Big Sky Cairn

The Wall Street Journal nails what Pelosi and her merry band did last week, in short bowed to the far left and cut off funding to support our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Senate will in all likelihood restore this funding and get rid of the retreat timelines, but the whole thing is one more example of Democrats turning our government into a circus.

My favorite, and I mean this sarcasticly, was the $51.6 billion “patriot premium,” imposed on small businesses without any public hearings.

What Speaker Pelosi didn’t expect was that all of this spending would cause a mutiny in her own caucus. She had to postpone a vote last week after a revolt by “Blue Dog” Democrats who promised to oppose a bill that piled domestic projects on war spending. Their complaint is that the extras violate “paygo,” the 2006 Democratic campaign promise to pay for new initiatives dollar-for-dollar with new taxes or budget cuts. Never mind that paygo has been a farce from the get-go, tossed aside when convenient this year and last.

So what to do? These are House Democrats, so the grand Blue Dog-liberal “compromise” was . . . raise taxes. Democrats have now added a 0.5% income tax surcharge on incomes over $500,000 for individuals, $1 million for couples. “They’re not going to miss it,” Arkansas Democrat Mike Ross told AP, in a sign of his respect for hard-earned private income.

The surcharge won’t vanish if the war does. And it would hit millions of small subchapter S businesses that pay individual income rates – and which hire the very people that Democrats claim need more jobless benefits because the economy is so terrible

Sounds about right, Democrats creating a permanent problem to alleviate a short-term headache. For those wanting to go in the way back machine this is exactly how the AMT was created in the ’60s.

Now onto other things, seems Jay cannot help himself as he goes on the path of distortion and speculation again. Glad he brought up CHIP and his Mother’s Day issue so I don’t have to. In fine BlueJay fashion, he goes on to speculate that Rehberg voted against the GI bill he cosponsored, not because of riders attached to that bill, but because Rehberg is stealthily positioning himself to back McCain. Of course the major problems here are that Jay neglected to mention the $51 billion tax hike attached to the GI Bill amendment, and my guess is that might have had something to do with his vote.

Rehberg also has not signed on as a sponsor of McCain’s bill in the House. He might, he might not, I do not know and I am guessing Jay does not either, but that is not really the point here. It more that Jay has gone the Tester route and if the facts do not support you, just make shit up.

I could spend days correcting the rest of his post (NCLB Republican only legislation? - I seem to remember Sen. Kennedy being the champion of that one in Congress, and Republicans leading the charge to roll it back), but it is a nice day out and I have some spring yardwork to do.

To close, CNN gives one of the more head scratching headlines in a long while; “Republicans Block Democrats War Funding Measure.” Of course it was the Out of Iraq and Progressive members who voted to cut funding, but hey its CNN, why not just blame Republicans.

[…] Stress wrote an interesting post today on Patriot GamesHere’s a quick excerpt…what Pelosi and her merry band did last week, in short bowed to the far left and cut off funding to support our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. […]

Your Jay Stevens obsession aside, I think you missed something vital in your words on Pelosi’s maneuvering. You’re caught up in partisan sniping. But think back to when Bush attacked Iraq - wasn’t it mostly bipartisan? Does it ever occur to you that that is not an accident?

Foreign policy is largely bipartisan, and doesn’t change much from one administration to the next. Clinton carried out George HW Bush’s Iraq policy, and Bush II merely brought Clinton’s eight years of bombing and murderous sanctions against Iraq to a logical conclusion. The Iraq invasion was meant to the the coup de grâce - the crowning jewel on a twelve year obsession with bringing down that country.

But it is taking longer than expected, and the public is no longer behind the occupation. The Democrats are mostly behind the effort still, but are caught in the middle - they have to both support the war effort and appear to oppose it.

Taken in that light, can you now see what Pelosi is doing? She’s using parliamentary tactics not to subvert the war effort, but rather to subvert and con the anti-war public.

It was a bipartisan war in the beginning, and is bipartisan war still. Accepting that you won’t get this or can’t see it,

Somebody, some insider, told me once that once you get to DC and go behind closed doors, parties disappear, and it is all about interests. R vs D is mostly for public consumption.