"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Friday, March 18, 2011
Tom Ganley (R-OH)-- First Of Cantor's Young Guns To Be Indicted
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Did you think Boehner's crooked buddy Tom Ganley-- remember him?-- landed on the garbage heap of history after being thrashed by Betty Sutton 56-44% last November? The multimillionaire sex predator is the first-- though surely not the last (keep an eye on David Rivera)-- of Eric Cantor's and Paul Ryan's Republican Young Guns to be indicted.
A seven-count indictment accuses Tom Ganley, a high-profile auto dealer and onetime congressional candidate, of kidnapping a 39-year-old Cleveland woman and having sexual contact with her.
Ganley, 68, faces three felony charges of gross sexual imposition, and single counts of kidnapping, abduction, solicitation, and menacing by stalking, according to Ryan Miday, a spokesman for County Prosecutor Bill Mason.
A county grand jury returned the indictments late Tuesday, nearly six months after the woman filed a lawsuit accusing Ganley of grabbing her from behind, wrapping his arms around her, kissing her and reaching into her pants during a meeting at one of his dealerships.
...The woman's lawyer, Ed Heben, commended the thoroughness of the investigation by Cleveland detectives and the county prosecutor. He also said his client welcomed the indictments.
"My client feels somewhat vindicated already that the grand jury had the faith and belief that these allegations appeared to be true and that somebody's business and political stature did not effect the efficiency of the investigation," he said. "We believe all of the charges will be proven true."
The woman, a married mother of four children, had volunteered to work on Ganley's campaign after she heard him speak at a Tea Party rally in downtown Cleveland in 2009, according to her lawsuit.
She later met Ganley at his Chevrolet dealership on Lorain Avenue, where she said he solicited sex from her, Miday said.
In exchange, she said in the lawsuit, Ganley offered to lower the interest rates on a van she bought from his dealership, to repair her van for free, and to give her a job at one of his dealerships.
Her lawsuit accused Ganley of making threatening calls after the encounter at the dealership. Miday said the calls resulted in the menacing-by-stalking charge.
Heben said the woman didn't report her allegations to police until October 2010 because she feared no one would believe her, due partly to Ganley's close ties to law enforcement.
...Another woman also accused Ganley of sexual misconduct after the Cleveland woman went public with her story. A 50-year-old woman from Broadview Heights told Cleveland police that Ganley grabbed her inappropriately five years ago during a visit to his Chevrolet dealership.
According to DCCC spokesman Jesse Ferguson, “Tom Ganley is just one of the candidates with dangerous histories and violent behavior that House Republicans backed in past elections and it’s only a matter of time until the troubling histories of the others come to light. With the criminal investigation expanding into Representative David Rivera, it’s clear that Ganley isn’t the first-- or the last-- of the candidates Republican leaders promoted whose background and behavior sends a chilling message.”
Republicans are desperate to knock off Betty Sutton, an effective and inspiring leader. All Ganley's millions didn't do it-- he threw $2,363,417 of his own money into the race, far more than Sutton was able to raise-- so now the GOP is determined to gerrymander Ohio in a manner that will eliminate her district and force her into a primary with Dennis Kucinich, another progressive champion.
Following The Money... Sometimes Right Down A Congressional Rabbit Hole
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Veteran populist Democrat Marcy Kaptur won her 15th House term on November 2, although she was outspent 4 to 1 by her opponent, Boehner crony and GOP Nazi Rich Iott. Iott was one of 15 Republicans who spent over a million dollars of his own in this election cycle. Only 4 of the big-spending Republicans won seats-- Rick Scott (FL- $75,000,000 or $29/vote), Scott Rigell (VA- $2,424,364 or $28/vote), Bill Flores (TX- $1,061,224, $10/vote, and Ron Johnson ($8,238,465, $7/vote). The rest, like Iott, lost, including Linda McMahon, who spent $46,600,161 of her own cash ($95/vote) and Meg Whitman, who burned through an eye-popping $175,000,000 ($57/vote). Iott's investment amounted to $20/vote.
