Hinchey threatened a journalist for his "free speech"?
Posted on 02/25/2005 8:41:42 AM PST by Pendragon_6
Thanks for the ping!
I heard him, too and I agree. The guy is certifiable.
I can't believe someone like this is in the Congress.
....and his little dog, too?
Being a Dem congresscritter, I'm sure he was more intersted in the ruby shoes.
I've never seen much need to write about the goings-on in live talk radio, but there was an exchange on February 24 unlike anything I've heard since I first opened a mic in 1975. It was so profoundly bizarre it cries for further attention.
The exchange was between radio host Sean Hannity and Congressman Maurice Hinchey, a seven-term Democrat from upstate New York...
You know, all the Democrats have to do is STOP with the hatred and looking in the rearview mirror, and come up with an articulable alternative plan for the country. But they waste time on "Halliburton" and "Ohio was stolen" and all that utter garbage.
Then again, coming up with an alternative plan that the country will ACCEPT is the hard part. Maybe they spend time on this nonsense because they CAN'T be honest about their policies.
Who knows? And, for me, I don't mind if they keep up their losing ways.
This congressman is only one guy, I know. But the Democrats have not demonstrated to me (and many, many others) that they can be trusted to govern. Period.
Maybe they will nominate Ward Churchill in 08. (Lest that seem too cruel towards all Democrats, I say this: I used to be one! They left me, I didn't leave them.)
___________________________________________________
Moi aussi. And when they started to leave planet earth, I left them. But you are not being too cruel, my friend. They brought this all on their own pointy little heads.
Same here... keep it up, 'RATs! Keep Hinchey in front of the mikes and cameras so people can see and hear what these libs are really like.
I only heard part of Sean's show yesterday, but he got at least one call from a Hinchey constituent who actually admitted he voted for the guy. He stated: "Now that I've learned what Hinchey is really like, I'll never vote for him again!!!" (my paraphrase)
BLL, as a citizen of the City of Evil perhaps you can answer KC_C's question.
;>)
Oh? Hinchey is from the Ithaca area? That explains it all.
Did any of you get the uneasy feeling, after hearing that he threaten to smear Sean Hannity, that Hinchey has used his position to intimidate and extort people in the past?
To quote the "Fish License" skit:
"He's gone off his chump."
I saw him on Hanity's show. The man came across as INSANE. I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean the man was pure tinfoil hat, kookdom.
Perhaps there is a DNC talking point to keep rasing this BS as part of a DNC resurgence strategy. Perhaps there is a democrat (gay) party effort to convice politicians abroad that the democrat party matters. Remember Kenedy does his rants for the foreign no the US press. The foreign nations like france have parlementary systems of government which are proportional. They don't grasp the USA has a winner and looser system, no the european "second place" gets you power too system.
I saw the same exchange on Fox. It was bizarre. Hincheley said he has a "duty" to his constituents to bring these issues up ... apparently even things for which he has no proof.
Basically, he believes he can put forth any theory as fact and not have to back it up.
I saw the same exchange on Fox. It was bizarre. Hincheley said he has a "duty" to his constituents to bring these issues up ... apparently even things for which he has no proof.
Basically, he believes he can put forth any theory as fact and not have to back it up.
More on the beloved Rep Hinchey:
MAURICE HINCHEY
Congressman representing the 22nd District of New York, the Catskills
Member of the radical Progressive Caucus, with “one of the most liberal voting records in the House”
Gave support to domestic terrorists who attacked a U.S. military facility
Provided propaganda for Communist FARC guerrillas in Colombia
Taxpayer-funded Cornell University is his single biggest campaign donor
Who is the most extreme leftwing Democrat in Congress? One contender for the title is Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a member of the overtly socialist Progressive Caucus with a 100 percent liberal voting record.
Last weekend, recounts James Taranto of OpinionJournal.com, Rep. Hinchey told a community forum in Ithaca that President George W. Bush’s campaign strategist Karl Rove had “set up [CBS anchorman] Dan Rather…with those false papers” about Bush’s National Guard service. Rep. Hinchey claimed to have evidence of this, a conspiracy first alleged by then-Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe. Pressed by the audience, Hinchey then admitted he had no proof, just “my belief” in this irrational theory.
Such belief in all-powerful conspiracies, notes Taranto, was once ascribed to the right by liberal historian Richard Hofstadter. More recently, liberals laughed off militia claims of conspiracies as coming from the “black helicopter right-wing.” But now we have Congressman Hinchey, a true believer in the red-state conspiratorial power of President Bush. So who is Rep. Maurice Hinchey, this poster child of what ought to be called the Red Helicopter Left?
