Edward Childers
[snip]
Missoula, Montana 59801
Dear Edward:
Thanks for contacting me regarding H.R. 1, the Continuing Resolution for fiscal year 2011.  It’s good to hear from you.
After two years of reckless spending, Americans overwhelmingly voted for a new direction last year in order to put an end to the job-killing policies coming out of Washington.  Unfortunately, the President didn’t get the message.  The White House budget blueprint continues on the path of too much spending, too much taxing and too much borrowing.

Let’s rephrase this: After Obama and Democrats spent 2 years trying to restore our economy after 8 years of Bush & Rehberg & co.’s best attempts to destroy it, American voters fell for Republicans’ promises to make jobs, save money, and cut taxes. Then Republicans discarded the jobs bit, redirected the money bit, joyfully cut taxes for rich people and global corporations, and attacked pregnant women and incidentally anyone who thinks they need an education that doesn’t include cowboys riding dinosaurs.

Maybe Americans are getting the message now.

Compared with the President’s budget, I joined the House and voted to reduce the deficit by $100 billion.  As Chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over funding the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, I helped save taxpayers $23 billion dollars compared with the previous year’s funding level.  The House ban on earmarks, which I supported, accounted for over $1 billion of those savings.

Congressman Rehberg has not supported earmarks before? Apparently not. In the meantime he votes to give tax breaks to gigacorporations, he votes to keep the “bridge to nowhere” alive (even though he had a helper write a story today that said he didn’t).

[From http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7459131.html] [Texas news]

‘Bridge to Nowhere’: Defeated, 181-246, a Democratic bid to strip HR 662 (above) of funds for building the Gravina Island Bridge linking tiny Ketchikan, Alaska, with an airport on sparsely populated Gravina Island. This is the “bridge to nowhere” lampooned in recent years as an example of wasteful congressional earmarks. While notoriety has cost the Gravina Island project much of its anticipated federal funding since 2005, HR 662 contains $183 million in fiscal 2011 spending for it and the Knik Arm Crossing Bridge, another disputed project in Alaska. A yes vote was to defund the “bridge to nowhere.”

and he votes to put Conservatives in everyone’s bedroom to watch over them. And incidentally Rehberg’s opposition to Obamacare is going to cost us all billions of dollars. And of course we’ll not have health insurance if he gets his way.

In addition to the carefully targeted savings of tax dollars, the legislation also included:
o   My amendment to prevent funds from being used to implement Obamacare;

Yeah, that’s just plan foolish.

o   An amendment offered by Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK) and I that prevents enforcement of a new gun control provision being pushed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms;

I know nothing about that.

o   A stop-gap provision to temporarily return partial control of wolf management to parts of some states, including Montana; and

Wolves. Now that’s the most important thing.

o   The elimination of at least 65 wasteful, duplicative, inefficient or questionable federal programs.

Questionable like for instance health insurance? What else? Education? How was their wastefulness etc. determined?

This legislation also allowed for an open process in which any member of Congress could offer and debate an amendment – the first time in years that this has been the case in the House.  More than 700 amendments from all sides were offered.

Yay. Is any of that true? If so, did it help get things done?

Thanks again for contacting me.  If you get a chance, I encourage you to visit my website at http://www.house.gov/rehberg where you can find the latest news about what’s happening in Congress.  Also, if you haven’t already done so, please be sure to sign up for my free E-Newsletter at http://www.house.gov/rehberg/newsletter/ which will help keep you up-to-date with what is going on in Washington, DC and how it affects Montana.  It’s a good source for news stories, blog posts and to read what other Montanans just like you are saying.

It’s good to know there’s other Montanans just like me.

Sincerely,
Denny Rehberg
Montana’s Congressman

Denny Rehberg is, indeed, Montana’s Congressman. Now he wants to be a Montana Senator.

Yay.

There are people who state emphatically that God’s Plan is thwarted when Humans engage in genetic manipulation. My guess is that they’re the same people who abhor contraception and the utilization of unwanted blastocycts for stem cell research. And the same people who detest the idea that God’s Plan could be evolution.

I want to know how they discovered the specifics of God’s Plan. I mean, if it’s happening, and if God’s Fingers move every piece on the board, how can any move on the board not happen according to God’s Plan? Really now, don’t those things seem mutually exclusive?

And more importantly, again, who knows God’s Plan, and how do they know? Do the TV bloviators have a special connection? Why would omnipotent God grant special super secret access to some conduit instead of telling everybody Himself? And why do people seem to believe what these people tell them? And send them money? And smile while they do it?

Back to the perils of genetic manipulation, the topic centered on its use for cosmetic purposes, mainly to make blonde blue-eyed children. Strong and smart were a distant second to blond and blue-eyed. Healthy was, I think, OK.

Why bother with cosmetic genetics? If people are blonde they’ll dye their hair brown. If eyes are blue they’ll wear brown contacts. Nobody’s satisfied with the way they are. Nobody’d be satisfied with the way their parents make them; that’s the way they are.

Here’s a suggestion, though: since humanity seems hell bent on multiplying until there are 10 or 30 or a hundred billion of us, maybe we should try to make ourselves very small. About the size of a lawn gnome might work best. Complete with pointy heads to fit those hats.

So anyhow this couple of lawyers want to cause a ruckus at the university level as big as the high school ruckus about Stuff. University = sex; high school = Stuff.

OK, that’s kind of how I remember it. Close enough.

What I think is, if those UM Lawyers – at least one teaches constitutional law, I’m thinking – if those guys are all clamped up about this innocuous Kaimin column, they really ought to go back to the 1960′s and go through Dave Rorvik’s stuff. If those guys are offended by this stuff, they’ll really go ballistic when they read Rorvik’s suggestion for a Portable Abortion Kit.

And that it’s his suggested alternative to reducing tax breaks for rich people.

What?

I know Max opposes having everybody pay income taxes in order to provide health care for everybody. This isn’t Cuba, to paraphrase his reasoning; we’re not ready for it.

Instead, the other thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to force people to buy health insurance.

What?

On the bright side, treating employer-provided health insurance as income should increase people’s income-based retirement, such as Social Security. The flipside of that is that the Conventional Wisdom is that SocSec is already upside-down.

But if Max is concerned about taking money from rich people to support America (which is what it looks like) then I’m afraid he didn’t get the November Message.