Apparently "Our Lady of Perpetual Campaigning" invaded California on Saturday to sell her books and raise money for her next campaign "meet with real patriots!"
And if that wasn't bad enough, their lousy attempt at Vaudeville comedy got even worse once they returned to Nevada (to torture us yet again!).
The Tea Party Express continued its cross-country tour Sunday with a midday rally in the heart of Nevada that featured about a dozen speakers and musicians focused on "reclaiming America" in the 2012 election.
Headlining the event was Sharron Angle, who lost to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in 2010. Angle is traveling with the bus tour and is expected to speak at most of the events along the way.
The Elko Daily Free Press reported that Angle told the crowd of about 75 people -- organizers pegged the crowd at closer to 100 people -- that the Republicans will take control of the U.S. Senate after the 2012 elections if people get involved in races around the country.
Tea Party Express communications director Levi Russell said the event was a success, especially considering that it was held on a Sunday.
"It was a small crowd, but enthusiastic," he said.
"We're happy that they came out to hear our message."
Other speakers included Amy Kremer, Tea Party Express co-chair, and Tabitha Hale of the Washington, D.C.-based conservative group FreedomWorks.
There's no word yet on whether Elko saw the same "colorful characters" that emerged in Searchlight last year...
But it does look like their "Tea Party Express" is losing steam on the open road. Now that we're seeing with our own eyes their strategy coming to full fruition as federal government becomes even more chaotic and dysfunctional, they're not seen as innocently as they were last year.
It seems that the Tea Party's governing style, most clearly on display during the debt ceiling fight in Congress, has taken a toll on Americans' view of the movement. Polls have been showing a drop in its approval, and a new AP/GfK poll shows that its unfavorable rating has seen a sharp rise. 46 percent of those surveyed said they have a negative view of the Tea Party movement, versus 28 who say they view it favorability.
The last time the AP conducted a national poll on Americans' favorability of Tea Partiers was in their pre-governing period: throughout 2010 the conservative movement was viewed slightly unfavorably but the splits were close. In June of 2010 it even earned a positive rating, with 33 percent of over 1,000 adults surveyed finding the movement favorable against 30 percent. In the last AP rating, taken Nov. 3-8, 2010, directly after the 2010 election, the split stood at a slim negative rating of 32 percent favorable against 36 unfavorable.
But can "unpopularity" really stop them? Remember when Sharrrrrrrrrrrrrron was pummeled for this?
She herself didn't win here in Nevada, but her "ideas" masquerading as "change" most certainly did win in other parts of the country. Look at how much President Obama and Congress have had to give in to them, and look at what we're getting in return. Economic recovery has been anemic at best, and the still jobless aren't seeing any of it. And when the American people are demanding job creation the most, all we're seeing out of Congress now is endless partisan brinksmanship and attacks on bedrocks of American society, such as Social Security and Medicare, that working class families need the most right now.
And of course, the Republican Presidential Candidates are tossing out all this teabagger nonsense as red meat to an increasingly radical and extreme "base". Watch Rick Perry call Social Security a "ponzi scheme" and a "lie".
How is this different from what Sharrrrrrrrrrrrrrrron said?
I saw this for myself last weekend. My Congressman refuses to meet with us, his own constituents, because we're not contributing to his campaign and the Republican Party (even though we pay his and his staffers' salaries!).
And that's why we can't be complacent at all. Public outrage clearly isn't enough to defeat these extremists. They'll probably just buy even more TV and radio air time to try to brainwash voters again "tell their side of the story". Sharron Angle may not be in Congress herself, but her radical ideology is increasingly becoming the policies being debated and implemented in federal government now. If we don't like this, then we have to stop electing her ideological kindred spirits.
Apparently, Congressional Republicans are really feeling the heat in the first town hall meetings since Congress broke for August Recess. Here's what happened next door in Arizona...
At a town hall meeting yesterday, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) became the latest Republican member of Congress to face a backlash over the GOP’s intransigence against raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. As the Lincoln Journal Star reported, “many of the loudest voices and waving fingers urged Johanns to include tax increases — particularly applied to the wealthiest Americans — as part of the solution to debt reduction“:
“The wealthy just hoard the cash.”
“The old tax rates worked well for the economy under Clinton.”
“Quit listening to the scare tactics, all the crap in the media.”
Jennifer Wendelin, who waited to be recognized by Johanns before voicing her opinion, said additional revenue has to be part of the debt reduction solution along with spending cuts.
