The do-nothing congress finally did one thing. Doesn't mean they still don't suck

With the year in Congress entering its final days, the House of Representatives last night passed a budget deal easing the sequester, and the Senate is expected to pass it next week. This is already being widely hailed as a truce in the sabotage governing wars and a return to some semblance of normalcy, however modest.

But if there’s one fact that continues to sum up this Congress, it’s this. Lawmakers remain far more likely to vote on a political, counter-productive measure on Iran than to vote on extending unemployment benefits for over one million Americans. And let’s not even talk about whether Congress will vote on any serious proposals to boost economic growth and create jobs amid a still sluggish recovery.
— Greg Sargent, pointing out that congress still sucks.

Look at it this way, this congress just passed a forgettable horsetrading bill that accomplishes nothing much other than avoiding a budget debate for a couple of years — and the media and punditry are acting like they’ve just passed the Civil Rights Act or something.

Why? Because this pile of nothing is among the 113th congress’ crowning achievements. This is being heralded as a tremendously important moment in modern history because the bar is just that low.

Congress stampedes the exits for Aug. recess, leaving the nation’s problems to smoulder

Politico: The government shuts down Sept. 30. The farm bill isn’t done. The appropriations process is in shambles. Immigration reform is stagnant.

And Congress is heading for the exits.

Thetensions on Capitol Hill are high, as legislative achievements are low.

The anger, frustration and disappointment was exposed after the House Republican leadership pulled a transportation spending bill from the floor this week because funding levels were too high for some, too low for others. Instead of recalibrating, House Republicans moved onto a series of bills aimed at stopping what they consider government abuse — legislation that dovetails with their August messaging.

Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa), the chair of the subcommittee that wrote the bill, stood up at a Wednesday afternoon meeting and yelled at attendees — including his best friend, Speaker John Boehner — “this is bullshit,” referring to leadership pulling his bill without warning.

Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), so frustrated by the stymied pace of spending bills, said he won’t pen a year-long continuing resolution, and his committee will not vote for it. The House has passed just four of 12 appropriations bills.

As Congress leaves town for a five-week recess, it faces no shortage of unsolved challenges. There is no clear strategy for funding the government beyond Sept. 30 and lifting the debt ceiling, the two fiscal fights looming in the fall.

According to Politico reporter Ginger Gibson, Nancy Pelosi said sarcastically, “We have to go home by noon on Friday because we have nothing else to do."

No wonder Congress is literally less popular than root canals, cockroaches, North Korea, or lice.

[image via UpNorth Memories - Donald (Don) Harrison]

Congress is shocked to learn that cutting spending means cutting services

Flight delays caused by the sequester get congress’ attention. However, “the tediously obvious point to make about this is that Congress can’t do much more than yawn about cuts to services for the poor, but a few days of air traffic delays and they’re practically tripping over themselves to offer up solutions,” writes Kevin Drum.

Poor people going hungry? We’re cool with that. Business traveler has a six hour layover? SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!

[photo by Global Jet]

Rush to invade Iraq fueled to large degree by congressional ignorance

Raw Story:

On Monday night, Rachel Maddow presented “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” a documentary about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of the biggest military blunders in U.S. history. In one segment, she reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who were charged with determining whether or not the country should go to war, never read the pertinent briefs before giving then-President George W. Bush the go-ahead to launch the Iraq War.

The segment began in September of 2002, when Congress returned from its summer recess. Bush administration officials were lobbying heavily for an invasion of Iraq, using a flawed intelligence brief, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which wildly oversold the case for Saddam Hussein having a nuclear and biological weapons program.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, told MSNBC that the main “shop” behind a large amount of slanted, pro-invasion intelligence was the office of Doug Feith, undersecretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, who was key in positing that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

The NIE on Iraq was prepared by the CIA in less than a month, a rush job that contained many thinly sourced claims, as well as outright distortions of the facts on the ground in Iraq. In intent, it was a barely disguised PR document for the Bush administration, hastily cobbled together by CIA Director George Tenet, who was then all but acting as the administration’s spokesperson.

Even within the NIE, however, there were caveats about the whether Hussein’s weapons programs were still active. Unfortunately, as Michael Isikoff, co-author of the book Hubris, noted, “As far as we can tell, only about a half a dozen Senators actually read it. If they’d done so, they would have seen that it was filled with dissents.”

