Category Archives: political news

medical news, political news

Do as he says, not does, on abortion

Here’s an item that might cause you to rethink your view of the world’s most glaring example of political hypocrisy.

U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., once was a physician in his hometown of Jasper, Tenn. He was married to a woman who obtained two abortions, reportedly on Dr. DesJarlais’s advice and counsel.

Then the congressman, who’s served in the House since 2011, voted “yes” on a bill that makes it illegal in this country for women to have an abortion after the 20-week period of their pregnancy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/16/congressman-who-advised-ex-wife-to-seek-abortion-votes-for-late-term-abortion-ban/?tid=sm_tw

His staff calls him “100-percent pro-life” and said his congressional voting record reflects that view.

Fine.

The congressman’s spokesman said he’s “always advocated for pro-life values.”

Always? Even when he counseled his wife to obtain an abortion? The spokesman didn’t say whether either abortion occurred after the 20th week of pregnancy.

This dichotomy cuts to the heart of why this particular issue is so troublesome for so many Americans. It’s one thing to pontificate from positions of power — such as from Capitol Hill — about what people should do when faced with these most emotionally charged decisions. It’s quite another when you’re faced with making them yourself or when asked to provide guidance for those with whom you are closest.

The Washington Post story attached to this blog post also notes that divorce papers released during DesJarlais’s re-election campaign in 2012 showed he had multiple affairs with patients, co-workers and drug company representatives while he was practicing medicine. Voters in his House district re-elected him anyway — twice, in fact.

Lawmakers’ lives are open books. They make laws that we all must follow and it’s fair to inquire about the background of those who cast these important votes — even when they reveal the harsh reality that some of them don’t always live by the values they preach to others.

national news, political news

Bush bungles an obvious question

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It turns out some of Jeb Bush’s allies in Washington are “flabbergasted” by his botched response to a question about the Iraq War.

The former Florida governor is likely to run for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

I believe I know the answer to why Bush’s confusing responses triggered by a single question has baffled his GOP allies.

It’s because of all the questions he should have expected from the media, this was at the top of the list. He should have been uber-prepared to answer it cleanly, crisply and without hesitation.

GOP lawmakers flabbergasted by Bush stumbles on Iraq

The question came from Fox News’s Megyn Kelly. Knowing what we now know, governor, would you have gone to war in Iraq? That’s more or less how Kelly pitched the question to Bush. His first answer? Yes, I would. Then he said he “misheard” the question. Then he said he “misinterpreted” it. Then he said, “No.”

Is he ready to become president of the United States? Some of his friends are worried. Others say he’s just “rusty,” having been out of elective office for a decade.

Whichever the cause of his early stumble, Jeb Bush had better get rid of cobwebs. In a hurry.

political news, State news

Here we go again, Gov. Perry

Rachel Maddow is no fan of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

There. I’ve stipulated what many folks know already about the liberal commentator for MSNBC.

That all said, she noted Friday night that Perry is about to break another “glass ceiling” for Republican presidential candidates. He’s about to become the first candidate under felony indictment to seek his party’s presidential nomination. He’ll make his announcement on June 4.

The Texas Tribune has posted a fascinating analysis on the pluses and minuses of a Perry presidential campaign.

http://www.texastribune.org/2015/05/15/case-and-against-perrys-2016-campaign/

You remember the indictment, yes? A Travis County grand jury indicted Perry in 2014 on charges of abuse of power and coercion when he tried to get the Democratic Travis County district attorney to resign after she pleaded guilty to drunken driving; if she quit, he’d then let the DA’s Public Integrity Unit have the money appropriated by the Legislature. She didn’t quit. So Perry vetoed the money.

The grand jury said that sequence constituted an indictable offense.

Hey, that doesn’t matter. He’s going to run for the presidency a second time, hoping that all will be forgiven from his first — and disastrous — run for the White House in 2012; he actually lasted only a few days into 2012, as he dropped out of the race in January of that year.

Will the indictment hold him back? Will it matter to GOP voters who are looking for a right-wing darling to embrace as an alternative to squishy moderates such as Jeb Bush, Rob Portmand, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham or Chris Christie? All of those guys — and the others who already have declared their intentions to run or are about to declare them — will seek to paint themselves as hard-core conservatives.

Perry, though, is the real thing … he says.

He’s got this chink in his conservative armor, however. It’s immigration. You see, as the governor of a border state for a bazillion years, he has this idea that we really ought to have immigration reform. He also favors something akin to President Obama’s DREAM Act, which grants amnesty to illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents, when they were children. And … he also favors granting in-state college tuition waivers to those very illegal immigrants.

That area is where I happen to agree with the former governor.

