Democratic candidates for U.S. House Matt Varilek and Jeff Barth have hit the papers and the airwaves with their criticisms of Rep. Kristi Noem's vote to raise darn near every worker's taxes by $1000 (Merry Christmas from the subsidy princess!). They've been slow to add such critiques to their websites, though Varilek has issued a Facebook post and an obscure Tweet on the issue. Give Varilek a slight social media advantage.
Varilek also sends out the following campaign e-mail hoping to translate the Noem-Boehner tax increase into a contributions increase for his war chest. In his pitch, Varilek takes a rhetorical route similar to that staked out by Barth, tying Rep. Noem to the Tea Party. Varilek says that Noem's Tea Party inclinations have brought us little more than "a year of threatened shut-downs, ultimatums, and political theater." Like Barth, Varilek argues that Noem's Tea-Party politics have destabilized the American economy. In a clever bit of Tea-tweaking jujitsu, Varilek cites the Tea Party's former favorite Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who is mad that "House Republicans would rather continue playing politics than find solutions.... Their actions will hurt American families and be detrimental to our fragile economy."
Maybe the candidates don't need to work too hard this week. Christmas is coming, and folks may already be tuning out the news in favor of egg nog and other pagan solstice revelry. But facing a candidate with a big war chest and lots of out-of-state supporters, Varilek and Barth should wring every headline and campaign contribution they can from this disastrous Noem vote. Chalk up extra points to Varilek for jumping on this issue.. and for using hyperlinks in his e-mail!
[Varilek campaign e-mail, 2011.12.21]
Dear Friend,
With the holidays approaching, the last thing working families should wake up to on New Year's Day is a tax increase. But if Kristi Noem and her Tea Party group in the U.S. House keep up their latest game of brinksmanship, the average South Dakota family could lose an average of $1000 next year. As I said yesterday to the Mitchell Daily Republic, that may be something to sneeze at out in Washington, but here that means a lot to the average family.
This issue should have been put to rest a long time ago. There is bipartisan agreement that if anyone deserves to avoid a tax increase when our economy is still struggling, it's middle-class and working families. So it was a breath of fresh air when the U.S. Senate reached a bipartisan agreement to extend the middle-class payroll tax cut. After difficult negotiations, involving compromise for both sides, 89 Senators, including Senators Johnson and Thune, approved the bipartisan extension. As I mentioned to KELO-TV news, that level of consensus is about as common as a four-leaf clover, and House leadership suggested they would pass the extension too. (Click the image below to watch the story.)
But after a year of threatened shut-downs, ultimatums, and political theater, Kristi Noem and her Tea Party group in the House decided to throw out the bipartisan deal and play one more game of chicken. To be fair, long ago Congress should have adopted a full-year extension of this tax cut, instead of the shorter-term bipartisan deal now pending. But with South Dakota families facing a $1000 per year tax increase as a result of the failure to compromise, the time for issuing new demands and ultimatums has long-since passed.
On this issue I agree with Republican U.S. Senator Scott Brown, who said to Kristi Noem and his other House counterparts: "It angers me that House Republicans would rather continue playing politics than find solutions. Their actions will hurt American families and be detrimental to our fragile economy." Kristi Noem's separation from Senators Johnson and Thune shows just how far she's willing to go to curry favor with the Tea Party group of U.S. House Members who made her their leader. If you agree that she should answer to South Dakota families, not her Tea Party colleagues in the House, please take a moment to join this campaign. Send a letter to the editor at your local newspaper. Sign up to volunteer. Make a contribution of $100, $50, or whatever you can afford.
Kristi made the bold choice with this vote. How can you continue to drain money from the social security fund when it's already full of I.O.U.'s?
Nobody is talking straight on this issue. It is not a "tax cut" as it is decreasing one's contribution to their Social Security account. In other words, it is spending today what could be available in retirement.
In my mind there are two rational choices:
1) Extend it for a year if one believes the Keynesian views on consumer spending as a stimulus and it applies here. I happen to believe the problem is not a demand problem but fundamental because of all the impediments to growth in the economy via regulation.
2) Terminate it and put the money into people's SS account for retirement and decrease the pressure on the Treasury to borrow more funds from China.
