Senatron Vitter and The Talking Points

I think my Senator might be an automaton.

This past summer, I emailed Sen. Vitter what I thought were two simple questions: "Could you please explain your reasons for voting NO on the nomination of Richard Cordray for Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?  Who do you think would have been a more appropriate choice for this position, someone you could have voted for?" 

A little over two weeks later, he responded:

Dear Friend,
 
Thank you for contacting me in opposition to Majority Leader Harry Reid's planed "nuclear option" to change procedures in the Senate. I appreciate hearing from you, and I completely agree with you. 
 
As you know, Senator Reid was advocating ending the 60-vote threshold currently needed to confirm Executive branch nominees. He was considering a "nuclear option" to lower the threshold to 51 votes, which would have drastically changed the rules and norms of the Senate. I am vehemently opposed to this hypocritical idea that would severely hamper a minority party's constitutional right to advise and consent. A last minute deal was reached to defuse this current crisis, but Democrats could still attempt this maneuver in the future. 
 
If Senate Democrats insist on changing how the Senate operates, it will not be because Senate Republicans have forced their hand. Of the 1,564 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate over the past four and a half years, only four have been rejected. Also, according to the Congressional Research Service, President Obama's cabinet nominees are, on average, moving from announcement to confirmation faster than nominees from the last two previous Presidents. Majority Leader Reid's plan is based on false premises, not on facts. Democrats would do permanent damage to the Senate for immediate and temporary political gain. Rest assured that I will hard to oppose this "nuclear option." 
 

Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this important issue. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future about other issues important to you and your family.

__________________________ 

OOOOOOK, Take 2.  Although I should have been pleased over the personalized comment tacked onto the end of his email in a totally different font, I ungratefully wrote back:

Senator Vitter,

I do appreciate your taking the time to respond to my message.  It appears, however, that you responded to questions different from the ones I asked.  My questions were:

Senator Vitter, Could you please explain your reasons for voting NO on the nomination of Richard Cordray for Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Who do you think would have been a more appropriate choice for this position, someone you could have voted for?

Could you please answer those questions?  Thank you.

_________________________

That was two months ago.  

Could the appropriate staffer please reboot the Senator in order to complete the installation of his most recent talking points?  It's not like y'all are doing anything else.  

Brown People Count -- and Other Election 2012 Lessons for Republicans

Early on during election night, even before President Obama was announced the winner, I watched a Fox News pundit soberly realize, as she put it, that Republicans need to realize they can no longer win many races without "brown people" and that they perhaps "overplayed" the whole Obama is a socialist thing.  Gee, you think? 

Grog's Gamut opened my eyes to a few other insightful take-home messages:  1) "All Obama lost from 2008 was Indiana and North Carolina which voted Republican even when Clinton was running in 1992 and 1996, let alone when George W won in 2000 and 2004. So it wasn’t a case of Romney making inroads, but more just getting back what the GOP used to take for granted"; 2) math and science rule; and 3) yes, the electoral map still looks like roadkill if you just look at land mass,

but the margins of victory at the county level may tell the more important story: 

 "Where Obama won big was in the big cities; where Mitt won big was in places that didn’t matter because they were never in play – such as Utah...

In Colorado for example Obama won big in and around Denver and Boulder. In Florida he won the Miami-Dade Country with 62% of the vote – that county had around 829,000 voters, next door in Broward County he won with 67%. It has around 719,000 voters. Together those 2 counties account for nearly 20% of the entire state’s vote.  In Ohio it’s the same story." [Grog's Gamut, 11-7-12]

Grog goes on to point out that radical Republican/Tea Party logic just will not win you votes in national and statewide elections in many states, nor will trying to appeal to (or trying not to piss off) that illogical segment of the population.  I think many Republicans fail to appreciate this. 

In a Facebook conversation I had with some local Republican friends hoopin' and hollin' about Scott Brown's loss to Elizabeth Warren, like they were born and raised in Massachusetts or something, I echoed that theory of flawed TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party logic.  Especially in the MA Senate race, I believe it boiled down to this:  Republicans  underestimated how much people are hurting. People want health care and to not be raped by their credit card companies more than they want tax cuts. Tax cuts aren't bad, but what the hell am I going to do with a tax credit I have to spend money up front to take advantage of if I don't have any money in the first place?

