Politics

As a former firefighter this pisses me off to no end:

Officials with the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, representing thousands of federal firefighters, complained this week to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee after learning that some committee staffers ran an office pool to guess how many acres are burned by wildfires each year.

The contest, run since 2003 by veteran staffer Frank Gladics, was open mostly to Republican staffers on the House and Senate energy and appropriations committees that oversee federal firefighting operations. While no money exchanged hands, Gladics would bequeath the winner one of several hats in his office, including a Wizard hat, a “When Pigs Fly” hat and the mechanical “Holly-Jolly Christmas Hat.”

News of the contest was first reported last week by the environmental news service Grist.org, which quoted the committee’s Republican spokesman, Robert Dillon, as saying the contest was for the benefit of eastern lawmakers less familiar with wildfire season.

Frank Gladics used to work close with former Senator Conrad Burns. Remember this one from him?

"See that guy over there? He hasn't done a God-damned thing. They sit around. I saw it up on the Wedge fire and in northwestern Montana some years ago. It's wasteful. You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It's gotta change."

[SNIP]

"Bullshit!" Says Burns. "They're lazy, overpaid bums."

That was this sorry sack of shit talking about firefighters who had been battling huge wildfires for weeks.

US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here).

[SNIP]

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

Republicans are still pissed over President Obama's recessed appointment, so now they want to take action. Of course that action won't occur until they return from their recess, which is what they are arguing they aren't in.

Sound confusing? Well let me add to that. OK - let's let Republican Congresswoman Diane Black add to it in this statement:

“These appointments are an affront to the Constitution. No matter how you look at this, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I hope the House considers my resolution as soon as we return to Washington so we can send a message to President Obama.”...

“No executive agency should be immune from the checks and balances our founders intended. What’s more, the NLRB appointments were jammed through by the president before the Senate even had the chance to consider the appointees. Their names were only put forward on Dec. 15, a mere two days before the Senate recessed for the holiday. The president is clearly out of bounds here and should not be allowed to skirt the Constitution as he pleases.”

The Constitution gives the President the power to make appointments when Congress is in recess. Black is apparently saying they aren't in recess, yet she says that the names were put forward only two days before the Senate did go into recess. Got it now?

If your head isn't ready to explode by such idiocracy in two little paragraphs then you are a stronger person than I!

From Gallup:

The percentage of Americans identifying as political independents increased in 2011, as is common in a non-election year, although the 40% who did so is the highest Gallup has measured, by one percentage point. More Americans continue to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, 31% to 27%.

This year will be even more interesting. There's a huge struggle going on in the Republican Party right now, where the establishment seems to be pushing Romney and the rest want anyone but Romney. This infighting could end up pushing more people to the Independent column should Mitt Romney become the nominee.

If all this helps rid us of a two party system that is slanted against true democracy, the better we will all be. It's time to get rid of this system and move to more independence of our elected leaders. So many times we see politicians have to represent their party instead of the people they are elected to represent and that is anything but American.

So what about you? Would you like to see political parties go away? Let me know in the comments.

Things are heating up in Wisconsin:

Three individuals - including a former top aide to Gov. Scott Walker - were charged Thursday with felonies as part of the ongoing John Doe investigation into Walker staffers.

Tim Russell, a longtime Walker campaign and county staffer, was charged with two felony and one misdemeanor count of embezzlement. One source said the charges are tied to Operation Freedom, an annual military appreciation day held at the zoo.

In 2010, Walker's county administration had asked prosecutors to investigate what had happened to $11,000 raised in 2007 for the event.

Russell's attorney, Michael Maistelman, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Also charged Thursday was Brian Pierick, Russell's longtime partner and a staffer at the state Department of Public Instruction, and Kevin Kavanaugh, Walker's appointee to the Milwaukee County Veteran Service Commission.

Kavanaugh is charged with five felonies for theft and fraudulent writings by a coporate officer. He was the treasurer of the Milwaukee Purple Heart chapter at the time of the dispute over the $11,000 for Operation Freedom.

Pierick, 48, was charged with two felonies counts for child enticement. He is an office operations assistant at DPI dealing with education for homeless children and youth, according to the agency's website.

That last one really gets me, as in it sounds an awful like another Jerry Sandusky case brewing. Despite that, it's pretty amazing to see this going down given Walker's former star status in the GOP.

I'm sure many have seen this chart before, showing communism being more popular than Congress:

But is it as bad as we think? Apparently so.

NPR as a lengthy article up examining just how bad Congress really is, and the conclusion is really, really bad. This quote should show you just how bad:

"There were a few really bruising periods in American congressional history, not only the run-up to the Civil War, but also around the War of 1812," he says.

Two periods in American History none of us could even begin to imagine living through, yet our Congress is viewed as badly now as then.

But it compares worst than other bad times for Congress:

Other periods of governmental deadlock include Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction presidency, Woodrow Wilson's conflict with Congress over the League of Nations and the fights between President Truman and the "do-nothing" 80th Congress in 1947-48.

"None of those involved the level of conflict within Congress itself that we see today," Feller says.

Ouch! But here's something that really could prove the case and something that I talked about in my last post:

In the pantheon of also-rans for least effective Congresses, Mann would add a contentious period circa 1910 when long-serving Republican House Speaker Joseph Cannon was ousted from his post mostly by renegades in his own party. There were also bruising fights over the Depression-era New Deal.

We just got over one of these, but here it comes again:

The White House plans to ask Congress for an increase in the debt limit before the end of the week, according to a senior Treasury Department official.

The debt limit is projected to fall within $100 billion of the current cap by December 30. President Barack Obama is expected to ask for additional borrowing authority to increase the limit by $1.2 trillion.

Under the new budget, Congress can only vote to block the debt-ceiling extension with a disapproval resolution. Lawmakers have 15 days within receiving the request to vote down the debt limit increase.

The debt limit currently stands at $15.194 trillion and would increase to $16.394 trillion with the request.

This time though Democrats have some strong ammo entering this fight. Our nation's credit downgrade in July was mostly due to the fighting over raising the debt limit that Republicans brought forth, but that has been the subject to much spin. Something that really can't be spun though is how investors feel about the U.S. right now:

The U.S. government received record demand for its bonds in 2011, pushing longer-maturity Treasuries to their best performance since 1995 in a sign that President Barack Obama may have little difficulty financing a fourth consecutive year of $1 trillion budget deficits.

The statement by Newt Gingrich's campaign equating his disqualification from the Virginia GOP primary ballot and Pearl Harbor wasn't the first time he has taken to exploiting that day of infamy. Last year on Pearl Harbor day Newt decided to use the day of remembrance to his own financial gains:

On a day when Americans remember the lives that were sacrificed during the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Gingrich reminded us all what this momentous occasion is really all about when he chirpily tweeted, “The 69th anniversary of the japanese attack is a good time to remind folks of our novels pearl harbor and days of infamy newt.”

Newt later decided to delete that tweet, but not before reminding the world that he views horrible days like that as a day to increase his personal wealth. Not very presidential if you ask me.