Michael Oberndorf
Drowning in the swamp
By Michael Oberndorf
The world's largest collection of spineless parasites — the U.S. Senate — has been just a beehive of activity lately. Apparently, to celebrate the November Atonement Feast and the Winter Diversity Festival in December (formerly, Thanksgiving and Christmas), they have moved beyond dithering and caving to outright active destruction of the country.
As of this morning, our national debt has risen to $15,046,283,312,778. That is 15 trillion, 46 billion, 283 million, 312 thousand, 778 dollars, and rising at a rate of approximately $ 2.8 million per minute. According to Jim DeMint, one of the half-dozen out of 100 senators who behaves like a real American, federal spending has increased five percent in the last nine months. If you will recall, also in the last nine months the country's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in her history due to massive, uncontrolled spending. Recall also that it was only last February that Congress saddled us with a $2.4 trillion hike in the debt ceiling, and then in August, jacked it up an additional $2.1 trillion. That's a $4,500,000,000.00 increase in six months. That is more than the entire national debt was in 1993, less than 20 years ago.
The August increase in the debt ceiling was approved of by 76 senators, which means a significant number of Republicans joined with the socialist/neo-fascist Democrats to further undermine our economy, and thus our future as a free, capitalist nation. These are the same Republicans who, as Senator DeMint reminds us, in order to "avoid a government shutdown" last spring, claimed they would deliver a measly $100 billion in spending cuts, dithered and caved down to $38 billion for some time in the mythical "future," and then ended up allowing this so-called cut to be turned into a $170 billion increase in spending from 2010 to 2011. Brilliant.
Now the Congress has allowed the Democrats, who even though they have controlled the House and the Senate most of the time since 2007, and the presidency since 2008, have refused to pass a federal budget, to force them to accept a bogus, totally unconstitutional "supercommittee" whose budget decisions cannot be amended. This is more like a commissariat from the old Soviet Union, but given that the country is now being run by Marxists, this should surprise no one. And to add injury to insult, one of the three Democrat senators on this outrage, tasked with bringing order to our government's financial house, is tax cheat, inside-trader, and liar, John Kerry (D-MA). Many are aware of Kerry's tax-avoidance scheme of registering his opulent yacht in Rhode Island, rather than Taxachussetts, and his serial lies regarding his time in the military, but most are unaware that multimillionaires Kerry and his heiress wife, Teresa Heinz, made a fortune with miraculously well timed trades of Big Pharma stock in the run-up to the ObamaCare boondoggle. It's no wonder no agreement is likely.
But even attempts at making miniscule cuts to worthless programs are objectionable to our spineless parasites. Senator DeMint recently pointed out that when Tom Coburn (R-OK) submitted an amendment to lower spending by a mere $1 billion on the Rural Development Agency, an outfit about which the left-wing Washington Post reported back in 2007, "More than three decades after the program was created, USDA officials still don't know whether it works," 85 senators rejected it. Not only that, senator DeMint informs us that 60 of these wastes of food and air voted "to raise the maximum size of federally subsidized loans to $729,750," loans backed by the mismanaged, corrupt, and bail-out dependent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How do these morons think the mess we're in started in the first place?
The notion that the senate contains our "elder statesmen" is not just pure fantasy, it's an outright lie. They allowed and facilitated the redistribution of over a trillion dollars in tax-money "stimulus" funds to Democrat donors and corporate and Big Union cronies. They refuse to do even the simplest things like force the removal of Obama-Soetoro's corrupt, lawless Attorney General from office. They also refuse, and have for years, to do anything to solve the soon-to-be-fatal problems suffered by Social Security and Medicare. They refuse to take the actions necessary to stop the monster they created with the "supercommittee" from forcing cuts to the country's defenses that will leave us vulnerable as never before in our history. The Senate has become a tool of those who are out to destroy our Constitution, and part of what can accurately be described as an out-of-control, treasury-looting kleptocracy.
We need to repeal the 17th Amendment (http://repealthe17thamendment.blogspot.com/, http://repeal17now.org/) and give the power of the senate back to the states, where it belongs.
