So despite the recent news that there is neither a real nor a theoretical basis for austerity, President Obama continues his laser-like focus on getting a Grand Bargain. Imagine if he'd worked this hard and strategized this relentlessly for a jobs bill!

President Barack Obama is reaching out to Republican senators — the most receptive participants from his recent “charm-offensive” dinners — to jump-start talks to reach a “grand bargain” on entitlements, spending and taxes, according to White House and Congressional officials.Obama — fighting against steep odds to reach a big legacy deal on deficits and debts — has personally pressed Congressional leaders for another shot at reaching an agreement similar to one that fell apart during negotiations with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in 2011.Republicans Obama considers to be committed to another round of negotiations in good faith.

But a senior White House official told POLITICO any speculation about specific participants would be “wrong,” and refused to confirm any names because none of the potential attendees had yet been contacted or even briefed on the new process.

The official did say the group of probably no more than eight would be largely “self-selecting” — GOP senators who had previously expressed interest in a budget working group.Obama’s team has kept Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the loop, according to leadership sources, but so far the effort has been spearheaded by the West Wing.

Again: We can not let our guard down. Obama wants this deal, no matter what. We have to stop him.

Since 2005, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) has put together a report on the Most Corrupt Members of Congress every year. It's a crowded field, what with Rangel up on ethic charges and Vitter and his diapers, but one name did rise to the top:

Roy Blunt is a candidate in the Republican primary for the United States Senate in Missouri. For the last 14 years, Rep. Blunt has served in the U.S. House of Representatives in the state’s 7th congressional district. As a member of Congress, Rep. Blunt came under fire for a variety of issues including employing the same corrupt tactics that forced his mentor, former Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, to resign. Rep. Blunt’s ethical issues were documented in CREW’s 2006 report on the most corrupt members of Congress.

In 2003, Rep. Blunt divorced his wife of 31 years to marry Philip Morris (now Altria) lobbyist Abigail Perlman. Before it was known publicly that Rep. Blunt and Ms. Perlman were dating – and only hours after Rep. Blunt assumed the role of Majority Whip – he tried to secretly insert a provision into Homeland Security legislation that would have benefitted Philip Morris, at the expense of competitors. Notably, Philip Morris/Altria and its subsidiaries contributed at least $217,000 to campaign committees connected to Rep. Blunt from 1996 to 2006.

Also in 2003, Rep. Blunt helped his son, Andrew Blunt, by inserting a provision into the $79 billion emergency appropriation for the war in Iraq to benefit U.S. shippers like United Parcel Service, Inc. and FedEx Corp. Andrew Blunt lobbied on behalf of UPS in Missouri, and UPS and FedEx contributed at least $58,000 to Rep. Blunt from 2001 to 2006.

Family connections have also helped another of Rep. Blunt’s sons, former Missouri Governor Matt Blunt. Gov. Blunt received campaign contributions from nearly three dozen influential Missouri lobbyists and lawyers when he ran for governor of Missouri in 2004, half of whom had provided financial support to his father. Earlier in 2000, when Matt Blunt was running for Secretary of State, Rep. Blunt was involved in an apparent scheme, along with Rep. DeLay, to funnel money through a local party committee into Matt Blunt’s campaign committee.Rep. Blunt and his staff had close connections to convicted former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In June 2003, Mr. Abramoff persuaded then-Majority Leader DeLay to organize a letter, co-signed by then-Speaker Dennis Hastert, then-Whip Blunt, and then-Deputy Whip Eric Cantor, which endorsed a view of gambling law benefitting Mr. Abramoff’s client, the Louisiana Coushatta, by blocking gambling competition by another tribe. Mr. Abramoff had donated $8,500 to Rep. Blunt’s leadership PAC, Rely on Your Beliefs.

There are nine others in the report, which includes Democrats Kendrick Meeks and Alvin Greene, "Independent" Charlie Crist and Tea Party favorites Marco Rubio and JD Hayworth.

This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. For months the California Republican Party has been paying professional petition gatherers to get enough signatures to put up a ballot initiative to repeal AB 32, California's climate change legislation passed in 2006. At the eleventh hour, they succeeded.

Now that they've succeeded, huge contributions are flowing into California to make sure the measure passes. In the name of "corporate speech", Tesoro has contributed $500,000, Occidental Petroleum $300,000 and Valero Energy has contributed $1,000,000.

Those are the ones we know about. Then there's the "Adam Smith Foundation."

The Adam Smith Foundation is a Missouri 501(c)(4) organization. It was organized in 2007. The Board of Directors is a fairly unknown bunch: Kurt Killen, William Clark Hardin IV, and John Elliott.

John Elliott is a mid-level player and associate of former Missouri Governor Matt Blunt. Matt Blunt is the son of Rep. Roy Blunt, who is closely linked to Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, and the rest of the Republican graft gang. Were it not for the Abramoff connection, Roy Blunt would be sitting in John Boehner's minority leader seat today.

William Clark Hardin IV is another director. You can read more about him here.

