Are you kidding me?
Blogger's note. I started this blog entry on Friday morning and now that it is 6:36 p.m. on Saturday, this is the first chance I've had to sit down and complete it. So I'm going to pick up where I left off and worry about an entry for Saturday afterward.
I just listened to an interview on CNN. Jake Tapper was taking to "conservative" talk show host Mark Levin and I'm amazed at how clueless he really is.
He actually believes that it is democratic for Congress to defund Obamacare as a way of putting a stop to a program that his party has tried (and failed) 40 times to derail. That anyone who criticizes the effort to defund is proof that the critic believe only that Congress that passed Obamacare into law was "democratic."
Someone who claims the vitae that Mr. Levin (that's LeVin, not LEvin, as though it might make him distant from his Jewish roots) has should know better. You want to repeal a law, you repeal it. If you don't want to have Social Insecurity, you can't defund it. You can attempt to repeal it. The vote in the House where a budget was passed that defunded Obamacare would have had a far different result if it was a vote solely on the issue of repealing the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Also the U.S. took a vote to put the funding back into the continuing resolution to fund the government. So people like Mark Levin want to see a federal government shutdown happen to try to force the Senate to accede to their wishes. Levin also talked about how in past federal government shutdowns, people got paid. Social Security payments were made, but military payments have been delayed in the past.
When someone is serving in the all-volunteer military, has reached the august rank of E-4 or E-5, and has a spouse who doesn't work outside the home and the couple has children; odds are good they qualify for food stamps. They are probably living paycheck to paycheck. Telling this family they have to wait to be paid, because politicians in Washington, D.C. are engaged in a pissing contest is not an answer to anything.
* * *
Depending on how you choose to define the phrase "passing a budget", our elected leadership in Washington, D.C. hasn't passed one since 1997 or 2009. Either measure is completely unacceptable. In 1974 the Congress passed a bill that was signed by the President, mandating that the Congress submit a budget. They aren't following the law of the land by operating the government through one continuing resolution after another.
The American people should unite and tell all of the members of Congress that if they can't avert the shutdown on October 1, pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling before government runs out of authority to borrow, and pass a budget on-time in early 2014 for the fiscal year that begins in October of that year; we will vote every single one of them out of office. Without exception!
All the talk of trying to find ways to reduce and ultimately eliminate the federal budget deficit mean nothing if our government fails to produce and follow an actual budget.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has refused to allow a single appropriations bill passed by the House to even come up for vote in the Senate. Nothing he doesn't want passed would pass, so why not at least have a vote? Politics.
I'm just disgusted by the entire 536 of them (535 members of Congress and 1 President).
* * *
Random Ponderings:
Would someone tell the asshole who was leaving the Westfield Century City parking structure at the same moment I was, that when you want to ignore the sign that says right-turn only and turn left, it's probably a good idea to do it from the left of the two exit lanes? That way she wouldn't have scared the shit out of me as I was making a proper right turn from that left exit lane. Her oversized SUV would have made mincemeat of my car if my reflexes weren't good.
While I'm on that topic, someone needs to tell the idiot who was driving in the fast lane of the 405 you don't want to wait until the last 200 yards before your exit to start moving to the right.
If the VA is going to insist we check in via computer kiosks, they might want to make sure they're working before they tell us to use them.
While I'm on that topic, if you work at the VA and you're telling a patient to go see X in order to get something done, it might be a good idea to make sure X is there that day. I had that one happen yesterday. Walked a good long distance only to find the person I'd been sent to see was off that day. I guess I should be grateful for the exercise rather than focus on the time and effort wasted.
Oh good, someone's found a way to make a substitute for heroin that's much cheaper to manufacturer, with only one bad side effect. It is a "flesh-eating" drug, causing the user's skin to become crocodile-like in appearance before it just dies off. Amputations usually follow. Just what the world needed and now it's in the U.S.
This Date in History (9/27/13):
1066 – William the Conqueror and his army set sail from the mouth of the Somme River, beginning the Norman Conquest of England.
1331 – The Battle of Płowce between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order is fought.
1422 – After the brief Gollub War the Teutonic Knights sign the Treaty of Melno with the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania
1529 – The Siege of Vienna begins when Suleiman I attacks the city.
1540 – The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) receives its charter from Pope Paul III.
1590 – Pope Urban VII dies 13 days after being chosen as the Pope, making his reign the shortest papacy in history.
1605 – The armies of Sweden are defeated by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Battle of Kircholm.
1669 – The Venetians surrender the fortress of Candia to the Ottomans, thus ending the 21-year long Siege of Candia.
