Dunking the Teabaggers

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..."Joe Miller, the Republican nominee in Alaska's tight Senate race, admitted Thursday that his family received federally subsidized healthcare benefits through programs he considers unconstitutional..."

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatc...efited-from-unconstitutional-medicaid-program

..."Congressman-elect Bill Johnson announced in a trumpeting press release that he was refusing to accept Congressional health care benefits in protest of President Obama’s health care insurance reform law...What wasn’t included in the statement is Johnson, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, has and will continue to receive federal health-care benefits from that branch of the military.

In other words, Congressman-elect Johnson isn’t going with any of the cafeteria plans of private health insurers offered to members of Congress. Instead, he’s sticking to TRICARE. Given his age and retired status, it gets worse.

Congressman-elect Johnson is probably participating in the TRICARE for Life program. You know, the TRICARE program that supplements… Medicare coverage.

What was that about the evils of “government-controlled” health care, Congressman-elect?..."

http://www.plunderbund.com/2010/12/...-keep-his-government-run-health-care-instead/
 
"When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.

Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist"...

...Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”

“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said...


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html


So, should the government quit giving Mr. Grimes his Social Security, so that he can "figure out how to do it" on his own?
 
"Tea party backed Republican candidates -- indeed most Republican candidates -- base their campaigns largely on opposition to President Obama's agenda, and an imprecise pledge to reduce the federal deficit.

Perhaps no single issue encapsulates that pledge better than the Democrats' stimulus bill -- one of the President's signature initiatives that is, by design, a big deficit booster.

Government can't create jobs, they say, the stimulus wasted tax payer dollars, and simply bloated the federal government.

Scratch under the surface a bit, though, and these candidates' opposition to government spending isn't very deep at all, particularly when they benefit directly.

Ron Johnson, who claims "government doesn't create jobs," and who's hoping to unseat Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), has perhaps the longest record of benefiting from government largesse.

In 1979 a company called Wisconsin Industrial Shipping Supplies, owned by Johnson's brother-in-law, received a $75,000 development grant from the city of Oshkosh to build a rail spur to a plant it was building.

One of the conditions of the grant required WISS to hire 11 people in exchange for the funds. Just a few months later, WISS became Pacur -- the company Johnson owns today -- and the factory was opened. The factory itself was also built with the help of a $1 million government-issued development bond.

Years later, as president of the board of the Grand Opera House in Oshkosh, Johnson would investigate the possibility of obtaining stimulus money to help pay for theater renovations.

According to the Northwestern, "no stimulus dollars went to the Grand repairs, but [the Grand] was able to secure $500,000 from the state building commission to help offset local costs for the project." The entire cost of the project was $1.8 million.

Johnson has plenty of company in his private interest in government funds.

Joe Miller, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate nominee in Alaska, who wants to end the "welfare state" received thousands of dollars in federal agriculture subsidies for land he owned in Kansas over a decade ago.

He's not alone: Washington candidate Clint Didier has collected more than $273,000 in federal farm subsidies since 1995.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has a stake in a family farm that received more than $250,000 in federal ag subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

There are other examples, too. As a State Assemblywoman, Sharron Angle's job was a government job -- and her husband, too, was on the federal government's payroll and now collects a pension.

And Rand Paul, who wants to "slash the size of government" also wants to end cuts to physicians' pay by changing the formula Medicare uses to pay its doctors. Paul, an ophthalmologist, says half of his patients are Medicare patients -- meaning a significant proportion of his income comes from the federal and state government, too.

And multimillionaire Florida gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott's former company, Columbia/HCA, had to pay the feds $1.7 billion to settle charges that they overbilled state and federal authorities for health care services.

Of course, numerous elected Republicans have tried to take credit for jobs and projects created by the stimulus in their district -- so this basic type of hypocrisy is nothing new.

But Tea Party candidates are supposed to be a rejection of the status quo.

In this way, at least, they are not."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...es-benefit-from-stimulus-federal-spending.php
 
oustanding job, mojo. you've successfully pointed out that there are political hypocrites of all bents, liberal...conservative....and even TEA party.
 
..."Take Rep. Michele Bachmann, the self-appointed leader of the tea party movement and recent founder of the Tea Party Caucus, whose stated mission is to promote “fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution and limited government” in the House of Representatives.

But, as I first reported on Truthdig in December 2009, Bachmann’s free-market beliefs do not seem to apply to her own pocketbook.

According to federal records compiled by the Environmental Working Group, since 1995 the congresswoman profited from $251,973 in dairy and corn subsidies via a stake in her family’s farm.

Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her piece of the business earned her a (federally subsidized) income of up to $50,000 in 2008, a nice addition to the $174,000 taxpayer-funded salary she gets as a House member.

Bachmann is not the only tea party subsidy queen.

Many of the fresh-faced tea party candidates jockeying for a spot in Congress on a platform of “fiscal responsibility” and “small government” are quite content to allow themselves—and their constituents—to keep feeding at the “big government” trough..."

http://exiledonline.com/tea-party-r...t-whores-just-like-their-billionaire-masters/
 
..."South Dakota’s Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, Kristi Noem, a tea party favorite, is cut from the same tainted cloth.

She has benefited from $3.1 million in corn, soybean and wheat subsidies since 1995, but doesn’t display an ounce of shame when she proclaims that government spending poses a “direct threat to our liberty.”

Who knows, maybe her lack of a guilty conscience has something to do with the fact that her congressional district is the fourth most subsidized in the U.S., having received $4.26 billion over the past 15 years..."

http://exiledonline.com/tea-party-r...t-whores-just-like-their-billionaire-masters/
 
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