Maurice Hinchey is a Democratic Member of Congress who represents the 22nd District of New York, the Catskills, Borscht Belt and Hudson River Valley stretching from liberal Vassar College in Poughkeepsie to liberal Cornell University in Ithaca to the communities bordering Pennsylvania. In a bipartisan agreement over reapportionment, Hinchey’s district was redrawn to protect his seat in Congress. The district is nearly 80 percent white, 7.7 percent African-American and 7.8 percent Hispanic. In 2000, before the latest gerrymandering, Al Gore won over George W. Bush here by 51-42 percent.
Maurice Hinchey was born in 1938 in New York City. He enlisted in the Navy at age 18, worked in a cement factory for five years, and then paid his way through the State University of New York at New Paltz by working as a New York State Thruway toll collector; he graduated from the college in 1968. Having acquired a taste for taking people’s money as an agent of government, Hinchey found work as an analyst for the state education department.
In the Watergate year 1974, Hinchey won election to the New York Assembly, where he served nine terms and passed more than 600 bills. In 1992, the year Democrat Bill Clinton won the presidency, Hinchey ran for Congress and won by a three-percent margin.
“Hinchey has one of the most liberal voting records in the House,” wrote journalist Michael Barone in the 2004 Almanac of American Politics. Congressman Hinchey is a member of the radical Progressive Caucus. The group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rates his recent voting record as 100 percent on the left side of legislation.
Like most leftwing Democrats, Hinchey voted against the use of force in Iraq (but for a supplemental $87 billion appropriation to support U.S. troops in the field). He also voted against allowing oil drilling on a scant 20 acres of the 1.2 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), thus voting to keep America dependent on Middle Eastern oil while opposing efforts to make that region politically democratic and stable.
Ithaca, New York, which is located in his district, was the second city in the United States (after Santa Cruz, California) whose city council voted, in 2002, to oppose the war in Iraq. Its declaration proclaimed: “Common Council urges the city’s representatives in Congress (Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Charles Schumer, and Congressman Maurice Hinchey) to vote against any resolution in Congress that would allow the President to declare war on Iraq.”
In 2003 activists of the Ithaca Catholic Worker vandalized a military recruiting center. As one witness described what happened, these activists “entered the Cayuga military recruiting office with jars filled with human blood which they poured upon the walls, door, bay window, on the flag, on the stand-up cut-outs of smiling military recruits, and over a body bag which they had brought representing the American soldiers who may die.”
Congressman Hinchey, a Roman Catholic, refused to denounce this act of domestic terrorism against a U.S. military facility in his own district. Instead, wrote reporter Joseph J. Sabia at FrontPageMagazine.com, Hinchey “has instead chosen to release a statement that echoes the protestors’ views.”
“In just two years,” said Hinchey’s statement, “the Bush Administration has deconstructed the American economy, the nation’s civil liberties, and our environmental protection…. And now, contrary to International Law and against every decent instinct, we are engaging in what will come to be seen as a massacre in Iraq on the basis of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ of preemption, which allows the United States to attack any other country anytime we want and for whatever reason the President feels is justified.”
In June 2004 a jury in upstate New York ignored the evidence of crimes committed by these Ithaca Catholic Worker activists and found all of them Not Guilty. “Jurors decided to engage in jury nullification,” wrote Sabia, “to express their contempt for the United States military and the war in Iraq.”
The huge left-leaning student body and faculty of Cornell University influences politics in Ithaca. This university has made Visiting Professors of such non-scholars as anti-American, pro-Marxist writer and documentarian John Pilger and anti-Semitic congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D.-Georgia).
Perhaps to win the votes of university students, Hinchey voted in 2001 to legalize medical marijuana. In December 2003 his voting record received the highest possible grade from VOTE-HEMP, an organization advocating hemp, a plant closely related to marijuana. Hinchey, like most liberal Democratic members of Congress, in 1998 voted against a bill to subject federal employees to random drug testing.
In 2002 Hinchey joined 43 other members of Congress, all but two of whom were Democrats, in signing a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell alleging human rights violations by the Government of Colombia in its war against the drug-running guerrilla terrorist Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, FARC, established as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party. This letter, published worldwide and used as pro-FARC anti-Government of Colombia propaganda, made no mention of FARC’s thousands of murders, atrocities and support from Cuban Marxist dictator Fidel Castro and from Venezuela’s Marxist caudillo Hugo Chavez. The letter urged Secretary Powell “to take our concerns into account when determining whether to approve additional military aid for Colombia this year.”
