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

Category: Congress sucks

  • Stop-loss backpay stopped/lost

    Now that the Defense Finance and Accounting Services have paid out to 1700 service members who were stop/lossed the $500/month they were owed, the Army and Air Force tell us that the rules were changed by Congress so that many soldiers and airmen are no longer eligible for the payments. From the Stars & Stripes;

    The bill makes clear that troops who re-enlisted or extended their contract and collected a bonus while being held under stop-loss do not qualify for the compensation.

    The temporary halt will last until the Army gets a list of soldiers who received a re-enlistment or retention bonus while being stop-lossed, said Army spokeswoman Jill Mueller.

    “The services didn’t decide this,” Mueller said on Wednesday. “This was decided by the legislature and we are executing their will.”

    Of course, no one mentioned this before the election when Democrats were holding this up as proof that they support the troops, and we find out now after months of chatter about their promises of largesse. Funny how that works, ain’t it?

    I wonder how VoteVets will report this?

  • Burris’ T’was The Night Before Christmess

    Tankerbabe sent us this link from Democrats.com starring one of this year’s best walking punchlines, Roland Burris, as he recites his staff’s version of Twas the Night Before Christmas;

    I guess his staff had to do something while they worked so hard to avoid reading the health care bill – this poem is the result of idle hands. This is how Democrats “remain civil“.

  • Conspiracy theories from the floor of the Senate

    Washington Time‘s Kerry Picket reports on the vile and disgusting hyperbole that oozed from the throat of Rhode Island’s Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse yesterday;

    “Voting ‘no’ and hiding from the vote [on the health care bill] are the same result. Those of us on the floor see it. It was clear the three of them who did not cast their yes votes until all 60 Senate votes had been tallied and it was clear that the result was a foregone conclusion. And why? Why all this discord and discourtesy, all this unprecedented destructive action? All to break the momentum of our new young president.

    They are desperate to break this president. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama. The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist. That is one powerful reason. It is not the only one.”

    Um, “the momentum of our new young president”? Really? What momentum? I must’ve missed it.

    “The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups…”…are all of these types in the Senate? I suppose it’d be easy to spot them in their 20-year-old BDUs and their crooked green berets.

    Aryans have support groups? Well, I suppose that’s true if it’s “unbearable” for them that Obama was born. They probably need to talk that out among themselves.

    I don’t want to “break” this president. I just want him to bring his politics in line with mine. I don’t care who runs the government, just so long as they run it the way I want them to run it.

    How shallow is an ideology that depends on fear-mongering and name-calling to convince people to vote for it?

    Picket interviewed Whitehouse after his speech;

    Mr. Whitehouse said he stood by his speech, but would not admit that he was accusing anyone who was against the health care bill as racist. He did reiterate that birthers are part of the group that is against the bill and are attacking president However, when I asked the Senator from Rhode Island what he meant by describing those who do not support the bill as “aryan,” he responded “No, I didn’t say that….again, pay attention to the speech.”

    Communists are part of the group that support the health care bill, so I guess that makes Whitehouse a communist.

  • Thanks to Speaker Pelosi

    I guess this is as funny as Republicans in Congress can get these days; Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thanks Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore for contributing to global warming (from the Washington News Observer);

    I think because we’re finding out that the world is either staying the same or maybe cooling, then it’s a good thing for her [Pelosi] to fly over on a big airplane and contribute to carbon emissions so that we can try to warm this up. We’re on top of the Capitol and it is freezing up here, very cold, my ears are about to fall off, so I would appreciate all the efforts that she, Al Gore as he keeps his suburbans plural running as he makes speeches.

  • Who’s in Copenhagen today?

    While all of the third world is in Copenhagen trying to figure a way to fleece the American taxpayers, Hillary Clinton is there to make their job easier;

    “The US is prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the climate change needs of developing countries,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

    Sweet, huh? We’re dealing with unemployment, health care, tax hikes, cap-and-tax, infrastructure deterioration, foreign oil barons – then on top of all of that, we’re going to start handing money to the corrupt third world to misuse.

    The President spoke this morning, insisting that this, among every other damn thing his administration is dealing with, is important enough to so anything, regardless of how destructive a catalyst it might become;

    “There are those developing countries that want aid with no strings attached, and who think that the most advanced nations should pay a higher price,” Obama said. “And, there are those advanced nations who think that developing countries cannot absorb this assistance, or that the world’s fastest-growing emitters should bear a greater share of the burden.

