Reflections From a Murky Pond

The US House of Representatives passed House Resolution 1 (HR 1), Making supplemental appropriations for job preservation and creation, infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and science, assistance to the unemployed, and State and local fiscal stabilization, for fiscal year ending September 30, 2009, and for other purposes. aka The Stimulus Package. The $819 billion stimulus bill passed the House 244 to 188.

Not one single Republican voted for it. The Republicans in the US House of Representatives stood strong and unified in the face of the Liberal opposition and voted in a block against HR 1. They chose to resist Obama’s will and the Democrats’ plan for the largest increase in government bureaucracy in American history.

To paraphrase King Leonidas of Sparta in 300 when he was told that his nation must submit, “This is America!”

There was no pass to defend, no cliffs, no burning sands, no crashing surf below as there had been at Thermopylae in August, 480 BCE; no one would lay dead and torn at the end of the day. Yet, even so, there was the same doomed courage and love of honor, duty and country as House Republican Leader, John Boehner led his 177 Republicans into Hall of the House Of Representatives to make their stand.

Like Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, Rep. John Boehner and his 177 were not alone when they made their stand;  a contingent Thespian and Theban volunteers stood beside the Spartans at the end in 480 BCE, and 11 Democrats crossed party lines to stand with the Republicans in January, 2009 CE.

Those Thespians and Thebans who stood beside the Spartans have gotten little notice from history. Let us not repeat that dishonorable mistake; let us honor these heroes for what they have done.

1. Bobby Bright – Alabama’s 2nd district
2. Parker Griffith – Alabama’s 5th district
3. Allen Boyd – Florida’s 2nd district
4. Walt Minnick – Idaho’s 1st district
5. Brad Ellsworth – Indiana’s 8th district
6. Frank Kratovil – Maryland’s 1st district
7. Collin Peterson – Minnesota’s 7th district
8. Gene Taylor – Mississippi’s 4th district
9. Heath Shuler – North Carolina’s 11th district
10. Paul Kanjorski – Pennsylvania’s 11th district
11. Jim Cooper – Tennessee’s 5th district

These 11 Democrats crossed party lines in open defiance of the Democratic leadership in order to defend America against the ill-thought plans of Obama and the Liberals. Honor them as you would those those 177 Republicans who put their careers on the lines for all of our sakes.

U.S. Rep. John Carter (R-TX) will introduce new legislation to Congress today, Thursday January 29, 2009, to eliminate all penalty and interest charges imposed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against U.S. citizens who have failed to properly pay their federal income tax correctly and on time.

The bill is designed to provide the same treatment for all U.S. taxpayers owing back taxes as that enjoyed by House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY).

Carter’s bill, known as the Rangel Rule, draws attention to the recent legal issues of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel, (D-NY), and would enable citizens who fail to pay taxes on time to do so later with no additional fees or interest.

Rangel, who writes America’s federal tax policies, finally admitted last fall that he failed to pay thousands in real estate taxes for rental income he earned from a property in the Dominican Republic. Yet, as of September 2008 the Harlem Democrat reportedly had paid back more than $10,000 in taxes but that did not include any IRS penalties.

Your [Rangel] citizens back home should have the same rights and benefits that come to you as a member of congress. You shouldn’t be treated any differently under the law than your citizens back home.

— Rep. John Carter

Carter also added that normal American citizens should receive the “same courtesy” that the IRS is supposedly granting to Rangel and Obama’s incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who was also recently exposed as having failed to pay his taxes.

I absolutely adore it when someone takes filthy, puling racist thugs like Rangel to task for their misdeeds. After all, there is a precedent; the IRS was used to break up the KKK in the 1944.

It gets better though. Apparently Rep. John Carter wrote to Rangel earlier in January and said that Rangel should either pay the IRS fees he should owe or join Carter in co-sponsoring the legislation establishing the law that such fees are no longer acceptable.

Is There Any Point?

Is there any point to Rep. John Carter’s introduction of the Rangel Rule bill to Congress? If one is solely concerned with getting legislation passed, then there was no point to Carter’s doing this; there is no chance at all that the Rangel Rule will be passed – or even voted upon. Carter knows this.

I am raising this issue not so much to just push the issue but to open the discussion. I don’t think it’s wrong for us to start having a free discussion in congress and with a certain amount of humor in it about how should people be treated in Congress.

— Rep. John Carter

I think it’s time – in fact, past time by a long margin – for such a discussion to happen. The people in Congress need to be held accountable for the actions instead of being granted special privileges and considerations because of the offices that they hold.

