Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Basically, this is a repost of a thread I started on another forum. I know I should have some grand thing to say after my long absence, but…I’m not sure how I could have said it differently.

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To say I didn’t see this coming would be a lie. I saw it…because the Republicans have been doing this since Obama took office. But still, this reeks of a surprising amount of petulance as well as a willingness to fuck over the whole country just to get their way.

Republicans Want to Extend Their Tax Cuts, Will Hold Breath Until They Get Their Way

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans threatened Wednesday to block virtually all legislation until expiring tax cuts are extended and a bill is passed to fund the federal government, vastly complicating Democratic attempts to leave their own stamp on the final days of the post-election Congress.

“While there are other items that might ultimately be worthy of the Senate’s attention, we cannot agree to prioritize any matters above the critical issues of funding the government and preventing a job-killing tax hike,” all 42 GOP senators wrote in a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The 42 signatures are more than enough to block action on almost any item he wishes to advance.

The threat does not apply to a new arms control treaty with Russia that is pending, since it would be debated under rules that differ from those that apply to routine legislation. President Barack Obama has made ratification of the pact a top priority.

But it does threaten Democratic attempts to lift the Pentagon’s ban on openly gay members of the military, and a separate item to give legal status to young illegal immigrants who attend college or serve in the military. The tax and spending bills are likely to be the last to pass before Congress adjourns for the year.

Of all the 9 members of the Hutaree arrested for their part in a conspiracy to kill police officers and their families with the aim of sparking a nationwide civil war, Mark Schauer represents the most of any U.S. Representative.

Congressman Schauer had a scheduled appearance in Lenawee County, where most of the arrests were made. His appearance was on Monday, the day after the arrests of the alleged terrorists were made public.

So, what did Schauer do in recognition of the Hutaree arrests? What did he say?

Nothing. In the face of homegrown terrorism centered in his own congressional district, Congressman Mark Schauer was silent. He said nothing. He did nothing. Now, two days later, Schauer continues his path of silence and inaction.

Why was Schauer afraid to speak out against extremism? Is he afraid that he’ll lose the votes of Hutaree supporters?

If you start looking into the Tea Party protests, you’ll find that there are a few protest sign memes that have spread quite effectively. You see them over and over again, at Tea Party events in places separated by a great physical distance.

One of those memes is the idea that the protester, for the first time ever, is ashamed of the President. In the case of this sign, it’s expressed, “First time in my entire life I’m ashamed of my President!” This particular message is supposed to communicate the profound degree of discontent against anti-Obama activists.

Is the discontent truly so profound? I have my doubts.

The key to evaluating the honesty of this meme is the phrase “first time”. Is it really the first time that these protesters are ashamed of their President, or are they just pretending it is?

10 years ago, the President of the United States was Bill Clinton. As I remember it, a lot of right wingers, the sort of people now populating Tea Party protests, were expressing outrage at Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

The hand holding this sign certainly doesn’t look very young. Its skin is starting to sag a bit, and is showing signs of mottling. Let’s be generous, and say that the hand is 30 years old. If that’s the case, then the protester was a 20 year-old adult during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Others carrying similar signs were even older.

Either these people were not ashamed of Bill Clinton, or they’re liars. I’d love to hear from someone who has carried one of these protest signs explain to me which one it is: Does the Tea Party love Bill Clinton, or do its protesters just express outrage at any Democrat who happens to be sitting in the White House?

It just doesn’t sound as persuasive to state, “This is the second time in my life I am ashamed of my President!” It makes the protester sound like a habitual malcontent. That would be a rather inconvenient perception for the Tea Party, wouldn’t it?

In an internal e-mail I received this morning, the Tea Party Nation corporation has announced the practice of censoring, banning and ejecting its own members for the sins of “antagonism” against Tea Party Nation leadership, consorting “with liberal media outlets”, and sharing information with other Americans about the Tea Party Nation’s workings…

… because it’s all about freedom! The kind of freedom a corporation like TPN can exercise to stamp out heresy.

Well, that and charging $360 a plate for dinner. So very much of the people.

