Monti Says: Guess who was just added to Monti’s Love List?
13 Action News Las Vegas
February 18, 2010
Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) – Mayor Oscar Goodman has refused an invitation to meet with President Obama when he arrives in town on Thursday. Mayor Goodman called President Obama a slow learner after he told Americans not to blow money on a weekend in Las Vegas if they were saving to put their kids through college.
“I’ve got other things to do quite frankly for my constituents here in Las Vegas who rely on me to do the right thing as a mayor,” explained Mayor Goodman.
Mayor Goodman has more important things like attend budget meetings during a major shortfall than meet with President Barack Obama when he visits Las Vegas Friday, even though he’s invited by the White House.
“Were you surprised to get that invitation in light of comments you’ve made before and your opinion on him and what he says,” asked Action News reporter Heather Klein.
“A little bit in the sense I would think they would know that I would say I’m not coming,” said Mayor Goodman.
They say time heals all wounds but not this time. Mayor Goodman not backing down after the president used Las Vegas the example of where not to go if you’re saving money.
This is strike two for the mayor.
“We are hurting, we have people in foreclosures, we have people having a hard time feeding their families and we can’t stand to have a flippant statement made,” said Mayor Goodman.
“I haven’t heard an apology, I haven’t heard a response, all I do is get invitations,” Goodman went on to say.
Invitations Mayor Oscar Goodman respectfully or depending on your point of view not so respectfully declines. The mayor says his presence isn’t necessary its more protocol than anything else. However, he says all it will take is a simple phone call and he will be there ready to move on.
Monti Says: Go get ‘em Scott!
Politico44
February 15, 2010
Carol E. Lee
Sen. Scott Brown thinks Vice President Joe Biden was “off base” when he suggested Sunday that the Massachusetts Republican get his facts straight on the legal procedures for military tribunals.
“It was insulting,” said Brown, who frequently jabbed the administration during his Senate campaign for giving suspected terrorists legal representation.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation” last weekend, Biden shot back that he doesn’t “know whether the new senator from Massachusetts understands: When you get tried in a military tribunal, you get a lawyer, too.”
“He’s trying to give me a lesson on military law, and I didn’t think it was appropriate,” Brown told POLITICO. “And I thought he was off base when it comes to explaining to the American people that somehow I need a lesson on whether people get attorneys — of course they get attorneys. There’s a difference as to what type of attorney they’re going to get and when they’re going to get that attorney, and how are they treated, and what rights do they, in fact, get.”
Brown said he is particularly incensed by Biden’s remarks because he’s served in the Massachusetts Army National Guard for more than 30 years and is currently the Guard’s top defense attorney in New England.
“I know the military rules and regulations and procedures from A to Z,” Brown said.
Brown said he was spending time with his younger daughter, Arianna, who was home from Syracuse University, Sunday when he learned that Biden had taken a swing at him.
“I was actually surprised,” said Brown. When Biden swore him into office they had a nice chat, Brown said, and the vice president told him he could visit the vice presidential residence.
“I would have thought that he would have reached out personally rather than go through the media,” Brown said. “I’m not quite sure what the message to me was, but I felt that it was important enough to respond.”
Biden’s comments came as part of the White House’s effort to defend its move to try alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a federal court, as well as the decision to read Miranda rights to the accused Christmas Day bomber.
Brown pushed back Monday on one of the White House’s talking points about the handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: that the Bush administration handled Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, in the same way.
“I’ve always felt that suspected terrorists should be tried in military tribunals and not civilian court, and as a matter of fact so do the majority of Americans,” Brown said. “The big difference is are we going to pay $1,000 an hour for a private attorney and treat him as a civilian or ordinary criminal in a criminal court, or are we going give him a military attorney who’s going to be paid as a captain, major or lieutenant colonel, and obviously go through the military tribunal process?”
Monti Says: The Al Gore Global Warming scam is crumbling just like the Obama presidency.
Times Online
February 14, 2010
Jonathan Leake
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.
It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.
His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.
Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.
Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.
In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.
“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.
Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.
“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.
Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”
Monti Says: Another Democrat coward decides not to run for re-election instead of standing up for what he believes in. Personal decision? Nonsense! Bye, bye…Bayh!
FOXNews.com
February 15, 2010
Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh will not seek re-election this November, an unexpected decision that hands Republicans an opportunity for a pick-up in a year when Democrats are already defending several open Senate seats.
