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After defending the profits of the health care industry when a previous caller asked him if he thought health care should be a human right, Rep. Issa is then asked who his biggest individual campaign contributor is.

Issa: Ah, boy that's a good question. Ah...I guess I am. I put several million dollars of my own money over the years into my campaigns for the Senate, the House and recalling the Governor, so I'm probably at $11 or $12 million of my own money. After that there's probably somebody that's given me $20,000 or $30,000 over ten elections.

Here are some of Darrell Issa's recent top campaign contributors from from OpenSecrets.org.

2009-2010

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Via Teddy Partridge at FDL, the shocking news that military weapons are now being deployed against civilians in the United States, just as many of us predicted:

You think your town hall meeting's law enforcement presence was authoritarian and heavy-handed?

Check this out: San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore deployed (but did not use) military type sonic crowd-control devices at two town hall meetings, one held by GOP Darrell Issa and the other by Democrat Susan Davis. These devices are the same as those used to control crowds of insurgents in the Iraq war theatre and have been linked to ear and brain injury.

Both town halls took place without incident; however the use of the military device concerned San Diegians. The LRAD [Long-Range Acoustic Device] crowd control is primarily used in Iraq to control insurgents and can cause serious and lasting harm to humans.

According to the manufacture, American Technology Corporation, the LRAD provides “military personnel the capability to transition through the rules of engagement to determine a target’s intent and also provides greater assurance that innocent lives on both sides of the device are not lost due to miscommunication.”

[...]“It’s very concerning,” Kevin Keenan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “ It is fine for the Sheriff’s Department to have new less-than-lethal weapons, but for their interactions with individuals these still-dangerous weapons need to be used only as substitutes for firearms. They can’t be used as just another tool on the tool belt. As we’ve seen with tasers and pepper spray, these types of weapons are being used to subdue people even though they pose the risk of serious physical harm.”

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Chris Matthews takes Darrell Issa to task on Hardball for using the term "Democrat Party".

Matthews: Well, I think the Democratic Party calls itself the Democratic Party, not the Democrat Party. Do we have to do this every night? Why do people talk like this? Is this just fighting words to get the name wrong?

Issa: This isn't intended to be fighting words.

Matthews: They call themselves the Democratic Party. Let's just call people what they call themselves and stop the uh, the Mickey Mouse here. Save that for the stump-seriously.

Issa: Chris, Chris.

Matthews: Now let's get to the issue here, seriously we've got a fiscal challenge. I want to go back to Congressman Frank and to some English here. Congressman Frank are you worried about the size of these WWII numbers here? Again, 1.75 trillion deficit this year. A spending level of almost 4 trillion. We're almost running deficits as big as the revenue number we're bringing in.

Frank: Well Chris let me first of all come to the defense of my colleague Mr. Issa and the Republicanistical Party that he represents, um and say that ah...

Issa: Thanks Barney.

Frank: You're welcome there Darrell. The point is this. For him to say oh these are the Democrat's deficits. I have never seen people disavow their own handiwork so quickly. And I knew that born again was an important strain, in in our society but born again deficit haters, it's a new version.

While this is pretty well a slap on the wrist for this sort of childish behavior we've come to expect out of the Republicans it's nice to see them get called out for it once in a while. Democrats need to do what Matthews did here to Republicans every time they pull this and maybe they'd finally stop after they got tired of getting egg on their face. You can watch the full segment with Issa and Franks talking about the budget here.

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When California Congressman Darrell Issa brings up the right-wing stimulus lie du jour -- the so-called "train to Sin City" -- David Shuster delivers a well-deserved smackdown, practically laughing at Issa for having the balls to spread that lie on his show. Good stuff. Bravo, David. Watch Issa start squirming as Shuster unloads at around 4:30.

ISSA: When we see $8 billion into a train to Sin City as part of a stimulus, we reject it.

SHUSTER: But Congressman, there's no project for a train from California to Las Vegas. You Republicans know better. It's $8 billion that's going to the Department of Transportation, and a Republican, Ray LaHood -- he was a Republican in your Congress -- he's the Transportation Secretary who gets to decide where the money is spent! It it wrong to say there is a project from L.A. to Las Vegas. It's not in the bill, Congressman.

When will people learn that this is how Republicans roll? They cherry-pick and try to exploit (or, in this case, flat-out fabricate) minor parts of a bill and run around repeating it over and over until the entire bill is defined by those few "controversial" programs. Too bad more of the DC establishment isn't like Shuster, who's always ready, willing and able to shoot them down.

Our good buddy Jon Perr chimes in with his "Top 10 Darrell Issa Hall of Shame Moments." Lots of wingnuttery in there.

They really have no sense of irony, do they? Funny, how indifferent they were to millions of missing BushCo emails:

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A California Republican congressman has called on President Obama to put in place a system that ensures all White House emails be preserved even if official business was done through private e- mail accounts.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, made the request in a February 19 letter to White House Counsel Greg Craig.

Issa specifically mentioned the new administration’s brief use of Gmail accounts after Obama was sworn in last month, as they waited for the official White House e-mail accounts to become active.

“As you know, any e-mail sent or received by White House officials may be subject to retention under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” Issa wrote Craig in the letter.

[...] A White House spokesman told CNN Thursday that all staff were told to forward any official correspondence to their White House e-mail accounts, and added that private e-mail accounts are no longer being used.

As ThinkProgress reported earlier Tuesday, the execrable California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa used the day of Tim Russert's wake to appropriate the memory of the late Meet the Press host for political purposes. After members of the House offered their condolences and eulogies to Russert while discussing a resolution in his honor, Issa took to floor to make a pitch for off-shore drilling:

"We are going to miss Tim Russert when it comes to the people on both sides of the issue of why we have $5 oil - $5 gasoline and $135 oil. I think Tim Russert would have been just the right guy to hold people accountable, who would talk about the 68 million acres that are, quote, inactive, while in fact 41 million are under current lease and use and are producing millions of barrels of oil and natural gas a day...

...So, Madam Speaker, I am going to miss Tim Russert because this debate is too important not to have a fact-oriented, unbiased moderator who could in fact bring to bear the truth that we need to have."

As abominable as Issa's performance today was, it hardly ranks as his worst. From attacking the families of dead Blackwater contractors and accusing Valerie Plame of perjury to playing a vital role in purging a U.S. attorney and committing myriad other outrages, Issa had long since guaranteed himself a particularly hot seat in Dante's inner circle. Perrspectives has a look back at the Top 10 Moments from Darrell Issa's Hall of Shame...

At an EPA hearing today on Capitol Hill about ozone standards, Henry Waxman got into a heated exchange with Administrator Stephen Johnson over his evasive non-answers to simple, straightforward questions about whether or not he had certain discussions with the White House about key environmental issues. It got so tense at one point that a frantically gavel-slamming Waxman threatened to have Rep Darrell Issa "physically removed" from the hearing if he continued to obstruct Waxman's line of inquiry. Classic.

It seems to me you're being awfully evasive and I don't know why you can't tell this committee whether you, in fact, had a discussion about this rule or that rule...either you did or you didn't and I don't know why you can't tell us that information.

"I will have you physically removed if you don't stop."

Why is it that conservatives consistently appoint people to head agencies who have nothing but contempt for the issues those agencies are supposed to oversee? Well, I guess they can't later claim that their self-fulfilling prophecy of "government is the problem" is true. The problem lies not with government, but rather with the stooges who run the government and appoint their incompetent cronies to fix problems they have no intention of fixing.