Tea Party extremist Frank Guinta voted to cut the Center for Disease Control budget-- and now he's whining about inadequate response to ebolaOn February 19, 2011 the Republican Party decided to cut funding for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in 2011. Although Ron Paul didn't vote that day, only 3 Republicans recognized the folly of what the House Republicans were doing: John Campbell (R-CA), Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Walter Jones (R-NC).
It's just two and a half weeks 'til election day.If someone feeds you a line about the Democrats taking back the House, you're talking with a dishonest huckster or someone steeped in ignorance. The House Democrats' sealed their fate when-- in the light of their 2012 disaster-- they allowed Pelosi to reappoint Steve Israel to chair the DCCC.
Bob Herbert’s piece in last week’s Politico Magazine, The Plot Against Public Education— How Millionaires And Billionaires Are Ruining Our Schools, casts Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, as the arch-villain of public education.
We’ve talked a lot about how DCCC chairman Steve Israel refuses to target any Republican leaders or policy makers, including GOP committee chairs, even ones in vulnerable blue-leaning districts. MN-02 south of Minneapolis/St Paul is a good example. In 2008, Obama beat McCain there by 10,000 votes. Four years later it was much closer but he still beat Romney in the district, which had also voted for Amy Klobuchar in 2006 and 2012 and for Al Franken in 2008.
Actual wrong guyFriday night, Bill Maher ended his big-buzz Flip A District competition by announcing the right-wing jerk he would work to defeat in November: John Kline in southeast Minnesota. Democrats have grown unaccustomed to anyone holding any Republican Party leaders or committee chairmen, like Kline, accountable for their destructive policy agendas.
The battle over refinancing student debt has been playing out-- badly-- in the Senate. Senate Republicans have filibustered Elizabeth Warren's bill so that it couldn't even be formally devoted on the floor.And in the House? Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman, John Kline, has bottled up the House version, H.R.
Since 1990, the Insurance Industry has contributed $306,387,653 in congressional races, almost two-thirds of it to Republicans. So far this year, they've doled out $17,600,207, again, most of it to Republicans. So far in the cycle they have carefully selected the incumbents who have been most willing-- in each house-- to put the special interests of the insurance industry ahead the interests of their own constituents and of the American people.
John Kline is a right-wing extremist from southeast Minnesota. His district, MN-02, stretches from south of St. Paul through Eagan, Burnsville, Apple Valley, and Northfield all the way down to Wabasha and the Zumbro Bottoms State Forest. Although the PVI is still classified R+2, Obama took the district in both 2008 and 2012. Kline is the chairman of the House Workforce and Education Committee, where he has been able to do a great deal of damage to working families.
Over the weekend Minnesota Democrats had their congressional district nominating conventions. There were two we were watching. One ended badly and one ended well. The one that ended badly was for the open red district (PVI is R+10) that Michele Bachmann is leaving. Joe Perske, a hopeless conservative won the right to challenge whomever wins the GOP primary, in all likelihood, far right sociopath Tom Emmer.
In recent days, we've been talking a lot about the push from progressives in the Senate, particularly Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to combat the never-ending conservative goal of whittling away at Social Security by actually fighting to expand it.