In all Iott raised $1,893,012 to Kaptur's $529,047 (although she still has over $800,000 in her campaign chest for next time). Other than the money Boehner and Boehner's personal PAC gave Iott, virtually all of it came right out of his own bank account. When he isn't running around in an SS Panzer uniform-- or defending Nazis as "freedom fighters" on CNN-- Iott, a college dropout who inherited his adoptive parents' grocery store chain, is a passive investor in a variety of businesses, from making salsa to making films.
In 2008-- in a district where Obama beat McCain 62-36%-- Kaptur captured 74% against a less well-financed-- and less controversial-- Republican than Iott, Brad Leavitt (who also lost to her in 2006 by the same margin). In 2006 the final tally was 149,886 to 53,803. Then in the presidential election year the totals shot up to 222,054 to 76,512. This year, with a very motivated Republican base nationwide-- and a lot of press coverage over the Nazi stuff-- Iott's total went way beyond the GOP totals in 2006 or 2008 to 81,876, while Kaptur's vote plummeted to 117,890. But in a district that Democratic even that amount of money couldn't propel Iott to victory, especially not after the nazi story broke big.
The other big-spending House candidates had varied results. Car dealer Tom Ganley spent more and also had a personal scandal, when two women reported that he sexually molested them. One, a campaign volunteer and devout Christian right-wing mother of four, is suing him for attempted rape. His $2,213,417 (out of $2,646,969 raised-- $29/vote, as it turns out) didn't do him much good either, even though it was about double what incumbent Betty Sutton spent. In 2006 Sutton won-- in an open seat-- with 129,290 votes (61%) to 81,997 against a wing-nut who got 81,997 votes. Two years later-- with Obama beating McCain 57-24% in the district-- Sutton beat another Republican 189,542 (65%) to 104,066 (35%). This year all Ganley's millions couldn't save him from the rape scandal and the big GOP enthusiasm surge only brought him 92,608 votes (45%), not enough despite a very significant drop off in Democratic turnout (115,331), similar to what we saw nationally as the Democratic base gave its own confused party a big thumbs down.
The two million-dollar-plus Republicans who did win, were both in more GOP-friendly territory. Scott Rigell spent $2,757,983 and $2,424,364 came from his own personal wealth. Blue Dog Glenn Nye, who worked very, very hard to turn off the Democratic base in his district for the past two years, voting far more frequently with the Republicans than with the Democrats on key issues, only spent $1,583,453. (The DCCC spent another $788,447.63 on negative TV ads against Rigell.) Nye won the seat in 2008 from GOP backbencher Thelma Drake 141,857 (52%) to 128,486 (48%), Obama beating McCain 51-49% in a district Bush won by healthy margins against both Gore and Kerry. This year only half of Nye's voters bothered coming to the polls for him (70,306) and he only managed 43%, many Democrats correctly understanding that he was working for the same corporate interests that the Republicans work for against their families and completely unworthy of their votes.
The other big GOP self-funder running for a House seat who won was Bill Flores in a very red Texas district between Dallas and Houston that the GOP has been trying to win for years. Although Democratic presidential candidates don't even get one-third of the vote here, conservative Chet Edwards was reelected in 2006 93,198 (58%) to 64,617 (40%) and in 2008 134,592 (53%) to 115,581 (45%). This year, Flores successfully deployed his cash to capitalize on Republican enthusiasm and Democratic lack of enthusiasm. It was a slaughter, Edwards only getting 62,926 votes (36%) to Flores' 106,275 (62%). This is now a safe Republican seat. Flores spent almost exactly what Edwards did-- $2,537,226 (1,061,224 from his own pockets) to $2,533,771. But Edwards was one of the 39 conservative Democrats voting against the healthcare reform bill, helping to guarantee an anemic turnout among base Democratic voters. His overall ProgressivePunch score on contentious, substantive issues was 53.28 this session, meaning he voted with the Democrats about the same number of times he voted with the Republicans, a strategy that worked for him in past years, but not this time when Fox and Hate Talk radio had Republican voters riled up and looking for blood and many Democratic voters felt they had no reason to bother voting. A flood of outside money on behalf of Flores plus his own cash doomed Edwards and ended his congressional career permanently.
