Tag Archives: GOP

Jeb!!!!$$$$? Vents

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Jeb!!!!$$$$? may have blown the last clear chance he had at winning the GOP nomination when he vented in public about his opponents and how he really has much better things to do than be President.  While campaigning in South Carolina last weekend, Jeb!!!!$$$$? revealed the following:

If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.

So Red felt compelled to compile a list of ten “really cool things” that Jeb!!!!$$$$? could do other than be President.

  1. Hold an actual Tea Party – you know with crumpets and cucumber sandwiches and all.
  2. Teach a first grade bilingual education class.
  3. Take a job at the Land Office working for son George P. Bush with out the Bush fils first complying with the Texas requirement that all job openings be publicly posted.
  4. Write that spy novel he’s been kicking around for several years.
  5. Brush up on his Jai Alai game.
  6. Get a personality transplant.
  7. Rhumba with Columba.
  8. Create a line of Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben Carson voodoo dolls.
  9. Challenge Mitt Romney to a boxing match – loser has to endorse Donald Trump.
  10. Go home and never be heard from again.

The Sinking Ship that is JEB!!!!$$$$?

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Red never likes to predict the demise of a particular political campaign, but a strong stench of failure is starting to emanate from the halls of the JEB!!!!$$$$? campaign.   First, JEB!!!!$$$$? announces that he is cutting back on staff, taking some campaign workers off of payroll, and cutting spending by almost half.  Then JEB!!!!$$$$? futilely lashes out again at an apparently Teflon-encrusted Trump making himself even more of punching bag for The Donald.  Then he dashes back to Texas to consult with Mom and Dad and big Bubba – the same Mom who said the country had had enough of the Bushes – or words to that effect, and the same big Bubba whose presidency set a new standard for failure that few could aspire to match.  Words of advice – always listen to Mom and ignore big Bubba.  And now the latest polls show that JEB!!!!$$$$? is in 4th place in Florida – his adopted home state where he was actually Governor for two terms – behind Trump, Carson and Rubio.  Apparently the good voters of the Sunshine State know a bad thing when they see one and the JEB!!!!$$$$? campaign cannot be characterized as anything other than incompetent and awful at this point.  But Red remembers 2008 when a battered and bruised John McCain limped into the New Year and then destroyed the competition – before the utter incompetency of the W. Bush administration ended any chance he had to win the general election.  Red doesn’t think JEB!!!!$$$$? has McCain’s fighting chops, but it’s too early to write anyone off that is still polling above a dead man or Rick Perry.

As They Say – Will Rogers Never Met Ted Cruz

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The Texas Tribune reports that former President George W. Bush has little use for Sen. Ted Cruz (TP-Texas) and has no reluctance to let that be known.   At a fundraiser JEB!!!!$$$$?, Bush did not hold back about his feelings for the Tea Party firebrand and GOP presidential hopeful.  Bush joins a growing class of GOP stalwarts whose animosity for Cruz is thinly veiled at best.

“I just don’t like the guy,” Bush said at the Denver fundraiser, as reported by Politico. One unnamed donor told the news organization, “I was like, ‘Holy sh-t, did he just say that?’ I remember looking around and seeing that other people were also looking around surprised.”

Another donor told Politico, “He sort of looks at this like Cruz is doing it all for his own personal gain, and that’s juxtaposed against a family that’s been all about public service and doing it for the right reasons. He’s frustrated to have watched Cruz basically hijack the Republican Party of Texas and the Republican Party in Washington.”

Cruz has criticized Bush’s record as president but his stint on Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign figures prominently in the candidate’s political biography.

Cruz gave a statement to Politico that simultaneously called on those happier associations while pushing back against Bush’s assertions. “I have great respect for George W. Bush, and was proud to work on his 2000 campaign and in his administration,” Cruz told Politico. “It’s no surprise that President Bush is supporting his brother and attacking the candidates he believes pose a threat to his campaign. I have no intention of reciprocating. I met my wife Heidi working on his campaign, and so I will always be grateful to him.”

Well, Red and W had to agree on something someday.

