Give the Republicans Some Cheese

Ok, I am such a good sport, I’ll post a NRSC video:

See, President Obama is failing!

Oh wait…much of the AIG bailout money came from the TARP bill that was passed before Obama became President.

What about that budget? Oh wait…that is a transitional budget left over from the previous year:

I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it is necessary for the ongoing functions of government. But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change. — President Barack Obama

Yesterday, Congress passed the final part of last year’s budget — an omnibus bill that combined nine funding bills required to keep the government running. Included in the $410 billion dollar spending bill were nearly 9,000 earmarks, totaling nearly $8 billion. These earmarks are unrelated projects inserted into the bill by members of Congress, designed to benefit individual legislators’ districts.

President Obama decided to sign the bill, which was inherited from the previous administration, rather than compromise government operations in a time of crisis. But he took the opportunity today to call for widespread earmark reform and a new approach to the appropriations process:

Now, let me be clear: Done right, earmarks give legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects that benefit people in their district, and that’s why I have opposed their outright elimination. I also find it ironic that some of those who railed the loudest against this bill because of earmarks actually inserted earmarks of their own – and will tout them in their own states and districts.

But the fact is that on occasion, earmarks have been used as a vehicle for waste, fraud, and abuse. Projects have been inserted at the eleventh hour, without review, and sometimes without merit, in order to satisfy the political or personal agendas of a given legislator, rather than the public interest.

And yes, many of the earmarks were inserted by Republicans.

What about those campaign promises? Actually, he is doing well with those.

(huge tip of the hat to Muzikal203 at the Daily Kos)

But I should give the Republicans some credit. They are making progress….toward putting creationism into the public school curriculum.

The Texas Board of Education is led by Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist and plagiarist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.

Just stop there and savor it. The man who wants to dictate what all of the children in one of the largest educational systems in the country should learn about science believes his pathetic and patently false superstition supersedes the evidence and the informed evaluation of virtually all the scientists in the world. There is no other way to put it than to point out that McLeroy is a blithering idiot who willingly puts his incompetence on display. His job is not at risk, and he’s even advancing his freakish agenda with some success.

It’s a marvel, isn’t it? A fellow just wants to laugh and shoo him back to his church and his dental practice, but instead, he’s been given all this power over the education of American children, and it’s hard to laugh, because it is so damned terrifying.

But wait! The unbelievable insanity is not yet complete! The Texas school board is debating and will vote on a revised curriculum this week, a curriculum in which the uninformed, uneducated doubts of this arrogantly ignorant man will be enshrined in the lesson plans of every child in Texas. And the board is about evenly split!

There’s a deeper problem here than the simple superficial fact that we’ve got influential people trying to push nonsense into science classrooms. It’s that somehow, we have a system that gives flaming incompetents this kind of power — that we willingly hand over important decisions about the education of our children to people who aren’t qualified, who have no understanding of science, and who want prioritize a page and a half of vague, poetic metaphor from a ragged old hodge-podge of a book of mythology over the concrete, well-tested, and well-documented body of modern scientific information.

Add that to the freakshow that is the Oklahoma State Legislature and well….you have….Red America.

Hey Conservatives: are you feeling down? Are your feelings hurt?

I’ve got something for you right here:

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