Here's some George Carlin to think about today. But whatever conclusions you come to-- and you're free to come to any, of course-- personally I don't think any Wall Street executives (or the politicians they own), should be executed without fair, speedy trials first:
UPDATE: Frank Rich Wants To Know Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?
Rich has a great column in the Sunday Times and I'll take a few excerpts in the hope you'll want to click the link and read the whole thing.
In the aftermath of the Great Democratic Shellacking of 2010, one election night subplot quickly receded into the footnotes: the drubbing received by very wealthy Americans, most of them Republican, who tried to buy Senate seats and governor’s mansions. Americans don’t hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, who sacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune-- not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper-- to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.’d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, “I made my money the old-fashioned way-- I inherited it.”
To my mind, these losers deserve a salute nonetheless. They all had run businesses that actually created jobs (Raese included). They all wanted to enter public service to give back to the country that allowed them to prosper. And by losing so decisively, they gave us a ray of hope in dark times. Their defeats reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don’t always end up running the asylum of American politics.
The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election-- those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.
The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid-- the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007-- up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.
It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.
How Safe Are Tea Parties And Other GOP Functions For Women? How Many More Tom Ganleys Are Lurking Out There?
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GOP sex predator Tom Ganley and his victim
Here at DWT we're big fans of progressive Democrat Betty Sutton, the Ohio congresswoman who wrote the Cash for Clunkers bill, and we've been trying to help you keep up with the shenanigans of her opponent, crooked multimillionaire used car dealer and close Boehner ally Tom Ganley. Ganley thinks he can buy Sutton's seat by flooding the airwaves with lies. Or he did 'til yesterday. As of yesterday, he has something more pressing to think about. As our friends at Plunderbund reported, a lifelong Republican and a Tea Party activist claims Ganley met her at a Tea Party rally and later, at one of his shady car dealerships, sexually assaulted her.
His accuser said she attended a Cleveland Tea Party rally where Ganley spoke on July 3, 2009, when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate, before he decided to run for Congress. Impressed by Ganley’s anti-abortion platform, the lawsuit says, the woman approached him, introduced herself and her children and offered to volunteer on his campaign.
The woman then visited Ganley’s Chevrolet dealership on Lorain Avenue in Cleveland three times during the following weeks, to discuss volunteer campaign duties and a reduction in the interest rate on a car loan she received from a Ganley dealership, the lawsuit says.
Ganley talked during the meetings about fixing her van for free, reducing her interest rate and giving her a job at a dealership, according to the suit.
In their second meeting, Ganley told the woman that he and his wife lead separate lives and live on opposite sides of their home, the suit says. In each of the meetings, the suit says, Ganley pressed her about what she does for "fun."
On her last visit to Ganley’s office, Aug. 1, the woman said she dropped off her van for repairs. While she waited in Ganley’s office, the suit says, he made sexually suggestive comments and invited her to join him and his friends at a condominium he owns in Strongsville. Ganley gave her a $100 bill and told her to buy some lingerie and high-heeled shoes, according to the lawsuit.
Ganley told her he wanted her to dominate her, parade her on a leash and have sex with her in front of his "play friends," the suit says. It accuses him of grabbing her from behind, wrapping his arms around her, kissing her and, despite her resistance, reaching into her pants.
So another top priority Republican candidate with the idea that women can be paraded around on leashes, beaten, or-- in the case of Daniel Webster in Florida-- stoned to death if she isn't obedient. And what do all three, Ganley, David Rivera (R-FL) and Taliban Dan (R-FL), have in common? They're all Young Guns. Do you have to be a pervert to be a Young Gun? Ganley is extremely close to John Boehner, who has a keen sense for people with millions of dollars and an easy sense of ethics. I wonder what Sarah Palin will have to say about this case. The victim, Robin Cupedro Saccany lists Sarah Palin as the only "like and interest" on her Facebook page. The law suit document is pretty startling and it must be pretty embarrassing for the other Young Guns who don't prey on women they meet at political rallies.
And this is hardly Ganley's first legal "woman problem." He's even more sleazy and self-entitled than your garden variety Republican congressional candidate. As Roll Call reported last week, Ganley has plenty of legal problems involving women.
