The GOP's Biggest Loser on Healthcare Debacle: Paul Ryan

Delcan & Company; Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times

I and others have been making the case that of the Congressional Republicans perhaps the biggest fraud is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.  His hypocrisy is almost unlimited, especially as he claims to be a dutiful Catholic out of one side of his mouth while at the same time pushing policies that are abhorrent from the perspective of the Catholic Church's social gospel.  For far too long, the media has give Ryan a pass on this breath taking hypocrisy.  Worse yet, many journalists have acted as if Ryan is a serious thinker and a policy expert.  The realty is that these images are empty and unsupported by objective facts.  If Ryan is expert at anything, it is at devising ways to take from the poor and middle class while give to the wealthy and then openly lying about the horrific impact of his policies on average Americans.  Thankfully, last week's American Health Care Act debacle may finally have the laudatory effect of showing the shallowness and cravenness - I would even argue moral bankruptcy - of Mr. Ryan.  A main page editorial in the New York Times does a wonderful take down of Ryan. Here are highlights:

“Look, I’m a policy guy.” That was Paul Ryan’s line before last Friday, when the health care bill he designed in secret went down without a vote, his own party showing what they thought of his policy.

Time and again when he was asked about President Trump’s attacks on immigrants or the courts, his ties to Russia or his claims of massive election fraud, the speaker of the House would say he was too busy working on his agenda, “A Better Way,” to think about all that nasty stuff.

That Mr. Ryan failed on the policy promise that Republicans have been running on for eight years makes it clear that if he is the policy wonk of the Republican Party, then the Republican Party has no policy. And with a health care plan that would have stripped 24 million Americans of basic care and drastically hiked premiums for people over 60, it seems that they don’t much care what Americans need or want.

The discrepancy between promise and reality should be no surprise to anyone who has looked at Mr. Ryan’s proposals over the years. Mr. Ryan has been rolling out grand pronouncements in bound volumes with fancy covers and snappy names, but the main message never changed: America‘s “path to prosperity” (remember that one? 2011) lies in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, and slashing social programs and regulations.

Three years ago, a House Republican leader said his report on antipoverty programs showed that “Paul Ryan remains our big-ideas guy.” We called it “a high-minded excuse” to “eviscerate programs like Medicaid, Head Start and food stamps.”

After Mitt Romney, with Mr. Ryan as his running mate, lost the presidential election in 2012, . . . . Mr. Ryan responded by repackaging the same agenda for the 2016 election, even though working-class Americans were demonstrating fury at his establishment orthodoxy. They didn’t want Social Security cut and they wanted the “health care for everybody” that Mr. Trump promised.

After seven years and 60 failed Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, Mr. Ryan finally got his moment, and blew it.

After pulling the bill, Mr. Ryan showed he hadn’t given up on trying to make people think he was someone they could believe in. With no detectable irony, he described his humiliating defeat as “an incredible opportunity,” adding “There remains so much that we can do to help improve people’s lives, and we will.”

But he’s fooling no one any longer. Put to the test, Mr. Ryan revealed that all along, he doesn’t have anything more creative in his cranium than stale conservative dogma.

He had helped fulfill a cynical prophecy delivered last month by John Boehner, . . . . . “In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress,” Mr. Boehner said, “Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once. And all this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal — yeah, we’ll do replace, replace — I started laughing.”

We might thank Mr. Ryan for one thing. His dreadful legislation drove voters of both parties to flood town halls and the Capitol, demanding that Congress reject the bill.

One can only hope that going forward, the media will recognize Ryan for the small minded phony that he is and give him media coverage that no longer aids the pretense that the man is a serious thinker.  

How Donald Trump Violated the U.S. Embargo Against Cuba

Donald Trump likes to talk about "crooked Hillary," but given the Trump University scam, Trump's use of his foundation as a personal piggy bank, and Trump's six bankruptcies and screwing over of contractors, Trump is the one who looks crooked.  Now, on top of all of this, Newsweek is reporting that Trump violated the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.  Admittedly, the dollar amounts are not huger - at least for someone like Trump.  But what I find so disturbing is Trump's attitude.  Like his Christofascist supporters, Trump obviously thinks that he is above the laws that apply to the rest of America.  Here are excerpts from the Newsweek piece:

A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.

The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami, where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.

He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had reimbursed its consultants for the money they spent on their secret business trip to Havana.

 Without obtaining a license from the federal Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) before the consultants went to Cuba, the undertaking by Trump Hotels would have been in violation of federal law, trade experts say.

Officials with the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to emails seeking comment on the Cuba trip, further documentation about the endeavor or an interview with Trump. Richard Fields, who was then the principal in charge of Seven Arrows, did not return calls seeking comment.

In that statement, Conway has acknowledged that Trump broke the law. Paying the money for the business trip and meetings in Cuba – regardless of whether it resulted in an additional investment or casino deal – would directly violate the law. 

[O]ne OFAC official, who agreed to discuss approval procedures if granted anonymity, says the probability that the office would grant a license for work on behalf of an American casino is “essentially zero.”

