congress

This one has made much better choices in which drugs to take before speaking than his colleagues.

It seems that conservative news outlets and talk radio spout endlessly that Senator Harry Reid needs to be defeated in Nevada.  Even some factions of the Tea Party seem to agree.

There's just one problem with that strategy, and it can be summed up in five words: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

If you think Reid's ideas are bad, you haven't paid attention to Schumer.  There's a lot of bad legislation that gets stopped because Reid uses his power as Senate Majority Leader to keep it from coming to the floor.  This is the same legislation that Schumer would forcefully push to the floor.

From the National Shooting Sports Foundation:

U.S. Congressman Dan Boren introduced legislation this week (H.R. 5667) to direct the U.S. Attorney General to work with the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a comprehensive study of firearm microstamping. NSSF supports this bipartisan legislation as a means of ensuring adequate research of microstamping is completed, and the concept is proven to work reliably, prior to states mandating microstamping through the legislative process.

Thanks, Mr. Boren, for working toward another way for the government to usurp our freedoms!  At least now you have plainly put out in public the NRA's true position on microstamping.

Here's a PDF of the list from Campaign for Liberty of your Representatives who cosponsored HR 1207 (Audit the Fed) but voted against it.  For you folks down in Southeastern Oklahoma, Dan Boren is on there.

Back on April 5th, WikiLeaks posted a rather disturbing 17 minute video taken from one of the U.S. Army's helicopters. It shows the troops repeatedly gunning down allegedly armed men (including two Reuters reporters) and attacking a van that had arrived to rescue the wounded. You be the judge from the video, but to me this looks like the typical gathering around a reporter with a camera that occurs in that area.

After waiting two and a half years for this video, Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger posted in an opinion column, "What I want from the Pentagon -- and from all militaries -- is simple: Acknowledgment, transparency, accountability."

According to a recent speech by Nancy Pelosi, Congress must first pass a bill before the people can know what is in it.  Yes, that is what she said.  Here's a contextual excerpt from the speech, with my emphasis added:

"You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

I know, it sounds harsh. But the reality is anything that Congress touches that it is not equipped for ends up worse than before. “Solving unemployment” is definitely something which Congress (and the rest of the federal government) is not equipped to do. Yet they are trying to do just that with the recent $13 billion HIRE bill that passed the House last week 217-201.

Yes, the unemployment rate is at 9.7%. (And really, the number is much worse considering that the “official” number only measures those who are seeking unemployment benefits and not those whose benefits have either run out or aren’t taking them.) Yes, people need jobs. But is this something that Congress or the federal government should handle? No.

 Don't you wish you had this option? Get closer to maxing out your available credit, so you give yourself a higher limit?  That is exactly what Congress just proposed.  As the national debt nears it's cap of $12.4 Trillion, Congress wants to increase how much it can borrow to $14.3 Trillion... an increase of $1.9 Trillion dollars.

Only a decade ago the entire Federal government operated on less than $1.9 Trillion.  Obama's deficit last year was $1.4 Trillion.  That means Uncle Sam had to borrow $1.4 Trillion just to function.  Here's what that looks like: $1,400,000,000,000.  When you look at a number that big, then the $100,000,000 ($100 Million, $0.1 Billion, $0.0001 Trillion) that they borrowed to send as "relief" to Haiti doesn't look so bad.

 Since Scott Brown won Massachusetts and broke the supermajority held by Democrats in the Senate, top Democrats are preparing to use a "nuclear option."  Before the polls even closed, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) began outlining a few "nuclear tactics" that Democrats could use to pass their socialization of healthcare.

"We could go to something called 'reconciliation', which is in the weeds procedurally, but would allow us to modify that health care bill by a different process that doesn't require 60 votes, only a majority," Durbin said. "So that is one possibility there."

"Reconciliation" is a process where only a 51-vote (rather than 60-vote) majority is necessary in the Senate to make adjustments to the bill.