Well done, 60 to 67,000 fat people on scooters, you broke the federal government. Bravo, morons, you’ve accomplished something every other enemy of America has failed to do, to date
Jaundiced boozebag John Boehner dragged his rich Corinthian leather hide in front of a room full of reporters to say that the House of Representatives had done all it would do to avoid the upcoming sequester, and now is the time for the Senate “to get off its ass.” From your mouth to God’s tanning bed, Smoking Man. Nobody even threw their shoe at him! Or pointed and laughed. No one asked, “What, besides food stamps, meals on wheels and health care do you want to cut, Speaker? Specifics”? Not even that. Maybe it was just the booze talking and later he will get all sloppy drunk and tearfully beg forgiveness.
Considering that the House has met for a grand total of fifteen days so far this year, Boneheader’s call for the Senate to get off its ass is super hilarious. 15 days. During which they concentrated on the important stuff, right? How many Republican bills introduced to repeal Obamacare? “Done all they could to avoid the sequester” – I don’t suppose he has one teeny example of something even remotely resembling such activity. They are looking for “compromise”? But compromise means you have no principles and should be run out of town, even if you only represent one half of one half of one branch of the government.
House Minority Leader and my dog’s namesake Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to Boehner’s remark:
“The Republican leadership says we passed bills last year. I remind them, that was a different Congress. That doesn’t count in this Congress. The Republican leadership says let the Senate begin. I remind them that the Constitution says that appropriations and revenue bills must begin in the House.”
That whole “revenue bills must begin in the House” part of Boehner’s passing the buck…..perhaps that part of the Constitution doesn’t count, because it does not involve guns.
The latest gimmick our leaders ginned up so that the Tea Party Caucus can continue holding its breath until it needs to eat fourth meal. This gimmick is known as THE SEQUESTER and will cut federal spending by 2.5% over the last six months of the fiscal year, or somewhere in the neighborhood of $85 billion out of a $3.5 trillion budget. It’s so simple, South Carolina’s weird had sex with a blogger at a school-choice convention in Salt Lake city Nikki Haley says even her kids could do it, but her kids are from South Carolina so I wouldn’t count on it.
This is the latest Republican push: to claim that these cuts represent such a teensy amount of money while alternately insisting that Obummer initiate them himself so the Party of Personal Responsibility won’t get blamed when friends and constituents find themselves laid off from jobs or standing in longer lines at the DMV. The real patriots, when laid off, of course will refuse all government assistance programs and spend their time burning science books. The White House has countered by talking about how exactly non-trivial these spending cuts would be to people who rely on the federal government for income.
The Virginia city that Obama visited this week, Newport News, was preparing for the USS Abraham Lincoln to arrive at its massive shipyard, for a multi billion-dollar, multi-year overhaul. The economy of Newport News is based largely on the tens of thousands of military personnel, contractors and veterans who live and work there, including SEAL Team 6, and its main industry is building Navy aircraft carriers and submarines. Due to the Washington budget deadlock, the Navy postponed the retrofitting job – which would have provided 21,000 ship working jobs. The congressional idiocy has caused what can only be described as ideological incoherence from some of Newport News locals:
In the smoky bar, ideological lines get blurred. Somers is a union guy but not an Obama fan. He wants cash to keep flowing to the large military contractor that employs him, but he opposed the auto bailout. He needs Washington but feels manipulated by it.
“They spend our money like a drunk sailor. . . . ‘We’ll give you a little bit of something, a little piece of cheese.’ Dangle that cheese. We’re pawns, that’s what we are,” he said.
But Somers has four kids and ultimately, he said: “I’m willing to accept anything to turn the country around. If it takes me getting laid off, so be it.”
This is quintessential Shock & Awe. Keep the American people disoriented just enough with so much bullshit that they just tune out of the debate, entirely. Overwhelm them with manufactured crisis after manufactured crisis, and then “blame it on the black guy”and/or hope everyone forgets the truth two years later. I mean, I get the fact that most people don’t have the time or energy to follow seemingly complex political debates, but for something like this… Ah, man, I make myself laugh so hard.
