Revolt!
Page 22
Now Obama’s people are walking through the door left open by Junior and are planning to include abortion funding in the health insurance policies being offered by the state exchanges they are establishing.
If there is one illustration of how far Junior has strayed from his dad, consider that he has sponsored 137 earmarks that cost the taxpayers $144 million.56 Even less like his father is the fact that he collected $5.9 million in campaign donations from the lobbyists for those who got the earmarks, almost a third of the total of $20.2 million he has raised.57 Dad would not approve.
Here is the list of earmark recipients whose lobbyists gave money to Casey in return.
* * *
BOB CASEY: EARMARKS FOR CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
Earmark Recipient: National Rural Water Assn.
Amount: $13,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 679,916
Earmark Recipient: Piasecki Aircraft
Amount: $ 5,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 92,500
Earmark Recipient: SCHOTT North America
Amount: $ 3,200,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 484,000
Earmark Recipient: Rajant Corp.
Amount: $ 3,200,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 170,000
Earmark Recipient: Power & Energy Inc.
Amount: $ 2,400,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 80,000
Earmark Recipient: LORD Corp.
Amount: $ 2,400,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 80,000
Earmark Recipient: MaxPower Inc.
Amount: $ 2,400,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 40,000
Earmark Recipient: V System Composites
Amount: $ 2,400,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 180,000
Earmark Recipient: CHI Systems CA; PA
Amount: $ 2,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 50,000
Earmark Recipient: South Carolina Research Authority
Amount: $ 2,000,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 240,000
Earmark Recipient: KCF Technologies
Amount: $ 1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 50,000
Earmark Recipient: Converteam Inc.
Amount: $ 1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 120,000
Earmark Recipient: Arkema Inc.
Amount: $ 1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 731,598
Earmark Recipient: Sechan Electronics
Amount: $ 1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 30,000
Earmark Recipient: NanoBlox Inc.
Amount: $ 1,600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 60,000
Earmark Recipient: Accipiter Systems
Amount: $ 800,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 40,000
Earmark Recipient: ProModel Corp.
Amount: $ 800,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 100,000
Earmark Recipient: INRange Systems
Amount: $ 800,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 230,000
Earmark Recipient: PPG Industries
Amount: $ 800,000
Campaign Contribution: $1,109,367
Earmark Recipient: Eaton Corp.
Amount: $ 600,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 674,942
Earmark Recipient: Findlay Township Municipal Authority
Amount: $ 500,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 80,000
Earmark Recipient: Philadelphia University
Amount: $ 500,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 120,000
Earmark Recipient: East Stroudsburg University
Amount: $ 500,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 40,000
Earmark Recipient: City of Philadelphia, PA
Amount: $ 987,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 300,000
Earmark Recipient: Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network
Amount: $ 300,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 60,000
Earmark Recipient: Lower Providence Township
Amount: $200,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 70,000
Earmark Recipient: Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse
Amount: $100,000
Campaign Contribution: $ 30,000
Amount: Total
Campaign Contribution: $5,942,32358
* * *
Bob Casey is a perfect illustration of the Peter Principle, which happens when hereditary politics is at work: he has risen to the level of his own incompetence and it’s time to send Junior home.
Claire McCaskill
Missouri
Elected: 2006
Voted with the Democrats 84% of the time59
Armed Services Committee
Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
Homeland Security Committee
Claire McCaskill thinks we voters need more education. She believes that the reason Americans lurched to the right in 2010 was that we were uninformed, ignorant, and need more information.
In a recent interview in The Oregonian, she blamed Americans for being “wrapped around this notion that things have gone crazy in Washington.”60
Well, when the deficit is tripled and the national debt increased by $3.8 trillion in two years, how could we have gotten that misguided impression?
She is convinced that the reason we disapprove of ObamaCare, legislation that she loyally supported, is that we are not well informed.
When voters in her home state voted three-to-one in favor of Proposition C in August 2010, which attacked the individual mandate that lies at the heart of ObamaCare, McCaskill said it was just a matter of their needing more information. “I certainly noticed the vote on Prop C, the healthcare law, and: message received,” she said. “I think there has been…a lot of noise about the mandate that people have gotten so focused on that they don’t realize that there’s going to be more access and affordability and more choices.”61
She also “declared that Democrat losses [in 2010] were the result of failed communication rather than a failed agenda, and she argued that she wasn’t going to have to ‘pivot.’”62
Our abysmal lack of education and information extends to our objections to intrusive body searches and pat-downs by the Transportation Safety Administration. She says that TSA’s groping are just “love pats.” In a Capitol Hill hearing, McCaskill said, “I’m wildly excited that I can walk through a machine instead of getting my dose of love pats.”63 She suggested “that the public outcry was a problem of education: if Americans learned more about the TSA’s new procedures, they wouldn’t object to the new searches.”64
Our propensity to be misinformed extends also to our concerns about closing Guantánamo and transferring the prisoners there to the United States to stand trial. At a town hall meeting in Sedalia, Missouri, she said, “everybody needs to take a deep breath” about Guantánamo.65 She said we need to close the prison and dismissed claims that the terrorists couldn’t be tried in the United States. She “compared terrorists to violent criminals, saying that they could be successfully tried and jailed in Missouri.”66
McCaskill misses the point. If we try terrorists before civilian courts in the United States, much of the evidence we have gathered cannot be admitted under U.S. judicial rules. It was the inability to get a confession obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques” that led a New York jury to dismiss 284 out of 285 charges brought against terrorist Ahmed Ghailani.
