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

Category: Congress sucks

  • Pelosi hasn’t suffered sexual harassment

    Pelosi hasn’t suffered sexual harassment

    The LA Times reports that Nancy Pelosi claims that she has never been the target of sexual harassment while she has been in Washington;

    More than 140 women in California’s Capitol — including legislators, Capitol staff, political consultants, lobbyists and the congresswoman’s own daughter Christine Pelosi — signed a letter on Tuesday calling out a “pervasive” culture of sexual harassment and mistreatment there.

    “I don’t have that experience in Washington, D.C. I just don’t,” Pelosi said when asked if the nation’s Capitol had the same problem. “I have not seen that.”

    I don’t know what I can tell you, Nance.

    Thanks to David for the link.

  • McCain sponsors bill to block transgender ban

    John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, joined co-sponsors Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) in support of a bill that would prevent President Trump from banning transgender people from serving in the military, according to the Washington Post;

    Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a military hawk and one of the GOP’s most outspoken critics of Trump, said in a statement Friday that he was backing the measure because “we should welcome all those who are willing and able to serve our country.”

    “Any member of the military who meets the medical and readiness standards should be allowed to serve — including those who are transgender,” he continued.

    Yeah, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Are transgender people fit to serve or does their confusion about nature make their service more dangerous to themselves and their peers? I think that’s why the Pentagon needs more time.

    Under Trump’s plan, Mattis has until Feb. 1 to finish his study. But the Senate’s bill would speed up Mattis’s timeline to the end of the year, prevent the military from discharging currently-serving transgender troops, and express Congress’ conviction that qualified individuals should be allowed to serve regardless of gender identity.

    You know, because the less time that Mattis has to study the problem, the better he’ll be able to study it.

    Idjits.

    They can’t even settle on the number of currently serving members of the military the ban would affect, according to the Huffington Post;

    Transgender troops have been openly serving in the military since June 2016. There are between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender people in active military service, a Rand Corp. study estimates. Another group, the Palm Center, put the number as high as 15,500 a few years ago.

    Congress has so few things on their plate, that they can afford to spend time on whether to allow a few deviants to serve or not. I don’t see McCain trying to resolve the DACA issue or getting the wall built on the Mexican border, fixing Obamacare, or any of the thousands of other things Congress should be worried about accomplishing this year. You know, things that are actually in Congress’ wheelhouse.

  • Gutiérrez: Kelly is “mean”

    Congressman Luis V. Gutiérrez, refusing to shut his trap, called White House Chief of Staff and Gold Star father John F. Kelly “mean” for allowing the President to withdraw the Executive Order which Gutiérrez wrote with the Obama Administration for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), according to the Washington Post;

    Asked whether it was inappropriate to attack Kelly, a key GOP broker on the immigration debate and a former Marine general, Gutiérrez insisted he saw no issue.

    “He’s a politician, okay, not a general. I don’t see a uniform. He’s a politician who works for Donald Trump,” Gutiérrez told the crowd. “A politician who didn’t stand up when the president of the United States attacked a real war hero, John McCain.”

    …says the draft dodger, member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party who engineered the presidential pardon for Oscar Lopez Rivera, the Puerto Rican terrorist.

    Gutiérrez said Kelly also said nothing to stop Trump from criticizing the family of a deceased Muslim U.S. military veteran or to stop the president’s calls to ban transgender people from serving in uniform.

    “I understand” where some of the criticism is coming from, Gutiérrez said, “but what could be more mean and more vicious than to say you’ve got six months to pack up your bag and to leave the United States of America?”

    Yeah, well, the only reason that a “Dreamer” would have to leave the United States is because Gutiérrez can’t summon the testicular fortitude to actually write legislation allowing them to stay. See, the problem isn’t the President, or Kelly, it’s Congress’ fault because they don’t have the wherewithal to actually pass legislation that everyone can live with.

