Salon.com > Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa

Tuesday link dump: I can hear Chuck Grassley’s “no”

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:45:00 +0000

John Yoo wrote something stupid today.
Some schmo at The Corner: "We dislike him, we ridicule him, and we tend to dismiss him, but here’s the sad truth: Paul Krugman’s influence is vast, and conservatives have no effective counterpoise." Ha ha ha the entire rest of the economics/finance media is the anti-Krugman.
Chuck Grassley basically told Obama that he wouldn't be able to vote for healthcare reform because no other Republicans would've voted for it.
GOProud, the gay GOP group, will participate in next year's CPAC, so some other conservative group has backed out.
Dick Morris is really good at taking money from stupid people, and lying.

Horses run amok at Iowa parade; 1 killed, 23 injured

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:29:00 +0000

Sandie Crilly was helping her 8-year-old son, 12-year-old niece and 2-year-old granddaughter pick up Tootsie Rolls from the ground during Bellevue's annual Fourth of July parade when someone yelled to get out of the way.

Looking up, she saw two panicked horses dragging a carriage charging toward them.

"I could see it was two horses," said Crilly, 46, of Willow Springs, Ill., who was visiting her parents in Bellevue. "I could see they were running at full speed and they were harnessed together and I knew we were going to most certainly get hit, and as soon as it happened, everybody was crying and screaming."

Someone pulled her granddaughter to safety, but Crilly said her niece broke her wrist and lost her two front teeth. At least 22 other people were injured, some critically, and one woman was killed, police and hospital officials said.

Janet Steines of Spragueville, whose husband was driving the carriage, died Sunday evening at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City, according to the Hachmann Funeral Home in Bellevue.

The horses got spooked after they rubbed heads and one's bridle fell off, police said. They galloped for several blocks through downtown Bellevue, a town of about 2,300 residents along the Iowa-Illinois border. The wagon overturned at some point, dumping its four passengers.

BP quibbles over what an oil plume is

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:12:00 +0000

Meanwhile, Kevin Costner owns a machine to fix the Gulf, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wants to turn the water into beer.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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The Spilling Fields - BP Ad Campaign

www.thedailyshow.com

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Our ancient Senate: Ben Nelson has never used an ATM

Thu, 20 May 2010 14:45:00 +0000

Sen. Tom Harkin introduced an amendment to the finance reform bill capping ATM fees at 50 cents. But Harry Reid apparently decided that it wasn't worth attempting to bring it to a vote.

This might help explain why the Senate's leadership doesn't consider it an issue worth addressing: None of these rich old people use ATMs. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb, has never used one.

"I've never used an ATM, so I don't know what the fees are," Nelson said, adding that he gets his cash from bank tellers, just not automatic ones. "It's true, I don't know how to use one.

"But I could learn how to do it just like I've ... I swipe to get my own gas, buy groceries. I know about the holograms."

By "holograms," Nelson clarified that he meant the bar codes on products read by automatic scanners in the checkout lanes at stores such as Lowe's and Menard's.

"I go and get my own seating assignment on an airplane," Nelson said. "I mean, I'm not without some skills. I just haven't had the need to use an ATM."

Pork is in the eye of the beholder

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:42:00 +0000

Republicans haven't exactly been shy about bashing the stimulus bill that passed last year. "This is spending, not stimulus," Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said about it. "Rather than create jobs or stimulate the economy, this massive spending bill was a laundry list of programs that focused on states with big-city urban communities," wrote Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., in his local newspaper last October.

As it turns out, they haven't exactly been shy about grabbing cash from the stimulus programs for their districts, either. An investigation in Tuesday's Washington Times turned up letters from more than a dozen fierce critics of the stimulus to the Department of Agriculture, requesting money for local projects. Three days after Aderholt's letter was published, accusing the stimulus of focusing on big cities, he wrote Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, seeking help from a stimulus program to expand broadband services in his (mostly rural) district. Not long after Alexander bashed the law as "spending, not stimulus," he told Vilsack he wanted money for a Tennessee project that would "create over 200 jobs in the first year and at least another 40 new jobs in the following years."

Senator presses for answers on Arlington Cemetery

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:45:00 +0000

A key senator is calling for increased oversight and coordinated government investigations of Arlington National Cemetery in the wake of a series of burial mix-ups and other scandals exposed by Salon.com.

In a Dec. 15 letter, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Lt. Gen. Steven Whitcomb, the Army inspector general, "If they are not already under review, I ask that these and any other new allegations be assigned to the appropriate office for investigation."

Grassley specifically referred to the most recent Salon story, which described how an urn containing cremated remains of unknown origin had apparently been dumped in Arlington's dirt landfill, recovered in 2002 and then buried as an unknown soldier. "These are very troublesome issues, indeed," Grassley wrote about that article.

In the letter, Grassley disclosed that there are at least seven separate ongoing or nearly completed government investigations into troubling allegations involving the cemetery. "These run the full gamut from alleged false official statements, contract fraud, whistleblower reprisal, discrimination, to improperly marked graves to name a few," he wrote. Grassley asked that the Army inspector general "coordinate and oversee" those separate investigations.

Logic in short supply at healthcare hearing

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:35:00 +0000

For today, at least, C-SPAN is must see TV. The Senate Finance Committee is considering two proposed amendments that would add a public, government-run insurance option to the healthcare reform legislation put forward by its chair, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. So far the debate, though lively, hasn't always involved totally logical arguments.

For instance, this morning, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, ripped the public option, saying it would be the first step towards a single-payer healthcare system in which Americans would lose the ability to choose their healthcare providers. This argument clearly got to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who introduced one of the public option amendments.

Schumer asked Grassley how he could support Medicare, yet oppose a public option. Grassley responded, “Medicare is part of the social fabric of America ... [but] to say that I support it is not to say that it’s the best program that it can be.” Grassley then went on to lament healthcare's fate if government becomes more involved.

Liberal groups unveil anti-Grassley ad

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:45:00 +0000

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has become a pretty prominent part of the debate over healthcare reform as the chief Republican negotiator in the Senate Finance Committee. And with his stance against the public option -- indeed, against any bill right now -- he's become a target for liberal groups. Now, two of them are joining to air an ad against him in his home state and in Washington D.C.

The two groups behind the spot are Democracy for America, which was founded by Howard Dean and is now run by his brother Jim, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. For now, it's slated to run 200 times in Iowa and another 100 in D.C. The groups had previously implemented a similar strategy against senators like Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson.

The ad features an Iowa farmer named Kevin Shilling who says he's voted for Republicans including Presidents Reagan, Nixon and George W. Bush and for Grassley himself.

Grassley to AIG execs: Apologize or kill yourselves

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, is definitely on board with that whole populism thing we were talking about yesterday. He might want to dial back his enthusiasm just a little bit, though.

In an interview with a Cedar Rapids radio station on Monday, Grassley lashed out at AIG executives over the hundreds of millions in bonuses the bailed-out company has paid out.

"I suggest, you know, obviously maybe they ought to be removed, but I would suggest that the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [is] if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide," the senator said. "In the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."