The Coming and Going of the Democrats’ $1,300,000,000,000 Omnibus Bill

It was good to see a bit of Republican presence in the Senate today when Harry Reid’s pork-stinking

$1,300,000,000,000 Omnibus was forced into the dump    The pork in the proposed budget bill was revealing for its exposure of the BIG TIME REPUBLICAN SPENDERS,  upon whom Senator Reid depended to slip another Obama spending spree throught the Senate.  He claimed he had nine votes,  Olympia Snow, Susan Collins of Maine, and Bob Bennett of Utah apparently among them.

Brian Faler at Bloomberg writes a little more about the drama:

“Lawmakers are patching together a temporary spending bill to avert a government shutdown after Republicans killed a $1.2 trillion “omnibus” measure that was loaded with the pet projects known as earmarks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid abandoned the omnibus bill yesterday after several Republicans he had been counting on withdrew their support for the plan, which would have funded government programs and agencies through Sept. 30, 2011. The Nevada Democrat said lawmakers would instead write a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, though he didn’t say how long it would last.

The House today approved, by voice vote, legislation that would keep the government running until Dec. 21 while lawmakers negotiate a longer-term extension. Several hours later, the Senate agreed by unanimous consent to approve the resolution. A stopgap measure currently funding the government expires tomorrow.

The moves mean that federal agencies could go roughly halfway through their 2011 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, before updated budgets are approved. Another stopgap measure also would set the stage for a spending fight early next year between President Barack Obama’s administration and Republicans, who will control the House in the new Congress and who have promised to slash spending by $100 billion.

Competing Timetables

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration prefers a continuing resolution that would fund the agencies for the duration of the government’s fiscal year. Reid said yesterday that he doesn’t have the votes for that, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants the funding extended only through Feb. 18.

The decision to pull the omnibus measure was a victory for Republicans, who lined up against the bill even though most had included in it funding for projects in their home states. Republicans complained they were only given days to consider the 1,924-page measure, which was introduced Dec. 14.

Reid “doesn’t have the votes, and the reason he doesn’t have the votes is because members on this side of the aisle increasingly felt concerned about the way we do business,” said McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.

“For many of our members, it was not so much the substance of the bill but the process” that spurred opposition, he said.

‘Great, Great Victory’

Critics of earmarks hailed the bill’s defeat. “This is a great, great victory for the American people,” said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican. “I want to thank those that made the calls, those that sent e-mails, those that stood up and called into the talk shows all over America and said, ‘We’ve had enough.’”

Democrats, who control the Senate with 58 votes, needed to pick up the support of at least three Republicans to overcome stalling tactics after Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, announced her opposition to the bill.

Utah Republican Senator Bob Bennett had announced he would support the measure, while Ohio Republican George Voinovich had said he was leaning toward backing it. Both lawmakers leave office when the new Congress convenes in early January.

Reid said last night that though he had been counting on support from as many as nine Republicans, “in the last 24 hours, they’ve walked away.” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat, said Republicans sank a bill they had helped write and after his colleagues dropped billions from the measure to meet their demands to reduce spending.

‘Hypocrite’ Charge

The earmark issue prompted sharp debate among lawmakers, with Reid calling Republicans hypocrites for threatening to torpedo the omnibus bill while failing to rescind earmarks they included in it.

“If you went to ‘H’ in a dictionary and found ‘hypocrite,’ under that would be people who ask for earmarks but vote against them,” he told reporters.

All but a handful of lawmakers in both parties had requested about $8 billion in earmarks in the bill. McConnell had secured more than $100 million in such projects, according to the Washington-based budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The derailing of the omnibus bill, which included about $160 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also included a food-safety measure, is the latest in a series of breakdowns this year in the congressional budgeting process. Democrats failed to approve an annual tax-and-spending blueprint or any of the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund agencies for the 2011 fiscal year.

“There’s no more basic work than the funding of the government — that’s the first thing we ought to be doing,” McConnell said. “As a result of not doing the basic work of government, here we are, at the end, struggling with this issue.”

Will Republicans Outwimp Obama in 2011-2012? Dick Morris Reports

Moving to the center is not a two-dimensional process. It has a third dimension — the difference between strength and weakness. In the course of coming in from the cold of his extreme far-left positions, the president looks like a wimp, abandoning his long-held views in the face of electoral defeats, adverse court rulings, recalcitrant Democrats and strong, united Republican opposition.