And then there's Kurt Killen. He's the one who is most interesting to me. Kurt Killen served in 2003-2004 as an officer of the Missouri Republican Party. Mainstream, straight up Republican who loves Boy Scouts, libraries and...Rep. Sam Graves, at least enough to donate to him. In fact, Graves is the only candidate I see any donations going to from Killen in 2008-2010. Sam Graves is an interesting fellow. He also has ties back to Abramoff and his Gang of College Republicans. Major donors include the Busch family, Tony Rudy (the convicted Abramoff crony), and Sheldon Adelson. Oh, and Kurt Killen has been a member of the Citizens Club for Growth since 2004.

In 2010, Sam Graves has received four times as much in campaign contributions from corporate PACs as he has from individual donors. But the donor who caught my eye is KochPAC.

To review, we have a 501(c)(4) organization incorporated in Missouri. Its stated purpose is to "promote conservative principles and individual liberties in Missouri." (2008 990 filing) On December 31, 2008, its net assets were $5,300 and 2008 contributions were $30,000. In April, 2010 this same organization cut a check for $498,000.00 to fight a California Ballot Initiative.

One of the directors is a member of the Club for Growth and other directors have ties back to the Missouri Blunt machine, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and KochPAC.

Who do YOU think wrote the check? Here are your choices:

1. Club for Growth
2. Koch Industries
3. Citizens United
4. All of the above

And even more ties that bind...here.

Roy Blunt, who was tapped to head the GOP Health Care Task Force said that if an adult has preexisting conditions then they shouldn't be covered. That proves the point Alan Grayson made when he said---don't get sick and die quickly...OK, you know what I mean.

Blunt: ...but access for adults who've done nothing to take care of themselves, who actually will have what I have described every incentive not to get insurance until the day you know you're going to have medical expenses, that's a very different kind of story.

How does Roy Blunt and the Republican party draw the line when people are considered to be "taking care of themselves?" Is he going to have regulations that tell people how to live? The health care industry would love to have a whole host of rules that a person would have to follow before they would be eligible to be covered. Most people don't get sick, but when they do they need health care. If they can't buy it when they need it then what good is our health care industry?

They're crawling out from under the rocks everywhere. In Missouri, white supremacist Glenn Miller has declared his candidacy for the United States Senate, vowing to "reach every nook and cranny in the state" in his quest for votes and launching a new campaign web site at the URL whty.org. His opponents include Roy Blunt and Robin Carnahan, and his last try got him around 40 votes or so, but hey, any excuse to spread a little hate among friends, right?

Miller isn't your ordinary run-of-the-mill Klansman either. From Southern Poverty Law Center, 2004:

One of the first white supremacists to use paramilitary tactics with his North Carolina-based hate group — the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which later morphed into the White Patriot Party — Glenn Miller went on the lam in 1986 after mailing a letter to 5,000 people calling for "total war" against the feds, blacks and Jews.

Miller had also violated a court order, stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, prohibiting him from continuing to operate a paramilitary organization. After a nationwide manhunt, authorities tear-gassed him out of a mobile home in Ozark, Mo.

But Miller served only three years in prison, largely because he testified against 14 leading white supremacists in a 1988 Arkansas sedition trial. Among other things, Miller told the court that the late Order founder Robert Mathews had given him $200,000 in stolen money to finance the White Patriot Party.

To kick off his campaign, he's running a series of vile anti-Semitic ads hosted on the white supremacist site Vanguard News Network.

This is what happens when the dog whistle sounds among the wingnut contingent. Sure, they're not all racists, but they know how to stir up the ones who are violent, evil and malevolent.

I'm amazed Miller is qualified to be a candidate for the Senate. Doesn't a felony conviction disqualify him?

(Check out Roy Blunt's hypocrisy)

We've been watching these Republican hypocrites for exactly a year now attack Obama's stimulus bill and then take credit for the cash it brought into their states.

Think Progress documents the atrocities.

Last month, President Obama admonished Republicans for going to “ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against.” It’s true: Last year, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) appeared at a ribbon cutting event for GetAbout Columbia’s MKT Plaza, a pedestrian walking and recreation area funded by the stimulus. (See picture at top right.)

ThinkProgress has investigated opponents of the Recovery Act, reporting throughout the year that many of the lawmakers who tried to kill the legislation have been returning to their home states to claim credit for popular stimulus programs. In a new research report, ThinkProgress finds that over half of the GOP caucus, 110 lawmakers — from the House and Senate — are guilty of stimulus hypocrisy. Among some of the key findings:

– Top Republican Senate Recruits Are Stimulus Hypocrites: As ThinkProgress reported, Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), a candidate for Senate, touted over $5 million in stimulus programs he voted to kill. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), the GOP nominee for Senate in Illinois, signed a letter urging Gov. Pat Quinn to provide “Recovery Act (ARRA) funding to expand the Illinois Community College Sustainability Network.”

– GOP Leadership Leads The Way In Hypocrisy: Although he regularly slams the stimulus as a waste while in DC, McConnell has returned to Kentucky to take credit for stimulus programs, even taking time to request more funds. ThinkProgress attended two job fairs held by Cantor, where we found dozens of employers able to hire directly because of the stimulus. Indeed, even Boehner’s office released a statement boasting that the stimulus will create “much needed jobs.”

