Cross posted at DailyKos and OpenLeft

So as we’ve established by now, Darrell Issa thinks very little of 9/11 rescue workers and would prefer that the federal government not concern itself with their welfare.  Cause according to him, 9/11 is not and presumably was not a national issue.  We’ve also established that he has no qualms about throwing federal money around on local pork as long as it benefits him directly.  So the next logical question for me is “oh hey, are there any familiar names that don’t mind taking Darrell Issa’s money?”  As you may or may not know, Darrell Issa is filthy rich.  So he’s spread a lot of money around on Republicans and conservative causes.  So as it turns out, there are quite a lot of Republicans currently running around the Capitol funded in part by Darrell Issa (partial list):

Dean Andal (candidate, CA-11)

Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN-06)

Rep. Brian Bilbray (CA-50)

Rep. Gus Bilirakis (FL-09)

Rep. Charles Boustany (LA-07)

Sen. Richard Burr (North Carolina)

Rep. John Campbell (CA-48)

Rep. Shelley Moore Captio (WV-02)

Rep. Steve Chabot (OH-01)

Rep. Tom Cole (OK-04) [head of NRCC]

Rep. Geoff Davis (KY-04)

Rep. John Doolitte (Retiring, CA-04)

Rep. Thelma Drake (VA-02)

Rep. Tom Feeney (FL-24)

Rep. Mike Ferguson (Retiring, NJ-07)

Rep. Randy Forbes (VA-04)

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (NE-01)

Rep. Jim Gerlach (PA-06)

Rep. Phil Gingrey (GA-11)

Rep. Robin Hayes (NC-08)

Rep. Ric Keller (FL-08)

Rep. Mark Kirk (IL-10)

Rep. John Kline (MN-02)

Rep. Joe Knollenberg (MI-09)

Rep. Randy Kuhl (NY-29)

Rep. Doug Lamborn (CO-05)

Rep. Tom Latham (IA-04)

Rep. Bob Latta (OH-05)

Fmr. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (What the hell? ha.)

Rep. Candice Miller (MI-10)

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (CO-04)

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (TX-19)

Fmr. Rep. Anne Northup (Candidate, KY-03)

Rep. Steve Pearce (Retiring, NM-02; Candidate, NM-SEN)

Rep. Mike Pence (IN-06)

Rep. Ted Poe (TX-02)

Rep. Jon Porter (NV-03)

Rep. Deborah Pryce (Retiring, OH-15)

Rep. Dennis Rehberg (MT-AL)

Rep. Dave Reichert (WA-08)

Rep. Rick Renzi (Retiring [to prison?], AZ-01)

Rep. Mike D. Rogers (AL-03)

Rep. Mike J. Rogers (MI-08)

Rep. Peter Roskam (IL-06)

Fmr. Rep. Jim Ryun (Candidate, KS-02)

Rep. Jean Schmidt (OH-02)

Shelley Sekula-Gibbs (Candidate, TX-22)

Rep. Pete Sessions (TX-32)

Rep. Chris Shays (CT-04)

Rep. John Shimkus (IL-19)

Fmr. Rep. Mike Sodrel (Candidate, IN-09)

Sen. John Sununu (New Hampshire)

Fmr. Rep. Pat Toomey (President, Club for Growth)

Rep. Jim Walsh (Retiring, NY-25)

Rep. Heather Wilson (Retiring, NM-01; Candidate, NM-SEN)

Rep. Rob Wittman (VA-01)

More than 50, and there are a lot of familiar names in there. Swing districts, notorious wingnuts, Senators in tough races.  How many of those people agree with Darrell Issa that the welfare of the heroes of 9/11 are no business of the United States government?  How many of them really want to be forced to answer such questions?  Rep. Issa has, for a number of years, been a bit of a hero in GOP fundraising circles.  Do people really want to be associated with his money now? Presumably the answer is “yes” in private and “maybe” in public.  If it’s even slightly possible to isolate Issa and his money, in this of all election cycles when the NRCC is desperately poor, it’s worth the effort.  Isn’t it time we start finding out how these politicians feel about taking money from just a soulless jerk?

Hammering on this a lot, but it just keeps getting more ridiculous

So Darrell Issa finds it inappropriate for the federal government to be funding medical care for sick 9/11 rescue workers.  Says Rep. Issa, “I have to ask … why the firefighters who went there and everybody in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state consideration.”