1777 – Lancaster, Pennsylvania is the capital of the United States, for one day.
1821 – Mexico gains its independence from Spain.
1822 – Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta stone.
1825 – The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens, and begins operation of the world's first service of locomotive-hauled passenger trains.
1854 – The steamship SS Arctic sinks with 300 people on board. This marks the first great disaster in the Atlantic Ocean.
1875 – The merchant sailing ship Ellen Southard is wrecked in a storm at Liverpool; the United States Congress subsequently awards 27 gold Lifesaving Medals to the lifeboat men who went to rescue her crew.
1903 – Wreck of the Old 97, a train crash made famous by the song of the same name.
1905 – The physics journal Annalen der Physik received Albert Einstein's paper "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", introducing the equation E=mc².
1908 – The first production of the Ford Model T automobile was built at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan.
1916 – Iyasu is proclaimed deposed as ruler of Ethiopia in a palace coup in favor of his aunt Zauditu.
1922 – King Constantine I of Greece abdicates his throne in favor of his eldest son, King George II.
1928 – The Republic of China is recognized by the United States.
1930 – Bobby Jones wins the U.S. Amateur Championship to complete the Grand Slam of golf. The old structure of the grand slam was the U.S. Open, British Open, U.S. Amateur, and British Amateur.
1937 – Balinese Tiger declared extinct.
1938 – Ocean liner Queen Elizabeth launched in Glasgow.
1940 – World War II: The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin by Germany, Japan and Italy.
1941 – The SS Patrick Henry is launched becoming the first of more than 2,700 Liberty ships.
1942 – Last day of the September Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marine Corps troops barely escape after being surrounded by Japanese forces near the Matanikau River.
1944 – The Kassel Mission results in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.
1949 – The first Plenary Session of the National People's Congress approves the design of the Flag of the People's Republic of China.
1954 – The nationwide debut of Tonight Starring Steve Allen (The Tonight Show) hosted by Steve Allen on NBC.
1956 – USAF Captain Milburn G. Apt becomes the first man to exceed Mach 3 while flying the Bell X-2. Shortly thereafter, the craft goes out of control and Captain Apt is killed.
1959 – Nearly 5000 people die on the main Japanese island of Honshū as the result of a typhoon.
1961 – Sierra Leone joins the United Nations.
1962 – The Yemen Arab Republic is established.
1964 – The British TSR-2 aircraft XR219 makes its maiden flight from Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.
1968 – The stage musical Hair opens at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, where it played 1,998 performances until its closure was forced by the roof collapsing in July 1973.
1977 – A United States Navy McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II crashes into a residential neighborhood in Yokohama, Japan, killing two children on the ground and injuring seven other people.
1979 – The United States Department of Education receives final approval from the U.S. Congress to become the 13th US Cabinet agency.
1983 – Richard Stallman announces the GNU project to develop a free Unix-like operating system.
1988 – National League for Democracy is formed by Aung San Suu Kyi and various others to help fight against dictatorship in Myanmar.
1993 – The Sukhumi massacre takes place in Abkhazia.
1996 – In Afghanistan, the Taliban capture the capital city Kabul after driving out President Burhanuddin Rabbani and executing former leader Mohammad Najibullah.
1996 – The Julie N. tanker ship crashes into the Million Dollar Bridge in Portland, Maine spilling thousands of gallons of oil.
1997 – Communications are suddenly lost with the Mars Pathfinder space probe.
1998 – The Google internet search engine retrospectively claims this as its birthday.
2000 – The first Olympic Gold Medal ever for Tae Kwon Do was won by Greek athlete Michalis Mouroutsos in men's -58 kg division in Sydney.
Famous Folk Born on September 27th:
Samuel Adams (you had to be special to have a beer named after you...wait, there was one named for Billy Carter...never mind)
Samuel Francis Du Pont
William "Bull" Nelson
Thomas Nast
Harry Blackstone, Sr.
Sam Ervin
William Conrad
Jayne Meadows
Arthur Penn
Roger C. Carmel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1EbxYKh_4 one of my favorite moments in TOS)
Greg Morris (I still feel a slight twinge of guilt for having put such a beating on him in a poker game at the old Desert Inn Hotel/Casino. I'm keeping the money though.)
Wilford Brimley
Don Cornelius
Kathy Whitworth
Randy Bachman (Happy 70th birthday!)
Meat Loaf (How many times will we hear Adam Richman making the same joke to a chef cooking a burger..."don't let your meat loaf"?)
Liz Torres
A Martinez
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Greg Ham
Shaun Cassidy
Beth Heiden
Christopher Cousins
Amanda Detmer
Gwyneth Paltrow
Lil Wayne
Avril Lavigne
No movie quotes for this blog.
