots and air crews, the ability of our people to have the right kind of equipment to fight with, then you are putting us in danger in my view,” John McCain said.
Here is a clip of McCain speaking with Lindsey Graham alongside, correctly assessing the harm the sequestration will cause our armed forces… No repairs? Mothball fleets? 20% pay cuts for all military personnel? What will that do to morale?
So, dude, why didn’t you do anything to stop it?
All you had to do was vote for an additional tax of one single penny on every dollar earned over $1 million…..
This sequester then would never have happened? Why did you singlehandedly cause this sequestration by your own inaction, when you and your party could have so easily prevented it?
And then you go on television to say it is really bad? America is looking at you like you are the dumbest person alive….
The inaugural commission created a menu balanced across the palate of the United States of America… Featuring Maine Lobster, hickory grilled bison from South Dakota, Hudson valley apple pie, wines from Lake Eire region. The decision was made by a committee…
Mrs. Debbie Boehnor
Mrs. Diani Cantor
Mrs. Honey Alexander
Mrs. Iris Schumner
Mr. Paul Pelosi
Mrs. Landra Reid
They tasted thousands of different items representing areas across this , and came to a consensus… How hard is that? You try it. It is very hard!
If Americans who have no connection other than their spouses chose to run for office and won, can come together to figure out a complicated endeavor, why can’t we figure how to keep guns out of school, how to raise our debt ceiling, how to cut spending fairly and how to balance our budget?
The reason is the bullies on the outside. Those groups who yell, “don’t you give one inch”. Those groups who say “they’re trying to take rights away from you”. Those groups who growl: “take everything; give them not one penny in return”.
Usually those bullies are powerful because they are bullies. They live and survive on your donations… IF they can freak you out, that you give up some of your hard earned money, they get rich…
There is an industry that thrives on conflict. That gets rich off discontent. That fans flames to grow their pockets.
That industry is who to blame for our nation’s intransigence. Fox News gets the lions share, because they were first. But Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coultier, Glenn Beck, are all to blame. Because we see them in surroundings that mirror our memories of Ed Marrow, Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, we drop the pretense that what we are hearing is not news. It is a business whose income depends upon the temperature of our hate. Pure and simple. The more we hate, the richer they get..
Would a consensus on a menu reflecting all of America have been so easily obtainable if Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly were shrieking about each item? Exhorting any viewers to call and complain?
You know the answer… Proof is without the bullies on the outside, you put a handful of Americans on any committee, and things get done….
We’ve got to silence the bullies on the outside… Let’s do it, and eat in peace…
He didn’t have a challenger.
Voting is ongoing, but he has secured the total of 215 needed to win.
His name was the only one put forward in nomination from the Republican side. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash who also crossed over with Boehner and supported the Fiscal Cliff package along with the Democrats, put his name up for nomination.
Protest votes include 2 for Allan West, outed in the last General Election, Colin Powell, and someone from Idaho I have to yet look up…Rep. Paul Labrador, R-Id. (one does not have to be a member of the House to be elected Speaker.)
It appears the Tea Party has been whupped, subdued, and marginalized for this 113th Congress. It was a different Eric Cantor who returned the day after elections were over.
The number is staggering. $15 million to Newt Gingrich, $70 million to official Republican entities, and reportedly $65 million to dark shady political shell organizations. All, being thrown up against the current President, the man who won.
Rumors floated up that this was in support of Netanyahu and the side of Israel that invests in settlements. It appears that Romney’s fervant support of Netanyahu was the result of his ties with this man… Not long after their first $10 million meeting, Romney restated his support for one of Adelson’s top priorities — his fervent backing of Israel’s conservative government and his opposition to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Romney’s first foreign trip after his meeting with Adelson included a late July visit to Israel, which included a Jerusalem fundraiser that Adelson famously attended.
However other fundraisers are now saying differently…
Adelson is reportedly to have said he planned to spend about $100 million or “as much as it takes” to defeat Obama and help Republicans in Congressional races. Adelson’s personal wealth has been pegged at $20.5 billion by Forbes, making him one of the world’s richest men and enabling him to open his checkbook wide without worrying much about his bottom line…..
During the election, Adelson told Politico that the Justice Department investigation, and the way he felt treated by prosecutors, was a primary motivation for his investment in Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates…
In dark money he shelled out:
40 million to Karl Rove’s Crossroads.
15 million to a grassroots foundation run by the Koch Brothers.
