Today Is Primary Day. Vote for the Least Worst Candidate of Your Choice.

Budget-Busting Spendthrift Congressman Jeff Flake Wasted Over One Trillion of Your Taxpayer's Dollars on Useless, Endless Wars We Can't Win

Budget-busting Jeff Flake is at again!
Can we - and our grandchildren - afford spendthrift Jeff Flake?

This loose-spending congressman continues to waste taxpayer dollars and drive up the deficit, as he has done continuously since he entered Congress in 2003.


He's voted to spend over $1.15 TRILLION DOLLARS on the combined wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and he shows no signs of stopping. Re-elect Jeff Flake, and he's just going to go on wasting your hard-earned money on useless, endless wars we can't win.

The Gulf War under the first President Bush cost only $102 billion in fiscal 2010 dollars. The decade-long Vietnam misadventure cost $738 billion.

Our war in Iraq alone has exceeded that, at $784 billion and counting. Afghanistan and other Mideast operations add another hefty $321 billion and growing fast.

Combined that's $1.15 TRILLION in money Jeff Flake has wasted.

He won't help out-of-work struggling families in Chandler and Mesa, but Jeff Flake spends like a drunken gambler to pay off corrupt mullahs and tribal leaders in Kandahar and Marja.

Jeff Flake: Arizona can't afford another two years of this budget-busting spendthrift. He's stealing our future.

What Right-Wing Extremist Jeff Flake Tells an Unemployed East Valley Voter: "Jobless Benefits HURT Laid-Off Employees"

A kind voter in the East Valley who's read my posts forwarded to me the response received when she wrote Jeff Flake about extending her unemployment benefits, which have expired:

Dear Ms. Jackson,

Thank you for contacting me about the extension of unemployment benefits.

You know all too well that a sluggish economy has resulted in increasing unemployment. The causes for the country's economic situation are complex and numerous. The federal/state unemployment compensation program provides partial wage replacement checks to people who are involuntarily unemployed. The federal Department
of Labor oversees the program, while each state designs and administers its own benefits packages.

The extension of unemployment benefits offers little in the way of job creation. Quite to the contrary of their stated intent, jobless benefits hurt laid-off employees in the long run because the programs seek to temporarily fix a problem, instead of implementing a long term-solution. The best jobless benefit an individual can receive is a job offer.

As such, I generally vote against these types of bills when they are considered by the House of Representatives.

A better approach would be to reduce the tax burden on individuals and small businesses. Reducing the the burden on small businesses would provide employers with the resources to hire additional workers.

I will continue to push for responsible federal policies that promote the growth of the economy that will, in turn, provide the resources for employers to hire additional people.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to do so again in the future. I also encourage you to visit my website, which may be found at http://flake.house.gov/.


Sincerely,


JEFF FLAKE
Member of Congress

What a miserable excuse for a human being. Jeff Flake is working hard to cut taxes for the rich and his corporate benefactors while denying struggling working-class people a lifeline. The corporation that laid off this worker and hundreds of others is one of Jeff Flake's biggest campaign donors!

There's not even a word of compassion for this American citizen's plight, no easy-to-say "I'm sorry you're suffering financially" throwaway line that would cost this cheap Flake nothing. The letter reeks of the condescension and contempt of the cold-hearted intellectual that Flake is.

How is this person supposed to live, you asshole career politician?

If you're as mad as I am about this, and as mad as Rebecca Schneider, the Democratic candidate running against Jeff Flake, please join her campaign's demonstration this Wednesday:

The Rebecca Schneider for Congress campaign will be staging a protest in front of Jeff Flake's Mesa Office. We will be wearing cardboard barrels, since Mr. Flake doesn't seem to care if his constituents lose their last remaining lifeline and self respect.

Join us on Wednesday, July 21th from 3:30 - 5:00 p.m., 1640 S. Stapley Drive, Mesa 85204.

Come dressed in grungy T-shirt and shorts. Barrels will be provided on site.

As President Obama said today, "That attitude [Jeff Flake's] reflects a lack of faith in the American people. They’re not looking for a handout. They desperately want to work."

Why Does Jeff Flake Hate This Good Christian Woman?

Family-hating Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake doesn't believe unemployment compensation benefits should exist. He's on record as saying, along with Senator John Kyl, as saying they deter people from looking for work. He's voted over seventeen times against expanding benefits. In fact, Jeff Flake has called for the repeal of the New Deal law that created unemployment insurance for the jobless.

Jeff Flake has contempt for the unemployed citizens of Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler, Apache Junction and Queen Creek. He has contempt for all those jobless people who are suffering in America.

Tomorrow's New York Times has a story by Michael Luo on one such person, the kind of woman Jeff Flake has contempt for:

CARLISLE, Ky. — In her well-thumbed, leather-bound Bible, Terri Sadler recently highlighted in bright pink a passage in the Gospel of Matthew.