A Texan Should be Speaker

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Considering the outsize influence Texas has in the current GOP domination of Congress, it only makes sense that a Texan should be Speaker of the House.  And at least three Texas Representatives seem willing to step forward if Paul Ryan (now allegedly too liberal – if you can believe that – to be Speaker) decides to decline to run.  The Texas Tribune indicates that Bill Flores (TP-Bryan), Michael McCaul (R-Gerrymanderland), and Mike Conaway (TP-Midland) are all interested in the job.  All would be midgets following in the Texas-sized footsteps of Congressional giants and former Texas Speakers Sam Rayburn, John Nance Garner and Jim Wright, but at least they would be Texas midgets.

 U.S. Rep. Bill Flores, R-Bryan, said Monday he intends to seek the gavel of the United States House of Representatives if his colleague, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, doesn’t.

Though GOP lawmakers have been urging Ryan to run as a consensus candidate, Flores said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that he spoke to Ryan on Sunday.

“I don’t want to share private conversations, but he was still a ‘no’ as of yesterday when I spoke to him,” Flores said. 

If Flores is to succeed, he will need the 25-member Texas House delegation behind him. That’s no certainty yet, given  possible home state competition. U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland, has said he will consider running for speaker if Ryan opts against a run. U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul is also mulling a run, a source close to him confirmed. 

Where we are now is, what we’ve agreed is that we’re going to hold our powder dry,” Flores said of his fellow Texans. “And then we’ll see which Texan gets the most traction, and the thinking is today that we’ll coalesce around one Texan eventually.” 

The race is complicated by the Gang of Forty ultra-right wingers who are making outsized demands as a condition of support for any candidate for Speaker.  So right now we have about 10% of the Congress who represent the most far-right lunatic fringe of what used to be a mainstream political party controlling who will hold the third most powerful position in American government.  If Ryan bails, Flores might just be the man.  First, he apparently doesn’t understand the meaning of a private conversation which positions him well to betray anyone who strays from the Tea Party line.  And second, he is apparently willing to kowtow to the Gang of Forty demands of ideological purity at the expense of actually governing.

Cruz Lines up Texas Tea Party Support – Big Whoop!

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The Houston Chronicle reports that Sen. Ted Cruz (TP-Texas) has lined up the support of numerous Tea Party denizens of the Texas Legislature.  Red is not sure how that is going to help him in Iowa where a decent showing is surely critical.  Cruz is currently staggering around in sixth place in most national polls, but ranges anywhere from third to sixth in Iowa.  Still, Red has to admit that even sixth place is an impressive feat for a politician that has NOT ACCOMPLISHED A SINGLE THING in his not quite TWO YEARS in actual elective office.  The Canadian-born Cruz talks a good game to his rabid base of right wing loonies, but he has yet to show much broader appeal.  Maybe that day will come now that Cruz has lined up the craziest of the inmates of the Texas Legislative Asylum.  With Tea Party favorites like Konni Burton, Matt Krause and Doug Miller backing him, Cruz is sure to rocket to the top.

But Cruz can’t match the endorsement chops of Ben Carson.  Carson, who looks more and more clueless with each passing minute, has snagged the coveted endorsements of Kid Rock, Roger McGuinn, Richard Petty and Mickey Rourke.  If that isn’t a lineup sure to sway the national consensus in Ben’s direction, Red doesn’t know what is.

John Cornyn Must Really Hate this Guy

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Sen. Ted Cruz (TP-Texas) continued his assault on Republican leadership yesterday before a nearly empty Senate chamber.  Cruz seemed desperate to vent on the GOP powers that be as part of his flagging “outsider” campaign for President.  The focus yesterday was the GOP’s failure to defund Planned Parenthood and block the Iran treaty. Cruz was practically frothing and at times, it was very hard to tell who Cruz hates more – Pres. Obama or the GOP leadership.  But that is so often the case with the professional Haters such as Cruz.  In contrast, Red thinks that it is becoming perfectly clear that Sen. John Cornyn and other stalwarts of the GOP in Congress likely hate Cruz with a white hot passion that far exceeds their loathing of Obama.  The Texas Tribune has the full story on Cruz’s latest diatribe.

