Your Inept Government Knew the Nigerian Had Ties to Terrorists…

An official briefed on the attack on a Detroit airliner said Saturday the U.S. has known for at least two years that the suspect in the attack could have terrorist ties. The official told The Associated Press that the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, has been on a list that includes people with known or suspected contact or ties to a terrorist or terrorist organization. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Then don’t you think it might have been a good idea to keep him off US bound planes?  It makes all those long security lines and checks a bloody joke when they know a guy has ties to such organizations and let him fly anyway.

Our government really doesn’t seem to have an ounce of sense.

Congress, You Stink

You just stink. You’re a worthless lot who should each and every one be booted out of office. And I hope you are.  You’re a self serving lot of worthless sycophants.

An analysis of public documents by Northwestern University’s Medill News Service in partnership with the Tribune Newspapers Washington Bureau and the Center for Responsive Politics found a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation. At least 166 former aides from the nine congressional leadership offices and five committees involved in shaping health overhaul legislation — along with at least 13 former lawmakers — registered to represent at least 338 health care clients since the beginning of last year, according to the analysis. Their health care clients spent $635 million on lobbying over the past two years, the study shows. The total of insider lobbyists jumps to 278 when non-health-care firms that reported lobbying on health issues are added in, the analysis found. Part of the lobbying pressure on current members of Congress and staffers comes from the powerful lure of post-congressional job possibilities. “There’s always a worry they may be thinking about their future employment opportunities when dealing with these issues, particularly with health care, because the stakes are so high and the breadth of the issues — pharmacies, hospitals, doctors,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. Lobbyists’ earnings can dwarf congressional salaries, which currently top out at $174,000 annually for lawmakers and $156,000 for aides, though.

Why don’t you just put a big for sale sign across your foreheads. At least then you’d be doing one thing honestly.  Every day, yes every single day, you make the Anarchists look better and better.

Sorry, Sick Folk, You’re Just Out of Luck

The public health insurance option died on Thursday, December 10, 2009, after a months-long struggle with Senate parliamentary procedure. The time of death was recorded as 11:12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Its death had been rumored numerous times over the past year, but the public option repeatedly and defiantly battled back. The Senate’s insistence on 60 votes, combined with President Obama’s decision not to intervene on its behalf, eventually proved overwhelming.

The public option leaves behind a Medicare buy-in for people aged 55-64, an expansion of Medicaid, a quasi-public option for those under 300 percent of the poverty line and a collection of national private plans managed by the Office of Personnel Management.

Well done, Congress.  Government at its best worst most inept.  Just keep protecting the health and insurance industries while the rest of the world looks on in utter amazement at your stupidity.

Stupid Government

ON Nov. 6, President Obama signed the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009 into law, extending unemployment benefits by 20 weeks and renewing the first-time homebuyer tax credit until next April. But tucked inside the law was another prize: a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. The tax cuts will generate corporate refunds or relief worth about $33 billion, according to an administration estimate.

So while the average tax payer remains saddled with the burden of a huge federal deficit, corporations get to take a tax write-off as far back as 2004 for anything they didn’t make a profit on this year or last.

Stupid government. Stupid, foul, unfair, unjust, disgusting, reprehensible, depraved, wretched, sorry, stinking, filthy… loathesome lot called elected officials.

None of them deserve to be in office. All of them are self serving crooks and liars watching out only for lobbyists and the wealthy.

Say what you like concerning any of them- but voting for one means voting for his or her twin.  There isn’t a hair’s worth of difference no matter what their party affiliation.  Hence, voting is a waste of time and effort.

Sure the Recession is Over, If You’re A Bank, On Wall Street, or In the Insurance or Auto Industries

But for real people who have to get out every day and do work that’s actually difficult, unemployment is over 10% now, so the Great Recession is still going strong.

But that’s because actual taxpayers don’t get government bailouts.  Only industries with lobbyists plying congressmen and women with bonus cash under the table do.

Corporations Used Bailout Money, To Lobby Congress…

Is it any wonder that many of us think our Government completely beneath contempt and the corporate moguls who have bought and paid for it- now with taxpayer dollars- even worse?

Twenty-five top recipients of government bailout funds spent more than $71 million on lobbying the federal government in the year since they were rescued, an extensive review of lobbying records by the Huffington Post reveals.

A year after taxpayers forked over $700 billion to help rescue the biggest names in banking, insurance and the automotive industry, those same institutions are using portions of the cash to influence legislation with a direct impact on taxpayers.

In all, during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three quarters of 2009, those 25 institutions spent $71,199,000 on lobbying. The list includes General Motors ($11.95 million), Citigroup ($8.915 million), Bank of American ($6.427 million), J.P. Morgan Chase ($7.735 million), Goldman Sachs ($4.38 million) and AIG ($3.47 million). Some of these companies have paid federal money back. Not all of the top bailout recipients, meanwhile, spent money on lobbying.

What profound absurdity.

Afghanistan’s Just Like The United States…

Corrupt politicians rule!  And in spite of the will of the public, do whatsoever they please whensoever they please to do it.

