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

Category: Congress sucks

  • Americans coming around?

    Two CNN polls released January 25th might mean that most Americans are coming around to the fact that Democrats are bad for the country. One story at CNN goes through the entire spiel without mentioning that the Stimulus package was Obama’s plan in the first place;

    Nearly three out of four Americans think that at least half of the money spent in the federal stimulus plan has been wasted, according to a new national poll.

    A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday morning also indicates that 63 percent of the public thinks that projects in the plan were included for purely political reasons and will have no economic benefit, with 36 percent saying those projects will benefit the economy.

    Twenty-one percent of people questioned in the poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted, with 24 percent feeling that most money has been wasted and an additional 29 percent saying that about half has been wasted. Twenty-one percent say only a little has been wasted and 4 percent think that no stimulus dollars have been wasted.

    Can you imagine how hard it was for them to not mention Obama in the article even once. If only Americans come to the realization that the stimulus was smoke and mirrors when the rest of us did back in November ’08. I think the switch in the mood occurred when folks realized that none of the stimulus was targeted at them.

    The other poll shows Americans don’t think Democrats deserve control of Congress;

    Americans are divided on whether Democratic control of Congress is good for the country, according to a new national poll.

    A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday also indicates that 7 in 10 Americans believe that the Democrats’ loss of their 60 seat supermajority in the Senate is a positive move for the country.

    Forty-five percent of people questioned in the poll said Democratic control of Congress is a good thing, with 48 percent disagreeing. The margin is within the survey’s sampling error. But the results are a shift from last June, when 50 percent felt that Democratic control of both chambers of Congress was good and 41 percent felt it was bad for the country.

    Of course, CNN are doing this ten months before the election – don’t expect any polls like this in late October.

  • OFA: Keep elections fair (for us)

    Organizing For America, the DNC’s front group for Obamabots, sent another BFF email to me this morning warning that corporations now have a free-for-all opportunity to pour their money into elections;

    ofa-special-interest-money

    Of course, they fail to mention that the Supreme Court also freed up contribution limits to campaigns from individuals and unions in addition to corporations. Chuckie Schumer blames the Court’s decision for the losses the Democrats expect at the polls in November, instead of their own incompetence;

    “The bottom line is, the Supreme Court has just predetermined the winners of next November’s election. It won’t be the Republican or the Democrats and it won’t be the American people; it will be corporate America,” Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said.

    That’s why Schumer thinks that a Congressional investigation of the Court’s decision doesn’t violate the separation of powers of the three branches of the federal government. Buncha idiot drama queens.

  • Fear-mongering in Massachusetts

    Editor’s note: I wrote this like eight hours ago so it’s stale old crap. But, I wrote it damn it, you’re readin’ it.

    Massachusetts’ Senator John Kerry is doing his best to get the crowds charged up against Scott Brown’s supporters, according to Boston.com;

    “I’m no stranger to hard fought campaigns, but what we’ve seen in the past few days is way over the line and reminiscent of the dangerous atmosphere of Sarah Palin’s 2008 campaign rallies. This is not how democracy works in Massachusetts,” Kerry said this afternoon in a statement.

    “Scott Brown needs to speak up and get his out of state tea party supporters under control. In Massachusetts, we fight hard and win elections on the issues and on our differences, not with bullying and threats,” Kerry said.

    Brown campaign spokesman Felix Browne said, “People are tired of John Kerry’s partisan politics. His baseless accusations reflect the desperate last gasps of a flailing campaign.”

    Daniel Foster at NRO recalls Kerry’s fear-mongering in Colorado during the 2004 Presidential campaign;

    “If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a ‘pre-emptive strike’ (particularly well-suited to states in which there techniques have been tried in the past).

    —Issue a press release

    i. Reviewing Republican tactic used in the past in your area or state

    ii. Quoting party/minority/civil rights leadership as denouncing tactics that discourage people from voting

    —Prime minority leadership to discuss the issue in the media; provide talking points

    —Place stories in which minority leadership expresses concern about the threat of intimidation tactics

    —Warn local newspapers not to accept advertising that is not properly disclaimed or that contains false warnings about voting requirements and/or about what will happen at the polls”

    Johnny Dollar, the only guy still keeping an eye on Olbermann watched him call Brown “a homophobic racist;

    Joe Scarborough wasted no time blasting back at Olbermann.

    Mean time, the President is promising to be combative if Brown wins according to Hot Air;

    But the president’s advisers plan to spin [Brown’s win] as a validation of the underdog arguments that fueled Obama’s insurgent candidacy.

    “The painstaking campaign for change over two years in 2007 and 2008 has become a painstaking effort in the White House, too,” the official said. “The old habits of Washington aren’t going away easy.”

    Indeed.

