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

Category: Congress sucks

  • Weinergate

    I am not even going to try and explain this shit. Ace of Spades is running wild with this story and I am not going to try and catch up with them. Most of you have probably been reading them anyways in regards to this story.

    I am sitting on something that I am not yet willing to throw out there yet in regards to this and I am going to wait a day to see if some things pan out. Whatever happens, this story has legs.

  • The false outrage of Think Progress

    Think Progress has their undies in a bunch because of this Rep. Allen West statement in the Miami Herald about a vote to end the Afghanistan War which failed by just 12 votes;

    “Is the Taliban still fighting? I spent 2.5 years in Afghanistan. Just because you kill Osama bin Laden does not mean that the Taliban has stopped fighting,” he said. “Now can we fight a little smarter? Absolutely.”

    Asked about efforts to curb U.S. involvement, West said, “I would take these gentlemen over and let them get shot at a few times and maybe they’d have a different opinion.”

    Think Progress, of course, extrapolates West’s comments to the Gifford shooting in Tucson;

    With the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) still fresh in Americans’ minds, West’s comments are especially irresponsible.

    Can someone explain to me how West suggesting that his peers need a taste of war in order to rationally legislate it compare to Jarod Loughner’s shooting rampage? He’s only asking that they face the same realities their constituents stationed in Afghanistan face every day.

  • Evil PATRIOT Act signed

    So the extension of provisions of the PATRIOT Act was signed last night by the President. The same PATRIOT Act provisions that the Democrats beat up President Bush with during his tenure – including roving wiretaps.

    I’m all for the PATRIOT Act because it’s one of the reasons we’ve not been attacked successfully in the past ten years, but the Democrats are being disingenuous (naturally) about the danger it posed a few short years ago which has suddenly dissipated since a Democrat is the executive.

    In fact, it was so imperative, that the President had to be awakened in order to sign it with a remote electronic pen from France just before the provisions expired at midnight. Didn’t the President campaign for office disparaging the PATRIOT Act and roving wiretaps?

    So what the hell have they really been bitching about all of these years?

  • Feds to tap pension funds

    Cortillaen sends us a link to the Obama Administration’s latest scheme to fund the government by tapping into the federal employee retirement fund;

    Geithner, who has already suspended a program that helps state and local government manage their finances, will begin to borrow from retirement funds for federal workers. The measure won’t have an impact on retirees because the Treasury is legally required to reimburse the program.

    And we all know how the federal government takes seriously it’s legal obligations. Ya know, if a public corporation tried to continue operations by dipping into their employees’ pensions, the federal government would be crawling up their corporate assholes with microscopes, and rightly so.

    How’s about they just stop paying retired Congressmen and Senators a pension, since the founding fathers never intended for Congress to be a career with benefits, anyway. Not only would we save a boat load of money, but they’d term limit themselves, too.

  • Intelligence community needs diversity

    Cortillaen sends us a link from The Hill which reports on the best way to lard up an intelligence spending bill, starring race pimp Maxine Waters;

    The House on Thursday afternoon accepted two Democratic amendments to a bill authorizing intelligence spending for the rest of FY 2011.

    The first, from Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.), would require intelligence agencies to work with black colleges to develop curricula that will prepare students for intelligence careers. The second, from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), would require a report on the diversity of intelligence officers.

    Yeah, cuz diversity is the intelligence community’s biggest problem. It’s not the lack of qualified candidates, the lack of trained officers, or the lack of equipment, it’s the lack of melanin.

  • Selective Service resists closure

    Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo. tried to shut down the $23 million Selective Service office but met stiff resistance in Congress, according to the Army Times;

    Coffman said he was surprised to learn that legislative jurisdiction over the Selective Service rests not with the Armed Services Committee, which would use draftees, but with the House Financial Services Committee. That panel, primarily responsible for writing tax laws and handling big federal entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, refused to waive jurisdiction, preventing Coffman from offering his amendment to kill the Selective Service.

    Coffman has the unique perspective of being one of the 175 reserve military officers who served in the agency;

    Coffman, who was once one of those reserve officers on loan to the Selective Service, said he continues to believe the agency should be shut down, but it is going to take a little longer than he thought.

    “I still believe we are wasting money on the Selective Service, but shutting it down isn’t going to be quick or easy,” Coffman said.

    Since there is no one brave enough to reconstitute the draft, since no one takes it seriously and register any more, and the all-volunteer military is a complete success, it’s the easiest way to save the taxpayers several million bucks. I don’t know why we cling to this boondoggle, other than as a jobs program.

  • Abandoning Afghanistan

    In the Huffington Post today, Amanda Terkel announces “Mission Accomplished: Is It Finally Time To Leave Afghanistan?” and makes the case that the war is over there and it’s time to leave. She quotes some lawmakers like Barney Franks and Jerry “The Waddler” Nadler;

    “The single biggest reason we went into Afghanistan was to get Osama bin Laden,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) at a Center for American Progress event Monday morning.

