New York Times Slams Rentboy Raid

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A Dysfunctional GOP is Failing to Govern

When the Republican took control of both houses of Congress in January, we heard a great deal about the party being set on a course to prove that it could govern the nation and that it was responsible enough to hold the White House come 2016.  Two months later, what the GOP has delivered is dysfunction and batshitery as the party continues to pander to the most insane and extreme elements of the party base, the infamous Iran letter being but the most recent example.  Such dysfunction should come as no surprise given the fact that the base to which Congressional Republicans prostitute themselves reject knowledge, scientific facts, often don't even know geography - e.g., Tom Cotton - and live in a fantasy world detached from objective reality.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's dysfunction.  Here are excerpts:

It was only January when Republicans took full control of Congress, but already it is safe to say they have no earthly idea of what they want to accomplish.

What we’re seeing is not just a bit of sputtering before the GOP machine cranks up and begins to systematically fulfill its governing plan. There is no plan. Republican majorities in both the House and Senate are so out of control that they’ve managed a feat once thought impossible: They make the Democratic Party look like a model of unity and discipline.

McConnell should be deeply embarrassed that a mere freshman, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) could invite widespread ridicule by convincing 46 of his colleagues (including McConnell himself) to sign a dangerously inappropriate letter to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is one thing for a rookie senator, perhaps impressed with his new status, to decide he can barge into sensitive international negotiations that are clearly the president’s to conduct. But to convince so many others to go along with such a bad idea suggests a disturbing lack of adult supervision.

Predictably, Senate Republicans who signed Cotton’s missive have had to spend days explaining why. The better question, in my view, is how: Specifically, how could McConnell allow his majority to be hijacked in this manner?

Not that McConnell showed any greater ability to control events during the long and pointless fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.  . . . Did McConnell allow the scenario to play out as a way of teaching House Republicans the limits of their power? If so, it was a triumph of hope over experience. We’ve seen this movie again and again, and it always ends the same way: with the House leadership apparently shocked to learn it takes 60 votes to get anything done in the Senate.

For all the post-election talk about how the GOP was going to show the nation it is capable of governing, by now it is clear that many Republicans in Congress do not share this goal.

Refusing to make the compromises needed to pass mandatory legislation, such as budget appropriations, leads to self-inflicted wounds such as government shutdowns for which Congress is blamed. These are not difficult concepts to grasp. Yet many House Republicans — either for ideological reasons or because they fear inviting a primary challenge from the right — will not compromise at all.

Opposition to Obama — rather than any set of ideas, values or principles — is the party’s North Star. So if a letter that seeks to torpedo the president’s Middle East policy is circulating in the Senate cloakroom, anyone thinking about the Iowa caucuses is going to sign on.

Another GOP Meltdown Bodes Ill for 2016

Yesterday, after gaining all kinds of negative publicity, John Boehner and his band of GOP cretins among the House of Representatives punted on Home Land Security funding and passed a spending bill for the coming year.   That's the good news.  The bad news is that now the GOP will face another show down a year from now in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election when it will be important that the GOP can show that it can govern - a concept lost on the Christofascist/Tea Party darlings of the GOP base.  Kathleen Parker has again ceased, at least temporarily, drinking the GOP Kool-Aid and writes in the Washington Post that the GOP is setting itself up for failure in 2016.  Here are column excerpts:

I’m getting that deja vu feeling as House Republicans these past several days have failed to alter the public’s perception that they’re incapable of governing. 

This week marked Episode 2, Season 2 in the series “Homeland Security Face-Off.” Subtitle: “How Republicans Forfeit the White House in 2016.”

We’ve seen this all before. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) tries to get his conference to act rationally, but the 52 or so whose mission is to act disruptively at any opportunity force the House majority into a “bad deal,” to borrow from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s description of our current negotiations with Iran. 

President Obama, much of the media and the tea party gang share common cause in placing blame for the House’s fumblings on Boehner’s leadership. But comparisons to previous speakers are too facile. Times change.