In one pending case against Ganley-owned dealerships, a former female employee alleges that management discriminated against her because of her gender. In court papers, the ex-employee alleges that she was “routinely given less opportunities for commissions that were given to the male employees” and that the mistreatment “made working conditions so intolerable that any reasonable person under the circumstances would have felt compelled to resign."
So Ganley treats women employees like dirt and tries to rape a married female volunteer who has introduced herself as an anti-Choice fundamentalist Christian, while David M. Rivera beats up women and claims it's a different David M. Rivera and neither of them look quite as bad as Daniel Webster who tried passing a bill to prohibit divorce and believes disobedient women should be stoned to death because "it's in the Bible." The Republican Party-- more dangerous to Americans than the Taliban! And not a peep from Boehner, Cantor, Sessions, Ryan, McCarthy about any of their Young Guns.
UPDATE: Sexual Predator Tom Ganley Makes The TV News
Every northeast Ohio TV channel covered Tom Ganley's attempted rape of his conservative Christian campaign worker, a mother of four who he lured to his office and assaulted, after dousing himself in cologne and spraying breathe freshener in his mouth. NRCC Chair Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Young Guns führer, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), neither having ever shown an ounce of compassion for women or mothers-- Sessions is a notorious womanizer almost on a David Vitter level-- are refusing to remove Ganley from the Republican Party's Young Gun program, bringing an air of suspicion onto the entire slate, which, as I mentioned, also includes woman beater David M. Rivera (R-FL) and, worst of all, religious fanatic Daniel "Taliban Dan" Webster, a disciple of Bill Gothard, who believes women who refuse to subjugate themselves to the will of men be stoned to death.
Who Would You Rather Have Represent You, An Ideological Fanatic... Or A Crook?
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This week Amanda Terkel reported about the disturbing tendency of the GOP towards endorsing anti-choice fanatics who insist on forcing rape and incest victims to give birth to children they were violently forced to conceive, the ultimate Big Government interference into the life of a woman. Aside from the long-standing crackpot incumbents like Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH) and Duncan Hunter's alcoholic son, DH, Junior (R-CA), there are 60 more who favor forcing rape victims to bear the child of their rapist including dangerous sociopaths and religious fanatics like GOP House challengers Bill Flores (TX-17), Stephen Broden (TX-30), Rocky Raczkowski (MI-9) and Sandy Adams (FL-24), crazy gubernatorial picks like Carl Paladino (R-NY), Bill Brady (R-IL) and Nathan Deal (R-GA), the last two of whom are probably winners, and some of the Tea Party fringe candidates running for Senate-- Sharron Angle (R-NV), Ken Buck (R-CO), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Joe Miller (R-AK), Christine O'Donnell (R-DE) and, of course, non-board certified eye doctor Rand Paul (R-KY). Marco Rubio is like a greased pig on this issue and depending who he's talking to he's either pro-rapist or anti-rapist and pro-incest or anti-incest. No one really knows where he stands because he's constantly flip-flopping and going out of his way to be hazy and sneaky in his approach. He's anti-choice for sure but doesn't want to be seen as being as extreme as O'Donnell, Angle, Rand Paul and the "new generation" of Republican extremists.
There are very few pro-Choice Republicans left-- and they're being squeezed out of the party. Many Republican office seekers, though, don't care one way or the other about abortion rights and just want to get on with Business... literally. The GOP is, after all, the conservative party that serves the interest of the wealthy. It's the party's raison d'être and, for them, the social issues is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Conservative politics for someone like Boehner or Ryan is about money and power; period. One of Boehner's handpicked shills in his homestate of Ohio, for example, is a spectacularly successful used car salesman, Tom Ganley, who's become rich by ripping off car buyers for decades-- and now wants to move his skill set to Capitol Hill.
In the DCCC’s latest round of TV ads, the campaign committee tells voters Ganley “made millions taking advantage of average folks.”
