THE KISS OF DEATH

I agree with Senator Paul and asking for a debate is not a step too far in a political process designed to incorporate unity by compromise and negotiation. This is going to leave a mark.

CNN is the enemy and everybody who matters knows it. Having them blow your horn in fake triumphant peals proclaiming you the moral victor in an argument spells both legislative and political defeat.

DENIZENS OF THE NETHER WORLD

I was reading along and ran across this:

In the few areas where Trump conceivably differed from his 16 primary Republican rivals—immigration, trade, and foreign policy—the 20th-century Republican/conservative orthodoxy was actually closer to Trump’s positions than to those of recent Republican nominees, John McCain or Mitt Romney.

I kind of like the sound of it but I mislaid the link. President Trump was not the candidate coughed up by a corrupt Party apparatus, he was the guy who went toe to toe again and again against some real heavy-weight rethuglican party powers and he kicked their asses.

People didn't just choose to elect the chief thuglican after a knife fight. There was one party of ideas that spilled out of 16 candidates and there is this other party of two ideas with just the 1 candidate. As a side note, Bernie was the Socialist Party running as a democrat. 

Hillary was a velociraptor in a pantsuit and behaved like it. 60 million people, not necessarily Americans, voted for the velociraptor. And still all them wonder just what kind of thug wouldn't vote for a velociraptor in a pantsuit.

It's kind of scary, John Kerry or slimyJoe Biden could have won that race and be the president now. How grotesquely awful was Hillary, the nominee of her corrupt regime, her corrupt Party apparatus, her corrupt media and the corrupt grabby Hollywood powers, that she couldn't scare enough people into voting for her, or, more honestly, steal the election with the invisible voter fraud that doesn't exist?

I see Congressman John Conyers (D-Corruption/Judiciary Committee) used our money to pay off the women he harassed for decades. How bloody typical. 

"No, no Miss Amway, we didn't use 'your' tax dollars to buy a bomber. We gave your tax dollars to the countless women who accused democratic congressmen of harassing them, for the public good that was in it."

I used to have a job that required me to know the federal budget inside out. I used THOMAS.GOV all the time and I still hardly ever find the actual money appropriation I needed. Still, those Congressional @ssholes probably hid the budget line for paying off harassment and rape claims in the black budget, which wasn't in THOMAS.

On the other hand, if you want to get angry at something else, there's always the incredible F-35.

WAR LIKE NO OTHER

Almost 3 years ago, Pew Research put together an interesting little graphic that purports to show the increasing radicalism of Congress and dearth of centrists/moderates. If you look at the short article and even the comments to it, there are some interesting insights into the nature of the country's wars over the last 50 years.

Under Nixon, it was readily apparent to all Americans that the United States was at war and a very brutal war in a meaningless place for insufficient reasons to justify the lives and well-being of the men we drafted and sent off to fight that war. Congress consisted in large part of members of the Greatest Generation and they still tended to act like a representative democracy which sought to make reasoned arguments for and against policy, law, and war.

Under Reagan/Bush, the country was once again manifestly locked in a war. It was the endgame of the Reagan determined end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR on terms all parties could find bearable. There was less agreement on policy and law but the mindset on nationalism was basically unchanged since Nixon's time. The Cold War, the missile gap, the ABM and IRBM Treaties and SALT issue weighed heavily on the minds of the legislators. They were people like Sam Nunn.

Under Obama the country was obviously not at war and had no intention of being at war and 100% of the majority party was opposed to the war. We all basically opposed the war as it finally had sunk in that we were pouring American lives and treasure into a sewer from which nothing good could be saved and an area and country which will never recover until the 'strongmen' take power again after more blood has been spilled than anybody can imagine.

We also aren't at war with islam or terrorists and even that war on drugs tapered off as everybody started to look at how stupid that rigged game was playing out. In the end, the only war both parties admitted to was the war on poverty. The voting record shows it. Both parties have radically different notions of how to fight that war.

One of the things I make out of that graph is that the flight of reasonableness began when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi slammed the door on any legislation that was not purely politically driven to enhance only democrats. In short, there was absolutely no 'upside' for any republican to vote with the majority on increasingly radical and insane notions put to vote by the leaders of the House and Senate and the republicans in the House all knew it. It was the 'elected representatives of the people in the Senate' that figured they could still compromise and get away with some comprise because they don't get reelected every 2 years and their political philosophy has always been, devil take the hindmost. Almost all of the legislation enacted under Obama is destructive to the United States and the record shows it.

I am wracking my brain trying to think what issue, presented to me by Pelosi or Reid, that there possibly could be, which I would vote for. I'm not having much luck finding a single one. Those two and Obama, did to politics in this country, what the Gracchi did to Rome and what Cato did to Carthage.

Collapse of Empire - Thomas Cole

ALL THEY HAD TO DO TO SAVE THEMSELVES

I overheard NPR yesterday while driving and, ok, I admit, I tuned to NPR like I used to and listened to Terry Gross and an official of the local Case Western Reserve University discuss how the Republic came to have somebody like Donald Trump as the Republican nominee this year for President. Neither one of them even came close to figuring out why we got Trump. The guy from Case kept bleating about how conservatives disdain Trump almost as much as 'we' do and said even Fox News hates the guy and the only real voice of advocacy he ever had is that horrible, awful, disgusting, mean Ann Coulter, who, he said, was the first to announce that Trump would win and she did that the second he threw his hat in the ring.

Naturally they had to blow off Ann as an idiot troll of the first water and neither of them spent even a second contemplating that perhaps Ann Coulter has a way better handle on what the people of the rest of the country are feeling about politics then any of the talking heads, pundits, politicians or media clowns. She's a populist who knows what real people think. Yeah, she's figured out democrats but she is unique in having figured out what the Tea Party is. It was a movement, not a Party and the movement remained strong and vital even after the media drove a stake through the heart of the Party.

The Republican leadership put Trump where he is today. We the People elected them and elected them to serve us. We gave them an overwhelming majority in the House and the Senate and what did the Republican leadership do with that majority? Nothing. Not a damned thing. They didn't lift a finger to repeal ObamaCare and they didn't lift a finger to rein in the out of control Executive agencies like the IRS or EPA or DOJ.  THEY DID NOTHING.

We tried to express how deeply unhappy we were with this state of affairs when the voters of Ohio repudiated John Boehner, the actual Speaker of the House, and kicked his slimy worthless ass out of Congress because he never did a single damned thing for us. Would you believe that none of the rest of those scumbags got the message? The majority of the voters had to signify their contempt for business-as-usual Rethuglicans and kick them to curb by voting Trump.

You know what the rethuglicans actually in Congress had to do right? It isn't hard. They merely had to put up a fight on our behalf the way the democrats fight on behalf of their masters. I guarantee that Boehner would have remained in office and the Rethuglicans would have been overwhelminingly voted for by a pleased group of GOP voters if they had voted to repeal ObamaCare. No, they didn't have the numbers to overcome a presidential veto but that isn't the point. They never understood that so they never even tried.

If the House had voted to repeal ObamaCare and slashed 50% funding from DOJ, IRS and EPA it would have sent a message. If Mitchell had copied Reid and simply used the nuclear option on Cloture and the Senate voted to follow the House then we would have "our" representatives doing what 'we' elected them to do but they couldn't be bothered. Mitchell wouldn't retaliate with a nuke or two of his own and Boehner wouldn't take to a vote anything that wasn't veto proof. Well, sucks to be them.

If they had played honestly with us, we would have entertained the idea of electing one of their 'wise old birds' but they didn't. They should have passed a repeal bill every single time Obama left the country on one of his vacations or boondoggles. They should have put him and the rest of the democrats on record again and again as supporting that abortion known as the Affordable Care Act where people are now required by law to pay whatever the price is irregardless of the service or details in order to get health care insurance even if it is now a monopoly in their state and only one company offers a plan that meets the law's requirements.

We'll never know if that would have brought out the voters for a Cruz or Rubio because the elected Rethuglicans who actually sit in Congress didn't lift a finger to act like the Representatives of the people who sent them there.

A TRICKY LITTLE DEVIL

Andrew Klavan gets the warheads on foreheads. A lot of conservatives drop the ball when they speak about the Speaker. They miss the subtle underlying sharkness. Boehner and McConnell play the Congress like Yo Yo Ma plays the fiddle or something.

You can’t get more anti-government than Ayn Rand, so here’s Jack Wakeland writing from an Objectivist perspective on the sequester Boehner stuffed down the president’s throat: “The sequester is the only policy that has reduced spending by the federal government. In fiscal year 2013, total federal spending decreased 1.5% to 2.0% in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. And it promises to do so again in 2014. The FY 2013 sequester is the first time in my lifetime that federal spending shrank in absolute terms. After the ramp-down from WWII, the only decreases in federal spending were decreases as a percentage of GDP, e.g., during the Clinton-Gingrich term in 1995-96. These occurred only because GDP expanded more quickly than spending.”

You never read about it in the press because they are the ones most often spitted and roasted by happy warriors on the rethuglican side.

MEDIA MOUTHBREATHERS

I have to say that I've lost my faith in the media. Their senility, dementia and rabid partisanship are crowding out all reference to reality. David Ignatius sucks.

Let's say it plainly: This is how nations lose their power and influence, when they are unable to agree even on basic matters such as diplomatic representation. The decision-making system breaks down, and the public is too bored or disunited to take action. Sadly, that's a snapshot of America in 2014.

I think the Republicans willingness to work with democrats snapped when Obama and Hillary Clinton left our ambassador to Libya to be captured, raped and killed by their peaceful muslim friends from the Brotherhood, or al Quida or ISIS. And I'm not sure anymore about how the Senate works after the Democrat Senate Majority Leader used a nuke to destroy the Senate Rules of generations that ripped away any need for Republican participation in the Senate Nomination and Approval process in a contemptible way so that Harry Reid and Obama could simply shove any nominees down the country's throat without a single vote from the Republican minority.

From judicialnominations.org, how-the-confirmation-process-works

6)     If any Senator objects to unanimous consent, then a cloture motion must be filed in order to end debate and move to a vote.  Cloture motions for judicial and executive nominations require 51 votes to pass.  If 51 Senators support cloture, the full Senate will vote on the nomination, with a majority required for confirmation.  If fewer than 51 Senators support cloture, debate continues and a confirmation vote cannot occur.  This is known as a filibuster. Prior to the November 2013 Senate rules change, all cloture motions required 60 votes to pass. Now, only cloture motions for legislation and nominees to the Supreme Court require 60 votes.

What do you say about a main stream media Washington inside scumbag who doesn't know what the President and Harry Reid did when they rammed through the nuclear option that destroyed any sense of comity between the democrats and the republicans? This Congressional Research Report explains the process that exists now for all nominees:

The question before the Senate when a nomination is called up is “will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination?” Only a majority of Senators present and voting, a quorum being present, is required to approve a nomination. Because nominations are vulnerable to filibusters, however, in the past a higher level of support has been necessary. Cloture may be invoked to place limits on further consideration of a nomination. In November 2013, the Senate (majority)* reinterpreted Rule XXII in order to allow a majority of Senators voting to invoke cloture on nominations other than to the Supreme Court. In the absence of unanimous consent, bringing a nomination to a vote could still require a multi-day cloture process, but with the exception of Supreme Court Justices it will no longer require the support of three-fifths of the Senate (typically 60 Senators). 

The problem that rethuglicans have is that there are so many media partisans who conveniently ignore the facts or simply make up their own. Many of them are members of the ultra-left wing journolist scandal.

The facts are clear to anyone except an extreme left winger like Ignatius. Democrats could have confirmed 100%  of all of Obama's nominees by now if they wanted to. They gave the simple majority of the quorum the right to do so and there have always been more democrat senators than republican since the last Congress of the United States.

 It speaks volumes that they cannot get even a single rethuglican to go along with voting for many of the nominees held up and most especially for the State Department and Justice who have stonewalled every minute of the day since 9/11/2012.

*I added the word 'majority'

WHAT THE NSA DOES

An interesting and informative summary of all of the revelations about NSA spying revealed by Snowden.  Remember the days of long ago when people laughed out loud at paranoiacs who raved about ECHELON and OMNIVORE? The funny thing to me is that people still don't believe that the NSA spies on everybody.

Our Representatives were supposed to keep on eye on the spies in our name

THE AWESOME SECRET OF THE NSA

It is now well known that the National Security Agency hoovers up every scrap of digital information in the world. Its probes and sensors are collecting everything from your cell phone calls to your baby monitor. It delves deeply into every single computer information system, network and cloud.

We never hear about NSA computers crashing because they were suddenly infected with a virus.

I wonder how many times over the years various news networks have been approached by some shadowy figure saying he worked for the NSA and knew what happened to Amelia Earheart and her plane, or knew Obama's GPA at all the schools he attended but got brushed off by the likes of Dan Rather. Now the hackers know to take the scoop to sock puppets instead of fake news outfits like CBS.

The NSA can get away with anything it wants because there is no oversight and no limit on their activities. I laughed out loud when I heard this referred to on the radio this morning and then read the news:

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that the CIA searched the panel's computers and that the search may have violated the Constitution.

"The CIA just went and searched the committee's computers," California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a lengthy speech on the Senate floor, calling the the matter a "defining moment" for the oversight of the Intelligence Committee.

"I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied by the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause," she said. "It may have undermined the Constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activity or any other government function."

 Gee Dianne, do you think?

RACIST DEMOCRATS VOTE AGAINST OBAMA NOMINEE

I couldn't be more shocked.  Senator Reid hinted that it was time for Reeducation Camps and additional stern measures to weed out this cancer of mindless opposition to the ruling party's decrees before  heading home to feed poor Republican children to his pet crocodiles.

WELCOME TO THE BANANA REPUBLIC

One man making the law for everybody. Unelected bureaucrats deciding to create trillion dollar entitlements in furtherance of their own twisted desires and ambition. It's looking more and more like we got the reincarnation of Hugo Chavez running this bizarre regime.

It would be nice if the lawmakers took some action to rein in the monster they created and also fire about half of the executive branch by defunding them. I'm OK with another sequester fight and war to the knife over the debt ceiling.

WANNA SEE SOME RACISM?

President Obama has made a few judicial nominations that are not meeting with universal approval. No doubt he campaigned on this and will simply appoint them in spite of Congress the next time they recess for lunch or the evening or the weekend if he's feeling really patient about putting up with Congressional intransigence.

Georgia Rep. David Scott (D), said he approached Jarrett about two nominees in particular: one who once supported a state bill to keep the Confederate battle emblem a part of Georgia’s flag, and another who led the defense of the state’s photo ID law, which Scott claims is a statute designed “to keep black folks, as much as possible, from voting.”

I'm shocked that even a Congressman can get away with shouting that blacks are too stupid to get a free photo ID because Racist! You would think the great mass of liberal progressives would ride this jackass out of town on a rail for being so racist and slandering all blacks with this sort of vile stereotype.

The issue the Congressman has with the second nominee fails to surprise me. Just from reading the language the Hill used to describe the problem, it sounds like he was state solicitor or a state's attorney charged with both upholding and defending the laws of the state. He should be penalized for that because, why? Oh yeah, now I remember. This is the party that wanted every lawyer who ever agreed with Bush to be fired and jailed forever for thought crimes.

STUPID AND PREDICTABLE

I listened to NPR today and read the news and it looks like the media is once again in full cover and deception mode for the administration and allowing the President and all of his non-media spokesmen to lie their heads off about Healthcare.gov and how all the problems are fixed and its all better now and everything is good to go. They're lying.

It's amazing to me how they rely so deeply on the ignorant voters who pull the lever for stupidity every single time. The vile and odious thing is how the media is slavishly lapping it up and passing it along to the stupid when anybody with 2 brain cells can see what is going to happen next month. Millions of people lost their insurance because Obamacare made their insurance policies unlawful. The policies were canceled effective 31 December in accordance with the Democratic Party's Law.

In January, the people with no insurance who enrolled on Healthcare.gov for replacement insurance are going to find that the "backend" of the program never worked and that they DON'T have any insurance after all. The code failed to communicate the policies to the insurers. The government and media aren't just lying about how 4 diplomats were murdered in Libya in the dark. They're lying about millions and millions of people losing health insurance. As it becomes clear that the people who enrolled at the government's web site don't actually have policies it will come out.

I know why Obama is doing it. He's going to blame the insurance companies. I'm sure he's already got the speech written where he condemns the evil bastards for letting Americans twist in the wind without insurance because they are greedy.

ARE YOU A WITCH?

Democratic congressman unsure so he asks the Administrator of Obamacare at the IRS if she is a witch. Unwilling to take no for an answer he persevered and demanded to know if she has been consorting with the devil.

Rep. Gerry Connolly(D-VA) demands to know if she is a witch

I don't have to make this stuff up. These Democratic guys are a hoot.

WHAT TOXIC POLITICS MEANT TO SAY

One cannot listen to NPR in the 21st century without the air being polluted by their talk of toxic politics in Washington. They have guest after guest on who heaps criticism and spews hatred of Republicans for creating, operating and maintaining a toxic political atmosphere that keeps the good people of the People's Democratic Party from enacting more Constitution gutting legislation that takes away your rights and gives them all to bureaucrats. I'm heartily sick of it.

The underlying presumption of the pseudo-intellectuals at NPR is that government is about compromise and that all must compromise in order to achieve what the majority want. Maybe that's what it is to them. They, for instance, are enthusiastic supporters of Venezuala's king, dictator-for-life, tyrant president who has compromised with his opposition by looting them of all they have in the name of the people. You see the same thing in Argentina, Mozambique, South Africa, most of Europe and of course, right here. Some drank the acid of Marxism and others slurped up the idiocy of Keynesian economics and transformed it in vile ways and never a peep of complaint from the neo-falangists at NPR.

I'll throw in some analogies. Take them for what you will. How exactly was it beneficial for the States and Congress to compromise for so many decades on the issue of slavery? Those who opposed slavery did so out of sincere belief and those that favored slavery also acted out of sincere belief. We had from them the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Do you feel repulsed by that or should the nation have torn itself apart over States Rights in 1820?

The lowly state of weapons technology, limited manpower and the lack of railroads would have significantly reduced the number of casualties before the South burned Washington DC to the ground and declared victory. It's amusing to think that Andrew Jackson, the slave-owning President from Tennessee and founder of the Democratic Party, could have thrown the first torch into the White House. He never hesitated to shoot men with whom he could see no compromise and launched the Trail of Tears that sent a whole people into exile.

Slavery was a toxic issue upon which men compromised because Constitution. There are other life-defining issues that will not permit men of good conscience to seek compromise because Penumbras. You may put your own names to some of them but one with which I strongly agree is, no taxation without representation. It is utterly foreign to me how this country and most of the rest of the world have decided to saddle future generations with enormous debts that pay for the foolish blandishments of a today, none of which will last until tomorrow except the debts which look like they'll last forever.

Evolution of America   courtesy of wikipedia 



PS Look at the size of the original colonies and also the Indian Territory.

ESSENCE OF DECISION

When all is said and done it's important to remember that it was a liberal and a committed member of the Communist Party and a former Marine who assassinated President Kennedy and not just some conspiracy. The article written by a twit and published by the NYT is a rather pathetic blaze on the downward path of scholarly study and socialist intellectualism. It's hard to believe that its author is a Marshall scholar.

All day NPR has been talking with guests and amongst themselves about what a horrible Kennedy hating place Dallas was and yet the good citizens of Dallas did no more than say that they hated everything that man stood for and that is their right as citizens of this country. Honest disagreement out in the open. It took a liberal to shoot Kennedy in the back of the head.

On an ahistorical note: By today's liberal standards, John F. Kennedy would be considered the most extreme right-wing nutjob of all time by all American democrats everywhere. He was far to the right of Democrat icons such as John McCain and Barak Obama.

One of the common perceptions of the idea of military overkill that so infused the White House and its staff for the last 50 years has been the seminal book, Essence of Decision; Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It is a fascinating read and it was read by every student of government and politics that I know. I suspect that everybody working in any sort of foreign or military policy billet is familiar with the book.

The author delved into some of the reasoning that affected Kennedy's decision making process as the crisis developed. One that struck me was that Kennedy wanted the Pentagon to tell him what it would take to destroy the existing missile launchers already in Cuba and all the Pentagon could come up with was what looked like a full scale invasion involving half the Continental Army Command and a good bit of the Air Force.

Kennedy kept reiterating that all he wanted was to destroy the missiles and the Pentagon insisted that in order to do that they would first have to gain total air superiority and destroy the complete Cuban Air Force and all anti-aircraft sites and then the Army would have to parachute in and land over the beaches to confirm that all the missiles were actually destroyed by physical inspection.

It makes you wonder doesn't it? What if Kennedy's CIA had armed drones that he could fly over Cuba to target and destroy the missiles without troubling the generals that ran the Pentagon?

The book has been completely rewritten since I read it in 1981 and updated with information out of the Soviet archives. I think I'll read it again.

There is a lot of talk about how the Pentagon must have been fudging the numbers required to win the War on Terrorism in both Iraq and Afghanistan. People speculate that the military generals must have been inflating the numbers of troops and strength of material needed for the surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan because, they say, that's what generals do. There might be some truth to that. General Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, certainly thought that far more soldiers were required to win the war in Iraq than what Secretary Rumsfeld thought necessary. Shinseki could be said to have been both right and wrong. The number Rumsfeld authorized did the job in double-quick time and destroyed the Iraqi military and toppled the government of Saddam Hussein. It just wasn't enough to let Paul Bremer do every stupid trick of misgovernment and misrule since Tsar Nicholas II  and alienated an entire country against its benefactors and liberators which is pretty much what Shinseki thought would happen anyway.

When it comes to deciding what forces are required for winning a war and occupying the defeated enemy country I'll side with whatever number the generals come up with. I just wouldn't let them have anything like those kinds of numbers until we're actually in a real shooting war. It is patently ridiculous that the US Army needs over 450,000 soldiers absent a major land war.

I wrote all the above 14 hours ago and finished when I got home with the below.

CAN YOU BELIEVE the OBAMACARE jam-it-through-at midnight-on-Christmas-Eve-Democrats have finally pulled the trigger on the nuclear option that has been hanging like the sword of Damocles for decades now? I think they said they did it because Racism. The reliable socialists and democrats overwhelming the slim thuglican minority...again.

LIBRARY POLICE

America has come to this.

Look now for the Library Police Task Forces sweeping the land searching out and arresting people who are late returning overdue library books or who dared to unlock their cell phones. As you can see from the picture below, they carry street sweepers for your protection.

Library Police

                                                                                                               Photo by Digital DJ Network Japan.

BOILING PITCH, FEATHERS, RAIL

As you watch the debacle of Obamacare rolled out over an unwilling and incredulous population of the most credulous fools in history, consider the dilemma of the employers, many of whom voted for democrats because of their posturing and faux concern for other people's health care.

Health care costs for those self-insured above the poverty line are doubling and tripling thanks to obamacare. Think what will happen when the employers are forced to pay triple and quadruple the cost to insure their employees and their families next year. That's going to be ugly and the insurers that are holding on in the expectation that they can gouge the deeper pockets of small business are in for a rude awakening. That kind of money isn't there either.

All those foolish immortals who thought the democratic party had your best interests at heart when they tore apart the health insurance market but who were insured by their employers and didn't care what the Federal government did to you little people since they had insurance...well.

It's going to suck to be you next year when the employer mandate is kicked back in. Remember, obamacare passed without a single rethuglican vote in the House or Senate and thus included pure democratic party language unadulterated by reason or moderation and among that language was the escape clause that lets the employer pay a pittance of a fine if she tosses her people bodily into the healthcare.gov market place to seek their own insurance at no expense to the company.

Thanks for reliably voting for democrats and rinos.

AS SUBTLE AS A DIESEL LOCOMOTIVE

Earlier this month I wondered here on how the party of John McCain and Lindsey Graham would pull the ten-foot-long-blazing-sword of hate and loathing out of the Tea Party's back. They had done it before you know when the Tea Partiests had conspired to carry off both ears and the tail during the fiscal cliff negotiations of January 2013. The old grand dames of the Republican Party trilled in dismay at the upstart hostage takers of the extreme right wing and forced them to back off and play nice. The thing is of course, that the upstarts had very cleverly, and I do mean really extremely amazingly cleverly worked with the Senate minority leader and the concession they got for caving in and allowing the Budget Sequestration demanded by the President to take effect, was that the Bush Tax Cuts were made permanent and signed into law by the President.*

I thought that was absolutely brilliant legislative politics. There hasn't been anything that smooth for decades, right up until last week when the extreme right wing rethuglicans caved in to the enormous pressure of all right-thinking persons and unilaterally conceded defeat and bowed to the inevitable demands of the Senate and President and the People! Yay!  Vorwärts Marsch!  Obamacare uber alles!

You remember what the fight was about, right? All that tussling and closing down every national park in the country was because the thugs said that Obamacare was no more ready to implement the Individual Mandate than it was to implement the Employer Mandate. Now the President unilaterally decided to back off on implementing the Employer Mandate by executive fiat which is his right in any communist dictatorship run by the hard left.

Perhaps the airwaves are filled with the cries of, "I told you so!" from the likes of the people all right-thinking people love to hate, but I don't listen to that stuff either. It's stories like this lame bit of Sebelius that make me laugh. The conniptions of all of them as they scramble around trying to fix the unfixable can only get more disturbing. It's like watching an RMS Titanic repair crew racing up to the giant hole in the side of the ship with a little tub of spackle and a putty knife. It's going to be painful and cost some people everything they have and more.

I am amused by Reuters slant on the news today. Judge allows suit to go forward. Other news services pointed out that the judge did not simply dismiss the law suit as "settled." It appears that in amidst all that smoke there might be a little bit of flame that could end up burning down the whole house. Isn't it odd though that Obamacare was passed legislatively on a strict party line vote and yet only 16 states have set up the exchanges mandated for its implementation. The rest of the states decided to stick with NO. Odd that. You'd think a majority of States and thus Senators, didn't want this as law.

I just get a kick out of it all. The very best talking heads the democrats could buy/own talked themselves blue in the face demanding that Obamacare be implemented right the fuck now! But just for the little people. They didn't mean it should be implemented as written for both employers and individuals.

On balance, I think that if I was them? I'd feel like an idiot right about now.

They made a great desert and called it a garden and yet nothing grew there.

As I said at the beginning, I suspected that the Tea Partisans had a cunning plan to outwit the ponderous dull-witted House of Reid and Pelosi but I had no idea at how elegantly simple their Machiavellian thinking would turn out. They threw up what they knew could only ever be a temporary roadblock to a really crappy piece of legislation knowing that they would have to cave in when the reliable stormtroopers known hereabouts as the Democratic Ministry of Truth locked on. I had no idea that their master stroke was simply going to be to bow politely, take one step back and allow the whole train to rush by and over the cliff to its doom. Congratulations guys! I couldn't have done that better myself.

Makes me wonder how many of those program managers for the health.gov site went down on their knees every night just before bedtime and begged God for one more week of rethuglican intransigence because they knew it wouldn't work. Oh yes. They knew.