“Big corporations and the rich have to pay their fair share,” she said after the meeting had concluded. “If we have to bite the bullet, they do, too.
“We can’t be forced to shoulder the entire burden,” she said.
And all this happened after Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Illinois) was caught off guard when constituents were asking why we can't "tax the rich".
So perhaps this is why Joe Heck didn't want constituents at his oil industry backed event "open to the public" on Tuesday? Maybe this explains it?
Republicans are facing a growing backlash over oil subsidies. Not only have top lawmakers faced angry constituents and questions from the press, but even Tea Party activists have called for the GOP to stop giving so much taxpayer money to multinational oil companies.
A few Republican lawmakers, like Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), have called for an end to oil subsidies, as well as all other energy subsidies.
Heck votedtwice to (mis)use our tax dollars to subsidize Big Oil!
So now you have it. While Joe Heck keeps voting for "shared sacrifice" that just seems to call on working families to sacrifice what they can't afford, he keeps giving away our tax dollars to the fossil fuel industry.
So what's this all really about? Desert Beacon, as usual, does a great job of explaining what happened on Wall Street:
Shift 1: Back in the day investment and commercial banking were two discrete and totally separate activities. Now they aren't. We can argue about the Volcker Rule or about bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, but the bottom line is that investment and commercial banking are now being done by divisions of the same bank holding companies. We have rules and a regulatory structure that still assume investment and commercial banking are separated, in an era in which both are done under the same roofing.
Shift 2: The old American financial system included investment banks that were private partnerships, with bankers who had their entire worth (right down to their homes and property) on the line with every trade. When Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette went public in 1970 all bets were off. DLJ "established a holding company that was exempted from the stock exchange's restraints on member firms." It wasn't long before other investment banks on Wall St. followed suit. Investment banks were no longer trading with their own funds, but with shareholder's money. The old, often clubby, ultra-conservative restraints on the investment bankers were loosened under the holding company structure; now revenues lines could come from a variety of sources, and the investment banks could make money not just by underwriting corporate bonds and other offerings, but by selling things, lots of different things. We have rules and a regulatory structure that still assume the existence of discrete investment banks -- after the meltdown of '07-08 there are no more investment banks. The major investment banks have been subsumed by commercial bank holding companies.
Shift 3: There was nothing in the wind in 1933 that would have caused anyone to believe that one day there would be hybrid financial corporations such as exist today. GMAC, for example, was incorporated in 1919 as a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors to offer credit to dealerships to purchase inventory, and to assist individuals to buy GM cars. In 1985 the company expanded to create GMAC Mortgage, and in 1999 it purchased the Bank of New York's asset based lending and factoring business. GMAC begat DITech, and the International Business Group, and in 2005 begat the Residential Capital LLC (ResCap). Then the wheels came off. In 2006 GM sold its controlling stake to Cerberus, a private equity firm, and the company became GMAC Financial Services. In 2008 it restructured as a bank holding company, making it eligible to receive TARP funds to offset the drumming it had taking in the mortgage finance debacle. More changes came in 2009 as GMAC entered into an agreement with Chrysler to provide auto loans for their products, and morphed into Ally Bank. [GMAC timeline] There's been more restructuring since.
The moral of this story is that in the days of the Tail Fins, GMAC simply financed cars; but, in the days of the hybrid fuel models, GMAC became a hybrid itself in the form of a bank holding company. The same sort of timeline could be constructed for insurance giant AIG, once an insurance company which collapsed under the weight of its own Financial Products division based in London.
Basically, Wall Street firms reorganized into holding companies to start using shareholder money to make investments. And as financial regulations were loosened in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, this paved the way for these investment banks to be gobbled up by larger consumer banks to become massive financial conglomerates. GMAC's story looks quite a bit like AIG's, Citigroup's, JP Morgan Chase's, Bank of America's, and so many others.
So how has our federal regulatory system kept up with the times? It has not, and that's the problem here. While these Wall Street firms were becoming gigantic multinational, multi-sector, financial conglomerates, the US regulatory system remained fractured, piecemeal, and completely unprepared to handle the Bear Stearns crisis, the Lehman Brothers crisis, and the start of "The Great Recession" as the financial houses were collapsing all around us.
So that's what this financial regulation legislation is all about. Here, I'll let Ezra Klein do some more explaining.
