With respect to the Michael Jackson story, the Drudge Report the other day had the best headline. It read, “Michael Jackson: Never Can Say Goodbye.”
I really feel like our celebrity-obsession crossed some line in the past two weeks and I believe Bernard Goldberg when he says we have become the ‘United States of Entertainment.’
And while we were all absorbed with the never-ending news coverage and retrospectives and downloading ‘Thriller’ to our iPods, Congress was busy trying to take away our freedom and destroy businesses and jobs.
HR 2454, the bill that is very misleadingly titled, ‘The American Clean Air and Energy Security Act of 2009’ passed the House overwhelmingly, with eight Republicans joining all of the Democrats in voting for it.
Let me read you something from a website that posts the text of pending legislation on the web.
“This bill is very large, and loading it may cause your web browser to perform sluggishly, or even freeze.”
Well it did, in fact, make my web browser freeze. It took me three tries to load this bill. That’s because the bill that is only one step from becoming law runs to over 1,300 pages. And not a single member of Congress read it before voting for it. Not one.
That’s because HR 2454 was still being written as it was being debated. More than 300 pages of amendments to the bill were inserted at three o’clock in the morning before debate began at 10:00 a.m. and a vote was taken at 3:00 p.m. If you watched C-SPAN, you could see the House clerk inserting and removing pages from the bill, the text of which is required to be in the House during debate and before a vote, while the bill was being debated and voted on.
It was surreal.
We’re not talking about naming a post office here. We’re talking about the federal government reaching right in to your wallet.
Among the many pernicious provisions of HR 2454 is this one. In order to sell your house, you will be required to obtain a certification from a federal agency that says your windows meet the latest energy efficiency standards, your appliances are Energy Star certified and that you have installed an outside receptacle for charging electric vehicles, even if neither you nor the buyer of your home has an electric vehicle.
Understand this. In order to sell your home, you will have to obtain the approval of a federal bureaucrat.
Small manufacturers will have to submit to federal energy audits and if found wanting, either cease operations or invest money they may never recoup in retrofitting their plants to meet stringent and aribitrary federal guidelines.
Your electric provider will have to provide a specified percentage of the electricity you use from renewable sources, irrespective of the fact that wind and solar electricity generation are not predictable and not practical in much of the country. This mandate will have an enormous impact on what it costs to keep your lights on and your air conditioner running.
All of this will put America at a competitive disadvantage in the world and will do little to bring about energy independence and will do nothing to reduce carbon output.
As I said, the bill runs to over 1,300 pages and no, I haven’t read all of it. I’m willing to believe that no single human has read every single page of the bill. Congressional staff members have been assigned to read portions of the bill and summarize them. But no member of Congress has read the bill.
And yet, it’s on the way to the Senate where it stands a good chance of passing. And it all happened in the dark of the night and while we were all involved in the endless goodbye to Jacko.
When are we going to wake up? This is not representative government. It’s tyranny of the most insidious kind. It’s a very small handful of very powerful legislators whose party holds the majority riding roughshod over anyone who would dare speak out.
If you and I don’t start raising seven kinds of hell and start doing it soon, our property rights, our access to health care, our ability to choose what kind of car we want to drive and countless other freedoms will be taken from us.
All while we’re watching the E! Channel.
we always agree with your conservative point of view.
should we be contacting the blue-dog dem to help vote the hr2454 down or better our republican people? a list of both/either on the web?
thx.
I was just sitting here with way too much time on my hands, as usual, when I read on Drudge that the US budget deficit hit $1 trillion for the first time yesterday. Well, I’ve never seen a trillion so I wondered how much that was in real dollars. So, this morning I went to the ever trusty Google and did a little research and figuring. I was a little stunned.
So a deficit means that the government is spending that much more than they’re taking in, right? Not total dollars spent, just the amount of money they don’t have that they’re still spending. OK, well, I took the average weight of one note of US currency and multiplied that by 1 trillion–I figured that we’d just see how much one trillion one dollar bills would weigh. Well, on average, they would weigh 2,204,622,621 pounds and 13.58 ounces. I then took that figure and divided it out to see how many (by weight) dollar bills you would have to throw away per second in order to blow 1 trillion dollars. It came out to 69.9081247 pounds. In other words, you’d have to throw away/burn/destroy almost 70 pounds of one dollar bills per second (24/7/365) to dispose of the amount of money that congress has spent over and above what they’re taking in. In my neighborhood we have trash pickup twice per week. If I threw out that amount of money they would need to send more than one truck–the weight would come to 21,198,294.4 pounds per trash day.
OK, I did some more checking and found out that the trash trucks that the City of Tyler uses are either 15 or 30 cubic yard side loaders. If they are the 30 cubic yard variety it would take 497.413462 trucks twice per week. If they are the 15 cubic yard variety it would take almost 1,000 trips! That would be way too much traffic on the street!
That’s a trillion dollars. And they want to keep adding to that amount? These people are spending money like a shopaholic on speed! I think it’s time for an intervention. We need to figure out how to cut up their “credit cards” so they have to stop!
Amazing!
Lady’s and Gentleman welcome on the US Liberal Airways flight “we love everybody 09” from Dulles International to Dulles International. Our Captain is today Mr. BHO. He will speak, after he lost ground, hourly to you via your little TV in front of you. So don’t worry we keep you updated. The flight time will be approximately 4 years. We flying in a 300 Trillion Dollar height and the flight will be rough. Don’t worry. We will tell you when and what to eat, when and what to drink and we will tell you even when and where to go to the lavatory.
Now switch your brain of and listen to the nice music. Please shot off all electrical devices and shot down all the ugly web pages and blogers from the right wing. We wish you a nice brainless flight and a happy landing. We hope you enjoy the flight and choose the US Liberal Airways again. Thank You.