Lou Barletta-- Face Of The KKK, Face Of The GOP, Face Of America's Dysfunctional Political System

I once lived in Monroe County, PA. Nice, all-American area, currently represented by thoughtful progressive freshman Matt Cartwright. But when I lived there, Monroe County was part of the 11th CD, represented by one of the worst Democratic banking shills, Paul Kanjorski, who was elected in 1984, grew more and more corrupt (and powerful), and was finally dumped in 2010 by Democrats too sick of him to bother going to the polls. It would have been impossible for anyone with any degree of self-respect to vote for a crook like Kanjorski. Aside from being an NRA Democrat, anti-gay, anti-Choice, and pro-war voters were becoming aware that Kanjorski was using his senior position on the House Financial Services Committee to enrich himself and his family. In 2010 Democrats nearly ousted him in a primary but "almost" doesn't count and Pennsylvania's most preeminent racist, Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta beat Kanjorski in the general election, 55-45%. (Barletta only took 54% in Monroe County.)

Hazleton is a small city (population 25,340) in Luzerne County and Barletta had a fairly undistinguished career working for his family's business after doing poorly in school and then failing to make it as a professional baseball player. He finally made a fortune by contracting highway work from the government. He was elected mayor of Hazleton in 1999, where he sang a one note song-- a vicious jihad against Hispanics.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania yesterday struck down ordinances adopted by the City of Hazleton to bar illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there, the most resounding legal blow so far to local efforts across the country to crack down on illegal immigration.

The decision, by Judge James M. Munley of Federal District Court, presents a new roadblock to local officials who want to take action against illegal immigration after broad federal legislation to address the issue failed in the Senate last month.

Judge Munley ruled that ordinances first passed last July by the Hazleton City Council interfered with federal law, which regulates immigration, and violated the due process rights of employers, landlords and illegal immigrants.

The ruling resonated beyond Hazleton because the town was the first in the country to pass such measures, after its mayor, Louis J. Barletta, vowed last year to make the city “one of the toughest places in the United States” for illegal immigrants. Many other local initiatives were modeled on Hazleton’s ordinances, which were never put into effect because of the legal challenge.

“Whatever frustrations officials of the City of Hazleton may feel about the current state of immigration enforcement,” Judge Munley wrote in the 206-page decision, “the nature of the political system in the United States prohibits the city from enacting ordinances that disrupt a carefully drawn federal statutory scheme.”

Mr. Barletta said the city would appeal and would fight to the United States Supreme Court if necessary.

“I will not sit back because the federal government has refused to do its job,” Mr. Barletta said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall.

Judge Munley reached his conclusion after a full hearing of the issues in a bench trial, the first such trial in the various legal challenges to local ordinances restricting illegal immigration. The challenge was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and Cozen O’Connor, a private law firm.

The judge emphasized that illegal immigrants had the same civil rights as legal immigrants and citizens.

...Mr. Barletta, the Hazleton mayor, has championed the city’s ordinances because he said illegal immigrants had unleashed a crime wave in Hazleton and had overburdened health and other public services.

At the nine-day trial in March, A.C.L.U. lawyers worked as hard to debunk those claims as they did to undercut the city’s legal arguments. They showed that 4 of 428 violent crimes in Hazleton in the last six years could be attributed to illegal immigrants.

Barletta and his racist allies on the city council passed an ordinance giving themselves the authority to fine landlords up to $1,000 for leasing to illegal immigrants-- as well as making English the official language of Hazleton, prohibiting city employees from translating documents into any language without official authorization, which sat badly with Puerto Rican American citizens.

So why bring up Barletta? Well, you can probably imagine that the immigration debate has stirred the wild beast in him. Yesterday it sprung into action. At a time when the Republican Party is trying to make nice with Hispanic voters, Congressman Lou Barletta is... going rogue.

Avowed immigration hardliner Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) announced his immediate opposition on Monday to a bipartisan Senate framework on comprehensive immigration reform, suggesting that it could be serving as an ill-advised Republican olive branch to Latino voters.

Barletta went on to say that the GOP should have no interest in providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, claiming that most are uneducated, government-dependent individuals who wouldn't support the party.

"I hope politics is not at the root of why we're rushing to pass a bill. Anyone who believes that they're going to win over the Latino vote is grossly mistaken," Barletta said, according to the Morning Call. "The majority that are here illegally are low-skilled or may not even have a high school diploma. The Republican Party is not going to compete over who can give more social programs out. They will become Democrats because of the social programs they’ll depend on."

