This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Congress sucks

  • Harry Reid blames Hawthorne deaths on sequester

    So today, Harry Reid blames the sequester for the deaths of seven Marines at the Hawthorne Nevada depot explosion overnight. From our buddy, the Gateway Pundit;

    I guess somehow because training funds aren’t available, those Marines forgot what to do and exploded themselves. Nice Harry. Former Congressman Allen West writes on Facebook;

    I am thoroughly disgusted by Sen. Harry Reid’s attempt to use the tragic deaths overnight of 7 US Marines in a training incident in NV for political purposes, suggesting they are somehow related to the sequester. It is precisely this kind of disgraceful behavior that justifiably earns Congress utter disdain from the American public, and on behalf of my fellow Americans, I demand Sen. Reid immediately apologize to the families of these fallen heroes and their fellow Marines.

  • Charlie Rangel’s poverty draft

    Flagwaver sends us a link to the link to Charlie Rangel’s latest attempt to restore the draft called the “Universal National Service Act“. Basically, it calls for a military draft supplemented by a draft into “civilian service in a Federal, State, or local government program or with a community-based agency or community-based entity”. If I read the thing correctly, there are no exemptions, except attending high school, attending college and a hardship/disability. By the way, the President gets to decide whether you’re drafted into the military or the civilian program, if you don’t make a choice before you’re drafted.

    The period of service is for two years, and there’s no conscientious objector exemption, for those of you so inclined. But Rangel explains the purpose of his bill;

    It is the obligation of every citizen of the United States, and every other person residing in the United States, who is between the ages of 18 and 25 to perform a period of national service as prescribed in this title unless exempted under the provisions of this title.

    Seriously? Is that in the Constitution? Since when are we subordinate to the government who now levies arbitrary obligations on us…us, you know the People who formed the more perfect union, established justice, etc….

    Funny how it’s the democrats who have trying to subordinate the population to the threat of a draft since Richard Nixon rendered it asunder. It was Jimmy Carter, who raped the military of training, pay and equipment, who restored draft registration when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and he suddenly realized that no one wanted to join the military. Most young people don’t register for the draft these days anyway, even with no threat of a draft, so how is Rangel going to round up the folks to register?

    And why legislate for a draft now, unless they plan on making military service Jimmy Carter-painful again. Yeah, you folks who weathered the Clinton years have no idea how bad it can get.

    All they’re going to get in the first few rounds are the derelicts who didn’t finish high school, and the poor and uneducated who can’t get into college for whatever reason. So, yeah, this is a really great idea whose time has come. Or. Not.

  • Some animals are more equal than others

    Remember the other day when Nancy Pelosi told us that a cut in Congress’ pay would “diminish our dignity”? And then her husband went on to explain that she really meant that it would hurt her staff, the little people, if Congress took a pay cut. Well, not surprisingly, according to the National Constitution Center, that’s total bullshit, too;

    Included in the mandatory cuts are expenses the members of Congress use to hire and maintain their staffs. In all, the operational expenses for Congress add up to $133 million annually.

    Staffers face 22 days of furloughs, which add up to about a 20 percent pay cut for them, and layoffs lurk as a possibility.

    Unless, of course, you are an actual member of Congress. Your pay can’t be cut as part of the 2011 Budget Control Act.

    Of course, there’s a legal reason, but, certainly not one Pelosi knows, or she would have used it instead of the blubbering bullshit she said. Congress can’t pass legislation which affects their current pay – but that’s bullshit, too, because it was the last Congress that passed the sequestration rules in 2011, so the last Congress could have made the cuts affect their pay during this session. But, I’m a non-attorney spokesperson. Or something.

  • Sequester lies

    Yesterday, the president surrounded himself with first responders while he lectured the American people on the impending spending cuts in the government known as “sequester”. from the Washington Examiner;

    “Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded,” he said. “Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.”

    Since when are teachers, child care providers, doctors and nurses, police and fire fighters federal employees? Those services are paid for with local taxes, not federal funds. Of course, that’s the kind of scare tactics to which we’ve become accustomed over the last few decades. I noticed that the President didn’t bother to mention that the whole sequester thing was one of those bright ideas which came out of his White House, yet somehow it’s Congress’ fault.

    The Defense Department is staring down the barrel of 700,000 job losses 495,000 of those jobs are in the DC area, which might be uncomfortable for the White House. The Washington Post says that the sequester might result in a quarter-point jump in the unemployment rate.

    Of course, it’s all because the Administration is holding out for higher taxes instead of meaningful spending cuts. And, oh, yeah, they think that they can depend on savings from withdrawal from Afghanistan for spending reductions. You know like that savings we were supposed to have from the withdrawal from Iraq – no one is talking about that magical surplus which never materialized.

    Congress isn’t ready to raise taxes again, so Obama is stuck playing the blame game. From the Washington Times;

    GOP House Speaker John A. Boehner said Tuesday the House has twice passed a plan to replace the so-called sequester with “common sense cuts,” but Mr. Obama has so far been unwilling to find enough savings from overhauling Medicare and Social Security. The president, he said, is relying too heavily on plans to increase taxes again.