“Millionaire used-car salesman Tom Ganley is trying to ride his reputation into Congress — he should be trying to hide it,” a narrator says in the new DCCC ad. “Sued by customers for fraudulent and deceptive practices, two ‘F’s’ from the Better Business Bureau, over 160 complaints in just three years. Tom Ganley will try to sell you on his reputation, but with this used-car salesman, it’s buyer beware.”
With accusations about Ganley’s business practices blanketing the northeastern Ohio airwaves, the DCCC may turn next to numerous court documents claiming his businesses not only ripped-off their customers, but also mistreated their employees.
According to court records obtained by Roll Call, Ganley’s dealerships-- like many companies-- are currently being sued for racial, gender and age discrimination.
The Ganley campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In an interview, National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Tory Mazzola said Democratic harping on the wealthy candidate’s alleged business practices are a distraction...
In one pending case against Ganley-owned dealerships, a former female employee alleges that management discriminated against her because of her gender. In court papers, the ex-employee alleges that she was “routinely given less opportunities for commissions that were given to the male employees” and that the mistreatment “made working conditions so intolerable that any reasonable person under the circumstances would have felt compelled to resign.”
In another pending case, one current and one former black employee are suing a Ganley Jeep dealership for not paying them fair wages and for giving white co-workers preferential treatment, as well as for their boss’s “disparaging remarks about [their] intelligence.”
Accusations of age discrimination have also been lodged at a Ganley Jeep dealership. In February 2009, two employees-- one 55 years old and the other 61 years old-- alleged that they were fired and replaced with younger salesmen who were in their 20s and 30s, an act that “had a great probability of causing substantial damage” to their predecessors, according to allegations in the court documents.
In May 2006, a former employee, who was white, accused two of Ganley’s dealerships of firing her because her boyfriend was black. Court papers also show the former office manager was erroneously accused of stealing $4,000 from a petty-cash drawer.
The false accusation resulted in the employee’s arrest and four nights in jail, where she “was forced to undergo degrading, humiliating and emotionally distressing experiences, including but not limited to, being strip-searched and forced to use and watch others use open bathroom facilities,” according to allegations in the court documents.
Ganley’s lawyers and the former employee settled the case in June 2007. Details of the agreement are unavailable.
Although cheating consumers and abusing workers could get Ganley far inside Boehner's GOP House caucus, lately he's probably getting even more famous for another Boehner trait-- blatant dishonesty and ye olde art of the flip-flop. PolitiFact's has just given him their Full Flop rating in regard to Betty Sutton's popular and successful Cash For Clunkers program.
The program devised by Sutton provided government rebates of up to $4,500 to buyers who traded in gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient models. The U.S. Department of Transportation says that over the weeks that program lasted in 2009, nearly 680,000 older vehicles were replaced. It says the nation's economy benefited immediately from this stimulus program, which caused a distinct upward movement in GDP and created or saved tens of thousands of jobs at a crucial time in the recovery process.
But the Republican candidate seeking Sutton’s congressional seat-- Brecksville auto dealer Tom Ganley-- says the program was a clunker even though government records show it helped his dealerships sell 934 cars worth $20.6 million. In recent interviews, he has insisted the program sparked a temporary sales spike that was followed by a slowdown, and had negative long-term effects on the industry and used-car consumers who could have bought trade-ins that were destroyed under the program.
Ganley’s views on the "Cash for Clunkers" program have evolved dramatically since he decided to run for Congress against Sutton. Ganley had nothing but praise for the program an August 2009 Time Warner Cable interview conducted while he was pursuing the GOP U.S. Senate nomination in Ohio that was ultimately won by Cincinnati’s Rob Portman.
Ganley told In the Spotlight host Bob Conklin that he generally opposed government bailouts for business, but believed the "Cash for Clunkers" program "really worked."
"I don’t think it is a double standard," he said. "Once again, the government was searching for ways to stimulate our economy and create jobs. And I’m sure your read the headlines just recently. General Motors is going to a second shift in Lordstown because of this. That creates jobs it also creates taxpayers. They are bringing back something close to 1,300 employees at Lordstown.. Those 1,300 people are going to begin to pay taxes. That’s 1,300 jobs we’ve stimulated through the Cash for Clunkers. Plus, I have created jobs out of necessity in my stores now because of the large volume of folks coming in. We are bringing back people that we had laid off."
