You can’t jam a major arms control treaty right before Christmas. What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians.
Reporter 1: Senator Thune, I was just looking at the list of earmark requests that you requested this year [in the Omnibus spending bill] and it adds up to over a hundred million dollars
Thune: I support those projects, but I don’t support this bill [to which my own earmarks are attached; I do not support it because of earmarks.]
Reporter 2: Going through this bill, there is earmark after earmark from the both of you, millions of dollars in earmarks, why do you have any credibility on this?
Cornyn: Because we’re going to vote against the bill.
Reporter 3: It appears like you’re saying one thing and doing another.
Cornyn: Not at all,
Thune: [also stepped in to defend their stance on the Omnibus]
GOP aide: We’ve got to leave it there – we’ve got to get going.
Holbrooke seems almost like the last statesman, a figure plucked from a time when diplomacy really mattered and America was represented abroad primarily by diplomats rather than generals.
[The GOP members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are issuing their own report, which will lay the entire financial crisis at the feet of] Fannie and Freddie, which somehow managed to cause housing bubbles in Ireland, Iceland, Latvia, and Spain as well as the United States; and the repo market had nothing to do with it.
And bear in mind that this wasn’t one Republican; it was all of them.
I really do wonder how this country can remain governable, when one party insists on creating its own reality. Next thing you know they’re going to reject the theory of evolution. Oh, wait …
Mitch McConnell plans to filibuster an omnibus spending bill because of the earmarks larded onto it. Worth noting that he personally added several of these earmarks to the bill. Your 2010 GOP, staunch earmark opponents as recently as a week ago:
the legislation includes provisions requested this year by McConnell, including $650,000 for a genetic technology center at the University of Kentucky, according to an analysis of the bill by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog.
[…]
But McConnell, like other new earmark opponents, stopped short of asking for his projects to be removed from the bill.
Rest assured, we shall never speak of this again. Or now, really. Just forget any of this happened.
I really think Senate Democrats should consider taking advantage of their critical numerical advantage in terms of Jewish Senators and just hold a “no Christians invited” special Christmas Day session. In the all-Jewish Senate, Chuck Schumer is the median member. Joe Lieberman, the most conservative Jewish Senator, is the median in the real Senate.
Lemkin 