And, as former attorney general Michael Mukasey wrote, “Terrorism prosecutions in this country have unintentionally provided terrorists with a rich source of intelligence.”67 We invite discovery and cross-examination in our criminal trials. If the prosecution withholds evidence that might tend to exculpate the defendant, they can be subject to court-ordered sanctions. A civil trial in the United States opens up a treasure trove for the terrorists and a Pandora’s Box for the government.
Sometimes, when we vote w
rong, McCaskill feels it is her duty to correct us. So when Congress rejected the cap and trade legislation, she voted to let the EPA impose by regulation what Congress had turned down.
She knew better, in this case, than the legislature of Missouri, which voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution calling on the “Environmental Protection Agency to rescind its formal endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.”68
Claire knows best. We voters, obviously, do not!
McCaskill very recently demonstrated that she had learned nothing at all from the repudiation of the Obama agenda. Facing the issue of whether or not to renew the Bush tax cuts, she told FoxNews.com that she wanted them to be extended for everyone but millionaires,69 upping the $250,000 level that Obama has set in his speeches. But Americans understand that tax increases on anyone hurt us all.
And even when she seems to understand the concerns of Americans, she ends up veering to the left anyway.
She goes to great pains to assure us that she grew up with guns in rural Missouri. She told the Kansas City Star that “whenever Mom got out a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, we knew that Daddy had killed something.”70 She told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Dad was shooting things all the time, and we had to eat them. I’m not interested in taking away anyone’s guns.”71
She told the St. Louis Beacon that she strongly endorsed gun owners’ rights: “She said she would never vote to curb Americans’ access to guns.”72
But then she did. Not just once, but again and again. When the Senate rejected, 67–29, a bill to let states decide whether or not their citizens could carry guns on federally owned land within their borders, she voted no, leaving the blanket federal prohibitions intact.73
In 1995, she lobbied against state-level concealed weapons legislation, telling the Kansas City Star that “no one will ever convince me that more guns will mean more safety.”74
In 1996, she told the Star that “this country continues to pay a tremendous price for its love affair with guns.”75
And, in 1999, when Missouri voters decided not to allow concealed weapons, she said that she agreed that “guns are not the answer for safety.”76
That’s why Missouri Republicans have taken to calling her “Chameleon” Claire McCaskill!
There is, however, one area in which she does not believe we need more information: her tax shelter in Bermuda, which cuts her liability to the IRS. She refuses to release her income tax returns and has stubbornly maintained her refusal ever since she entered public life.
But we do know that she and her husband own a reinsurance company based in Bermuda, which, says David Cole, chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, “is valued at up to $1,000,000…according to her own estimates.”77
McCaskill says that it all belongs to her husband, not to her.
Her office said, “Like Warren Buffett, Claire’s husband has an investment in a reinsurance company in a foreign country.” The spokesman went on to say that there “has never been a tax benefit to him nor will there ever be a tax benefit for this investment.”78
But, in 2004, McCaskill scoffed at the idea that the “assets of my family don’t belong to me. That notion is pretty archaic.” She said that “my husband and I are a team…We are married and we share everything—assets, children and a house.”79
She also seems to have implied, in an earlier statement, that the investment was indeed a tax shelter. Responding to attacks from Senator Jim Talent, whom she defeated in 2006, she told the Kansas City Star, “There is absolutely no tax sheltering that is occurring that is not part of a tax code that Senator Talent embraces.”80
That’s a bit different from her subsequent statement that there is “no tax sheltering” going on. Now she seems to be saying that it is a tax shelter, but she defends it as a legal part of the tax code. That’s quite different!
The New York Times sheds light on what is probably going on with her Bermuda investment. In a March 6, 2000, article headlined “Bermuda Move Allows Insurers to Avoid Taxes,” the paper wrote that reinsurance company “profits come from investing the premiums their customers pay from the time they are collected until they are paid out in claims. In the United States these investment earnings are subject to the 35% corporate income tax and about 5% in state taxes. But Bermuda does not tax corporate profits. By moving its headquarters there, an insurer can put the investment income on the books of its Bermuda offices, beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service.”81
Or maybe McCaskill’s company liked the pink beaches!
