Furibundum

Snippets from the ramblings of an irregular three percent; to wit, the archetypal lunatic fringe. For your consideration, format and emphases my own, content via Sipsey Street Irregulars , the gathering place for a merry band of Three Percenters: "Pelosi and her ilk apparently do not understand that this Intolerable Act has some folks so angry that they are ready to resist their slow-rolling revolution against the Founders' Republic by force of arms . "They certainly do not hear the soft 'snik-snik' of cleaning rods being used on millions of rifle barrels in this country by people who have decided that their backs are to the wall, politics and the courts no longer are sufficient to the task of defending their liberties, and they must make their own arrangements. "[I]f we are to avoid civil war, we must get their attention BEFORE the IRS thug parties descend upon us each in turn -- when we will be forced into dozens of defensive slaughters and then, to end i...

Imperfect, for a fact, but it's finally over; the health care reform bill passed and ready for Obama to sign off on. I'm not wetting my pants about it or anything, but I am glad, for what it's worth. For all my bitching about the details of the plan and for the peremptory stunts pulled getting it through, it is at least something useful, bringing the United States' health care setup closer to better. I suppose it's really not ended yet, of course. Already the Republican claptrap has started up vowing to legislatively repeal the "monstrosity", which might be interesting to watch them try, seeing as how to repeal the bill they would need to bring in 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House. And as Paul Abrams at HuffPo pointedly asks , what exactly in the bill would they scrub? In part, "They will again allow discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, wiping millions off of insurance rolls? They will reinstate lifetime caps on health c...

You know it's bad when the "Party of No" gets all squirmy about one of their own, a fellow-Republican, demonstrating just why the label. Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky flustered even his partisan peers by digging in his heels to not let pass emergency legislation extending unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless still out of work. Of course, he ultimately caved and at the end of the day (literally) the Senate passed the measure ready to send on to the president for signing into law. But the inconstancy, not to mention the thoughtlessness, of Bunning's one-man filibuster that delayed getting it there is certainly notable. Such a poser, acting suddenly all fiscally responsible, going on insisting that the extended unemployment pay must be paid for rather than added to the deficit. "If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators support, how can we tell the American people with a straight face that we will ever pay for anything?" he said. ...

Back in 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama had this to say opposing The Patriot Act when it came up then for reauthorization: "We do not have to settle for a Patriot Act that sacrifices our liberties or our safety. We can have one that secures both." Throughout his entire presidential campaign, Obama often railed against the Act, criticizing it giving authorization for the Bush administration to secretly spy on U.S. citizens, illegally and unconstitutionally and with little or no judicial or congressional oversight. He pledged that he would institute "robust" checks and balances if he got elected, explicitly promising to overturn its unconstitutional sneak-and-peek provisions toward citizens not even suspected of a crime. "Warrantless surveillance of American citizens, in defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional," he said. Now tomorrow, President Obama is set to sign into law an unamended extension of that same Patriot Act, a bill that pre...

Despite the whole of his spiel or whatever the purpose, regardless of anything else he might have had to say, Osama bin Laden's latest audio installment was really pretty much spot on in many respects at the start. In it he talks about the dangers of global climate change , and how the preponderance of responsibility for the mess lies squarely at the feet of the United States and the Western industrialized nations. Al-Quaeda à la Al-Gore, you might say. But the similarities between the two of them shouldn't in fact surprise anyone, actually, seeing how that bin Laden is so much a Democrat at heart. Leave it to Rush Limbaugh to point out this inconvenient truth , check, check, checking off bin Laden's parroting so many of the Democratic party's talking points. To bin Laden criticizing George W. Bush for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol for benefiting giant corporations, Limbaugh asks, "Does this not sound like an average Democrat? Okay, blame the U.S. and greedy, evil c...

Since Scott Brown beat out Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts Senate seat (mostly because she ran a sucky campaign; the loss of it squarely on her shoulders, in my opinion and others' ), the Democrats are all discombobulated now. What with the passage of Obama's aim to overhaul health care shot down in that one fell conservative swoop and Teddy rolling over in his grave, the party has been acting rather awkwardly ever since; it's kind of embarrassing. Losing the seat to a Republican and with no hope bringing off health care reform as intended, the Democrats have started whistling a different tune. Just last year, getting the bill done was of such high import that Obama was setting deadlines to ramrod making legislation ready by the end of summer the year . As President Obama put it often, "Health reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a necessity that cannot wait" . Now it seems maybe not so much. Despite at first wanting to have something signed int...