To Spite GOP: The List of Things Leftists have Voted Against

As the shutdown showdown continues, I think it is instructive to put together a little list of the various things that democrats have refused to even discuss, or pass through the legislative process for no other reason besides sticking it to Republicans for their opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

Before the shutdown:

• They voted down a continuing resolution that fully funded all of government except the small funding going to the administration of the ACA (the defund measure)
• They voted down a continuing resolution that fully funded all of government but delayed implementation of the entire ACA by one year
• They voted down a continuing resolution that fully funded all of government but delayed just the individual mandate (to give the exchanges time to work properly before forcing everyone to use them) and repealed, permanently, an unpopular medical device tax that many democrats have spoken out against since the passage of the ACA
• They voted down one last effort to reach compromise – a move to create a joint congressional committee to draft a CR which would reflect some compromise between the houses as is prescribed in the legislative governing rules (so…they wouldn’t even TALK about it)

After the shutdown:

• They voted against funding the Veterans Administration
• They voted against funding DC Government services despite urgent pleas from the lone DC representative – a democrat
• They rejected the funding of the National Parks (long a pet project of democrats and funding opposed by the GOP during lean financial times – offered anyway as a sign of good faith)
• They shot down an attempt to fund the department of defense in full (relying instead on a minimalist appropriation for military personnel to get paid…and nothing more)
• They refused to even bring a motion passed by the house to the floor of the senate that would have funded the National Institutes of Health fully.
• When that failed, the house passed a bill simply to fund cancer research and Reid shot it down using procedural rules.
• And then, with a tropical cyclone bearing down on New Orleans…they voted no to funding FEMA
• EDIT TO ADD: In their latest quest to kick babies and punch women, the GOP passed a measure to fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition for Women program.  Dems refused it.  #LiberalWarOnWomen

While all of those wonderfully humanitarian democrats weren’t voting down measures to get government services to the people, they were barricading open air monuments that cost nothing to run and forcibly removing WWII veterans from the grounds of their own memorial, blocking park trail heads on privately run park lands that received federal aid, trapping hikers who had gone up trail prior to the shutdown, declaring that the GOP were nothing but anarchists, terrorists, and on a “jihad” against affordable health care (uttered by a representative from northern CA).

All while the exchanges have been mercilessly aped by phishers, identity thieves and security breeches and public demand for the exchanges continues to lag way behind expectations in part because democrats have done such a crappy job of explaining the exchange system and partly because the exchanges are more expensive than advertised and far from affordable unless you qualify for the full subsidies.

I don’t say the GOP was right about all of its objections to the law when it was first being discussed on Capital Hill…but there are a couple of reasons why there were inaccuracies in their complaints at the time of its passage:

• They were afraid of the scope of the law and wanted to get negative messaging out (and went about it the wrong way)
• NO ONE KNEW WHAT WAS IN THE DAMNED THING SO NO ONE WAS ARGUING ABOUT IT IN AN INFORMED WAY.  And that includes democrats too.  They made up a lot of fairy-tale crap that the GOP knew would be wrong along the way.

So much of this frustration would end if we just passed a readable bill amendment and required that our elected officials knew what they were voting on before they voted.  But that is neither here nor there.  Right now, Democrats are the party of no; the party of immaturity and inhumanity.  Democrats are the ones dragging this out, hoping to inflict pain on the GOP for daring to question whether their signature legislation was wise…or even whether it was ready to be deployed.  And Democrats are the ones on whose conscience should rest the dead children who could have been saved by NIH cancer treatments they refused to fund.

SHAME on them.  Their outrageous conduct has once again reminded me of why, though I do not identify as a republican, I certainly could never call myself one of them.

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This Is Getting Ridiculous

Obama prevents budget cuts to favorite programs

WASHINGTON – A close look at the government shutdown-dodging agreement to cut federal spending by $38 billion reveals that lawmakers significantly eased the fiscal pain by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.

I think our leaders need a serious bitch-slapping. Every arm of our federal government is guilty of wasting money, and yet no one is doing anything about it.

A Clarification

Some seem to have walked away from my last post with the impression that I wanted the House Republican leadership to commit political suicide out of principle. To make things crystal clear: I understand that the Republicans control “only one half of one third” of the government, and I recognize that we are not going to get everything we want as a result. But I think it’s very important to highlight that what we were able to squeeze out of the Democrats is not even close to being enough to get us out of the financial hole we’re in. That was the purpose of my last post. I truly believe that celebrating this latest deal will only encourage complacency on the part of our leaders, and so I refuse to pat them on the back for it, even if it is indeed the case that, political realities being what they are, $38 billion in change was all we could cut.

The other purpose of my last post was to criticize the Republican leadership for their poor handling of the media. There are a lot of people out there who have no clue what is actually going on with the federal budget. And it’s not because they’re stupid; it’s because nobody has told them the truth. For example, how many ordinary Americans are aware of the fact that the Democrats refused to pass a budget while they had a super-majority in the Congress and control of the White House? How many Americans have been told that we would not be absorbed in this partisan wrangling over FY 2011 right now if the Democrats hadn’t shirked their duty? How many are aware of the size of our deficit and how piddly even the most stringent of the proposed cuts have been in comparison?

