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

Category: Congress sucks

  • NYT provides cover for Obama on Vet and Defense cuts

    The New York Times knows, like we all know, that Obama won’t keep his promise that he made to the assemblage of Legionnaires in Minneapolis on Tuesday that he won’t the national budget to be balanced on the back of veterans. So the Times, provides excuses for the president;

    Yet just how much power Mr. Obama will have to prevent such cuts is not quite clear. The bipartisan “super committee” created to recommend $1.5 billion trillion in spending cuts over the coming decade will undoubtedly include some veterans programs on its agenda; already some of those proposals are floating around Congress and inside the Pentagon, including one that would revamp military pensions to make them similar to 401(k) retirement programs.

    And if Congress cannot agree with the committee’s plan, then across-the-board cuts will be mandated, some of which will almost certainly fall on the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has seen its budget increase by more than 20 percent since Mr. Obama took office.

    Yeah, see it’s not Obama’s fault that he and Congress have no intention of keeping their promises to veterans. It’s the political forces involved. Probably those Tea Partiers.

    Of course, dicksmith at VetVoice just takes the President at his word;

    “We’re pleased that President Obama has committed to not balancing the budget on the backs of veterans,” said Ashwin Madia, Iraq War Veteran and Interim Chairman of VoteVets.org. “We have always made a deal with those who served that we will take care of them when they get home.

    I’m sure everyone is prepared to blame the Tea Party when the President and Congress make their final plans to make veterans and their families pay for this country’s irresponsibility once again.

  • Michelle Bachmann at the 2011 American Legion Convention

    Michelle Bachman 072

    Finally a Republican shows up at the Convention. But like everyone else, her words don’t match her actions. Bachmann praises veterans and promises to support us, however regular readers will remember how we had to force her to remove veterans benefits from her proposal to reduce government spending a few short months ago.

    If we have to continually remind them, they aren’t really thinking of us.

    Thanks to Mr. Wolf for the above picture.

  • Nancy Pelosi at the American Legion 2011 Convention

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    It’s like listening to that Miss America candidate a few years back on that video that went viral. She’s obviously partially retarded, because all she’s doing is stringing words together in an incoherent babble. But at least she’s not coming in here making idiot promises that she has no intention of keeping. Instead she’s telling the American Legion to do the heavy lifting of putting veterans to work.

    She closed out her yapping with a Bush-borrowed phrase; “Leave no veteran behind”.

  • Phony at American Legion Conference

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    The title is probably unfair to Tim Walz, because he certainly does talk well for veterans, and that’s probably why TSO gives him a pass for embellishing his military career. Walz, on his campaign web site, wrote that he was deployed in support of the war in Iraq, but “in support of” in this case meant that he ran base security in Italy.

    Our buddy, Dave Thul, wrote about Walz a few years back;

    It took me about two months to realize that Congressman Walz, contrary to the statement on his official congressional website, did not serve in Afghanistan. He served in Italy, in charge of base security. In order to understand this discrepancy, it is useful to know a little bit about military terms. “In Support Of” means just that, a mission to support a major military operation. It is a vague term even among military members and the military itself. For instance, when I deployed to Kosovo in 2004, my military orders stated “Purpose: Operation Joint Guardian”, while my official discharge papers listed me as being “ordered to active duty in support of Operation Joint Guardian”.

    To the best of my knowledge, Walz has never come clean about this discrepancy, and until he does, he’s still on my shit list.

  • A talking, red cowboy hat declares war on the Tea Party

    A giant, talking, red cowboy hat who was elected to Congress from Florida and named Frederica Wilson declares that the “Tea party is the enemy”.

    I’d accept that, if the giant, talking, red cowboy hat would take time out of it’s day to talk as tough about al Qaeda or the Taliban. I think the real enemy is whoever told her that she looked good in that hat. And the dumbasses that elected her in spite of her fashion sense, or the lack thereof.

    Apparently, the giant, talking, red cowboy hat is concerned that unemployment is racist, too. I’m sure that the giant, talking, red cowboy hat thinks the solution to racist unemployment would be to raise taxes on the evil rich people of a particular skin pigment, but that’s not racist.