So as to prove that he’s not just running off incoherently about hating rescue workers, Issa wants you to know he’s proud of his alternative plans for spending federal funds.  To that end, he’s triumphantly sent around a press release listing all of his new earmarks (word doc, h/t Chris Reed).  So what, you’re probably wondering, has Representative Issa chosen to crow about that exemplifies the “local money for local issues, federal money for screw you” spending mantra?  Here’s the quick list:

San Diego Regional Interoperable Computer Aided Dispatch Project -$6 million

San Diego Regional Communications System (RCS) Upgrade -$3.5 million

Gang Prevention Program (City of Oceanside) -$500K

Lake Elsinore Emergency Operations Center -$250K

Murrieta Creek Flood Control Project -$13 million

San Luis Rey Flood Control Project -$7.2 million

Perris II Desalter (Perris, CA) -$2 million

Non-Potable Distribution Facilities and Demineralization/Desalination Recycled Water Treatment and Reclamation Facility Project (Riverside County) -$2 million

Santa Margarita Conjunctive Use Project (Camp Pendleton) -$1 million

San Jacinto & Upper Santa Margarita Watersheds Project -$355K

San Diego County Fire Safety and Fuels Reduction Program -$45 million

Corpsmen/Medics Civilian Nursing Training Program (Oceanside) -$1.6 million

Vista Community Clinic -$1 million

North County Health Project Oceanside Clinic Expansion (Oceanside) -$1 million

Railroad Canyon I-15 interchange project -$8 million

State Route 76 (widen and realign) -$5 million

San Luis Rey Transit Center (Oceanside) -$3.1 million

West Vista Way (City of Vista, widen) -$2 million

French Valley Airport (Temecula) -$1 million

Renovation and expansion of Fallbrook Boys and Girls Club -$500K

Some pretty nice projects in there. But it begs the question: Ahem, why do all these people need “to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state [or local] consideration?” Rep. Issa? Bueller? Bueller?

Lemme just venture one guess. Rescue workers in New York don’t vote in Temecula or Oceanside do they? Oh yeah. So only when Issa is trying to hook it up for his own self should federal money be spent on state and local projects.  Not only cruel and hateful, but selfish and duplicitous too.  He’s building himself quite a nice collection of adjectives.  Full of crap isn’t technically an adjective, but it also applies.

Robert Hamilton is challenging Darrell Issa this year.

Cross posted at San Diego Politico

Yesterday I noted with considerable disdain that Darrell Issa doesn’t give a crap about 9/11 victims and is, not surprisingly, an ass.  Turns out that Issa’s heartless BS isn’t finding much of an audience elsewhere either, as people from coast to coast line up to tear him a new one:

“That is a pretty distorted view of things,” said Frank Fraone, a Menlo Park, Calif., fire chief who led a 67-man crew at Ground Zero. “Whether they’re a couple of planes or a couple of missiles, they still did the same damage.”

“New York was attacked by Al Qaeda. It doesn’t have to be attacked by Congress,” added Long Island Rep. Pete King, a Republican.

“I’m really surprised by Darrell Issa,” King added. “It showed such a cavalier dismissal of what happened to New York. It’s wrong and inexcusable.”

Lorie Van Aucken, who lost her husband, Kenneth, in the attacks, slammed Issa’s “cruel and heartless” comments.

“It’s really discouraging. People stepped up and did the right thing. They sacrificed themselves and now a lot of people are getting really horrible illnesses,” she added.

New York Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler and Anthony Weiner and GOP Rep. Vito Fossella also added some heated criticisms of Issa.  Issa, however, remains mostly unrepentant:

“I continue to support federal assistance for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” he said.

But he didn’t retract his wacked-out rhetoric claiming the feds “just threw” buckets of cash at New York for an attack “that had no dirty bomb in it, it had no chemical munitions in it.”

He went on: “I have to ask … why the firefighters who went there and everybody in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state consideration.”

In his statement yesterday, Issa insisted he only “asked tough questions about the expenditures” during a hearing Tuesday on an aid bill for sick New Yorkers.