And wimps don’t win.

When Bill Clinton moved to the center, he arrived in triumph. After vanquishing the Republican Congress during the government shutdown of 1995-96, he agreed to a balanced-budget deal with Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. But it was his deal, along his lines, on his principles. When he signed a welfare reform bill, he did so after beating back and vetoing two Republican bills that coupled reform with harsh cuts to Medicaid. After he got a bill on his own terms, he signed it.

Barack Obama’s “compromise” with the Republicans over the Bush tax cuts is no more of a compromise than was the deal Emperor Hirohito cut with Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the deck of the battleship Missouri after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a surrender, not a compromise. It was submission, not triangulation.Obama is checkmated as long as Republicans hold firm, challenge him on solid grounds anchored in public opinion and remain united. He can either lose the election of 2012 because he is an obstinate ideologue who won’t compromise and won’t abandon his socialist principles or he can lose it because he does surrender and is too weak to be president.He does not have a third option — winning the budget fights and winning reelection — as long as the Republicans properly mount their challenge, because public opinion, the essential element for victory, is not with him.

 

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Americans want spending cuts, not tax increases

• Americans believe that cutting spending is more important even than cutting the deficit (see Rasmussen)

• Americans oppose ObamaCare

• Americans are against letting the Environmental Protection Agency impose carbon dioxide restrictions without consulting Congress.

• Americans are against unilateral National Labor Relations Board action to eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.

• Americans oppose earmarks

• Americans do not want the Federal Communications Commission to limit or censor talk radio.

These are the grounds for our battles in 2011-2012. It is on this turf that the Republican House majority must fight. The fearful “moderate” Democratic senators will cave in. And then Obama will be forced to surrender because the Force — public opinion — is not with him. You can govern by ignoring what Americans think if you have a majority. But not if you don’t.

And with each surrender — over his desire to raise the debt limit without mandated spending cuts, over his support for bailing out states in trouble, and over his demand to raise taxes in the 2012 budget — Obama will get weaker and weaker.

His inability to fight and win the war on terror and his choice to become mired in Afghanistan with no real plan for winning will contribute to the image of weakness.

In 2012, he will face America denuded of all the programs he passed in 2009-2010, with an economy only slightly improved but with at least 7-8 percent unemployment, and with a manifest inability to measure up to the job of president.

Most presidents face a challenge of weakness. With Eisenhower, it was his refusal to stand up to Joe McCarthy. With Kennedy, it was his inability to pass legislation. With Nixon, it was his inability to get ahead of the Watergate scandal. With Ford, it was his helplessness in the face of inflation. With Carter, it was the hostage crisis. With Reagan, it was his failure to control the Iran-Contra affair. With Bush-41, it was his passivity on the economy. With Clinton, it was the flip-flopping early in his presidency. With Obama, it will be his retreat in the face of the Republican counterattack of 2011.

 Dear Mr. Morris:  You have missed the boat with your sentence regarding Eisenhower’s challenge from Joseph McCarthy.  Eisenhower was never weakened by anything Joseph R. McCarthy poked at him.  The moment Ike became president in January, 1952, the McCarthy era was on its way down hill.  Eisenhower was never in trouble with the voters.  Both presidential campaigns were landslides.   McCarthy was finished by 1956, having been found out as a nut during the Army-McCarthy trials. 

GOP Group Organizing to Oppose Republican Senators Supporting START

Can anyone name an area where this president, Barack Hussein Obama, has not weakened a vital pillar of American strength?

Most Americans don’t know what START is……the START which is stirring anger among many Repblican citizens.   START is a treaty with the new Soviet Union…..called Russia.  Vladimir Putin is the Stalin of our day…..and compared to this Monster of the Moscow Midway for thirty years, he is angelic.

He is the dictator in charge of today’s Russia.  He used to star in the K.G.B. the Soviet Secret Police.   It is reported that this Putin government is in reality the old KGB in its bureaucratic  makeup. 

There is nearly universal agreement that the present Russian government is not different from any of the past seventy years….it is not to be trusted.

Marxist Obama believes strongly in weakening the American nuclear arsenal and its weapons capability in general.   Reasons for his motives can be debated.   Marxists rarely move  themselves to speaking truths.  He sees himself as a peacenik…..so this might be enough to put the country which he is supposed to lead, at risk.