The goal of the Cuba trip, the former Trump executive says, was to give Trump’s company a foothold should Washington loosen or lift the trade restrictions. While in Cuba, the Trump representatives met with government officials, bankers and other business leaders to explore possible opportunities for the casino company. The former executive says Trump had participated in discussions about the Cuba trip and knew it had taken place. 

The fact that Seven Arrows spent the money and then received reimbursement from Trump Hotels does not mitigate any potential corporate liability for violating the Cuban embargo. . . . If OFAC discovered this and found there was evidence of willful misconduct, they could have made a referral to the Department of Justice.” 

Like the Communist regime, the company was struggling, having piled up losses for years. In 1998 alone, Trump Hotels lost $39.7 million, according to the company’s financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its stock price had collapsed, falling almost 80 percent from a high that year of $12 a share to a low of just $2.75.

Though it has long been illegal for corporations to spend money in Cuba without proper authorization, there is no chance that Trump, the company or any of its executives will be prosecuted for wrongdoing. The statute of limitations ran out long ago, and legal analysts say OFAC’s enforcement division is understaffed, so the chances for an investigation were slim even at the time.

And perhaps that was the calculation behind the company’s decision to flout the law: the low risk of getting caught versus the high reward of lining up Cuban allies if the U.S. loosened or dropped the embargo. The only catch: What would happen if Trump’s Cuban-American supporters ever found out?

Dennis Hastert Demonized Gays While He Was the True Predator

Dennis Hastert is the poster boy for all of the anti-gay Republicans who demonize and strive to stigmatize gays even as they seek gay sex on the down low or, in the case of Hastert, molest under aged boys.  Indeed, the pattern is so consistent, that the "godly folk" - if they had any brains (admittedly, a very big if) - ought to start immediately questioning Republicans who jump on the anti-gay bandwagon.   A piece by Michelangelo Signorile at Huffington Post looks at the utter hypocrisy of Hastert - and by extension other GOP homophobes.  Here are column excerpts:

No, it wasn’t African-American young men of the ‘90s — supposedly feral, “fatherless” and “godless” urban youth hell-bent on murder and mayhem — who were “super-predators,” a myth since exposed and which was created by the Princeton political science professor John DiIulio (who later became George W. Bush’s first director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) based on junk science.

The same twisted ideas that led to the “super-predator” myth, which we’ve seen raised and debunked again during the current Democratic primary race amid discussion of the 1994 crime bill, have been used by anti-LGBT religious conservatives to argue against marriage equality. They promoted the notion that gays would destroy “traditional marriage,” which supposedly would contribute to a breakdown in the family, causing deviant and dangerous consequences.

Some of those arguments against marriage equality were informed by a similarly debunked myth that gay men are likely to be sexual predators, the lie perpetuated by anti-LGBT hate mongers for decades, using junk science to exploit and further rampant homophobia in society in same the way the “super-predator” myth used it to exploit and further racism.

Meanwhile, the true example of a “super-predator” appears to have been former GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a man who prosecutors now say molested at least 4 boys, including a 14-year-old and one who years later took his own life.

Worse yet, through the years, as he covered up the sexual assaults he committed as a wrestling coach back in Yorkville, Illinois, Hastert pushed policies and positions as a House member and as the Speaker of a far-right GOP majority from 1999 to 2007 that demonized gays in part by portraying gay men as sexual predators.

[As] a Politico report last year . . .  revealed that Hastert had a file in his office labeled “Homosexuals,” which included the sexual predator smear against gay men:

The records show that Hastert’s office kept a legislative file titled “Homosexuals,” filled with policy statements from social conservative groups like the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Research Council that criticized same-sex marriage and Clinton administration efforts to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. The file also includes a 1996 Weekly Standard article, “Pedophilia Chic” that warned that “revisionist suggestions about pedophilia” were being embraced by the left.

The scurrilous Weekly Standard piece raged on about teens supposedly being lured into sex by adult gay men. The Family Research Council, whose statements filled Hastert’s “Homosexuals” file, has perpetuated the lie that gays are more likely to engage in sexual assault against boys — among the defamatory claims that earned it the label of “hate group“ by the Southern Poverty law Center — and its leader, Tony Perkins, has called pedophilia “a homosexual problem.”

The Hastert story is revolting on so many levels. He sexually assaulted boys who trusted him as their wrestling coach, scarring them for life. And while he covered it up over a period of decades, he also assaulted an entire minority group that was under a barrage of attacks from religious conservatives, continually denying them civil rights and demonizing them and pummeling gay people over and over again, with bill after bill, informed by lie after lie. If there’s a true definition of a super-predator, Dennis Hastert is it.

If there is a Hell, Hastert should have a special reserved seat - along with all the predator Catholic priests and the Popes, cardinals, bishops and others who covered up for them and aided and abetted their molestation of children and minors.  They are all cut from the same hypocrisy filled cloth.