If recent opinion polls are any indication, Americans don’t genuinely see the fiscal danger we’re in. While many pay lip service to making budget cuts, when you ask them for specifics, they go wobbly:

So if we can’t make cuts in education, Medicare, Social Security, research, military expenses, etc., what can we cut?

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m frustrated. There are too many people out there with their hands out and not enough people who’ve agreed to take one for the team. And in many ways, this is our fault, conservatives, because we are, to a man, too chicken to confront the left. Oh, yes, we have our shock-jocks out there singing to the choir, but those with some power to do something always flinch whenever the Democrats rail at us for being big meanies who wish to starve grandma. Someone on our side in DC needs to have the balls to tell liberals that their accusations are psychotic. That’s all there is to it. And it has to be someone with some seniority. Allen West is fantastic and all, but when he takes the left to task, only those who regularly read The Hill end up hearing about it — and that’s not going to help us at all.

Historic?

Pathetic is more like it.

‘Historic’ deal to avoid government shutdown
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Perilously close to a government shutdown, President Barack Obama and congressional leaders forged agreement late Friday night on a deal to cut about $38 billion in federal spending and avert the first closure in 15 years.

Obama hailed the deal, a bit more than an hour before a midnight deadline, as “the biggest annual spending cut in history,” and House Speaker John Boehner said that over the next decade it would cut government spending by $500 billion.

“This is historic, what we’ve done,” said the third man in the talks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Yes, I am glad that Sub Spike will not be furloughed (he works for a contractor which receives funding from the federal government, and this afternoon, he and Mom were joking about subsisting on beans and weenies), but let’s remember that these cuts only amount to a little more than 2% of this year’s budget deficit.

Because Math Is Hard – especially when we’re dealing with astronomically large numbers – allow me to conceptualize it this way: Let’s allow $1 to represent $100 billion. According to estimates I’ve seen, this year’s deficit would therefore equal $16-$17. During the 2010 campaign, many current members of the Republican House ran on a promise to knock off just $1 of that deficit. Since January, however, that number has gradually fallen until, tonight, we’re handed a measly $0.38 in cuts. Can you imagine what would happen if you personally owed someone $17 yet handed him $0.38 and demanded that he be grateful?

We can’t keep going on like this. Eventually, our creditors are going to come knocking and then we’ll really be in trouble. We have to stop pandering to the masses and start thinking about what is truly essential.

And while I’m at it: The Republicans desperately need to learn how to manage the optics. It absolutely enrages me that the lying left still has the power to set the media narrative, and I don’t understand why politicians on our side consistently fail to go after that narrative in venues where ordinary Americans will hear them. Every time I turned on the radio or the television this week, I should’ve heard or seen Republican-sponsored ads raking the Democrats over the coals for their failure to pass a budget for FY 2011 despite their super-majority and their control of the White House. And Republican leaders should’ve held their noses and braved the talk show circuit to explain why we need to make cuts, why the Republican proposals make sense, and why – given the sheer size of our budget, our deficits, and our debt – a reduction in federal spending of tens of billions of dollars is not “too much too fast.” How can we ever hope to win the debate if we don’t ever engage the enemy on his own turf and challenge his emotional reasoning and his illogical declarations?

Ugh. I just hope someone on the right in Washington wakes up before we have to do battle over the FY 2012 budget. The continued health of the American experiment depends upon our ability to breach the media wall.

A Note to the Republican Leadership:

If in fact the federal government does shut down, you need to head to every talk show and news program in existence and repeat until you’re blue in the face that the Democrats refused to make a deal in order to protect Planned Parenthood. And you need to be clear that the Democrat position is the extreme position. The Republican House is not proposing that we outlaw abortion. The Republicans are proposing that we allow tax payers to decide for themselves whether they want their hard-earned money to fund the practice. And if people start whining about health care for women, you need to give Abby Johnson the floor so she can shoot down that tissue of lies. Yes, there are individual Planned Parenthood employees who do care for the well-being of women, but that is certainly not the goal of the organization in general. If Planned Parenthood were truly concerned about women, they would work much harder to prevent the sexual exploitation of underaged girls. Moreover, if what they do for women is so wonderful and necessary, then surely they can ask for funding from their supposed scores of fawning supporters.

Again, Republicans, when you speak to the American people, frame it this way: The Democrat Party wants to force us to fund a key entity in the national abortion industry whether we agree with abortion or not. That is what is at issue here. As with PBS and the NEA and a host of other pet liberal programs, the Democrats have decided that abortion is a public good that must be funded, and if you disagree, you are a mean, evil person who eats babies, kicks little old grandmothers, and cheers whenever a woman dies of breast cancer. As far as the Democrats are concerned, when it comes to Planned Parenthood, those of us who happen to be conscientious objectors should just sit down, shut up, and take it up the rear. We should refuse to stay silent. (/rant)