Eric Cantor

Donald Trump: The Phony Presidential Candidate Opens Up On The Republican Party!

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Donald Trump was a phony presidential possibility for the Republican Party, someone that anyone who was really paying attention well realized.

But now that Trump has bowed out, he has come clean on his views on the GOP!

Now he criticizes the Paul Ryan budget plan, including Medicare privatization, something that caused grief for Newt Gingrich!

He also attacked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for putting conditions on aid to tornado and flood victims in the South and Midwest, requiring spending cuts to offer such aid.

As horrible and outrageous as Trump is, he at least is ringing some basic truth about the GOP: It is a heartless, anti government party which wishes to govern only for the elite and the powerful, and does not give a damn about ordinary citizens, whether seniors, the young, the poor, single mothers, the disabled, or minorities!

The Contradictions And Blunders Of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor!

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia has really been, symbolically, shooting himself in the foot lately!

Calling for spending cuts, if there was a desire to provide relief to flood and tornado victims in the South and Midwest, made him look totally hardhearted and uncaring!

Calling upon New York Congressman Anthony Weiner to resign because of his sex scandal was hypocritical, since Cantor did not say the same thing about Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, Senator John Ensign of Nevada, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, or Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, among others.

His lack of consistency and compassion is a major negative, plus the image created that he is an overly ambitious man who wishes to undermine House Speaker John Boehner due to his own ambitions to take over that position!

Eric Cantor does not exactly come across in a positive way for someone who wishes to become a national leader with consistent views and principles! Instead, he gives the impression of willingness to do or say anything to advance himself!

House Republicans Hold Back On Disaster Relief And Emergency Preparedness, Insist On Budget Cuts

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The House Republican leadership. led by Eric Cantor, Majority Leader, is insisting that there be budget cuts to match any increase in spending on disaster relief and emergency preparedness.

This outrage is being perpetrated as the Midwest and the South face the most daunting natural disasters we have ever seen in just the past few months!

The onslaught of hundreds of tornadoes in the past two months, including the most disastrous in Alabama and Missouri, along with the flood crisis faced along the Mississippi River all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, is a national emergency of massive proportions!

When a natural disaster occurs, reaction by first responders, police, firefighters, and paramedics should be unlimited without any consideration of budget costs!

If government cannot provide aid to the needy and the desperate in a time of trauma, then what good is government at all? It is NOT the job of government solely to defend the nation from outside attack and internal man made threats to our national security. It is ALSO to come to the aid of the needy, the poor, and the disadvantaged when a natural disaster occurs, without forcing budget cuts to match the disaster’s costs!

The truth is that there is no way around the fact that tax INCREASES will be necessary, whether the American people want them or not. It is government’s job to do what is “necessary and proper”, for the “common defense and general welfare”, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the “elastic clause”!

The Republican Party is showing its true colors in so many ways, but particularly in “blackmailing” the Democrats to force cuts in the midst of a national emergency! How despicable and disgraceful!

House Republicans Begin A Strategic Retreat On Medicare Portion Of Ryan Budget!

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The Republican Party may have committed a “Waterloo” on themselves by promoting the Paul Ryan plan to privatize Medicare over ten years, and taking a vote where all but four Republicans in the House of Representatives voted in favor of what has become a major controversy in House districts all over the nation during the Easter recess.

When Paul Ryan himself, Allan West in South Florida, and other GOP Congressmen witnessed massive assaults on them at Town Halls in their districts, it had a tremendous impact on them, putting some of them into panic mode.

So now House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia has indicated that the GOP will not push the change in the Medicare system until after the 2012 elections.

That is a warning sign of what can be expected if the American people are stupid or ignorant enough to elect a Republican House of Representatives and Senate and a Republican President in 2012.

The Republicans are biding their time, and hoping that corporate outlays in campaign spending and effective propaganda commercials can fool the people a second time!

The Democrats, led by Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, have made it clear that they will hammer home what the GOP wanted to do, and what it will certainly do if they gain complete control of the government. And one can be sure that Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the South Florida Congresswoman, will be effective in pushing the issue as well!