In the US we don’t talk that much about our ongoing efforts against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Our media has spent years concentrating on defining our efforts in Iraq as unmitigated failures instead. I find this sad on many levels; putting patriotism, journalistic ethics, and morality aside – as our media has done – there’s still the incredible source of humor that is being overlooked.

So – to help correct society’s gross oversight in the matter:

You Might Be Taliban If…

You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.

You own a  $15,000 rocket launcher, but you can’t afford shoes.

You have more wives than teeth.

You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.

You’ve ever opened a can of falafel with a mortar round.

You used a Stinger missile given to you by George Bush Sr. to shoot at a helicopter sent by George Bush Jr.

You’ve ever had your camel repossessed.

You can’t think of anyone you HAVEN’T declared Jihad against.

You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry ammunition in your robe.

You get really excited by the idea of a goat beauty pageant.

You’ve ever been asked, “Does this burka make my ass look fat?”

You think “The Kite Runner” is the funniest book you ever read.

You’ve felt the urge to rub one out after seeing a woman’s exposed ankle.

You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs.

You’ve ever uttered the phrase, “I love what you’ve done with your cave.”

You wipe your ass with your bare left hand, but consider bacon “unclean.”

You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least one.

You believe rape is a crime punishable by death – for the victim.

You bathe at least monthly whether necessary or not.

You’ve ever had a crush on your neighbor’s goat.

You’ve ever executed a goat for being sexually provocative.

You think homosexuals should be killed but see nothing wrong with molesting boys under 11 years of age.

You think there is nothing wrong with forcing 9 year old girls into marriage with 50 year old men.

Come on, people. Terrorism relies on terror in order to be even marginally successful. You defeat things like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas by ridiculing them and laughing at them. Then shoot them, strip their corpses naked, and leave them unshriven on the ground for the vultures and jackals to feast upon. But the ridicule and laughing should come first. 😉

The nightmare that is the office of President of the United States has always taken a heavy toll on the men who’ve been arrogant and/or foolish enough to hold it. Sometimes it happens sooner than others though…

Image From Mad Magazine

Maybe this is – or something similar to it – is President Obama refused to allow the press access to the Oval Office and wanted them to only publish White House-provided photos of President Barack Obama working in the Oval Office.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, is – perhaps in a fit of decompensation –  stridently and shamelessly demanding that a significant fraction of the proposed Stimulus Package be given over to abortion clinics run by population control organizations.

Don’t Let Them Breed

Rep. Pelosi says that it is necessary to subsidize these organizations with US tax dollars because  the US needs to rebuild its economy by limiting the population of those poor people who are a burden on the state.

There’s a word that defines this sort of social engineering, a word laden a great deal of evil  – eugenics.

Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

— Rep. Nancy Pelosi
This Week with George Stephanopoulos

“Family Planning” covers a bit more than just the contraception that Pelosi mentions though. It also covers abortion. And when you combine the two with subsidies based on social engineering principles, you are endorsing eugenics in America. Of course eugenics has a fairly long history America, and it has always been entangled with population control and family planning groups. In fact most of the modern family planning groups and abortion clinics derived from the American Eugenic Movement.

These groups are, of course, the ones that Pelosi is beholden to and the ones she demands that vast sums of US tax dollars be given to. This is unsurprising since Rep. Pelosi’s former Deputy Chief of Staff was none other than Cecile Richards, the current President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Planned Parenthood evolved out of the American Eugenics Movement as it was adhered to by its founder, Margaret Sanger. Both Sanger and her organization, Planned Parenthood, focus on Negative Eugenics. Negative eugenics is the attempt to improve society by lowering the fertility among the genetically disadvantaged. Methods for this include abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.

So far, so good – or at least not entirely bad or evil. Encouraging or making it easier for people with severe genetic conditions not to pass those damaging traits to the next generation has a certain logic and benefit. Of course this wasn’t the sole focus of Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood and similar organizations, and apparently Rep. Pelosi. The focus is, and has always been, on reducing the number of “undesirables” in American society.

In Sanger’s own words:

Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.

~*~

It [charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

~*~

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern “benevolence” is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.

— Margaret Sanger,
The Pivot of Civilization

Reading Sanger’s writings and listening to Pelosi’s mouthings is enough to raise the hackles of any reasonable and right-thinking American, even those who follow the beliefs of the Pro-Choice / Pro-Abortion side of American reproductive politics.

Perhaps it’s past time to apply something akin to negative eugenics to the US House of Representatives. 😉