  • Zombie Kennedy wants his Senate seat back

    The ghoulish Democrat Party has disinterred the rotting corpse of Ted Kennedy to defeat Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown. Apparently, Kennedy’s widow is complicit in the macabre plot to seat Zombie Kennedy in the Senate once again;

    victoria-and-zombie-kennedy

    A radical right wing plot to prevent Kennedy from taking his seat back has come to the attention of Harry Reid, so he’s joined in the conspiracy to return Kennedy’s corpse to the Senate;

    harry-reid-zombie-kennedy

    Reanimating a guy no one really liked to resuscitate a healthcare plan no one needs.

  • Racism – just another day in the Democrat Party

    Trent Lott (former Democrat) was forced from his position as Senate Minority Leader for this comment at (former Democrat) Strom Thurmond’s retirement tribute and 100th birthday;

    “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

    Bill Clinton, attempting to convince Ted Kennedy to back his wife for president rather than Barack Obama said;

    A few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been getting us coffee.

    Janeane Garafalo said the teapartiers were “straight-up racists” for opposing the politics of Barack Obama. Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in supporting Obama noticed that he is “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

    That’s tame compared to actually opposing Obama’s policies, huh? Garafalo also called Michael Steele “that Black guy in the Republican party” a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, that he tries to “curry favor with [his] oppressor”. But we’re the racists.

    I could drag out all of the Robert Byrd quotes and catalog his career with the KKK, but you all know about it – just like every Democrat knows it. Name one Republican in Congress, living or dead, who spent ten years in the KKK. Um, you can’t.

    Republicans get accused of using “code words” to communicate with the racists, but the Democrats use the actual words of racists without accountability.

  • Military retired pay drops

    This is more informational than a personal complaint, but retired military pay dipped in real dollars this year for the first time my memory – just like it did for Social Security recipients. How’d it happen?

    Well, the Obama Administration and Congress didn’t give SS folks and retired military a cost of living allowance, even though the cost of living has gone up this year. However, because Medicare went up for SS recipients, and we lost our “tax cut”, which wasn’t really a tax cut anyway, Our payments went down. Sure it was just a little bit, but it happened despite all of this talk about taking care of the needy and the little guys.

    It was just a coupla bucks for me, probably so small that it would have got eaten up in taxes anyway, but that’s not my point. There are people out there who depend on every penny they get from their SS and retired paychecks, despite the fact that the six-figure crowd in DC think it’s a tiny amount. How many times have we been bombarded with ads that tell us that seniors have to choose between food and medicine – yet that’s exactly who gets stiffed by this administration.

    Now the Bush Administration made sure we got our COLA increases even when inflation was minuscule, but that didn’t stop the AARP crowd from complaining that it wasn’t enough (it’s not a merit increase, for Pete’s sake).

    Regardless of what you think about retired military pay or Social Security, you still have to admit that those folks were promised those checks and fulfilled their end of the bargain, but the government doesn’t feel that it has to meet it’s obligations and that’s just not right.

    Sure it probably helps with the national budget, but it seems that the people who’ve always sacrificed (since the Depression) are always expected to suffer in silence. I just thought they needed someone to speak up for them today.

  • [Army Sergeant] Partisan Politics Only Screws Veterans

    Now, I’ll start off by admitting that my politics may not look like a lot of the commentators on this blog. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how: most of you know. I am an IVAW member, and if you want to see more of my more nakedly political offerings, they’re over at Active Duty Patriot. That’s not what this post is about, though I’m sure it’ll be interpreted that way by those with an axe to grind.

    What I’m here to talk about is the way that veterans are constantly being exploited by politicians and over-bureaucratic systems, promised the world when it’s election season or when they want to look good, and then as the nitty gritty grind of the year drags on, people remember that helping veterans is work, and costs money, and not just money but actual commitment. And somehow, almost to a man, they all find better things to do.

    A few years back I was almost fangirlishly squealing over Senator Jim Webb’s Post 9/11 GI Bill. I loved it then, and I love it-in concept-now. But I know too many veterans who are having to drop out of school, who are getting evicted, or who are straight up not able to afford an apartment of their own because they haven’t gotten their check. Some still haven’t gotten their check. This is happening in an Obama administration just as much as it was happening in a Bush one, and you older vets will have to tell me if it was happening just as much under a Clinton one. The VA is broken. They’ve got some good people working for it, but the VA is still broken. They’ve been hiring some of their former most outspoken critics, but I haven’t seen substantive changes, and I don’t know that anyone else has either.

    The problem is right now, there’s a severe recession going on. How severe? Severe enough that I know more than a couple vets personally, my generation of vets, still in their twenties or early thirties, who are functionally homeless, couch-surfing across the USA because they don’t have a better option. There are veterans out in the streets right now-veterans who often have no ability to make it through the severe, complicated, time-consuming process that is applying for benefits. Severe enough that veterans are coming out of the woodwork to apply for their VA benefits and disability benefits for the first time in years. Veterans who know the VA is broken, who know they’re going to be engaging in a fight that will potentially take years. But they don’t have a better option.

