Eideard

Freshman U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, a tax-bashing Tea Party champion who sharply lectures President Barack Obama and other Democrats on fiscal responsibility, owes more than $100,000 in child support to his ex-wife and three children, according to documents his ex-wife filed in their divorce case in December.

“I won’t place one more dollar of debt upon the backs of my kids and grandkids unless we structurally reform the way this town spends money!” Walsh says directly into the camera in his viral video lecturing Obama on the need to get the nation’s finances in order…

An intense, silver-haired firebrand, Walsh, 49, has taken cable TV by storm in recent weeks, becoming the unofficial spokesman for the “No compromise” faction of the Republican majority in the U.S. House — refusing to consider any debt crisis solution that includes raising taxes on the wealthy.

Walsh admits he is not wealthy. Some of his financial problems — including losing his Evanston condo to foreclosure — were documented before his out-of-nowhere victory last fall in the 8th Congressional District in Chicago’s north and northwest suburbs…

Before getting elected, he had told Laura Walsh that because he was out of work or between jobs, he could not make child support payments. So she was surprised to read in his congressional campaign disclosures that he was earning enough money to loan his campaign $35,000.

“Joe personally loaned his campaign $35,000, which, given that he failed to make any child support payments to Laura because he ‘had no money’ is surprising,” Laura Walsh’s attorneys wrote in a motion filed in December seeking $117,437 in back child support and interest. “Joe has paid himself back at least $14,200 for the loans he gave himself…”

Walsh lives with his new wife and children in McHenry. He has not paid any of the $117,437 yet, Laura Walsh’s attorney, Jack Coladarci, said Wednesday.

My lifetime political dicho still stands: Republicans would have invented hypocrisy if Christians hadn’t beaten them to it.

Thinking about death can be frightening, no matter your age or medical condition. As we get older, the reality of our own mortality tends to come into clearer focus; this doesn’t make talking about death or life-sustaining treatments any less frightening though.

It was fear — stoked by certain politicians — that led to the inaccurate and misguided “death panel” rumors that surrounded health care reform proposals last year.

Beginning January 1, Medicare will reimburse physicians who advise patients, in voluntary discussions, about their preferences for end-of-life care treatment during their annual Medicare “wellness visit.” This is advance care planning, and it is a good thing for seniors, their families and health care professionals.

It’s not new. A law passed in 2008 allowed end-of-life planning to be part of a patient’s “welcome to Medicare” exam. Health care reform turned the welcome visit into an annual wellness visit. And now regulations clarify that these important discussions will be covered should the Medicare beneficiary wish to take advantage of this opportunity.

Advance care planning allows a person to make his or her wishes and care preferences known before being faced with a medical crisis. Advance care planning is simply smart life-planning.

RTFA. Many important details and suggestions about planning for the end of your future.

You can be smart. Or you can be stupid.

When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

Congressional supporters of the new policy, though pleased, have kept quiet. They fear provoking another furor like the one in 2009 when Republicans seized on the idea of end-of-life counseling to argue that the Democrats’ bill would allow the government to cut off care for the critically ill.

The same dweebs who believed the agitprop back then will likely get their wedgies on, again.

The final version of the health care legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, authorized Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations, or wellness visits. The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit.

Under the rule, doctors can provide information to patients on how to prepare an “advance directive,” stating how aggressively they wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.

While the new law does not mention advance care planning, the Obama administration has been able to achieve its policy goal through the regulation-writing process, a strategy that could become more prevalent in the next two years as the president deals with a strengthened Republican opposition in Congress…

“Advance care planning improves end-of-life care and patient and family satisfaction and reduces stress, anxiety and depression in surviving relatives,” the administration said in the preamble to the Medicare regulation, quoting research published this year in the British Medical Journal.

RTFA. Reflect on the fact that the average Tea Party nutball hasn’t gotten past 1611 when it comes to palliative care – much less understanding that terminally ill folk just might someone more than the parish shaman advising them on their legal and medical choices.

There are Republicans who know better; but, they are corrupt enough to let opportunism and vote-getting from the truly ignorant override anything approaching ethical standards.

A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan takes a month to kick in.

Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.

“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange. The benefits session, held behind closed doors, drew about 250 freshman members, staffers and family members to the Capitol Visitors Center auditorium late Monday morning,”…

Harris, a Maryland state senator who works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and several hospitals on the Eastern Shore, also told the audience, “This is the only employer I’ve ever worked for where you don’t get coverage the first day you are employed,” his spokeswoman Anna Nix told POLITICO.

Like most of the Tea Party ignoranuses, he cares nothing for the reality of folks who depend on federally managed or mandated healthcare programs for their needs. This egregious prick whines when his professional “rights” are forced into the mold constructed by his political peers.

Imagine how loud he would oink if he had to support his family on an unemployment insurance check?

Republicans may be abandoning Christine O’Donnell’s U.S. Senate campaign. But she still has friends in high places — really high places.

In fact, the Delaware Tea Party favorite is crediting divine intervention for the successes that her campaign has had.

“The day that we saw a spike in the polls was a day that some people had a prayer meeting for me, that morning for this campaign,” she tells the Christian Broadcasting Network…

“I believe that prayer plays a direct role in this campaign,” she said. “I always ask people: ‘Please pray for the campaign. Please pray for our staff. Please pray, specifically, that the eyes of the voters be opened.’”

