Down Home Kookin’

How Could You Do This Toomey? 

Pennsylvania

December 27, 2014

It is often said that Pennsylvania has Philadelphia at one end, Pittsburgh at the other and Kentucky in the middle. Or maybe it’s Montana. Either way, this is why my home state elects so many anti-intellectual, anti-union, anti-science, anti-woman, anti-gay, kill-the-poor, bomb-Iran, knuckle-draggers to office. We are in the process of evicting the least popular governor in the nation, Tom Corbett in favor of millionaire Tom Wolfe - we’ll see how that goes, but losing Corbett can’t be a bad thing. And, lest we forget, the last senator we jettisoned was the very frothy Rick Santorum. Unfortunately, we still have Pat Toomey, purported to be the fourth most conservative member of the senate, as our junior senator. 

Pat Toomey (R-Wall Street) looking very serious…or something

Pat Toomey rode in on the 2010 wave of Tea Party psychosis fervor and huge money. He is a pre-sex-scandal radical Christian, virulently anti-choice and pro-corporation. He wants personhood for fetuses, but no gun control for protecting the lives of those actually born. Toomey wants to protect the rights of the flag, but not the rights of people to marry who they choose, or to adopt children if they do not meet his criteria. He is in favor of more prosecution and sentencing for juvenile crime, but against alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.  He opposes campaign finance reform and any attempts to protect the environment. Just an all-around great guy. 

Pat Toomey is very upset that there are regulations affecting the ability of Wall Street criminals to run roughshod over real people. Wall Street should instead be permitted to do anything they want and crash our economy as they see fit. As often as they like. To this end he’s going after a senator who seriously disagrees with him, one who knows what she’s talking about when she warns the American people about what Wall Street has done and is poised to do again if left to their own, and Toomey’s, devices.

Toomey, referring to a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law - the swaps rule - which requires banks to have certain derivatives in units outside the government’s safety net said, “I hope you’re not going to fall for Elizabeth Warren’s nonsense.” The House passed a 1.1 trillion spending bill with the provision to roll back the swaps rule recently. The Senate must now consider the bill, which Senator Warren has vigorously opposed. The Pennsylvania Republican’t suggested Warren’s outrage came out of personal ambition adding, “This is Elizabeth Warren ginning up the leftwing of the Democratic Party who are professional haters of business. This is absolute nonsense.” If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about absolute nonsense, it’s Pat Toomey. Well, he may or may not know a thing or two about it, but he is its personification.

Elizabeth Warren, not taking any Toomey from anyone

Toomey added, “There is a tiny provision in Dodd-Frank that forces banks do something that is counter-productive, it forces, in fact it increases taxpayer risk because it forces them to do some of their risk management outside the bank in a separate subsidiary where they can’t manage their risk as well. Nobody thinks this is a good idea. No regulators do, nobody who understands banking does, nobody who understands risk management. So all it does is it says banks can conduct their ordinary risk management processes within the institution itself.”  Now there’s some quality absolute nonsense for you.

Toomey is not only shill for Wall Street and former investment banker, he is the former president of the Club for Growth, a super PAC which has been accused of driving all the moderates out of the Republican’t party. An ad opposing Toomey’s 2010 election said, “In Congress, Toomey voted to give China special trade status. Toomey's vote for China helped cost us 2.4 million jobs. Maybe he ought to run for Senate in China.” Toomey claims nobody thinks the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept regular folks’ money out of the risky investment business, is a good idea. Glass-Steagall demands that banks keep our money (which now earns us a whopping 0.1% or so, while they make millions using it) safe while they’re out creating phony investment products that will eventually blow up, which they already did in 2007, leaving the banks in need of taxpayer-funded bail-outs, which they already got in 2008. It was Bill Clinton (husband of presidential wannabe Hillary) who dismantled Glass-Steagall; he now claims this is one of his major regrets.

Mr. Toomey, after leaving Wall Street and before moving to Allentown to help operate a chain of restaurants, spent a year in Hong Kong doing financial markets research for a billionaire named Ronnie Chan. So Pat Toomey is probably not the guy you want to listen to about our economy.

I. Mangrey, staying in touch, so you don’t have to.

Vetoes welcome.

Happy New Year.

Cheney's Last Stand

Tortured Logic Logic Tortured

Where The Wired Things Are

December 12, 2014

“This government does not torture people.”

The above caption quotes George Bush lying to the American people. He had been told 18 months earlier that we were, in fact, torturing people. He and his boss, Dick Cheney were, as everyone knows, directly responsible for these depredations since it was they who ordered their people to find a way to make torture seem legal. They did this by torturing the law of the land. They rebranded torture as “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” to make it sound thoughtful and pleasant. C’mon, it’s just some old techniques that we decided to enhance. How bad could that be? Who doesn’t want some enhancement? Like botox or lap-band surgery or fracking? It’s all good. Quit your whining. Or you might get enhanced.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released its long awaited report on torture, which included letting Bush off the hook. “I think he knew everything he wanted to know and needed to know,” Cheney told Fux News’ Brett Baier. “He was in fact an integral part of the program; he had to approve it before we moved forward with it.” One can’t help but wonder how Cheney managed to persuade Bush to sign off. He probably gave him a pretzel to chew on.

According to the report, “...the president of the United States had directed that he not be informed of the locations of the CIA detention facilities to ensure he would not accidentally disclose the information.” I can just imagine the conversation. “Hey, Uncle Dick, make sure that those guys we told to start torturing, heh, heh…I mean, enhansively interrogating, not to tell me where they’re gonna do it. You know what a moron I am. I’d probably just start tellin’ ever’one where to go watch the fun. But make sure I get to watch the videos before we destroy the evidence.”

To give Bush his due, Cheney was running the show on this. Cheney circumvented the CIA when he didn’t like what they were saying, especially regarding Iraq and WMD. Cheney created his own secret agency to create the intelligence he needed. He took the phony info to the press, planted it there and then used what he planted to reap an illegal, unnecessary war in Iraq. The rest of course, is history heavily redacted.

Bush, in Cheney’s shadow,

even while standing in front of him

Cheney called the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report “a terrible piece of work” and “deeply flawed.” Then he called it “a piece of crap.” It was interesting to hear Cheney compare the report to the terrible job done during the Iran-Contra hearings, which Cheney described as another case where politicians “sort of throw the professionals under the bus.” You may recall that a record-breaking number of high-level Reagan administration officials were convicted of felonies back then. Some non-Cheney individuals describe events like this as JUSTICE. Cheney said of his plan to torture, “What happened here was we asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards that killed 3 thousand of us on 9/11.” Cheney said he’d “do it again in a minute.” And he’s in good company. According to Antonin Scalia, the Constitution does not appear to prohibit torture. He’s on the Supreme Court. Does that count as torture?

Ronald Reagan called torture, “an abhorrent practice.” Current CIA chief John Brennan agrees, even as he tries to torture the truth about what went on and how well it worked. Torturing people was Cheney’s idea. He is a war criminal. John McCain had to remind torture-loving Bill O’Reilly that after World War II we sentenced Japanese to death for waterboarding American prisoners. Dick Cheney said those who carried out the torture policy that he initiated deserve a lot of credit. After all they were just following orders. Cheney’s orders. And lord knows, we shouldn’t fault anyone for just following orders. Where would that leave us a nation?

I. Mangrey reporting. I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.