Terri Sadler of Carlisle, Ky., listening to C-Span for news of Senate action on an extension of federal unem- ployment benefits. In it, Jesus urges his followers not to “worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”

But Ms. Sadler’s tightening throat and halting breath when she tries to read the words aloud make it clear that she is having trouble mustering enough faith to follow them.

Ms. Sadler, who lost her job at an automotive parts plant in October 2008, learned last month that her unemployment insurance had been cut off. She is one of an estimated 2.1 million Americans whose benefits have expired and who are waiting for an end to an impasse that has lasted months in the Senate over extending the payments once more to the long-term unemployed.

Times have changed politically, however, and opposition is growing in Washington and abroad to deficit-bloating government spending, even for those who are hurting.

For Ms. Sadler, and many like her, each passing day has become an excruciating countdown of debts and deadlines.

“I’m basically applying for everything, trying to get something,” said Ms. Sadler, 52, who since early June has not received an unemployment check, which used to be about $388 a week before taxes. “If I don’t, I’m going to lose everything. I’m not going to have a roof over my head. I’m just going to have to walk away with what I have on my back, and my dog.”

She is down to $44 in her purse and a quarter-tank of gas. She says she has exhausted the help of family and friends.

Members of her tiny Baptist church just up the road from her cramped mobile home pooled their money on Sunday to come up with her car payment and insurance. A county ministerial association paid her water bill. A nonprofit organization covered her last two electric bills.

A notepad on her refrigerator lists the other outstanding bills: $102 cellphone, $79 cable and Internet, which she relies on for job-hunting; $15 for her credit card; and $30 for an end table she had bought on layaway. Not listed was $275 for her rent this month, which she still owes.

Every morning, after Ms. Sadler takes her dog out and turns on the coffee maker, she switches on the television to C-Span. Then she cracks open her laptop to resume a job hunt that has become frantic.

But as she has run low on money, her search has also become increasingly circumscribed. She used to drive to drop off résumés with businesses; now she is mostly limited to scanning online listings.

Ms. Sadler eagerly tuned in to C-Span last Monday, mistakenly believing that Senate Democrats returning from recess would quickly take up the unemployment insurance extension. But they remain a vote short of being able to block a Republican filibuster, forcing them to wait for Carte Goodwin, the successor to Senator Robert C. Byrd, who died last month, to be sworn in. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said the vote on an extension would occur on Tuesday.

The measure is now expected to pass, but advocates for unemployment insurance are hardly declaring victory yet. Fears about the country’s skyrocketing deficit, which are at the heart of Republican objections, have gained growing prevalence, even with moderate Democrats. Economic arguments that additional government spending is needed to spur the economy have been swamped.

Some Republican politicians [like Jeff Flake, John Kyl, et al.] have argued that continuing to extend unemployment benefits offers a disincentive for the jobless to find work. Supporters of unemployment insurance counter that job openings remain in short supply.

Ms. Sadler estimates that she used to spend six hours a day searching for work; now it is at least double amount of time.

“There’s been times I’ve had to make myself stop looking for jobs because it was driving me nuts,” said Ms. Sadler, who admitted that she had contemplated suicide.

Every day has become a tense scramble, highlighting just how thin the governmental safety net for the jobless becomes beyond unemployment benefits. After Ms. Sadler was cut off from jobless benefits, she qualified for $200 a month in food stamps, but food stamps do not pay her bills, nor do they cover other necessities.

She recently wrote to Tom’s of Maine, because she uses the company’s toothpaste, mouthwash and deodorant, asking whether it might be able to donate some products to her. But she was informed that the company usually gives only to nonprofit organizations.

Ms. Sadler lives alone here in this small town in the northern part of the state, where Amish are sometimes spotted heading down the main road with horse and buggy. She has only her 2-year-old dog, Tootie-muffin, for company.

Before she lost her job, she had enrolled in community college to study medical billing and coding. She finished the program in May, but most of the medical billing jobs she has applied for require experience. The framed certificate, and another one for data entry, on her bedroom wall are just decorations at this point.

How she landed in this predicament is a product of both mistakes she made and forces beyond her control. She dropped out of high school and had her daughter, Chastity, at age 15. She started working in factories soon after and eventually earned her G.E.D. She had managed to scratch out a relatively comfortable life before she lost her job, making $14.65 an hour at Vuteq, in Georgetown, Ky., a company that makes sun roofs and windshields for Toyota.

But she never accumulated much savings, besides $3,000 she had socked away in a 401(k) account, which she quickly ran through. She has always had a thing for Ford Mustangs and bought a used red one in 2006 that she now admits was a bad decision.

She filed for bankruptcy in March 2009 and was allowed to keep her car on a reduced payment schedule, but she was barred from selling it.

After moving several times, she finally found her mobile home here, with cheap green siding and outdated wood paneling, at a monthly rent she could afford on unemployment insurance.

She had used up 79 weeks of benefits but was expecting an additional 20 weeks under the extended federal program.