..."It's amnesty that America can't afford," Barletta said. "We have to stop people from coming in illegally. This will be a green light for anyone who wants to come to America illegally and then be granted citizenship one day."

Looks like Barletta either didn't get the message, ignored it or... shot the messenger. Jed Lewison at Daily Kos shared the GOP message on how to talk about immigrants.

A top Hispanic Republican advocacy group co-chaired by Jeb Bush is so worried about how the GOP will respond to immigration reform that they are distributing a set of guidelines instructing congressional Republicans on how to discuss the topic without sounding like a bunch of neanderthals. The issue, according to the group, isn't really about substance. Instead, it's about using "tonally sensitive" language:
"Tone and rhetoric will be key in the days and weeks ahead as both liberals and conservatives lay out their perspectives. Please consider these tonally sensitive messaging points as you discuss immigration, regardless of your position," Hispanic Leadership Network Executive Director Jennifer Korn writes.

Before you even read word one from the memo, the fact that the group is more concerned about how congressional Republicans talk about the issue than how they vote on it is a pretty clear indication of just how backwards Republicans are on this topic. Usually in politics, advocacy groups try to achieve actual policy priorities. Here, they are just trying to stop their party from acting like assholes—and based on some of their advice, they must really think there's a lot of assholes in their party. For example, on their list of "messaging dos and don'ts for immigration reform," they say:

Don’t use phrases like “send them all back”

And:

Don’t characterize all Hispanics as undocumented and all undocumented as Hispanics.

Had the Democratic Party not tolerated the gross corruption of Paul Kanjorski-- of course, now a sleazy lobbyist-- Barletta would never have won in 2010. That's our Beltway system. (I'm not certain of this but I believe that the Judge Munley who ruled against Barletta's anti-immigrant ordinance is Congressman Matt Cartwright's father-in-law.)

Corey O'Brien v Paul Kanjorski? More Of The Same

Corey O'Kanjo

Gort42 in northern Pennsylvania sat down with Corey O'Brien for a nice long interview a couple days ago. You may recall that a week or so ago we were asking if O'Brien, a young Lackawanna County Commissioner, and erstwhile Kanjorski ally, was ready to run a primary campaign against the spectacularly corrupt and relatively reactionary Kanjorski (in my old congressional district).

Young O'Brien hasn't had a chance to get down with the corruption drill-- that afflicts politics so grievously in his area-- yet, but he has certainly picked up on the reactionary piece of the pie already. Gort passed along a DWT question for us-- which O'Brien awkwardly dodged:

One of the more liberal bloggers said this about you. (DWT)

But progressive Democrats can cool their heels for now. O'Brien is no champion of progressive values-- In fact, he's a better packaged avatar of social conservatism-- anti-Choice and against equality for gays.

Reaction? I don’t know what your positions are on the hot button social issues.

Wow, I don’t know them. I would venture to guess that they don’t know many of my positions on those issues as well. I can tell you this. I would represent the values of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Those issues and values will be brought forward if I decide to enter the race. I think what they will find is that I’m certainly a progressive Democrat that believes very strongly in universal health care and health care reform. That believes very strongly in energy independence and that energy independence is a national security priority that we need to embrace. And education reform is a critical component to compete in a global economy, especially early childhood development. As you probably know 90% of a person’s brain growth is completed by the age of 5 yet we spend the least amount of dollars by the age of 5. I don’t know why we don’t have programs were we start spending more money on early childhood development, we start spending more money on bilingual education. I don’t why as a sophomore in high school it’s the first time people start taking French or Spanish as I did at Dunmore High School. Why we don’t have a second or a third language from early childhood education through college. But I also think that college should become a right and no longer a privilege and that’s something that I’ll talk about if I end up getting into this race. I think you are going to hear a lot from me about energy independence because my record is strong there. We are replacing our fleet of vehicles in Lackawanna County with hybrids. We will have set of 10 hybrids in a week or two. We are replacing our fleet of COLTS buses with hybrids. With these progressives actions we are now a COOL County, we are only the second COOL County in Pennsylvania. Which is guaranteeing a reduction in our carbon emissions to reduce the effects of global warming. So we are taking some significant steps toward energy independence and we are doing them right here in northeastern Pennsylvania. I will talk a lot about energy, education and job creation throughout any kind of campaign.

