It’s Wednesday, December 28th, 2022…but before we begin, in an entry which deserves inclusion in full, the incomparable Kim Strassel shines the harsh light of reality on…
“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week he was “pretty proud” of the $1.8 trillion-plus omnibus the Senate passed Thursday, since the GOP was able to “achieve . . . essentially all of our priorities.” That, America, is why Republicans are in the Senate minority. And why they arguably deserve to stay there.
Never has Washington contemplated such a monstrosity. If a satirist set out to describe a once-admirable institution in decline, its members cheerfully passing off their laziness, secrecy, cowardliness and graft as “success,” it’d be hard to compete with this week’s Senate show. The omnibus is everything that is broken in D.C., dumped in one steaming pile.
Congress has this omnibus only because Democrats wasted the year chasing Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, while Republicans helped waste more with semiconductor payouts and other unnecessary legislation. The Senate couldn’t rouse itself to pass a single one of its 12 annual spending bills. Pretty much the only deadline Congress hit this year was the cutoff for submitting thousands of earmark requests for home-state pork. Priorities, priorities.
A handful of powerful leaders took advantage of this dilatory behavior by using it as an excuse to disappear at the last minute into a smoke-filled room and conjure up a “top line” number for funding—with no votes, no debate. Other leaders then disappeared to write the bill in secret—4,155 pages of it. It was unveiled in the dead of Monday night, with initial plans for Wednesday passage, the better to ensure nobody would know what’s in it.
Or what’s attached to it. Past omnibuses at least confined themselves to funding everything under the sun (especially monuments to super-appropriators like Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby). This omnibus has also become a vehicle for legislation Congress wanted to pass this year but didn’t. These aren’t small changes: An overhaul of retirement savings rules. Cosmetics regulation. Electoral Count Act reform. Major changes to healthcare. For all we know, there’s a provision creating 12 new cabinet positions. We’ll find out next year, when someone has time to read it.
Want to know if your senator approves of authorizing the Food and Drug Administration to micromanage your mascara? Or killing off drift-net fishing operations? Or letting athletes at service academies get a waiver to play professional sports? Good luck. Members of both parties will say they voted for this turkey solely to avoid a government shutdown, and they’ll duck questions on the other major changes. Lucky them.Zero accountability. Only this isn’t luck—it’s by design.
Senate Republicans spent this week telling the public there were only two options: Sign off on earmarks, bad policy and Democratic demands for huge increases in domestic spending (on top of $4.5 trillion in the past two years), or lose a 10% increase in defense dollars. We can add dishonesty to the list of transgressions. The GOP could have insisted on zero domestic increases and dared Democrats to own a shutdown and the loss of military readiness. But who wants a spending fight when we can simply spend?
That’s a central problem for Republicans—even if they don’t want to admit it. They haven’t shown a whiff of interest in fiscal restraint since the early days of Paul Ryan’s tenure as House speaker. Their majorities broke the bank during the Trump administration, enabling Democrats to point to deficits as reason to resist further tax reform. They held hands with the left to partake in five Covid bailouts in 2020 alone. They joined again to pass Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill and the semiconductor slush fund. Members of the new, supposedly responsible Republican House majority weeks ago voted to keep the earmark gravy flowing.
Voters in 2010 put Republicans in charge of the House to serve as a brake on the Obama administration. Next year’s House majority is no guarantee of a repeat. Democrats have figured out that the bait for “bipartisanship” is the promise of dollars, and today’s Republican Party bites every time. Eighteen Senate Republicans voted Thursday for the ugliest, least transparent spending bill on record. As Republicans scratch their heads over their disappointing midterm, they might consider that voters don’t see much of a defining difference with Democrats.
The real scandal of the holdouts to House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker is that they are stomping on an important message. A far bigger and more serious group of House conservatives are appalled by the practices that lead to omnibuses, and want changes to require the House to return to “regular order.” Committees. Votes. Amendments. Debates. This would return a focus on fiscal discipline, with members again subject to transparency and accountability.
But Reps. Andy Biggs and Matt Gaetz are more interested in grandstanding than actual victory. The battle helps Republican House porksters ignore substantive demands by casting the race for speaker as a fight over personalities. It enabled Senate Republicans to justify their mess of an omnibus on the grounds that House Republicans can’t be trusted to do better.
Right now, neither chamber can. Your government at work.“
“…When deputies arrived, a statement from the department read, they saw evidence that a fenced area was broken into.While nothing was taken from the substation, police said equipment was vandalized, causing a power outage in the area.
Another burglary was reported later that morning at a Tacoma Public Utilities substation on 224th Street, again with forced entry and damage to the equipment, and nothing stolen from the scene.
At 11:25 a.m. a third burglary was reported by Puget Sound Energy of a power outage and burglary that occurred at about 2:40 a.m.Deputies said the third scene was broken into as well, and the equipment was vandalized.
As a result of the burglaries and vandalism that took place, 14,000 Tacoma residents were without power on Sunday morning…”
Contemporary politically-correct dictionaries define “burglary” as “illegal entry into a building with intent to commit a crime, especially theft”. Yet here, in all three “burglaries” nothing was taken, only equipment “vandalized”, i.e., “destroyed”.