– The Audacity Of Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds: Many opponents of the stimulus have been quite brazen with their ability to try to claim credit for the program. For instance, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) spent the morning of July 28th railing against the stimulus, yelling “Where’s the stimulus package? Where’s the jobs?” on the House floor. On the same day of his rant, Kingston’s office sent out multiple press releases bragging that he had secured hundreds of thousands in stimulus funds to hire additional police officers in his district. Other stimulus opponents, like Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) — who has called the stimulus a “trillion dollar debt bill” — have printed out jumbo-sized ceremonial stimulus checks to present to local communities to try to garner positive press.

Individually, over half of the entire Republican caucus has hailed nearly every aspect of the stimulus as a success — from infrastructure funds, to food programs, to education grants. But politically, admitting its success might harm the GOP’s chances in November. So with Republicans fixated on winning politically, they have focused on deceiving the public by calling the stimulus a failure, while pretending successful programs aren’t stimulus funded.

Even as Republicans wage their new war against the latest efforts at health care reform, they are still fighting the last one. 44 years after the passage of Medicare, Republicans leaders like Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) are attacking Democratic proposals by blasting the popular health system for America's elderly. Sadly for the GOP, Medicare's proven success in reducing poverty among the elderly and its strong support from beneficiaries belies Price's claim that "nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare."

As ThinkProgress noted, Republican demagoguery on Medicare has a long and sordid past. While George H.W. Bush in 1964 used the now-eternal sound bite to describe it simply as "socialized medicine," Ronald Reagan warned three years earlier that failure to stop Medicare meant " you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

On Thursday, orthopedic surgeon turned Georgia Congressman Tom Price picked up the baton of GOP fear-mongering on Medicare. In a Politico op-ed which unsurprisingly omitted any estimates of the cost and coverage of the Republicans' latest supposed health care reform plan, Price slammed Medicare as the poster child for everything that's wrong about proposals backed by the Obama White House:

Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare. Because of Washington's one-size-fits-all approach, its flawed coverage rules and broken financing mechanisms, seniors are increasingly having care rationed while federal health spending spirals out of control.

And though newly eligible Medicare patients struggle even to find a doctor who can accept them, the president appears immovable in his belief that what is needed to fix health care is more government involvement. His proposal can only be described as a government takeover of health care.

Continue reading »

After Rep. Roy Blunt, leader of the supposed House GOP Health Care Solutions Group, suggested Thursday that Republicans won't offer a health care plan of their own, Minority Leader John Boehner insisted one was still in the works.

Of course, the Republican plan as in 1993 is to stop health care reform at all costs to prevent an enduring Democratic majority. Bill Kristol, who told Republicans 16 years ago that there was "no crisis" justifying health care reform then, now simply calls on his party to "kill it." With spinmeisters Frank Luntz and Alex Castellanos supplying the talking points that a supposed "government takeover of health care" is "too much, too fast, too soon," obstructionists like Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe boasted his party would "stall" President Obama's health care initiative to ensure a "huge gain" in the 2010 election. In a nutshell, the GOP is proposing to extend the status quo for a nation gripped by a collapsing health care system.

Here, then, is the Republican 10-Point Plan for Health Care:

1. 50 Million Uninsured in America
2. Another 25 Million Underinsured
3. Employer-Based Coverage Plummets Below 60%
4. Employer Health Costs to Jump by 9% in 2010
5. One in Five Americans Forced to Postpone Care
6. 62% of U.S. Bankruptcies Involve Medical Bills
7. Current Health Care Costs Already Fueling Job Losses
8. 94% of Health Insurance Markets in U.S Now "Highly Concentrated"
9. Dramatic Decline in Emergency Room Capacity
10. Perpetuating Red State Health Care Failure

For the details and data behind each, continue reading.

Continue reading »

Shakespeare's Sister: After reading about the GOP senators who think giving amnesty to Iraqis who've killed or wounded American troops is a fine idea, this soldier had to speak out. Here are some more good questions.

Words of Power: An interview with Mark Crispin Miller on campaign finance reform and...media reform.

The Debate Link: The Law as an outrage

Gristmill: Legendary climate scientist Jim Hansen leaves behind the cozy confines of technical scientific writing and launches into the world of book review prose.

After Downing Street: Here's a way to 'support the troops' other than sending them to kill and die for corrupt corporate profiteers.

BlogActive: Roy Blunt tries to change a movie rating

TDS on Delay's ACU Tribute

Blast form the Past

I'm digging in the vault to see what I come up with and this is a winner. The American Conservative Union sponsored a big party in honor of Tom Delay back in June. As usual-they all blamed the media for his troubles and Phyllis Schlafly hit the high point with her Star Trek reference.

Download | play -WMP only- Download | play -QT

Roy Blunt makes a cameo appearance too.

Blunt: When I became the WHIP, he gave me a velvet coded hammer

Jon: "You never hear about the laws Tom Delay doesn't break."

The segment wrapped up with a tribute to "The Hammer" by playing Pete Seeger's song called " If I Had a Hammer"

Jon: If Tom Delay actually had a hammer, he'd bludgeon Pete Seeger to death...