Friday, September 25, 2015

Boehner Out

House Speaker Boehner to resign from Congress at end of October

Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, who has repeatedly been challenged by the conservative wing of his Republican Party, told members on Friday that he will resign from the House at the end of October.
An aide to Boehner, who holds the top job in the House, said the Ohio lawmaker will step down from the speakership and his seat in Congress effective on Oct. 30.
U.S. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 2 Republican in the House, is expected to be the top contender to replace Boehner as speaker, Republican Representative Peter King told reporters.

22 comments:

  1. From Bloomberg News: House Speaker John Boehner will resign from Congress at the end of October, lawmakers said, following repeated clashes with conservative members of his Republican conference that had threatened a government shutdown next week.

    Boehner had intended only to serve through the end of 2014, but cited the defeat last year of former No. 2 Republican Eric Cantor as reason to stay on. His meeting this week with Pope Francis was among developments that helped him decide to now leave, according to a Republican aide. He announced his decision to rank-and-file Republicans in a private meeting Friday morning and said nothing to reporters as he left.

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    1. A shame he will not leave the first of October.

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  2. Surprisingly, I could actually believe that sitting in to watch the Pope could help Boehner decide enough is enough. I'm genuinely curious Lou about why you wish he would be gone sooner. Not ball busting at, but Im curious about whether you think there is someone who could do a better job.

    The tea baggers, I believe, do not have enough votes to get one of their village idiots elected to Boehner's spot. It seems there is an insatiable desire to defund PP, because, what else do old men really give a shit about besides the possibility that some woman might have sex without a consequence. Sigh, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that most of them are fat, ugly and probably can't get their dicks up anymore without assistance of viagra, which of course they want to make sure that all insurance plans still cover that.

    Boehner was called an "institutionalist" and it seems there can't be any bigger insult to heap on a Republican. It implies some level of wanting government to actually function, and we know this isn't wanted. I think Boehner could have actually gotten things done conservatives would approve of, but he could not have done so without Democrat support, and that is another capital crime to those right of center. Either get everything 100% on your terms, or shut down the government to fuck everybody. When a guy like Ryan want's nothing to do with the job, you know it's a shitty job. I wish they would put a guy like Louie Gohmert in there. Now that would be entertainment.

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    1. For someone who appears astute, you seem to have missed the fact that America is frustrated with the go along to get along politics in Washington. As I have said numerous times. Compromise does not always get to the heart of a problem. There are a significant number of people who are cheering the likes of Sanders and Trump for some reason. People on the right feel totally betrayed by the Republican leadership.

      King mentioned my perspective being here in Britain. Something quite interesting is happening here and it is very much the same kinds of political winds that are stirring in the US. In the US it comes under the heading of States’ Rights. A federal government too centralized, too powerful and too unresponsive to the local need. Here it is called 'Devolution'. What is generally in the news is that the for major parts of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, want more autonomy from a centralized Westminster. What is not so talked about is the louder calls by counties(that would be the states within these four countries) to have more control over both their finance and decision making. Britain will never loose its ‘Nanny State’ status because many things have become so ingrained over time, but folks are tired of the one size fits all compromises that occur in London under the control of party whips.... This desire for more localized control is also driving an ever larger block of people who want to exit their association with what is the ultimate goal of a United States of Europe. Centralization is more about a power play than it is good governance...

      McConnell will be next to go, he just doesn't realize it yet.

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    2. “Boehner was called an "institutionalist"”

      The word institutionalist is one which people all over the US need to think about and understand. It is exactly why wack-jobs like Lewis Farrakhan have a following when he says, “To hell with the confederate flag, we need to burn the US Flag.”

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    3. Cantor check

      Boehner check

      1773-2009

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    4. It can be argued that the person who benefits most from Boehner's departure is none other than Hillary Clinton.

      http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-09-25/boehner-leaves-chaos-in-the-house-and-clarity-in-the-presidential-election

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    5. "Also on Friday, a State Department official also told CNN that in the process of turning over Libya-related emails to the Select Committee on Benghazi, it found a "small number" of Benghazi-related emails that had not been disclosed to the committee previously. These emails are among 925 Libya-related emails being turned over Friday and were found within the emails Clinton turned over to the State Department from her private server. The official said the emails were found because they have now been digitized and are easier to search."

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    6. I'm happy that the previous committees that investigated the Benghazi matter did such an outstanding job.

