Fred Upton

Fred Upton's "monkey court"Today Congressman Fred Upton grilled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sabelius over the error-plagued launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal government’s enrollment website for mandatory health insurance. Would that he were so assiduous in his support for Americans’ access to high quality, affordable health care!This is the same Upton who voted 40 times to defund the Affordable Care Act.

-by NoahSometimes satirists have a very hard time satirizing Congress. Case in point: the current Congressional hearings about glitches in the allegedly satanic, marxist, communist, Muslim jihad-influenced Affordable Care Act; aka, dare we say it out loud, Obamacare.How does one satirize a bunch of morons in suits who have but one discernable talent-- satirizing themselves, whether intentionally or not, better than anyone else could ever hope to?

Unlike Benghazi! and the rest of the nonsense Darrell Issa's Witch-Hunt Committee "investigates," Boehner is eager to try to get some serious attention focused on the flaws in the roll out of the Affordable Care Act.

Last week, MoveOn and PPP polled some of the swing districts where the DCCC protects Republican incumbents. The results were breathtaking, especially for media folks who only get their information from Cook and the DCCC. Blue America candidates are on target to beat long-time Republican incumbents and one of the strongest showings was from first-time candidate, Paul Clements, who's running against Fred Upton in western Michigan. Upton is underwater in terms of his constituents' approval.

Last week, when MoveOn and PPP released their much buzzed about polls showing how Democrats could pick up many seats, the first thing I noticed was that these were all the Steve Israel seats they had polled.

Thursday afternoon, all but 15 Republicans voted to take $40 billion out of the food stamps program. It will never pass the Senate or be signed by the President, but it was a way for Republicans to reassure their crazy Tea Party base that they're as greedy, selfish and filled with hatred as the people who vote for them are. Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) and CPC Whip Barbara Lee (D-CA), like every Democrat in the House, voted NO.

Fred Upton, Steve Israel-- corrupt cronies in CongressThe DCCC announcement this week of another batch of candidates has been called their "worst recruitment effort in history." No one should be surprised that most of Steve Israel's picks for their Jump Start program could be barely described as "the lesser of two evils" in comparison to their opponents.

Fred Upton represents a blue-leaning district in western Michigan that Obama won 53-45% in 2008 and lost to Romney by a handful of votes. The biggest county in the 6th district, by far, is Kalamazoo. Upton only got 49% of the vote there last year (same as his under-funded opponent).

Michigan could be a very fertile hunting ground for the DCCC. All that stands in the way is its own chairman, former Center Aisle Caucus big-shot and founder who refuses to allow the DCCC to target any of his former frat brothers, no matter how detestable they are.

It's virtually impossible to know how many hundreds of millions of dollars the overtly fascist Koch family has poured into Republican politics. But what we do know is that it was enough to buy the whole enterprise. The Koch brothers now own the failed, toxic, destructive operation known as the GOP.