Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently raised the specter of Ken Starr to try to scare her liberal donors into digging a little deeper to prevent a Republican takeover of the House. She wrote in a fundraising letter that a Republican win would "bring back the days of Ken Starr and the politics of personal destruction". Speaker Pelosi ought to know that even if Republicans wanted to bring back "the days of Ken Starr"--and I haven't heard of any of them expressing that they do--it's a legal impossibility. The Independent Counsel law expired over eleven years ago, on June 30, 1999. That bogeyman has left the building.
Besides, between the John Edwards sex tape and Al Gore staining a masseuse's black slacks the American people have had more than enough nauseating Democrat sex scandals for the time being (and by "time being" I mean eternity). If there's anything more lascivious than the Democrats' love affair with Wall Street going on in the government then we don't want to know. Seriously, we're grossed out enough.
Don't want to know
Reading about Pelosi'ssentimental journey down memory lane has put me in the mindset to remember the disgraced former Congressman Tom DeLay whose unethical actions are being mirrored today by Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy.
In 2004 Congressman DeLay was admonished by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (commonly known as the Ethics Committee) for participating in and facilitating an energy company fundraiser while energy legislation was pending. This week with financial reform legislation pending Mary Jo Kilroy held a fundraiser (actually fundraisers (plural) if you count the $30,400 per couple gala Kilroy had with Speaker Pelosi this past Saturday) to solicit PAC donations from the financial industry--and she made sure "Member of House Financial Services Committee" was printed in large font on the invitation.
It will be very telling of the ethical standards of the Pelosi Congress if the Ethics Committee fails to admonish Kilroy for her DeLay-like behavior. The good news is that even if Speaker Pelosi abuses her influence to protect Congresswoman Kilroy, her veritable Bobbsey Twin, you and I will have the opportunity to admonish Mary Jo ourselves in the election booth this coming November.
Look lively, Mary Jo! After we fire you maybe you can be on Dancing with the Stars just like your ethical role model Tom DeLay! If you can stay awake, that is....
When she voted to make the flawedObamacare legislation the law of the land Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy promised us it would lower the deficit. Her ridiculous assertion was based on the assumption that Congress would not cancel a programmed cut in the reimbursement rate doctors receive for treating Medicare patients. As we've known from the beginning, Mary Jo was lying through her teeth.
It would have been more believable had the Democrats told us Dennis Kucinich was going to start calling himself Rumpelstiltskin and spin straw into gold, but Congresswoman Kilroy and her ilk are full of crap not creativity so the "doc fix" lie is the best they could come up with.
Yesterday Mary Jo Kilroy voted to cancel the programmed cuts to the medicare reimbursement rate--just as we all knew she was planning to do back when she was making wild claims about how Obamacare would lower the deficit. After all, her ideological twin Nancy Pelosi had stated that the Congressional Democrats were "committed" to doing this.
And now they've done it. Except they didn't solve the long-term problem.
This vote was just another short-term "fix". Congresswoman Kilroy voted us $23 billion deeper into the red and left the problem simmering until January 1, 2012. We needed a solution, and she gave us a "fix".
Let's make sure Congresswoman Kilroy isn't in office two years from now when the Medicare reimbursement rate needs tackled again or it'll never get solved.
Within a few short hours the national debt will soar to a new milestone high: $13,000,000,000,000 (that's trillion--with a "t" and if you tried to plug that number into a standard calculator it wouldn't fit). I remember driving to some forgotten high school banquet years ago and watching the odometer on my car change to what seemed like a milestone number. It was exhilarating to watch so many 9's turn into so many 0's in unison. We should feel anything but exhilaration as the debt clock strikes $13,000,000,000,000. We're hitting a staggering new low as we reach that all-time high: a new low in the economic prospects for our future and a new low in the government's ability to keep us safe.
We've been driven to this point by an irresponsible Congress that's addicted to spending. They're like drunks on a bender. Every day Members of Congress are at the bar of special interests buying rounds for every entity in sight--top shelf stuff if the entity has a Wall Street address--and when everyone is good and sloshed Congress points a finger over at the public and tells the bartender (who's a Chinese central banker, by the way) to send us the tab.
Congresswoman Kilroy: On a bender
Like all good alcoholics, Members of Congress tell us self-serving lies to make their relationship with us easier. They set "debt limits" (artificial ceilings on how much the country will borrow) as if to say, "We're just going to have a few drinks. We won't embarrass you--we won't let you down." Sure enough, by the end of the party, there they are: face-down in a puddle without their dignity. Apparently, during the course of the night they saw fit to raise the debt limit. Our Congresswoman Kilroy has already done ittwice in her short time in Congress.
