Politics Blog

Leaders end session a week early so they can go home and campaign to be re-elected just to come back and do nothing for another 2 years:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Leaving behind a pile of unfinished work, members of the scandal-rocked U.S. Congress adjourned and went home on Saturday to ask voters to re-elect them in five weeks.

With polls showing President George W. Bush’s fellow Republicans could lose control of Congress in the November 7 contests, their leaders even decided to depart a week early to give members more time to campaign.

“It’s been a ghastly congressional session, particularly the last year,” said Stephen Hess, a congressional scholar the Brookings Institution. “They figure the best thing to do is get out of town. They aren’t doing anything here.”

Congress has been dogged by low approval ratings, huge federal deficits, the increasingly unpopular Iraq war and a string of scandals. At the top of the list was the departure of indicted former House of Representatives Republican leader Tom DeLay of Texas and an investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who, according to a congressional report this week, had frequent contact with the White House.

-- 'The Commish' A.J. Sparxx

Moving from the “financial services industry” into politics is not a good idea especially when the company that you own and are touting has a track record likethis: LINK HERE

I wonder how long it will take to find the many investors who lost their “life savings” in vFinance, Inc?

I did see that Tim Mahoney (D) was against individual social security accounts. With a track record like his publicly traded company, I do not blame him.

Plus, it is a very fun exercise to google vFinance and lawsuit……

UPDATE:The best part of this is that all that shareholder value was lost while Clinton was President!!! This company went public in March 2000 at $7.00 a share. In one year, Tim Mahoney (D) lost $300,000,000 of shareholder value for the stockholders. This chart from Yahoo Finance will sink this guys campaign. Please help spread the news.

-- Oak Leaf

A comment posted at Polipundit.com from May 31, 2006:

listen, if we had the numbers the Senate would have agreed with the House, and bush would have been forced to swallow hard.

but we don’ have the numbers.

no bill = no wall = the status quo = illegal aliens continue crossing the borders in the hundreds of thousands yearly.

A comment posted at Polipundit.com from May 30, 2006:

I can’t agree with #3 #s b/c i don’t know the internals, but it is blatantly obvious that if the choice is between comprehensive immigration reform and the House’s my-way-or-no way, the former is by far the best option.

If the House decides not to compromise, we will be left with what we have now: NOTHING.

A comment posted at Polipundit.com from May 24, 2006:

no comprehensive reform = no wall = 10 - 12 million more illegal border crossings.

the dems, rinos and president bush will not go along with the house version as it stand without – at the very least – hagel-martinez’s provision (5).

if, and most of u guys hope when, the bill dies in conference we will be left with what we have now:

no wall, no border, 10 - 12 million illegal crossings more in a few years.

CHEERS

Well, the House did not cave. We are now getting a 700 mile Fence PLUS high tech monitoring for 1,300 miles.

We called the bluff of the “amnesty Republicans” and they blinked!!!

Yep, as predicted this was Dubai Ports and Harriet Miers all over again.

-- Oak Leaf

From the Editors at NRO:

The Centers for Disease Control recommended in a September 22 report that all people aged 13–64 be routinely tested for HIV. The CDC is not recommending that tests be mandatory: Patients would be notified and have the option of refusing. Fears such as those aired by the ACLU — that the tests will, in practice, not be voluntary because written consent is not required — are pure paranoia. Previously, doctors had been advised to offer the test only to patients at high risk of being infected. The new recommendation suggests that these people tended not to take the test, and the statistics corroborate this implication: Forty percent of those diagnosed with HIV were tested because they were suffering from its symptoms, meaning they’d already had the virus, on average, for ten years. If more people at risk of getting AIDS were responsible enough to have themselves tested, these revised recommendations would not have been necessary.

So, we need to spend millions of health care dollars because a few lack personal responsabilty.

-- Oak Leaf

If the State can force it’s citizens what they can not eat, will a day come when they force us to take manadatory daily pills all under the guise of better health? Why not mandatory cholestoral pills to be distributed with every order of french fries?

A proposal to ban most artery-clogging trans fats from New York’s restaurants could save thousands of lives at little cost to restaurateurs, supporters of the initiative said on Wednesday.

But a leading industry group called for dialogue with city authorities to modify their “Orwellian regulation", which comes as many fast-food restaurants are already trying to reduce transfats in response to shifting consumer demand.

-- Oak Leaf

Sorry guys but I can not participate in the comments but I thought I would throw out an Open Thread.

Hopefully, the other guests will keep this open thread bumped.

Here is a question that ties into other posts today.

Are we better off today because we held our ground and forced the Seante to submit to the House’s Immigration position?

-- Oak Leaf

Fences work:

Members of the the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives agreed Monday at a reconciliation conference on the funding they would approve to boost border security as part of a $34.9 billion appropriations package for the Department of Homeland Security.

