Posts Tagged ‘Rangel’

PA GOP News Brief – 7.30.10

1. Rasmussen Reports: Election 2010: Pennsylvania Senate

2. PA GOP: Will Joe Sestak And Other Pennsylvania Democratic Members Of Congress Join The Call For Charlie Rangel To Resign?

3. Altoona Mirror: Tax hikes hurt job creation

4. The Wall Street Journal: The Rangel Dispensation

5. Town Hall: “Bipartisan” Dems Go on the Attack

1. Rasmussen Reports: Election 2010: Pennsylvania Senate

Republican Pat Toomey continues to hold a small lead over Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Pennsylvania Voters shows Toomey earning 45% support, while Sestak picks up 39% of the vote. Six percent (6%) prefer another candidate in the race, and 10% are undecided.

That’s little changed from two weeks ago.

Sixty-six percent (66%) of Pennsylvania voters regard Toomey as politically conservative, and 42% place his views in the mainstream. Twenty-seven percent (27%) see him as an extremist, with 31% undecided.

Forty-five percent (45%) feel that Sestak is politically liberal, while 27% characterize him as a moderate. But 39% regard his views an extreme, while nearly as many (37%) think his views are in the mainstream. But roughly one-in-four voters (23%) aren’t sure.

2. PA GOP: Will Joe Sestak And Other Pennsylvania Democratic Members Of Congress Join The Call For Charlie Rangel To Resign?

Republican Party of Pennsylvania Spokesman Mike Barley released the following statement calling on Joe Sestak and fellow Democratic members of Congress Paul Kanjorski, Kathy Dahlkemper, Jason Altmire, Chris Carney, Tim Holden, Mark Critz, Allyson Schwartz, Mike Doyle, Chaka Fattah and Bob Brady continued refusal to call for Charlie Rangel’s resignation.

“What will it take for Joe Sestak and his fellow Democratic members of Congress to finally take a stand and call for the ethically challenged Congressman Charlie Rangel to resign,” Barley said. “It’s been months since allegations surrounding Charlie Rangel’s unethical behavior first came to light, and yet Joe Sestak and nearly all of his Democratic colleagues have remained silent on this issue as Charlie Rangel continues to serve as a United States Congressman.”

3. Altoona Mirror: Tax hikes hurt job creation

With the nation’s unemployment rate still troubling at 9.5 percent, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner believes it is time to kill more of the country’s job-creation ability.

Geithner did not put it that way, of course. He and his boss, President Barack Obama, continue to insist their actions are lifting the United States out of recession.

While some economic indicators have trended upwards, the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high. In some states, it exceeds the national rate. Ohio, for example, is suffering from 10.5 percent unemployment.

Economists warn the recovery is a very fragile one. Missteps could plunge us back into a more severe downturn. Geithner, Obama and other policy makers do not seem to understand that. On Sunday, the treasury secretary suggested tax increases may be a good idea.

4. The Wall Street Journal: The Rangel Dispensation

As we went to press last night, it wasn’t clear if Charlie Rangel would cut a plea deal with the House ethics committee to avoid a public trial. Still, the rap sheet of 13 alleged violations the committee released yesterday after a two-year investigation of the New York Democrat’s conduct in office are an object lesson in the reasons the public holds Congress in contempt. They reveal in detail the culture of entitlement and self-dealing that typifies modern Washington.

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The most pungent allegations concern the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York and suggest that he used his Chairmanship of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee to lure corporate donations in return for the expectation or hope of favorable tax treatment. The vanity project in Mr. Rangel’s Harlem district was akin to a Presidential library to “preserve the work of my public life,” as he put it in a 2004 letter, and it used several taxpayer earmarks as seed money, including a $1.9 million appropriation in 2007.

5. Town Hall: “Bipartisan” Dems Go on the Attack

With their poll numbers plunging in a jobless recovery, skyrocketing budget deficits, an unpopular health care plan, and their majority teetering on the edge of defeat, Democrats have switched to a novel election strategy: attack the Republicans.

In a campaign strategy that comes directly from the White House high command, Democrats are ditching President Obama’s 2008 campaign promise of political reconciliation and attempting to smear the GOP by tying it to the tea party movement.

The decision, announced Wednesday by Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, has failure and desperation written all over it.

The tea party movement, which is not a party and has no central organization, was born in the fiery debate over the health care bill in the summer of 2009 as thousands of dissident voters showed up at town hall meetings to express their opposition. It grew over time as Obama’s budget deficits grew to $1.4 trillion last year, then to $1.5 trillion this year. Their common sense response: Enough is enough!