I just listened to an interview on CNN. Jake Tapper was taking to "conservative" talk show host Mark Levin and I'm amazed at how clueless he really is.
He actually believes that it is democratic for Congress to defund Obamacare as a way of putting a stop to a program that his party has tried (and failed) 40 times to derail. That anyone who criticizes the effort to defund is proof that the critic believe only that Congress that passed Obamacare into law was "democratic."
Someone who claims the vitae that Mr. Levin (that's LeVin, not LEvin, as though it might make him distant from his Jewish roots) has should know better. You want to repeal a law, you repeal it. If you don't want to have Social Insecurity, you can't defund it. You can attempt to repeal it. The vote in the House where a budget was passed that defunded Obamacare would have had a far different result if it was a vote solely on the issue of repealing the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Also the U.S. took a vote to put the funding back into the continuing resolution to fund the government. So people like Mark Levin want to see a federal government shutdown happen to try to force the Senate to accede to their wishes. Levin also talked about how in past federal government shutdowns, people got paid. Social Security payments were made, but military payments have been delayed in the past.
When someone is serving in the all-volunteer military, has reached the august rank of E-4 or E-5, and has a spouse who doesn't work outside the home and the couple has children; odds are good they qualify for food stamps. They are probably living paycheck to paycheck. Telling this family they have to wait to be paid, because politicians in Washington, D.C. are engaged in a pissing contest is not an answer to anything.
* * *
Depending on how you choose to define the phrase "passing a budget", our elected leadership in Washington, D.C. hasn't passed one since 1997 or 2009. Either measure is completely unacceptable. In 1974 the Congress passed a bill that was signed by the President, mandating that the Congress submit a budget. They aren't following the law of the land by operating the government through one continuing resolution after another.
The American people should unite and tell all of the members of Congress that if they can't avert the shutdown on October 1, pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling before government runs out of authority to borrow, and pass a budget on-time in early 2014 for the fiscal year that begins in October of that year; we will vote every single one of them out of office. Without exception!
All the talk of trying to find ways to reduce and ultimately eliminate the federal budget deficit mean nothing if our government fails to produce and follow an actual budget.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has refused to allow a single appropriations bill passed by the House to even come up for vote in the Senate. Nothing he doesn't want passed would pass, so why not at least have a vote? Politics.
I'm just disgusted by the entire 536 of them (535 members of Congress and 1 President).
* * *
Random Ponderings:
Would someone tell the asshole who was leaving the Westfield Century City parking structure at the same moment I was, that when you want to ignore the sign that says right-turn only and turn left, it's probably a good idea to do it from the left of the two exit lanes? That way she wouldn't have scared the shit out of me as I was making a proper right turn from that left exit lane. Her oversized SUV would have made mincemeat of my car if my reflexes weren't good.
While I'm on that topic, someone needs to tell the idiot who was driving in the fast lane of the 405 you don't want to wait until the last 200 yards before your exit to start moving to the right.
If the VA is going to insist we check in via computer kiosks, they might want to make sure they're working before they tell us to use them.
While I'm on that topic, if you work at the VA and you're telling a patient to go see X in order to get something done, it might be a good idea to make sure X is there that day. I had that one happen yesterday. Walked a good long distance only to find the person I'd been sent to see was off that day. I guess I should be grateful for the exercise rather than focus on the time and effort wasted.
Oh good, someone's found a way to make a substitute for heroin that's much cheaper to manufacturer, with only one bad side effect. It is a "flesh-eating" drug, causing the user's skin to become crocodile-like in appearance before it just dies off. Amputations usually follow. Just what the world needed and now it's in the U.S.
This Date in History (9/27/13):
1066 – William the Conqueror and his army set sail from the mouth of the Somme River, beginning the Norman Conquest of England.
1331 – The Battle of Płowce between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order is fought.
1422 – After the brief Gollub War the Teutonic Knights sign the Treaty of Melno with the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania
1529 – The Siege of Vienna begins when Suleiman I attacks the city.
1540 – The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) receives its charter from Pope Paul III.
1590 – Pope Urban VII dies 13 days after being chosen as the Pope, making his reign the shortest papacy in history.
1605 – The armies of Sweden are defeated by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Battle of Kircholm.
1669 – The Venetians surrender the fortress of Candia to the Ottomans, thus ending the 21-year long Siege of Candia.
1777 – Lancaster, Pennsylvania is the capital of the United States, for one day.
1821 – Mexico gains its independence from Spain.
1822 – Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta stone.
