Leftovers from the cave

The past week's leftovers:

With so many hawkish wingers who won't shave a budgetary dime in protecting the lives of Americans from terrorists overseas, it does seem odd that the very same hawkish wingers on the right  continue to hack at Obamacare that protects the lives of millions of uninsured Americans at home.

* * * * *

That was another of Gov.Kasich's sunny performances in his CNN interview by Gloria Borger.  It could have ended quickly after he said that all of his options were on the table, or at least after he again mentioned  Matthew 25 (the part about feeding the poor!). He also shrugged off any interest in the vice presidency , cheerily saying he's been on the veep list since he was 35. He also called for an unspecified "battle plan"against ISIS and claimed to be  "worried about America".  He dismissed any thoughts about  conservative opposition  if he decides to run for the presidency (which at this very moment is an idea that controls every lobe of his brain) because right-wingers do not represent the culture of Ohio. You'd be better off if you didn't allow any of the above Kasichisms burden your lobes.

* * * * *

Re Matthew 25,  do you think the guv might start showing up with John 3:16 on a placard in his public appearances - the way they do it at baseball games?

* * * * *

Hope you saw the angry letter in Monday's Beacon Journal from Brian Williams defending Common Pleas Judge Tammy O'Brien   for recusing herself from more than 60 cases after her bailiff threatened to quit because the bailiff didn't like the assistant county procesutor assigned to the court.  "Mercilessly vilified," Williams complained.  But it does seem that a judge at the common pleas level should have weighed  the consequences of her behavior.  Indeed, she finally did by saying she would now preside over all of the cases from now on.

If you do crossword puzzles (as I do) Rep. Darrell Issa, the toothy mega-millionaire Republican from California, is manning the battlements against the army of Giuliani  critics by asking us to thank the New York City mayor.  But he also tests all of us to know the difference between "believe" and 'wasn't".

Here's Issa:

"Rudy Giuliani said he didn't 'believe'  [that Obama doesn't love America]  He didn't say the president 'wasn't'."

Yeah.  Me, too.

Darrell Issa: Catching up with Louie Gohmert

We get a little spooked when we hear a congressman who is  the Republicans' leading investigator  engtangle himself in the the English language. We could have forgiven my immigrant grandmother for imprecise references to little things like verbs and nouns.  But when Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman and Inspector Clouseau of the House Oversight Committee does it, you have to wonder whether America has moved one step closer to Orwell's Newspeak.

Issa,  a forever showboating right-wing nuisance, has yet to produce anything of substance from his feral probes.  Back in February 2012 , you may remember,  he barred Sandra Fluke from appearing on his all-male panel on contraception, supposing she lacked "expertise". That raised the bar to declaring that condoms and such are only a guy thing.

Now, back in the fetid trenches of Benghazi, Issa insisted  that "an act of terror is different from terrorist actions".

Huh?  Right.   For this profound insight into international terrorism and American unpreparedness  (read: Obama/Clinton deriliction) we have  hauled out the cherished Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy  (GALL)  Award for the congressman.

That will put him still a tad behind  on this day to the Louie Gohmert Award.  But with Issa, you can be certain there will  be more opportunities for him to even the score.

Universal questions of the millennium

I have questions:

• As the Republican presidential campaigns shambles toward Election Day,  when will good soldier John Boehner crack and start sobbing on TV?
• 
  
• Who will convince  Mitt Romney that the  presidency is  not an  entitlement?
• 
  
• Who will respond to comedian Lewis Black's appeal for someone to make his bathroom as white as the GOP convention that he viewed?
• 
  
• When a Romney strategist asserted that Mitt would Etch-a-Sketch after the primaries, was he referring to the 2016 primaries?
• 
  
• Would it at least help the economy with job creation if  the government made silver  spoons for  the  47 pct. of Americans whom he says won't take responsibilitiy for themselves?
• 
  
• Would you join an office pool  to predict the day when Rep. Darrell Issa will say something intelligent?
• 
  
• Will Josh Mandel ,  the Republican candidate for the senate,  tell us whether he was really   stationed in the Green Zone in Iraq.
• 
  
• When will Paul Ryan stop referring to Romney as his "running mate"?
•       
• Why won't the media ask Paul Ryan about the time he saw the North Pole from his front porch?
• 
  
• Am I the only person who doesn't  think Comedian Dennis Miller is funny?
• 
  
• When will Rush Limbaugh refer to all women as sluts?
• 
  
• How many wives is Mitt Romney permitted to have? 
• 
  
• Finally, will Mitt add an elevator for his dancing horses to his palatial home?  
• 
  
• And finally again: Wouldn't Mitt's life be a lot less complicated if he let H&R  Block  do his taxes?    

•     

Issa's Cursed House of Seven Gables

Has there ever been a moment in the history of House of Representatives when one political party engaged en masse in a witch hunt?  That's the valid question that can be raised by the gang of Republicans led by Rep. Darrell Issa in voting Attorney General  Eric Holder in criminal and civil contempt of Congress.

How dare Issa, the California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and wealthiest congressman of Capitol Hill (several hundred million $$).

You need to understand that this sinister grandstander said before the vote that he had no evidence  that Holder had any knowledge of the screwed-up undercover gun deal that was to lead to drug dealers in Mexico.  No evidence.  So what!  If Holder had agreed to add a few more documents to the  thousands that the Justice Department had  already turned over to Issa, who knows?  There might been a sliver of damning  information leading to Holder.  That's the Issa narrative, at least.