    Thanks to ROS for the links.

  • The “Tea Party Downgrade”

    So, I’m sitting watching the Democrats throw fingers everywhere but at each other for the Standard and Poor’s downgrade of our Treasury paper. John Kerry and David Axelrod use the phrase “Tea party downgrade” in separate interviews yesterday…as if it had been coordinated or something;

    “I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day that also saw mounting anxieties in world markets over the downgrade among myriad other economic woes worldwide. Some of the world’s top financial ministers issued a joint statement Sunday night committing themselves to preserve the stability of financial markets and their economies.

    David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, used the exact same phrase in dubbing the credit rating drop the “tea party downgrade,” as Democrats tried to position themselves as reasonable, pragmatic leaders and conservative Republicans as irresponsible ideologues who caused the downgrade by refusing to accept any new taxes.

    Meanwhile Barney Franks blames…who else…the military;

    Frank says the military establishment has always had this “great momentum” in politics, but says the credit reversal “could change our thinking.” Frank calls the military a logical target “if we’re looking for something that breaks the mold” on spending.

    I guess they couldn’t think of blaming the people who controlled government purse strings from 2007 until last January – the same people who couldn’t pass a budget despite being in the majority in both the House and the Senate. The people who passed the health care bill without reading it and used fuzzy math to justify doing the healythcare bill when we couldn’t afford it. The people who only now admit that the “shovel ready” jobs didn’t exist and they knew it when they were funding them.

    But it’s the tea party’s fault suddenly.

  • Honoré speaks

    StrikeFO sends us a commentary from Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, the man who commanded the military response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster and coined the phrase “stuck on stupid”. Honoré pontificates on how we can fix Congress and politicians in general;

    It’s time to get draconian. But not with the helpless elderly who need their Social Security payments, not with the powerless Army private supporting a family. I mean it’s time to load our elected officials on troop planes and send them to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Put them in tents with no air conditioning, have Army drill sergeants teach them teamwork and physical sacrifice. When they recognize their responsibility to the people of America, they can return to D.C., their upscale restaurants, and military plane trips, as though they were royalty.

    And if they can’t? Better that they should fail to learn what an 18-year-old Army private understands than continue to fail America.

    I don’t know if it’d work or not, but it’d sure be fun to watch on live TV.

  • Harry Reid: Did I mention that I hate Bush?

    I caught myself dozing off a few minutes ago, which is bad since I’m supposed to be working. I glanced up and discovered why I was suddenly so drowsy – Harry Reid, the VoteVet-supported draft dodger, was talking to the Senate just prior to their vote on the “debt deal”. That droning, monotonous voice always puts me to sleep.

    Anyway, I listened to him blame former President Bush for our current financial difficulties and tell us how there was a $7 trillion surplus under Clinton. Funny, but the Democrats controlled the Senate for the first two years of the Bush Administration and both houses for the last two years. I don’t remember them doing anything to cut spending during those years.

    In fact, I remember Bush and McCain trying to rein in Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac while those two organizations were enabling people to buy homes they couldn’t afford before the housing crisis. In fact, I sat out the housing boom in a tiny apartment while everyone was telling me how I needed to buy a house and get in on it. Everyone including the Democrats.

    I have one simple rule when it comes to my money and investments – if everyone else is doing what I’m doing, I need to stop doing it.

    So after the housing bust, I bought a house and the only money I borrowed was from myself. Now I’m not especially smart, but if people are selling me a long-term loan and their sole selling point is “Rates have never been lower”, I’m pretty certain that rates are going to go up sooner than they’ll go down further or remain the same.

    But that’s the deal Democrats are trying to sell to the American people…again. They’re upset that they didn’t get to tax the rich, but that doesn’t mean that tax revenues aren’t going to go up. When Bush cut taxes, revenues exceeded the Clinton years revenues two years after the tax cuts took effect and every year afterwards.

    But somehow, it’s appealing to Democrats to “tax the rich” and as we discovered after the Clinton tax hikes, everyone who has a job is rich – even retirees on fixed incomes.

    But Reid was doing what he’s always done best – take the easy way out – blame the guy who hasn’t been in office for more than two years and complain that he can’t increase taxes.