John Raese, running for U.S. Senate as a Republican in West Virginia, equated a county smoking ban with Hitler forcing Jews to wear the Star of David at a recent Republican event.
Speaking in Hurricane, W.Va., last Thursday at the Putnam County Lincoln Day Dinner, Raese turned to Monongalia County’s recently enacted smoking ban as an example of government overreach.
“But in Monongalia County now, I have to put a huge sticker on my buildings to say this is a smoke-free environment. This is brought to you by the government of Monongalia County. Okay?” he said. “Remember Hitler used to put Star of David on everybody’s lapel, remember that? Same thing.”
Later on in the video, Raese calls President Franklin D. Roosevelt “General Roosevelt” and “Fidel Roosevelt.”
Asked by Politico about the Nazi comparison, he said: “No, this is not a standard line, nor a misstatement. It is a loss of freedom. As Ronald Reagan once said, there is no such thing as partial freedom, there is only freedom.”
Raese, a wealthy businessman, lost the 2010 special election to replace late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) to then-Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin by ten points. Despite President Barack Obama’s unpopularity in the state, Manchin distanced himself from the president and won big. In the campaign, Raese proclaimed that minimum wage laws should be repealed and said the U.S. needed to put “1000 laser systems” in the sky to defend against a “rogue missile.”- The Huffington Post by Luke Johnson
Disgusting
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has, to say the least, a very odd understanding of the Constitution. He thinks Texas should be able to opt out of Social Security, and he believes that everything from federal public school programs to clean air laws are unconstitutional. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry makes his most outlandish claim to date — Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. […]
Claiming that she will be “the new sheriff” in Washington D.C., presidential-hopeful Michele Bachmann once again set her sites on the Environmental Protection Agency.
Finding that completely abolishing the EPA, as she promised to do in June, might be a difficult goal to achieve, Bachmann has announced a clever new tactic:
“I guarantee you the EPA will have doors locked and lights turned off and they will only be about conservation,” she said on Saturday at a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids (Des Moines Register).
Pledging that she is a “doer” and “not a talker,” Bachmann told crowds on the campaign trail that the EPA should be renamed ”the job killing organization of America.”
Bachmann seems to have forgotten that enforcing regulations on clean air and water creates jobs, not to mention making it much easier to survive on this struggling planet.
“The EPA is a convenient bogey man for Republican leaders when it comes to their messaging on jobs,” writes Stephen Lacey of Climate Progress. “But what they don’t mention is that new regulations will be phased in over a three-year period of time, giving most power companies enough time to meet standards. This has nothing to do with today’s economic issues. And over the next five years, the number of jobs created through retrofitting power plants with pollution controls could be in the tens of thousands, with virtually no impact on nationwide rates, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration projections.”
