DC Democrats are the richest pols Wealth is not in and of itself bad, but when the wealthy run around wildly spending other people’s money that’s practically criminal. So, we find it less than amusing that the spendthrift Democrats — check Omaba’s recent spending spree — are also the richest elected officials in Washington, DC.
The Web political publication, The Hill , just issued its list of the 50 richest politicians in DC, and eight of the top 10 are Democrats, which we list below.
Of the 50 richest members of Congress, The Hill says 26 are Democrats and 24 are Republicans.
What’s especially irritating is that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry heads the list and he’s the guy we recently wrote about because he docks his new $450,000 sailing yacht in Rhode Island to avoid paying the Bay State’s sales and excise taxes. What a hypocritical cheapskate!
Of course, after the story hit every newspaper in America and many abroad, Kerry said he’d pay the $70,000 in taxes even though his boat would still be moored in RI. Kerry is the poster boy for adage, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Here are the top 10 richest elected officials according to The Hill , where you can read the full list.
S. John Kerry, D-MA, 167M
R. Darrell Issa, R-CA, 164M
R. Jane Harman, D-CA, 112M
S. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, 80M
S. Mark Warner, D-VA, 72M
R. Jared Polis, D-CO, 71M
R. Vern Buchanan, R-FL, 50M
S. Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, 48M
S. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, 43M
R. Harry Teague, D-NM, 40M
Richest Politician Skirted Taxes It only took two days of bad press to get the Democrataic Senate hypocrite John Kerry to cave in and pay his tax bill, as the AP reported.
Kerry is a free spender of tax dollars, but when it comes to his own money, he's obviously a bit tighter. Of course, all of that money really isn't Kerry's, a good bit of it comes from his wife who inherited the Heinz ketchup fortune from her late husband, also a politician.
Kerry recently commission the 76-foot yacht, christened Isabel, at a boatyard in Rhode Island. Therefore, it was naturally convenient for Kerry to have the boat legally moored in Rhode Island. The location also allows Kerry to avoid paying the sales tax plus annual excise tax, which total about $70,000 in Massachusetts.
If Kerry were only as stingy with tax dollars that would be nice.
We might note, too, that the Isabel is said to spend a good bit of her summer moored off of Nantucket Island, the millionaires island, where the Kerry family has a summer home.
A couple of broadcast reports the Kerry Yacht Fiasco and interesting. One is WBZ-TV, Boston, and the other isFox News'
US Says Repeal ObamaCare 60% of US voters want Obamacare repealed — “the second straight week that support for repeal of Obamacare is at 60% or above,” according to the Rasmussen Report.
And...
36% Oppose repeal.
45% Strongly Favor repeal.
27% Strongly Oppose repeal.
Plus…
62% believe Obamacare will increase the federal budget deficit.
58% think it will raise the cost of healthcare.
51% say the new law will hurt the quality of healthcare.
(Rasmussen 5-31-10)
Obama’s disaster: Unemployment Gallup Daily tracking finds that 20.3% of the U.S. workforce was underemployed in March — a slight uptick from the relatively flat January and February numbers.
A rise in the percentage of part-timers wanting to work full time (from 9.2% to 9.9%) is responsible for the March increase in underemployment.
Unemployment saw a slight, but insignificant, decline in March.
Six in 10 underemployed Americans are not hopeful they will find work or move from part-time to full-time work in the next four weeks. That translates to 12% of the workforce that is both underemployed and not hopeful they will find their desired amount of work.
The lack of change suggests that underemployed Americans anticipated long-term difficulties in finding work well before the administration's formal announcement was made.
The Gallup report was released April 1, 2010.
US 47-50% Pro-Con On Obamacare "Americans are now about evenly split in their reactions to the healthcare bill's passage: 47% consider it a good thing and 50% a bad thing. The divided, but slightly negative, assessment is similar to what Gallup found in recent months prior to the final House vote," the polling company reported today, Monday 3-29-10.
Poll: Kill ObamaCare A week after the House passed ObamaCare, 54% of voters favor the law’s repeal, including 44% who Strongly Favor repeal, according to the latest Rasmussen survey.
The poll also shows that 42% oppose repeal, including 34% who Strongly Oppose repeal.