He didn't mention that he's against a woman's right to choice and against a same sex couple's right to marry, just that he thinks he's socially progressive because he thinks we should teach second and third languages in elementary school. So we don't know, do we? Well, we do know he's a sleazy political hack that doesn't even have the skill to dodge a question artfully. Guy sounds like a dud to me-- and I hope the reform-minded Democrats sickened by Kanjorski's avarice can come up with someone better than Corey O'Brien.

Are Members Of Congress Willing To Wreck The Country's Educational Reforms For The Sake Of The Bribes They Receive? Meet Buck McKeon & Ben Nelson

Is Buck McKeon a crook?

For several years we've been covering the House's "fiercest protector of subsidies for student lending institutions," Buck McKeon (R-CA), who rakes in huge amounts of money from the anachronistic middleman lenders President Obama is trying to put out of business-- a move that will save the taxpayers billions of dollars annually. Obama:

"This is not about growing the size of government or relying on the free market, because it's not a free market when we have a student-loan system that's rigged to reward private lenders without any risk" [said Obama as he] reiterated his pledge to end the 43-year-old Federal Family Education Loan guarantee program, which provides subsidies to banks and other lenders. Phasing out the program would curb what the administration terms "wasteful spending." The plan would prevent new loans from the program being made after June 30, 2010.

As we've documented for years, McKeon jealously-- even viciously-- guards this little corner of banksterdom, one of his biggest sources of legalized bribes ($160,000, among the Top 10 in the House) for another sleazy Mormon congressman very much in the John Doolittle mode of anything-goes-as-long-as-you're-stealing-from-the-gentiles.

The same crooks have given the Senate's version McKeon, Ben Nelson (D-NE) $113,500-- and Nelson has been as adamant as McKeon that no one's goring his sacred cow (NelNet). Bad news for these two corrupt old fossils and great news for America: as Ryan Grimm reported at HuffPo yesterday budgetary reconciliation has been agreed between the White House and congressional leaders as the way to go after student-lending subsidies.

Grimm concentrated on Nelson, lately a far bigger threat to Obama's agenda for change than the impotent-- if noisy-- McKeon. Unlike McKeon, whose only concern has been what has gone into his own coffers, Nelson is worried about 1,000 NelNet jobs in Nebraska that would be effected. Nelson's power (as the 58th Democrat-- and, by far, the one who votes most frequently with the Republicans) is rendered useless when Democrats need a simple majority to pass a bill. He is only needed-- if only rarely willing-- when Democrats have to close down a GOP filibuster, which calls for 60 votes.

McKeon and Nelson have based their miserable and hypocritical political careers on whining about other people spending too much taxpayer money. They each insist they are strict fiscal conservatives but now they're screaming like stuck pigs. The White House says at least $4.8 billion will be saved annually and the CBO estimates that Obama's plan would save $94 billion over 10 years and much of the savings could be actually directed towards real student aid-- instead of towards lining the pockets of greedy middlemen-- and the corrupt congressmembers they've bought off. NelNet spent the same amount ($170,000) lobbing Congress in this past quarter as it did in the first quarter of 2008.

Because loan repayment is guaranteed by the federal government, private lenders assume very little risk under the FFELP and yet are rewarded handsomely -- a subsidy that makes little economic sense. Much of the savings from the move to direct lending would be used to increase the maximum Pell grant award to $5,550 for the 2010-11 school year, and make the Pell grant a mandatory government program guaranteed an increase-- inflation plus 1 percent-- every year.

There are other important reasons to make the change. For one, the FFELP program is prone to corruption. A 2006 audit of the student lender Nelnet by the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general revealed that the company had received more than $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies by gaming the system. Another investigation in 2007 led by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo found that lenders were lavishing gifts, payments, and other inducements on college financial aid officers in order to encourage them to recommend their loans to unwitting students.

...The student loan industry’s influence in this debate cannot be separated from their extensive campaign contributions to federal lawmakers. For example, The Hill newspaper recently reported that during the last campaign cycle, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Calif.), the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, received $20,000 in donations from major loan companies Sallie Mae and Nelnet, the most of any representative. Responsible members of Congress should be more concerned about supporting policies that will allow us to live up to President Obama’s pledge that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” With the Lumina Foundation for Education estimating that by 2025 we will face a shortage of 16 million college-educated workers, this call to action must be heeded immediately.

