They Have No Shame, Do They? Rachel Rips Bart Stupak For Hypocrisy
Rachel Maddow really drew blood last night with her attack on Congressional hypocrite Bart Stupak for sabotaging healthcare reform.
She reminds us exactly how Stupak lied about living at the C Street house belonging to The Family (registered as a church for tax purposes), the right-wing fundamentalist Christian cult that encourages politicians to lie their way into office so they can help form a God-centered government.
She pointed out that he paid only $600 a month for a luxury room with meals in The Family's mansion for many years, calls it what it is (a "donation in kind") and want to know if he paid taxes on it or declared it. She called on him to disclose whether he reported it and asked just who subsidized him.
I await the IRS investigation.
aren't considered healthcare? Thanks for clearing that up Mr. Congressman Stupid.
I guess being a liar is ok if you are lying for god. Isn't that what the Koran also says, it's ok to lie to infidels? What's the difference between our extremists and their's?
IF YOU EVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO
with C street you are an extremist, and a Liar.
on the abortion funding lies...We need to call him out on it too.
1.866.311.3405
Rachel is correct --he must declare or get a tax audit!
Don't hold your breath to long you might faint.
I can’t help but think that Greenwald is right. It’s just Stupak’s turn to play the heavy and kill legislation because none of them want to give up those health insurance lobby dollars. Stupak gets to polish his winger bonafides with what he perceives his base to be, which provides cover for Democrats from more liberal districts and they all get to keep those lobby dollars. It’s a win-win! What? The American people LOSE you say? Since when did THEY matter?
Barack Obama: Change we can only imagine
Every morning, must be some sort of 'Thug roundtable that includes the crotch-sniffing, c*ck-sucking wannabe Blue Dogs who service them. He/she who provides the best oral gets to go out and run interference with his/her special little issue.
What a way to go through life--bowing to and blowing 'Thugs, then appearing in front of the cameras before the money shot has even dried...
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
It goes well beyond that!
... to explain how not funding pro-life organizations and/or abortions through federal dollars is going to help a family that can't afford healthcare for routine medical expenses, let alone emergency care.
People are dying, facing an immediate and real need. Stupak is basing his stance on a book of what might as well be fairy tales.
to be another Joe Lieberman.
Progressives should try to get a challenger to defeat this guy in the primaries. I have become more estranged with the Democrats because of how the health care overhaul process through Congress has proceeded. It has really brought some of these guys true colors out. The lucky thing for the Dems is the Republicans are worse and because there are only two viable parties, make you choice between the lesser of two evils.
Beyond making the point that health care reform is a Democratic Party platform issue and that you would think that a Party member would not use some belief of his to hold it hostage, you can really see the arrogance of this guy. What gets my blood pressure up is what gives these guys the right to play God with peoples lives? So he is potentially creating anxiety for people who are more vulnerable, who don't have health care right now and are siting on pins needles to see if this bill gets passed. What an egocentric son of a bitch this dirt bag is! Again he should be kicked out of the Democratic Party and the fact the Democrats have probably at least two dozen people like him and don't do anything about it pisses me off about the Democrats as a Party.
I have received multiple calls from the DNC in the last year and I voice my complaints and tell I tell them their going to have to get spine and show some character before I give them any money. About the only two I would contribute to are Grayson and Weiner.
Go get this son of a bitch liar, Rachel. Drag him out into the sunlight. I wish there were more like you who actually check and investigate stories and the people involved...
http://www.uclick.com/client/nyt/po/
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
i will now play "I've never been to me" by Charlene.
why?
because it's freakin hilarious that's why.
'The Family' and their ilk needs to be smashed into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds.
People and organizations who countenance and encourage irrevocably breaking one of their fundamental religious tenets, one purportedly handed down by their own Lord, as a strategy to worm their way into power and enact an agenda of self-justified ignorance deserve no shelter from the storm.
Crush them, lest they crush you.
revoke the "religious" tax exemption of the C Street house. I am sick and tired of the intrusion of religion into the governing of our country. WHERE DOES THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE BEGIN? And don't give me that bull about America being a Christian nation. The Founders were DEISTS, ya morons!
And by the way, thank the Deity for Rachel Maddow!
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,”
... doesn't mean I want these arsehats sticking their noses in government.
I'm also fond of Jefferson's quote, "Leave no authority standing not answerable to man."
"needs to be smashed into a thousand pieces"
They already are... ;) Though they do gather for breakfast!
Study the symptoms not the virus...
That's brunched.
;)
We need her to take over the miserable job that John Harwood is doing on Meet The Press - so Mr. Cheney, when did you stop bitting off the heads of chickens?
because she'll expose you as the idiot you are and rip you a new one!
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,”
The Rachel Maddow Political Science class is a must see every night. There is so much to learn and she explains it so that even a Republican can get it.
Trouble is they never watch Rachael or Keith , they're all watching Fox and listening to Limbaugh , hearing only what they want to hear . Brainwashed cult members , no capacity to think and use reason or logic .
the rich and powerful using their positions for special favors and gain.
USA! USA! ScrewedSA!