The two-term senator is known as a moderate Democrat. Former GOP Sen. Dan Coats had been planning to challenge Bayh in November — but a senior Democratic source told Fox News that recent polling showed Bayh way ahead of Coats, and that the retirement must have been a personal decision.
Bayh’s staff said the latest polling showed Bayh ahead of Coats by 20 points.
In prepared remarks published by The Indianapolis Star, Bayh said he was “confident” about his prospects for re-election, but discouraged in his work on Capitol Hill by excessive partisanship.
“After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so in Congress has waned,” he said, according to The Star.
Sources told Fox News that Indiana Reps. Baron Hill and Brad Ellsworth are possible Democratic contenders to vie for Bayh’s vacant seat.
The timing of the expected Bayh announcement creates a dilemma for Democrats, though, since the deadline for candidates’ petitions to be submitted is Tuesday. That means Bayh’s name could still be on the ballot in May’s Democratic primary — Democrats will have another opportunity to pick a candidate through a separate nominating process.
The retirement decision comes after Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., both announced their retirements in January. Democrats are trying to defend open seats in Delaware and Illinois as well.
Republican incumbents are abandoning seats in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio. More Senate Democratic incumbents are considered vulnerable, however.
Bayh is a former Indiana governor and secretary of state. An e-mail from the National Republican Congressional Committee suggested that resistance to the Democratic energy agenda, which includes a cap-and-trade policy for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, is contributing to Democratic problems in Indiana and elsewhere in the region.
Fox News’ Major Garrett, Trish Turner and Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
Monti Says: Hey Washington! There’s a new sheriff in town!
Foxnews.com
January 19, 2010
In a victory few thought possible just a month ago, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley Tuesday in the race for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy — a win that could grind President Obama’s agenda to a halt and portend huge losses for Democrats in the November midterms.
In a victory few thought possible just a month ago, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley Tuesday in the race for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy — a win that could grind President Obama’s agenda to a halt and portend huge losses for Democrats in the November midterms.
In his victory speech, Brown declared that he had “defied the odds and the pundits,” and said he would try to be a “worthy successor” to Kennedy.
“Tonight, the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken,” Brown said. “This Senate seat belongs to no one person, no one political party. … This is the people’s seat.”
With 97 percent of precincts reporting, returns showed Brown leading Coakley 52-47 percent, by a margin of 120,000 votes. Independent candidate Joseph Kennedy was pulling 1 percent.
The victory marks a stunning upset in a race thought to be safe for Democrats until Brown’s campaign began to surge just weeks ago. It has powerful ramifications for Obama’s agenda.
The GOP state senator, once sworn in, will break the Democrats’ 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in Washington. This creates problems for proposed legislation ranging from financial regulatory reform to cap-and-trade, but most immediately Brown’s win sends Democrats into a scramble to pass health care reform before he arrives in Washington. Democrats were already weighing options for how to fast-track the bill before polls closed Tuesday.
Brown blasted the health care bill in his Tuesday night speech. He was visibly giddy during the address, going off script and at one point offering up his daughters to the dating circuit — and later flubbing his campaign pitch line, “I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. And I drive a truck.”
Coakley, in her concession speech, said she was “heartbroken” by the result but thanked the Kennedy family for their support in the race and said she respects the voters’ choice.
“There will be plenty of Wednesday-morning quarterbacking about what happened, what went right, what went wrong …. We will be honest about the assessment of this race and although I was very disappointed, I always respect the voters’ choice,” she said.
Brown’s margin of victory is significant, making it difficult for any potential challenges to slow down his certification as the winner. The state senator becomes the first Republican to be elected to the Senate from the Bay State since 1972.
Kennedy, who died in August, held the post for 47 years.
“This is a lot different than my victory,” former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney told Fox News. “To have a Republican senator, that’s unheard of. … This is monumental. This is epic.”
He and other Republicans said the race sends a warning sign to Washington that voters are not happy with Obama’s policy decisions.
The White House said Obama has spoken with both candidates. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama told Brown he “looks forward to working with him on the urgent economic challenges facing Massachusetts families and struggling families across our nation.”