OK, McKeon is certainly the worst crook in Congress in this regard and he should be investigated on charges of selling his votes for cash. But he isn't the only one-- and the other perps aren't all Republicans, not by a long shot. It's no coincidence that the members of Congress-- like McKeon (R-CA) and Kanjorski (D-PA) in the House and Cornyn (R-TX), Alexander (R-TN) and Nelson (D-NE)-- who are the most vocal opponents of reform and are all on the take from the two biggest student loan middlemen.

Will Corey O'Brien Take On Paul Kanjorski?

Briefly, I lived in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. The congressman was-- and still is-- Paul Kanjorski-- a corrupt, socially conservative shill for Big Business. A heavyweight on the House Financial Services Committee, Kanjorski has been an apologist for the banksters and has taken more in legalized bribes ($3,185,464) from the financial/insurance/real estate sector that he's supposed to be regulating than any other member of that committee except ranking Republican shill and chief bankster apologist Spencer Bachus ($3,789,474).

In November, Kanjorski came closer to being ousted by northeast Pennsylvania voters in the 11th CD than any other Democratic incumbent. While Obama was racking up an impressive 57% win in the district-- significantly better than either Gore or Kerry-- Kanjorski was nearly defeated by virulent xenophobe and wingnut Lou Barletta (52-48%). The Obama voters were clearly not endorsing Barletta's Know Nothing politics; they had just had it with Kanjorski's sleazy politics.

This morning Gort42 broke the news that a (former) Kanjorski ally, Lackawanna County Commissioner Corey O'Brien, who caused a stir and ruffled some feathers last year by endorsing Obama in the run-up to the presidential primary-- in the middle of Clinton Country, would probably be challenging Kanjorski in next year's congressional primary.

But progressive Democrats can cool their heels for now. O'Brien is no champion of progressive values-- In fact, he's a better packaged avatar of social conservatism-- anti-Choice and against equality for gays. O'Brien looks like he could quickly grow up to me another Kanjorski-- just a lot slicker. Here's an effective, if phony-sounding, ad he ran last year:

I KNOW EXACTLY WHO KANJORSKI WAS TALKING ABOUT TODAY WHEN HE DESCRIBED A DISHONEST DEMOCRAT FALSELY PROMISING TO HELP END THE WAR

I used to live in Stroudsburg, a town in northeast Pennsylvania. Although Chris Carney's district is right next door, since 1984 the congressman from PA-11 has been Paul Kanjorski, a fairly undistinguished backbencher whose constituents like his approach-- basically to get the district as much pork as possible. He generally votes with his fellow Democrats, although when looking at the tough substantive roll calls of 2007-08 he ranked #156 out of 236 Democrats in terms of sticking with his own party. He's keeps his head down and is rarely in the national news. But he is today. The right-wing  blogosphere is having a heyday with some lame and confused statement he made:

"I'll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we...the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn't say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn't true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts...and people ate it up." (Watch the video here.)

The key here is to understand who he meant by "the Democrats," the ones he implies "stretched the facts" about ending the war. If there's one high ranking Democrat I abhor more than any other it would be Rahm Emanuel, at the time the chair of the DCCC. And you know what-- Emanuel did the opposite! He tried to purge candidates-- and in some cases succeeded-- who were speaking out too strongly about opposing Bush on the war. So who could Kanjorski have been talking about? The Democratic candidates themselves? In most cases, the voting records would not bare that out.

Oddly enough, I know of only one Democratic member of the House who out and out lied about it. Of course, there may be a few others. But, oddly enough, the one candidate who did campaign against the war and who won and then instantly transformed himself into a Bush rubber stamp was the candidate who is #1 on the list of recipients from Kanjorski's PAC, Citizen's For Action, namely Blue Dog Chris Carney. Kanjorski embraced Carney's campaign and gave him campaign advice as well. He was a kind of Big Brother to his neighbor to the north.

Since getting to Congress, Carney has voted well to the right of Kanjorski. In fact, on that same scale that shows Kanjorski at # 156, Carney is #227, tucked neatly among reactionary Blue Dogs Heath Shuler (NC), Jason Altmire (PA), Brad Ellsworth (IN), Jim Matheson (UT), Zach Space (OH) and Melissa Bean (IL), all of whom have voted significantly more often with the GOP on these issues than with the Democrats.

