Tag: charlie rangel

#rsrh I TOLD you Rangel was a Gnostic!

I TOLD all of you. But did you listen? No. I was ignored. Ignored! But it’s downright obvious by now.  Don’t believe me?  Well, below is Charlie Rangel, explaining why he decided not to take a plea bargain:

How lucky are you when God tells you that you don’t have to take a plea … that you can tell them, let the facts speak for themselves.”

Fronting reporters later, Rangel changed his tune somewhat about any divine guidance he may have received, the New York Daily News reported.

“I exaggerated. I really didn’t talk to God … I said that in the heat of the campaign but no, she hasn’t spoken to me recently,” he said.

Bolding mine. With this use of the feminine pronoun Rep. Rangel’s clearly referring to Sophia there, which as everybody knows is one of the feminine manifestations of what Gnostics consider to be the true Godhead (not the Demiurge that created the world in mainstream Gnostic thought, of course).  It thus follows then that Rep. Rangel is engaging in a personalized metaphor where his life represents the entanglement of the soul in the corruption and dross materiality of this flawed universe; but just when it seems that the soul is trapped forever, Sophia comes to reveal to it an alternative to submitting to gross reality.  You can instead embrace the true, ethereal nature of the soul, and allow yourself to be in the corporeal world, but not of it – which will then allow you to suffer the physical world’s outrages and offenses against you as the meaningless acts that they are.  When it comes right down to it, this is pretty solid mysticism, here; and it’s also pretty brave of Rep. Rangel to demonstrate the worthlessness of the physical universe by using himself as the metaphysical canvas.  Truly, this man is an inspiration to esoteric adepts everywhere.

Alternatively, Charlie Rangel’s an idiot.

Moe Lane

PS: Michel Faulkner for Congress.

Charlie Rangel will not resign…

…and will ride this puppy all the way down, bless his heart.

For those living in a cave, Charlie Rangel* (D, NY) is about to get served with ethics charges by the House Ethics committee for committing ethical violations (mostly involving real estate) beyond the power of the House Ethics committee leadership to plausibly overlook… not that they didn’t try their best.  In keeping with this tradition of benign overlooksight, it turns out that Rangel met with the Ethics Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren (D, CA) without any pesky Republicans around to hear about any particular deals that Rangel might or might not have been willing to make to avoid embarrassing the Democratic party in public.  I can’t imagine why the GOP would be worried about that, though: it’s not like Rangel gave three Democratic members of the Ethics Committee campaign money… oh.  Right.  He did. Continue reading Charlie Rangel will not resign…

Keep spending that campaign cash, Rangel.

I beg to differ with JammieWearingFool: I heartily approve of Rep. Charlie Rangel’s (D, NY-15) spending decisions.

Charles Rangel’s legal bills are piling up as high as the campaign cash he’s raking in to pay for his ethics defense.

That leaves the Harlem Democrat with no choice but to run for, and win, a 21st term in the House to keep raising campaign money to pay legal fees – which top $1.7 million, records show.

You see: as of June 2010, Rangel has $517K on hand to cover both his primary and the general election.  That is not a good number, particularly if you’re becoming exceedingly politically radioactive.  The Republican party has a good recruit for this race – Rev. Michel Faulkner, who I interviewed here (donation link here) – this cycle*; so there’s a chance that we can pull a Cao, assuming that Rangel manages to fight his way clear of the primary.  Which I think that he will.

Thus, it is in the best interests of the Republic that Rangel continue to burn through campaign money in order to pay his legal bills.  Not in the best interests of the Democratic party, of course – but then, the differences between the two will probably be a minor theme of this election.

Moe Lane Continue reading Keep spending that campaign cash, Rangel.

Meet Michel Faulkner (R CAND, NY-15).

It’s pronounced ‘Michael:’ he’s running in Charlie Rangel’s seat, assuming of course that Charlie Rangel doesn’t get ousted in the primary itself.

I like our chances on this one. Rangel’s got a serious primary challenger, he’s got a very poor ethical reputation right now, and Faulkner’s the sort of candidate that you want to have on hand for a general election challenge when in a situation like this.

But you have to speculate to accumulate, as a wise man once said. Donation page for Rev. Faulkner here.  His main sites are here and here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Rangel equates Obama with Cheney.

Guess he’s not counting on the President to campaign for him, then.

Rep. Charles Rangel compared President Obama to former Vice President Dick Cheney Saturday for their shared commitment to the Iraq War, one the Harlem Democrat argues is based on the country’s hunger for oil.

“I challenge anyone to tell me we aren’t there because of the oil,” said Rangel, who kicks off his re-election campaign for a 21st congressional term in Washington Heights Sunday.

“The lack of an honest explanation [for the war] is consistent with Bush and Cheney,” he told the Daily News during an hour-long interview that touched on his ongoing ethics probe, relationship with the President and ability to get work done in Washington.

Via AoSHQ.  Personally, I’m hoping for a nice, nasty, expensive primary here that Charlie Rangel will barely survive.  Michel Faulkner would certainly prefer to face him than somebody with plausible deniability…

Moe Lane

PS: By the way… Barack Obama and Dick Cheney identical?   Not on Obama’s best day, and Cheney’s worst.

