Far East Cynic

Too much time on my hands……

Congress imposed a government shutdown? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.

( All posts will start with this until the shutdown is over).

 

So the clock is ticking upward-and the place I work could not get its act together. SECDEF gave some guidance on who would and would not be exempted. Personnel supporting certain operations-such as one I work on were supposed to be exempted.

So why was I at home this afternoon? Pay or no pay-I should have been at work-per the SECDEF guidance. The discussions got heated this morning as the leadership slithered out of that stance in order to get all civilians to go home. The pessismist in me thinks this is some person trying to "save money". How?

Sigh. Sometimes we affix blame too far from home. DOD is its own worst enemy at times.

And what is this all about?

Kevin Drum explains:

The Republican Party is bending its entire will, staking its very soul, fighting to its last breath, in service of a crusade to….

Make sure that the working poor don't have access to affordable health care. I just thought I'd mention that in plain language, since it seems to get lost in the fog fairly often. But that's it. That's what's happening. They have been driven mad by the thought that rich people will see their taxes go up slightly in order to help non-rich people get decent access to medical care.

That's a pretty stirring animating principle, no?

Fuck you, pay me.

  1. I prefer this view, "The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has no Constitutional or other obligation to pass a funding bill that includes funding for Obamacare or any other particular government program."

    If there was someone out there who really really wanted it to, they would have been wise to ask. Nicely.

    I dare to say that telling them, "Fuck you, pay me," weren't the magic words.

  2. Then you would be wrong sir-on two points. For one thing, The House has a responsibility to negotiate differences with the Senate and provide a matching version of the bill to the President.

    Secondly, let me remind you, the majority of American voters said no to your point of view in 2012. The proper thing is to STFU and make your case in 2014. Not to take a hostage the year before.

    And finally I refer you to Mr. Abraham Lincoln who had to deal with the predecessor of the Tea Party. They had a different name then-The Confederacy. They too got their asses kicked.

    Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

    This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer's distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it; that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact – the statement in the opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution."

     

    Shorter version: Fuck you ! Pay Me!

  3. Oh and in case that didn't make the point clear-let me give you one more thought to chew on:  there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can't be buffed away or ignored.

  4. 1. Your Senate democrats have now voted to utterly refuse to negotiate this issue with the House. Somebody is screwing the process but it aint the Republicans or the House.

    2. The House runs for election every two years. All of them. Every single member faces the electorate every two years. Remember the House majority commanded by Pelosi that jammed that law you love through the House with a simple majority and not one vote from the minority? The NEW majority is saying STFU. Why don't you listen?

    and 3. What is a slave, Skippy, but a man who labors for no pay and can be dispossessed of all he has by ignorant vicious thugs who feel entitled to everything he owns? It's hard to see the distinction between slaves and taxpayers when people like you see everyone as a sheep to be shorn at your command.

  5. Oh father high in heaven — smile down upon your son
    whose busy with his money games — his women and his gun.
    Oh Jesus save me!

  6. Skippy,

    Well at least if you are not working, you can watch the Pirates in the Playoffs!

  7. Can't get the Baseball games over here. The evil overlord Murdoch made ESPN a premium channel on Skye. But it was nice to see the Pirates beat the Reds. Go Bucs.

    Curtis.you should read Lincoln's entire Cooper Union Speech. He had his own group of assholes to deal with, and called them the assholes that they were.  BTW as simple majority is all that is required to pass MOST bills in the Senate or the House. The Constituiton is funny that way. The filibuster is an abomination to the Constitution. Only certain bills require 2/3 majorities and they are spelled out in the Constitution. James Fallows spelled out why this is different here: 

    1. If the House of Representatives voted on a "clean" budget bill — one that opened up the closed federal offices but did not attempt to defund the Obama health care program — that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over. Nearly all Democrats would vote for it, as would enough Republicans to end the shutdown and its related damage. (And of course itwould pass has already passed the Senate, repeatedly, unless the minority dared filibuster it,and would be signed by the president.) For illustrations of the wanton damage, see here andhere.
       
    2. So far House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let this vote occur. His Tea Party contingent knows how the vote would go and therefore does not want it to happen; and such is Boehner's fear of them, and fear for his job as Speaker, that he will not let it take place.

  8. You labor under this absurd delusion that the Majority is somehow oathbound to deliver up everything that you demand and also to be respectfully quiet and obey and do as they are told. You keep writing about some sort of "clean" bill but the way the majority see it, having scraped off the excrescence that is Obamacare, the budget bill is clean. You keep missing the point about democracy and how the government works. To you, one vote, one time, is all that the people are ever to be allowed. Because Romney was the wrong candidate to oppose Obamacare since he was responsible for Romneycare in MA, he had no leg to stand on to fight Obama on health care issues and had to fight on other domestic policy and foreign policy issues. Elections have consequences. You should know that. Who controls the purse controls the budget and America wised up enough to put the purse strings firmly in non-Obama/non-Pelosi hands. You lost.

    You keep insisting that the House Majority cave to the will of the majority of the senate. Why do you imagine that they have greater equality than the majority in the House? You do know why Reid and the senate democrats won't negotiate right? Remember the last time? They dimly remember that McConnell and Boehner totally skunked them and are too afraid to let that happen again. I'm sure that McCain and Graham are skulking around trying to find some way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That's their special gift.

    Viz the ESPN and evil empire. You should get to know some expats. Most of them can finagle a way to watch anything they want to wherever in the wide world they are. Getting ESPN would take any of the tech savvy expats I know about 10 minutes.

  9. I do know expats. I have my satellite through an outfit in Ramstein, and its not exactly something Skye would approve of. I would stream the game-but we don't have bandwidth out here in the country to keep the video from buffering every 10 minutes or so.

    There are three branches of government. IMHO Reid and the President have made the right call in not negotiating. They did that in 2011 and this wonderful "majority" you extol fucked us all. Curtis, I'm going to tell you one last time-these morons do not get extort the rest of the country. The ACA is going to happen-get over it. Its needed and people who oppose it are fucked in the head. I'm sorry they are fucked in the head-but they are. I do appreciate you providing a wonderful example of how stupid a certain portion of the country is however. You make a wonderful lab exhibit.

    We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

     

    We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

     

    We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

     

    This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.



     

  10. Oh Skippy, that hurts. You voted for Pelosi. You lurved Ted Kennedy. Jesse Jackson, Jr was your idea of a good politician. Ha! You voted for Biden! You think Harry Reid is the savior of mankind because he defunded medicaid to pay your $ to millionaires who own and run insurance companies. Note: he's not paying the money to the doctors, nurses, dentists and hospitals; just to the same kind of crony capitalist scumbags who got your money for all their green projects that dim-witted voters approve of everyday because they have all the intellectual heft of a used condom.

    What I find hard to believe is that you simply think the money is out there somewhere. Don't you ever wonder where it is? Has anybody ever pointed to it and said, there it is?

  11. Speaking of extortion, we here in America love it as we watch the goons take over and shut down public monuments on the national mall and set up barricades to keep the little people away from the Lincoln Memorial and World War II monument. Classy.

    You gotta be on some weird-shit drug to keep laying all your trouble with reality on the guys that keep voting yes on bills and sending them off to die in the wilderness that is the Party of NO. Every time the House approves another budget bill to open yet more of the government, it's your friends the terrorists and goon-masters that shout no and lash the country with the bullwhip.

    Just who is extorting who?