2%

Our Government is so stupid.  Really.

What’s all the fuss about? After all the noise over Democrats’ push for a government insurance plan to compete with private carriers, coverage numbers are finally in: Two percent. That’s the estimated share of Americans younger than 65 who’d sign up for the public option plan under the health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is steering toward House approval.

And

The underwhelming statistic is raising questions about whether the government plan will be the iron-fisted competitor that private insurers warn will shut them down or a niche operator that becomes a haven for patients with health insurance horror stories.

Or more likely- D.O.A. anyway, watered down by a Congress that’s in the pocket of the Insurance Industry.  Good grief.  Our government deserves whatever plague is coming its way.

Joe Lieberman: Putz

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent Democrat from Connecticut, emerged Tuesday afternoon from a meeting with his caucus as the center of attention — again. On his way in, he told reporters that if a public health insurance option was in the final health care bill, he would join a GOP filibuster to prevent it from getting an up or down vote. HuffPost asked him if there’d been much reaction from his colleagues in the Democratic caucus.

Lieberman isn’t an Independent, or Democrat, or Republican. He belongs to the Putz Party.   While he, and the rest of Congress, mere elected servants, enjoy the best health care plan in the country, they deny to those for whom they work the very same security.  Lieberman isn’t the only member of the Putz Party- the entire Congress, both House and Senate, are populated by that party.

An Afghani Drug Lord Paid by Americans

The CIA pays – or has been paying – one of the most notorious of Afghani drug king-pins; and he just so happens to be the brother of Afghanistan’s President.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president of Afghanistan, gets regular payments from the CIA and has for much of the past eight years, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The newspaper said that according to current and former American officials, the CIA pays Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around Kandahar. The CIA’s ties to Karzai, who is a suspected player in the country’s illegal opium trade, have created deep divisions within the Obama administration, the Times said.

I guess the CIA didn’t learn its lesson with Bin Laden, so now they’ve hopped in with Karzai.  Stupid government…

Ok Britain, That’s Just Stupid

Children in British primary schools as young as nine are to receive advice via internet sites such as YouTube on their future career paths under a new scheme, the government said on Monday. Under the program designed to help children of all socio-economic backgrounds realize their goals, students will be given mentors, have the chance to visit universities, and be given counseling on what subjects to study via social networking sites like Facebook.

Ah yes- having 9 year olds choose their career path… that’s smart. Especially since 9 year olds don’t even know what they want to eat for dinner an hour beforehand. What the devil life goals do 9 year olds have or are even capable of? Come on.

Now The Insurance Industry Refuses to Insure an ‘Underweight’ Kid…

Last week it was an ‘overweight’ kid.  This week, an ‘underweight’ one.

When Robert Bates, the girl’s father, left his former job to start his own business, he was forced to seek out his own health insurance, and enrolled his family in an insurance plan with United Healthcare Golden Rule. “It took me by surprise,” Bates told ABC 7 in Denver. “I didn’t think that her size was that abnormal and that it was something that you’d consider to be unhealthy.”

Absurdity unless you recall that insurance companies are thieves and they’ve bought Congress for their own pleasure.  that’s why Congress protects the profits of the insurance companies at the expense of the voters.

See, if you just had enough money, you could buy Congress too.

The Government’s Ability To Pick Friends is Appallingly Bad

The old saw says ’show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are’ certainly applies to the Government of the United States, which seems to have a habit of getting chummy with the wrong sorts of people.  Remember the alliance the CIA had with Osama bin Laden?

And now, we’ve got attached to Karzai in Afghanistan- a scoundrelly politician and a greasy one at that if ever there was one.

U.N.-backed fraud investigators on Monday threw out nearly a third of President Hamid Karzai’s ballots from Afghanistan’s disputed August election, setting the stage for a runoff. The rulings dropped Karzai’s votes to 48 percent of the total, below the 50 percent threshold needed for him to avoid a runoff with his top challenger, according to calculations by independent election monitors.

The Government can’t seem to hitch its wagon to folk in the Middle East who understand honesty.  But, as they say, birds of a feather…  And now we’re bogged down in Afghanistan.  In quicksand.  It’s our new Vietnam.

What? Someone in Government is Corrupt????

I’m shocked!

Prosecutors claim a greedy, power-drunk [Larry] Langford accepted bribes totaling some $235,000 — a chunk of it for upscale clothes and jewelry — while serving as president of the Jefferson County Commission before he was elected mayor. In exchange, they say, Langford steered $7.1 million in bond business to a political crony’s investment banking firm. Those bond deals and others turned sour during the credit crunch and brought on a financial crisis that has pushed Alabama’s most populous county to the brink of filing what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. The current commissioners have repeatedly extended credit agreements as they struggle to pay back $3.9 billion.

What’s a country come to when it can’t find enough honest people to fill elected positions?  If Jeremiah were alive, I know what he would say.  In fact, if there were any prophets alive anymore, I know what they would say about elected officials in the United States of America, and it wouldn’t be pretty.  And they would be completely ignored.

More Government Stupidity…

See Jon Stewart skewer it here. Well said and rightly.