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  3. "The irony is that Boehner, on most issues, is every bit as conservative as his conservative critics. He wants to defund Planned Parenthood, scrap the Affordable Care Act, and stop the Iran nuclear deal. But, unlike his critics, Boehner has been both realistic and accommodationist, however uncomfortably, to the realities of Harry Reid's veto capability in the Senate and Obama's veto pen. "


    While that may be true.... sometimes you have to vote your conscience... sometimes you have to make the other guy commit. Win, lose or draw, you are on record as a person of principle..... I, like a lot of other people thing that he was just a ... bit... too accommodating...

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  4. "For someone who appears astute, you seem to have missed the fact that America is frustrated with the go along to get along politics in Washington. As I have said numerous times. Compromise does not always get to the heart of a problem. "

    I don't know what makes you think I haven't seen this? I've seen angry mobs aplenty; eagerly showing up at some meet up ready to have their day at being Howard Beale. Yeah, they are pissed, in fact they are royally pissed at whatever their gurus tell them to be pissed at. We are obsessing over people who are getting a sliver of a sliver, IE 26% of a group of people who will vote for a rubber chicken as long as it is Democrat or Republican. I'm not surprised you make that comment about compromise, wasn't it that Grand Ole Dame Maggie who said that comprise is what happens when you have a lack of strong leadership? I think it was. And therein we have a picture of what is going on here.

    Compromising for the sake of compromising is not a solution IMO. That said, millions of people here have immersed, no make that drowned themselves in a sea of ridiculously biased information and don't have a fucking clue about reality. Take that idiot at Trumps rally claiming once again that Obama is a Muslim and there are re-education camps. I'm sorry TS, this is not principled dissent, it's fucking idiots being lead by their nose to show up and yell and drown out any voice that doesn't agree.

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    1. And Max describes those that are concerned about PP killing hundreds of thousands of babies each year, having their grandchildren's future indebted to the tune of 18T, worried about a foreign policy that has enabled millions of refuges worldwide to occur, yada, yada,,,,yada,,as "fucking idiots."

      Well if that's the evolved definition of 'fucking idiot," then call me a "fucking idiot."

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    2. “We are obsessing over people who are getting a sliver of a sliver.”

      The ‘obsession’ isn’t over the sliver... its over where the sliver goes. A whole lotta taxpayers don’t want their money attached to an organization that 1) performs abortions, certainly on the scale that they do and 2) generates income from the ‘waste products’ of its services.... Want people to support your efforts to give guidance to parents.... stick to giving guidance.

      “I'm not surprised you make that comment about compromise, wasn't it that Grand Ole Dame Maggie who said that comprise is what happens when you have a lack of strong leadership? I think it was. And therein we have a picture of what is going on here.”

      I did say sometimes.... of course I have never compromised my vote... I voted for Clinton by proxy. Guess Bush would have been the lesser of two evils...

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    3. The ‘obsession’ isn’t over the sliver... its over where the sliver goes. A whole lotta taxpayers don’t want their money attached to an organization that 1) performs abortions, certainly on the scale that they do and 2) generates income from the ‘waste products’ of its services.... Want people to support your efforts to give guidance to parents.... stick to giving guidance

      And I don't want to pay for fucking needless wars. I don't want to pay for stupid ass farm subsidies. I don't want to pay for endless military hardware we don't need that is created with the sole intention of delivering wholesale slaughter. Yeah, I get it TS, the people losing their fucking minds over PP are correct and everyone else is wrong.

      I voted for Perot back at a time when I ate that "They work for me" shit up. In hindsight, I have developed more respect for Bush senior as he was truly the last honest Republican that party had. Under Clinton, we actually paid our bills and other good things for the middle class happened. But, Clinton signed NAFTA, and made it henceforth completely acceptable for Democrats to be the same bitch for money that Republicans had been for decades.

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    4. Look, there has always been a large block of silent voters who grumble but never stand up and let their voice be heard. Every once in a while society gets pissed off and gets active. The last time it really happened, for better or worse, was in the 60’s. War, individual liberty, racial and social equality, strained the very limits of the status quo to understand what was going on.

      I think that is happening today except in the other direction. People understand that the push for social justice as lead in many cases to a breakdown in social order. Note that there is a difference between natural social order and the kind we have manufactured over the last 60 years.

      Rumblings of this dissatisfaction and acknowledgement of the irresponsibility of the federal government and the usurpation of its authority cropped up with Goldwater and then Reagan and again with Ross Perot and Ron Paul. It changed gear in earnest when the president and both houses of congress ignored an overwhelming majority of people’s opinions with regard to the bailouts. Yeah, I know, the world would have ended and cooler, more intelligent heads prevailed which is why we have a representative government... problem is, we don’t. We have a special interest government. A government so entwined with business that the federal government has become the clearing house for everything with think and do...