According to my understanding of this START treaty, America gets absolutely nothing from any agreement for backtracking from our systems to defend ourselves. 

The following is an article by Scott Conroy at RealClearPolitics about some GOP resistance to START:

“A prominent conservative political action committee is vowing to defeat any Republican senator who votes to ratify the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia in the lame-duck session of Congress.

The National Republican Trust PAC is making its pledge in a letter that was obtained by RealClearPolitics before it was set to be delivered on Friday afternoon.

In the letter, the PAC’s executive director Scott Wheeler writes to National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Sen. John Cornyn and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele that the group is “fully committed” to defeating any GOP senator that votes for ratification during the lame-duck session.

“We as a country cannot allow our national defense to be greatly undermined by a President and members of a lame duck Congress who are hell-bent on redistributing America’s military advantage because of their bizarre belief that the US lacks the moral authority to be the world’s lone superpower,” the letter says. “Republicans cannot and must not participate in the sell out of our national defense merely because of political pressures applied to them by an extremist President and a liberal media.”

In the letter, Wheeler goes on to write that the group will recruit primary challengers and “will be singular in the purpose” of defeating pro-ratification Republican senators.

“Senator Cornyn and Mr. Steele — we urge you to advise every Republican Senator to prevent this treaty from coming to the Senate floor for a vote,” the letter says. “Now is time to put our future before politics. Now is the time to do the right thing and stand firm in our beliefs.”

The New START treaty, which President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed in April, would limit both countries’ nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads, put new caps on missile launchers and heavy bombers, and would establish verification regimes for compliance.

The White House has made ratification of the treaty during the lame-duck session a top priority and has cited extensive support within the Republican foreign policy establishment, including the backing of every living GOP secretary of state and former President George H.W. Bush.

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid on Friday vowed to bring the treaty to a vote next week before Congress adjourns.

The National Republican Trust PAC objects to the treaty on several grounds, including its concerns that it could limit U.S. missile defense capabilities.

“Clearly scrapping our missile defense system, allowing Russia to dictate what we can do in that regard, is absolutely foolish,” Wheeler said. “Even if Russia did abide by this treaty — and they have a long history of not abiding by them — even if they did, it leaves us vulnerable to a number of other threats, including China and Iran.”

New START must receive at least 67 votes in the Senate before being taken up by the Russian Duma, where it would be expected to face relatively easy passage. Its prospects for Senate ratification remain uncertain.

Wheeler said that his group was earnest in its vow to mount credible primary challenges, pointing to radio ads and robocalls it launched in Pennsylvania last year against Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.) after he voted in favor of the stimulus bill. Facing a Republican primary challenge from Senator-elect Pat Toomey, Specter left the GOP and went on to lose a Democratic primary battle.

Wheeler pointed to Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), both of whom are up for re-election in 2012, as particular targets of his group’s open letter.

“I think they should look at what happened to Arlen Specter,” he said. “That was us, and this is even more important than the stimulus.”

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Will American Court Become Co-conspirator With Mom to Embezzle from McDonald’s?

 Personally, the American Courts have become corrupt these days, so  befouled by the  Parham screwballs and those highway thieves who bankroll her ego,  I expect this Court WILL become a co-conspirator in theis case.  Especially if the judge is a Progressive.  We shall see. 

Let this be an example of the nowadays popular American crime of using the courts steal treasure from whomever has enought money to “settle”.   THIS IS A SCAM……A Holdup!

The way to stop this CRIME is to pass legislation as now being considered in Texas.  By LAW make the loser of the case pay the costs.   If the stooge, the Parhams of the world, cannot pay for the court costs, the stooge’s attorneys must come up with the funds.   This will free courts to perform more honestly and far less as an accessory to CRIME as is now often the case.

Recently Kellogg Cereals were sued frivolously by highwaypersons.   They delivered the loot to avoid the trial.

Shame ….Shame America and your sleazy politicians…..the vast majority of sleaze, Democrat!!  Clean up our Courts!

Now, dear reader check out this lesson  in the Embezzlement Studies 101……..written by Allahpundit at HotAir:

Headline:    “Mom Sues McDonald’s because Happy Meals Make Her Feel Guilty ….or something!” 

