Politics Plus

Here is the forty-seventh article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is federal Judge Rudolph Randa. He is so honored for his blatant attempt to help the Republican Fartfuhrer of Fitzwalkerstan, Scott Walker, get away with his electioneering crimes.

In one of the first cases to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision, a federal judge just tried to open the door to new levels of corruption in Wisconsin elections — but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals could still stop him.

On May 6, federal Judge Rudolph Randa ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s long-running "John Doe" criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between political campaigns (including Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign) and non-profit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth that spent millions during the state’s recall elections. Randa, who was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush and is a board member of the Milwaukee Federalist Society, compared limits on money-in-politics to "the guillotine and the gulag."…

…Judge Randa’s May 6 decision halting the investigation is extraordinary. It involves a federal court injecting its own interpretation of state law into a high-profile criminal probe of political operatives of the party that appointed him to the bench, while state court proceedings are ongoing. It deploys a strained reading of U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the facts of the case, portraying the investigation — led by a bipartisan group of District Attorneys and a Special Prosecutor who voted for Walker, and approved unanimously by the bipartisan group of retired judges on Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board — as politically-motivated retaliation against Republicans. It green-lights electoral coordination between candidates and third-party groups, making it easy for politicians to bypass contribution and disclosure limits and solicit unlimited, secret donations for so-called "issue ads" timed to influence elections.

Randa even celebrated the intentional evasion of campaign finance rules by the players under investigation in the John Doe. He described their tactics as a means of promoting "speech."… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <PR Watch>

Because of the volunteer work I do, I am aware that if something is illegal at the time a crime is committed, and subsequent changes in the law make the same activity legal, it has no effect.  I know men who are in prison for doing things that are currently legal, but were crimes at the time they did them.  No Judge could fail to realize that.

Furthermore, much of the investigation this Republican tried to kill involves Walker using the public employees he supervised to assist in his campaign, which is still a criminal activity.

But if you still don’t believe that Republican Judge Randa rendered an intentionally corrupt decision to help Walker evade the law, consider this.  Randa should have recused himself at the outset, because his assistant is married to one of Walker’s campaign lawyers.

Corruption doesn’t get get much more Republican than that!

Republicans claim that their new select committee on Benghazi is serious investigation.  Let any Democrats question this, and these Republicans accuse them of spitting in the faces of four murdered heroes.  In that case, what is it when these same Republicans ignore the head of that committee to use both him and it as an opportunity for their second favorite (behind election theft) activity: sheeple-fleecing.

Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told a Morning Joe panel Wednesday morning that the GOP should not use the Benghazi Select Committee — of which he was just appointed chairman — as a fundraising tool. But as he spoke, a National Republican Campaign Committee website was doing just that.

“I have never sought to raise a single penny on the backs of four murdered Americans,” Gowdy said on MSNBC. “There are, even in a culture of hyper-partisanship, certain things that ought to be above politics, like the murder of our four fellow Americans.”

But BenghaziWatchdogs.com [Republican Party delinked], an NRCC-run website, proclaims, “House Republicans will make sure that no one will get away from Gowdy and the Select Committee… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Mediaite>

Republicans are always desperate for a meme to distract, energize and fleece their rabid base.  Chris Hayes explains their motivation in much greater detail.

This is hypocrisy at its worst.  The so-called rationale for this investigation is that the second Whitehouse document dump at Congress’ request contained an email that had been omitted from the first document dump.  Therefore Republicans claim a Democratic cover-up.  However, that email had no information that was not also included in several other documents that were released.  If effect, Republicans are  accusing the Obama administration of a cover-up for withholding information that the Republicans already have from them.

This is how Republicans in Congress are spending $millions of YOUR tax dollars!

Every Republican in office is one Republican too many!

The mainstream media if finally catching up to the blogosphere on the importance of the UN assessment of global climate change.  Although, the Koch Brothers, other fossil fuel producers, their bought Republican (and a few Democratic) lackeys, and their media echo chamber continue to deny it, their lies are getting harder to sell, because the effects are now hitting people where they live.

The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.

Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report continued. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Click through for much more information.

The effects I have noticed personally here in Oregon is that summers have gotten hotter and winters have grown both shorter and colder in the time I have loved here, and this is one of the places where the effects have been rather moderate compared to other places.

At the very minimum, the US government must end all tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel producers.

I would also assess every Republican and DINO politician a Methane Tax equal to the amount of the contributions, perquisites, and third party advertising they get from fossil fuel polluters to cover the cost of their BS.