The underlying issue here is, as per usual, the too-big-to-fail problem. "When big financial institutions fail," says Raj Date, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities and the founder of the Cambridge Winter Project, "they have an immediate, catastrophic impact on the financial system. They live on borrowed money, and as they approach failure, their creditors try to get all their money back at once. So the firm begins selling all its assets into the marketplace very quickly. But when you're large, there's no way to move that volume of assets without cratering their prices. So now the types of assets the firm is selling drop in value. That means that everyone else's balance sheet is worth less, at least if they have these assets, too."
Here's the problem: Banks don't fail. They explode. They take other banks down with them. The easiest analogy is to a bomb. What happened with Lehman Brothers is that the bomb went off, and it took the financial sector with it, at least temporarily. That's, well, one way of handling a bomb. But it's not the preferred way. The preferred way is to defuse it. That's what resolution authority does, at least in theory.
These firms were sucking up more and more and more debt. They were growing and growing and growing, but their whole foundation was made on "financial quicksand" like mortgage backed securities that looked far less "secure" once the housing bubble started to burst. Bond agencies were allowed to market these extremely risky loans as "safe bonds". Banks were allowed to prey on consumers with subprime mortgages, and these same banks were allowed to profit off them by financing them with these very mortgage backed securities that were then used to finance even more borrowing. What was supposedly a "strong economy" five years ago in George Bush's supposedly successful "ownership society" was really more of a very high stakes poker tournament that made any of our Las Vegas poker rooms look like a "safe investment".
And again, we get back to the problem of the feds not being properly prepared to handle this crisis. Robert Kuttner properly diagnosed this crisis in 2008, and offered some specific solutions to get us out of this mess.
What all of these sins had in common was that they led financial markets to misprice assets. In plain English, that means buyers were purchasing securities based on bad information, often with borrowed money. When firms started losing money on sub-prime in mid-2007 and other owners decided it was time to get their money out, the whole miracle of leverage went into reverse. And it spilled over into other securities that had been mispriced thanks to all the conflicts of interest tolerated by regulators.
That's why, no matter how much taxpayer money the Federal Reserve and the Treasury keep pumping in, they can't turn dross back into gold. The next administration and the Congress need to return the financial economy to its historic task of supplying capital to the real economy -- of connecting investors to entrepreneurs -- and shut down the purely casino aspects of the system that have only enriched middlemen and passed along huge risks to everyone else. [...]
Barack Obama said it well in his historic speech on the financial emergency [on] March 27[, 2008,] in New York. "We need to regulate financial institutions for what they do, not what they are." Increasingly, different kinds of financial firms do the same kinds of things, and they are all capable of infusing toxic products into the nation's financial bloodstream. That's why [then] Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has had to extend the government's financial safety net to all kinds of large financial firms like A.I.G. that have no technical right to the aid and no regulation to keep them from taking outlandish risks. Going forward, all financial firms that buy and sell products in money markets need the same regulation and examination. That will be the essence of the 2009 version of the Glass-Steagall Act.
And while the current Wall Street Reform legislation isn't a panacea, it's a start... And hopefully, it will lead to stronger We need stronger oversight, and we definitely need a regulatory system that equipped with all the proper tools to deal with future crises in a way that doesn't just leave us the taxpayers holding the bag for another no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout.
But as usual, the GOoPers are trying to spin this to look like supporting financial reform is "supporting more bailouts".
So Republicans want more no-strings-attached Wall Street bailouts? More unregulated Wall Street firms making risky bets, but keeping all the rewards for themselves while making us pay when their risk taking fails? I guess so.
But hopefully, they won't succeed. We can't afford any more inaction on a broken regulatory system and a new generation of "robber barons" that keep stealing from us to make themselves even richer.
As President of Santa Fe Hotel, Inc., Sue Lowden illegally denied health insurance to buffet workers both by forcing them to sign a document waiving their right to it and cutting their hours to render them ineligible for it. As a result, her company was found guilty of violating the National Labor Relations Act and was ordered to repay employees whose hours and benefits were unlawfully slashed.
After breaking the law, Lowden tried a different tact as a state senator to undermine quality medical coverage. She voted to put profits over the health needs of Nevada’s women, allowing insurance companies to refuse to cover lifesaving treatments like mammograms. Additionally, she voted to put insurance companies between patients and their doctors, allowing them to refuse coverage for medical services that were not only in their plans but were administered by a physician.