The two month extension is a joke from a policy point of view. But is good politics as Obama gets to pretend he is doing something for the folks by dribbling out this faux "tax cut" and he doesn't have to change his projections on the deficit all in one fell swoop but a little bit at a time.
I'm with Troy. And the bigger problem is that Noem is viewed as stubborn and not willing to compromise. The deal was passed now they don't like it. It looks partisan or simply like they are a dilliberate road block.
Noem is right on the issue. (and that is hard for me to say). That said they should learn when they need to play politics and just pass it.
"not willing to compromise"
That is an application of the Hegelian dialectic where socialism and capitalism is murged into the "Third Way"...fascism.
Noem is part of the partisan intransigent obstructionism that is making the Republican party irrelevant in terms of real solutions to real problems. Noem and her conspirators are purveyors of nonsense economic and regulatory mythology.
Thad, it appears they can continue to do it when they realize everyone else sees it as a $1000 tax increase on every job-doer in America: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/22/politics/congress-payroll-tax-cut/index.html
I think some of the bigger stories playing out here are that Cantor and other GOP leaders threw Boehner under the bus...so to speak.
Boehner acknowledged that engaging in a payroll tax fight "may not have been politically the smartest thing in the world to do."
So where else have we seen the radical right making a deliberate effort to divide the GOP and attempt to take over the party...no matter what the cost?
Heck of a parallel, Jana! An important difference, though, is that Boehner had party leaders, especially in the Senate, turning on him.
I wonder: is Boehner really at risk of getting Gingriched?
It is just killing me that we are fighting over stealing $80 from Paul to give to Mary while nearly $15,000,000,000,000 in debt sits out there growing and growing and growing and growing.........................
It's also killing the GOP in the court of public opinion. That's why Boehner, Noem, et al caved!
"So where else have we seen the radical right making a deliberate effort to divide the GOP and attempt to take over the party…no matter what the cost?"
"Heck of a parallel, Jana!"
"It’s also killing the GOP in the court of public opinion."
Again we have Marxist Democrats defending the Establishment GOP in order to continue their Hegelian dialectic fascist agenda toward a New World Order.
Peace be with the United States of Earth!
Boehner was just doing what Kristi (on behalf of the wing-nut House freshman class) told him to do (until McConnell yanked his leash.)
Noem should take this one square on the nose and stick up for John. If she doesn't, she will be the one who's throwing Boehner under the bus, don't you think, Cory?
I kinda agree with Jana here.
Noem tried to put an full Nelson on Congress and Obama, but her grip slipped.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_hold
p.s. What the Wiki article doesn't reveal is that the "Nelson grip" was really developed by the New Age Shirly Templeton Knight Masons as a means of holding Satan down so the Sibbonites could give him a cosmic wedgie and release his grip on the Freedom Fighters (great great grandfathers of George Washington and great great grandsons of Mary Magdaline, the secret founder of the French Masons.
...they failed. Their grip slipped too. And thus "Novus Ordo Seclorum" was printed on our money by Gutenberg and Ben Franklin, causing the New World Order and the Council on Foreign Relations to be funded as a result of a bad translation from the Latin and a couple of typographical errors.)
Merry Christmas to all and to All a Good Morning Vietnam.
Ron Paul wants to end the embargo on Cuba. Marxist.
Halleluja. Sibby's got me speaking in tongues! I always wonder how they did that. Blessings abound.
Thanks for all the fun this year, Cory.
Your blog is a riot, brother.
Cuba for the 54th State!
Bill must have seen this and completely lost it:
https://madvilletimes.com/2011/12/kristi-noems-vote-to-raise-payroll-taxes-is-so-bad/#comment-39998
And Bill, the Occult America includes your pal Gandhi.
The New Year is here! Happy Solstice, Sibby!
All the planets of Sol will be in the night sky this week:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45756603/ns/technology_and_science-space/
Bill, you wanted something from the CFR tath backs up my research:
It is all such an obvious hoax, all such a see-through front for fascism, that even the new world order organ Foreign Affairs played it safe by permitting one lone voice to raise a warning cry in its September/October 1999 edition.