Of course, for a lot of congress critters, reading it would’ve been a waste of time. They were going to go to war no matter what, facts be damned. One way to get a reputation as a “tough” politician is to cast a vote to send Americans to kill and die. John McCain, for example, has never once in his entire career voted against military action. Think of it as an extension of the “tough on crime” spin.

But those who cast their votes without studying the rationale for signing off on creating a mountain of corpses should not sleep soundly at night.

[image source]

Poll: Americans want term limits. But at the ballot box, they don’t

Gallup:

Even after the 2012 election in which Americans re-elected most of the sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate — as is typical in national elections — three-quarters of Americans say that, given the opportunity, they would vote “for” term limits for members of both houses of Congress.

Republicans and independents are slightly more likely than Democrats to favor term limits; nevertheless, the vast majority of all party groups agree on the issue. Further, Gallup finds no generational differences in support for the proposal.

These findings, from Gallup Daily tracking conducted Jan. 8-9, are similar to those from 1994 to 1996 Gallup polls, in which between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms that members of Congress and the U.S. Senate can serve.

The problem is that voters reelected 90% of congress in 2012, meaning that they think term limits are a good idea — so long as they’re applied to someone else’s congress critter. Their’s is fine. Congressional approval ratings are very low and term limits are one way we’d lose a lot of really awful legislators that other dopes keep reelecting (I’m looking at you, people in Louie Gohmert’s district).

But term limits solve no real problems. The problems are the undue influence of money in politics and the revolving door that allows congress members to come back to Washington and write law as lobbyists — even when voters soundly rejected their ideas. Term limits only ensure that congress is staffed with idealists and dreamers. Seriously, in what other line of work would you say, “The less experience, the better.” And do you want to fire Bernie Sanders in order to fire Michele Bachmann? There’s an old saying about babies and bathwater that I’m sure you’re familiar with.

No, the way to fix politics is to end multi-billion dollar campaigns that convince people to vote for complete tools. Replacing congress with a bunch of people who don’t even know where the cloakroom is would only make things worse. Doubt me? Name the Tea Party freshman you think did a bang-up job 2010-2012. Those were the new guys — and they sucked.

Little appetite for copyright extremism in the 113th

The Hill:

Nearly a year after a wave of online protests killed two anti-piracy bills, lawmakers are skittish about moving forward with legislation aimed at cracking down on websites that illegally distribute copies of movies and music.

 

The fracas over SOPA and PIPA a year ago is still fresh on the minds of lawmakers, making it doubtful that similar legislation will surface in the opening months of the 113th Congress.

“I think people are shell-shocked from that,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who was a vocal opponent of SOPA.

“It was sort of an unprecedented experience that members do not want to repeat,” she added. 

Members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have yet to even hint at efforts to revisit anti-piracy legislation this year…

»READ MORE»

[image source]

Goodbye 112th -- and good riddance

[via Truthdig.]

Gerrymandering works -- 90% of congress reelected despite record low approvals

USA Today:

Voters apparently really, really like their own member of Congress even though the institution as a whole gets low ratings.

A whopping 90% of the House members and 91% of the senators who ran for re-election this year were returned to office, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Government (known as BGOV). That tops the 2010 re-election rates for both chambers, which were 85% and 84% respectively.

Think of it this way: The approval rating for Congress as a whole tied a record-low of 10% this year in the Gallup Poll. But as the BGOV analysis shows, voters don't hold such lowly opinions about their own members of Congress and they sent their representatives and senators back to Washington.

This is despite the fact that Democrats got the most votes in congressional races. Had more districts been anything close to competitive demographically, we'd have a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives right now.

Classless Conservative Sore-Loserism

Conservative cartoonist Darleen Click, brought to our attention by SEK at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money (click image for larger version):



From her blog post:

Oh I know I’m going to get called names on this. But I’m not going to play that game anymore. Like the sign at one of the TEA parties that said “it doesn’t matter what this sign says, you going to call it racist anyway.” When even the lawsuits now being brought by 30 plus state AG’s is considered racist, it is time to stop playing that game.

[...]


Heck, I want to shake them up. This is supposed to be a post-racial era? Then deal with the fact that the President of the United States is the head of a gang that just raped our American principles.

This is the way the right gets away with (and rationalizes) being total assholes; before anyone's even had a chance to chime in on her "cartoon" (in quotes because it's not even close to funny), she lays down the victim card. "No matter what I do, you're going to be mean to me, so I might was well be a complete ass."