But Carney is a special case; he didn't just lie about opposing Bush's war in Iraq, he lied about virtually everything. On many issues-- although just the important ones-- he hasn't voted any differently from the way the right-wing kook he beat in 2006 had been voting. In fact, on vote after vote after vote Carney is one of a tiny handful of Democrats crossing the aisle to vote with the GOP extremists. Many times he'll be one of a dozen or fewer right-wing Democrats who vote with the Republicans while dozens of mainstream conservatives are crossing the other way to vote with the Democrats. A good example of that was the Hate Crimes bill. Carney had vowed to support it when campaigning but when he had a chance to vote for it, he was one of only 14 Democrats to oppose it (while 25 Republicans voted for the legislation).

Recently you may have read that Blue America is in another tussle with Carney, this time over Bush's demand for the power to order warrantless wiretaps on American citizens and to get retroactive immunity for his lawbreaking cronies. Carney was one of 21 reactionary Blue Dogs who sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi demanding that they get a chance to rubber stamp Bush's unconstitutional and dangerous policies once again. Corporate shill Steny Hoyer got Carney to back off promising him that they would sneak retroactive immunity back into the bill when it came time to reconcile with the Senate.

Now, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and constitutional law expert Jerrold Nadler have authored a bill that would, in effect, continue the FISA law as is and put off retroactive immunity for criminals until after Bush has been tossed onto the garbage heap of history in January. If you've been reading any of the Blue America blogs-- or Salon, Daily Kos or many others-- you have read about our multimedia campaign to alert voters in PA-10 about their shiftless congressman and these basic issues over American freedoms. A couple months ago we had some laughs making fun of running into Rahm Emanuel at a bar. But, in reality, Jane and I were there talking with some DCCC staffers about getting a message to Carney that we would scrap our campaign if he would reassess his plan to join the GOP on this matter. They tried and failed. We also spoke with a mutual friend of ours and Carney's from his military days; that also came up snake eyes. Finally, we were asked to hold off the campaign by a Capitol Hill staffer with close Carney connections. We called all the radio and TV stations and newspapers, etc and put everything on hold. We started getting calls from our ad reps that "people in Washington" were calling and asking how much we were spending and when the ads were scheduled to run and how long they would run, etc.

Eventually we realized that Carney had no intention of reassessing anything and it was with great sorrow this week that I started writing thousands of dollars in checks for full page ads in newspapers and flights of TV and radio ads all over PA-10. Why sorrow? That money was collected from over 1,500 donors with the intention of fighting retroactive immunity. I would so much have rather spent it helping worthy Democrats who oppose retroactive immunity fighting Republicans who support it. In fact, I'm hoping Carney will change his mind after the first, relatively mild batch of ads, runs this month. That way we can use the rest of the money educating voters in districts where Republicans are subverting the Constitution instead of a Democrat. If you'd like to contribute to this effort, you can do it here.


UPDATE: HOW THE TELECOM EXECUTIVES ARE TRYING TO BRIBE THEIR WAY TO AMNESTY

At Salon today, Glenn Greenwald lays out the sickening details of how the big telecoms are perverting, not just the Bush Regime and their GOP rubber stamps-- well, they barely need any help at that (and I'm not talking about the Larry Craig/David Vitter type of perversion)-- but also the least savory segments of the Democratic Party, It isn't the part of the Democratic Party Howard Dean referred to as "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." It's the unscrupulous Blue Dogs and their money-hungry allies like Steny Hoyer who operate exactly like Republicans, taking tens of millions of dollars from the telecoms and then voting in their interests instead of in the interests of their constituents and, in this case, in the interests of protecting the Constitution and maintaining the rule of law. Believe me, it is no coincidence that Comcast is Chris Carney's second biggest contributor so far this year and that he's taken $68,149 from lobbyists and $54,000 from the communications industry.


UPDATE: SO IF COMCAST IS CARNEY'S SECOND BIGGEST BRIBER DONOR, WHO IS #1?

Jacquie is the Blue America media buyer. She's also not one to leave a stone unturned. She was the first to ask that question-- and find the answer. A shady entity called The PMA Group is Carney's biggest single donor. And it's easy to figure out why. According to wikipedia "The PMA Group is a government relations firm based in Washington D.C. Although the group initially concentrated on defense issues, they have expanded their areas of expertise to include: Homeland Security; Education; Energy, Environment and Natural Resources; Health; Information Technology; State and Local Infrastructure; and Transportation. PMA is considered a leader in "government relations, legislative counsel, and federal sector-funding." The firm's annual lobbying income climbed steadily to its 2006 peak at $16,060,000. In 2007, the firm's income totaled $9,010,132." The rest of the story is sad and ugly.