The Himes campaign has launched a new website devoted to Chris Shays’ idea of “oversight” (or lack thereof) from his perch on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee:
Chris Shays serves on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But instead of using his position to actually conduct oversight of private security contractors in Iraq and ask the tough questions that his job demands, he has been using it to relentlessly defend the Bush Administration and effusively praise witnesses like the CEO of Blackwater USA:
Also debuted on the site is a powerful 45 second webvideo highlighting Shays’ effusive praise of “the perfect job” performed by Blackwater, 2 weeks after employees of the company killed 17 Iraqi civilians.
Click over and watch the video, the production quality is high, and it contrasts Shays’ “questioning” of the Blackwater CEO with the angry editorials on Blackwater that followed in the wake of the civilian deaths.
The site also includes other examples of the Shays brand of oversight, including his “oversight” of “remarkable person” (and potential Hatch Act violator) Lurita Doan, his bizarrely condescending questioning of the widows of contractors killed in Iraq, and his “oversight” of Don Rumsfeld over the conflicting stories surrounding the death of Pat Tillman.
Altogether, the site, and especially the web video, makes a devastating critique of Shays as unwilling to do his oversight job if it means conducting real oversight of the Bush administration and fellow Republicans:
If this is his idea of a perfect job, what kind of a job is Christopher Shays doing?
Indeed.
UPDATE: Here is a statement from Jim Himes on oversight:
“Oversight is hard and uncompromising. It is asking tough questions, and demanding answers. It is speaking truth to power. And it is absolutely essential to effective government. Without it, the Bush Administration is free to squander our treasure, our soldiers’ lives, and our national reputation.
“Instead of asking the tough questions that his job demands, Chris Shays has used his position on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to constantly defend and praise both Bush administration officials and private for-profit military contractors.
“We can’t afford to wait until November 2008 for new leadership to emerge. If Chris Shays isn’t going to ask the tough questions and demand accountability, I will.”
42 responses so far ↓
Nice hit job!
A Perfect Job: This website!
Someone needs to get a link to the video of the hearing where Shays treated the Blackwater widows, (remember the bodies hanging from the bridge), …. like pieces of shit.
Is Chris Shays an idiot, an ass, or both?
Well, definitely an asshole.
Watch this and cringe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8naofAE8AFY
Himes is doing a great job of energizing his base, which appears to be composed primarily of his fellow Lamontistas. I guess that’s good at this satge of the game but so far he’s offered up no reason for the middle to vote for him. The primary reason Farrell lost last time around was she went too far to the left during her campaign- furhter left than she had ever been in her political life.
Here comes the mud!!!
I’m glad to see Shays be taken to task for this. If there was ever a reason to send him packing this is it.
Mr. Reality said:
I am waiting for Thomas Hooker - who seems to think I am a Shays supporter - to telll me once again that I hate Himes. Shays lost my vote several years ago for a variety of reasons just as he lost the vote of other republicans. If there is no alternative that I want foir 4th CD, I just skip the line.
Himes is actually doing quite well with the “mainstream” and not just the “Lamontistas.” Himes and Lamont have a few things in common: from Greenwich, Democrats, anti-Iraq War, anti-Shays. That’s about where the similarities end. Take a look at his Himes’s fundraising so far. Lamont’s core base of grassroots activists and local bloggers work hard, but aren’t exactly your $4600 contributors. As for Farrell, I strongly disagree that she ran too far left. If your theory was true, why did she do much better in 2006 than 2004? One of her biggest problems was pandering to Lieberman and wavering on Iraq. A lot of Dems didn’t see big enough differences between Farrell and Shays, so stuck with the devil they knew.
Shays went to the left of her on Iraq. Farrell wanted benchmarks for withdrawal from Iraq while Shays came out for timelines. Only the Lamontistas and Pelosoites had a problem with her position on Iraq. However, contrary to what you may think the race wasn’t about Iraq. As for the 2004 thing vs. 2006; 2006 was not a Presidential race year, Farrell was no longer a novice,…… and the race for the 4th CD was not a referendum on Iraq. Farrell went left on otther issues and associated with liberal lefties as well.
Work to make sure each and every American child receives an education that will enrich his or her life in every way. How is it possible that almost one-third of our high school students fail to graduate on time? What kind of life will a high-school dropout live in 21st century America?
And what exactly is he going to do about it diffeenrently than Chris Shays?
Work to make America a responsible steward of our environment. A nation that can put men into space can devise ways to generate plentiful energy in a sustainable way. The private sector knows this and is investing heavily. Government needs to help lead the way.
will the Sierra Club drop their endorsement of Shays?