During election years they even promise to quit their out-of-control spending. But it's always the same convenient, familiar (and ultimately empty) promise. There's never an actual plan to cut spending, just as Congresswoman Kilroy doesn't have a plan (she's still searching for a clue). Her recent quote in the Columbus Dispatch would be comical if it weren't so sad: "We always wanted to keep a close eye on spending."
Golly, if only she'd been in a position to do just that... like say if she had a seat in Congress! Oh wait....
She's like an alcoholic dad explaining to his kid why she missed his soccer game for the latest in a series of countless absences. "I wanted to be there. It's just...." and then the unspoken I like drinking too much. The Congresswoman likes spending too much. Nobody knows what a $13 trillion hangover feels like, but thanks to Ms. Kilroy we're about to find out together.
It's closing time, Congresswoman. Last call is in November.
If Mary Jo Kilroy were Pinocchio her nose would be as long as our national debt is deep. Her distortions and falsehoods are so frequent it might be a good idea to assume everything she says is a lie--convenient, self-serving obfuscations for her own political benefit. She may not be as blatant as Richard Blumenthal, but still, she's pretty good at putting forth realities that never were.
Okay, calling Ms. Kilroy Pinocchio is a bit of a stretch: Pinocchio implies a puerile innocence that the Congresswoman doesn't have. She's more of an "Honest John", the duplicitous conniver who twice dupes Pinocchio into betraying his own interests for the con artist's benefit.
Examine, for example, her behavior in the recent Lehman Brothers hearing. Congresswoman Kilroy did all she could to assert that Ohio's public pension funds lost $480 million. In reality, as calculated by the pension funds themselves the losses were closer to $221 million. Still a very devastating loss. However, the loss should have been reported to the American people accurately; we don't need a Members of Congress sensationalizing and distorting facts for political gain. (It's better for her ally, Governor Ted Strickland, if he can claim the collapse of Lehman Brothers cost Ohio's pension funds "half of a billion dollars" rather than "$221 million".)
The whole hearing, of course, was nothing more than a political scheme constructed by Congresswoman Kilroy in the hopes of embarrassing Republican gubernatorial nominee John Kasich, a former Columbus-based employee of Lehman Brothers. The Congresswoman denies that motive, but her actions betray the truth. As reported by the Columbus Dispatch: "In preparing for the hearings, Kilroy asked the pension funds in March for 'the names of all individuals who acted on behalf of Lehman transactions' from 1999 to 2009."
Um, she wanted names named, but not because she was looking for a specific name? That doesn't make any sense. You don't have a witch hunt unless you're looking for a witch--though Mary Jo is the kind of gal who would burn taxpayer dollars in a hunt knowing full well there was no witch. Mary Jo loves to spend taxpayer dollars.
(By the way, a pension fund spokesman statedKasich's efforts did not lead to Lehman receiving business--Kilroy didn't find her witch.)
Mary Jo Kilroy has the distinction of spending more taxpayer dollars on franking (junk mail, automated phone calls, and tele-town halls) than any other member of Ohio's House delegation. She is the 7th biggest spender of all 435 Members of Congress with a walloping $377,713!
Ha! And she promised us she would control spending and cut government waste. If Congresswoman Kilroy had any interest in making good on those pledges she should start with her own office. For me, it really adds insult to injury that those badgering phone calls from a recording are paid for by taxpayer dollars. And why the frank do they always come just as I'm sitting down for dinner?
One can't help but wonder if Ms. Kilroy would be more judicious in her spending if it were her own money hemorrhaging out. Perhaps, but perhaps not. As a multi-millionaire she may not have the same sense of frugality displayed by so many of us in Central Ohio. Her net worth is between $1,481,083 and $5,185,998 (84th wealthiest in the House)--though by her rules I should say she's worth $5,185,998. By Kilroy logic you always choose the highest number--it's more sensational that way.
The easy thing about being opposed to her hypocrisy is that there's no need to sensationalize. The facts speak for themselves.
Governor Ted Strickland has lately been proving himself a true Kilroy Democrat. The term, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the Congresswoman would surmise, describes a career politician who is epically inept, inexcusably negative, intensely hypocritical, and downright dangerous to the interests of his or her constituents.
