Archive for the 'Waste' category

This Isn’t Amnesty…

May 16 2006 Published by under Congress, Government, Legislation, Politics, The President, Waste

PoliticsGovernmentIt just looks, acts, smells, and sounds like it.

When is amnesty not amnesty, when the President goes out of his way to tell you it’s not.

Some in this country argue that the solution is to deport every illegal immigrant – and that any proposal short of this amounts to amnesty. I disagree. It is neither wise nor realistic to round up millions of people, many with deep roots in the United States, and send them across the border. There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to citizenship for every illegal immigrant, and a program of mass deportation. That middle ground recognizes that there are differences between an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently – and someone who has worked here for many years, and has a home, a family, and an otherwise clean record. I believe that illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay should have to pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law … to pay their taxes … to learn English … and to work in a job for a number of years. People who meet these conditions should be able to apply for citizenship – but approval would not be automatic, and they will have to wait in line behind those who played by the rules and followed the law. What I have just described is not amnesty – it is a way for those who have broken the law to pay their debt to society, and demonstrate the character that makes a good citizen.

The dictionary defines amnesty as, “the voluntary overlooking of an offense by the one offended.” So explain to me how this isn’t amnesty?

We have existing border security laws, but we’re not enforcing them and now 11-12 million people are here illegally, so we’re going to pass new laws – that we allow people to ignore – and fine people who ignored the last set of laws.

Here’s where this gets complicated…

We don’t actually know who all the illegals in the US are, because they’re here illegally, live under assumed names and false papers, and rounding them up would be nearly impossible because of this. But it doesn’t prevent us from issuing fines. Gotcha…

I also don’t really understand the rationale behind allowing someone who has been here for a really long time (meaning they have been violating the law for a really long time, not paying taxes, and generally living a lie) getting the benefit of the law, but the guy just over the border gets screwed.

It seems like a strange way to apply the law. Imagine if the rest of the world worked that way. If you’ve been cheating and plagiarizing all through school and your professional career, you get a salary bonus and promotion, but if you’re caught cheating for the first time in college, you get thrown out of school and exiled to a third world nation.

WTF?

Something tells me this plan is going to go over about as well as the Social Security reform we passed with all that “political capital”… oh, wait…

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Government Wackiness

May 04 2006 Published by under Government, Religion, The President, Waste

Government StupidityDo you remember M*A*S*H? The old sit com featuring the zany hijinks of the 4077th? Remember Father Mulcahy? Can you imagine Father Mulcahy not being able to mention Jesus in his sermons? Can you imagine Father Mulcahy being fired for praying while in uniform?

Well, in a case of life being stranger than art, that’s exactly what’s happening to one Navy Chaplain.

Lt. Gordon Klingenschmitt said he prayed at a March 30 protest opposing Department of Defense rules forbidding military chaplains from invoking the name of Jesus Christ.

He’s accused of violating an order not to appear in uniform at news conferences in support of personal or religious issues.

So let me get this straight, after all, I’m not from DC originally, which means I don’t view life through the Beltway prism.

You hire a guy as a CHAPLAIN, then tell him he can’t say the name JESUS. When he protests that little bit of stupidity BY PRAYING, you fire him because he did it in uniform. The guy was a chaplain, but not allowed to say Christ or pray in uniform?

Now I’m not a very religious guy, but even I think that’s kind of fuqed up. What will the government think of next? Are we going to hire scientists but tell them they can’t go near the labs? Are we going to hire pilots and tell them they’re not allowed to fly? Are we going to elect a President and then tell him he can’t lead, and instead let his Veep run the country?

Forget that last one. Ok?

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Why Do I Read The News?

May 04 2006 Published by under Congress, Legislation, News Media, Republicans, Waste

Government WasteLegislationRepublicansI have no idea why I spend so much time reading news. It just makes me unhappy, but not because, as a comedian once said, “they should call it the bad news”. The reason it makes me unhappy is because it makes me angry; and I don’t like being angry.

Reading the details of the Senate “emergency” spending bill made me unhappy.

Cochran may face an uphill battle in trying to preserve controversial earmarks such as $700 million to relocate a freight line along the Mississippi coast further inland despite its being already rebuilt with insurance proceeds.

That’s right. Our fiscally conservative Republicans from the south want us to spend $700 million to tear up a rail line that was just rebuilt with insurance funds and move it inland. Now, it seems to me that the prudent time to do that would have been BEFORE it was rebuilt. Why should taxpayers shell out three quarters of a billion dollars to relocate a rail line that the hurricane already relocated once, and which was already put back together?

What sense does that make?

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This Made Me Laugh

May 03 2006 Published by under Congress, Elections, Government, Politics, Republicans, The President, Waste

PoliticsGovernment

“The Congress needs to hear me loud and clear. If they spend more than $92.2 (billion) plus pandemic flu emergency funds, I will veto the bill,” [President] Bush said. “It’s important for there to be fiscal discipline in Washington D.C. if we want to keep this economy strong.”

This may be the first indication in five years that fiscal discipline, as a belief system, ever existed in the Republican Party. It’s certainly the first time the Administration has acknowledged it. It’s amazing what happens when your base is running away from you and you face an ass kicking come November.

I guess the old saying is true; when politicians feel the heat, they see the light.

As a life-long true believer in fiscal restraint, I’d like to welcome the President to the pool. Come on in, sir, the water is fine.

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I’m More Afraid Of FEMA’s Reaction To The Bird Flu

Apr 21 2006 Published by under Disease, Government, Waste

GovernmentDiseaseA new poll out indicates that American’s have little confidence in the Government’s ability to handle a bird flu outbreak. That’s not a huge surprise to me. I have little confidence that the government can handle most of the things we ask of it. My low expectations are rarely exceeded.

Now we have the bird flu. The media and the government have done a fabulous job of terrifying the public. So now I have a month supply of canned goods, water and other essentials stored under my stairs next to enough duct tape and plastic to cover my whole house..

I was only six the last time we freaked out over a breed of virus that was supposed to wipe us out. The government handled that one beautifully. The immunization killed more people than the virus, but that’s ok. It was dealt with in typical government fashion – fix it until it’s broken, then fix it again.

The one person who seems to have this whole thing in perspective, and the one guy getting the least media attention, is apparently the one guy that we should listen to the most. He’s not a professional bureaucrat like the head of HHS. He’s an expert on infectious disease at the National Institute of Health. What’s his take?

“It won’t be what you see in countries in which there is no regulation, in which there is no incentive to compensate farmers, in which the people, who are so poor, when they see their chickens are getting infected they immediately sell them or they don’t tell anybody because they don’t want them culled,” [Dr. Anthony] Fauci [the National Institutes of Health's infectious disease chief] said in Tuesday’s interview. “That is a critical issue that is fundamentally different than what we see in Western Europe and that we will see in the United States.”

It is entirely conceivable that this virus is inherently programmed that it will never be able to go efficiently from human to human,” Fauci said. “Hopefully the epidemic (in birds) will burn itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of being more efficient in going from human to human.”

If not, we can practice unnatural selection by killing off our own with an unnecessary immunization the way we did in ’76.

Go Government!

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