    “If Osama bin Laden was still alive, that would have given some people an argument, ‘Oh you can’t get out of Afghanistan for reputational reasons.’ … Having killed Osama bin Laden deprives people who wanted to stay in Afghanistan for other reasons of the argument that we would be leaving in defeat,” he added.

    Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told The Huffington Post in an interview on Monday that once the euphoria of the U.S. success in Pakistan wears off, the country needs to start reconsidering its Afghanistan policy.

    “We accomplished what we had to do in Afghanistan a long time ago,” Nadler said. “We ought to stop wasting our troops and our money and our lives and get out. And this just shows that should al Qaeda establish a base there, we can go in and take it out as we just did in Pakistan. It just shows how superfluous everything we’re doing in Afghanistan is. Pakistan is more dangerous, and look what we did.”

    So, to listen to those two, we went to Afghanistan merely to act on our revenge instincts. I’d like to think America is better than that. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, we left that country unable to attack us since – our initial motives maybe have been revenge, but the strategy was to wage total war and leave them impotent.

    If we leave Afghanistan right now, history will record that we only wanted revenge for bin Laden’s attack on 9-11, when that wasn’t even our initial reaction. We left Afghanistan to it’s own devices in 1988 when the Soviets withdrew and it became a terror haven and a huge terrorist training camp. If we don’t build the military infrastructure to prevent that from happening again, what have the last ten years been about if not purely revenge for 9-11?

    The Taliban have launched their Spring offensive already – they certainly think they’re at war while our politicians obviously think the war is over. Think the Taliban will go easy on our troops because the politicians have lost the will to see this through to a successful conclusion?

    Harry Reid doesn’t even know where the troops are anymore;

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was also asked on Monday what bin Laden’s killing meant for the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. He initially slipped and said the President had committed to beginning withdrawal of troops “from Pakistan” but quickly corrected himself to indicate the correct country that the U.S. is occupying, despite the centrality of Pakistan to the effort.

    John Conyers declared the war over;

    With the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Long War that began on 9/11 is finally over. It’s time to bring our troops home, refocus our resources, reward the resiliency of the American people, and rededicate ourselves to rebuilding our nation.

    The Democrats have obviously lost the will to continue, though the troops haven’t. If we don’t finish the job in Afghan, we’ll be back again, but not before we pay another terrible cost.

  • In the Wreckage of an Almost-Shutdown

    Today, a lot of us are taking a slightly ragged breath and relaxing a bit. Last night, around 11PM, a deal was reached that would extend for a week the operations of government as we know it. This is particularly meaningful for all of our servicemembers, many serving in harm’s way, who had already opened up Mypay to reveal a LES with only half the pay anticipated for it. This will allow them to get their midmonth pay.

    Let me stress, for those few who might happen to be unaware, that unlike the rest of the government, when the military isn’t getting paid, the military is still working. People don’t stop trying to kill them just because they’re not getting paid. Instead, it’s just another worry on their mind, preventing them from being fully focused on the dangers surrounding them, because they’re too busy wondering if their family will be able to pay the rent or buy groceries.

    I’d like to take a moment to thank those organizations that went above and beyond in order to make sure servicemembers didn’t have to worry about where their family’s next meal would come from: such as the Navy Federal Credit Union, that promised all servicemember’s mid-month checks would be covered by the institution. I’d also like to thank (and this is rare) the VA (or as Brandon Friedman likes to remind everyone, Veterans Affairs) for putting out a Veterans Guide to the Shutdown, to help address the justified concerns many veterans had about whether their disability checks and education benefits would arrive on the 1st.

    However, what really needs to be addressed is not so pretty: why did it come so close in the first place? A lot of people in both political parties want to blame the other party. But really, both parties are to blame, and both parties gambled way too much with the lives of people who have already given up a lot to serve their country.

    The one bare-minimum standard any governmental body that deals with money has is to pass a budget for the next year. But nobody wanted to pass a budget before the elections, because then they’d have to deal with possible consequences for their votes. And after the elections, when Democrats realized that they were going to be out of power next year, they hurried with pushing through the healthcare reform, instead of worrying about doing their job and passing the budget.

    But the Republicans aren’t off the hook yet. Passing a budget was their job, too, and they chose to focus on ideological battles also. They decided to play a game of brinksmanship to show how tough they were for the next budget fight, ignoring the people it was going to impact. They tried to create a temporary bill that supposedly would fund the Pentagon all year, and the rest of government a week, to save the military, but then again added ideological riders on it.
    Why do we put up with this? People on both sides, why do we act as though our party protects veterans and servicemembers? I think we need to acknowledge that both sides use us for photo ops and for talking points on the halls of Congress, but when it comes down to it, they don’t really care.