Rasmussen said these number are “virtually unchanged” from last week’s poll results.
84% of Republicans favor repeal.
59% of Independents favor repeal.
25% of Democrats favor repeal.
1% of black Democrats favor repeal.
55% say the plan will increase healthcare costs.
17% say it will reduce healthcare costs.
49% say it will reduce care quality.
60% say it will increase the federal deficit.
The Rasmussen president Scott Rasmussen said: "The overriding tone of the data is that passage of the legislation has not changed anything. Those who opposed the bill before it passed now want to repeal it. Those who supported the legislation oppose repealing it."
Remember Scott Brown? That vote didn’t count either In voting for Scott Brown to fill the US Senate seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts voters demonstrated:
1. Dissatisfaction with the direction of the country,
2. Antipathy toward federal government activism, and
3. Opposition to the Democrats' health-care proposals.
Those are the conclusions (1-22-10) drawn from a Jan. 20-21 poll sponsored by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University's School of Public Health, and released by The Post, which says the statistics show “how dramatically the political landscape has shifted during President Obama's first year in office.”
63% of Massachusetts’ special-election voters said America “is seriously off track,” the newspaper reported. “Nearly two-thirds of Brown's voters say their vote was intended at least in part to express opposition to the Democratic agenda in Washington.”
Among all Massachusetts voters — including those who voted for Brown’s opponent, state attorney general Martha Coakley — 48 percent oppose said they oppose Obama’s healthcare proposals while 43 percent support them.
Among Brown's supporters, however, eight in 10 said they were opposed to Obama’s healthcare proposals, and, 66 percent of them strongly opposed them.
President Lincoln would have cried In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared and prayed at Gettysburg Pennsylvania that "...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
But a little over 200 years later, 219 self-important Democrats in the House of Representatives voted FOR Obamacare; this despite the fact that the majority of Americans had repeatedly told them that they did not approve of the proposed legislation.
Before the House vote was taken, 56% of American voters said they opposed Obama's plan while 40% approved of it. And for six months before the House vote, all major national polls demonstrated close, but consistently negative, public attitudes of both Obamacare and Obama himself, to say nothing about House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Leader Reid.
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The Gallup organization today reported that “Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters” in their weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences.
This 10-percentage-point lead “is the GOP’s largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress,” the polling company reported in making the announcement. Here is the tracking graph Gallup provided with the announcement. The full story is available here.
 Gallup tracking results on GOP and Democrat identification
Looks like it takes a British newspaper to accurately characterize the growing schism among Obama ideologues, thus:
“Senator Harry Reid’s opposition to the controversial Cordoba Centre is his first major public disagreement with the US president and signals the possibility of an electorally dangerous split in the Democratic party ahead of the midterms,” according to The Telegraph in the UK.
The importance of Reid’s policy split with BHO is emphasized when even ABC News characterizes him as “Obama’s staunchest ally in the Senate,” until now that is.
And if there ever was a partisan true believer, is has to be the slippery black representative from Harlem, Charlie Rangel, who is charged by Congress with multiple ethics violations.
Rangel’s financial and tax-dodging shenanigans have so rankled BHO that he recently suggested that the Harlem dandy might just want to quietly exit stage left. In BHO’s words, Rep. Rangel, age 80, should retire in order to “end his career with dignity,” according to a report in The New York Times.
Not one to be pushed around by the IRS, Congress or BHO, testy Rangel observed of BHO: “Frankly, he has not been around long enough to determine what my dignity is.”
This is just what the nation needs headed into the November mid-term elections: a fed up national electorate strengthened by a splintered party of Democrats consumed with in-fighting.
(As to Rangel’s seniority, he was 31 years old when Barack Hussein Obama was born.)
The most recent example of Obama as an opportunist, who is not quite in touch with reality, comes in his contradictory statements regarding the Islamic community center proposed for lower Manhattan, otherwise known as The 9/11 Mosque.
At a dinner BHO hosted celebrating the Islamic holy period of Ramadan, he said the following.
Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities — particularly New York. Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan. The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country. And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable. So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. And Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.
But let me be clear. As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.
Then, less than 24 hours later, BHO undercut his own statement supporting construction of the Islamic center near what he admitted was “hallowed ground,” the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, Muslim terrorist attack on the World Trade Center complex of building.