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PA GOP News Brief – 7.26.10

1. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Allegheny’s poured drink tax ruined businesses, bar owners say

2. PA2010: GOPers hit Dems anew over Rangel cash

3. The Times Leader: Marino is critical of Carney on fund issues

4. Town Hall: Senate Small Business Job Scam

5. The Wall Street Journal: The Democratic Fisc

6. Las Vegas Review-Journal: The financial services ‘reform’ mess

1. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Allegheny’s poured drink tax ruined businesses, bar owners say

Mike Speranzo considers himself a casualty of the Allegheny County booze tax. But at least he survived.

The owner of Mr. Small’s Funhouse said he needed a bailout from a friend and a break from his mortgage holder to pay $30,000 of overdue drink taxes and avoid closing his Millvale concert venue.

But more than 50 bars have closed — some shut down by the county for unpaid drink taxes, while others closed on their own while holding past-due balances. Several owners cited the tax as the tipping point toward bankruptcy.

“It killed me and put me into default with the banks,” said Speranzo, who borrowed money for a new register system to help staff calculate the tax quickly enough to keep up with the frenetic pace of a concert crowd. “I was a super casualty. I don’t think the system was designed for people like me in mind, people who didn’t have the ability to raise their prices.”

2. PA2010: GOPers hit Dems anew over Rangel cash

The latest troubles for Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) have led Republican challengers to once again criticize their Democratic opponents for taking—and not returning—campaign contributions from the embattled lawmaker.

The attacks of recent days have come as Rangel was reportedly in talks with a House ethics committee that has been investigating him for two years. Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey and at least two House challengers have made Rangel contributions an issue, calling on Democrats to return the money.

“Throughout the campaign, Congressman [Joe] Sestak has spoken about accountability and putting principle over politics, but it is now becoming clear that his pledges and lofty promises are just hollow words from another Washington insider,” Toomey campaign spokeswoman Nachama Soloveichik said about contributions Sestak has received from Rangel’s political action committees.

3. The Times Leader: Marino is critical of Carney on fund issues

Republican congressional candidate Tom Marino criticized his Democratic opponent U.S. Rep. Chris Carney for supporting health care legislation that will allow funding for certain abortions.

“I am deeply troubled to hear that taxpayer dollars will be used to fund abortions in Pennsylvania,” Marino, the former U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, said in a press release sent by his campaign late Friday. “This is only further evidence that the Executive Order that was signed by President Obama, and supported by liberals in Congress like Chris Carney, is a total sham.”

The candidates are running in the 10th Congressional District.

4. Town Hall: Senate Small Business Job Scam

The Senate Finance Committee recently announced its latest scam: a small business jobs act that will do little to promote entrepreneurship or create jobs.

The legislation, seemingly designed to give Democrats cover with voters in the fall, is much ado about nothing, for nothing is what the legislation does for small business.  Memo to Congress: no new laws are needed to grow small businesses, just enforce the laws already on the books.

Few members of congress or the Obama Administration have ever had to experience what Jerry McGuire calls the “up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege,” of starting a company and trying to win a customer’s business. So, it’s not surprising that they do not know what’s important and what’s window-dressing.

5. The Wall Street Journal: The Democratic Fisc

Democrats have been running Congress for nearly four years, and President Obama has been at the White House for 18 months, so it’s not too soon to ask: How’s that working out? One devastating scorecard came out Friday from the White House, in the form of its own semi-annual budget review.

The message: Tax revenues are smaller, spending is greater, and the deficits are thus larger than the White House has been saying. No wonder it dumped the news on the eve of a sweltering mid-July weekend.

Mr. Obama inherited a recession, so let’s give him a pass on the budget numbers for 2009. Clearly the deficit would have been large no matter who was President, even if the David Obey-Nancy Pelosi $862 billion stimulus made it larger than it otherwise would have been. What’s striking about the latest budget estimates, however, is that the White House is predicting the numbers won’t improve much through 2011, the third year of the President’s term.

6. Las Vegas Review-Journal: The financial services ‘reform’ mess

During my service in Congress, whenever legislation was dubbed “reform” it was especially necessary to analyze the details and consequences. So it is with congressional passage of President Barack Obama’s financial services “reform”– the biggest expansion of government power over banks and private markets since the Great Depression.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the 2,300-page law – crafted by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.- requires no fewer than 243 new rules by 11 federal agencies. “A general attack on our free enterprise system,” is how a frustrated U.S. Chamber of Commerce describes the law that will make it tougher for consumers and small businesses to borrow money.