“No, really. That’s the gist of the lawsuit. In fact, after reading the LA Times’s piece on this and the press release from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, it looks like the Happy Meal aspect is basically irrelevant to the case. Granted, they’re ostensibly going after McDonald’s because they’re worried about children’s nutrition, but that’s really just a fig leaf designed to make the suit more sympathetic to health fanatics and overprotective parents. Their real target here, it seems, is advertising aimed at children — not just in the context of unhealthy food or even healthy food, but in any context. Read the CSPI release for yourself; their argument is that young kids aren’t intelligent enough to understand marketing, and “advertising that is not understood to be advertising is inherently deceptive.” Which means, I presume, that virtually every toy commercial ever made should be potentially actionable.

Who knew that when I whined to mom and dad as a kid about “Star Wars” figures, I might have been facilitating a tort?

The lawsuit alleges that “McDonald’s exploits very young California children and harms their health by advertising unhealthy Happy Meals with toys directly to them” and that “children 8 years old and younger do not have the cognitive skills and the developmental maturity to understand the persuasive intent of marketing and advertising.”…

“I don’t think it’s OK to entice children with Happy Meals with the promise of a toy,” Parham said, adding that she tries to hold her daughters, 6 and 2, to monthly visits to the fast-food chain. But she said their requests increased this summer, thanks to the popularity of “Shrek Forever After.” Collecting all of the toys offered in conjunction with the movie would require weekly visits, she said.

“Needless to say, my answer was no,” Parham said. “And as usual, pouting ensued and a little bit of a disagreement between us. This doesn’t stop with one request. It’s truly a litany of requests.”

According to CSPI’s press release, it’s the toy in the Happy Meal, not the food, that’s getting the kids’ attention and putting poor Monet Parham through the terrible ordeal of having to say no to her children. Which raises the question: If it’s nutrition that Parham’s worried about and not having to cope psychologically with the occasional stamping of tiny feet, why not buy ‘em the Happy Meal and throw the food away? Bring some brussels sprouts to McD’s in a baggie and let ‘em dig in while they play with their new Voltron or whatever. Or better yet, why not follow the San Francisco model and just ban Happy Meals coast to coast? That’s what the practical effect of winning this lawsuit would be, after all. This is what I’m all about, my friends — solutions.

Actually, in all fairness, Parham’s probably not afraid to stand up to her kids. Read this Daily News piece and you’ll see that this “ordinary mom” of two is actually a children’s nutrition advocate on California’s state payroll. It’s not her kids who need guidance on healthy eating, it’s yours, and if that means using the courts to try to deny them an occasional treat that they might otherwise enjoy, hey.”

Yes, hey!!!  Welcome to Marxism 101 and the advancement of government micromanagement of the American citizen.

AND, dear American citizen, YOU SHALL DESERVE THE GOVERMENT YOU GET!!!!!   

The Richer the Government, the Cheaper the Citizen….that is what you will enjoy…..your worthlessness. 

This woman and those who backer her should be charged with Extortion!

Harry Reid Forced to Drop $1,300,000,000,000 Spending Bill: Thank You, Tea Party People!

This following article was found at RealClearPolitics, written by Andrew Taylor::

“Democrats controlling the Senate abandoned on Thursday a huge catchall spending measure combining nearly $1.3 trillion worth of unfinished budget work, including another $158 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 1,924-page bill collapsed of its own weight after an outcry from conservatives who complained it was stuffed with more than $8 billion in homestate pet projects known as earmarks and wrapped together 12 bills into a single foot-tall piece of legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass with just a couple of days’ worth of debate.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., gave up on the bill after several Republicans who had been thinking of voting for it pulled back their support.

GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky threw his weight against the bill in recent days, saying it was “unbelievable” that Democrats would try to muscle through in the days before Christmas legislation that usually takes months to debate.

The turn of events was a major victory for earmark opponents like Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who for years have been steamrolled by the old-school members of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

But the spending barons saw their power ebb in the wake of midterm elections that delivered major gains for Republicans — with considerable help from anti-spending tea party activists.

Reid said he would work with McConnell to produce a short-term funding bill to keep the government running into early next year.”

Comment:  I case you are being confused by all this spending and its numbers……This $1,300,000,000,000 price tag was in addition to the $855,000,000,000 bill president Obama and Republican Mitch McConnell had agreed upon as a compromise bill to which pork has been dumped on…..adding over $2,000,000,000,000 to the National Debt.

President Obama will try to have you forget this December frenzy of Democrat spending by mid January.  Try hard to remember that this Obama administration has no limits to what it will spend to propel the country closer to Marxism.