    60 minutes recently did a piece on the VA issues, which, while it won points from me for using the phrase ‘Delay, Deny, and Hope You Die’ in national newsmedia, honestly turned into more of a light exfoliation than the gritty expose the VA actually deserves.

    For a million veterans to be waiting for their VA benefits is wrong, wrong, wrong. The fact that it can be glossed over by anyone is just straight jacked up. And this is where the partisan shit comes in-because it is just as wrong under an Obama administration as it was under a Bush administration, but there are a lot less of certain people willing to talk about it. Just as under a Bush administration, there were a lot less of a different kind of certain people willing to talk about the problem.

    We have to stop that. If we’re ever going to get anything accomplished, if these guys aren’t going to be languishing for years while the VA fantasizes about getting its shit together, we need to be united in these issues. Forget who’s in charge, forget who may gain or lose in political capital, stand united. Because let’s face it-much as everyone may hate to talk aloud about it, we have  a lot in common. We as veterans have a lot in common. We as politicized veterans who aren’t going to take things lying down have even more in common. Whatever else we may want, whatever else our personal issues may happen to be, whether they come with an elephant or a donkey or a little Ron Paul sticker, we all served, and we all want to have our brothers-in-arms treated as well as they deserve for that service. Most of us have been in the military so long that we have an inborn distaste of taking care of ourselves: well, think of it as taking care of your buddy while your buddy takes care of you.

    We need to take on the VA-the whole bloated mess of it. Yes, Democrats, you too, even in an Obama administration. Yes, Republicans, even if they take back the Senate or the House. We need to take on the entrenched incompetence and apathy.

    People talk a lot about the old GI Bill, back in WWII. What they forget to remember is that those benefits didn’t come from nowhere. Those benefits came, in large part, because of what happened to the last veterans, the veterans of World War I. And those veterans had to march on Washington to get better treatment. Not as part of a protest march, some three hour shindig where everybody enjoys feeling good about themselves, and then goes home with their demands unmet and their needs unsatisfied. No, those veterans set up a camp and refused to leave until they got what they needed. Check out some history of the Bonus Army-it’s a fascinating read. And they weren’t divided by politics. They were of no political brand or creed. They united and said-hey, we’re starving here. We were promised these things and they didn’t materialize. There’s a Depression, and we really need the country we served to honor their promise to take care of us. Real issues faced by real veterans at the time-not pie-in-the-sky stuff. And what’s the important thing-they succeeded.

    We could learn a lot from those folks.

    “No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir; but couldn’t you take an’ write
    A sort of ‘to be continued’ and ‘see next page’ o’ the fight?
    We think that someone has blundered, an’ couldn’t you tell ’em how?
    You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now.”

    -Rudyard Kipling, Last of the Light Brigade

    I know that this doesn’t apply to all veterans. I know many veterans are making it, are successfully weathering out this economic downturn. But the thing is, there are a lot who aren’t. I’m not trying to make it sound like everyone is out on the streets. But there are a lot who are, and a lot who aren’t making it. And the more we fight with each other about what the concept of taking on the problem would mean to various political parties, the more the problem doesn’t get fixed.

  • The bloom is off the rose

    I had to laugh the other day when I watched Harry Reid call the vote buying and pay offs that led the news last week “leadership”. I’ve been preaching on these pages since early last year about leadership and how we weren’t going to see any when this bunch took over last January. Apparently, their constituents have arrived at the same conclusion a year too late.

    TSO forwarded an email from the developmentally disabled Jane Hamsher of Far Left blog FireDogLake last week that urged the blog’s readers to condemn the health care bill in the Senate. Hamsher writes;

    The Senate health care bill is an ungodly mess of errors, loopholes, and massive giveaways. When the American people find out what’s actually in this bill, they will revolt.

    Funny, but the right has been saying that for more than half of the year. But the Left seems to be catching up. Ace of Spades writes that Hamsher has co-signed with Grover Nordquist a letter to Attorney General Holder calling for an investigation of Rahm Emanuel;

    We believe there is an abundant public record which establishes that the actions of the White House have blocked any investigation into his activities while on the board of Freddie Mac from 2000-2001, and facilitated the cover up of potential malfeasance until the 10-year statute of limitations has run out.

    Oh, imagine that – the Left finally believes that Rahm should called to accoount for his role in the collapse of the housing lending market.

    Also at FDL, Gordon Ginsburg has noticed that maybe what the Democrats have been engaging in the last twelve months isn’t leadership at all;

    The times call for a leader of Churchillian or Rooseveltian magnitude; what we have instead is a cautious risk-averse manager. Bold progressives must fill the leadership vacuum in order to restore and support a vibrant US middle class.

    Well, ya know, when the goal becomes winning the next election instead of governing, when each legislative victory is crafted to quell the whining of every disparate leftist whiner’s agenda, that’s the kind of crapola with which we get saddled. You get hucksters and shysters who revel in the act of fooling voters. Why else would a health care bill that we so desperately need to save lives today not take effect until after the next election?