    They have six months to get legislation accomplished, but they’d rather call names and impugn reputations, because that’s what they’re best at doing.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the link,

  • Gutiérrez: Kelly is a disgrace to the uniform

    A few years ago, President Obama ruled by fiat to protect illegal immigrant children from being deported with what has been known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy. The courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional and that the president over-stepped his authority by legislating from the White House, so yesterday, the Trump Administration announced that they would phase out the policy forcing Congress to do their job and write legislation to fill the gap left in the wake of the Executive Order’s withdrawal.

    Well this caused Democrat Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) to get personal with White House chief of staff John Kelly, according to The Hill;

    “General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear. He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House along with the white supremacists and those enabling the President’s actions by ‘just following orders,’ ” Gutiérrez said in a scathing statement, shortly after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy will be phased out.

    The Congressional Hispanic Caucus member claimed Kelly backed out of a commitment to protect DACA recipients, who were brought to the United States illegally as children, from deportation while serving as the Homeland Security secretary.

    “General Kelly, when he was the head of Homeland Security, lied straight to the faces of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about preventing the mass deportation of DREAMers. Now as Chief of Staff, this former general is executing the plan to take away their lifeline and taking steps to criminalize young people who live and work here legally,” he said.

    Gutiérrez, a member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party when he lived in Puerto Rico, has no military service, so how does he know what is a disgrace to the uniform? From the Daily Caller;

    Gutiérrez is a vocal advocate for immigrants and has himself been arrested on three separate occasions for protesting perceived injustice in state and federal immigration policy. Most recently, Gutiérrez was arrested along with roughly 30 fellow protesters outside the White House during a gathering commemorating the fifth anniversary of DACA in mid August.

    Yeah, that’s not disgraceful behavior, a representative of the people being arrested.

    All the Trump Administration did was force Congress to do their fricken job for once, and morons like Gutiérrez make it a name-calling exercise because Congress can’t get out of it’s own way.

    I should point out that Gutiérrez helped the Obama Administration to write the unconstitutional executive order that the Trump Administration nullified yesterday.

  • Army won’t rename streets to soothe SJW’s feelings

    Army won’t rename streets to soothe SJW’s feelings

    According to the Washington Examiner, New York Congresspersons are upset because somewhere, out of sight of most New Yorkers, on Fort Hamilton, New York are two streets named for Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. The Army contends that renaming the streets would clash with the intended purpose – reconciliation. Of course, the perpetually outraged aren’t satisfied with the answer;

    Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., mocked the decision as a victory for white supremacy. “That ‘reconciliation’ was actually complicity by the North and the South to ignore the interests of African Americans and enforce white supremacy, effectively denying the result of the Civil War for generations,” she said Monday. “These monuments are deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to hold in slavery.”

    Yeah, whatever. Renaming two streets that the congresswoman probably hasn’t even seen is certainly more important than ending the crime in Brooklyn, or ending poverty, or whatever else she promised her constituents that she’d do if she was elected. It’s about time that the Army stood up to the social justice warriors.

  • Letter from the edge

    Letter from the edge

    53 Congressmen banded together last week to send Secretary of Defense James Mattis a letter urging the Secretary to ignore the orders of his Commander-in-Chief, claiming that the President intended to disregard the Constitutional rights of transgendered soldiers by denying them enlistment and service in the military. However, they were unable to point to the enumerated right to military service.

    So, here’s the letter and it’s signatories;

    Apparently, they weren’t paying attention when Mr Mattis said that he wasn’t interested in any issues that didn’t make the force more lethal.

    Reading through the names, I didn’t see many Congresspersons who would band together in support of fighting the war against terror the way it should be fought. Most of them have done their best to distract any discussion of the war or military service from the discussions that they should be having in that regard. This is just one more distraction, this time they are hoping to undermine the authority of the President.

    I don’t know how the transgender ban could be unconstitutional, it’s been the Defense Department policy since 1775, including the eight years of the Obama Administration.

    I’m reminded of the Congressmen who stood on the roof of Saddam Hussein’s palace and declared that Hussein was more trustworthy than President Bush.

