A quick update

When it comes to a CR, Linsday Graham is part of the problem. He is trading principals for expediency. As you’ll see below, that is why our national legislature is such a pathetic circus.

The vote for the truncated CR is tonight.

If it doesn’t fly the whiney Left can’t blame the GOP this time. They’ll try of course. But they’ll be lying. Nothing new. Especially for that dull-eyed moron, Hakeem Jeffries. The shut down will be on HIM.``

The failed CR.

I’m skimming through the circle jerk, known as the Continuing Resolution for FY-2025. This is one disgusting piece of work. It is packed with crony money and earmarks that are of no value to the American People writ large.

Common through the entire document is the phrase “Provided further, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement…”. We seem to have a lot of emergencies right now. Just from my reading so far about 80% of what congress does seems to be in response to emergencies.

They are not emergencies, of course. That’s just a fake designation Congress will use to “justify” spending reams of money. But if they were real emergencies, that would be an even greater indictment. Any organization inundated by this many “emergencies” ought not be in business.

This is what happens when you keep voting in the same pack of jackasses to congress each election without knowing what the hell they are doing to you. I’ll say it again: THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU!

I have been searching for a summary of the CR which lists all the individual appropriations in the bill. So far, no luck. But we do know a few of them, and I’ll get to that.

But the most important take away for us is the way it’s being sold to us.

Look! It’s got money for flood victims in North Carolina! If you don’t vote for it, you don’t want to help those people.

AND

Look! It’s got money for the DoD in it! If you don’t vote for it, you want Putin to invade the United States!

For those who aren’t paying attention, that’s called extortion. And it is motus operandi for Congress. They are constantly loading up bills containing popular line items with hundreds of billions of extraneous bullshit. This is usually done to extort a signature from the president or to coerce cowards in an opposing party to vote for the bullshit.

Example: Politicians promise to fund the Coolest Program Ever (CPE)! The bill is drafted and it is combined with the Stupidest Idea in History (SIH). Then 400 of the 435 knuckleheads pack in pet projects for cronies, donors and local constituents. The other 35 are back-benchers or honest people so their shit doesn’t make it in the final cut.

If anybody votes against the SIH, or against the greasy pork, they are accused of denying the American people of the CPE?! How horrible do you have to be to vote against Cool Shit for the American People!?!?!

To give you an idea of how thick the bullshit is (that’s things you shouldn’t be paying for - EVER) the original CR was about 80 pages long. The one they just set aside is 1547 pages long. That’s about 1400 pages of extraneous bullshit.

And this is how they spend your money all year, every year - every time they appropriate.

And so it was this week. At the moment the CR appears to have failed, but they can resurrect it any time they want. I saw a quote from Speaker Johnson saying he might be forced to come up with a clean CR. Well, DUH! Would ya think?!?!

In this pig was:

* Money for a gay old folks home. Where’s my straight old folks home.

* $3B for a stadium. Will all American be able to go there for free any time they want?

* Money for lithium batteries. If it wasn’t for the government giving away YOUR money every year, there would be no electric cars on the road. You’ve been dinged for every last one of them.

* Tommy Tuberville is telling us that we will lose 50k farms this year if we don’t get a CR through. He says we lost 150k in the last four years. I don’t believe either number. But tell me this, Tommy, how many of those farms are growing food that will go into our gas tanks (ethanol)? They can forgo the subsidy and grow regular food…that we eat. I don’t think the demand for that is slipping.

I’ll never dig them all out in time for this podcast, but you know they are there. For FY 24 Citizens Against Government Waste listed, in “The 2024 Congressional Pig Book 8,222 such earmarks. You can be certain many of them were in the CR.

I don’t know how much it cost, but adults spent countless hours preparing linguistic nonsense to be included in the CR. For example, the bill wanted unemployed dropouts to be officially referred to as “opportunity youth”. A criminal was to henceforth be known as a “justice-involved person”. Seriously? If you don’t have a home, these language idiots want to call you an “individual experiencing homelessness". In some places the trendy term is “unhoused”. I’m sure some guy sleeping on a steam vent would appreciate the wasted energy on that one.

These bits of wit make their way into government parlance because some non-essential pantload in the bowels of the bureaucracy assembles a team to spend inordinate amounts of time (and therefore, your tax dollars) playing with words. The team holds meetings and sets milestones. They seek out common terms, make remarkably stupid changes, like “justice-involved person” and then spend the next year or so producing a 50 page report outlining the brilliance behind it all.

When constructing a bill, the poor bastard writing it says, “Well, we paid for this ‘justice-involved’ shit. We might as well use it.”

Besides being vastly overpaid, the pantloads reward is their new terminology being included in abortions like the recent CR proposal. The pantload has nailed his name in the pages of history. Yeah, the experiencing homeless thing? Yeah, that was me. It’s like Clark Griswold and his non-nutritive cereal varnish. It’s non-osmotic.

There are silly strike and replace entries all over this document. If it passed, or if any of it goes through, some goof ball is going to have to go through all the records and paste “individual facing homelessness” and “jusice involved persons”.

The common evolution of language is to be for concise and easily communicated. Who is helped by these stupid word games?

The Musk Factor

I am hearing talking heads especially Lefties getting the vapors because Elon Musk was involved in the “negotiations” over this bill. I know why the Lefties are getting loose stools about that. But, I have a problem with it for reason those same Lefties couldn’t possible grasp. And this is an old saw at the P4B.

Some decades ago, about the time School House Rock was teaching little kids valid civics lessons, DC politicians in both parties and in the Legislative and Executive branch completely forgot their civics lessons.

There is no guidance in the Constitution that says the White House and Congressional Leadership will “negotiate” what is to become legislation. There is no guidance in the constitution that says the whatever garbage these elites come away with will then be voted up or down by people who haven’t had the time to read or debate it.

In order to get our country back the following MUST happen. And you the voter, through emails, phone calls but especially SNAIL MAIL, must insist on it. All spending MUST originate in the House of Representatives. There will be no “negotiating” with outside parties the contents of the bill. Outside parties are here defined as the Senate or the Executive Branch.

The Senate then considers the bill. THEY TOO allow real time for debate. They come up with their version of the bill. Any disagreements are worked out in conference before the final version is sent to the White House for signature or veto. At no time does the Senate negotiate the contents of the bill with the White House.

Try to grasp this. These two branches of government are intended to be civil participants on an adversarial relationship. They are not legislative partners. The president can certainly put his finger on the scale, stating publicly that he would love to see X or that he will absolutely veto Y. Legislators can save time by telling the White House, publicly to not expect such and such a bill. But the grunt work is all done internally.

I’ve had people say that this would take too much time. We’re in a fast-moving world. We have to get the shit done!

Don’t be stupid. Do you think these knuckleheads are setting land speed records doing what they are doing now? They can’t even pass an annual budget! They are spending all their time negotiating and currying favor with cronies. MAKE THEM DO THEIR GODDAMN JOBS!!!

Here’s a crazy idea!

Instead of these costly and opaque spending boondoggles being thrown out there every few months, how about congress, especially the House DO their jobs and pass a real budget. That, along with oversight as to how the money is spent, is your only fucking job!

And no earmarks at all. Right now there are rules for adding the worthless shit to legislation. We need to kill those immediately. If Podunk, Arkansas wants a museum to feature exotic bicycle parts, they can fund it - or they can’t have it. I know the citizens of Florida shouldn’t be funding it.

If your state is sucker enough to give your taxpayer money, well… that’s none of my business, no matter how stupid the idea is. And it’s none of Virginia’s business.

As a starting point for a clean budget, I suggest you start with whatever our budget for EVERYTHING was in 2019...