The rest of it? No thanks.

Plus, he’s got that indictment matter to settle before he thinks about taking the presidential oath on Jan. 20, 2017.

Something tells me it won’t come to that.

 

national news, political news

Well, that clears it up: Jeb wouldn't go to war

Jeb Bush has set the record straight … I think.

He now says he wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq if he and the rest of the world knew then what we know now — which is that Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction.

Does that clear it up for you? The former Republican Florida governor — and likely GOP presidential candidate — surely hopes so.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/14/jeb-bush-clears-air-on-iraq-war-stance-says-would-not-have-authorized-invasion/?intcmp=latestnews

He went from “yes I would” go to war, to “mishearing” the question from Megyn Kelly of Fox News, to “misinterpreting” the question to now reversing himself completely.

MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow — and I’m acutely aware that she is no fan of any of the Republicans running, or thinking of running, for president — pointed out an important element of the botched answer to a simple question. She said Thursday night that Jeb Bush, whose brother George W. Bush, invaded Iraq in 2003, should have been aware that the question would come and he should have had his answer down pat.

He didn’t. He either hasn’t done his homework on the nuts and bolts of running for president, or doesn’t quite understand how the media work. Reporters are going to ask him repeatedly about the Iraq War and whether it was a good or bad idea for the United States to invade another country.

Jeb Bush remains one of the frontrunners for the GOP nomination, whenever he declares his candidacy.

I actually want him to do well as the nomination campaign ramps up.

But, oh man, he must stop fumbling the questions everyone in America knows he’s going to get.

national news, political news, Uncategorized

Step aside, George Stephanopoulos

I hope it doesn’t come to this, that the Republican National Committee forces George Stephanopoulos to do the right thing.

My hope is that he does it himself.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/05/14/the-rnc-should-ban-george-stephanopoulos-from-participating-in-2016-debates/

Stephanopoulos, host of the ABC-TV weekend news-talk show “This Week,” has revealed that he gave $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Rodham Clinton, of course, is running for president of the United States. Stephanopoulos’s credibility as an impartial journalist has been compromised beyond repair and he must not cover any aspect of the political campaign that’s beginning to unfold.

He didn’t reveal the donation until he was forced to do so by conservative media organizations.

This doesn’t look good for someone I’ve always trusted to be impartial — and bipartisan — in his questioning of political figures.

His contribution to the Clinton Foundation ties him directly — and monetarily — to the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate. He cannot possibly be seen as a neutral participant in any debate involving Hillary Clinton.

Surely he knows that. Just as surely he knows what he has to do.

 

political news, State news

Feingold seeks revenge against guy who beat him

Russ Feingold wants his old job back.

He wants to return to the U.S. Senate and he is going to run against the individual, Ron Johnson, who beat him six years ago.

Feingold is a Democrat; Johnson is a Republican. They want to represent Wisconsin in the Senate. Given the poisonous climate in Washington these days, it’s an excellent bet the two of them aren’t exactly close.

I heard today about Feingold’s decision to run for the Senate and I thought about two Texas foes who fought each other twice electorally back in the 1980s. I know they disliked each other.

Bill Clements became the first Republican elected Texas governor since Reconstruction. He defeated Democratic Gov. Dolph Briscoe in 1978.

Then came 1982 and Clements sought re-election. He ran into Democratic Texas Attorney General Mark White. He lost his bid for a second term.

Clements cooled his jets for four years and then decided to try once again. He ran against White in 1986 and scored a mirror-image victory over the Democratic incumbent.

They had built considerable hard feelings toward each going back to the 1982 campaign, which was understandable if you ever met Gov. Clements. He was an irascible fellow, but could be charming in a kind of surly way. Clements spoke bluntly, often in harsh tones, but he, as they say in the world of print journalism, was “good copy.”

Feingold and Johnson come from the farthest reaches of their respective political parties.

This campaign, assuming they both get nominated, should be fun to watch.

 

national news, political news

'Mistakes were made' in Iraq … do you think?

There goes Jeb Bush, using that maddening passive-voice clichĂ© that declares “mistakes were made.”

The mistakes occurred in Iraq after his brother, former President George W. Bush, invaded that country on a bogus premise that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction.

He told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly that he’d invade Iraq also, even he knew there were no WMD.

Now he’s backing away from the statement, telling conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity that predicting what he’d do is a “hypothetical” situation.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jeb-bush-backs-off-support-of-iraq-invasion/ar-BBjH0wT

The former Florida governor is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination next year. He’s almost certain to join a growing GOP field.

He’d better get his Iraq War spiel lined out.

