Lee Fang

Mike Rounds has surrounded himself with crooks who have helped make him wealthyIf you follow DWT with any regularity you weren't taken by surprise when the DSCC and the Beltway pundits who take their marching orders from the party committees discovered South Dakota's Senate race last week.

For the past several years, we've been pointing out how Buck McKeon has a bunch of worthless relatives who work as lobbyists, where they can trade on his name for their personal enrichment. This week Legistorm.com released a list of congressmembers whose direct relatives are also lobbyists-- and McKeon was only the second worst.

Saturday night House Republicans passed 248-174 a repeal of a medical device tax as part of the CR that threatens to shut down the government. They are demanding a one year delay to the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of the medical device tax.

It's how the Bourbons saw themselves; it's how conservatives always see themselves, especially the plutocratic onesRight after Obama was reelected, the Republican-controlled state government of North Carolina kicked an ALEC-initiated plan into high gear--

Maybe you read the NY Times editorial over the weekend, The War Over Health Care Exchanges.

Neo-fascist extremist and deranged "pastor," Bryan Fischer wasn't trying his hand at stand-up comedy this week with his demon hunter routine (above). Fischer is an annoying crackpot but Satan has higher-placed surrogates to do his work Inside the Beltway. In his brilliant book, The Machine, investigative journalist Lee Fang introduces us to the Koch Empire's chief political operative, Tim Phillips, one of the sleaziest and most destructive lobbyists in the history of K Street.

Not every right-winger is a moron. Sure, every teabagger is a moron, but some right-wingers aren't teabaggers. This week Alabama winger Byron York was asking his fellow Republicans if they've been "fooling themselves" about Obamacare.

In June of 2009, we had a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. The Republicans didn't have much-- other than K Street. Obama and the Democrats were determined to deal with Climate Change. They failed. I think Ed Markey was just elected senator from Massachusetts because of his leadership in this struggle.

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.

No human being is perfect-- and that includes politicians. Even FDR made some mighty big mistakes. I think all Americans with their heads screwed on properly will agree that Roosevelt made a gigantic, historically-tragic error by not having the plotters involved in the 1933 Wall Street plot against America tried and hung. If J.P.