Considering how much was on the line, Brown’s late-in-the-game surge commanded the attention of the Democratic Party establishment, which dispatched top officials over the past week to try to keep the seat formerly held by Kennedy in Democratic hands. Voter interest in the race for U.S. Senate also seemed high throughout the day. Poll workers reported a steady stream of voters at the ballot box despite the snow.
Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin was predicting turnout could be as high as 50 percent.
Brown’s campaign marked an upset just by being as competitive as it was against Coakley’s.
Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-to-1 in the state — 37 percent of registered voters are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 51 percent are unaffiliated. Obama won the state by 26 percentage points in the 2008 presidential election.
But Brown was pulling far more support across the state Tuesday than Republican presidential candidate John McCain did in 2008.
The campaigns had been inundated with help from outside the state in recent days. Obama and former President Bill Clinton both came to campaign rallies for Coakley, and Obama appeared in a television ad.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington also “emptied out the building” of staff to send nearly everyone to Massachusetts to help Brown get out the vote. The NRSC reportedly quietly shifted $500,000 to help Brown’s campaign in the last two weeks.
Brown’s swift rise in the reliably blue state has startled Democrats nationally who are already worried about a backlash in the midterms.
“When there’s trouble in Massachusetts, there’s trouble everywhere, and they know it,” Brown said Tuesday night.
Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, acknowledged the rough road ahead for the party.
“I have no interest in sugar coating what happened in Massachusetts. There is a lot of anxiety in the country right now,” he said in a statement. “In the days ahead, we will sort through the lessons of Massachusetts: the need to redouble our efforts on the economy, the need to show that our commitment to real change is as powerful as it was in 2008, and the reality that we cannot take a single thing for granted and cannot afford even a second of complacency.”
Brown will have to run for re-election in November 2012.
Massachusetts: ‘Bottom has fallen out’ of Coakley’s polls; Dems prepare to explain defeat, protect Obama
Monti Says: Hey left, wing-nut Democrats! What goes up, must come down! Bye bye unconstitutional healthcare bill!
Washingtonexaminer.com
January 15, 2010
Byron York
Here in Massachusetts, as well as in Washington, a growing sense of gloom is setting in among Democrats about the fortunes of Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley. “I have heard that in the last two days the bottom has fallen out of her poll numbers,” says one well-connected Democratic strategist. In her own polling, Coakley is said to be around five points behind Republican Scott Brown. “If she’s not six or eight ahead going into the election, all the intensity is on the other side in terms of turnout,” the Democrat says. “So right now, she is destined to lose.”
Intensifying the gloom, the Democrat says, is the fact that the same polls showing Coakley falling behind also show President Obama with a healthy approval rating in the state. “With Obama at 60 percent in Massachusetts, this shouldn’t be happening, but it is,” the Democrat says.
Given those numbers, some Democrats, eager to distance Obama from any electoral failure, are beginning to compare Coakley to Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate in the Virginia governor’s race last year. Deeds ran such a lackluster campaign, Democrats say, that his defeat could be solely attributed to his own shortcomings, and should not be seen as a referendum on President Obama’s policies or those of the national Democratic party.
The same sort of thinking is emerging in Massachusetts. “This is a Creigh Deeds situation,” the Democrat says. “I don’t think it says that the Obama agenda is a problem. I think it says, 1) that she’s a terrible candidate, 2) that she ran a terrible campaign, 3) that the climate is difficult but she should have been able to overcome it, and 4) that Democrats beware — you better run good campaigns, or you’re going to lose.”
With the election still four days away, Democrats are still hoping that “something could happen” to change the dynamics of the race. But until that thing happens, the situation as it exists today explains Barack Obama’s decision not to travel to Massachusetts to campaign for Coakley. “If the White House thinks she can win, Obama will be there,” the Democrat says. “If they don’t think she can win, he won’t be there.” For national Democrats, the task is now to insulate Obama against any suggestion that a Coakley defeat would be a judgment on the president’s agenda and performance in office.
The private talk among Democrats is also reflected in some public polling on the race. Late Thursday, we learned the results of a Suffolk University poll showing Brown in the lead by four points, 50 percent to 46 percent. That poll showed Obama with a 55 percent approval rating. Also on Thursday, two of Washington’s leading political analysts, Stuart Rothenberg and Charlie Cook, each changed their assessment of the Brown/Coakley race from a narrow advantage for Coakley to a toss-up.