Ted Strickland is our state's accidental governor; he's the Jimmy Carter of Ohio. Both men were elected because the people were tired of scandal. For Carter the impetus was Watergate, for Strickland it was Coingate. Candidate Strickland promised us that he would end a culture of corruption in Ohio's state government and create jobs. As everyone knows, Strickland's job creation promise didn't pan out: Ohio has lost 427,300 jobs on his watch. As demonstrated by the recent scandal over a canceled sting operation at the Governor's Residence, Strickland has also proven himself a failure at ending the culture of corruption.
In a recently released report Ohio Inspector General Thomas P. Charles, the state official responsible for investigating allegations of wrongdoing by state agencies and executives, states that both Strickland's Director of Public Safety, Cathy Collins-Taylor, and the commander of his security detail, Lt. Joseph Mannion, lied to investigators in an effort to cover-up the politically motivated decision to cancel a "safe, well-planned and routine" operation in order to protect Governor Strickland from political embarrassment.
The facts in the Inspector General's report paint a disturbing picture that makes it impossible to excuse Director of Public Safety Cathy Collins-Taylor's conduct. In her testimony Collins-Taylor argued that past tense verbs used to describe DPS actions didn't necessarily mean that the actions had already taken place and that the phrase "embarrassment to the boss" didn't mean embarrassment to the governor, it just meant "embarrassment to the administration in general – to the Patrol, to DRC [Department of Rehabilitation and Correction], to DAS [Department of Administrative Services]". Overall, her statements read like they should have been performed by Jon Lovitz and followed up with "Yeah! That's the ticket!" The Inspector General correctly classifies her statements as "absurd".
In addition to her lies, the Department of Public Safety under Collins-Taylor obstructed the Inspector General's investigation by intentionally providing 44,000 pages of meaningless records including "a series of communications labeled 'Girls Night Out'". Good to know the Department of Public Safety takes conserving taxpayer-funded resources seriously.
Fortunately, the Ohio Senate will have the opportunity to hold Collins-Taylor accountable for her misdeeds. As it turns out, Governor Strickland failed to submit Collins-Taylor's nomination to the Senate when he appointed her on September 18. That's right: Governor Strickland is so inept he forgot to submit a cabinet member's nomination to the Senate. Wow.
To change the subject from his administration's shortcomings, Strickland's campaign has released a Kilroy-style negative attack ad against his electoral opponent, John Kasich.
The ad itself is almost an exact copy of a SEIU ad produced in 2008 to promote Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. I imagine Vice President Biden has to be hopping mad about this; when he plagiarized another politician back in 1988 it derailed his presidential aspirations. Strickland's pretty much getting a free pass--not fair! Plagiarism is a big f*cking deal!
The standout takeaway from the ad isn't that it displays political desperation or betrays Team Strickland's banality, the major takeaway is that even Ted Strickland realizes the Pelosi Congress has failed! For months Team Strickland has been trying to peg John Kasich as a Wall Street bigwig (they even had Congresswoman Kilroy hold a hearing in hopes of doing so), but now Strickland's dreamt up a label capable of inspiring even more scorn: "Congressman!"
In the 30 second ad the word "Congressman" is spoken or displayed six times--that's one "Congressman" for every five seconds. At no point does the ad inform viewers that John Kasich hasn't been in Congress for almost ten years. It's a deliberate omission because Strickland wants voters to think Kasich is in league with Nancy Pelosi and Mary Jo Kilroy as they jack up your tax rate and murder jobs like fish in a barrel. The reality, however, is that Strickland is the incumbent. His Kilroy-style politics are going to put him exactly where they're going to put her--and coincidentally where the two of them have put far too many Ohioans--in the unemployment line.
The Democrats' public professions of enmity towards Wall Street remind me of the anti-gay rhetoric of disgraced former Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig. In his public life, Senator Craig was very outspoken in his condemnations of homosexuality; in their public life, the Democrats are very outspoken in their condemnations of Wall Street. As we learned after a revealing incident in an airport bathroom, Senator Craig’s public mask and his private face were vastly different. The Democrats are every bit as two-faced as the former Senator, and just like him when they’re out of the public view they’re cruising for under-stall action with the object of their public animosity: Wall Street.
Take Senate Banking Committee Chris Dodd, for example: Earlier this week, on the Senate floor, Dodd railed against Goldman Sachs and Magnetar (the hedge fund hijinks of each firm having been previously discussed in this blog here and here, respectively) culminating with the punchline:
"Betting against America" is a pretty strong indictment. The Senator must have been so proud of himself for making it in full public view that he forgot to mention that after the investment banks bet against America they shared their winnings with him. From Goldman Dodd received $273,466, and from the relative upstart Magnetar he accepted at least $6,900. Not too shabby. I can't help but wonder if the Senator and his donors ever sing this Magnetar-inspired song to each other:
And Chris Dodd's not the only one having a closeted love affair with Wall Street--not by a long shot! It's widespread: Kirsten Gillibrand, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt is now a Goldman Sachs lobbyist, our Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy has accepted $52,736 from the Securities and Investment industry--and that doesn't even include the Magnetar money laundered to her by Rahm Emanuel--the list goes on and on and on. So many Democrats, so hot for Wall Street cash, but also, so very ashamed to admit their hearts' desire.