There is no question of the need to reform Medicare, but not destroy it, as the GOP has wanted to do since it was first born over their opposition in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson!

The Tea Party Movement Revealed: Radical Anarchists Of The Far Right!

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The Tea Party Movement has now been revealed as what it is: radical anarchists of the FAR Right, a dangerous group that will brook no compromise, and now plans to challenge Speaker of the House John Boehner in the 2012 primaries, because he had the gall to make a compromise deal with Barack Obama and the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown at the last possible moment last evening!

Obama and the Democrats agreed to about $39 billion in budget cuts from the original budget sent by the President, a record amount, which Barack Obama claimed was a victory for common sense.

Actually, the Democrats and Obama gave in too much, but they held out for protection of the environment, the funding of the President’s Health Care law, and continuation of miniscule funding of Planned Parenthood.

Boehner has been in an impossible position having to deal with House freshmen who are totally irresponsible in their demands for massive budget cuts, and have been, unfortunately, assisted in their recklessness by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who has been undermining Boehner all along, as he and Congressman Kevin McCarthy have been working to push Boehner into an untenable position as Speaker.

If one thinks Cantor and McCarthy are “friends” of Boehner, one has to be absolutely blind! We will now see a large negative vote on the permanent budget for the next six months, when it comes up for a vote next week, and Boehner is in great danger of a revolt led by Cantor and McCarthy, and he might wish he had not been elected Speaker! To imagine that John Boehner might be seen in a sympathetic light by some shows how far right the GOP is going!

And if there is a true “Rasputin” of the Far Right, it is Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has recklessly and irresponsibly promoted a radical attack on Medicare and Medicaid in the fiscal year 2012 budget and beyond, in his role as Chairman of the House Budget Committee!

What Ryan proposes is to make Medicare a voucher system, and put Medicaid under block grants that state governors decide how to dispense, all of which means the total destruction of both programs for future generations of elderly, sick, and poor people, all this at the same time as the plan to defund the President’s Health Care program for all Americans not covered under either plan now!

All this while tax cuts down to 25 percent top rate from 35 percent for the ultra rich top two percent, and also cuts in corporate taxes further, which means an attack on the middle class and the poor, as America is transformed more than ever into a plutocracy, rather than the image of a democracy, in which we have government of, by, and for the people, not the elite rich!

With the concessions made by Obama and the Democrats this time, in the next round there can be NO concessions, as this is a battle for the future of the entire nation, and the plutocracy that has developed MUST be stopped dead in its tracks!

And realize finally that this is not just an economic struggle, but also a social struggle, as the Tea Party Movement has its ugly desire to intervene in people’s private lives, as related to abortion, gay rights, and women’s rights. This is a battle for economic and social justice, the battle fought by progressives and liberals for more than a century, and a constant struggle that one can never rest from, as the far right continues its determination to dictate the continued dominance of an evil, selfish, greedy plutocracy!

Eric Cantor And The Constitution: Back To Government 101 For The House Majority Leader!

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia has come across over the years as extremely ambitious, intensely partisan to the extreme, and possessing a great level of arrogance in dealing with opponents, and this showed through this past week, when Mr. Cantor suggested that the House of Representatives, controlled by his Republican Party, pass legislation authorizing the enactment of the House spending bill even if the Senate, controlled by the Democrats, failed to agree to the legislation!

Such a move would be patently unconstitutional, and in any case, could not become law without passage by the Senate and the signing of the law by the President, none of which would happen! So maybe Eric Cantor needs to go back to Government 101, and learn the reality that the House cannot act recklessly on its own!

This suggestion is totally a sign of the impatience and arrogance of the House majority, being pressured by the Tea Party freshmen, who want no compromise on the spending for the rest of the present fiscal year, with the House demanding $61 billion in cuts, as compared to the $33 billion acceptable to Senate Democrats and the President!

It seems more and more likely that the Tea Party activists would love to see a government shutdown, and this includes freshmen Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida among others, who are a literal nightmare to their party and to the nation because of their unreasonable and uncompromising nature!