Something really smells about that. Even Stupak whould have known that. All those people living there or have lived there needs to be audited.
that we might someday move toward a public debate that is driven by an unwavering and courageous search for the truth as you so effectively make the rest of our information/news sources look like the inane lapdogs that they are.
Keep up the good work; it is important and know that you have a legion of strong and grateful supporters.
here.
The language, from what I have read, doesn't fund abortions directly any more than welfare or unemployment checks do.
With welfare or UI, the recipient gets a check and chooses what they want to buy with the money. Those receiving welfare and/or unemployment have purchased abortion services.
In the bill, money from subsidies that would go to those meeting specific income standards, would go to the health plan that they chose to help pay the premium. That insurance company may have abortion services in its menu.
The manner of transferring money is much less direct than that of welfare or unemployment payments.
Here's the problem. If Stupid wants to restrict recipients of subsidies from purchasing the health plan they want, then those recipients would be denied access to care by the rules of the federal government.
In that case, they could have a 14th Amendment case under the Equal Protection Clause.
Stupid should not get his way as the cases to follow would cost way more to defend than they are worth IMO.
Also, it would create a precedent where government funding of any kind to individuals could restrict abortion or any host of procedures the government in power at the time deemed unacceptable.
Do liberals favor laws that protect the individual's liberties/freedom while conservatives trend towards laws which punish those they disapprove of?
it would seem so, but I would not venture to know if this ideal represents the factual norm.
Here in Canada we are very lucky in that our Supreme Court ruled that laws restricting a woman's right to an abortion abrogated her human rights under the equal rights clause of our charter.
By ruling in that way, it has taken abortion off the table for the conservatives to use as a political football.
Of course we don't have total nutbars like Alito, Thomas and Scalia sitting on our Supreme Court.
Maybe someday you'll have a sane Supreme Court too.
RELIGION interferes with the governing of our country. GET RELIGION OUT OF GOVERNMENT FOR GOOD! This country was founded on FREEDOM OF RELIGION, which also means freedom FROM religion, if we so choose. If anybody wants to live in a society ruled by religious theory and philosophy, they can move to IRAN and be under the thumb of the MULLAHS! And isn't that what the fundies here DON'T WANT?!!!
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,”
GET RELIGION OUT OF THE UNIVERSE FOR GOOD!
"I could give a flying crap about the political process.... We're an entertainment company."
- Glenn Beck - Forbes interview; April 26, 2010
As 'belief in the unseen' has taken various religious and non-religious forms over the centuries. What passes for Christianity in some circles may not be palatable, but it's not exclusive to the Bible crowd.
Funny how it's scientists insisting we don't know everything about the universe, and the religious insisting that it was all explained centuries ago by a committee deciding what books were to be included in the Bible.
There are basically four types of ways of thinking of God(s[esses]), based on distance and activity:
Distant Not Active (Deist)
Close Not Active (Creative)
Distant Not Active (Old Testament, the stern judge who lets things play out for a while)
Close Active: Most fundie Christianity
Either:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq_9wu-KjTk
Or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BEZaPN8gUY
You don't mistake the one that is loudest for the many.
The Vendata's make it Bhakti, Raja and Yoga, one is devout, the other reflective (which includes science), and the other disciplined puification.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
... religious doctrine as the basis of law when it's the Old Testament.
Here's where you go off the reservation.
You read the actual bill and you're not blinded by religious dogma which impairs one's ability to comprehend anything outside their worldview.
"When are we going to stop trying to tell elected officials what to do. Our job is to spend the taxpayers' money the best way we can." -- Tommy Watkins, Justice of the Peace, Crawford County, Arkansas
I knew that public school education would lead to trouble sooner or later.
...crooked repugnicant with a D after his name. I really hope this story gets some traction and he is investigated about the rent he was paying.
Seems to me that he is a religious idealogue, despite the reporter's opinion. He just camouflages it better than most.
In 2007, as this book neared completion, I met with a former special assistant to President Bush the younger named David Kuo, in a quiet office he'd rented outside of Washington to write his memoirs. He'd published a book called Tempting Faith: The Inside Story of a Political Seduction, in which he recounts his own journey from liberalism to fundamentalism and, after a fashion, back again. Kuo is a tall, big-boned man with spiky black hair and a pleasantly padded face given to loose smiles. His demeanor is naive, but by his own account he can be calculating; yet he doesn't seem to want to deceive.
As a student at Tufts University in the 1980s, Kuo found the Family. Or rather, they found him. He was bright, political, and moving rightward, from a girlfriend's abortion to antiabortion activism. A man named Kevin, who worked with student Christians on elite campuses, fed him books by conservative Christian writers and took him to go hear Chuck Colson speak. "I was dazzled," writes Kuo. "If I followed Jesus, helped others follow Jesus, and did it all publicly, I'd be fighting back against the secularizing forces that were sweeping God into the corner." Kuo has always been a service-minded soul. He wanted to help—as a young man, he didn't think too much about what he wanted to help—and he wanted to do so on a grand scale... THE FAMILY (P. 379)
Study the symptoms not the virus...
