Qtec
05-30-2010, 03:31 AM
Jonathan Alter on the Sestak Offer: It's Criminalizing Politics
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Jonathan Alter made some good points about why the Republicans are being ridiculous going after the White House and Sestak for this trumped up scandal on Real Time. It's criminalizing politics and <u>if you're going to go after Obama and Emanuel for this, then there's a long list behind them to go after as well.</u>
And Patrick Ruffini's tired line about campaign promises is wearing thin. That's not an excuse to scandalize everything and they obviously don't hold their own politicians to the same standard. As our team member Jamie pointed out to everyone when he was watching this last night "It's funny though that no one mentions how George W. Bush was going to 'restore the integrity of the Oval Office', and we all see how that went." Ain't that the truth.
I like Bill Maher's suggestion for a compromise at the end of the clip.
Alter: George H.W. Bush's political director Ron Kaufman said recently that if this was a crime that every president going back to George Washington, should go to jail. This has been done in politics forever. It will always be done in politics and there's actually nothing wrong with it. Nobody's ever been prosecuted under this.
Ruffini: Here's the problem.
Maher: Do you agree with that.
Ruffini: Wasn't Obama supposed to be different? I mean wasn't the... the Bush administration was hyper-political. They were using their political office to fire, you know, supposedly fire the US Attorneys...
Maher: And they did.
Ruffini: ...and instead, you know, we were basically... when Obama got in we were going to put all the politics over at the DNC, get it out of the White House...
Alter: Who said that?
Ruffini: ...and then you have Rahm Emanuel...
Maher: But that's not really... now wait a second. That's not really (crosstalk) that's not really a good analogy. Firing the federal prosecutors, okay, a federal prosecutor, a non-political job with a very important function, okay? This is, this is politics. This is people on your own team. This is one Democrat saying to another Democrat, "Maybe you'd be better over here and we'll elect this guy"...
Alter: Patrick your man Ronald Reagan about twenty years ago, his political director Ed Rollins actually bragged in the newspaper that they were trying to get Senator Hayakawa from CA to not run for reelection by offering him a federal job. It's just, to politicize, to criminalize politics is insane. (crosstalk)
Ruffini: <u>But Obama had held himself up to a higher standard I think during his campaign.</u> </div></div>
Even if he did, it still doesn't make it a crime.
Obama . a Dem, offered another Dem a <span style='font-size: 20pt'>non paying job</span> to step out of the race for the good of the Party.......some crime.
How about this for corruption? Quid pro quo ?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The Pioneers have evolved from an initial group of family, friends and associates willing to bet on putting another Bush in the White House into an extraordinarily organized and disciplined machine. It is now twice as big as it was in 2000 and fueled by the desire of corporate CEOs, Wall Street financial leaders, Washington lobbyists and Republican officials to outdo each other in demonstrating their support for Bush and his administration's pro-business policies.
"This is the most impressive, organized, focused and disciplined fundraising operation I have ever been involved in," declared Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, who has been raising money for GOP candidates since 1980. "They have done just about everything right."
Fo<span style='font-size: 17pt'>r achieving their fundraising goals, Pioneers receive a relatively modest token, the right to buy a set of silver cuff links with an engraved Lone Star of Texas</span> (Rangers can buy a more expensive belt buckle set). <span style='font-size: 17pt'><u>Their real reward is entree to the White House and the upper levels of the administration.</u></span>
<span style='font-size: 20pt'>Of the 246 fundraisers identified by The Post as Pioneers in the 2000 campaign, 104 -- or slightly more than 40 percent -- ended up in a job or an appointment.</span> A study by The Washington Post, partly using information compiled by Texans for Public Justice, which is planning to release a separate study of the Pioneers this week, found that <span style='font-size: 20pt'>23 Pioneers were named as ambassadors and three were named to the Cabinet: Donald L. Evans at the Commerce Department, Elaine L. Chao at Labor and Tom Ridge at Homeland Security. At least 37 Pioneers were named to postelection transition teams, which helped place political appointees into key regulatory positions affecting industry.
</span>
A more important reward than a job, perhaps, is access. For about one-fifth of the 2000 Pioneers, this is their business -- they are lobbyists whose livelihoods depend on the perception that they can get things done in the government. More than half the Pioneers are heads of companies -- chief executive officers, company founders or managing partners -- whose bottom lines are directly affected by a variety of government regulatory and tax decisions.
When Kenneth L. Lay, for example, a 2000 Pioneer and then-chairman of Enron Corp., was a member of the Energy Department transition team, he sent White House personnel director Clay Johnson III a list of eight persons he recommended for appointment to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Two were named to the five-member commission.
Lay had ties to Bush and his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and was typical of the 2000 Pioneers. Two-thirds of them had some connection to the Bush family or Bush himself -- from his days in college and business school, his early oil wildcatting in West Texas, his partial ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team and the political machine he developed as governor.
"It's clearly the case that these networking operations have been the key driving Bush fundraising," </div></div>
This is blatant jobs for cash, why no outrage?
I guess they just got their appointments because they were the best people for the job.
<u> Bush says.
" isn't that right Brownie! "</u>
When you look up Republican or Bush or GOP in any dictionary, the result reads,
1. Party of hypocrisy
2. see Corruption.