Prayer may be O’Donnell’s best hope. Since her upset primary win over Republican moderate Mike Castle, she has been dogged by questions about her qualifications for office, ridiculed for acknowledging a teenage fascination with witchcraft and excoriated over her understanding of U.S. religious freedoms…

“God is the reason that I’m running. If I didn’t believe that there were a cause greater than myself worth fighting for, if I didn’t believe that it takes a complete dying of self to make things right in this eleciton cycle, I would not be running,” she says…

Barring any more acts of God, her Senate candidacy will face its final judgment before the Delaware electorate on Nov. 2.

Har!

Where’s the Looney Party when you really need them?

Har, har, har!

Thanks, Mr. Justin

I’m going to say yes. Based on the the photos and videos I’ve seen of the two events, more people showed up at the Apple store’s grand opening last Friday in Philadelphia than showed up for what was hyped as a national Tea Party rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, which featured speaker Andrew Breitbart.

For the record, the Philadelphia Inquirer put the Saturday Tea Party crowd at 300 (no, that is not a misprint), and reported that Friday’s Apple store opening drew “hundreds.’

Given that fact, it might be time for the country’s political press corps to start asking itself whether the Tea Party really is a national movement if it’s heavily hyped rallies are drawing smaller crowds than computer store openings.

The Tea Party, um, event was billed as a unity rally to show the world how people of color supported America’s leading rightwing nutballs.

Har!

The Republican nominee for a New Mexico congressional seat suggested during a radio interview that the United States could place land mines along the Mexican border to secure the international boundary…

Mullins says border security came up during a radio interview last month, when he was campaigning for the GOP nod to run against Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M.

Mullins subsequently won the Republican primary June 1.

In the May 18 interview with KNMX radio in Las Vegas, N.M., Mullins says the U.S. could mine the border, install barbed wire and post signs directing would-be border jumpers to cross legally at designated checkpoints.

He explained Monday it was a suggestion he’d heard while campaigning.

It’s not often I get to vote against a thoroughly dislikable right-wing nutball. The Republicans – half the time – don’t even try to run candidates in northern New Mexico. Down in Albuquerque with military bases and war-lover retirees they have a constituency. Up here, folks are construction workers, hotel employees, subsistence farmers – ordinary folks or part of the arts-and-crafts crowd attracted by living in a beautiful place.

But, the wingnut right-wing that controls what’s left of the Republican Party is beyond belief. This is the kind of crap they come up with all the time.

Facing significant anger aimed at Washington and at some of his past votes, Utah Sen. Robert Bennett was eliminated Saturday from seeking re-election as a Republican, becoming the first incumbent to fall victim to the growing anti-Washington mood ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.

Bennett came in third in a second round of balloting at the state party convention behind more conservative candidates Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee. In a final round of voting, neither Lee nor Bridgewater won 60 percent of the vote needed to win the nomination. They will now face each other in a primary election June 22…

Bennett’s elimination from the ballot likely will send shock waves throughout the political community with more incumbents worried they will also become the victims of the anti-Washington, anti-incumbency fervor that is being fueled at least in part by the Tea Party movement…

David Kirkham, a Tea Party activist, told CNN in an interview…he was so upset about the bailout issue that he was motivated to form the Utah Tea Party chapter last year.

“That one vote was pretty toxic,” he said. “That one vote affected a lot of things, changed the rules of the game. President Bush said that where we have to abandon free market principles to save the free market and fundamentally, we just don’t agree. There’s just no way.”

I love it. The Republican hierarchy has embraced the single issue nutballs for so long it’s coming back to bite them on the butt.

Presuming Dems in the neighborhood with backbone and smarts. That may be a stretch.

It’s a grass-roots protest movement composed of the newly politicized and people distrustful of hierarchy. So how is it possible to be an illegitimate Tea Party member?

Ask Republicans in Nevada. Some are accusing Jon Scott Ashjian, a new Tea Party candidate running for U.S. Senate, of being a fake. The allegation? He was put in the race by agents of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to siphon votes from the GOP.

“No doubt about it,” says Danny Tarkanian, one of the many Republican Senate candidates hoping to challenge Reid in November…

As for Reid, an aide dismisses the accusations. As does Reid, who says he’s never met Ashjian or “anyone in his family.” Reid tells CNN, “I think there are too many conspiratorialists in the world today. This is a free country…”

The conspiracy theories abound from Tea Party activists and worried Republicans: Ashjian’s never attended Tea Party rallies; he hasn’t coordinated with local organizers; the secretary of his Tea Party of Nevada, Barry Levinson, is a registered Democrat. Levinson said, “I vote the person, not the party” and calls the accusations “political garbage…”

Jon Scott Ashjian seems to find the fuss amusing. New to the political scene, he personally gave CNN directions to his house for an interview that his wife, daughter and bulldog attended. He said it was the first time he’d spoken with the national media. Ashjian, who helped form the Tea Party of Nevada just to run for this seat, said that he’d never take marching orders from the Democrats or Reid.

He says he’s fielded endless calls from Republicans trying to strong-arm him to leave the race, and he resents it: “I don’t think Republicans own the Tea Party,” Ashjian said. “In fact, I know they don’t in Nevada, because I do. That’s what’s really got them in an uproar.”

Pretty hilarious. If true, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.

It’s just extra funny to see these hypocrites claiming they love the independence of “grassroots” organizations – funded by former Republican officials – and ripped because someone may have stolen their tapdance routine.