That’s on just two of Himes 4 key issues, which are right out of Ned’s playbook. I’ll hazard a guess the voters of Fairfield County who actually decide elections don’t have their ears on to this guy. Himes is energizing his base - the Lamontistas
http://www.himesforcongress.com/issues.html
Jim Himes sounds like another version of liberal Ned Lamont.
People rejected Lamont handily last year and will reject Himes.
Weicker Liker said:
Lamont was a lot smarter
PS: pleas don’t give me the Harvard and Rhodes scholar stuff as evidence that Himes is smart. he obvioulsy tests well though!!!!!!!
Weicker Liker said:
Which is pretty much what you say every time we post anything about Himes. Now, what about the video.
Jim Himes is a much better candidate than Ned Lamont. He’s not a liberal fundamentalist who will turn off independent voters in Fairfield County like Lamont did. I expect him to do very well, and that will be precisely why. CT-4 elects moderates, and at this point, Shays is out of touch.
We won’t. You obviously know. Why would we need to give you that clear, factual, and relevant evidence?
My favorite bit of the thread so far:
Runner-up? Jim, with whom I normally disagree on most things (even though we are both Dems), is on fire today.
2nd Runner-up? The imminent arrival of SimsburySally and/or Litchfield Bob!
I’m no Shays fan. No Himes fan, either. But can I point out, like the kid three rows back at the emperor’s parade, that — agree with him or not — Shays, at least, is in Washington, doing the job he’s paid to do, unlike certain other congresscritters all too frequently lionized here at CTLP?
Shays was probably referring to the fact that no one under Blackwater protection has been killed in Iraq.
But telling the truth in context? We don’t care about that on this site when it comes to Republicans.
Strike the word “probably” from my last post.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/02/africa/contract.php
I’ve watched video of Shays at several of these Oversight Committee hearings and he does the same thing over and over. He briefly feigns concern about the issue at hand, then eagerly and angrily defends the administration against its critics. He implies his Democratic colleagues are partisan hacks, then acts as a Republican partisan hack.
Wow! Shays is a Republican, and on occassion a partisan Republican — but not, some conservatives think, partisan enough. Shocking! Next think you know, someone will be telling us that Ted Kennedy is a partisan Democrat. It take away the breath; it makes the head explode. Who wudda thunk it?
Shays is a partisan hack for Republicans in the same way that Lieberman is a partisan hack for Democrats. Connecticut likes its politicians in the middle-ground, operating more like Independents than partisan hacks. Shays is perhaps the most liberal Republican in Congress. To call him a partisan hack Republican is absurd. He regularly wins, even in the anti-Republican year of 2006, because he is far from a Republican partisan hack — he’s a maverick. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what s/he’s talking about.
Partisan hack = defending incompetence, illegality, and poor performance based solely on party identification. Watch Shays in these hearings. You want to stand behind that, go ahead.
Don’t let’em push you around cranemeister. You’re right. With proper editing, you could make a watermellon sound like Ted Kennedy or Chris Dodd, partisan Democrats. Partisanship never hurt them. The YouTube clips are the equivelent of the attack add of olds. Same fanatics, differerent lemonade stand.
Not in the present YouTube collection, from the Hartford Courant: “Shays could revel in the knowledge that Pelosi is leading the fight for his plans for ethics reform: to ban gifts from lobbyists, to place tough restrictions on privately financed trips and to ban travel on corporate jets.
“Pelosi’s people are saying nice things publicly about Shays, and he’s saying nice things about her. ‘I’ll probably see more things done in this Congress than in the past,’ he said.”
And finally, Chicken Little had admitted that the sky id NOT falling:
Rep. John Murtha http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07333/837824-100.stm# today said he saw signs of military progress during a brief trip to Iraq last week, but he warned that Iraqis need to play a larger role in providing their own security and the Bush administration still must develop an exit strategy.
“I think the ’surge’ is working,” the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president’s decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year. But the Iraqis “have got to take care of themselves.”
Violence has dropped significantly in recent months, but Mr. Murtha said he was most encouraged by changes in the once-volatile Anbar province, where locals have started working closely with U.S. forces to isolate insurgents linked to Al Qaeda.
He said Iraqis need to duplicate that success at the national level, but the central government in Baghdad is “dysfunctional.”
Mr. Murtha’s four day-trip took him to a Thanksgiving dinner with troops in Kuwait last Thursday, and he then made stops in Iraq, Turkey and Belgium.
Are Murtha and Pelosi idiots, asses or both?
Uh….is this a quiz Mr Pesci? …`cause you didn’t tell us we needed to study……
gabe: it’s not like you to take things out of context. Farrel went way left on the issues that were considered important in deciding the election - it was not a referendum om Iraq although Shays played that one as a skillful politician but not a straight shooter. campaigns can be complex particularly in a district where folks are tuned in to national stuff.