The recanting that BHO denies was contradictory follows.
In this country, we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion. I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.
And I think it’s very important as difficult as some of these issues are that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.
BHO seems to be loosing more than ever his touch with reality and fact.
“People are really smart,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg told The Washington Post. “They know the economic collapse happened before Obama. They hold lots of people responsible, and they’re realistic enough to know you can’t change things overnight. People are more angry at Washington being broken, and the wrong people being helped.”
That professional’s opinion is echoed by workers around the country.
“They bail out these lending institutions. They bail out those auto manufacturers. Where’s my bailout? Me and my children and my grandchildren are going to have to pay for these bailouts,” says a laid-off factory worker.
That controlled anger over Washington’s unbridled spending of taxpayers’ future earnings is growing in intensity and geography.
Voters recognize Obama may not have caused the recession, but he is directly responsible the subsequent runaway spending, the overreaching of healthcare legislation, unprecedented federal budget deficits, and failure to put the nation’s economy on a recovery course.
The key word is “anxiety,” which is moving Americans from vehement outrage to studied anger.
Cat-calls and shout of “socialism” have been replaced by serious questions “about the intricacies of the new healthcare law and financial regulations, [and] finding alternative energy sources,” according to The Post. “Most of all, people want to talk about the economy.”
The Post story runs just under 1500 words and is worth your time to read.
The US Constitution gives Congress alone — not the president — the authority to establish federal immigration laws. However, BHO and his cabal are seeking ways to circumvent the Constitution and our nation’s laws.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley discovered an otherwise secret “draft” memorandum written by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and entitled “Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive  Immigration Reform.”
The 11-page document begins: “This memorandum offers administrative relief options to promote family unity, foster economic growth, achieve significant process improvements and reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization.”
It states that the Obama administration has three means of avoiding the law and the Constitution, “in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” to make legal residents out of illegal aliens.
1. USCIS could grant “parole-in-place” that would provide a work permit and the ability to obtain a green card to certain classes of aliens who entered the country illegally.
2. For those who are in the country illegally because they have overstayed their visas, “deferred action” could be granted, which would delay deportation while the illegal alien applies for a work permit.
3. And the most blatant disregard for duty and ethical behavior would be for the USCIS simply to stop issuing “Notices to Appear,” the action that begins the deportation process.
Choosing one of these three ways around the law is no altruistic consideration by BHO, but a transparent play for Hispanic and other non-white votes in 2012.
While these options could make legal residents out of illegal aliens, those individuals would not immediately be eligible to vote; that requires citizenship. However, all three actions would create a new and smooth path to citizenship, to voter registration, and to an opportunity to re-elect the provider of their citizenship, BHO.
BHO’s sidestepping the Constitution also would inspire the gratitude — and seal the vote — of the existing legal resident Hispanic population.
BHO knows that two broad demographics groups are responsible for his election in 2008: the sub-28 youth vote and the non-white vote that includes Hispanics, Latinos, Asians and blacks.
The elections in 2012 are certain to be much more difficult for BHO than in 2008, and he can use every vote he can get his hands on. Thus, why not avoid the law, ignore the Constitution, and create a few million new votes the easy way: Executive Order. And it all sounds so “American,” so generous.
But the facts obscure any suggestion of generosity.
“About 131 million people voted in the 2008 presidential election, an increase of 5 million from 2004. The increase included about 2 million more black voters, 2 million more Hispanic voters and about 600,000 more Asian voters, while the number of non-Hispanic white voters remained statistically unchanged,” according to a 2009 Census Bureau news release.
So American, so generous? Get a grip!
BHO never ceases to amaze with his total disregard for rule of law, his ability to contort the truth, his lack of economic and business knowledge, and his near total lack of ethical judgment and behavior.
The only thing more amazing is that so many Americans don’t have time to pay attention and give a damn.
 The owner of the Phoenix Suns basketball team has spoken out against Arizona’s new immigration laws. And we understand (thought are not positive) that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer released the following statement in response to the team owner’s criticism.
“What if the owners of the Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying? What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn’t be ejected. Furthermore, what if Suns’ ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?”