    “Just last month, the president got his higher taxes on the wealthy, and he’s already back for more,” Ohio’s Mr. Boehner said in a statement. The Democrats’ “new-found concern about the president’s sequester is appreciated, but words alone won’t avert it.”

    Also from the Times, sequester is forcing defense contractor to send jobs overseas;

    First Line Technologies of Chantilly, Va., makes cooling vests for troops to wear underneath their body armor and employs about a dozen people. Having experienced rapid growth last year, it was readying to hire about a dozen more workers before the uncertainty over sequestration developed, company President Amit Kapoor said.

    Now, First Line Technologies is looking to market its products overseas and will hire employees abroad. Its strategy is to move quickly into overseas markets to avoid layoffs or having to close.

    We still have 47 months of this shit ahead.

  • Pelosi: A pay cut would diminish our dignity

    ROS sends a link from The Hill in which Nancy Pelosi complains to the media that she doesn’t think Congress should take a pay cut because it would ” diminish the dignity of lawmakers’ jobs”. Never mind that they have done their primary job – create a budget for the government – in more then three years.

    Americans across this country have taken pay cuts in this current economical environment, but, then I guess, the royalty in Congress is better than the rest of us.

    The comments were made in the context of the looming sequester, which would force across-the-board cuts affecting most federal offices, including Congress. With lawmakers nowhere near a deal to avert those cuts, federal agencies are bracing for ways to absorb them with minimum damage to programs and personnel.

    Pelosi, whose husband is a wealthy real-estate developer, was quick to note that a cut in her own pay would be far less significant than that for both staffers and less wealthy members of Congress.

    Yeah, speaking of staffers, the day before Gabriela Giffords was shot in Tucson, she had introduced a bill to reduce Congressional staffers by 10%. Whatever happened to that? Again, we can’t inconvenience the Congressional royalty.

  • Pelosi; no spending problem

    Pelosi no problem

    I agree with Nancy, the folks in DC seem to have no problem spending our money. I don’t know what gave anyone the impression that they did. Well, other than the fact that they’re running out of our money and they need raise taxes in order to ease their craving;

    “We have to recognize that, which cuts really help us and which cuts hurt our future? And cuts in education, scientific research and the rest are harmful, and they are what are affected by the sequestration,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So, it is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem. We have a budget deficit problem that we have to address.”

    See, that’s what a “budget deficit problem” means – they’re going to raise our taxes, because you know, after Jimmy Carter created the Education Department, our children are fricken geniuses, so no cuts there – and since he created the Energy Department, we’ve weaned ourselves off of foreign oil and gas is so much cheaper now than it was then, so where can we cut there? So the only thing we can do is raise taxes because, aside from the Defense Department, there’s really nothing else we can do balance the budget. No. Really.

    And John McCain fully supports raising taxes. See? That’s why I didn’t want to raise taxes on the rich – it’s like chum in the water for Congress.

  • H.J.Res. 15; To repeal the 22nd Amendment

    RaptorFire22 and ROS send us a link to GovTrack about House Resolution “H.J.Res. 15” “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.”

    22d amendment

    22d amendment2

    This is such a good idea. Of course, it has no co-sponsors and 0% chance of passing, but let’s just look like fawning imbeciles. I wonder if Salazar wrote his resolution while he was under the Oval Office desk. The text isn’t available yet according to the link.

    That pesky Constitution is always getting in the way of Democrats.

  • Avoiding the cliff

    So, our poor overworked representatives cobbled together a last minute bill to stop our taxes from going up early this year. Big damn whoop. That’s how they keep themselves in their jobs – coming with last minute stop-gap measures and kick the can down the road. From Fox News;

    For the near-term, it appears a tax hike will technically go into effect on Jan. 1, as the midnight deadline was missed. In total, $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts are scheduled to hit in the new year unless and until the legislation is finalized.

    But the goal in Washington is to produce a bill that could patch up the problem in the coming days, sparing most Americans from any major or lasting blow to their paychecks.

    The bill now goes to the House side, where its chances are unclear. The House is expected to come back into session at noon on Tuesday.

    Senate leaders, though, hailed the deal as an “imperfect” but vital solution to the fiscal crisis.

    But, wait, wasn’t the Bush Tax Cuts just for the wealthiest Americans? How could the expiration affect all of us? Members of Congress are proud that they’ve saved Americans some of their own money. Many of those members of Congress did nothing to stop the Clinton tax hikes from going into effect back in 1993 – because this hoopla is all about not bringing back the Clinton tax rates.

    And, oh, by the way, the reason the economy is in the shitter is because Congress keeps kicking all of their cans down the road. Who wants to expand their business and hire more employees when no one knows what the future looks like. The Senate hasn’t passed a budget in how many years? It seems like every year we go through this tax hike thing, and then there’s the Obamacare blather, and even though it’s been passed, no one has read it yet.

    Our economy is being held hostage so the politicians can justify their jobs.