1825 – The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens, and begins operation of the world's first service of locomotive-hauled passenger trains.
1854 – The steamship SS Arctic sinks with 300 people on board. This marks the first great disaster in the Atlantic Ocean.
1875 – The merchant sailing ship Ellen Southard is wrecked in a storm at Liverpool; the United States Congress subsequently awards 27 gold Lifesaving Medals to the lifeboat men who went to rescue her crew.
1903 – Wreck of the Old 97, a train crash made famous by the song of the same name.
1905 – The physics journal Annalen der Physik received Albert Einstein's paper "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", introducing the equation E=mc².
1908 – The first production of the Ford Model T automobile was built at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan.
1916 – Iyasu is proclaimed deposed as ruler of Ethiopia in a palace coup in favor of his aunt Zauditu.
1922 – King Constantine I of Greece abdicates his throne in favor of his eldest son, King George II.
1928 – The Republic of China is recognized by the United States.
1930 – Bobby Jones wins the U.S. Amateur Championship to complete the Grand Slam of golf. The old structure of the grand slam was the U.S. Open, British Open, U.S. Amateur, and British Amateur.
1937 – Balinese Tiger declared extinct.
1938 – Ocean liner Queen Elizabeth launched in Glasgow.
1940 – World War II: The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin by Germany, Japan and Italy.
1941 – The SS Patrick Henry is launched becoming the first of more than 2,700 Liberty ships.
1942 – Last day of the September Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marine Corps troops barely escape after being surrounded by Japanese forces near the Matanikau River.
1944 – The Kassel Mission results in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.
1949 – The first Plenary Session of the National People's Congress approves the design of the Flag of the People's Republic of China.
1954 – The nationwide debut of Tonight Starring Steve Allen (The Tonight Show) hosted by Steve Allen on NBC.
1956 – USAF Captain Milburn G. Apt becomes the first man to exceed Mach 3 while flying the Bell X-2. Shortly thereafter, the craft goes out of control and Captain Apt is killed.
1959 – Nearly 5000 people die on the main Japanese island of Honshū as the result of a typhoon.
1961 – Sierra Leone joins the United Nations.
1962 – The Yemen Arab Republic is established.
1964 – The British TSR-2 aircraft XR219 makes its maiden flight from Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.
1968 – The stage musical Hair opens at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, where it played 1,998 performances until its closure was forced by the roof collapsing in July 1973.
1977 – A United States Navy McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II crashes into a residential neighborhood in Yokohama, Japan, killing two children on the ground and injuring seven other people.
1979 – The United States Department of Education receives final approval from the U.S. Congress to become the 13th US Cabinet agency.
1983 – Richard Stallman announces the GNU project to develop a free Unix-like operating system.
1988 – National League for Democracy is formed by Aung San Suu Kyi and various others to help fight against dictatorship in Myanmar.
1993 – The Sukhumi massacre takes place in Abkhazia.
1996 – In Afghanistan, the Taliban capture the capital city Kabul after driving out President Burhanuddin Rabbani and executing former leader Mohammad Najibullah.
1996 – The Julie N. tanker ship crashes into the Million Dollar Bridge in Portland, Maine spilling thousands of gallons of oil.
1997 – Communications are suddenly lost with the Mars Pathfinder space probe.
1998 – The Google internet search engine retrospectively claims this as its birthday.
2000 – The first Olympic Gold Medal ever for Tae Kwon Do was won by Greek athlete Michalis Mouroutsos in men's -58 kg division in Sydney.
Famous Folk Born on September 27th:
Samuel Adams (you had to be special to have a beer named after you...wait, there was one named for Billy Carter...never mind)
Samuel Francis Du Pont
William "Bull" Nelson
Thomas Nast
Harry Blackstone, Sr.
Sam Ervin
William Conrad
Jayne Meadows
Arthur Penn
Roger C. Carmel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1EbxYKh_4 one of my favorite moments in TOS)
Greg Morris (I still feel a slight twinge of guilt for having put such a beating on him in a poker game at the old Desert Inn Hotel/Casino. I'm keeping the money though.)
Wilford Brimley
Don Cornelius
Kathy Whitworth
Randy Bachman (Happy 70th birthday!)
Meat Loaf (How many times will we hear Adam Richman making the same joke to a chef cooking a burger..."don't let your meat loaf"?)
Liz Torres
A Martinez
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
Greg Ham
Shaun Cassidy
Beth Heiden
Christopher Cousins
Amanda Detmer
Gwyneth Paltrow
Lil Wayne
Avril Lavigne
No movie quotes for this blog.
posted by me at 8:08 PM
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