And if that wasn’t enough, contrast this with another recent dumbass maneuver by Issa in which he DID scurry to apologize for his missteps.  Back in February during hearings into a million missing White House emails, Darrell Issa enthusiastically did his water carrying for the Bush administration, declaring it entirely reasonable that converting from Lotus Notes to Outlook would cause such a loss of information.  He went so far as to compare Lotus Notes to wooden wagon wheels and Betamax.  But once big business got agitated about it, Issa fell all over himself and even officially correcting the Congressional record.  But 9/11 rescue workers? Apparently not on the same level as keeping Lotus happy.  I mean after all, according to Issa, 9/11 “simply was an aircraft” hitting the World Trade Center and causing “a fire.”

I don’t know what world Darrell Issa is living in, but he certainly doesn’t have much company.

Robert Hamilton is challenging Darrell Issa this year.

Cross posted at San Diego Politico

I’m not sure if he’s just a soulless ass or if he’s also actively trying to undermine the entire foundation of post-9/11 conservativism, but Darrell Issa is doing his level best to spit on the rescue workers who got sick at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the twin towers attacks.  He’s flatly refused to vote for federal funding that would provide medical care to these victims of the attack because, in Issa’s mind, it apparently was just a local thing, and not a major one at all:

“It simply was an aircraft, residue of two aircraft, and residue from the materials used to build this building,” Issa said during a hearing into whether a new 9/11 victims’ compensation fund should be launched.

Which is odd since, as Rep. Anthony Weiner notes, “The gentleman voted for [original 9/11 funding] because we had the national sense that this was not an attack on New York City, this was an attack on our country.”

But hey, keep up the dispicably cruel hypocrisy Rep. Issa.  Feel free to even bring some friends along. Because all it proves is that 9/11 to you is nothing more than a tool to intimidate people into sacrificing Constitutional rights and attempt to justify the $3 trillion Iraq boondoggle. That’s when it’s a national issue. That’s when America is at stake. Only when it serves the political interests of Darrell Issa.

But when the heroes who sacrificed at Ground Zero need help? For Darrell Issa, that’s not America’s problem and it apparently sure isn’t his problem. It’s…well…somebody else’s problem.

Robert Hamilton is challenging Darrell Issa this year.

Cross posted at San Diego Politico

As the smoke begins to clear in San Diego, the stories and reactions to the fire will start competing with the recovery effort atop the fold.  First on the minds of many in government seems, not surprisingly, to be response time and firefighting capacity.  Unforunately, Republicans are again demonstrating that they make up in bluster what they lack in remote semblance of coherence.  Southern California Republican Congressmen such as Duncan Hunter, Brian Bilbray, Darrell Issa, Jerry Lewis, Elton Gallegly and Dana Rohrabacher have been lining up for every available reporter to knock Governor Schwarzenegger and the state’s CalFire bureaucracy for supposedly impeding firefighting efforts throughout the region last week.  They’ve flown so dramatically off the handle in fact that even Chris Reed has it right on their craziness- or at least part of it:

The congressmen who are doing such a good job exposing the state’s bureaucratic tomfoolery in its wildfire response have some explaining to do themselves. Couldn’t they have spared an earmark to cover the cost of outfitting the California Air National Guard’s C-130 with a fire-retardant tank, something that was promised to happen after the 2003 wildfires but never did?

Instead, Duncan Hunter funneled $63 million into the DP-2 Vectored Thrust Aircraft boondoggle. And Dana Rohrabacher worried more about buying expensive planes the military didn’t want than about helping California’s wildfire-fighting capacity. This is from a May story in the Washington Post:

… Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) has made one of the biggest earmark requests in the new Congress, seeking $2.4 billion to build 10 more C-17 planes — which the Pentagon has said it does not need.

These gentlemen have ended up discussing almost every issue in the country, all in the context of the fire.  And they’ve managed to be completely wrong every time.  So without further ado, an “oh the humanity” sampling from the past week.

Certainly the loudest complaints have come over the 36 hours that passed before military aircraft could be cleared to fight fires.  This delay was apparently to do with dangerous winds and CalFire’s insistence, later dropped, that all aircraft must fly with a CalFire spotter. Without a doubt, there’s a discussion to be had about this process and almsot certainly it will be coming soon.  Indeed, Rep. Rohrabacher wailed that “The weight of bureaucracy kept these planes from flying, not the heavy winds…When you look at what’s happened, it’s disgusting, inexcusable foot-dragging that’s put tens of thousands of people in danger.”