Folks, this isn't even good political farce.   It's a power-mad committee chairman leading his lemmings who are all over the Tea Party-driven House. Issa had to know that his stunt  would go nowhere outside the boundaries of his captives on Capitol Hill.  The Justice Department quickly announced that it had no intention of prosecuting Holder,  the first presidential  cabinet member to be voted in contempt. That's of no consequence to Issa.  He had already succeeded in showing the Obama Administration who was boss on Capitol Hill, such as this monster is.

The Congressional Black Caucus and its white allies in the House marched out of the chamber before the vote to show Issa that they had no patience for  playing his game of seeking  and destroying an African-American attorney general.  Issa's shameful behavior should have erased any hopes  among black voters that the GOP is on their side.

Issa  has turned his side in the House of Representatives into Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables, which existed under a curse.

When only one ear hears a hearing

I'M A WHITE GUY. Always have been since birth. But I've always been put off by so many white guys, pejoratively speaking, that I've met over the years who use the color of their skin as Exhibit A of swaggering superiority over various other human hues. As if that isn't bad enough, I can also report there are a lot of swaggering white guys in the land who are deeply into patriarchy predating the Dark Ages.

That was easily confirmed, by Rep. Darrell Issa's hokey male-dominated congressional hearing on separation of church and state but was really all about contraceptives. Issa is a native Clevelander, the richest man in Congress (estimated $450 million), politically fashioned by the accident of his gender and culture, and submissive only to the dark climate of his remarkably conservative district in Southern California. (Could he possibly be one of Gov. Kasich's California Wackadoodles, too? Naw. Too white , well off and Republican to be criticized.)

One day earlier this week, Issa sat as the committee chairman for his inquiry that paraded a panel of witnesses carefully selected to ignore the certain argument against his premise that contraceptives are bad business. He even barred a woman law student from testifying for the other side. There's that side of democracy, too.

Here are the carefully chosen enablers of Issa's dense patriarchal premise that men know better about everything: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Yeshiva University; Dr. Craig Mitchell, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Bishop William E. Lori, representing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Matthew Harrison, President of Missouri Lutheran Synod, (who claimed conscience martyrdom by the Feds), Prof. Ben Mitchell, Union University (evangelical).

You might want to bet $10,000 that all were against abortion and a lot of other bothersome female stuff.

Dissenters would have had more luck walking barefoot over a stretch of hot coals.

But wait: That one misrepresented hearing drew a coast-to-coast response from women who won't let anybody forget their outrage. And we're told they outnumber the white guys. After all, it is 2012.

As I keep insisting: Republicans, you have a problem.

Out of the mouths of knaves

ADD THESE POINTS OF interest in your entertainment guide for your visit to Capitol Hill:

Meet Andy Harris, the conservative Maryland anesthesiologist, who will be going to Congress as a big winner with an anti-Obamacare campaign. At a freshman orientation meeting, he declared his confusion over why his federal health care benefits didn't kick in immediately after he was sworn-in in January instead of having him wait until February. Well, it is what it is, Doc. Maybe all of your sleep-inducing has had an effect on you, too.

Meet Sen. John Ensign, Nevada Republican, another harsh opponent of Obamacare, who accepted without protest a $960,000 earmarked grant to the University of Nevada for a primary care residency program. Ensign has opposed earmarks, too.

Meet Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose state of Kentucky has received nearly $1 million in earmarks. He now says he supports a moratorium on ....um...earmarks.

Finally, meet conservative Rep. Darrell Issa, a fun guy from California and the wealthiest congressman in the corps, who went on Rush Limbaugh's show and denounced President Obama "as one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times." When he was challenged later to put up or shut up - Rep. Dennis Kucinich was among those who joined the assault on him - Issa meekly recanted on CNN with regrets about his fumble in his own (Limbaugh's) end zone. "If I had to do it over again, I'd have parsed my words a little more carefully," he said.

"Do I think the president is personally corrupt? No. I should never have implied that or created that in a quick statement on a radio call-in."

Strange things are said with so much adrenalin flowing in the Republican ranks these days.

Be patient, Issa says. You may win the lottery someday

IF YOU ARE serious about finding a reason to support the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, you might want to consider as good a reason as any from Rep. Darrell Issa, a fringe Republican from California. Rising to the challenge in the Fox News Echo Class, Issa said that it would be important to any of us if we happened to win a lottery. Said Issa: "One of the things that you lose in the debate is most people don't make over a quarter million dollars a year. But a great many people once in their lifetime will sort of win the lottery." Cool. Tell me when it's my turn.

Issa, who made a fortune in the auto security business, is the richest man in Congress with a piggy bank of $250 million. According the ThinkProgress, if the GOP takes over the House of Representatives, he would be chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. His early agenda would include investigations of the U.S. Post Office Department and ACORN, despite the fact that the community organizing operation has already been scrutinized inside out on a bipartisan basis. He will also be raising more questions about President's Obama's birth, reports ThinkProgress, as well as whether his parents were ever married. All of this has the the makings of still another Republican presidential candidate. Although he represents a very conservative district that includes part of San Diego, he actually was born in Cleveland (I haven't seen his birth certificate) and attended the Kent State University Stark campus for awhile. He's s rich, kooky pol but the kind of guy who will make his party proud even though very few of us will ever hold that big winning lottery ticket.