      We have social attitudes that have gone from what many felt were restrictive in the 50’s and the pendulum has swung the other direction. The problem now of course isn’t much different than it was in the 60’s... the establishment is now a liberal one... and people are tired of it. Fed up with wars and subsidies? So start yelling and kicking and screaming about wars but do it with the constitution in mind. So stand up with the ‘fiscal responsibility’ group and carry a ‘stop farm subsidies’ placard. You are already use to standing with a rag tag of diverse groups who have little interest in each other but came together to save each other... it’s called the Democratic Party, so it shouldn’t be such a stretch to stand with folks like the Tea Party and talk about fiscal responsibility...

      P.S. I don’t like paying or for that matter, involving ourselves in wars that are of no concern, yet the same people who support this presidents ability to take unilateral actions because congress won’t support his vision is the same group of people who allow congress to abrogate their responsibility to declare and fund a war. I also don’t believe in farm subsidies... I don’t think the federal government has any business being involved in people’s business or dictating social actions using tax dollars either....

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    5. I don't get it TS. Here you tell me that if I don't like something that someone like a tea bagger also doesn't like, I should stand with them. Do I not do this damn near every day that I post? I've told William I agree with him when I do. Is that not good enough because I don't have the ultra pure, blue meth view of the constitution that I do? Does my dissent about the war mean nothing if it isn't couched in a constituational mindset like yours? If so, than this is what is so F'n annoying to me. It's the equivalent of the flipping Hastert rule wherein a Republican cannot bring up a bill unless it can basically pass without Democrat support. It's flipping childish.

      I'm actually not going to argue that life was probably a lot more simply for everyone when people accepted their lot in life and just shut up about it. The negro accepting their seat at the back of the bus, the woman accepting her role to breed children, the father who worked at some shitty job to put food on the table. people got tired of that and we still haven't figured out a more equitable way to live with each other.

      You worship the constitution the way other people worship God. Respectfully, there is no one on this site who sees the world as sharply through the constitutional lens the way you do. For the most part, you soundly find a way to describe how the constitution does not support some social justice program, and further, you make an argument for how every social problem we face today is the direct result of some unconstitutional law. You blissfully ignore, however, the angst that created such laws.

      I personally believe most of our social problems today are about power. When one group of people feels abused for a long enough period of time, they erupt. I don't think it's that complicated. A strict, concrete, inflexible, intransigent and unchanging adherence to the constitution would likely have prevented us from having a deficit. The bitterness within society, however, would be there regardless. I don't think you like that anymore than I do, but when it goes unaddressed, that's when revolutions happen. Government programs will not make people think differently, but they can start to put an upper limit on how far we will let the abuse ago, or on how much power we will let one group accumulate. The constitution, of course, doesn't give a damn about these issues and while there is a lofty, ivory tower argument to be made of why there should never be intervention, I think a lot of well meaning people along the way concluded that if there is no balance in society, there eventually is little structure left to maintain a society wherein only a few truly benefit while all the others do the work of maintaining it.

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  5. Watching FOX does make you dumber.

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    1. Well, as Mike said above “IE 26% of a group of people who will vote for a rubber chicken as long as it is Democrat or Republican.” Problem is, this process started long before Fox and as it affects Dems as well it must be something else.... like a public education system intent on teaching kids what to think rather than how to think.

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    2. Our education system is always a whipping boy, and for those of sa certain political persuasion, it always will be. The advance of technology, however, is one of many variables that have had a massive impact on our society, and not in an entirely good way. I tinkered with bikes when I was young, then cars in high school, and I helped my father fix just about everything on the house at least once. I don't use those skills precisely today, but taking shit apart and putting it back together, IMO, gave me some reasoning skills I could not have gotten just playing with electronic gadgets. All of us today have enormous ability to go right to the internet, find some article that agrees with our outlook, and fling into some chat board (cough Willliam cough) and never have to make a persuasive argument. I don't think it's completely fair to blame an education system for something that arguably was not always taught. Common sense goes a long, long way and I blame parents way more than I do the education system.