There are 45,000 dead every year because of a lack of insurance. 46 million without insurance. Medical bills are the cause of half of all bankruptcies. This is a crisis.

And Click, as well as people like her, proclaim that to be what the founders intended. Never mind that Thomas Paine -- who teabaggers like to dress up as -- argued in favor of a national healthcare system. Apparently, the founders intended a supremely fucked up and unsustainable state of affairs.

I'm not going to call Click racist. I'll leave that to other people. I'm going to call her a fucking idiot. If getting affordable healthcare -- with the elimination of denials of coverage, recissions, and lifetime caps -- makes you feel like you've been raped, then I suggest you self-medicate with drugs and alcohol.

Not that it'd help, it'd just give you an excuse. If you're not drunk or high, I can only assume that you're fuckwitted. You lost a political battle. Unlike the battles liberals lost to Bush, no one's going to die and certainly not by the hundreds of thousands. I guess you could move to some conservative-Libertarian Utopia... Like, say, Somalia.

But, assuming you're going to stick around, try making some sort of an argument, instead of displaying how outraged you are by crudely drawing a Willy Horton-esque pile of idiotic bullshit. Whining isn't going to get you anywhere. Look at the evidence; it hasn't worked so far.

GOP Post-Reform Vote Fundraising Email

The RNC's response to healthcare reform, in the form of a fundraising email:

Dear Terry,

They've done it. Nancy Pelosi and her Democrat minions in the U.S. House -- against the will of the American people -- have "passed" their radical government-run health care experiment.

I'm absolutely outraged and furious beyond belief at the Congressional Democrats' craven partisan tactics! Republicans are ready to fight back, and we need your immediate help to remind Pelosi and crew they work for you. That's why I've authorized a money bomb to send a message that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will hear loud and clear.

Let's Fire Nancy Pelosi!

Go to GOP.com right now and make a secure online contribution of $40 or more to support our Republican money bomb and help ensure our Party has the resources to elect Republican majorities to the U.S. House and Senate in 2010 so we can fire Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Our goal is to raise $402,010 or more in the next 40 hours.

With your emergency contribution, the RNC will lay the groundwork to fire all the Democrats who ignored the American people and passed a health care scheme that takes more of your hard-earned income to pay for their unsustainable, freedom destroying entitlement.

Terry, we need your support to make a major statement right now. Help fire Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the U.S. House and replace her with Republican leadership who will work for you and your family -- not the liberal special interest groups. Make a donation to the RNC's money bomb right away. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Michael Steele
Chairman, Republican National Committee

Offered without comment.

Do Dems Already Have the Votes to Pass Healthcare Reform?

Steve Benen points out a weird story in today's new York Times. Benen says he's "deeply skeptical" of an article stating "that the leadership is so confident about securing a majority [to pass the healthcare reform bill], the Speaker's office is now in the process of trying to figure out which vulnerable Dems to give passes to." According to the Times:

Yes, the 11th-hour vote tallying is under way at a brisk pace in offices from Capitol Hill to the West Wing, with Ms. Pelosi and her lieutenants keeping hour-by-hour tabs on wavering Democrats.

But as the week inches along, with momentum steadily building to a Sunday vote, the party leaders are also beginning to decide which politically endangered lawmakers will be given absolution to vote no. [...]

There are, of course, very few votes to spare. Yet there are some. And even most Republican leaders concede that the mystery is not so much whether Democrats will reach the magic number of 216, but rather whose names will be included as yes votes in the final count.

"That's about the most optimistic assessment for reform supporters I've seen," Benen writes, "which is probably why I find it so hard to believe." Apparently, so does the New York Times; their own whip count as of this writing is 198 yay, 200 nay.

Still, the speaker's count is likely more accurate than the Times', so who knows? Maybe the story's accurate. I'm with Benen here, though -- I don't see this as being true. Is it some weird form of arm-twisting, a hope for a sort of bandwagon effect if the majority is perceived as being behind it? Or is it that no one wants to be seen as the deciding vote, so the perception of some headroom is being created?

In any case, even if it isn't accurate, it suggests that they're close enough to bluff. Keep your fingers crossed.