They’re really smart people over there at Cornell University. They have the ivy growing on their buildings to prove it. That’s why, when I saw an advertisement reading…

“Research participant needed for a study on credit cards conducted by a Cornell PhD student. Monetary compensation of $60 will be paid to participants who complete a photo-taking task and an interview. Participants need to bake pictures of anything that comes to their minds when they think about credit cards, and anything that can express how they think and feel about credit card, either by the disposable camera provided or by their own digital cameras depending on their own preference.”

… why, I just knew it had to make sense. So, I’ve gone and used my own digital camera, because that’s my own preference, and taken a whole lot of pictures of everything that I think of when it comes to credit cards. Now, I’ve set my oven to 450 degrees, and put my digital camera in on a no-stick pan.

I can’t wait to get my 60 dollars!

It appears that Joe Wilson is even embarrassed with himself. Wilson’s was the voice you heard last night during the speech by President Obama – the voice that shouted out “You lie!”

This morning, Joe Wilson is not to be found – at least not on the official congressional web.

It appears that Wilson’s staff has placed his site in the garage, “for maintenance”. The following is all Wilson’s constituents see this morning, when they try to find out information about him through House.gov:

There’s an interesting story about people seeing lights in the sky in Texas. Some say that they’re alien space ships. Others say that they saw military jets chasing the lights.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, is on the scene, “investigating”. Helpfully, Kenneth Cherry, the leader of the Texas chapter of MUFON, announced to reporters that “We believe there is some sort of phenomenon in action here.”

What an expert opinion. A phenomenon? A phenomenon in action?

You mean that something happened?

Thanks for the insight, MUFON. We none of us could have figured that out. Keep up the good work.

Thanks to the Associated Press too, for reporting that essential insight.

I have decided to come unhinged. Over the last few years, as things have gotten worse and worse, I have become increasingly serious, and dedicated to getting the word out.

I’ve watched as more and more Americans just tune out. The more outrageous the abuses of our government get, the less they pay attention. The more blatant Bush’s crimes have become, they less they care. The more bizarre the distortion of our democracy becomes, the more they pretend that nothing has changed.

I’d say that it seems that Americans are in training for living under totalitarian rule… except that tonight, I’m too tired to say that.

My sense of normalcy has been shredded by the way that most Americans shrug off what it has meant to be an American, and accept a monstrous replacement. The new normal is insane, and so tonight, I am insane.

I feel that my efforts to communicate warnings to other Americans have been about as effective as the voice of a microscopic organism. So, in this video, I speak in my true voice for these irregular times: The voice of Herman, the Activist Protozoan, who clamors in vain in the effort to convince multicellular organism to take action. That’s about as effectual as I’ve been, in my little bitty marginal pool of slime.

‘lo and behold, what do I find when I wake up and log into Yahoo this morning?

(link)

Bush vetoes water projects bill
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer 22 minutes ago

An increasingly confrontational President Bush on Friday vetoed a bill authorizing hundreds of popular water projects even though lawmakers can count enough votes to override him.

Bush brushed aside significant objections from Capitol Hill, even from Republicans, in thwarting legislation that provides money for projects like repairing hurricane damage, restoring wetlands and preventing flooding in communities across the nation.

This level of opposition virtually assured that Bush would have a veto overridden for the first time in his presidency. He has used the veto very sparingly for most of the time he has been in office, but has made more use of it recently.

“When we override this irresponsible veto, perhaps the president will finally recognize that Congress is an equal branch of government and reconsider his many other reckless veto threats,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

“More than two years after failing to respond to the devastation and destruction of Hurricane Katrina, he is refusing to fund important projects guided by the Army Corps of Engineers that are essential to protecting the people of the Gulf Coast region.”

The $23 billion water bill passed in both chambers of Congress by well more than the two-thirds majority needed to vacate a veto and make the bill law.

Bush objected to the $9 billion in projects added during negotiations between the House and Senate. He hoped that his action, even though it is sure not to hold, would cast him as a friend to conservatives who demand a tighter rein on federal spending.