Lord Ralf Dahrendorf cautioned of the Third Way: 1. “[It] is the only game in town.†2. Its sermons about “the coming wave of democratization … have a curious authoritarian streak in [them].â€
http://www.themoralliberal.com/2010/01/21/clinton-and-blairs-center-left-democracy-steve-farrell/
Cannápopa Wi – Moon When Trees Crack From The Cold
Anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre next week.
The link I just provided has a very interesting paragraph:
Third Way welfare reform includes compulsory savings and the old communist equal liability of all to work, including putting single mothers and the disabled to work — or else. But it doesn’t stop there. Throw in the part about creating state-run Boy’s Town-like facilities for neglected children, something Republican Third Wayer Newt Gingrich fought for in his Contract With America and you get the picture: first create welfare laws that encourage dads to leave the home (which we already have), then reform the laws to force the abandoned moms to leave the home and work (the proposed change), then have the state confiscate the parent-neglected kids who now have both parents missing in action. At last socialism wins the prize it always wanted: father becomes one part menace, one part effeminate, undermining his own and society’s morality and strength; mother is made masculine, ripped from out of her caregiver loving role to become the provider, and obligated to do so acknowledging a power to force labor the state never had before, the child becomes owned by the state, and the more likely to be a delinquent, which dilemma adds to the likelihood of even more state interventions.
Not good a third time.
Professor David Trask cites the beginning of South Dakota as a failed state from Mt. Blogmore:
"By the way, I am reading Richardson, Wounded Knee Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre, which repeats the (I think) familiar story of the successful Harrison administration plan to divide Dakota Territory into two states in order to get four Republican senators rather than two from Dakota. Of course, western South Dakota was part of Nebraska Territory until 1861 when it became part of Dakota Territory."
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/app/blogs/politicalblog/?p=8803#comment-398335
Libertarians are just earth haters who smoke pot.
And if you go to part three of Steve Farrell’s “Democrats in Dragâ€, you will find this proof of the fascist Reublican/Democrat drive toward the New World Order:
Not surprisingly, then, ten years later, in the wake of the passage of NAFTA, globalist Council on Foreign Relations Republican Insider Henry Kissinger would be heard bragging here, there, and everywhere, that the man most responsible for giving us NAFTA (what Kissinger called the important checkpoint on the way to a New World Order) was none other than Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich, more than any other man, was responsible for fast-tracking NAFTA and GATT through Congress in December of 1994 (call it a gift to Third Wayer, President Clinton), shortly before the incoming ‘revolutionary’ Republican dominated Congress (which had it been given the chance to vote on it, would likely would have defeated the treaties) took control. An example of things to come from this ‘conservative’ futurist.
And perhaps it all fits: heralded Republican Third Way Futurist Newt Gingrich emerges from the right, and at the same time his comrade Third Way Futurist Al Gore and his pal Bill Clinton burst upon the scene from the left. Gingrich promised to take Clinton and Gore down and out for the count; in the end Gingrich preserved their radical agenda by bringing to the plate a more palatable and patient — call it a more progressive — center/right push to the left.
http://www.themoralliberal.com/2010/01/30/gingrich-toffler-and-gore-a-peculiar-trio-steve-farrell/
Silence can be golden? Bill Fleming is making comments over at the SDWC, but he has avoided saying anything over here since I put up the Huffington Post links and these Steve Farrell links. The truth will shock the masses into silence. But putting a cork in Fleming is golden.
Don't flatter yourself, Steve. I just like to post where there is someone semi-coherent to have a conversation with. Your constant irrational prattle gets really tiresome after a while. Like a broken record. I find myself having to decide whether I would rather read your next goofball thing, or stab myself in the leg 20 times with an ice pick.
"stab myself in the leg 20 times with an ice pick"
Bill, get some help, you can't handle reality.
I'm laughing so hard right now I can't even get my wife to quit smiling at me........................The United States Of EARTH!!!!!!!!
I love it, love it, love it............only one thing wrong here.........we are all interconnected by air and water! :(
BF; I agree with you. Honestly I totally agree; which is why I can't read these posts without a good solid swatch of single malt. :)
Throw one back for me too, Charlie. Merry Christmas, man.
Charlie, you write like Duh over at the War Toilet. Are you he?
The Madville Times reminds its readers to drink and comment responsibly. [Burp!]
"BF; I agree with you. Honestly I totally agree;"
Not surprised.