Don’t worry, Mr. Somers! Your GOP has the answer! They’re planning to build the CSS John Wilkes Booth in Newport News just as soon the dust around the sequester settles! Seriously Mr. Somers, you know that auto bailout you opposed? Well, those auto workers had the same pride in their product and in their city that you do. What the military is to your region of Virginia, automobile making is to Detroit. Look upon the once thriving hub of the United States’ manufacturing industry as a portent of your own – how it has been reduced to being the source of material for second-rate comedians and “ruin porn” for the derivative portfolios of uncreative art students and saturated Medicaid rolls (meaning everyone is poor) (but on the plus side, you can buy a house for roughly the same price as a 2004 Corolla!) I look forward to the groovy gritty music that will come out of Newport News once the crushing generational poverty of unregulated sociopathic capitalism is combined with the hopelessness of existing as powerless drones in your glorious new era of authoritarian Social Darwinism.
It’s never the Republicans’ fault, is it? Always The Government. Except when Republicans are running The Government. Republican Voter = Mental Arthritis. Thanks for your consistency, conservatives who get their macroeconomic “knowledge” from radio talks show hosts who dropped out of college. If the Socialist Kenyan Usurper in Chief would just give in to the GOP’s demands that none of the spending cuts hit the defense industry, as demanded by local Congressional Rep Randy Forbes (R – Va), who introduced legislation Monday to exclude the Defense Department from sequestration and to cut the total savings target by that much. He’s glad Obama is coming to town, but when the smoke clears and the president’s divisive advocacy ends, he said, they will realize he is to blame:
“When people are afraid of losing their jobs, and they see how poorly this has been handled, it’s easy for them to be mad at everybody”.
Sometime in the gloriously chromed future, guys like Randy Forbes will be safely tucked away in their FEMA camp beds, and our overlords will have unfettered access to the defense money coffers and we’ll be able to due crazy things like rebuilt our nation’s parodically crumbling infrastructure. But in the short term — like, before 5PM this evening— there is no plan to put those shipyard men and women to work fixing our crater-ridden roads, deathtrap bridges, primordial electrical grids and exploding sewer lines. There’s not even a plan to put these folks to work fixing up Newport News itself – a dystopian hellscape of broken roads, boarded-up buildings, rotting housing projects, and abject poverty. They need the money that comes from government paychecks – not some mythical Cadillac driving welfare queen with big screen LCDs and free Obamaphones. Mr Somers should note, he will need his UI check if the aircraft retrofit money doesn’t show up from the government. Can’t someone in the lamestream media point out that the sequester enables the GOP to inflict pain on working people? Nah, lets talk about Seth on the Oscars and the Pope’s retirement castle and the bionic man who whacked his girlfriend on the other side of the friggin planet.
BTW I googlered state-by-state sequester-impact and the red states with their military bases, boy oh boy, gives more meaning to “live by the sword, die by the sword”, and literally every county west of the Cascades depends on federal largesse because of a guy named Weyerhaeuser who successfully gamed the land grant system and totally hosed non-logging development west of the Cascades. Now the federal government subsidizes about half of the county budgets because we’re out of trees to axe down.
Thanks to gerrymandered Congressional districts, the PeeWee’s Playhouse formerly known as the US House of Representatives is going to maintain this level of professionalism and productivity until outraged peasants (read: Democrats) finally seize control of some state legislatures. In the meantime, other countries will continue to watch our congress squabble like idiots and revel in the fact that we are a bunch of corn-syrup chugging Hot Pockets monsters. China in particular is beginning to be scared shitless, and a scared shitless China means that it is time for those with real American dollars to buy stock in Dulcolax, Ipecac and all the other violent emetics. At that point, China may be worried more about itself and America can just sneak away to some desert island where Boehner can continue piling on his tangerine skin and the rest of us can pound sand.
All of this is to tell the towering pile of whale blubber that is the GOP congressional caucus — again — that a governing philosophy of “I got mine so fuck you” is not sustainable. Americans like things like “money” that can be exchanged for goods like “food” and “shelter.” Unfortunately, it does not look as if the asshats in Congress will reach sentience before Friday. Shutting down Dulles and Raygun National tomorrow morning might help keep those rancid gizzards in DC this weekend, but it would mean another weekend of Crisis & Stage Tears.
President Obama, maybe just shut down Texas and Ohio. States whose caucus has expressed enthusiasm for the sequester can have it, and the rest of us, in the reality-based part of America, can carry on. Maybe we can sell Texas to a Mexican Drug Cartel and pay off our debts with that?