Vitter's Balanced Budget Amendment and Other Stupid Ideas

I was pondering this Balanced Budget Amendment idea and kept coming to the conclusion that it would be a horrible way to run the country, and that was before I read The Pelican Institute's post stating: "Despite a balanced budget requirement, Louisiana has still managed to acquire $21 billion more in liabilities than it has assets to offset them."

It was also before I read that Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute said: "It is about the most irresponsible action imaginable. It would virtually ensure that an economic downturn would end up as a deep depression, by erasing any real ability of the government to pursue countercyclical fiscal policies and in fact demanding the opposite, at the worst possible time."

I think good ole Norm was getting at what I was thinking. I was thinking: where will Louisiana get federal disaster help the next time a levee or an oil well explodes? Given the state's Republican leaders' non-stop pleading for help cleaning up the oil and making the fisherman financially whole again, we'd be up shit bayou if we need those funds if while operating under a federal Balanced Budget Amendment we have a disaster at a point in the fiscal year when all federal disaster funds have already been allocated.

I emailed Senator Vitter and posed this very question to him when I learned of his refusal to vote for a debt ceiling bill unless it is tied to a Balanced Budget Amendment, but he didn't respond. Which brings me to the point of this post. Why does Senator Vitter keep wasting his time on stupid legislation that even other conservatives consider stupid? We all champion lost causes now and again, but Vitter seems to have made a career out of being on the wrong side of issues, being ineffective, and even worse, being consistently counterproductive.

Concept of the Day: DOUBLE STANDARD

Hey kids! Today's concept is: DOUBLE STANDARD. As in, "The Republicans seem to espouse a double standard when judging private sector and government sector finances."

The piece What's Good Enough for GE is Good Enough for the United States argues the point that S&P's downgrading of the U.S.'s credit rating was widely met with snorts and chuckling. Why?

Still, it’s true that federal debt held by the public has reached 60 percent of GDP, while tax revenues remain around 20 percent of GDP. 60 percent of GDP is a lot! And double, nearly triple, tax revenue! What would we call a company with outstanding debt double or even triple its revenues, and expected to keep the highest bond rating?

We would call it General Electric. As recently as 2007, GE had an S&P rating of AAA with outstanding debt at over three time revenues...

Even Transocean, which operated the Deepwater Horizon rig for BP, managed an A- rating prior to the spill, with a debt-revenue ratio similar to what the federal government has now. [J.W. Mason, New Deal 2.0]

We all know the conservative mantra, spouted ad nauseum from our Gret Stet of Looziana to the congressional halls of the Beltway: "Government should be run like a business!" As it turns out, the government is already run like a business. So thank you, Republicans. Your work here is done. You can all step down from your lives of public service now and go home.

Landrieu & Vitter Silent on Taxes and Unemployment Benefits

I couldn't help but notice that LA's Senators are strangely quiet about the two biggest Congressional issues plastered all over the news this week: extending tax cuts for the wealthy and extending unemployment benefits. Neither Sen. Landrieu nor Sen. Vitter have even so much as a one-sentence press release regarding these issues on their websites.

Like After Katrina, Outside Folks Getting the Disaster Contracts

The fine folk over at The Lens informed the citizenry today that "Gulf Coast states lag behind other states in getting contracts for oil disaster work." Only 12% of the $53.3 million in federal oil-spill related contracts have gone to Louisiana companies. Most of the rest of that has been contracted to companies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Colorado -- not to other Gulf Coast states suffering the direct environmental and socioeconomic consequences of this disaster.

People in other states need work too, and it seems quite plausible to me that some of corporations best able to execute the particular terms of some contracts are not Gulf Coast business. Maybe many Gulf Coast businesses were already at full capacity due to having already received state or local contracts or contracts directly from BP to do disaster-related work.

My point is I just don't know enough about the details to know whether we're getting shafted down here in the federal contracting game for this disaster. I do know, based on past experience, that we need to dig deeper into this before it becomes like the Katrina recovery in which local workers were brazenly left out of the citizen driven recovery we were promised. That is, if it's not too late. I blogged about it on 9/16/2006, and I'm going to be quite pissed if this sort of thing is happening again...