    I wonder what other maladies Congress is willing to overlook for military service.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the tip.

  • Senate approves Global War on Terrorism memorial

    Stars & Stripes reports that the Senate unanimously approved the construction of a memorial to the Global War on Terrorism for some stupid reason.

    “We’re looking forward to building a sacred place of healing and remembrance for our GWOT veterans, a place for families to gather to honor their loved ones and for future generations of Americans to learn about a war they will likely grow up alongside of,” said Andrew J. Brennan, the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation founder and executive director.

    Yeah, well, it seems to me that the Senate would do well to fight the war against terror in the same way, but, you know there was no political upside to voting against the memorial.

    The bill will go to the White House, where Brennan said staff have assured him it has President Donald Trump’s support. After that, the project will go through a detailed 24-step bureaucratic process that will include choosing a site, selecting a design through competition and constructing the memorial. The foundation is eyeing a site north of the Lincoln Memorial – at the northwest end of the National Mall area – where there is some open land, though it currently contains a mess of snaking roadways.

    The memorial will include six themes: endurance, sacrifice, all-volunteer, global, multicultural and unfinished.

    It should be easy to memorialize a war that hasn’t ended yet. I remember it like it was yesterday. In fact, my son is deploying in the Fall to the war against terror.

  • Afghan uniform dust-up

    Afghan uniform dust-up

    The USAToday reports that Congress is criticizing the Pentagon for buying a woodland pattern uniform for our Afghan allies;

    The Pentagon wasted as much as $28 million over the past decade buying uniforms for the Afghan army with a woodland camouflage pattern appropriate for a tiny fraction of that war-torn country, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

    The Afghan Defense Minister picked the pricey, privately owned “forest” color pattern over free camouflage schemes owned by the U.S. government, according to an advance copy of the report due out on Wednesday. The scathing, 17-page study notes that “forests cover only 2.1% of Afghanistan’s total land area.”

    The Daily Caller quotes camouflage expert, Senator Claire McCaskill;

    Members of Congress from both parties want the Pentagon to answer for purchasing camouflage for Afghan forces that is the wrong pattern for the region.

    Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill voiced her frustration over the potential waste of $28 million in a letter to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), USA Today reports.

    “This is a contracting decision that makes you smack your head in frustration,” McCaskill said in a statement. “It’s a prime example of wasting hard-earned taxpayer dollars, and we’ve got to get to the bottom of how this happened.”

    Personally, I’m sick and tired of all of this talk about an “effective” camouflage pattern. When I invaded Iraq in 1991, I was wearing woodland pattern BDUs because we only had one set of desert pattern uniforms and mine was dirty – it really didn’t matter what color, or pattern, uniform I had anyway. Within ten seconds of putting my uniform on and rolling around in the terrain, my uniform matched my surroundings.

    I don’t give a tiny rat’s ass what those pointy-headed people at Natick say, a camouflage pattern is no more than a fashion statement – it doesn’t protect anyone, it doesn’t make you magically invisible, it’s covered with dirt and mud as soon as you take cover, so it doesn’t really matter. Anyone who says otherwise has never spent a moment as a real soldier.

    From the Washington Post;

    The report said that the then-Afghan defense minister picked the uniform because he liked its aesthetics and the Pentagon supported the decision with little oversight, wasting millions over a 10-year period because of the camouflage’s “proprietary status” and the fact that the U.S. military could have provided less complicated uniforms at a significantly cheaper cost.

    Aesthetics is all that matters for uniforms, if anything ever really counts. For decades we wore the old OD green single-color fatigues, in combat and in the messhall on KP. They were cheap (I think a set cost $12) and durable and then the VOLAR (Volunteer Army) decided that we needed permanent press fatigues. Those of us in some infantry units wore camouflaged uniforms for the field and then everyone wanted cool camo – even pregos needed camo. Now, its a topic of discussion in unit meetings and in the halls of Congress because everyone wants to give input on fashion.

    Here’s an idea, pay as much attention to winning the war against terror as you put towards fashion and tattoos.