In an hour-long speech on a nearly empty Senate floor that ended when he could not gain permission to continue, the state’s junior senator and presidential hopeful expanded his usual criticisms of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to include outgoing House Speaker John Boehner. Cruz also lambasted fellow Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, spoke of the recent lunar eclipse and boasted of a puzzling personal role in law enforcement.

“Speaker Boehner faced a conundrum,” Cruz said of Boehner’s abrupt decision to step down. “If he does what he and McConnell promised, which is funding all of Barack Obama’s priorities, he would have lost his job.” 

“And so what did he do?” Cruz asked. “He announced he’s resigning as speaker and resigning as a member of Congress.” 

He also took aim at his colleague from Texas, Majority Whip Cornyn. Dozens of times, he questioned the integrity of “Republican leadership,” a reference that includes Cornyn in his capacity as the second-ranking Senate Republican. 

He specifically called out Cornyn, along with a handful of other senior Republican senators, for voting down a Cruz amendment targeting funding for Planned Parenthood and the Iran nuclear weapons deal via voice vote. 

In contrast, Cruz cast himself and conservative senators and House members who frequently vote with him as the only elected members performing their jobs with the will of the American public in mind.  

The speech lasted until his colleagues refused to extend his allotted time. Along the way, Cruz made several pop culture references — the Sunday night lunar eclipse, the movie “The Terminator” and the novel “Brave New World” — not an altogether unimaginable departure from his marathon 2013 speech two years ago which included a reading of “Green Eggs and Ham.” 

He also claimed the mantle of the badge: 

“I’m an alumnus of the U.S.  Department of Justice,” he said. “I was an associate deputy attorney general. I spent much of my adult life working in law enforcement.” 

Cruz served in that position for six months, according to his online LinkedIn.

Red will sleep more soundly at night now that he knows Chief Assistant Deputy Constable Trainee, Part-time Dog Catcher and Self-Proclaimed Piece Officer Ted Cruz is on the job.  Canada’s loss is our gain. And Red knows how to spell Peace, just in case you were wondering.

Carly Gets an “F” from Fortune

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Carly Fiorina sole “qualification” for the high office to which she aspires is her supposedly successful business career.  Fortune takes a closer look at CF’s tenure at HP and the results are not good.  Fortune asks the simple question, How did she do?

The answer in short is: Pretty badly.

In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.

Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”

However, before Conservative Political Action Caucus in February, Fiorina proclaimed that under her HP command, “We would double its revenues to $90 billion, triple its rate of innovation to 11 patents a day, and go from a laggard to a leader in every product category and every market segment in which we competed.”

Sure, she doubled revenues—through a massive, ill-conceived, controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002.  Fiorina did nothing to increase profits over her five-year term, with the S&P 500 showing net income across enterprises concomitantly up 70%. Furthermore, shareholder wealth at HP was sliced 52% under her reign against the S&P, which was down only 15% in that bearish period. She modeled the old joke of “making it up in the volume.”

Fiorina rammed the Compaq deal through despite intense opposition by analysts, employees, and shareholders. When it appeared that she would lose the proxy vote, the balance was tipped back the other way using hardball tactics that would make Donald Trump wince.

The lost shareholder wealth and lost strategic direction at HP are only part of Fiorina’s legacy. Also lost during her reign were 30,000 U.S. tech jobs, the company’s revered employee morale, and the egalitarian, humble HP way culture. A new defensive, finger-pointing style of leadership led to waves of firing. Dissent was equated with disloyalty as discovered by Walter Hewlett, a board member and son of HP’s co-founder, when he questioned Fiorina’s misguided Compaq acquisition strategy and refused to be bullied into a board statement of unanimous consent, suffering legal and personal threats.