Here’s the juice: Does anyone else sense Washington authorities are unwilling to call a spade a spade, or, in this case, acts of domestic ecoterrorism acts of domestic ecoterrorism?!? We’re not talking about a couple of home boys spray painting graffiti on a transformer or substation. Think about it: Nobody in their right mind risks electrocution by cutting their way into three substations early Christmas morning with any intent other than deliberate, targeted destruction. This bears the fingerprints of Antifa or some “the planet is more important than people” EnviroNazi organization.
The fact Tuesday morning Jim Geraghty came to the same conclusion we reached late Sunday evening only solidifies our position.
Meanwhile, the law enforcement branch of the Biden clown car is focused on “right-wing” domestic terrorists. You know, like this duo of incredibly dangerous desperados:
In a related item, at the same time they seek to impose utterly unnecessary, completely counterproductive restrictions and changes on a country in which many shiver in the cold, Biden’s climate czars fly private and live like kings. This despite us being nowhere near a world in which we can live without fossil fuels, as evidenced by this forward from Nick:
Fossil fuels powering 90% of the Texas grid during the storm
Nuclear powering more than their renewables & TX hasn’t built a new plant in 30 yrs
Over $70 billion spent on wind & solar and solar with 0% & wind 4.8%
It’s as Rahmbo said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Would it surprise you to learn Emanuel was quoting Winston Churchill without even the faintest hint of attribution?
And in today’s video installment of the EnvironMental Moment, Harris Faulkner and her guests confirm there’s nothing The Left won’t attempt to tie to the junk science of anthropogenic global warming:
We’re far less shocked CBS relied on such lunacy than the AFA’s Taylor Garland representing it as scientific fact. BTW, anyone interested in Ms. Garland’s qualifications in environmental, climate or any other science can find, or perhaps more appropriately, NOT find them here. SPOILER ALERT:
“China sent 71 aircraft and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour period, while Russia shelled the Kherson region more than 70 times. These acts of aggression — occurring 5,000 miles apart, one in a grinding war of attrition, the other as part of an ongoing political and diplomatic struggle that may well result in open hostilities — are related.
It’s no accident that the two most dangerous powers in the world, China and Russia, are aggrieved empires seeking to right what they consider the wrongs that resulted in their humiliation and diminishment in the 19th and 20th centuries. Whereas in the 2000s the most pressing problem of the international system seemed to be malicious sub-national groups operating in ungoverned spaces, now it is malicious would-be supranational entities seeking to take over spaces governed by others.
In his masterly book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger observed, “Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”
The fall of the Roman Empire was a social and economic catastrophe for the West, but it’s been a blessing that no such overawing behemoth ever rose in its place. Russia and China, in contrast, never lost their imperial DNA, and have chips on their shoulders.
…The man who has statues of Peter and Catherine the Great, accomplished Russian imperialists, on display in the Kremlin considers an independent Ukraine merely a tool of hostile Western forces and a wayward part of Greater Russia. Such ideas — and a deep feeling of shame at Russia’s fall — justify the brutish attempted occupation and dismemberment of Ukraine, a cynical and crude operation even by Russian standards.
…Xi views Taiwan much the same way as Putin views Ukraine: It rightfully belongs to China, and retaking it will help salve the geopolitical and psychological wounds of imperial China’s spectacular descent into disaster and powerlessness. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Xi informed a U.S. official in 2018.
The war in Ukraine shows that when an autocrat ruling a once-great empire speaks in such terms, it is time to arm the targeted state to the teeth and dispense with all illusions.“
More importantly, it’s time WE armed to the teeth, and ensured the forces tasked with employing said arms are able to do so in the most effective and destructive manner possible, not the most woke or politically correct.
Moving on, here’s a octet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
…author of the Final Solution to the “Jewish question”, had it in for the Children of Israel. You know…besides his own words. It’s almost as if Goldberg’s never heard of, let alone read, Mein Kampf.
(5). In backing spendaholic Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, Marjorie Taylor Greene is on a mad quest for power. As the sage Daniel Francis often observes, one can tell what someone’s about by what they’re accusing others of doing.
(6). Ben Shapiro is absolutely at the top of his game as he destroys the Progressive myth of race-based inequality resulting from systemic racism:
(7). In a related item, responding to Progressives’ relentless, completely counterproductive “living wage” crusade, McDonald’s unveiled its first automated location, Guess the fast-food giant grasps what Limousine Liberals cannot comprehend: Customers wouldn’t be lovin‘ paying $10 for a Big Mac.
Mr. Morales obviously cannot differentiate between a gimmick on a gadget and a highly-accurate medical device. Something tells us his attorney and he are just casting a line in hopes of reeling in an easy windfall.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton…
…and the lovely Shannon…
…along with this string from our old friend and classmate Breeze:
Finally, we’ll call it a year with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as KTVU relates the curious tale of a…
While we find Jordan Krah’s behavior both bizarre and reprehensible, we’re forced to question what law he broke? And if California has some harassment statute of which we’re unaware, why is it not enforced on a daily basis to protect those verbally assaulted and physically threatened by the homeless literally littering the streets of San Francisco?!?
Magoo
P.S. We’ll be traveling to Dripping Springs, TX to ring in the New Year with friends, and will consequently be radio-silent until Friday, January 6th. So ’til then…
Video of the Day
Chip Roy of Texas tells it like it is!
Tales of The Darkside
Matt Walsh reveals Sodom and Gomorrah can truly be found in America.
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