‘So, Moe, how’s your election cycle going?’

Let me put it this way: below (in no particular order) is my Top Ten List of Democratic Members of the 111th Congress Whose Presence There Personally Offends My Sense of Civics.

David Obey
Jack Murtha
Alan Mollohan
Eric Massa
Charlie Rangel
Russ Carnahan
Carol Shea-Porter
Alan Grayson
Jim Moran
Patrick Kennedy

It’s going great. Thanks for asking!

Moe Lane

Charlie Rangel (D, NY-15) is a Gnostic Cainite!

And he reveals this on Holy Thursday, too.

This is EXCITING! I needn’t remind any of you that the Cainites were fourth century Gnostics who honored both Cain (as the first human to rebel against the Demiurge*) and Judas Iscariot (as the agent who – with Christ’s permission – acted as the agent of Christ’s sacrifice, and was thus rewarded with secret esoteric knowledge**). This particular heresy was long thought to have died out with most other contemporary Gnostic sects; but it must have gone underground, and survived. And now Charlie Rangel, of all people (I assume that he’s a high-level initiate), has given their presence away with his claim that Judas Iscariot later became a saint! The things that we can learn!

Of course, there’s always the alternative: Charlie Rangel’s knowledge of Christianity approaches that of a battered parakeet’s.

Moe Lane

PS: It’s 2010, people: the GOP has been doing its recruiting. I gather that Rev. Michel Faulkner (Baptist minister, community leader, former NY Jet) is looking like he’ll be the eventual Republican candidate.

*As you know, the Demiurge was believed by Gnostics to be the true creator of the physical universe; as the Gnostics were of course mystics who hated the material world, that meant that they equate the Demiurge with both the Old Testament God and Satan. The early Church went to some trouble to, ah, dissuade that interpretation of Scripture…

**Which they just happened to have, in the ‘Gospel of Judas.’

Crossposted to RedState.

Who *shall* replace Rangel?

Having watched for a while the entertaining meltdown that is the Democratic party’s House Ways & Means chairmanship crisis, I’d thought that I’d take a look at the top seven replacements for Charlie Rangel (via Jen Rubin) and quickly point out the… complications.

  • Fortney Pete Stark, CA-13.  Crazy.
  • Sander M. Levin, MI-12. Public option squish*.
  • Jim McDermott, WA-07.  Seditionist.
  • John Lewis, GA-05. Racist.
  • Richard E. Neal, MA-02. Fifth in seniority.
  • John S. Tanner, TN-08. Retiring.
  • Xavier Becerra, CA-31. Seventh in seniority.

No, Neal and Becerra’s lack of seniority is an issue for Democrats.  They don’t rotate out their leadership like the GOP does.  Which makes the way that everybody skips past Levin a bit odd: looking over the guy’s record… well, there isn’t much of one.  He’s this 78 year old guy who’s been in Congress for 28 years and doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly noteworthy while he was there.  This is, of course, a personal tragedy and searing indictment of the man’s life choices: but it’s not precisely an obstacle to his taking the chairmanship, rambling progressive attack video or no.

Besides, even if it was: it’s only until January 2011 anyway.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState. Continue reading Who *shall* replace Rangel?

Michael Barone: Charlie Rangel not yet albatross*.

(Via Instapundit) Contra Michael Barone (who I both like and respect), there’s a simpler answer to the question of why Speaker Pelosi hasn’t cut Charlie Rangel loose yet: by Democratic standards, he’s not particularly corrupt. We are after all talking about a political party whose collective inability to pay their taxes became the first national political joke of 2009.

That being said, Barone’s point that Rangel’s replacement would be problematical for the Democrats is well-taken. Just imagine Pete Stark as Ways & Means Chair, for example. It’d be like Christmas had come early.

Moe Lane

*The albatross was only a problem after they shot it, remember?

Crossposted to RedState.

Charlie Rangel gets a primary challenger in NY-15.

I understand why Glenn Reynolds is suspicious, but I think this primary challenge of Charlie Rangel by former campaign director Vincent Morgan is legitimate.  To begin with, the possibility was first reported about a month and a half ago, and that article notes an important detail about NY-15:

Someday, whether it be 2010 or 2012 or 3012, Charlie Rangel will not be the congressman from Harlem. There may not in fact be another African-American congressman from Manhattan, since a huge influx of white and Hispanic residents have moved into the borough in recent years.

Redistricting is set for the 2012 elections, and if Rangel is still around, political observers say, how his district’s lines move will give a clear message about the seat’s future. If the district moves northward into the Bronx, it will, first of all, no longer be the only district to be entirely in Manhattan, and, secondly, show that Rangel and his allies intend for the seat to remain African-American. If the district moves to the south, it would favor a white candidate and mean that black political power has effectively switched to the outer boroughs. If the district stays the same, then New York will likely send the first Dominican-American to Congress.

Continue reading Charlie Rangel gets a primary challenger in NY-15.