    “But here is the bottom line: we can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward, and continue to refine it and build upon its foundation,” he said.

    Republican James Sensenbrenner is there, too, according to Byron York;

    Sensenbrenner’s office says he will “closely follow” several issues at the Copenhagen conference, including “the developing world’s demands for wealth transfers, the levels of commitment from developing countries [and] the feasibility of greenhouse gas reduction targets.” With him are Republican Reps. Joe Barton, Fred Upton, Shelley Moore Capito, John Sullivan, and Marsha Blackburn. Fourteen Democrats are on the trip, including the Speaker.

    According to Andrew Breitbart, more nefarious forces are at work in Copenhagen, too;

    Nothing like few thousand proud communists to draw support to a cause.

  • Leadership, and the lack thereof

    John Aravosis at AMERICAblog News, a Left-of-center blog, writes, if he’ll allow me to boil it down to it’s simplest elements, that the Democrats are spineless wienies. Aravosis compares what Bush was able to accomplish with only 55 Republican Senators as compared to what the Democrats can’t deliver with their 60 pledged seats. While I agree with some of what Aravosis wrote, he gets some of it wrong;

    What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles.

    How did they do it? Bush was willing to use his bully pulpit to create an environment in which the opposition party feared taking him on, feared challenging his agenda, lest they be seen as unpatriotic and extreme.

    There was nothing “cunning” about George Bush. He told us what he was going to do, and he did it – just the way he said he’d do it. Republicans and Democrats knew exactly where he stood on every issue. And he explained WHY he was going to do it and how it would benefit us. Whether you agreed with him or not, you understood his motivations. That’s called leadership – not that whiney Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama leadership – where everyone is too loud, everyone is out to get them, and they’re scared of “tones” of the debate.

    Aravosis even points out how before the election, Obama said he was going to vote against FISA and then didn’t. Even Democrats can’t trust him to do what he says. With healthcare, Obama tells us “the system is broken” that “we can’t continue with the status quo” – but that rings hollow when 86% of Americans are happy with their healthcare. When we all know that the poor get the best healthcare in the world and no one can tell us who this healthcare bill is supposed to help.

    See, that’s not leadership. Leadership isn’t standing up in front of the American people and talking about yourself and how things are going to affect you. Leadership is telling everyone why you’re doing stuff and how it’ll help. Saying things that make sense – not making wild sweeping gestures like telling us stupid shit like a government take over over of healthcare will save the economy when there’s no evidence that it’ll happen. Things like committing troops to war and sending them there on lame burros so it takes a decade for their presence to have an effect.

    Honestly, you guys voted for the guy solely because of his skin pigment and didn’t allow any of us to look deeper because you didn’t want to look deeper than his skin.

    So quitcherbitchin’.

  • Biggest tax cheats? Federal employees.

    The other day we learned that Federal employees continue to get cost-of-living pay raises, even though the cost of living doesn’t rise. Today, we learn that Federal employees are some of the biggest tax cheats, too;

    Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe $3,042,200,000.

    You’d think the IRS and Congress would be free of this type of fraud, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong;

    The IRS is the only federal agency where employees can be fired for not paying their taxes. The non-compliance rate for IRS employees in 2008 was 0.76 percent — down from 0.89 percent in 2007.

    # Executive Office of the President (includes the White House): 50 employees owe $812,917;
    # U.S. Senate: 231 employees owe $2,469,026;
    # U.S. House of Representatives: 447 employees owe $5,809,631;

    OF course, the Feds claim they can’t fire their employees for not paying their taxes – apparently they don’t make it the least bit uncomfortable for them, either.

  • My holiday message for Cardin and Mikulski.

    I got this from my BFF, Mitch Stewart at Organizing for America urging me to write my Senators with my holiday wishes;

    holiday-card

    So here’s my holiday message to the two Maryland Senators;

    One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year — even at higher rates.

    All of this means that the burden of paying for bloated government in Annapolis will fall on the middle class. Thanks to the futility of soaking the rich, these working families will now pay Mr. O’Malley’s “fair share.”

    I’m no millionaire, but I’m following them because I want to be one, too.