[mikemike]

They have already painted the walls Boener Orange so that he can be camouflaged and move undetected through the capital building.

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Last edited by mikemike; 01-05-2011 at 12:27 PM.

[Nesster]

Hey, which Pentax lens was that

[Ratmagiclady]

Here comes another expensive exercise in how blaming is a lot easier than governing.

[JohnInIndy]

Here comes another expensive exercise in how blaming is a lot easier than governing.

How can it be any more expensive than the 111th Congress?

[Ratmagiclady]

How can it be any more expensive than the 111th Congress?

We're about to find out why and how. Bon appetit.

[jeffkrol]

How can it be any more expensive than the 111th Congress?

Like it costing 1.1mil to recite the constitution to a group of people who should know what it says???????????
Republicans to Spend $1.1 Million Reciting Constitution on House Floor | VF Daily | Vanity Fair

Happy Hour Roundup
By Jonathan Bernstein

Speaking of deficits, those who like large budget deficits should be be quite pleased that House Republicans are fulfilling their promise to replace deficit-reducing PAYGO with deficit-increasing CUTGO. Robert Greenstein and James Horney explain this in more depth; see also Steve Benen. Remember: no one actually cares about the deficit, and quite a few people who claim to care about the deficit don't even know that we're talking about the federal budget deficit (and not, for example, the overall state of the economy). And of all the people who don't care about the deficit, conservative Republican politicians are the most don't-caringest, because the thing they really do care about, low income tax rates, causes higher deficits.

The Plum Line - Happy Hour Roundup

Sadly, we’ve been here before. In the 1990s, when pay-as-you-go rules applied to both spending increases and tax cuts and Congress used reconciliation solely to enact deficit-reduction packages, the country went from large deficits to a balanced budget. (A strong economy obviously helped as well.) But in the early 2000s, with Republicans controlling Congress and President Bush in the White House, Congress set aside pay-as-you-go and turned reconciliation on its head, using it not to reduce deficits but instead to push through costly, unpaid-for tax cuts in both 2001 and 2003. Previously, reconciliation had only been used for deficit reduction.

The results are plain to see. The Bush-era tax cuts were a significant factor in the return to large deficits after 2001, contributing $2.6 trillion (including added interest costs on the national debt) to the budgetary deterioration between 2001 and 2010. House Republicans now plan to restore the very type of permissive budget rules that contributed markedly to that fiscal deterioration.

Moreover, measures to scuttle the current, even-handed pay-as-you-go rule and to allow use of the reconciliation process to increase the deficit are even more indefensible today than such steps were in 2001 — because now we already have deficits that exceed $1 trillion a year.

It should be recognized that the House rules unveiled December 22 go to great lengths to make clear the intent of the new Republican majority to pass an array of tax-cut measures that will significantly enlarge deficits. Not only do the new rules eliminate the pay-as-you-go restriction on tax cuts that are not paid for, but the rules also specifically authorize the Chairman of the House Budget Committee to ignore for purposes of budget enforcement rules all of the costs of:

* Extending or making permanent the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts (including the tax cuts for the highest-income taxpayers) and relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax;
* Extending or making permanent the hollowing out of the estate tax included in the just-enacted tax-cut compromise legislation; and
* Legislation to provide a major, costly new tax cut — a deduction equal to 20 percent of gross income for “small businesses,” which Republican lawmakers typically have defined very expansively so the term covers a vast swath of firms and wealthy individuals that do not resemble what most Americans think of as a “small business.”

House Republican Rule Changes Pave the Way For Major Deficit-Increasing Tax Cuts, Despite Anti-Deficit Rhetoric — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The new rules also specifically empower the Budget Committee Chairman to exempt from budget enforcement rules the fiscal effects of repealing the health reform law. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the health reform law will reduce deficits by more than $100 billion over the first ten years and by roughly $1 trillion or more over the second ten years. Its repeal would increase deficits by those amounts.

Finally, the new rules would pave the way for a further widening of the already very large gap between rich and poor. While the new rules would allow the House to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for high-income families, continue the new estate-tax provisions that benefit only the top one-quarter of one percent of estates (those with a value in excess of $10 million for a couple, and create a big new tax break for “small businesses” — all without paying for the costs — they would prohibit the continuation of improvements for low-income working families in the child tax credit and earned income tax credit that were enacted in 2009 and extended in the recent tax-cut compromise legislation unless the cost of those extensions was fully offset. And, as noted above, the House would be barred from offsetting the cost of maintaining these low-income tax-credit provisions by curbing unwarranted tax loopholes, which will make the demise of these low-income tax-credit benefits more likely. To simultaneously pave the way for both deficit-financed extensions of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and termination of critical tax-credit measures that keep several million low-income working parents and their children out of poverty represents a set of priorities that can aptly be described as worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge.