Can you imagine the scenes?
--
A flustered and slightly sweaty Rahm Emanuel popping out of a coat closet after an afternoon quickie cell-phone call to Magnetar Capital CEO Alec Litowitz.
--
Senator Chris Dodd getting his war chest stuffed in the back of a Citigroup executive's limousine.
--
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sitting on a bench in a secluded section of a public park smiling coyly at a cute jogger in a Goldman Sachs t-shirt.
"Oh yes! He winked at me! More cash for Harry!" he congratulates himself after the encounter.
"But Mary Jo, what if your constituents find out?" the breathless banker asks.
Emphatically the Congresswoman replies, "They won't!" And then, unleashing even more of her passion for Wall Street cash, "They could never understand OUR LOVE!"
--
Of course those were dramatizations. In reality, the Democrats surely have a far more sophisticated and organized method of setting up Wall Street bankers with the politicians who love them than the ol' Larry Craig tap-and-whistle. The major difference as I see it, is that Senator Craig is deserving of pity for the tortured life he surely had. The Democrats, however, deserve only contempt for their deception. In stepping out on us to dally with Wall Street bankers the Democrats are inflicting great harm on our country and our future. We should help them come out of the closet by kicking them out of the Congress.
Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy's campaign manager either announced an abrupt shift in Ms. Kilroy's politics this past Thursday or decided Kilroy's policies are so unpalatable to voters that he needed to mask them with a lie. Her campaign manager stated that the Congresswoman is opposed to the idea of a value-added tax and that she has developed an interest "in finding ways to cut taxes and get money back into the hands of the people who need it."
If this were more than election year rhetoric, it'd be shocking. Of course, it's not. Mary Jo Kilroy will always be a pro-tax, anti-growth politician. Throughout her life as a politician Ms. Kilroy has consistently raised taxes. It's what she does. Fish swim, birds fly, and Mary Jo Kilroy raises taxes. Sure as death and... taxes.
All told Mary Jo Kilroy raised taxes by more than $200,000,000 as a county commissioner. Apparently, by "get money back into the hands of the people who need it" her campaign manager meant the hands of an ever-expanding government.
Sadly, the $200,000,000 mountain of tax hikes Mary Jo Kilroy buried us under as a county commissioner looks like a molehill compared to the tax hikes she has approved as a congresswoman--and she's just getting started!
Congresswoman Kilroy voted FOR a tax hike with the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, declared by the Wall Street Journal as likely to be "the biggest tax in American history". Estimates have the costs reaching as high as $161,000,000,000 in 2020--that's $1,870 vacuumed right out of a family of four's grocery budget. Even liberal Democratic "Dean of the House" Rep. John Dingell cautioned that the bill Congresswoman Kilroy supported is "a great big" tax.
Congresswoman Kilroy voted FOR a tax hike with Obamacare, the healthcare overhaul which will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next ten years and will raise taxes by $569.2 billion. Additionally, it will hit an estimated 4 million households with further tax penalties for failing to afford insurance (the law mandates all citizens must purchase insurance).
And it gets worse: A primary objective of the healthcare overhaul was to rein in costs. Despite Mary Jo Kilroy's Joe Isuzu logic that Obamacare could achieve that feat, a new report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Chief Actuarystates the legislation will increase national healthcare spending by $311 billion.
Job well done, Congresswoman. Thanks to Mary Jo Kilroy we all will have the pleasure of paying more for healthcare. What would we do without her?
For one, we'd pay a whole lot less in taxes. Between the $200,000,000 in tax hikes she brought us as county commissioner and the hundreds of billions she's brought us as a Member of Congress, Mary Jo Kilroy could easily fill a money bin and swim through it a la Scrooge McDuck. The difference, of course, is that when Scrooge McDuck does it he entertains children; when Mary Jo Kilroy does it she's saddling them with a deeper share of the national debt--$41,626 per citizen as of this posting.
Kilroy making it rain--with your tax dollars!
If this is what it looks like when Congresswoman Kilroy is "finding ways to cut taxes and get money back into the hands of the people who need it," God help us when she's out of election-year mode.
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