But Bush never vetoed spending bills under the Republican Congress, despite budgetary increases then, too. Attempting to demonstrate fiscal toughness now, in the seventh year of his presidency, carried the risk being criticized for doing too little, too late or as waging a transparently partisan attack against the Democrats who now run Capitol Hill.

The president took the gamble, making it part of a broader effort to more pointedly and frequently take on Democratic leaders.

The legislation originally approved by the Senate would have cost $14 billion and the House version would have totaled $15 billion. Bush and a few Republicans complained that the final version was larded with unneeded pet projects pushed by individual lawmakers — sending the overall cost of the bill much higher.

“Only in Washington could the House take a $14 billion bill into a conference with the Senate’s $15 billion bill and emerge with a compromise that costs taxpayers over $23 billion,” said White House press secretary Dana Perino.

She also said Bush vetoed the bill because it is “fiscally irresponsible” and falls outside the scope of the Army Corps’ mission.

Critics noted that the bill piles more work on the Army Corps of Engineers, which already has a backlog of $58 billion worth of projects and an annual budget of only about $2 billion to address them.

If Bush is overridden, the measure would give a green light to projects in virtually every state. It only authorizes the projects; the actual funding must be approved separately.

The authorizations include:

_$3.6 billion for major wetlands and other coastal restoration, flood control and dredging projects for Louisiana, a state where coastal erosion and storms have resulted in the disappearance of huge areas of land;

_nearly $2 billion for the restoration of the Florida Everglades;

_nearly $2 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers to build seven new locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers;

_$7 billion for various projects related to hurricane mitigation in Mississippi and Louisiana, including assuring 100-year levee protection in New Orleans;

_hundreds of smaller dredging, wetlands restoration and flood control projects across the country.

The Congressional Budget office says the bill includes projects that, if fully funded, would cost $11.2 billion over the next four years and $12 billion in the decade after that. The bill also calls for increased oversight of the Corps, requiring an outside review of water construction projects.

The veto was Bush’s fifth. Four of those have come since Democrats took over Congress in January, but this one was unusual because it also pits the president against a sizable number of lawmakers from his own party. Previous Bush vetoes include two of bills allowing expanded federal research using embryonic stem cells, and a spending bill that would have required troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Last month, Bush vetoed a major expansion of a children’s health insurance program, also over objections from some Republicans. But he has far more partisan unity on that issue than on the water projects bill. It was the first time Bush went into a veto knowing it was a futile effort. This turns the tables somewhat on him, as he has been criticizing Democrats almost daily for wasting time by passing legislation they knew he would not accept.

Isn’t it funny that now that there’s a Democratic majority in Congress Bush is finally taking the packaging off his veto pen? Ain’t it also funny that Bush considers things that will cost around 14 billion over the next 14 years to help fix some badly needed things is “fiscally irresponsible” and yet I just found an article that report economists are speculating that the war in Iraq could balloon to over $1 TRILLION dollars. Whether that is true or not that same article is reporting that the daily cost is over $200 million a day.

Which is fiscally irresponsible? Adding in things to help protect American citizens from natural disasters and restore the environment for $14 billion, or continue an occupation of a foreign nation that serves as nothing but a black hole for the economy and is turning this into the most expensive military campaign in American history?

You want to be fiscally responsible? Pull troops out of Iraq and STOP GIVING TAX BREAKS TO COMPANIES FOR OUTSOURCING AMERICAN JOBS!

Last night, one of our regular visitors came upon an article I wrote pointing out that right wing oversight of the economy has proven to be a threat, not just to the US economy, but to the global economy as well. The visitor, being something of a right winger himself, felt called upon to express outrage, but could not come up with a substantive response.

So, the outraged visitor decided to use a tried-and-not-so-true debating tactic: Suggesting that if a person does not support something, the only alternative is support for the extreme opposite position. In this particular case, the visitor suggested that if a person does not support right wing economic blundering, that person must support the economic models employed by Soviet Communists.

This kind of thinking is not exactly subtle, but it sure is amusing. Here are a few other example of this sort of argument that I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment.