Consistent with my fair and balanced posting history ......
Stage of Fools
Published: March 3, 2009
WASHINGTON
Maureen Dowd
If only Shakespeare had known how to Twitter.
There was a bit of King Lear in the scene on the Senate floor, a stormy, solitary John McCain on “this great stage of fools,” as the Bard wrote, railing against both parties and the president in fiery speeches and rapid-fire tweets.
“He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath,” the Fool told Lear.
And he’s truly mad that trusts in the promise of a presidential candidate to quell earmarks.
The 72-year-old senator who seemed hopelessly 20th century when he confessed during the campaign that he didn’t know how to use a computer or send an e-mail has now mastered the latest technology fad, twittering up a twizzard to tweak his former rival.
Before the Senate resoundingly defeated a McCain amendment on Tuesday that would have shorn 9,000 earmarks worth $7.7 billion from the $410 billion spending bill, the Arizona senator twittered lists of offensive bipartisan pork, including:
• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. “quick peel me a grape,” McCain twittered.
• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex.
• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa.
• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.
• $819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama.
• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi.
• $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas. (McCain, a devotee of Vegas and gambling, must really be against earmarks if he doesn’t want to “sustain” Vegas.)
• $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.”
• $167,000 for the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles. “Hopefully for a Back in the Saddle Again exhibit,” McCain tweeted sarcastically.
• $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii. “During these tough economic times with Americans out of work,” McCain twittered.
• $200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.
• $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia.
“When do we turn off the spigots?” Senator McCain said in his cri de coeur on the Senate floor. “Haven’t we learned anything? Bills like this jeopardize our future.”
In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.
He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.
“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.
He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.
Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.
Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.
On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.
But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.
It includes $38.4 million of earmarks sponsored or co-sponsored by President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis; $109 million Hillary Clinton signed on to; and $31.2 million in earmarks sought by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood with colleagues.
(Even Barack Obama was listed as one of the co-sponsors of a $7.7 million pet project for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions until he got his name taken off last week.)
And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.
Blame it on the stars, Rahm, or on old business. But as Shakespeare wrote in “Lear”: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our own disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars.”
Replies to: Consistent with my fair and balanced posting history ......
It really is the stuff of Tragic Comedy... or just plain Tragedy
On the heels of Obama's and the Democrats' victory, a clean bill for America at this pivotal time would engender goodwill that would have a long tail - longer than tossing candy to the crying children. Instead, Obama and the Democrat Congress opts for the "we had better take it now while we can" model. Even my most liberal friends are unhappy and scratching their heads.
The leadership self-implosion cycle continues....
It comes down tom the fact
that this is Nancy Pee's plan and O.B. didn't have the B's to go head to head with her
Spot on
He has ceded control of the budget and 'stimulus' plan to Reid and Pelosi. He's stil in campaign mode. Lead, for God's sake!
Pelosi and Reid aren't about to accept a pulled pork sandwich.
What leadership experience will Obama draw upon?
Editing the Harvard Law Review? Or organizing the community cupcake sales?
Pelosi had his stones measured a long time ago. They're in a felt pouch in her back pocket.
Re:omit the m
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Editable subject lines.
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I was miffed that they cut my pet pork amendment, a barrel full of monkeys, for the policeman's ball
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This can't be true
Tom Hynes told us BO was a man of his word, and Tom is always right. But since it's 'only' $7B+, I guess it's only a small lie, right?
"In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.
He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday."
I'm sure Barry just forgot to pack his "scalpel" back in Chicago...
That doesn't excuse the fact that he could probably just borrow one of Rahm's coke razors.
Just one man's suggestion.
Oh man....
when you get to the "white" house you don't need no razors! The stuff comes combed and raked. Bush liked his with spoons, silver spoons.
Hmmm, seems like I need to consider a career in politics.
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Agreed that these are absurd. But they are also a small portion of the bill....
...and no different than the pork that the GOP put on during its reign - and puts on now. About 40% of the porky business is from Republicans, as I understand it.
It is just the cost of doing business in Washington. Consider it a tax on the stimulus - there is no chance anything would pass without the pork tax, which these days is around 10%.
And to re-emphasize, I don't like these additions either. But almost 40% of the bill is tax cuts, and much of the rest is stimulative (hopefully) in one way or another.
...and no different than the pork that the GOP put on during its reign - and puts on now.
Tom, the old "everyone is doing it" doesn't get it. It's time we stop being Democrats dissing on the Republicans and Republicans dissing on the Democrats and start being honest Americans while we still have part of America left!! As a yellow dog Independent I can agree with you that the Republicans have tried to out democrat the Democrats. Now where does that get us??? STOP IT!!!! Democrats ... STOP IT!! Republicans ... STOP IT!!! Get your heads together and start doing what you know is good for America and to hell with doing what is good for the party!!!
McCain was not the man for the job, but neither is Obama! Up to this point the guy's administration is a train wreck!! Known and admitted tax dodgers and lobbyists for cabinet appointees after all the campaign rhetoric! If they have one clue about what to do to help the economy they've sure kept it well concealed.
Enough about how fucking small they are. It's $7 billion of bullshit Obama promised to veto.
And he didn't bat an eyelash while breaking that promise in the first damn budget bill he signed. If it was so small and inconsequential (which $7 billion isn't btw), then he should have told Congress to get rid of it. It's our money, not their little pet project piggy bank.
Not sure you know how government works, AngryInNJ
There is no way to veto that $7 billion. There is no line-item veto. There is also no way to get senators to go along unless you buy them off - you may remember it from your civics classes as "log-rolling."
(If the pork is only $7 billion - or less than 1% of the bill - it would be miraculous. It is probably 10 times that.)
Thus it has always has been; thus it will always be.
Wouldn't want to send a message by vetoing the whole thing I guess.
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I'm almost certain I read somewhere that Obama was going to change the way Washington did business.
I swear I did. I even think it may have been a campaign slogan.
New Obama slogan: Hope, but no change.
Hope will disappear shortly too.
for anyone with a brain
there was never hope.
AngryInNJ has a nice ring to it.
I'm not quite sure that you are pulling off the white heat rage than I am, but it's a start.
I think...
I'll signify that AngryinNJ is in the house by writing in red, which is much angrier than your pussified green.
Fuck off, asshole,
rage green is just the first stage of my anger. You had better hope that you never run into me when I start posting in dark orange...or God forbid, dark puke, orange.
My post has nothing to do w/ this thread
...but I just love the fact that we can post things like 'Fuck off, asshole' on this board.
You mean that orange shit they pour over vomit in schools?
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Yes, the stuff that somehow makes the puke smell worse.
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Only if your'e Catholic schooled
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...or Baptist schooled....
...the difference being that in Catholic school, they slap you with a ruler if you say the orange shit stinks. In Baptist school, they punch you in the face 5 times and make you eat a bar of soap. At least that has been my experience.
The Jesuits make you stay for weekend "JUG".
Posted at 9:23 pm on Mar 4, 2009
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Link: The Beauty of JUG
From 5th thru 8th grade, I was in a group of fine, young lads responsible for maintaining the
convent grounds. Sometimes those broads even fabricated claims against us if they needed their lawn furniture painted or leaves raked. I'm told we were supposed to learn from those experiences, and I did. I learned that even a nun can get carried away when placed in a position of power.
I went to a Jesuit college and the only Jugs I experienced were on the ladies.
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So you didn't experience the "pleasure" of...
Posted at 9:30 pm on Mar 4, 2009
...being handed a pair of garden shears and "instructed" to trim the grass around the entire building, by hand? (ya' know...the grass that the lawnmower missed)
JUG a.k.a Justice Under God.
Are you kidding me?
My dad made me do that twice a week...after he punched me in the face 5 times and made me eat a bar of soap.
BTW, my weed eater broke 2 years ago. Being that I'm too cheap to buy another one, I've been using my wife's cutlery sheers to trim my lawn ever since.
I do hope that, like me, you brushed your teeth first...
Posted at 9:41 pm on Mar 4, 2009
...because after about 20 feet of trimming, despite switching hands, you cannot squeeze a tube of toothpaste.
I do have a pretty strong grip...
although, I suppose it's possible that my dad and I are better mowers than the groundskeeper at your school.
Perhaps, but....
Posted at 10:08 pm on Mar 4, 2009
....I'd like to see how close to the brick wall you can cut with one of these...
Hope, can you spare some change?
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Thanks for explaining the unconstitutionality of the line-item veto. There remains a "veto" though.
The guy has enormous approval ratings and the country by the balls. Those ratings would have skyrocketed if he stood up to Congress and threatened to veto any bill with earmarks. Instead, he took it up the ass like a scared little bitch and now he looks like a hypocritical blowhard (appropriately enough, I believe).
Good points.
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$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi?
I'd do that job pro bone-o...
"Just dam"!
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wasn't this john edward's .... ahem.... pet project?
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