Lest the tea party faction or the Freedom Caucus construct an effigy in my image, allow me to note that, yes, they are doing their people’s bidding. These folks who prefer shutdowns to compromise were elected to stand on principle, no matter the consequences. Given that most are in no danger of being challenged in their home districts, they seem perfectly content to oblige.

But principles defended at the expense of pragmatic application is the business of priests.

Here on terra firma, if you lose, you lose. You may be reelected as approval for your zeal as a live-free-or-die, stand-with-Bibi, “Duck Dynasty” patriot, but to what effect if one’s ability to bring about change is neutered in the process?

Not even Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who is a member of the tea party, has been able to whip his brethren into line. Herding cats? Loading frogs into a wheelbarrow? There is yet no simile or metaphor adequate to describe the moment. How about this: They are like the football player who intercepts a pass, then turns around and runs the ball over the opposing team’s goal line.

Insisting that Homeland Security funding be attached to the president’s executive actions to curtail deportations of immigrants here illegally — a predictably losing gamble for Republicans — was a touchdown for the other team.

Whether this solution changes public perception sufficiently — and whether it can hold up through the Republican primary process — is yet to be seen. In the meantime, what we do know is that a Republican can’t win the presidency if the party more widely is considered not ready for prime time.

Without the 40 percent of the Hispanic vote widely considered necessary to win — and enough independents and moderates who are turned off by the more-righteous-than-thou Freedom Caucus — a Republican doesn’t stand a chance.

The GOP ceased to be a party of rational thought and logic years ago now when the Christofascists - the Tea Party is truly a bunch of Christofascists parading under a different name along with white supremacists - were allowed to hijack the party base.  When those how blindly follow dogma unsupported by objective reality and knowledge, are allowed control, what we are now seeing is the only plausible outcome.  The insanity will continue. 

Poll: Americans Will Blame GOP for DHS Shutdown

As the GOP controlled House of Representatives remains dead set on pandering to the racist, anti-Hispanic elements of the GOP base, Congressional Republicans are on the verge of proving to the nation that the party is unable to govern responsibly and about to shut down the Department of Homeland Security rather than provide funding that could assist Hispanic immigrants covered by Barack Obama's executive order.  The good news is that a new CNN/ORC International poll indicates that voters will rightly blame the GOP (and in particular John Boehner) for the debacle that may endanger America's safety.  Here are highlights from Politico:

If the Department of Homeland Security shuts down later this month, most Americans would point the finger at congressional Republicans, a new CNN/ORC International poll finds.

The survey’s results find that if DHS shuts down on Feb. 27 — the date when the department is set to run out of funds — 53 percent of Americans would blame the Republicans in Congress. Thirty percent of respondents said they would blame President Barack Obama, while 13 percent said they would blame both.

House Republicans have passed a bill to fund the department that would also unravel Obama’s executive action granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants. Senate Democrats have indicated that the bill is dead on arrival in the upper chamber.

Multiple Senate Republicans, including Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have asked the House to pass a bill that would pass muster with Democrats.

McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that cutting off DHS’ funding would be “terrible.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner has repeatedly insisted that blame should fall on Senate Democrats for blocking the House’s version of the bill.

New York’s Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer responded in a statement, “When Speaker Boehner tied immigration to DHS funding he knew exactly what he was doing: saying, ‘Unless I get my way, I’m going to shut down a large part of the government.’ To now blame Democrats when members of his own party, conservative leaders and others have all asked him to back off this game of chicken is disingenuous at best.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has stated publicly that the House’s bill is a nonstarter in the Senate.

The Cliffs Ahead of Congressional Republicans

Even if they succeed in putting out the brush fire sparked by Rep. Steve Scalise's white supremacist ties, Congressional Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, will find themselves facing several potential cliffs as they try to prove to the nation that the GOP can govern and is more than the party of obstruction.  In addition to confrontations with the White House, McConnell and Boehner will need to seek to rein in the lunatic elements of their respective caucuses.  A piece in Politico looks at the coming circus.  Here are highlights:

They just won control of the Senate and have a historic majority in the House. The presidential election hasn’t yet begun. President Barack Obama says he wants to engage with Capitol Hill. For the first time in a while, there seems to be a genuine thirst for getting something done.

