South Carolina's U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson voted to provide medical care to illegal aliens. See solid coverage of the vote and issue at Open Congress.
And this from Gordon Duff at Salem-News.com:
(CINCINNATI, Ohio) – Joe Wilson, real name "Addison", presents himself as a hard boiled combat veteran, retired Army colonel and all around tough guy.
He belongs to "white supremacist" organizations, fought hard to keep the Confederate flag in South Carolina and, when an aide to the notorious racist Strom Thurmond admitted Thurmond had a half African-American daughter, Wilson abused and threatened the woman in an attempt to shut her up.
His real record is Vietnam. Born in 1947, Wilson was prime material for the Vietnam War. After taking deferment after deferment for college and law school, in 1972, Wilson was glided into a coveted Army Reserve billet, protecting him from service in Vietnam.
He quit in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and transferred to the National Guard where he was a Judge Advocate, a "lawyer."
Wilson has one of the worst records in Congress, having voted against Veteran funding 11 times. The only "veteran" Wilson has helped is himself.
Though ending up with full health insurance and a fat military retirement, Joe Wilson, like Senator Lindsay Graham, both passed more qualified serving officers who were deployed to combat and moved into high paying positions as full Colonels, all done using political clout.
This gives both Wilson and his good friend and reportedly highest ranking gay officer in the US military, Lindsay Graham, substantial "double dip" retirements without ever having to actually serve in the real military and, especially, not during the Vietnam War.
Wilson's opponent in the upcoming election is Rob Miller, 13 year US Marine with 2 combat tours in Iraq. Wilson missed his chance at combat due to more important considerations involving "personal skin."
Wilson, close friend and confidant of Fox Entertainment reality show host Glenn Beck, is a strong advocate of private health care.
In fact he received over $ 400,000 in political donations from the health care industry in support of his position.
Insiders say that Beck helped stage the Wilson "impromptu theater" during the Presidents address to Congress, offering full support from Fox News in exchange for Wilson's violation of traditional Southern good manners, something Wilson has little familiarity with.
Wilson has spent a lifetime on the public payroll running his mouth while others have done the fighting.
Much has been made of late about Wilson's ties to White Supremest and neo-Klan groups. As one of the 7 legislators who stood against all others to keep the secessionist flag as the state flag of South Carolina and as former staffer to the former anti-civil rights activist Strom Thurmond, Wilson's racist views are well known and well established.
What some of us would like to have seen established is a biography that included military service during the Vietnam War instead of deferment after deferment then hiding out in an "undeployable" Army Reserve unit until the second the Communists moved into Saigon.
This tells me all I need to know.
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Lots of debunking of teabagger claims on the size of their event recently. Kombiz tweeted
Couple next to me convinced themselves this is bigger than inauguration. Good to be reality based.
"In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger," Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. "The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis."
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President Obama is going to Wall Street today to nicely ask them to act responsibly.
The only people he's NOT playing nice with are the ones who voted for him.
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Schooling Americans in being looney
Given the speed at which America's looney right creates new silliness to be outraged over, the manufactured controversy over Barack Obama's speech to school children is already old news after just a few days. I think it's worth returning to, though, because certain aspects of it are illustrative of problems in the right-wing generally. It's not surprising that any one issue would express deeper, systemic issues, but the school "indoctrination" issue may do this a bit better than most.
It's counter-productive for ulterior motives and deeper agendas to be so readily visible, but this particular outrage was also hastily contrived. Most "culture war" issues that the far right has pushed were developed over the course of many years, so any early missteps could be easily covered over by consistently using the correct framing later on. Complaints about Barack Obama's speech to school students had to be mobilized very quickly, and there wasn't enough time to coordinate the best excuses that didn't make them look ridiculous.
As a result, more of their true feelings may ultimately be revealed than is typical.
Keep reading: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/09/schooling-americans-in-being-looney.html
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After al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of congress want us to do nothing? -Must read op-ed today from nicholas kristof.
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It's our media. Our media loves to keep it going. They love to throw him (Cheney) out there and, you know, stoke the fires. I asked a couple of people fairly high up in our media world, "Why in the world do you continue to give him and Limbaugh an audience? Why? Why do you even put them on the same plane as the president of the United States? Why do you have these dueling speeches? You guys made them dueling speeches, not the two principals." Well, you know, they're running out of business. People are canceling their newspaper subscriptions every day. They want news.
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Well, to keep it brief, I think the problem is that this is a national security issue, and there are so many more challenging issues — as one official put it to me the other day — on which the President has already shown some ankle, whether it's about talking to Iran or whether it's his rather pronounced silence vis-à-vis North Korea, or whether it's something as minuscule as lifting some travel restrictions on Cuban Americans for Cuba. They don't believe they can show another square centimeter of ankle on national security, because the Republicans will eat their lunch, and every time I'm told this I die laughing. I say, your guys are captured by the Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, you're captured by Rush Limbaugh, whose real radio audience is about 2.2 million, and whose employer, Clear Channel, lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. I said, when are you gonna wake up? These are kooks. And Cheney is the kook leader. But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven't got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle.
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Chalk another win for the GOP – and I learned this one from the Twitter of Bachmann-the-Nut, future resident of Bedlam and notorious baby mill operator:
…In splitting with ACORN, Groves sought to tamp down GOP concerns and negative publicity that the partnership will taint the 2010 head count.
"It is clear that ACORN's affiliation with the 2010 census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 census efforts," Groves wrote.