Nearly a year later, on August 18, 2010, he told the Plain Dealer that the government stimulus and "Cash for Clunkers" program "created work, not jobs." He said he would have voted against the program if he were in Congress, even though he’s a car dealer.
I've been looking into what most of the Republican congressional candidates have in common this year-- no it isn't O'Donnell's anti-masturbation mania-- and it seems to be a threat to block tax cuts for the middle class if the wealthiest 2 or 3% of Americans don't get them too. Their message is, "If the rich don't get their Bush tax breaks extended, no one else will either." Crooked Ohio used car dealer Tom Ganley is a good example. He's trying to buy a seat for himself in northeast Ohio (suburbs of Cleveland and Akron) and he isn't terribly savvy, just sort of parroting the Boehner line. His opponent, progressive Congresswoman Betty Sutton has been an indefatigable fighter for the middle class and is a champion of extending the tax breaks for middle class families. Ganley is more interested in the 3% of Americans who have benefited the most from the Bush economy: " The President just doesn’t seem to understand how dire a situation his policies have created. AND he’s now arguing a step that I believe will certainly make the problem far worse! He’s proposing the elimination of Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year-- in other words, a TAX INCREASE for all those folk. He says he would use that revenue to fund a temporary tax credit for business investment."
A bit to the south of Sutton's district, Congressman John Yarmuth, who represents the Louisville area and is also a firm backer of an extension of middle-class tax cuts and new incentives for small business, is up against Todd Lally, a guy widely seen as dangerously uninformed and angry to the point of becoming unhinged. And Lally, like Ganley, seems obsessed with helping "hard-pressed" millionaires.
Ganley and Lally may be stupider than your average garden variety GOP House candidates, but, essentially, it's the same message wherever you look. When asked directly by the Louisville Courier-Journal if he thought wealthy people were really the ones hurting, he replied, “Yes, I think some of them are.” Economists have concluded that, in fact, the wealth of American millionaires increased by 16% in 2009 alone, while the income of middle-class workers remained stagnate or declined. According to the CBO, extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost taxpayers $700 billion over ten years. When confronted with the burden this would place on the national debt, Lally scoffed, reiterated strong support for his millionaire tax plan and offered no plan to pay for it.
Now, recall that way back on September 12, Boehner, probably drunk, said on Face The Nation that he would vote to extend middle-class tax rates even if it means eliminating the reductions on household incomes exceeding $250,000 a year. He's been walking that back-- in a panic-- ever since. Fearful of the scorn of more Republicans Boehner put together a press conference and said, repeatedly, that he would support only legislation that kept in place the tax cuts for the wealthy as well as for average Americans.
"The Republicans really are put into a very difficult position," said former Republican Representative Bill Archer of Texas, who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax bills. "They are historically for tax relief. In this case, the question is can you be against tax relief if you don't get everything you want?" ... Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, was among Republicans who distanced themselves from Boehner yesterday. "We're for a full, complete extension of the Bush tax cuts," Ryan said on talk-show host Sean Hannity's radio program.
Instead of joining President Obama in his call to extend the middle class tax cuts to working families, to the people who need it most, McConnell and Boehner’s focus appears to be on millionaires and billionaires who aren’t asking for a tax cut. During these challenging economic times, we simply can’t afford to borrow another $700 billion over the next decade to give an average tax cut of $100,000 to Americans making over $1 million per year.
What’s clear is that Senator McConnell’s and Congressman Boehner’s plan would do absolutely nothing to grow our economy, put people back to work and strengthen America’s middle class. Instead, it would take us back to the same exact failed economic policies that created the mess we’re in: cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; cut rules for the special interests and big corporations and cut the middle class loose to fend for itself.
...The Congressional Republicans have tried very hard over the past 19 months to convince the American people that they were the only ones who could be trusted with getting spending under control and reducing the deficit. This argument was always laughable, considering these are the same people that took a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton administration and turned it into a $1.3 trillion deficit. Now we have further evidence that, despite all of their bluster about deficits and out of control spending, it’s clear that the Congressional Republicans have no plans to fix these problems and is unprepared to govern responsibly.
