He brags that the van — not that he’d call it by its “EUROVAN” model name — has nearly 200,000 miles on it, and says, “My kids call it the rolling trashcan. I call it reliable.” Because Bruce Rauner knows that living simply is the way to go, a lesson that surely rubbed off on his daughter in 2009 when Rauner donated $250,000 to an elite public high school. That completely magnanimous gift and a personal phone call from Rauner to the principal mysteriously changed the girl’s application status from “rejected” to “Oh please come and drink deeply from the font of knowledge, to which we have affixed a plaque thanking your daddy for his generosity.” Again, this is just an example of what a regular everyday guy Bruce Rauner is. Some parents pitch in with setup for the choir’s annual Madrigal Dinner, and some contribute a quarter-million dollars to their daughter’s school.

And just to drive home the important point that he knows the value of a dollar, or several billion of them, a radio interview from January of this year has surfaced in which Rauner acknowledged that he once supported eliminating the minimum wage, although he does not think so anymore, because he has been convinced that it’s {del}economically{/del} politically unwise:

“I have said, on a number of occasions, that we could have a lower minimum wage or no minimum wage as part of increasing Illinois’ competitiveness. I’ve said that many times,” Rauner told WJBC host Scott Laughlin.


Read more at http://wonkette.com/559369/zillionaire-bruce-rauner-has-an-old-van-so-illinois-must-make-him-governor#o6awZ6ZcEbDvRo0e.99

Bruce Rauner, GOP Il Gov Candidate, Promises Government Shutdown and Mass Firing of Public Workers
http://www.ibtimes.com/bruce-rauner-gop-candidate-illinois-governor-promises-government-shutdown-mass-firing-1648244

In a newly surfaced video, Illinois' Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner suggested if elected governor, he will fire public employees and potentially shut down the government to address his state's fiscal challenges.

The video, circulated today by the Illinois Federation of Teachers, shows Rauner addressing the Tazewell County Republican dinner in March. In remarks to that group, Rauner said: "We may have to go through rough times. We may have to do what Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers. Sort of have to do a do-over and shut things down for a little while. That's what we're gonna do."

snip

Critics of Illinois' recent move to slash pension benefits have pointed to the state's spending on tax cuts and subsidies as proof Illinois has plenty of money to address its pension obligations. For example, a New York Times analysis indicated, Illinois currently spends roughly $1.5 billion every year on taxpayer subsidies to corporations. Additionally, the state in 2011 passed a corporate tax cut bill that is estimated to cost $371 million a year. That bill was designed to award tax breaks to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Rauner is considered a top pickup opportunity for Republicans. He has been consistently leading in polls in his election matchup against incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn. His rhetoric against public employees stands in contrast to his business experience as a billionaire private equity executive who made his fortune managing government workers' public pension money.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/24/gore.bush/
Gore rips Bush on al Qaeda-Saddam link
RNC cites 'history of denial' in response

Friday, June 25, 2004 Posted: 10:36 AM EDT (1436 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Vice President Al Gore accused the Bush administration Thursday of misleading the American people by claiming a strong connection between Saddam Hussein and the terror group al Qaeda.

"Beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind," Gore said.

Bush and Cheney created a false impression in the minds of American people that the former Iraqi leader and al Qaeda, blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were working together, Gore said at the Georgetown University Law School.

(snip)

This month, the independent commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks said it found "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection beyond preliminary meetings that led nowhere. But neither Bush nor Cheney have wavered from their earlier statements.

"They dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever," Gore charged.
GOP response

(snip)

Gore said media who challenge Bush and Cheney's claims of a link are intimidated by the administration.

"The administration works closely with a network of rapid-response digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for undermining support for our troops," Gore said. The term "Brown Shirts" refers to Nazi supporters in the 1930s and '40s.

"The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another.

"But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison," Gore said, referring to the prisoner-abuse scandal.

"F**k it. We're going in."

Sometimes you come across a disconnect so profound it almost gives you whiplash.

The cover story in this morning’s New York Times Magazine, by Peter Baker, presumably an excerpt from his upcoming book, concerns Bush’s final days in office, and the beginning of the article focuses on the McCain campaign’s attempt to distance itself from this most unpopular president. At the end of the first section, Mark Salter, McCain’s campaign advisor, says this about the President: “You feel bad for the guy if you think about it.” This leads to the first line of the second section:

George Bush does not want anyone feeling bad for him.

Allow me to back up for a second. Yesterday I came across the money portion of Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World. Suskind is writing about all the end-arounds the Bush administration performed in the lead-up to the Iraq war: ignoring George Tenet and the CIA to get the 16 words into the State of the Union address; using the CIA chief of station for Germany to muzzle German fears about the unreliability of Rafid Ahmed, or “Curveball,” who was feeding the administration misinformation about Saddam’s biological weapons operation; and, finally, not just ignoring but actually reversing the findings of the CIA Paris chief, who was told, in a clandestine meeting with Naji Sabri, Saddam’s last foreign minister, that Saddam didn’t possess WMD.

Then Suskind gets to the big one. In a casual conversation with an American intelligence officer in a Washington restaurant, and subsequently confirmed in face-to-face meetings with the former director and current assistant director of MI6, Suskind discovers that the Bush administration knew Saddam didn’t possess WMD before they went to war. They didn’t suspect. They knew.

In the months before the war, it seems a British agent, Michael Shipster, met with the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, who confirmed everything we subsequently found to be true: Not just that Saddam didn’t have WMD but why he was unwilling to say so publicly. And it all made sense. Here’s Suskind talking with the unnamed American intelligence officer:

I ask if the intelligence was passed to CIA and the White House.
“Of course. Passed instantly, at the very highest levels.”
“And what did we say,” I ask. “Or, I guess, what did Bush say?”
“He said, Fuck it. We’re going in.”

Don’t know if that’s a direct quote or not. Either way, it’s probably a good thing George Bush doesn’t want anyone feeling bad for him.