Senator McCaskill could end the discussion by releasing her and her husband’s tax returns to demonstrate that she is telling the truth when she says that there is no tax sheltering going on. But she won’t. That would be TMI (too much information).
Polls in Missouri show the senator with a 53% disapproval rating,82 likely because of her vote for ObamaCare. But she actually wanted to go further than Obama did and set up a government-owned insurance company. On ABC’s This Week, she “reiterated her support for the public option and predicted that her party would pass it over the objections of Missourians.”83
The “public option” was a proposal embraced by liberals to have the government establish an insurance company to compete with private firms. The idea was that it would offer comprehensive coverage at reasonable premiums and would, through competition, force private firms to do likewise. Opponents of the idea were concerned that the public company—which would receive a lot of direct and indirect government subsidy—would put private firms out of business and lead to a single-payer system, as in Canada, where the government pays for all care.
The public option was slated to pass the Senate—as it did in the House—until Connecticut’s Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman said he would not support legislation that included it.
McCaskill told FoxNews.com, “I have gone against my party more than almost anyone else in the Democratic caucus.”84 But she didn’t mention that when she does, she’s usually to the left of it!
Jim Talent, the former senator whom McCaskill defeated in 2006, may run again and would be a worthy and strong candidate. But we like Sarah Steelman, the former Missouri state treasurer who pioneered the way toward effective sanctions against Iran. She was the first state official in the nation to insist that none of her state’s assets be invested in companies that do business with Iran or North Korea. In doing so, she was really the first person to demonstrate how really to hurt Iran and force it to make hard decisions about which it values more—it’s economy or the bomb. Other states and, belatedly, the Feds have followed suit. Sarah would make a great senator.
Let’s hope Missouri voters, who went overwhelmingly Republican in 2010, repeat the trend in 2012.
Herb Kohl
Wisconsin
Elected 1988
Voted with the Democrats 96% of the time85
Appropriations Committee
Banking Committee
Judiciary Committee
Wisconsin is changing from blue to red. In 2010, Republicans elected a U.S. senator, Ron Johnson, who replaced the ultra-ultra-liberal Senator Russ Feingold. Republicans also elected a new governor, Scott Walker, a conservative dedicated to educational choice, lower taxes, and cuts in spending. They swept both houses of the legislature and picked up a seat in Congress. Nice work.
Herb Kohl is next on the list. He ought to be. What does Wisconsin need a senator for? Kohl votes the way the party tells him to 96% of the time. Save the money on his salary and just elect a voting machine instead!
Kohl is one of the richest members of the Senate. FoxNews.com reports that he “listed numerous investments [on his disclosure form], including stock in the Milwaukee Bucks valued at more than $50 million, the highest category on the forms. Kohl owns the Milwaukee Bucks professional basketball team, which Forbes magazine valued at $260 million this year.”86
That’s OK. He earned his money. But he is also very fond of spending our money as freely as he may choose t
o spend his own. He uses his seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and his extensive seniority to promote all kinds of spending projects. He authored 69 earmarks in 2010, costing a total of $95 million.87
As the Wisconsin State Journal noted, Kohl has certainly brought home the bacon for Wisconsin. But, “by playing the earmark game, he’s also helped to shell out billions to other states. Some of this spending may be justified. But earmarks dodge the normal review process that requires evidence of need. Congressional leaders also use earmarks as bait to get uncooperative colleagues to support legislation they would otherwise oppose.”88
And consider some of the earmarks he has made us pay for:89
Corrosion Control Hangar at General Mitchell Airport—$5 million
Dairy Forage Agricultural Research Center in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin—$4 million
Dairy Forage Research in Marshfield, Wisconsin—$2.5 million
Water Environment Research Fund—$2 million
Shipyard Repair Facility, Superior, Wisconsin—$2 million
Dairy Market Development—$2 million
Henry Avenue Bridge reconstruction—$974,000
Nutrition Enhancement Public Institute—$950,000
Marquette University Rural Dental Health—$850,000
Grazing Lands Conservation Institution $835,000
Sometimes Kohl is so anxious to appease the special interests in his state that he hurts us all. For example, he recently lobbied Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to increase the purchase price for products under the federal Dairy Price Support program, a move that would trigger higher milk prices.
Kohl wrote that “a meaningful but temporary increase in the Dairy Price Support program will begin to restore farm level prices and help restore producers’ ability to produce basic cash flow for their operations during these difficult financial times.”90
If Herbert Kohl lavished the same kind of attention on protecting taxpayers that he used on serving customers in his famous chain of stores, he would make a much better senator.
Jeff Bingaman
New Mexico
Elected: 1982
Voted with the Democrats 96% of the time91