Tuesday three of the most committed progressives in Congress, Alan Grayson, Raul Grijalva and Mary Jo Kilroy sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi urging action on the Bush tax cuts before October adjournment. The letter calls for the elimination of tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans who simply don't need them, and use that revenue to help end deficit spending. Boehner and his cronies are already going insane over it-- especially since it was their decades of pushing terrible trade policies that led to the terrible US-China trade deficit and this elimination of unwarranted tax cuts to the wealthy is being touted as a way to get rid of that deficit.
Meanwhile you might be interested in a survey from Stan Greenberg's Democracy Corps that shows how strongly voters support the Democratic position on letting the tax breaks to the wealthy expire while extending them for the middle class.
This will be a tough election, but fortunately, the unfolding tax issue can work strongly to help Democrats and define the choice in the election. This is a case where Democrats are strongly aligned with public thinking and priorities. Only 38 percent favor extending the Bush tax cuts for those over $250,000-- the official position of Republican leaders and candidates. Clearly messaging around this choice-- with Democrats voting for middle class tax cuts, while starting to address the deficit and protecting Social Security, contrasted with Republican candidates who still believe trickle-down economics and worsening the deficit-- works for progressives.
With Democrats down by 7 points in the congressional test ballot, they have reason to welcome this potential shift in the dynamic. Democrats hold the high ground on these issues-- and this one noticeably moves the congressional vote to the Democrats after a debate. Democrats should embrace a tax debate. Frankly, they do not have many issues where:
* There is a 17-point margin in favor of the Democratic position, 55 to 38 percent.
* The strong messages gives a disproportionate lift to the Democratic candidates-- scored 13 points better than named Democratic candidates while Republican messages performed half as well.
* There is an opportunity to show seriousness on the deficit, while undermining Republicans on the issue.
* The choice re-enforces Democrats’ core values and strongest framework for the election (for the middle class versus Wall Street).
The payoff from this debate comes in a 2-point narrowing of the Republican lead in the congressional vote after hearing the debate. And for the most powerful Democratic messages, it narrows the vote by 5 points, to 45 to 47 percent.
This latest poll of likely voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps finds majority support for a variety of tax cut measures to protect the middle class. Some of the key findings include:
• Over half-- 55 percent-- support increasing taxes by letting some or all of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. Specifically, 42 percent say the cuts should remain in place for the middle class, but expire for those making more than $250,000. Just 38 percent say all the tax cuts should remain in place. This is not a purely base issue-- by a 17-point margin, independents favor raising taxes on the wealthy.
• This message is even more popular when it is contextualized by broader economic messages. By a 10-point margin, voters are persuaded and reassured by the idea of raising taxes on the wealthiest so that revenue can be used for deficit reduction and investment in jobs.
• Majorities clearly side with extending the cuts for the middle class, at least for some time. Voters favor extending the tax cuts for the middle class for two years, as some have proposed, while a similar majority favors extending these cuts permanently. The proposals receive intense popular support from Democrats, with all proposals advocating expiration of tax cuts getting more than six-in-ten support.
President Obama spoke about the hostage-taking from the Rose Garden late yesterday afternoon:
Extending these tax cuts is right. It is just. It will help our economy because middle-class folks are the folks who are most likely to actually spend this tax relief-- for a new computer for the kids or for maybe some home improvement.
And if the other party continues to hold these tax cuts hostage, these are the same families who will suffer the most when their taxes go up next year. And if we can’t get an agreement with Republicans, that's what will happen.
So we don't have time for any more games. I understand there’s an election coming up. But the American people didn't send us here to just think about our jobs; they sent us here to think about theirs. They sent us here to think about their lives and their children’s lives, and to be responsible, and to be serious about the challenges we face as a nation.