Our belief is, if Gov. Brewer didn’t release this statement, she should have.
CNBC’s Becky Quick interviewed IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller at the Fortune Brainstorming Conference in Aspen and managed to get a few candid executive insights into how at least one business leader feels about the Obama administration — calm expressions of guarded anger that one rarely hears from a CEO in public.
Most of Quick’s interview of Diller was about the future of an open Internet and the recovery of advertising — which is robust — across all media. Then, at the end of the dialogue, Quick pushed into another area.
Quick: The administration probably didn’t help travel with some of the things they were saying.
Diller: The administration didn’t help a lot of things; but the statements of the administration, the president, against conventions and things like that were, uh, kind of rank. I mean on any level. I mean they were simply a kind of sensationalist obvious target. The truth is conventions are great for cities, they’re great for hotels; they’re great for, you know, a convention comes to town everything picks up. So, I don’t know how you go against conventions….
Don’t damn the whole industry. Las Vegas was so cratered by that, I think, reckless rhetoric… It still is hurting our conventions…
Quick: Does the administration recognize that; there have been some apologies. What is the relationship between business and the administration right now?
Diller: Not very good.
Quick: What else besides the travel polices.
Diller: Everybody knows. You don’t want to hear it from me. Tension between business and government is healthy. There is nothing terrible about that. That’s a healthy thing. But, when in fact there is, or there appears to be — and in this case there is fire and smoke — where there appears to be a consistent slamming of business in so many different areas I think, then, it is unhealthy.
Here’s a link to the interview; it runs 3:20.
 Image source: "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," Warner Brothers, 1948 In two weeks, the most destructive forces in America, the two house of Congress, will begin what they euphemistically call their “Summer District Work Period.”
This year, from Monday August 9, through Friday, September 10, the two chambers’ members will prowl their respective districts ostensibly to take the aggregate temperature of the people they purportedly represent. Of course, the “Summer District Work Period” is really just an high-sounding name — as so many things are in Congress — for an excuse to escape the oppressive heat and humidity that characterize The District’s Dog Days of Summer, as if no one else in the country has hot, muggy Augusts.
Quizzically, we muse why now would Congress care what their constituents think; they haven’t paid attention to the polls, letters and editorials for years. After all, Congress is so damned smart they don’t need no stinking input from their constituents.
Which, of course, reminds us of this classic sequence from John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Think of Humphrey Bogart as the American people and the Mexican banditos, pretending to be Federales who “don’t need no stinking badges,” as a deceitful Congress.
Thank God for the “Summer District Work Period,” a full month when Congressional banditos can do less harm to the American people and our economy with their destructive deficit spending practices.
Gallup reports today that former President Bill Clinton currently is “more well-liked by Americans than both of his successors.”
- 61% view Clinton favorably.
- 52% view Obama favorably.
- 45% view former President George W. Bush favorably.
Ratings for both Clinton and Bush have improved with age, and this is the first time in Gallup polling that Clinton’s favorable rating exceeds Obama’s.
Clinton’s rating has increased considerably since the 2008 presidential election campaign, rising from 52% in August 2008 to 61% today.
Bush’s current 45% favorable rating is 10 points higher than in March 2009, when Gallup last asked about him, and is his highest since January 2007.
“Obama’s 52% favorable rating now ties his lowest since he entered the White House. Obama’s favorable rating first fell to 52% in March, and has since stayed in that range,” Gallup reports.
Get the full Gallup report here.
“Public confidence in President Obama has hit a new low,” The Washington Post reported today. The assertion resulted from a joint Post-ABC News poll of likely voters in November’s mid-term elections.
The poll showed that “nearly six in 10 voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country. Furthermore, “a clear majority once again disapproves of how he is dealing with the economy.”
Additionally, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that “there is no doubt there are enough [Congressional] seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control.” Here’s the full transcript.
And that’s supported by what voters think of Congress. The Post-ABC poll shows “about seven in 10 registered voters say they lack confidence in Democratic lawmakers.” Republicans get similar negative ratings.
And the bad gets worse: 36% of likely voters said they have no confidence or only some confidence in Obama and Congressional Democrats and Republicans.
Independents are even more disillusioned: about 66% say they are dissatisfied with or angry about the way the federal government is working.
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