The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same "contract vehicles" in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" open-ended "contingency" contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also "cost-plus" contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend. [Corpwatch.org, 8/17/2006]

...and we were supposed to have learned our lesson so that our federal government could protect us from shady contract deals.

I hope that last part didn't make you laugh TOO HARD.

Now Learn the Reverse Jindal Two-Step

In my previous post, I taught y'all how to do the Jindal Two-Step. Now I'm going to show you the Reverse Jindal Two-Step. You may recall that in the simple Jindal Two-Step you do something THEN you claim you're not doing that exact same thing. The Reverse Jindal Two-Step is merely the same thing except backwards:

1) DON'T do something (or say you're not going to do that thing):

Governor Jindal said: Unlike Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, and New Mexico, which all assumed in their budgets that FMAP aid would be extended for their states - this budget does not anticipate federal relief for FMAP, out of an abundance of caution. [nwlanews.com, 2/15/2010]

2) Then do that thing you told the world you would not do:

By relying on a federal bailout to solve the 2010-11 budget deficit, Jindal is courting potential opposition from legislators who might be leery of using that money until Congress has acted. [T-P, 4/17/2010]

As you can see, you'll add flair and pizazz to the first part of this dance move if you also criticize others for doing something that you'll turn right around and do yourself. Try out these moves at your next Fais Do Do. It'll be a hit! Let me know how it works out.

Here's an Idea for Improving Student Test Scores

$150 million for improving accountability measures?

If Louisiana is selected by the U.S. Department of Education for the grants, about half the money would be distributed to districts to help with programs aimed at helping the poorest performing schools improve their rankings and student test results. Stronger accountability measures and teacher evaluations would be part of the process. [T-P, 1-9-2010]

I'm all for accountability, but here's an idear: How about spending the money on mental health services and more special education resources like more individualized supports, speech-language therapy, occupational therapy or on-campus health clinics or supports for parents to help their kids do better in school -- you know, all of the things that research has actually shown to help kids perform better in school.

Would a Real Leader Please Report to the Principal's Office?

At this point, if we could just manage to smuggle a real leader into Louisiana, I'd be satisfied.

First, we've had nearly all of our state and Congressional politicians who themselves make their living off of "big government," say nothing to point out to the paranoid mobs trying to kill healthcare reform that the big scary "socialist" government is entirely run by fellow Americans and is not some strange other-worldly evil force trying to take away our rights. (When you get down to it, the government is run by the same people exerting their democratic right to bad mouth their democratic government. Otherwise, there would be no town hall meetings because what would be the point of trying to influence government policy if we had no control over it?)

Now we have school officials wasting their time -- and our money and our children's education -- trying to figure out how to accommodate parents who don't want the President to tell their children to stay in school and work hard. These are the very same parents, mind you, who send their children to school precisely so they can get an education and in doing so hopefully learn the value of hard work.

My 17-year-old son shared with me Thursday a letter distributed in school from Gayle Sloan, superintendent of St. Tammany Parish Schools. The letter explains that President Barack Obama will address schoolchildren nationwide next week, and that "he will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning."

The letter also adds the following: "If you prefer for your child not to participate, please contact the school principal so that an alternate assignment can be provided outside the classroom." (Times Picayune Letter to the Editor, 9-4-2009)

From Sen. Mary Landrieu, seemingly the last "Democrat" remaining in public office, to St. Tammany Parish Schools Superintendent Gayle Sloan, it seems like no one we've put in charge of looking after our best interests has the leadership ability to do so. They'd rather take the easy way out and kowtow to the ignorant screams of those hellbent on screwing themselves out of what is in their and in their children's own best interests.

When did REAL leadership stop including the very basic role of taking an unpopular stand every now and then? If our public officials aren't willing to point out foolishness, or at the very least, the holes in their constituents' logic, then there is no reason to believe that they possess the desire or even moral conviction to lead us in the right direction at all on any issue. These are not even hard stances to take. Saying there already are people (i.e., the insurances companies) standing between us and our doctors and that Republican presidents have given similar back-to-school addresses have nothing to do with whether you support the Democrats' and the President's policy agenda.