The Extremist House Of Representatives: Totally Out Of Control, Even By Its Leaders! :(

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Overnight, the House Of Representatives became the most extremist it has ever been, as even its leaders–Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor–could not control its fanatical movement toward budget cutting way beyond their wishes or any sense of reality! 🙁

Dozens of programs were cut, and many government agencies were slashed up to 40 percent in a mad orgy of striking out against the federal government!

The Republican Party, in so doing, abandoned any sense of sobriety or common sense, and set up a confrontation with the Democratic controlled Senate and President Obama, and it now looks likely that there will be a government shutdown which will affect every American, and be noticed within a short period of time after the deadline for extension of the budget, taking place on March 4!

The Republican Party is proving itself captive to the Tea Party Movement, and is showing itself to be anti labor, anti environment, anti women, anti children, anti poor, anti consumer, anti elderly, anti health care, anti education, anti public works spending, anti government agencies, anti space program, anti military even! 🙁

The country, in the midst of the Great Recession, no matter how much people deny it, is facing a House of Representatives which has no concern about the future of its own citizens, as extremist right wingers, who could be considered fascist in nature, hijack the “People’s House”! 🙁

This is a day to mourn, and the worst is yet to come, with the shutdown of the government imminent, and the chamber taking off next week for the President’s Holiday. And the Republicans are said to care about citizens? What a mockery of the truth of their agenda, which is just to continue to enrich those who have and promote extremist religious views! 🙁

The Birther Movement And The Republican Party

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The “Birther” movement is still alive and well, the idea that President Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States, that he is foreign born in Kenya, and that he is a secret Muslim.

Hawaii has made available birth certificate evidence, and the newspapers in Hawaii published announcement of his birth in August 1961, but still that is not seen as acceptable by many who refuse to accept the truth and the evidence.

This is an insult to the President, and no other President has had to deal with it, but what is more shocking is that a Public Policy Polling questioning of so called Republican primary voters shows that 51 percent are believers in the “birther” conspiracy theory, while 21 percent are not sure what to believe, and only 28 percent believe for certain that Obama is a citizen and born in the United States.

This mythology is further promoted by the reluctance of Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to condemn it, while saying they take the President and the state of Hawaii at their word. Both refuse to say how ridiculous an idea it is, and as leaders, they are passing the buck, rather than take responsibility to nip the idea in the bud.

All of a sudden, these two GOP leaders are saying they cannot tell people what to think, even though it is clear that they are indeed trying to promote uniformity in their opposition to anything Barack Obama says or does.

They are, therefore, contributing to the perpetuation of the myth, and showing they have no ethics at all, and they should both be condemned and also be made to feel ashamed of their improper behavior! 🙁

And another idea comes across one’s mind: Do we really want anyone chosen by these Republican primary voters to become President of the United States in 2013? 🙁

Senator Rand Paul Of Kentucky: Center Of Controversy And Nightmare For The Republican Party! :(

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has had to learn to live with fellow Kentucky Senate colleagues that have both embarrassed him and made his life miserable! If only one could read his mind, as his body language regarding past Senator Jim Bunning and his successor Rand Paul reveals discomfort, it would be an interesting analysis of how a party leader must survive both fools and loons! 🙁

Rand Paul may only have been in the Senate now for one month, but he is like a hurricane in his promotion of ideas that almost no one will accept, even in his own party, but yet saluted by the Tea Party movement!

Rand Paul seems to love introducing legislation that will never pass, just to draw attention to his looniness and his weird libertarian ideas which will never go anywhere, except into the minds of those who believe that government is a total evil and that we must isolate ourselves from the outside world! 🙁

Rand Paul, in association with Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, is promoting a Life at Conception Act, which he believes would overrule Roe V. Wade, and in the process take a woman’s right over her own body totally away! 🙁

He is also sponsoring legislation to prevent the children of illegal immigrants born in America from being citizens, thereby introducing a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which grants birthright citizenship!