On Tuesday, Ms. Sadler scored just her third interview since 2008, for a $7.50-an-hour job at a check-cashing business that is an hour’s drive from her home. It would have paid less than she received on unemployment benefits and left her still unable to cover her expenses, but she had little choice.

It took all her willpower not to reach across the table to shake her interviewer and beg for a chance. The company said she would know by Thursday, but as of Friday she had not heard back.

* * *
From Rebecca Schneider, Democratic candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District:

Before the bill even got to the Senate, YOUR Congressman (Jeff Flake) voted to cut unemployment benefits to the thousands of men and women who can't find work.

This vote was not only fiscally irresponsible, but downright wrong!

The Rebecca Schneider for Congress campaign will be staging a protest in front of Jeff Flake's Mesa Office. We will be wearing cardboard barrels, since Mr. Flake doesn't seem to care if his constituents lose their last remaining lifeline and self respect.

Join us on Wednesday, July 21th from 3:30 - 5:00 p.m., 1640 S. Stapley Drive, Mesa 85204.

Come dressed in grungy T-shirt and shorts. Barrels will be provided on site.

We urge you to join Rebecca Schneider's demonstration if you can.

Hey, Rep. Jeff Flake -- If You're So Concerned About the Deficit, Why Not Cut Your Big Congressional Salary?

Arizona's right-wing showoff congressman, Jeff Flake, talks a big game when it comes to his alarms about the deficit. He's rejected any attempt to use federal funds to help working-class American families: no unemployment, food stamps, money for small businesses, no nothing.

Hey, Jeff, how about cutting your own $174,000 salary? You're a supposed rebel: How about introducing a bill to reduce it by $100,000 to a still-healthy $74,000? Many of your constituents in Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Apache Junction and Queen Creek have had to take salary cuts in the Great Recession -- that is, if they haven't lost their jobs? Of course they're not career politicians like you, Jeff.

Some of us manage to live okay on $44,000 (our income last year) or a lot less.

From 1789 to 1815, congressional pay was $6 per diem (per day); from 1817 to 1855, it was $8 a day. Factoring in inflation, that was about from $80 to $180 a day -- and you don't work more than three days a week, do you, Jeff?

If you're a true conservative, you should be able to live on a lot less, right? Maybe if you didn't waste your money on all the high-tech devices you're shown bragging about in the D.C. papers, you could manage on less.

You know, there's nothing that says you have to accept your salary, the money that comes from taxpayer dollars, the money that lets you live your plush lifestyle that is cheating the future of our children and grandchildren.

Some governors have refused part of their annual salaries. New York's mayor, like some CEOs of troubled corporations, takes one dollar a year. We know you're not a billionaire, Jeff Flake, but what would happen if you had to live on less than your exorbitant benefits and $174,000 a year?

Maybe if the voters of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District kick you out on your hypocritical ass, you'll find out, hypocrite.

If I'm elected, I'll introduce a bill to lower congressional pay by $100,00 a year.

And if it doesn't pass, I'll return the $100,000 to the Treasury. I'm a thrifty Green and don't need your exorbitant pay.

Linda Greenhouse: Arizona a "Police State," Calls on Everyone to Identify as Illegal Alien

Linda Greenhouse, the retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter - when I taught U.S. constitutional history and political & civil rights courses at Nova Southeastern University, I used to tell my college students to read her reporting on the the justices' opinions - has an op-ed column today on Arizona's immigration law that ends with the suggestion that everyone in Arizona identify as an illegal alien, as in our campaign's T-shirts. Excerpts:

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa? . . .

I’ll offer a reflection on how, a generation ago, another of the country’s periodic anti-immigrant spasms was handled by the Supreme Court. In 1975, Texas passed a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education. Many thousands of children — a good number of whom were on the road to eventual citizenship under immigration laws that were notably less harsh back then — faced being thrown out of school and deprived of a future.

The law was challenged in federal court, with the Carter administration supporting the plaintiffs. By the time the case, Plyler v. Doe, reached the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a major debate within his administration over whether to change sides. Rex E. Lee, the admirable solicitor general, refused to do so.

In June 1982, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited the state from imposing “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee and the swing justice of his day, provided the fifth vote. The law “threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents,” he wrote.

I have no doubt that but for that ruling, public school systems all over the country would be checking papers and tossing away their undocumented students like so much playground litter. Blocked from that approach, local governments now try others. The city of Hazleton, Pa., passed a law that made it a crime for a landlord to rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. A federal district judge struck down the law on the ground that immigration is the business of the federal government, not of Hazleton, Pa.

Indeed, federal pre-emption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies.

My confidence about the law’s fate in the court’s hands is not boundless, however. In 1982, hours after the court decided the Texas case, a young assistant to Attorney General William French Smith analyzed the decision and complained in a memo: “This is a case in which our supposed litigation program to encourage judicial restraint did not get off the ground, and should have.” That memo’s author was John G. Roberts Jr.

So what to do in the meantime? Here’s a modest proposal. Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: I Could Be Illegal.