In November 2004 Colombian Defense Minister Alberto Uribe announced that informants had warned of a FARC plot to assassinate President George W. Bush during his brief visit that month to Colombia.
In 2003 Congressman Hinchey co-sponsored legislation reducing or ending U.S. economic sanctions and travel restrictions against Cuba. In 2001 he had voted to keep a travel ban in place against Communist Cuba until Castro frees political prisoners. In 2000 he voted against Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with Communist China until its observance of human rights improves.
Hinchey has a 100 percent pro-union voting record, according to the AFL-CIO. He also has a 92 percent pro-education voting record, according to the teachers’ union -- the National Education Association (NEA). Hinchey earned this honor in part by voting in 1998 to deny vouchers to the 70 percent of African-American parents in Washington, D.C. who want to liberate their children from inferior, unionized public schools.
Hinchey opposed the tax cuts proposed by President George W. Bush, endorsing instead the Progressive Caucus’ “American People’s Dividend,” a payment of $300 to every person in America, the same for all whether a person paid $1 million in taxes or $0. Under this plan, a husband and wife with three children would receive a refundable tax credit of $1,500, regardless of their income or tax burden.
In 2000, 2001, and 2004 Hinchey voted against reducing or ending the marriage penalty that imposed higher taxes on married couples than on singles. In 2000 and 2001 he voted against the “death tax” that can force the sale of a small family farm or business to pay tax on its value of up to 50 percent when a family member dies. In 2000 he voted against reducing taxes on Social Security benefits.
Although a Roman Catholic, Hinchey has a 100 percent pro-choice voting record, according to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). He voted in 2003 against banning partial-birth abortion except to save a mother’s life. He voted in 2004 against making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime.
In 1998 Hinchey voted against ending racial preferences in college admissions. In 1994 he voted to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment. In 1999 he voted against banning physician-assisted suicide.
While the National Rifle Association (NRA) gives most gun-control-supporting liberal members of Congress a grade of “F,” it has given Hinchey a much higher grade of “C-.” One reason is that, after voting for the Brady Bill on handguns, “in 1994, as he faced a tough reelection campaign in a non-metropolitan district,” Hinchey, wrote Barone, “agonized over the assault weapons ban, deciding at the last minute to vote against it, despite a call from [President] Bill Clinton.”
In 1999, 2001 and 2003 Hinchey voted against a proposed Constitutional amendment to prohibit desecration of the American flag.
Hinchey has taken on several of what Barone calls “lost causes,” ranging from rural “Empowerment Zones” to legislation attempting to halt the shift of “veterans funds to the Sun Belt.”
One Hinchey crusade is to restore the government “Fairness Doctrine” that used to require commercial broadcasters to provide free airtime for opposing points of view. Like many government ideas, the ideal of the “Fairness Doctrine” was to allow many different views to be heard. In practice, its arbitrary regulatory chill prompted many broadcasters to take all opinions off their airwaves. The alternative was to risk paying a price in lost commercial airtime that must be given away, or to risk loss of their government license if a bureaucrat arbitrarily decided a broadcaster had been unfair. Many liberals now advocate restoring the “Fairness Doctrine” precisely because of this chilling effect, as a way to stifle predominantly-conservative talk radio by requiring stations to offer equal time to liberals.
Some of Hinchey’s biggest campaign contributors have been the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) and law firms whose members are wealthy tort lawyers. He has voted against every measure that would limit their profits. Hinchey, e.g., in 2003 voted against a bill to prohibit lawsuits against gun makers and sellers when a criminal misuses a firearm. In 2003 he voted No on bills to cap damages in medical lawsuits and to put lawsuits against HMOs under federal regulation. In 2004 he voted against limiting medical malpractice lawsuits to $250,000 in damages.
Roughly 54 percent of Hinchey’s Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions in 2003-2004 came from organized labor. One of his biggest contributors was the mostly-public employees’ Service Employees International Union (SEIU). His seat on the powerful, pork-dispensing House Appropriations Committee means that many special interest groups have an interest in being Congressman Hinchey’s friend.
Hinchey’s single largest campaign contributor during the 2003-04 political cycle was Cornell University, a complex institution that is partly state funded and partly private. Investigative reporters might want to look into whether Rep. Hinchey has found a way to coerce Republican as well as Democratic taxpayers to pay for his re-election campaigns through partisan political contributions he is given by the taxpayer-funded colleges of Cornell University.
I probably shouldn't say it, but I've already said it once on a thread yesterday, so I will again: I've met the guy a couple of times in the capacity of my job. He is very slimy and too touchy-feely. You know what I mean.
Hinchey threatened a journalist for his "free speech"?
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