So how much rocket science does it take to figure out that the Obameister’s policy of appeasement just isn’t working? And the better question is why didn’t more people see that he was ill prepared to be the Commander-in-Chief while we were at war with an enemy he is afraid to name: Jihadist Islam?
AMERCAN THINKER
January 10, 2010
Pop star admits that she was a little tipsy during her award show acceptance speech.
Monti Says: How many women are hot even while drunk like Mariah was? She’s given me inspiration to launch my new page: Monti’s Foxy’s. Enjoy!
Associated Press
January 6, 2010
Monti Says: This low-life, corrupt, coward is not retiring. He’s quitting because the going is getting tough. The silver lining is that the American people will no longer suffer because this political thief’s public service career is over!
The Washington Post
January 6, 2010
By Chris Cillizza
Embattled Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday at which he is expected to announce he will not seek reelection, sources familiar with his plans said Tuesday night.
Word of Dodd’s retirement plans comes after months of speculation about his political future, his faltering poll numbers and a growing sense among the Democratic establishment that he could not win a sixth term in the Senate. The news also came on the same day Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced he would not seek reelection.
Once among the safest of incumbents, Dodd’s political star fell over a two-year period, during which he moved his family to Iowa to pursue the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and was linked to a VIP mortgage loan program overseen by a controversial Wall Street financier. He also drew harsh questions about his oversight of Wall Street, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, in the years when the nation’s financial system was heading toward near collapse.
Dodd’s poll numbers plummeted last spring before rebounding somewhat over the summer. But another dive in the polls late last year led to widespread concern that Dodd needed to vacate the seat for Democrats to have a chance at retaining it in the 2010 elections.
Dodd’s troubles were politically ironic, coming at a time when his power on Capitol Hill had reached a height that most legislators only dream of. In addition to the banking committee, he also held pivotal posts on the health and foreign relations committees.
Over the past 18 months, he has been the primary author or co-author of legislation rewriting housing mortgage rules; the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street; key portions of the $787 billion stimulus package; a consumer protection bill overseeing the credit card industry; and the nearly $900 billion health-care legislation that has passed the Senate and is in final negotiations with the House now.
With each major piece of legislation Dodd ushered into law, the senator also endured criticism that he did not anticipate. The mortgage bill came in mid-2008, which some said was delayed because of Dodd’s presidential aspirations, and the financial bailout became one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation passed in recent memory. His work on the stimulus bill, approved last February, was an attempt to rein in executive compensation at firms that had been bailed out but instead led to sharp criticism when executives at AIG, the largest recipient of taxpayer dollars, still received seven-figure bonuses shortly thereafter.
Without Dodd on the ballot, Republicans’ chances of taking over a seat in solid-blue Connecticut are considerably diminished.
Richard Blumenthal (D), who has served as state attorney general since 1990, is widely expected to declare his candidacy for the seat. The most popular politician in the state, Blumenthal has long coveted a Senate seat, and he had already signaled that he would run for the Democratic nomination against Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I) in 2012.
Former Rep. Rob Simmons and businesswoman Linda McMahon are battling for the Republican nomination, but either would start as an underdog in a general-election match-up with Blumenthal.
Dodd, 65, was elected to the Senate in 1980, after three terms in the House, following the path blazed by his father, Thomas. By the early 1990s, Chris Dodd had set his sights on Senate leadership.
He ran for Democratic leader in the wake of the 1994 elections, but he lost in a close race to Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). President Bill Clinton selected Dodd to chair the Democratic National Committee, overseeing Clinton’s reelection as president in 1996, but the DNC’s fundraising practices during the 1996 campaign landed him in some political hot water.
After Daschle was voted out of office in 2004, Dodd considered jumping into the race to succeed him, but he quickly stepped aside when he realized Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) had overwhelming support to claim the post.
Instead, Dodd began laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign in 2008. Always a long shot in a field filled with better-known and better-financed candidates, he moved his family to Iowa in fall 2007 in hopes of generating some excitement for his bid. But the move backfired in Connecticut, where voters bristled.
The next year, it was reported that Dodd had received special treatment in his acquisition of a mortgage loan from Countrywide Financial, through a program that labeled him and others as friends of Countrywide chief executive Angelo Mozilo. Dodd insisted he was unaware of his inclusion in the program, and he was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Senate Ethics Committee, but the political damage was done.
Staff writers Paul Kane and Dan Balz contributed to this report.