But guess what: Congress is running straight into another series of cliffs. . . . . The legislative land mines range from tricky transportation issues to funding controversial slices of the government, to updating a pricey Medicare program and, of course, the ever-explosive debt ceiling.

The lineup of these so-called cliffs could complicate the GOP’s desire for scoring a big accomplishment before the onset of presidential primary season. Furthermore, it could stoke intraparty confrontation and force Republicans into cooperation with the White House. These problems can’t be ignored, and GOP leadership will have to decide if it wants to set up short-term solutions or negotiate permanent fixes to these long-lingering problems. These deals don’t come together quickly and could require leaders to spend their hard-earned political capital on brokering compromises.

The first cliff comes just 25 legislative days into the 114th Congress. By Feb. 28, Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must devise a plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Conservatives are furious that Obama unilaterally changed the enforcement of immigration laws and will want to enact some change of their own.

The potential for an intraparty feud over immigration is high: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his conservative allies are urging Boehner and McConnell to play hardball and defund the administration’s order to shelter millions of immigrants from deportation.

In March, Congress has to deal, once again, with the extremely pricey formula by which the government reimburses Medicare providers — known inside the Beltway as the “doc fix.” Washington has punted on changes to the formula for years, but there is a desire to fix the problem for good. That would cost billions of dollars and could drive fiscal conservatives mad.

The highway trust fund will become insolvent in May, and federally funded infrastructure projects across America will grind to a halt if nothing is done. Congress will have to work out a new funding mechanism — the gas tax has not been raised since 1993, and fuel-efficient cars have steadily decreased its buying power. Raising the tax is politically difficult, so Boehner, McConnell and the transportation chairmen will have to work out another funding mechanism — or turn to another unpopular general fund bailout, rather than risk a construction shutdown.

The debt ceiling isn’t far behind — the nation’s borrowing authority will need to be extended sometime between the late spring or early fall.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans must confront the unique challenge of processing Obama’s executive and judicial branch nominees while occasionally flexing their parliamentary muscle to halt some confirmations.

The GOP has vowed to hold numerous votes on amendments to each piece of legislation, a key promise of McConnell’s reign, along with working a five-day workweek and empowering the committees. But Democrats are eager to prove the GOP’s parliamentary promises are hard ones to keep.

9/11 Redux: 'Thousands of Aliens' in U.S. Flight Schools Illegally

While the Chimperator and the GOP make pronouncements that they have made Americans safer, it now appears like so many other things that they do, it's all talk and no action. American citizens are now spied upon domestically and have vastly reduced privacy and are subject to arrest at the Chimperator's whim, yet the same problems that allowed the 9/11 attack to occur still go on today as shown in this new ABC News article (http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=4353991). In short, we have given up freedoms and legal protections for nothing. If anything, Bush/Cheney have made the country much less secure and have vastly inflamed Islamic hatred towards the USA. Here are some story highlights:

Thousands of foreign student pilots have been able to enroll and obtain pilot licenses from U.S. flight schools, despite tough laws passed in the wake of the 9/ll attacks, according to internal government documents obtained by ABC News. "Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today," wrote one regional security official to his boss at the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration.

Under the new laws, American flight schools are only supposed to provide pilot training to foreign students who have been given a background check by the TSA and have a specific type of visa. But in thousands of cases that has not happened, according to the documents and current and former government officials involved in the program. "TSA's enforcement is basically nonexistent," said former FAA inspector Bill McNease, in an interview for ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson."

No one from the TSA or Homeland Security would agree to be interviewed for this story, but officials said they were preparing an official statement in response. The Department of Homeland Security would not provide an official from the flight school program to be interviewed for this story. In a statement, the DHS said, "We have a high degree of confidence that our layered security measures, both seen and unseen, have raised the level of security in our aviation sector." The statement did not address the issue of the thousands of students who have received pilot training and licenses with improper visas,