Additionally, Rand Paul wants all foreign aid to our ally, Israel, ended, as part of his proposal to cut $500 billion from the present year’s national budget with only eight months left in the fiscal year. He wants the $3 billion aid to Israel ended, along with massive cuts in education, housing and energy programs, the most extreme idea of cuts proposed by any Republican, with the party shooting for only $100 billion cuts this fiscal year, with no cut in aid to Israel and other foreign aid, which he wants cut by $20 billion!

Republican leaders such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and House Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Ilena Ros-Lehtinen of Florida have condemned a cutoff of aid to Israel, and Jewish groups in both major political parties, and both conservatives and liberals have made clear their opposition to such a cutoff, so Rand Paul’s advocacy has no chance of success, anymore than his other ideas mentioned above!

And get this: this past week, the Senate unanimously, except for Paul, adopted a measure making it a federal crime to aim a laser point at an aircraft, with the Kentucky senator feeling that should be an issue for states to handle individually, even though aviation is interstate, and there has been a growing problem of such incidents, thankfully without a disaster occurring!

It is clear that Rand Paul will be a center of attention over the next six years with his outrageous statements and actions, and imagine this. It is rumored that his father, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, may run for the soon to be open seat in that state after Kay Bailey Hutchison decided not to run for re-election in 2012!

If Ron Paul were to win that seat, he would be the oldest first time freshman at age 77 to take a seat in the US Senate!

Can one imagine having two Senators Paul at the same time? 🙁

The only worse scenario is the nightmare of either Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann as President of the United States in 2013!

If both scenarios were to occur, the nation would be in a living hell of its own making, due to stupidity, ignorance, and lack of common sense of the American people! 🙁

The Republicans And The State Of The Union: Not The Time For Obama To Cave In To GOP Threats! :(

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The Republicans have declared war on the federal budget, and the House membership of the party today unanimously backed a resolution giving Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the Budget Committee, total control over the House budget bill for the remainder of the fiscal year 2010-2011.

This is fascinating for a party that is against centralized power and for states rights, that now they are willing to hand over total control to one Congressman over the federal budget. This makes Ryan a “Czar”, a title that Republicans are very willing to assign to advisers to President Obama who deal with different issues, but suddenly it is alright to have a financial “Czar”! 🙁

But Ryan, who will give the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address tonight, has already made clear that he wants to privatize Social Security, gut Medicare and Medicaid, and dramatically lower taxes on the wealthy, even more than they have already by deals between President Obama and the GOP leadership last month.

And the Republican Study Group, a group of Congressional Republicans even MORE conservative than Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan, wants more draconian cuts in the federal budget immediately and long term, including gutting Amtrak, PBS, NPR, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and funding for research on many diseases, including cancer, AIDS, and heart disease. And also the goal is the wiping out of the Department of Commerce, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy! 🙁

And to add insult to injury, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the Tea Party favorite, will give her own response to the President’s State of the Union address, after Congressman Paul Ryan gives the official response!

And Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, has made it clear that the Congress will NOT give any aid to any state or city to avoid layoffs of police, firefighters, teachers, and other public servants, therefore guaranteeing massive losses of jobs, and adding to the unemployment rate!

Rather than working to create jobs, the GOP is warring on the job market as it is, and has only destructive intentions as part of a war, not only on Barack Obama’s health care plan and other reforms, but also with the express purpose of destroying the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt! 🙁

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said today that if President Obama offers a message that includes all of what the GOP wants, they will be glad to support him!

What gall and nerve, without any indication that the Republicans in Congress are willing to make any concessions, but just expect Obama to cave in ! 🙁

The answer is that the President needs to make clear that he is willing to work and negotiate with the opposition party, but will not surrender the right to disagree and use his Presidential powers to protect government programs and the historic accomplishments of Roosevelt, Johnson and even Richard Nixon!

The President and the Democratic Party and progressives and liberals everywhere MUST understand that this is a battle for the heart and soul of the American nation, and they cannot cave in to the destructive tendencies of the Republican party, and must stand and fight to the bitter end, and stop worrying about those who say they are unwilling to negotiate and compromise, and tell them to look in the mirror at themselves! 🙁