5 million to the US Chamber of Commerce.
6.5 million to the Republican Jewish Coalition. (close to 100% of its entire funding.
It was a disappointing election for Adelson. His nemasis whooped him bad.
In SuperPac money Adelson gave $5 million to Boehner, and $5 million to Cantor and his allies. Which is why, he was in Washington today, meeting with Congressional Republicans to devise methods to disrupt any new tax on his estate… The Sands.
The primary reason for the meeting, is he wants these charges dropped. The Justice Department investigation, and the way he felt treated by prosecutors, was a primary motivation for his investment into the campaign of the Republican presidential nominee. Federal officials are looking into potential money laundering by two shady high rollers at his Las Vegas casinos.
The money laundering investigation, led by the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, is probing whether the casino broke the law by failing to report to the government millions of dollars of potentially laundered funds that two gamblers transferred to its casinos. (Tax evasion: the same thing that brought down Al Capone.)
One of the two gamblers, Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, is being probed about over $100 million of his transactions through the casinos. Separately, he was arrested in 2009 and pleaded guilty to accepting illegal kickbacks in his job as an executive with Fry’s Electronics in California. He is now serving a six-year jail term.
The other big gambler in the probe is Zhenil Ye Gon, a Chinese-born Mexican-based businessman, who reportedly transferred $85 million to Sands casinos several years ago. Ye Gon was indicted in 2007 for dealing in illegal drugs, but the charges were dismissed in 2009.
So the largess of Sheldon Adelson’s giving experienced the Republican party, was part of the $185 million in laundered money it got from these two people, leaving a cool $35 million in profit. Seen this way, it didn’t cost Sheldon a thing.
Another inquiry by Justice and the SEC has been under way for about two years. It involves allegations that Adelson’s lucrative casinos on the Chinese island of Macau may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by paying bribes to Chinese officials to expand its operations there.
Bribing the Chinese was a smart deal, if only the SEC and Justice Department hadn’t been so “hung up” on
regulations… (Can anyone else here a Romney campaign line here?) $700,000 went to a local attorney, Leonel Alves, who was hired by the Sands Chinese subsidiary while he was a government legislator in Macau. The lion’s share of Sands’ corporate revenues now come from Macau. That $700,000 bribe now yields a return of $326 million this past quarter…. As a business proposition, it made very good sense. Unfortunately there is one of those ridiculous regulations that hog-tie real business people called Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
Republicans would simply look the other way as long as they were on the receiving end of millions. Obama’s Justice Department? Well, not so fast.
Hence the determination to throw money away on the flimsiest chance that doing so could defeat him.
Of the billion dollars spent in this past election, 15% of that came from one man. Now, I believe in America, a man should spend his money how he wishers. Had he chosen to give this to fight Breast Cancer, we would all hold him in high esteem…
And the law is so broad, after Citizen’s United, that it appears he violated no rules, no regulations, and all his giving to Republicans was legal and completely within the law….
Seen from hindsight, obviously his influence impacts candidates. Karl Rove was in his box during his election night meltdown. Some fundraisers are pointing fingers at Karl Rove for advising Sheldon not to invest in “their” dark money organization, simply leaving competing interests for Rove, out in the cold. Newt Gingrich out of nowhere came out with an uncharacteristically backing of Israel during the primary. We now know why. Netanyahu figured prominently in the third debate, far more than his importance warrants. We now know why. Republicans against their parties own self interest, are risking losing any loyality with the American middle class over their intransigence not to raise taxes a teeny bit upon the wealthy. We now know why….
Simply put, if you can’t get elected without the help of one man…. and that one man is in your office telling you what you should be doing, you are going to listen to him…
The losers of this method of campaign financing are the American people. In this battle between the wealthy and everyone else, the Republicans are siding with the wealthy for their own self interest…. and their political survival is a pretty darn big self interest. Which means the rest of us are only getting one option to choose from. One party rule will again dominate America, as long as dark money is allowed into politics and there are no caps on one person’s influence.. And that party… will be the one representing the 98%….. and any party, without being repeatedly challenged, inevitably becomes soft and corrupt.
Until soft money becomes dried up, we will continue to have Sheldon Adelson types dropping into Washington with open checkbooks, and the rest of us will suffer these childish posturing battles between Sheldon Adelson supporters, and the rest of America. More grandstanding is guaranteed to be forthcoming by the Republicans….
I’ll bet you $150 million on it….
kavips 