At bottom, the new House GOP rules proposals make one other point abundantly clear — tax cuts for high-income taxpayers, not deficit reduction, is the top priority of the incoming House leadership.

and to the "health care repeal" well lets just make an "EXCEPTION"........
Ezra Klein - Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- and Eric Cantor knows it

One of their new rules says that new legislation must be paid for. But the health-care bill reduces the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years. Luckily, they've figured out an answer to their problem: They've decided to simply exempt the repeal bill from the rules. That means they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in order to take a vote that will increase the deficit. Change we can believe in, and all that.

[Wheatfield]

You guys need to stop voting for incumbents.
Get a whole new batch of senators in, and if they don't do what's good for the country, then vote for whomever runs against them next time.
And if you have the chance to vote for neither Reps or Dems, then do that.

Your politicians are wrecking your country for it's citizens by putting party political agendas ahead of what is right for the people.

You can force them to change, but you have to walk away from party politics and vote for anyone but who is in power right now.

[jeffkrol]

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., disputed the CBO estimate this week, but Republicans have yet to produce one of their own.
Dems say GOP exempting $1 trillion from deficit............

The Associated Press: Dems say GOP exempting $1 trillion from deficit

He told ABC's "Good Morning America" the GOP is serious about attempts to repeal Obama's health care law, saying Republicans understand the political realities of a repeal failing in the Senate but that they want to "send a signal" about "job-killing regulations." "Republicans do care about people having health care," he said, "and we just know there's a better way.

CARE to share, you've had enough time........
famous last words of the desperate.. "we just know"...
Funny............

King Won’t Give Up His Government Health Care, But Applauds Those Who Do ‘For Standing On Principle’

As ThinkProgress has noted, despite spending the past year and a half railing against government healthcare, just five Republican members of the 112th Congress have been willing to forgo their own government healthcare coverage, which is provided to them as federal employees. Rep.-elect Joe Walsh (R-IL) is one of those Republicans who will opt out of his congressional health package, even though his wife will have difficulty finding coverage due to her pre-existing condition (that is, until portions of President Obama’s health care law barring insurers from discriminating against people with such conditions take affect in 2014).

Asked tonight about Walsh’s suggestion that it’s hypocritical for GOP congressmen fighting Obama’s health law to keep their own government coverage, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) didn’t seem to disagree. King told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he gives Walsh “a lot of credit for standing on principle,” even though King himself won’t forgo his government coverage:

BLITZER: [H]e thinks to accept the federal government’s health insurance program would be hypocritical, do you accept the federal government’s health insurance program for yourself

KING: Well, I’m on it now, like other federal employees are –

BLITZER: Will you stay on it?

KING: I don’t intend to pull off of it, but I give Joe a lot of credit for that. I went to Joe to help him in the campaign and I give him a lot of credit for standing on principle.

Walsh explained his decision by saying, “My wife and I now are going to have to go through the struggles that a lot of Americans go through, trying to find insurance in the individual market and having to deal with problems of preexisting conditions.” As of 2008, 12 percent of King’s constituents lacked coverage. Apparently King doesn’t think he should have to face the same struggles as them.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/04/steve-king-walsh/

[mikemike]

That means they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in order to take a vote that will increase the deficit.

No one noticed that they had their fingers crossed when they made those rules and slipped a "syke" in there at the end?

You can break the rules if you do that you know...

[Wheatfield]

No one noticed that they had their fingers crossed when they made those rules and slipped a "syke" in there at the end?

You can break the rules if you do that you know...

Just stop complaining about the governments in Cuba, Iran or Venezuela. Your government is more corrupt and less honest than these three dictatorships.

[Nesster]

Ah, the march of taxation with representation and the primacy of the Constitution...

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) failed Wednesday in an effort to forestall the new Republican majority's plan to strip her and her fellow delegates of the right to vote on the floor in certain circumstances.

Under Democratic control, Norton has been permitted to vote when the House is in the Committee of the Whole -- a parliamentary term that describes when the chamber becomes a committee for the purpose of considering certain legislation. That right has allowed her to vote on amendments to tax and spending legislation, but her vote has only counted when it is not the deciding one on any given issue.

The House GOP's opening-day rules package strips delegates of that right, and Norton attempted to block that move by offering a motion that would have sent the package to a five-member select committee that would study whether it is constitutional for delegates to have the vote. Republicans have contended that allowing delegates to vote, even in the Committee of the Whole, is unconstitutional, while Norton and other Democrats point out that a federal appeals court has previously ruled that it is constitutional.

But Republicans successfully tabled Norton's resolution on a party-line vote, 225-188, with 20 members not present. The House is considering the full rules package, and when it passes, Norton's committee of the whole vote will officially be gone.

D.C. Wire - Norton fails in effort to prevent loss of Committee of the Whole vote