Posts tagged u.s. senate

Gun show background checks are pretty universally popular in New Hampshire…and Kelly Ayotte is facing some serious backlash from voters in the state for voting against them last week.

Ayotte now has a negative approval rating with 44% of voters giving her good marks and 46% disapproving. That’s down a net 15 points from the last time we polled on her, in October, when she had a 48% approval with 35% disapproving. 75% of New Hampshire voters- including 95% of Democrats, 74% of independents, and 56% of Republicans- say they support background checks. And 50% of voters in the state say Ayotte’s ‘no’ vote will make them less likely to support her in a future election, compared to just 23% who consider it to be a positive.

Ayotte faces backlash over gun vote - Public Policy Polling

But Warren, with a grass-roots army of enthusiastic supporters and a yen to deliver on her early promise, makes headlines crossing the street. And the foreclosure review debacle represented an excellent test case to expose the corrupt dealing between banks and the regulators who are supposed to curb their excesses, and also to pit Wall Street denizens getting rich off these crimes against ordinary victims who lost their homes. You couldn’t tee up a better issue for Warren, or a better entryway for traditional media to report it.

Last Thursday’s hearing on the reviews, the first congressional hearing on foreclosure fraud in over a year, provided the perfect set piece. Warren, along with Jack Reed, Sherrod Brown and other Senate Democrats, pounded the regulators for protecting the banks and ignoring homeowners suffering from illegal foreclosures. Warren highlighted that nobody will ever learn the precise extent of harm suffered at the hands of banks, and that without a true accounting, adequately compensating homeowners would be impossible. Brown focused on the role of the third-party consultants who operate as shadow regulators, performing work when the agencies lack capacity, but without any independence from the banks.

I assume most of you have played the, the game Whac-A-Mole?” (Laughter.) This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out.

“She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s.

“I call it the American anesthesia. You know, I come back to this country. I freak out in airports. The colors, the sounds, all those different ways of packaging the same snack but trying to, you know, make it look like it’s distinct and different and convince consumers that they have to have it. I mean all of that. The last time I came home from a trip, I absolutely flipped out when I saw pink fuzzy socks on a rack. I mean, I can never anticipate what is going to push me over the edge.

“But in a few weeks, you know, I’m driving along smooth roads and I think nothing of it. I’m, you know, choosing between four different brands of cereal from plastic dispensers so that I don’t have to have, you know, ugly, mismatched boxes on my shelf, and I don’t think anything of it.

“She is critical…of traditional Christianity. She sort of views it as sort of a vestige of patriarchy. She says Christianity gives a God like a man, presented and discussed exclusively with male imagery, which legitimizes and seals male power, the intention to dominate even if that intention is nowhere visible.

“I think too she’s clearly sort of anti-sort-of-traditional American family. I think Jesse tracked this down. She described having children as selfish, and she thinks it’s unconscionable to breed…She also is critical of, of fathers giving away their daughters in marriage ceremonies. She says it’s a common vestige of male dominion over a women’s reproductive status when her father gives her away at a wedding.

“I still choose the God of my understanding as the God of my childhood. I have to expand my God concept from time to time, and you know particularly I enjoy native faith practices, and have a very nature-based God concept. I’d like to think I’m like St. Francis in that way. Brother Donkey, Sister Bird.

If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re gonna go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life, but evidently if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your bed at night.

…I resent the hyperbolic tone which paints a grossly distorted picture which is hard to take seriously. And the fact that it comes from Rand Paul who’s base philosophy of stripping away basic protections from women and minorities that are infinitely and further more immediately more harmful is a joke.