"John Amato: David Kuo comes off as a very credible and honest man. He asks Christians to take a step back from politics because something is very wrong in the White House. Will this finally wake up the Extreme Christian right to accept the fact that Rove & Bush have been using them? They mock you and ridicule you and yet you'll still line up at the ballot box."
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Kuo began to rise in politics. An intern for Ted Kennedy in college, he became a Republican, working in the orbit of Family men such as Jack Kemp and John Ashcroft. He tried to strike out on his own—and failed. Coe took him up as a project. "Without my realizing it, the Fellowship"—as he prefers to call the Family—"began subverting my ideas of power, and, more specifically, of Christian power." Coe took Kuo fishing in Montana, with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He introduced him to Billy Graham and Bill Bright of Campus Crusade, to Democrats and Republicans. Through the Family, he met former vice president Dan Quayle. In 1996, Quayle arranged for his conservative backers to support a nonprofit Kuo had created to evaluate groups doing "effective" poverty work and channel more money their way—an experience Kuo would draw on when the grand experiment in "faith-based initiatives" to which he'd been contributing went federal in 2001. --JEFF SHARLET
Study the symptoms not the virus...
In the first months of the new Bush administration, John Dilulio, the Democrat Bush had tapped to sell his faith-based program, called to invite Kuo to move into the West Wing. "Karen Hughes is on board, Karl Rove is on board," he told Kuo. "When can you start?" Faith-Based and Community Initiatives merged Dilulio's old-school urban politics, rooted in Catholic social justice teachings, with the ideas long championed by the Family.
Its chief advocates in Congress during the late 1990s were two Family members, Senator Dan Coats of Indiana and Ashcroft, who as a senator from Missouri inserted the concept of "charitable choice"—allowing religious groups to win government funding without separating out their religious agenda—into the 1996 welfare-reform bill. The theory behind faith-based initiatives grew out of the work of scholars and theologians schooled in traditions that could hardly be considered fundamentalist, or even conservative. But its implementation was in many senses the logical result of the Family's decades of ministry to Washington's elite combined with the increasingly established power of populist fundamentalism: a mix of sophisticated policy maneuvers and the kind of sentimentalism that blinded many supporters to the fact that faith-based initiatives, no matter how well intended, are nothing less than "the privatization of welfare," as a 1996 report commissioned by then-Governor Bush put in.
Such an outcome satisfied elite fundamentalism's long-standing belief in the relationship between laissez-faire economics and God's invisible, interventionist hand, and populist fundamentalism's desire for public expressions of faith, preferably heartwarming ones. The goal, Senator Coats declared, was the "transfer of resources and authority ... to those private and religious institutions that shape, direct, and reclaim individual lives."
Study the symptoms not the virus...
Coats, a bulb so dim he considers Dan Quayle a mentor, isn't much of a thinker on his own, but he couldn't have summed up Abram's original Idea any more succinctly. The Family's interests have always tended toward foreign affairs, but faith-based initiatives embody a core philosophy of governance fundamentalists have long sought on every front. During the 1980s, Attorney General Ed Meese and Gary Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy adviser, corresponded with Coe about creating a federal, faith-based response to poverty—a broad application of the methods Coe had experimented with a decade earlier by backing the Black Buffers as an alternative to black power. Meese's plans never came to fruition, but the outlines of compassionate conservatism, as Olasky would describe the trickle-down approach to helping the poor, began to cohere in those letters.
What is the cause of poverty? they asked themselves. Their answer was simple: "disobedience," according to a special report commissioned by the Family. At the right end of the Family spectrum, this was interpreted according to the logic of just deserts (Bauer, for instance, seemed to believe AIDS was a punishment from God) or plain denial (in 1983, Meese said he had a hard time believing there actually were any hungry children in the United States). But both those positions eroded as the Family's international realpolitik asserted itself domestically: the poor existed, and they had to be helped. Or reconciled, in the Family's words. The goal was not the eradication of poverty; it was the maintenance of a social order through the salvation of souls. That's always been the main agenda of populist fundamentalism; now, elite fundamentalism began to embrace it as well.
Study the symptoms not the virus...
Julia Rabig,
History “Black Buffers”--Evangelical Entrepreneurship Meets Black Power on the Streets of Washington, D.C.
In 1968, a Howard University sociology professor and a young A.M.E. minister received funding from the Washington, D.C. Mayor’s office, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and a group of white evangelical business leaders to create the Black Buffers. An organization of former convicts, the Black Buffers patrolled the streets of Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of the 1968 riots with the twin goals of preventing street crime and mediating between the city’s African-American neighborhoods and its predominantly white police force.
The Black Buffers blended evangelical religious belief with a commitment to Black Nationalism and local entrepreneurship. Their philosophy alternately embraced the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the left radicalism of black activists, such as Stokely Carmichael, and the conservatism of the businessmen and women who influenced Washington, D.C. politics from the suburbs.
Study the symptoms not the virus...
This should set off all kinds of alarms...
Vatican Hit By Gay Sex Scandal :P
Frank Schaeffer is a brave individual.
Study the symptoms not the virus...
Mayhaps they should start worshipping Ganymede.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Stupak is as Stupak does.
Well, on the rent apparently.
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