“Sue Lowden’s track record shows that she’s willing to do anything – even break the law – to save a buck by denying quality health insurance from hardworking Nevada families. Whether gutting medical coverage as a state senator or unlawfully refusing to cover employees, Lowden has proven that her idea of ‘leadership’ is not something Nevadans can afford,” said campaign manager Brandon Hall.
“While filled with lies and distortions, at least Lowden’s latest TV ad is actually a legal attempt to deny Nevadans access to quality, affordable health insurance. So for her, I guess that’s progress.”
Apparently back in the 1990s, Suzy and her husband had this habit of illegally denying their Santa Fe employees health care benefits... Oh, and they liked to illegally fire their workers, too!
Uh huh... So the person best suited to work on "creating jobs" is someone who has a history of illegally eliminating health care benefits for her workers and firing workers while giving herself and her husband a healthy six-figure bonus?
And wait, who could forget Suzy Lowdown working so hard at Archon to "create jobs" in Nevada by shutting down Wet & Wild and leaving it as an empty lot for construction equipment?
Yep, that's Suzy Lowdown for us. She works hard... To make sure working class Nevadans get screwed while she laughs her way to the bank.
Ignoring that she’s a freshman congresswoman and he’s a two-term senator, Democratic Rep. Dina Titus leveled a broadside against Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who is holding up an extension of unemployment benefits for out-of-work Nevadans.
For days, Bunning has blocked a vote on extending jobless benefits, saying he believes the aid should not be added to the national debt.
But as he makes his case, nearly 20,000 out-of-work Nevadans, among more than 1 million Americans nationwide, will run out of benefits this month unless the program is extended. Nearly 176,000 Nevadans are out of work.
“Sen. Bunning’s obstructionist delay tactics are a perfect example of why the American people think Washington is broken,” Titus said.
With Southern Nevada residents “facing high unemployment, a foreclosure crisis and skyrocketing health care costs, they want to see elected officials working together,” she said. “Unfortunately, one Republican in the Senate is standing in the way.”
And rumor has it that Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) is also moving behind Bunning's blocking of unemployment aid to try to force a deal that includes an estate tax cut. Now doesn't that sound "fiscally responsible"? For all their talk (more like whining) of "DEBT! DEBT! DEBT!", they didn't mind George Bush adding $5 trillion to the national debt with his tax cuts for the super-rich and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. So let's try to get this right: Jim Bunning, Jon Kyl, and a handful of other Republicans want to keep blocking unemployment benefits until they can get their estate tax cuts for the super-rich that do nothing to stimulate the economy and only add to the debt?
GOP hypocrisy in action! Or is it inaction?
So what else can I say? Oh, I'll just let Shelley say it.
Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley fired off a pointed statement — though she did not name names.
“With Nevada’s unemployment rate in double digits and families relying on these benefits to put food on the table for breakfast, lunch and dinner, this move will only punish those in our community who are already struggling,” Berkley said.
Sorry, but this one is just too good to pass up. I have to get a start on my "weekend activities", so for now enjoy this juicy tidbit from NV Elephant Watch:
Lowden opposes job creation and tax cuts, but loves big bonuses
Sue Lowden opposes tax cuts for small businesses and efforts to create jobs in Nevada.
What she doesn't oppose is a $200,000 bonus for her husband the same year her gaming company cut a quarter of its work force and axed the 401(k) contribution while her family took home a $1 million paycheck.
Lowden joined embattled Republican Sen. John Ensign in taking a stand against the Jobs Bill, which would cut taxes for small businesses and create jobs, in response to criticism of her job-killing history as a Las Vegas casino boss.
The same year Sue Lowden's company slashed pensions and cut its work force, the Lowdens made $1 million, including a $200,000 bonus for Paul Lowden.
Taking home $1 million a year including hefty bonuses, the Lowdens don't have to worry about job creation like the maids, dealers and servers who no longer work in their casino do. And considering Sue Lowden's record as a job-killing casino owner, it should come as no surprise that she opposes a bill to create jobs for ordinary Nevadans -- a bill that 13 Republican Senators voted for. Those Republicans were willing to put American jobs first and partisan politics second. But if you look at Lowden's record rather than her rhetoric, it's clear how much she values the kind of jobs that don't bring in seven figures for her and her husband.
The Jobs Bill Lowden opposes, which was endorsed by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, will:
• Save 1 million jobs and invest in our nation's infrastructure
• Cut payroll taxes for business that hire workers who have been out of work for more than 60 days
• Give a tax credit for businesses that hire new workers and keep them on staff for at least a year
• Help small businesses grow by allowing them to write off investments
