(UPDATE: Let’s add a few more. 51) Allen voted against providing emergency health care for Katrina survivors. 52) Allen voted against a Lieberman amendment to provide financial relief for those affected by Katrina. 53) Allen voted against a Schumer amendment to restore $300 million in funding to FEMA’s disaster relief account. – promoted by lowkell)
There are many reasons why Virginians should vote for Tim Kaine over George Allen this coming Tuesday (or before, if you’re voting absentee). Here are 50 that sprung to my mind, but I’m sure you can think of many more.
1. He has a long and pathetic record in a wide variety of areas. The following three items are all from this same link.
2. He voted for Bush administration budgets – huge tax cuts for the wealthy, two unpaid-for wars, an unpaid-for new Medicare benefit – that turned surpluses as far as the eye can see (under Bill Clinton) into enormous deficits which we’re still dealing with today.
3. He wouldn’t say whether he would have voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Paycheck Fairness Act.
4. Along with Jim Gilmore, Allen “managed to stick Virginia with unprecedented deficits that Mr. Warner has spent most of his time trying to erase.”
5. He attacked Jim Webb’s award-winning novels “to try to suggest that the explicit war time experiences Webb writes about are demeaning and repugnant.”
6. He refused to oppose Virginia’s invasive ultrasound measure.
7. He voted against the Family and Medical Leave Act three times.
8. He pledged to defund Planned Parenthood.
9. He supported the Blunt Amendment, which would allow any employer to deny their employees contraception coverage.
10. He voted to partially privatize Social Security.
11. He praised the Ryan budget, which would end Medicare as we know it.
12. He praised the Ryan budget, which would end Medicarrepeatedly calls federal employees “sanctimonious social engineers” and “federales.”
13. He said his top priority was electing more Republicans, not working for the best interests of Virginia.
14. He voted against pay-as-you-go budget rules six times.
15. He voted for 52,319 earmarks worth $121.8 billion and has refused to disclose his own earmarks.
16. He voted against raising the minimum wage four times.
17. He has mocked clean energy, including wind and solar, which the vast majority of Americans strongly support.
18. He loves tax subsidies for big oil companies that don’t need them.
19. He and his American Energy Freedom Center mock the scientifically proven fact of man-made global warming. That alone should disqualify him, especially after what we just saw with “superstorm” Sandy.
20. The Jack Abramoff connection.
21. More on the Abramoff-Allen connection.
22. The Tony Rudy connection.
23. His abysmal environmental record.
24. The fact that he was bored in the Senate.
25. The Koch brothers connection.
26. The white supremacist connection.
27. The little deer head in a black man’s mailbox incident.
28. His support for a personhood amendment that would outlaw certain forms of contraception, embryonic stem cell research, and abortion in ALL cases.
29. His love for dirty energy that’s trashing the planet (but enriching him).
30. “Macaca” of course. Also note that after he used the racist slur against an Asian-American man, he then lied, claiming he’d never heard of the word, that he really meant to say “caca,” etc.
31. The Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum connection.
32. The bat****-crazy, right-wing extremist Washington Examiner endorsed him.
33. He voted with his party 96% of the time.
34. He is as partisan and nasty as you can get, saying he enjoys knocking Democrats’ “soft teeth down their whiny throats” for instance.
35. He dragged his sister upstairs by the hair.
36. He “slam[med] a pool cue into [his sister’s] new boyfriend’s head”.
37. He “saw dentistry as a perfect profession–getting paid to make people suffer.”
38. He threw his brother Bruce “through a sliding glass door”.
39. He spray-painted “‘die whitey’ and other ‘racially tinged’ graffiti on the walls of Palos Verde High School.”
40. He “plastered the school with Confederate flags.”
41. He was one of only 27 Virginia House of Delegates members in 1984 who voted against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.
42. He co-sponsored “a resolution expressing ‘regret and sorrow upon the loss’ of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised ‘massive resistance’ to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision banning segregation.”
42. He used the “n word” “on a regular basis” in college.
43. He angrily asserts that implying he might have Jewish heritage – which of course is true, as his mother’s side of the family is Jewish – was “making aspersions” on him.
44. To make it even clearer that he had no Jewish heritage, Allen claimed that “I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops.”
45. He has a truly sordid, ugly history on racial issues.
46. The Washington Post reports that even “some Republicans…[contend] that Allen compiled an undistinguished legislative record, even for a one-term senator.”
47. He criticized Sen. John Warner for attempting to reach a bipartisan agreement on breaking gridlock over judicial nominees.
48. He opposed comprehensive immigration reform.
49. He even opposed an immigration bill signed by Ronald Reagan, saying it would “cause a mass invasion by persons unable to speak or read English.”
50. He has been criticized by veterans for voting against “billions for veterans care,” and for calling veterans programs (and other government programs) “a waste.”
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