On Thursday morning, the U-T fireblog reported 40-45% containment of the Horno/Pendleton fire, 20% containment for the Witch Creek and Rice Canyon fires, 10% containment of the Poomacha fire and no containment estimate of the Harris fire.  These fires were, clearly, still mostly out of control.  Yet neither Rep. Rohrabacher nor his Republican colleagues from throughout the region objected to President Bush’s Thursday visit to the area that grounded all firefighting aircraft for several crucial hours.  Rep. Brian Bilbray, who represents areas that were still burning at the time, even joined the President.  For a group so concerned about rapid air response, the silence here is deafening.

San Diego’s GOP Congressional delegation (Bilbray, Hunter, Issa) blasted specifically the policy of, well, requiring a trained crew and compatable equipment.  They specifically targeted the CalFire policy of requiring a ‘military helicopter monitor’ as responsible for keeping eight marine helicopters on the ground during the early stages fo the fire.  But if you listen to CalFire’s chief of aviation, you get a slightly different story.  Michael Padilla, who actually does this for a living, said that laying blame entirely on bureaucracy would be “‘absolutely wrong. Those aircraft could have been used had they had properly trained crews’ and proper equipment, including radio systems compatible with ones used by California fire agencies. ‘They represented a hazard to themselves and to the rest of the people.'”  Presumably the sort of necessary training and equipment could have been provided in the four years since the 2003 Cedar Fire.  Certainly Congress promised to outfit military C-130s with necessary firefighting tanks after the Cedar Fire and never delivered, a failure which Rep. Elton Gallegly terms “an absolute tragedy, an unacceptable tragedy.”  Left out of lamentation over that tragedy is any note of the fact that Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress during and after the Cedar fire and that all of these Republican Congressmen save Bilbray were part of that majority.  But they never actually delivered the goods.

The SoCal GOPers are infuriated that the country’s business would carry on without them as well.  Despite everyone knowing full well that none of them would vote for it and the outcome was never in question, Jerry Lewis was one of many who was indignant over the most recent SCHIP vote on Thursday.  He asserted that at least Republicans were not elected to help children, blasting Democrats for “showing a blatant disregard for the people we are elected to represent and are trying to help.”  At least he was good enough to say it outright instead of forcing us to infer based on his voting record from the past 27 years.

But perhaps nothing has whipped local Republicans into a frenzy more than the implication that there might have been ways different than Republican second-guessing which might have been helpful.  Senator Barbara Boxer for example noted:

Right now we are down 50% in terms of our National Guard equipment because they’re all in Iraq, the equipment, half of the equipment. So we really will need help. I think all of our states are down in terms of equipment.

You might that Republicans who had been champing at the bit to get the military more involved faster would also lament this lack of response capacity.  Yet Rep. Brian Bilbray instead “said the global warming and Iraq war concerns are coming from ‘the `blame America first’ crowd in Washington.'”  This being the same Rep. Brian Bilbray who blamed CalFire for keeping potentially hazardous helicopters out of the air.  I guess blame is alright as long as it’s directed at someone else.  Bilbray also went on to explain that, essentially, everything being said about preventing or better reacting to such a fire said by a Democrat is wrong because these sorts of things “are caused by winds that have been around for thousands of years.”  Somehow I’m not comforted to know that Bilbray’s plan is to just accept the inevitability of it all.  Especially when he’s complaining about the response.

But it all comes down to feigned outrage over “politicizing” disaster.  I’m less interested here in casting blame than I am for demanding accountability, both for words and actions.  For comparison’s sake, Rep. Susan Davis, San Diego Democrat, visited today with Navy families who had been evacuated to the local Naval Amphibious Base and praised the military’s “amazing response to the fires here in San Diego,” expressing her appreciation for the military’s help to the entire community. This juxtaposed with Rep. Lewis railing last week that “The Democratic leadership is once again showing that they only care about scoring political points.”  SoCal Republicans are up in arms accusing Democrats of playing politics, but it certainly seems as though the GOPers have found plenty of politics for themselves.  While it’s important to learn lessons from each experience, pointing fingers isn’t productive.  Michael Padilla perhaps explained it best:  “We want to get it (the response) better, too,” Padilla said, but “we would like to wait until after the crisis is over.”