Despite such carnage, Fiorina pocketed over $100 million in compensation for her short reign—including a $65 million signing bonus and a $21 million severance. I have studied comebacks from adversity, but she’s not shown the required contrition nor earned the needed exoneration, and she’s not served as a CEO since. Upon leaving Taiwan Semiconductor’s board, the firm disclosed she only attended 17% of the board meetings. Under Meg Whitman’s brilliant leadership, HP’s character and performance have recovered, but we have not seen Fiorina’s parallel resilience just yet.

One Thing the Bushes Know How to Do, Cont.

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The Houston Chronicle reports that Land Commissioner and Bush family scion George P. doesn’t seem very interested in following the law when it comes to hiring for the General Land Office.  Either that, or the latest Texas Bush is more interested in rewarding Bush family friends and sycophants.  The Houston Chronicle reports that Bush has failed to follow Texas law in remaking the agency in the Bush family image.

Less than a year after being elected to lead the oldest state agency in Texas, Land Commissioner George P. Bush has dramatically remade the General Land Office by ousting a majority of its longtime leaders and replacing many of them with people with ties to his campaign and family. 

Eleven of the top 18 officials on the agency’s organizational chart a year ago have been fired, forced out or quit, and more could leave soon under an ongoing overhaul that Bush has described as a “reboot.”

In their place, Bush has given top jobs to two of his law school classmates, two relatives of members of two Bush presidential administrations and at least three others with ties to the family or other political leaders.

In all, Bush has hired at least 29 people who worked on his campaign or have political connections, according to a review of thousands of pages of personnel records. The agency did not advertise any of the openings publicly.

State law requires all agencies considering external candidates for a job to post the opening with the Texas Workforce Commission. Newly elected statewide officials often ignore the requirement for some core positions – Attorney General Ken Paxton and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller already have been publicly criticized for doing it a handful of times this year – but Bush’s hiring differs because of how far-reaching it has been, with the hires ranging from a temporary transition director to five campaign veterans hired permanently for the new position of “regional outreach coordinator.”

Another Bush ignoring the law is no big deal, but it seems especially blatant in the case of George P.

Chapter 656 of Title 6B of the Texas Government Code prohibits appointments from outside of the agency except in cases of reorganization ordered by the Legislature.

“Any agency, board, bureau, commission, committee, council, court, department, institution, or office in the executive or judicial branch of state government that has an employment opening for which persons from outside the agency will be considered shall list the opening with the Texas Workforce Commission,” the law states.

Workforce Commission spokeswoman Lisa Givens said she did not know who was responsible for enforcing that law. The commission does not check to ensure that jobs are posted, she said.

The Attorney General’s Office referred questions about the law to the Workforce Commission.

Personnel records show that Bush has directed at least 40 external hires between November 2014 and July 2015 but listed only four of those with the Workforce Commission.

One Thing the Bushes Do Know How to Do

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The Bushes clearly know how to reward friends and punish anyone not swearing fealty to all things Bush.  George P. is clearing if not cleaning house at the Land Office and installing friends and Bush family cohorts.  Former Commissioner Jerry Patterson laments the loss of institutional knowledge while others question where this important agency is headed under the latest Bush name.

At least 111 state workers have been fired, retired or have quit the Texas General Land Office — about 17 percent of the agency’s workforce — under the leadership of George P. Bush, whose so-called reboot has drawn criticism from his predecessor, who says the agency is suffering under “a purge.”

Bush’s house-cleaning invokes the conservative belt-tightening mantra that pervades Texas politics, but the size of the exodus and the tenor with which it was announced has raised questions.

This whole idea is all about looking good,” former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, also a Republican, told the Statesman.

Despite recent audits that were critical of “significant weaknesses” in the way the agency managed contracts under Patterson, the former commissioner called Bush’s shake-up “a purge of the best agency in Texas government and a purge of people who have done wonderful things.”

“It’s all about ‘I’m going to show that I can cut the size of government,’” he said. “I think it’s some serious ignorance. You’ve been hired to do a job. They’re all on the street now, and they haven’t got new jobs.”

When he announced the reboot in June, Bush and his No. 2, Anne Idsal, suggested the agency was hampered by entitled workers and other “threats.”

Threats? What threats?  Please tell us.