Day: May 22, 2013

But It’s Different

A killer tornado slashed through Moore, Oklahoma on 20 May…….if destroyed a lot of the same stuff that the tornado of 03 May 1999 trashed…….time for the country to step up and do that right thing for the victims….or should we play the same game that Congress played with the victims of Sandy?

If you recall the Repubs in Congress played a sickening game with the lives of people in New York and New Jersey……they held up disaster relief funds while playing politics……a thoroughly disgusting spectacle of partisan bullshit…….will that happen again?  Hell NO!  why?  It is different because it is the home state of the biggest douche in Congress, Inhofe…….the same person that demanded that the funds for Sandy be tied to some sort of crap legislation of partisan origins……

Inhofe railed against the relief funds……

Inhofe said the Sandy Relief bill “was supposed to be in New Jersey,” but “they were getting things … in the Virgin Islands, fixing roads there, and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.” Both Inhofe and Coburn voted to slash aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, with Inhofe saying he considered the full proposed aid amount to be a “slush fund.”

While Northeastern states like New Jersey and New York suffered some of the worst damage from Hurricane Sandy, the storm affected 24 U.S. states in total during October of 2012. Sandy carved a destructive path from the Caribbean Sea to the Great Lakes, where it produced 25-foot waves in Lake Huron.

The Atlantic walks us through more of the supposed “pork” in the bill that conservatives were complaining about:

  • $150 million for fisheries in Alaska damaged by the 2011 Japanese tsunami,which littered debris on Alaska’s shoreline
  • $41 million to repair military bases damaged by Hurricane Sandy (including ,controversially, Guantanamo Bay)
  • $13 billion for future flood preparations (that is, money that will not be spent on victims of Sandy but on preventing future, Sandy-scale disasters from occurring)

So those are all disaster relief, and disaster-related.  One, the Alaskan one, is for a past disaster that wasn’t addressed, and should have been.  So that’s not pork.  The National Review has more of the GOP argument against the bill, but to call any of what they write about “pork” is simply bs.

Inhofe has said the the tornado damage is totally different from the Sandy damage…….yes, it was…..Sandy effected blue states and the tornado effected people who vote in Oklahoma…..

I can respect Oklahoma’s Coburn who was against Sandy legislation and has said about the tornado damage….

Oklahoma’s other stingy Republican Senator, Tom Coburn, is also in a bit of a pickle over tornado relief.  Coburn has already said that any tornado relief bill must include cuts in the rest of the budget to pay for it, or he won’t support it.

Coburn may be stingy but at least he is NOT a screaming hypocrite like Inhofe……

This is all so typical of the hypocrites in Congress………those twats are a bad sitcom…..a joke around the world…..and it only gets worse year after year…….

I am waiting for my conserv readers to comment…….I want to hear the defense they will have for this douche…..I regret that I may be waiting and waiting……..it will most likely be a response written by Drudge or the like…..

Thoughts?

What Should We Be Talking About?

Continuing the bandwagon of looking for scandals……….There are some things that should be more important than they are in the media…..sensationalism is rampant not accurate reporting….personally, I think we are all dunderheads for falling for the stories the media hands us as news……..I feel there are more important issues that need to be discussed and then handled…….unfortunately these things will hold NO weight in the media….why?  They are looking for keywords like Benghazi, IRS and AP….without those terms in the post few will read anything else….sad and a bit pathetic!

Think Progress has an excellent list of issues that should be a priority……

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

I realize that Righties will not agree with much on this list….but I feel that the American people see the need for actual talks, negotiations and then solutions……beyond the clowns getting up in front of a camera and call for jail time for nothing or impeachment for little……

Here is an inside tract for the GOP……Obama will survive and he will finish his term…..accept the fact you cannot find a descent candidate and get to work fixing the country…..we need leadership not some babbling buffoons that could not find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.