From the Epic Facebook Statuses thread:

haresfur wrote:



Pope visits the sick.

 muzik wrote: 

 Proclivities wrote: 
Hilarious!  

Paul Ryan Discovers Half-Finished Escape Tunnel Leading Out Of Speaker’s Office

You don't hear this very often, but good job Senate Democrats!

Senate Democrats Foil Obama on Asia Trade Deal

Americans Favor Legalizing Pot and Criminalizing Congress - The New Yorker 

By a huge majority, Americans support laws legalizing marijuana and criminalizing Congress, according to a poll released on Thursday.

While the poll reflects a relaxation of attitudes about recreational pot use, it also suggests that many Americans now view membership in Congress as a problem ravaging the nation.

Harland Dorrinson, an activist who has spent years mobilizing support for the criminalization of Congress, said that “this poll reinforces what many of us have been saying for a long time: Congress destroys lives.”

“I’ve seen productive members of society get involved with Congress and completely lose the will to work,” he said. “They just sit there, totally numb and out of touch with reality.”

He noted that the once prevalent view that membership in Congress was “harmless” is now being discredited. “If you look at what happens to someone’s brain after ten, twenty, or even thirty years in Congress, it’s devastating,” he said. “There is severe impairment.”

Additionally, he warned that Congress is a “gateway elective office” that leads many to try running for President.

 miamizsun wrote: 
Surveys/polls on the functioning of politicians (esp. Congress) suggest other—wise.

Not so much blind as (at times) powerless.

 sirdroseph wrote: 
Neither you or miami were part of the group my comment was directed at, by the way.

I agree with the reasons stated so far to not pass the Cromnibus and there are some other things I object to in it.

The line item veto would do so much to move things along and also for legislators to cast votes and commit to individual issues eliminating the cover that comprehensive bills provide individual legislators on revealing their actual positions.

The other thing needed is term limits.  Both require a constitutional amendment. 

the problem with shut downs is that they aren't shutting down the corruption

it is as if the masses are blind to it

 kurtster wrote: 

This time I actually think that the Democrats should shut down the government.  The provisions the Republicans stuck into the spending bill are unacceptable.  More importantly as usual I think the issue is systemic and this screams more the need for line item veto or some other method to insure that bills are separate entities with issues held tightly together, not lobbyist Christmas trees that they get to gleefuly hang their ornaments on.

Here we go.  Another threatened government shut down.  Damn Tea Party ...

Oh wait, this time its the Democrats led by Senator Warren D, Ma with the support of Pelosi in the House.

So its total BS when the TP tries it, but its OK if the D's try it ?

I had no problem with the last shut down and am not against another, so no hypocrisy on my part. 

So to all you Tea Party haters out there (and there are plenty of you) who spoke up openly and with vitriol against the last shut down, what say you now ? 

.
My guess is nothing ...

 sirdroseph wrote: 
Since it flew out of the House and died in the Senate, once again I say ...

Thanks Harry Reid ! 

 sirdroseph wrote: 
I didn't even need to read it.
 

 Prodigal_SOB wrote: 

You are absolutely correct on soooo many levels.

 sirdroseph wrote: 
I think it's right there in the headline.  The reason for the failure was the "meaningful". 

This Meaningful Surveillance Reform Had Bipartisan Support. It Failed Anyway.

2015 NDAA Gives Native American Land to Foreign Mining Corporation

Wikipedia bans edits from Congressional troublemaker(s) ^2*

Enough, Congress. Wikipedia has had it with you.

The administrators of the collaborative encyclopedia imposed a 10-day ban on edits being made by an anonymous troublemaker (or troublemakers) using a House of Representatives IP address.

The edits were first unearthed by @congressedits, an automated Twitter account that linked to all changes made to Wikipedia articles originating from congressional IP addresses (presumably, by Senate and House staffers, although no one has definitively ruled out an elected official doing the editing for his or herself). Following a considerable amount of media coverage, @congressedits has amassed 24,000 followers.

Among @congressedits’ most amusing discoveries: the time someone on Capitol Hill implicated the Cuban government in spreading conspiracy theories about the moon landing on the “moon landing conspiracy theories page,” the time that an anonymous user labeled BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith “a Smirnoff enthusiast,” or the time that an edit suggested that the blog Mediaite was a “sexist transphobic” news organization “that automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence,” after Mediaite wrote a post on @congressedits.  

The 10-day ban, made by the volunteer editors overseeing Wikipedia, only applies to a single IP address making a number of “disruptive edits,” which could affect a number of users, since multiple congressional officers often uses one IP address. 

One congressional user anonymously made his displeasure known on the Wikipedia page for the blocked IP address.

“Out of over 9000 staffers in the House, should we really be banning this whole IP range based on the actions of two or three?" they said. "Some of us here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD."

* For the Al-jazeera-phobic