He told Hannity that President Bush learned from the “faulty intelligence” on which he relied to launch the March 2003 invasion. I guess that’s his view. As for the former president, he hasn’t yet revealed what precisely he “learned” from the mistaken intelligence-gathering.

I’m actually hoping Bush gets his act together. His party needs someone with a reputation for moderation running for president. The TEA party wing of the GOP has a lot of champions in the hunt already for the White House — and I expect fully that Gov. Bush will try to sound like one of them as he launches his own presidential bid.

His record, though, tells a different story.

Jeb Bush’s first major obstacle, though, is to persuade the country he is no carbon copy of his brother.

 

national news, political news

Jeb 'misheard' question about Iraq War?

Mind-reading isn’t my thing.

Therefore, I cannot pretend to know what Jeb Bush heard or “misheard” when Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him whether he would have gone to war in Iraq “knowing what we now know” about the absence of any weapons of mass destruction.

The former Florida governor and presumed Republican Party candidate for president said he would have gone to war.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-aide-says-jeb-bush-misheard-iraq-question/ar-BBjFW9y

Then he said, “And so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everyone. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”

Well.

Let’s just review for a moment. Then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton did vote to authorize war in Iraq. President Bush ordered the invasion in 2003, our troops toppled Saddam Hussein’s government then looked high and low for the WMD. They didn’t find any. They captured Saddam, pulling him out of that spider hole. He was tried and convicted of crimes against humanity and was hanged.

Clinton then said while running for president in 2008 that she was wrong to vote for the war authorization, based on what we now know.

Gov. Bush said he misheard Kelly’s question. I won’t quibble with that point.

I will quibble, though, with his characterization of what Hillary Clinton would do. She’s said she made a mistake.

His bungled answer has angered those on the right, who don’t like him too much anyway.

Time to hit the reset button, Jeb.

 

national news, political news

Santorum goes to the well once again

Rick Santorum is a puzzle to me.

The former Republican senator from Pennsylvania flamed out in his 2012 bid to become president of the United States, as his party nominated Mitt Romney.

That came after he had lost his U.S. Senate seat to Democrat Bob Casey.

Now he wants to run for president a second time. As the link attached here observes, he’s starting from scratch all over again.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/rick-santorum-2016-uphill-climb-117832.html?hp=r1_4

Is it hubris? Is it some desire to hold a public office? Is it a need for acceptance?

Do any or all of those things drive this man to do the seemingly impossible, which is get elected to the world’s most powerful and influential office?

I don’t get it. Nor do I get Sen. Santorum.

The conservative base of his party is being pulled in a number of directions, with Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio already running; former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is set to go; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has the Duggar family made famous by the “19 Kids” reality show on his team; Ben Carson has attracted other conservative hired hands, as has Sen. Rand Paul; Carly Fiorina is veering way right, as are Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, both of whom are waiting in the wings.

There seems to be nothing left for Santorum to mine for support.

What drives a politician to get beaten down so many times?

 

national news, political news

Perry IDs critical '16 campaign issue

It’s always a cold day in hell when former Texas Gov. Rick Perry draws praise from anyone on the left end of the political spectrum.

He’s done it, though, with an observation about what he believes is the most critical issue of the 2016 campaign for the presidency.

It involves the Supreme Court.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/perry-identifies-the-top-issue-the-2016-race

Steve Benen, writing a blog for lefty commentator Rachel Maddow’s blog, notes:

“But over at Bloomberg Politics, Sahil Kapur reported over the weekend on a South Carolina event, where former Gov. Rick Perry (R) highlighted a central national issue that doesn’t generally get as much attention.
 
“Something I want you all to think about is that the next president of the United States, whoever that individual may be, could choose up to three, maybe even four members of the Supreme Court,” he said. “Now this isn’t about who’s going to be the president of the United States for just the next four years. This could be about individuals who have an impact on you, your children, and even our grandchildren. That’s the weight of what this election is really about.”
 
“That, I will suggest to you, is the real question we need to be asking ourselves,” he continued. “What would those justices look like if, let’s be theoretical here and say, if it were Hillary Clinton versus Rick Perry? And if that won’t make you go work, if I do decide to get into the race, then I don’t know what will.”
The next president likely is going to get a chance to appoint several justices to the highest court in the land. And those appointments always seem to outlast the presidencies of those who select them.
Perry knows a thing or two about these kinds of legacies. He built one himself as the longest-serving governor in Texas history. He appointed several justices to the state Supreme Court and judges to the Court of Criminal Appeals.
As Benen states: “Purely on institutional grounds, Perry is absolutely right – the makeup of the high court will likely give the next president a unique opportunity to shape much of American public life for a generation.”