If our leaders cannot, or worse, are unwilling to bring reason and calm to chaos, why do we need them at all?

UPDATED - Republican White Men Pretending Being White Doesn't Matter: Irony or Hypocrisy?

When I'm feeling generous, I like to think of this whole brouhaha about Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" quote as ironic, given that it's mostly White conservatives pretending to be shocked that someone's background or ethnicity influences the way s/he thinks. As if their collective objection to affirmative action has absolutely nothing to do with their being White.

On the days I'm feeling less generous and, quite frankly, just plain over the bullshit (most days), I think it nothing less than hypocritical for people like Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to chastise Judge Sotomayor for being prejudiced.

See minute 1:20 for a little background about Sen. Sessions.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Idiots!

2 doctors weigh in on health reform

From a T-P article on the two new physician congressmen from Louisiana:

Both hope to hear from the president-elect, or his top health aides, so they can advocate for measures that put more emphasis on patient responsibility and free market solutions to Obama's campaign promise to provide coverage to more than 40 million uninsured Americans.

Because that has been working so well for the American people? Honestly, do you know ANYONE who is pleased with the cost and quality of their health insurance or who isn't hassled by her health insurance provider when it really counts (i.e., other than a quick well visit to the doctor)? Do we really need to advocate for more emphasis on free market solutions? Isn't that what we already have? It sounds a lot like Nagin's repopulation plan.

Oh wait. That wasn't a plan at all. Just like this isn't a fucking plan either!!

As for patient responsibility, last I heard, the patients' responsibility to pay for medical treatments not covered by their expensive health insurance is a main cause of personal bankruptcy filings. But Congressmen, you're right. The American people need more bills. It's not like there's a mortgage crisis or rising unemployment or a financial market meltdown or anything!

Now for the piece de resistance:

But Cassidy also spoke about working across party lines to get affordable homeowners insurance to south Louisiana residents ...

"If our workers can't afford to live near the refineries, pipelines and shipyards that serve the entire nation, then our whole national economy suffers, " Cassidy said.

So, healthcare insurance...leave to the market forces. Homeowners insurance...too important to leave to the market forces? Huh? People not being able to afford healthcare insurance...no threat to the economy, but people not being able to afford homeowners insurance in Louisiana...threat to the whole national economy?

What the...?

Idiots, I tell you. Fucking idiots.

We're watching you, Congressmen. We're watching.

Too Disgusted to Even Think of a Title

See, this is the kind of shit that leads me to spend my days contemplating whether I should move to another state before I suffer a stroke secondary to the most bomb-ass conniption fit ever recorded in human history.

Posted: Friday, 01 August 2008 1:40PM

Poll: Kennedy leads Landrieu
Dave Cohen Reporting

A Zogby poll shows Republican John Kennedy has taken the lead in the U.S. Senate race against Democrat Mary Landrieu.

According to the Zogby International website, "Republican John Kennedy is among the GOP's best hopes to oust a Democratic incumbent. He leads Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu, 47%-41%." The poll's margin of error is less than 5%.

I know it's still a bit early and only a poll, but I mean really, people. Do you know that getting rid of Landrieu would mean getting rid of our most senior Congressperson? Besides Charlie Melancon in the House, who has been a better, more effective advocate for us? Not to mention, if you (cuz it sure as hell won't be me) elect Kennedy, we'd have him and Vitter for Senators -- two Republicans in a Democrat controlled Congress, and possibly a Democrat president too. What the FUCK do you think a newbie and a man more concerned with trying to use his campaign money (i.e., the money you sent him) to pay off legal debts stemming from personal behavior he himself called wrong and sinful can accomplish for us?

And no, I'm not a Democrat. I'm a registered Independent, which is what Kennedy should run as, since he can't make up his damn mind. I used to like the straight-talking, sensible sounding Kennedy; but has anyone else noticed he's been damn quiet and useless since this talk of running for the Senate started.

And if you're part of the old New Orleans establishment who refuses to vote for ANY Landrieu because you think Moon "betrayed" you by being the first mayor to allow black people to work in City Hall, get over it or fucking DROP DEAD ALREADY! You're NOT helping!!!