Griper Blade: Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]


Get updates via Twitter

Griper Blade: GOP Wins a Battle No One was Fighting

Yesterday was a big day for residents of the nation's capital. Taxation without representation will finally end in Washington DC. With the passage of a DC Voting Rights Bill, the city will get one voting member of the House of Representatives -- Obama is certain to sign it. I was flipping through the channels recently and came across Glenn Beck claiming it would give Democrats two more senators, but -- not surprisingly -- Beck has no idea what he's talking about. The bill increases the seats in the house from 435 to 437 (a deal was struck to add a balancing seat from Utah). It doesn't do anything to change senate membership.

It's kind of fitting that I came across Beck's idiocy on this subject, because another deal swung in the senate to get the bill passed involved the Fairness Doctrine.

Reuters:

The U.S. Senate passed an amendment on Thursday that would bar regulators from requiring broadcasters to give equal time to all points of view, a ban strongly supported by some Republican lawmakers.

The legislative amendment, sponsored by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from reimposing the so-called Fairness Doctrine to all broadcasters. It was repealed more than 20 years ago.

Aides to President Barack Obama have said he has no intention of trying to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but that has not stopped some Republicans from raising the issue.

DeMint added the amendment to the voting rights bill, in order to save right wing talk radio and conservative media from destruction by the forces of... Well, fairness. The right has been demagoguing the issue for some time, pretending that there was some danger of the doctrine ever returning -- while completely misrepresenting what the Fairness Doctrine actually was... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: After Stimulus Vote, Republicans Demand More Rope

When the stimulus passed in the House of Representatives, it did so without a single Republican vote. When it passed in the Senate yesterday, it earned a whopping three Republican votes. Sens. Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins broke ranks with their party, voting for a watered down version of the bill. Not content to fiddle while the nation burns, these three senators recognized that we're in an honest-to-goodness emergency. Something needed to be done and, despite pressure from their own party, these three senators did something. Not enough, but something.

How real is this emergency? So real that the world economy came close to literal collapse in late 2008. It was then that there was an electronic run on banks "to the tune of $550 billion dollars" within "an hour or two."

According to [Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA)], on September 18, 2008 the Fed tried to "stem the tide" by pumping money into the financial system but it didn't work and decided instead to announce an immediate increase in deposit insurance to $250,000 per account to stop the panic.

Said Kanjorski: "If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

But, of course, when the market and the economy are this bad, the Republican party decided that it would be a perfect time to do a little grandstanding, score some cheap political points with their base, and put on a show of wingnut solidarity. Three senators didn't play along... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Winning the Public Opinion War

Yesterday, I wrote that Republicans are enjoying their minority status, because it means they no longer feel the need to make sense or be responsible or get anything done. Free to be as wingnutty as they want to be, they can repeat thoroughly debunked economic theories and beat their ideological drum as loud as they want, since there's no consequence for them in being 100% wrong. They can propose insane alternatives that serve no purpose other than to shore up their far right bona fides, then complain that the dems shut out their "better ideas" when those insane alternatives are rejected. Grandstanding and theatrics are much, much more fun than actually getting anything done.

At President Obama's first press conference last night, he was asked a question about bipartisanship by CBS News' Chip Reid:

You have often said that bipartisanship is extraordinarily important, overall and in this stimulus package, but now, when we ask your advisers about the lack of bipartisanship so far -- zero votes in the House, three in the Senate -- they say, "Well, it's not the number of votes that matters; it's the number of jobs that will be created."

Is that a sign that you are moving away -- your White House is moving away from this emphasis on bipartisanship?

And what went wrong? Did you underestimate how hard it would be to change the way Washington works?

It was a good question... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: The Pasha of GOPerstan

You can call it the Republican confederacy or Crazyland. I've been thinking of it as GOPerstan. The last Republican strongholds are mostly huddled together in the center of the nation. For the most part, they're far from the coasts, where people stubbornly insist on living in the real world. The coasts of America are godless places, where people believe in evolution, accept human-caused global warming, are pretty damned sure invading Iraq was a very expensive mistake -- in more ways than one -- and that the economic policies that brought us to the brink of an honest-to-goodness depression should probably be abandoned. With the exception of Alaska, America's coasts -- along with most of the rest of the nation -- are lost to the Satanic forces of liberalism. Woe be unto the realm.

This is what Crazyland or GOPerstan or the Republican confederacy looks like today, according to Gallup:


Click for fullsized map

The familiar red/blue breakdown of the states shows a whopping four red states out of fifty -- Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alaska -- as solidly Republican, with Nebraska leaning. Every other state is either blue, leaning blue, or a toss up. Those red spots on that map are the only places where voters who identify themselves as Republican are the majority.