The bill allocates $1.2 billion to build 700 miles of security fence along the U.S.-Mexican border. The fence would involve advanced technology sensors and 1,800 towers built by Boeing and equipped with sensors.

…

It is certainly the case that in the long run of decades, generations and centuries, eventually long walls or border fences usually do come tumbling down. But they usually work very well indeed for a very long time first.

The Great Wall of China was famously breached three or four times over the millennia by hoards of barbarian invaders who did conquer China like the 13th century Mongols. But it worked very well for hundreds of years at a time in keeping them out. The German Army, or Wehrmacht, never breached the French Army’s Maginot Line in 1940. They had to go around it. In the fall of 1944, the defenses of the Wehrmacht’s own Siegfried Line, once it was fully manned, stopped even U.S. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army in its tracks and helped keep Nazi Germany in the war for another half a year.

In more recent times, the whole world knows that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989 during the collapse of communism in Central Europe. But it had bought time for the communists and kept East Germany from collapsing for more than 28 years before that finally happened.

Now in the 21st century, passive border defenses are in fashion again thanks to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. During his five stressful years as leader of the Jewish State, Sharon stopped the slaughter of more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, including a large proportion of women and children, by Palestinian suicide bombers by the straightforward expedient of building a massive security barrier, or fence, across the country to keep them out.

The fence continues to work well. Even when Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, lobs over low-tech, very short-range Qassem missiles at Israel over the fence, their cost in casualties so far has been negligible..

Sharon’s achievement not only defeated the Second Intifada, it also transformed the strategic assessments of nations and militaries facing guerrilla campaigns based from outside their own borders all around the world

Impressed by the Israeli example, India rapidly followed suit in building a security fence along the Line of Control in Kashmir. Indian security officials later said this fence cut the number of incursions by Islamist guerrillas operating from their havens in Pakistanby as much as 90 percent. The Indians have therefore pushed ahead with building another, even longer fence, around the nation of Bangladesh to cut back on Islamist guerrilla incursions from there.

Even Saudi Arabia has followed the Israeli example by building a massive security fence along its southern border with Yemen. Interestingly, the strategic purpose of the Saudi fence has much more in common with the U.S.-Mexico fence than with the Israeli one. The Israeli fence was built to choke off a vicious suicide bomber offensive against civilians. The Saudi fence, like the U.S. one, was built primarily to keep out a flood of illegal immigrants from a far poorer neighboring country to the south, and to prevent terrorist groups like al-Qaida from being able to funnel agents and weapons at will across the frontier.

Via Mickey Kaus, who can’t resist gloating about the Senate vote on the Secure Fence Act.

-- PoliPundit

On September 29, 1789, the final day of its very first session, the United States Congress passed “An act to recognize and adapt to the Constitution of the United States, the establishment of the troops raised under the resolves of the United States in Congress assembled” officially creating the military of the United States. To the men already serving on the frontier under orders of the Continental Congress, the change probably meant little.

Although the Constitution of the United States charged Congress with raising and regulating military forces, newly-elected House and Senate members delayed acting on this provision. Busy organizing the federal government and debating the location of the new Federal City, Congress neglected dealing with the issue of military forces until prodded by President and Commander in Chief George Washington.

Senate Sends Detainee Bill to Bush

Defense Budget Passed.

-- KnightHawk

Oh boy,

Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) planned to resign today, hours after ABC questioned him about sexually explicit internet messages with current and former Congressional pages under the age of 18.

A spokesman for Foley, the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, said the congressman submitted his resignation in a letter late this afternoon to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

I read the text of what he had written last night. Very, very creepy.

UPDATE by PoliPundit: Most important fact here:

Florida Republicans could replace Foley on the ballot.

-- The Ace

RCP’s Jay Cost agrees with my somewhat bleak assessment of GOP prospects in November:

As everybody has been shifting their estimates toward the GOP, I have found myself shifting toward the Democrats a bit. The reason is that there are a whole swath of GOP seats where, on an individual level, the party looks obscenely weak. I am thinking (in order of obscenity): TX 22, AZ 08, IA 01, CO 07, OH 18, PA 10, NC 11, IN 09, IN 08, IN 02. That’s 10 seats. Half of them look like “gimme’s” for the Democrats. That’s 1/3rd of what they need. That is a lot. I am starting to think that the performance of stronger incumbents in swing districts – FL 22, PA 06, PA 07, CT 02, CT 05 – is not so much a sufficient condition for the GOP to hold the House, but really more like a necessary condition.

And this, of course, was before Foley resigned. Here’s a fun question: just how many more Republican congressman are going to resign before Election Day and, as a consequence, essentially cede their seats to the Democrats? At this point, at least 20% of what the Democrats need will come from this types of seats alone. Make no mistake – this is bad news for the GOP. Tim Mahoney, the Democratic challenger, has no electoral experience and he is self-funding, but he has the cash to capitalize on this.

-- PoliPundit