3. see unethical
Q
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Jonathan Alter made some good points about why the Republicans are being ridiculous going after the White House and Sestak for this trumped up scandal on Real Time. It's criminalizing politics and <u>if you're going to go after Obama and Emanuel for this, then there's a long list behind them to go after as well.</u>
And Patrick Ruffini's tired line about campaign promises is wearing thin. That's not an excuse to scandalize everything and they obviously don't hold their own politicians to the same standard. As our team member Jamie pointed out to everyone when he was watching this last night "It's funny though that no one mentions how George W. Bush was going to 'restore the integrity of the Oval Office', and we all see how that went." Ain't that the truth.
I like Bill Maher's suggestion for a compromise at the end of the clip.
Alter: George H.W. Bush's political director Ron Kaufman said recently that if this was a crime that every president going back to George Washington, should go to jail. This has been done in politics forever. It will always be done in politics and there's actually nothing wrong with it. Nobody's ever been prosecuted under this.
Ruffini: Here's the problem.
Maher: Do you agree with that.
Ruffini: Wasn't Obama supposed to be different? I mean wasn't the... the Bush administration was hyper-political. They were using their political office to fire, you know, supposedly fire the US Attorneys...
Maher: And they did.
Ruffini: ...and instead, you know, we were basically... when Obama got in we were going to put all the politics over at the DNC, get it out of the White House...
Alter: Who said that?
Ruffini: ...and then you have Rahm Emanuel...
Maher: But that's not really... now wait a second. That's not really (crosstalk) that's not really a good analogy. Firing the federal prosecutors, okay, a federal prosecutor, a non-political job with a very important function, okay? This is, this is politics. This is people on your own team. This is one Democrat saying to another Democrat, "Maybe you'd be better over here and we'll elect this guy"...
Alter: Patrick your man Ronald Reagan about twenty years ago, his political director Ed Rollins actually bragged in the newspaper that they were trying to get Senator Hayakawa from CA to not run for reelection by offering him a federal job. It's just, to politicize, to criminalize politics is insane. (crosstalk)
Ruffini: <u>But Obama had held himself up to a higher standard I think during his campaign.</u> </div></div>
Even if he did, it still doesn't make it a crime.
Obama . a Dem, offered another Dem a <span style='font-size: 20pt'>non paying job</span> to step out of the race for the good of the Party.......some crime.
How about this for corruption? Quid pro quo ?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The Pioneers have evolved from an initial group of family, friends and associates willing to bet on putting another Bush in the White House into an extraordinarily organized and disciplined machine. It is now twice as big as it was in 2000 and fueled by the desire of corporate CEOs, Wall Street financial leaders, Washington lobbyists and Republican officials to outdo each other in demonstrating their support for Bush and his administration's pro-business policies.
"This is the most impressive, organized, focused and disciplined fundraising operation I have ever been involved in," declared Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, who has been raising money for GOP candidates since 1980. "They have done just about everything right."
Fo<span style='font-size: 17pt'>r achieving their fundraising goals, Pioneers receive a relatively modest token, the right to buy a set of silver cuff links with an engraved Lone Star of Texas</span> (Rangers can buy a more expensive belt buckle set). <span style='font-size: 17pt'><u>Their real reward is entree to the White House and the upper levels of the administration.</u></span>
<span style='font-size: 20pt'>Of the 246 fundraisers identified by The Post as Pioneers in the 2000 campaign, 104 -- or slightly more than 40 percent -- ended up in a job or an appointment.</span> A study by The Washington Post, partly using information compiled by Texans for Public Justice, which is planning to release a separate study of the Pioneers this week, found that <span style='font-size: 20pt'>23 Pioneers were named as ambassadors and three were named to the Cabinet: Donald L. Evans at the Commerce Department, Elaine L. Chao at Labor and Tom Ridge at Homeland Security. At least 37 Pioneers were named to postelection transition teams, which helped place political appointees into key regulatory positions affecting industry.
</span>
A more important reward than a job, perhaps, is access. For about one-fifth of the 2000 Pioneers, this is their business -- they are lobbyists whose livelihoods depend on the perception that they can get things done in the government. More than half the Pioneers are heads of companies -- chief executive officers, company founders or managing partners -- whose bottom lines are directly affected by a variety of government regulatory and tax decisions.
When Kenneth L. Lay, for example, a 2000 Pioneer and then-chairman of Enron Corp., was a member of the Energy Department transition team, he sent White House personnel director Clay Johnson III a list of eight persons he recommended for appointment to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Two were named to the five-member commission.
Lay had ties to Bush and his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and was typical of the 2000 Pioneers. Two-thirds of them had some connection to the Bush family or Bush himself -- from his days in college and business school, his early oil wildcatting in West Texas, his partial ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team and the political machine he developed as governor.
"It's clearly the case that these networking operations have been the key driving Bush fundraising," </div></div>
This is blatant jobs for cash, why no outrage?
I guess they just got their appointments because they were the best people for the job.
<u> Bush says.
" isn't that right Brownie! "</u>
When you look up Republican or Bush or GOP in any dictionary, the result reads,
1. Party of hypocrisy
2. see Corruption.
3. see unethical
Q