© Michael Oberndorf
November 21, 2011
The world's largest collection of spineless parasites — the U.S. Senate — has been just a beehive of activity lately. Apparently, to celebrate the November Atonement Feast and the Winter Diversity Festival in December (formerly, Thanksgiving and Christmas), they have moved beyond dithering and caving to outright active destruction of the country.
As of this morning, our national debt has risen to $15,046,283,312,778. That is 15 trillion, 46 billion, 283 million, 312 thousand, 778 dollars, and rising at a rate of approximately $ 2.8 million per minute. According to Jim DeMint, one of the half-dozen out of 100 senators who behaves like a real American, federal spending has increased five percent in the last nine months. If you will recall, also in the last nine months the country's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in her history due to massive, uncontrolled spending. Recall also that it was only last February that Congress saddled us with a $2.4 trillion hike in the debt ceiling, and then in August, jacked it up an additional $2.1 trillion. That's a $4,500,000,000.00 increase in six months. That is more than the entire national debt was in 1993, less than 20 years ago.
The August increase in the debt ceiling was approved of by 76 senators, which means a significant number of Republicans joined with the socialist/neo-fascist Democrats to further undermine our economy, and thus our future as a free, capitalist nation. These are the same Republicans who, as Senator DeMint reminds us, in order to "avoid a government shutdown" last spring, claimed they would deliver a measly $100 billion in spending cuts, dithered and caved down to $38 billion for some time in the mythical "future," and then ended up allowing this so-called cut to be turned into a $170 billion increase in spending from 2010 to 2011. Brilliant.
Now the Congress has allowed the Democrats, who even though they have controlled the House and the Senate most of the time since 2007, and the presidency since 2008, have refused to pass a federal budget, to force them to accept a bogus, totally unconstitutional "supercommittee" whose budget decisions cannot be amended. This is more like a commissariat from the old Soviet Union, but given that the country is now being run by Marxists, this should surprise no one. And to add injury to insult, one of the three Democrat senators on this outrage, tasked with bringing order to our government's financial house, is tax cheat, inside-trader, and liar, John Kerry (D-MA). Many are aware of Kerry's tax-avoidance scheme of registering his opulent yacht in Rhode Island, rather than Taxachussetts, and his serial lies regarding his time in the military, but most are unaware that multimillionaires Kerry and his heiress wife, Teresa Heinz, made a fortune with miraculously well timed trades of Big Pharma stock in the run-up to the ObamaCare boondoggle. It's no wonder no agreement is likely.
But even attempts at making miniscule cuts to worthless programs are objectionable to our spineless parasites. Senator DeMint recently pointed out that when Tom Coburn (R-OK) submitted an amendment to lower spending by a mere $1 billion on the Rural Development Agency, an outfit about which the left-wing Washington Post reported back in 2007, "More than three decades after the program was created, USDA officials still don't know whether it works," 85 senators rejected it. Not only that, senator DeMint informs us that 60 of these wastes of food and air voted "to raise the maximum size of federally subsidized loans to $729,750," loans backed by the mismanaged, corrupt, and bail-out dependent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How do these morons think the mess we're in started in the first place?
The notion that the senate contains our "elder statesmen" is not just pure fantasy, it's an outright lie. They allowed and facilitated the redistribution of over a trillion dollars in tax-money "stimulus" funds to Democrat donors and corporate and Big Union cronies. They refuse to do even the simplest things like force the removal of Obama-Soetoro's corrupt, lawless Attorney General from office. They also refuse, and have for years, to do anything to solve the soon-to-be-fatal problems suffered by Social Security and Medicare. They refuse to take the actions necessary to stop the monster they created with the "supercommittee" from forcing cuts to the country's defenses that will leave us vulnerable as never before in our history. The Senate has become a tool of those who are out to destroy our Constitution, and part of what can accurately be described as an out-of-control, treasury-looting kleptocracy.
We need to repeal the 17th Amendment (http://repealthe17thamendment.blogspot.com/, http://repeal17now.org/) and give the power of the senate back to the states, where it belongs.
© Michael Oberndorf
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