Himes ain’t smart at all guys - he tests well!!!!
Iraq was not considered important in deciding the election?
Gabe said:
It was not the deciding factor by any means. Most people down here understand that the president sets forein policy while the Congress funds it - or not.
See how those are very different statements?
and Shays went to the left of Farrell on Iraq!!!!!!
sorry i didn’t write a full blown treatise from the outset.
Rudolph W. Giuliani last night called a Web site’s account of his spending a “political hit job” as his campaign struggled to explain why hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses for his mayoral security detail were billed to obscure city offices instead of the Police Department.
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But neither Mr. Giuliani nor Mr. Lhota explained why the travel expenses for the security detail were spread across the budgets of an array of obscure mayoral offices rather than paid out of a single account in the mayor’s office.
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He said auditors working under his predecessor first raised questions about the travel costs during the Giuliani administration. Their requests to the Giuliani administration for details and justification went unanswered, Mr. Thompson said.
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Bernard B. Kerik, who was Mr. Giuliani’s police commissioner when some of the charges were billed, said in an interview yesterday that the security detail’s travel expenses would normally come out of the Police Department’s budget.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/us/politics/30security.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views.
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All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record.
He endorsed rowland for guv his last time around too —-
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/us/politics/30truth.html?hp
Unless, that is, the buyer is Medicare, the government health care program for older Americans.
A little exposee form the liberal NYT that suggests medicare ai’t as cost effective as the left would suggest it is. Ya gotta love those lobbyists!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/business/30golden.html?hp
toucan said:
I would love to hear on precisely which issues Diane Farrell “went too far to the left.” Please list some of them and tell us in what way, in your opinion, her positions were “way left.”
toucan said:
You don’t read very carefully, Toucan. A close reading would reveal that this gouging of the American taxpayer all took place under the watchful eye of the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled congress. As the article points out, it is “physician groups, medical device manufacturers, insurance companies and other businesses,” that is, corporations at the core of the Republican K Street lobbying base, that have colluded with the Republican administration to keep these fees high. But now Democrats are in charge. Read further and you would have seen this:
“’I would guess we’re grossly overpaying for about 80 percent of the people who receive these services,’ said Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat and senior member of the Ways and Means Committee who recently pushed to cut Medicare’s oxygen spending.”
So the Republicans grossly misused American taxpayer funds to prop up their corporate friends, and now Democrats are coming in to put a stop to it. Very similar to the billions and billions in corruption that the private student loan industry ripped off from American families under Republican control over the last several years, ignoring demands from the Democrats to institute a system of direct lending that would have been enormously more cost-effective. And just like the horrifically inefficient and expensive Republican Medicare Part D plan to require Medicare recipients to go through the confusing maize of private health insurance companies with their web of even more confusing prescription plans in order to get their drug coverage, resulting in hundreds of billions in wasted taxpayer funds. And all to pump up the bottom line of the health care industry that relies on Republican support to continue this grossly inefficient system. Let’s recall that the VA pays on average 50% less for the ten most important drugs used by the elderly than the private health insurers pay for the same drugs.
Recall, if you will, that it was Bill Clinton who took the horribly broken Veterans Administration health care system and made it into America’s best health care system. It was the Clinton administration that took FEMA, which was riddled with incompetent hacks put there by George HW Bush, and made it into a respected and responsive agency. It was the Clinton administration that instituted a system of airline safety that has resulted in a sharp decline in airline passenger deaths due to crashes since 1997 (Fox News did a program about that, talking about the new program, but not saying a word about the fact that it was thanks to the Clinton administration).
No, Toucan, the Republicans come into power and inject inefficiency and corruption in government. It is the Democrats who come in and prove that government not only can work, but that it can work for the benefit of the people it was meant to serve. And do it while balancing the budget. Let’s recall that it was under the Clinton administration that the federal budget moved into the black for the first time in over half a century, and so strongly that the Fed discontinued the issuance of the thirty year bond.
Again, read the article carefully, and you will understand that it is another indictment of Republican sloth and corruption.
2008: time to make a change.
Congratulations on your upcoming loss for the 4th CD race in 2008, Hooker.
toucan said:
Wait a minute. Is that all you can say? Is that the extent of your thought processes? Gratuitiously insulting comments? Is that all you can write?
If you are incapable of reasoned, intelligent discourse, stay off this site. Your snide remarks are beneath the level of discussion on this website, the dignity of other contributors, and add nothing to the debate. If all you have to contribute is insults, don’t write anything. The rest of the contributors here deserve better.
I would like to take this opportunity to once again iCongratulate you, Hooker, on your upcoming loss for the 4th CD race in 2008. Nice job.
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