"In all the other 41 states, including every one of the large population states, Democrats outnumber Republicans," wrote former Bushie David Frum yesterday. "In 29 states, including every Northeastern state and every Midwestern state save Indiana, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 10 points or more."... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: A New Era of Cooperation and Bipartisanship

It's a new age of bipartisanship. Republicans and Democrats are putting the good of the nation above politics and are working together to make the hard choices it takes to get the American economy going again. Hope oozes up from the cracks in the sidewalks in Washington DC and buildings are festooned with balloons bearing the words "unity" and "cooperation."

Yup, it's a new post-partisan day in the nation's capital -- so long as you don't count all of those Republicans who aren't putting the good of the nation above politics and aren't working together to make the hard choices it takes to get the American economy going again. And, when I say "all of those Republicans," I mean all of those Republicans.

Washington Post:

The House approved an $819 billion stimulus package on a near party-line vote yesterday, a plan breathtaking in size and scope that President Obama hopes to make the cornerstone of his efforts to resuscitate the staggering economy.

...Obama's personal salesmanship effort failed to secure a single Republican supporter for the spending plan, which passed on a 244 to 188 vote. Just a day after the president spent more than an hour behind closed doors at the Capitol seeking their support, all 177 House Republicans opposed the measure, arguing that it would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on initiatives that would do little to stimulate the economy. Eleven Democrats opposed the bill.

Not a single Republican voted for the stimulus package, demanding instead that it hinge on tax cuts. That's right. Tax cuts. Because the last eight years of economic policy that depended nearly exclusively on tax cuts has worked so well... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: A Ban in Search of a Reason for Being

In March 2007, Stephen Benjamin was discharged from the Navy. An Arabic language translator, Benjamin fell prey to Bill Clinton's absurd 1993 compromise policy of "don't ask, don't tell." Under that rule, gays are allowed to serve in the military, but only so long as it's a big secret. If you tell anyone about your sexual orientation, for any reason, you're out. In Benjamin's case, it was text messages -- intercepted by military censors -- that made it clear that he and a former roommate stationed in Iraq were gay. They were fired.

"My supervisors did not want to lose me," he wrote in the New York Times in June of that same year. "Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it."

Despite a "desperate shortage of linguists," the Navy thought it was more important that intercepted intelligence pile up untranslated than to let some gay guy translate them. This is supposed to serve our national interests, because allowing gays to serve would somehow harm "unit cohesion." Seems to me that breaking up units to preserve their "cohesion" is astonishingly ludicrous -- it's like arguing you have to get divorced to save your marriage... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Two Crises, No Waiting

Not having the world's fastest connection, I use Sage for Firefox to keep up on news headlines. Click the feed, wait a second, and watch the headlines come up without all the extra ads and widgets and scripts. Beautiful. One of the feeds I check fairly regularly is Yahoo: Climate Change. I like being able to check news by issue, which is why I also subscribe to feeds created by Google News searches, as well.

So I clicked on my climate change feed and I came across two headlines, one above the other. It's too early to start drinking, so I guess I'll write about them. First is a Bloomberg Story, "Obama to Act Quickly on Global Warming in 2009."

President-elect Barack Obama will act quickly on a campaign promise to address climate change upon taking office in January, his environment adviser said.

Obama will borrow from initiatives in place in Europe and some U.S. states to control heat-trapping emissions, Jason Grumet said today in Washington. While he avoided talk of new policies today, the adviser last month said Obama may continue international climate negotiations endorsed by his predecessor, George W. Bush, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and others.

We really should start calling this the "climate emergency" or "climate crisis," so it's good to see that we'll finally have a president who takes it seriously. This is something that needs to be addressed yesterday.

But there were two stories. The next was the one that made me consider drinking -- Associated Press's "Bingaman: Global warming on Congress' back burner."

Congress will not act until 2010 on a bill to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming despite President-elect Obama's declaration that he will move quickly to address climate change, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee predicted Wednesday.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said that while every effort should be made to cap greenhouse gases, the economic crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a nationwide market for carbon pollution permits preclude acting in 2009.

"The reality is, it may take more than the first year to get it all done," Bingaman told a carbon markets conference here.

You know, in all the post-election celebrating, I forgot just how badly Democratic congressional leadership sucks. They were ready to roll over every time Bush wanted to do something stupid and now they feel the need to put the brakes on the necessary...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]