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    4. Our educational system hasn’t always been the whipping boy. The federal government sticking its nose into education has created several bones of contention however. The results both internally and when compared with the rest of the world shows without a doubt that it is a failed policy yet people of a certain political persuasion refuse to believe that anything can possibly operate without centralized planning and ... democratic oversight. If they actually believed in the general goodness of state education, then they would allow it to stand on its own and compete with other forms... let the best system win. Dems however aren’t much into the competition thing... it goes against the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ mentality.

      You mention parents... While not wanting to make too many excuses for them, parents today are a product of that educational system. The first big loss of parental control was over sex education; remember? Where parents lost the right to decide when and how their children would find out about the birds and the bees... where parents taught the importance of relationships not state guided, liberally education, disinterested third parties. (And if you think a teacher is REALLY interested, tell me how many take personal responsibility for the tragedies that they help to produce?) Sex education was in response of course to ‘busy and inattentive’ parents not teaching their children>>>> What one segment of the state thought they should be teaching the children.

      Lets see, how did this chain of events unfolded... well, we rapidly developed the ‘latch key’ generation.

      The sexual revolution produced a generation of women who, rather than any acknowledgement that they were at least partially responsible for the future generations they helped produce, pursued their dreams (Whiles still having children)... as if scores of men chose to get black lung working in the mines or the steel mills. Or somehow the day in day out paycheck of an assembly line that was worked by their father and their fathers father was actually... fulfilling their dreams.

      Monetary policy dramatically changed the way money was created and distributed.. Our detachment from Breton Woods changed the way the economy funded itself and was a direct result of a government that overspent not only on Vietnam but Great Society programs. And a direct result of the irresponsible debt we have today.

      Social programs that were not needed. By all measures, poverty was falling quite well on its own. Black unemployment was actually lower that white unemployment. Perhaps this was just another one of those ‘we’ll keep them N..egros voting democrat for the next 200 years’ kind of programs.

      At any rate, the great society created, yes created, the start of a trend towards fatherless homes that have resulted in a community that have very close family relationships to a result of 70% of black children parented by only one parent.

      This of course requires increased social manipulation of society in schools... all in the name of promoting the general welfare.... So, no, schools haven’t always gotten a bad wrap.. but the failure of schools to actually teach our kids how to think instead of social engineering them certainly is.

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    5. So the sexual revolution caused the downfall. I'm sorry TS, but that is way outside of a rational argument. As a kid of parents who got divorced in the mid 70's, I have a far, far different outlook on this. What ended my parents marriage was my Dad's drinking. Period. He was inattentive as a parent and like many men of his generation, and he stated this directly to me many years later, he truly believed that as long as he worked and brought a paycheck home, he was meeting his requirements. The education system did not have a damn thing to do with that.

      Your para on the sexual revolution remains a clearly male perspective. No doubt the Fathers and then sons who worked at shitty jobs were NOT living the dream. You ignore a central point, however, they still had far more choice than woman did. They could go to a different job, they could go to a trade, they could stay at the factory, they could go to school and work towards a high skilled job that was all but closed to woman. Woman were repressed for decade after decade, is it really so outrageous to think that when things finally started to turn and open up that women weren't going to explore that as fully as possible? Have you ever watched freshman in college drink until they puke because they no longer have their parents watching over them? Your suggestion, as I interpret it, is that women should basically accept that men weren't living their dreams either and with that in mind, maybe they should just shut up and accept the lot that God gave them. What if the wife was smarter than the husband? In an market based world, shouldn't the wife be the breadwinner, the husband at home caring for the kids while the wife is rewarded completely according to her ability to beat out anyone else, including other men in the workplace? If you are being consistent, I don't think you should have a problem with this outlook.

      Instead, what we have is a situation where women are still paid less than men for doing the same work, they are frequently passed over for promotions in favor of some man, and they still have to endure the ape mindset of men who are intimidated by meeting a woman who is smarter than they are. Sorry TS, what I hear in your comment is it was meant that women would be in a role wherein they exist to support their husband and raise children without daring to think about what they find interesting. In my parents age and grandparents age, people picked someone, married, and lived with it no matter how miserable they got. I don't think this was doing society any favors either. Even Hank Reardon finally ditched his bitch wife.

      Lastly, your para there about the Negro is every bit as paternalistic and dismissive as anything you think liberals present. It's another version of the "Democrats have a big base cause they give away free shit" argument that I think it complete crap. In essence, you are saying the negro is too stupid to realize he/she is being had, which means you are just as high minded as Democrats. Fact-African Americans are still paid less than whites for comparable work (just one link http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/09/high-tech-pay-gap-hispanics-asians-african-americans/16606121/ of many that are easy to find)

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