Senator David Vitter doesn't pay any attention when President Obama speaks. He summed up the Republican incomprehension of the plight of regular American families nicely and it was caught on tape by Charlie Melancon's campaign. Now Melancon is a conservative Blue Dog, but even he thinks unfair tax breaks for millionaires should be allowed to expire while tax cuts for the middle class stay in place:
Washington Is Already Too Full Of Crooks; It Doesn’t Need Tom Ganley Added To The List
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When Sherrod Brown left a his House seat to run for the Senate in 2006, state Rep. Betty Sutton stepped up to the plate and defeated Lorain Mayor Craig Foltin 61-39%, a percentage that she increased to 65% in 2008 (as Obama was beating McCain 57-42%). A blue collar district that includes parts of Akron plus suburbs of both Akron and Cleveland, it tends to go for Democrats and for progressives... like Betty Sutton. But 2010 is shaping up as a very challenging year for Democrats and incumbents in general and Ohio Democratic incumbents in particular. And in Betty's case, she's up against a very wealthy, free-spending Republican with gigantic name recognition because he's been selling cars in the area since 1968.
Tom Ganley is the latest in a long line of self-funding millionaire Republican candidates attempting to take out solid, hardworking Democrats this cycle. Widely regarded as a dishonest used car dealer Ganley is eager to buy himself a congressional seat in northeastern Ohio (since the state GOP drove him out of the Senate race he was waging against Rob Portman).
As CQPolitics succinctly put it this spring when Ganley dropped out of the OH Senate race to challenge Sutton, “it only took a few strokes of a pen for Ohio car dealer Tom Ganley (R) to become the best-funded challenger to a House incumbent thus far this cycle.” At that point, Ganley had only dumped a little under $2 million into his campaign. By the end of the summer, Ganley had moved millions in and out of his account-- loaning himself $6.5 million at one point, and then pulling $4 million of that back out. Makes you wonder what he’s going to do with all that money, and how much he’s willing to spend to buy himself a seat in the House-- questions Ganley is of course completely unwilling to answer. Smells like... Darrell Issa.
Speaking of which... another good question arises from Ganley filtering so much in and out of his account: how did he come to make his millions? Lucky for us, the answer to that one is simple: by preying on and even outright deceiving Ohio’s workers and families. You name it, Ganley has been accused of doing it to make a buck-- forgery, lying, fraud, deception, even age and sex discrimination against his own employees.
Even the GOP’s pet news station Fox dropped a hit on Ganley just last week, pointing to the over 400 lawsuits he’s been the target of for his crooked business practices. But not to worry, Ganley is “very proud of his record” of getting rich by trampling on middle-class folk, or so says his spokesperson (Ganley hardly ever opens his own mouth, doesn’t seem to go too well when he does). Really, these tactics are just business as usual for someone who’s as “successful” as Tom Ganley.
And like so many other right wing extremist candidates this cycle, Ganley never shies away from an opportunity to pander to the tea partiers. Just a few weeks ago he touted his Republican bona fides when he announced he’d “cut the dickens” out of Federal entitlement programs (read: Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits, etc. etc. etc.) if elected. He was quick to sign onto ATR’s 2010 Pledge, and Ganley’s even gone so far as to support the inappropriately misnamed “Fair Tax”-- a plan to put a 23% sales tax on food, clothes, medicine... the works, while giving a big ol’ tax break to himself and corporations.
If you weren’t sure by now whether Ganley has your vote in November, he has the mother of all Ohio endorsements to solidify his reputation as a would-be advocate for his fellow millionaires and business men-- that of minority leader and fellow down-the-line corporate shill John Boehner.
Betty Sutton on the other hand is a true Democrat through and through, and it’s distressing to see someone who has done so much for her constituents facing the fight of her life from a worthless tea party hack like Tom Ganley. Sutton helped jump start auto sales throughout the country last summer with the successful “Cash for Clunkers” program she authored, and as a former labor-lawyer, she’s fought tirelessly (and successfully) to insert what should be no-brainer “Buy American” clauses and amendments wherever possible.
At the end of the day, the choice for voters in Ohio’s 13th district should be a simple one-– Betty Sutton, an advocate for workers and working families, or Tom Ganley, a tea party pandering corporate GOP crazy who rips off customers and treats employees poorly, wants to put a 23% sales tax on EVERYTHING, and-- this GOP stand-by is my favorite-- doesn’t believe in global warming.
