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Fiery speeches right now on House Floor - lawmakers just found out they won't be taking up the Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Wow.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) January 2, 2013

Speaking as one who has been through several large and devastating earthquakes in my lifetime, I just think this is horrible. As Speaker Pelosi said on the floor Tuesday night, it's disrespectful to those people who have already lost so much.

After the vote on the tax compromise last night, the House held a few perfunctory votes and then opened up the floor for one-minute speeches. But John Boehner forgot one really important item of business: Relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Despite reports that a vote might take place on Wednesday before adjournment of the 112th Congress, Steny Hoyer came to the floor after the tax vote in a wave of fury, saying that he'd been told there would be no more votes held before the new Congress is sworn in.

The Senate passed a $60 billion aid package last week. There was a bill ready in the House that would have pared down the $60 billion to $27 billion, with a proposed amendment to bring the total back up to $60 billion.

Instead, it seems that John Boehner is going to adjourn this Congress without a vote. Evidently he takes his direction from conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin who called upon him to punish Democrats by not voting on Sandy relief. John Aravosis said it clearly:

The most likely reason – Boehner is afraid of a revolt from conservatives if asked to spend even more money, even if it is to help victims of one of the greatest disasters in American history. Conservatives don’t care. Remember that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for closing down FEMA in the middle of the Hurricane Sandy.

Rep. Rush Holt came to the floor and said what many are thinking: They dropped the ball because the disaster happened in a blue state. He's not the only one to think so:

Wonder if the House would adjourn without even voting on Hurricane #Sandy relief if it had hit red states the hardest. Having my doubts.

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) January 2, 2013

This could possibly be the most despicable non-act of Congress ever. Howie Klein has more on one of the tea party idiots in New Jersey who is probably dancing a jig right now:

Among the Koch whores in the House GOP threatening to disrupt the aid are right-wing hacks in New York (like Staten Island's corrupt Mafia-related Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm) and New Jersey's worst extremist ideologue Scott Garrett. Long Island Congressman Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has been handling the bill, is worried that if the money doesn't get approved while he's still chair, Texas hate-monger Michael McCaul-- the richest member of the House and an anti-tax fanatic-- will kill it. Many Republicans still fighting the Civil War look at this as an opportunity to deal a painful blow to the hated Northerners.

I rest my case.

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[h/t Scarce. Video of entire speech can be viewed here with Romney's remarks starting at the 19 min. mark.]

Memo to Ann Romney: Please just stop. You aren't fooling anyone, and telling a bunch of people at the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner that your conversation with all those peons alongside the road where your husband campaigns is a sure-fire predictor of his election is arrogant and cynical.

Via ABC News:

“The kindness and sweetest of all is that so many women that I’ve never met before and may never see ever again in my life tell me how much they care for me and how much they are praying for me,” Romney said at a GOP fundraiser and awards ceremony here. “And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that because the days are long and the road is hard, the trials are there and I never know when I have this little gray cloud that’s over my head when it’s going to start raining on me again and I do need those prayers, but I honestly feel like we are there for a purpose.”

Clearly trying to confront the gender gap her husband is facing head on, Romney said it’s the economy that women on the trail tell her they are concerned with: “Their husbands’ jobs, their jobs, their children’s jobs.”
Dressed in a pink sweater, she admitted the campaign can be “emotional draining” when she watches her husband being “maligned at times” or “being misrepresented at times.”

Although she said campaigning “doesn’t come naturally” to her she got an enthusiastic reception and painted an empathetic portrait of her husband just one day before Connecticut Republicans cast their primary vote.

Yeah, because Etch-a-Sketch empathy is so real.

And this:

“I know what it’s like to wake up early in the morning and get them off to school; I know what it’s like to be up in the middle of the night when they are sick; and I know what it’s like to struggle and to have those concerns that all mothers have,” Romney said. “So we are grateful for the response that we got from that and appreciative of recognizing that women have choices in life and some choices are not all the same, but we value everyone’s choice that they make in their profession.

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Meet Lawrence A. Hunter, the executive director of the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, senior fellow at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP) and the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). He might sound more familiar to you as the director of the Social Security Alliance, a 501(c)(4) group with the following mission statement (from their 2008 990 filing):

Working to promote the retirement security of today's seniors and the seniors of tomorrow. SSI's top policy priorities are to stop the raid on Social Security trust funds, prevent cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits, and protect seniors from health care rationing and other limitations on their access to health care.

SSI was a recycle of an organization originally launched in 2004 at the time of the Great Social Security Privatization Debate. That organization was also known as the "Alliance for Retirement Prosperity", and was spun off by Jack Kemp and Dick Armey from Citizens for a Sound Economy, known today as FreedomWorks, and Kemp's Empower America. The IPI That organization's stated purpose was as follows:

Advocacy and lobbying activities aimed at reforming Social Security by dedicating a substantial portion of the payroll tax to large personal accounts.

The newest incarnation of the "Alliance for Retirement Prosperity" is a bit different, as Hunter indicates in the video. For starters, it's a for-profit group, purporting to be a "true alternative to the AARP". To that end, it offers members the opportunity to "ensure a prosperous, enriched and secure retirement" for the low, low price of $60 per year for the premium membership, and just $16 for an individual membership.

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Those were definitely words that we in the wilderness wanted to hear, after the secrecy and closed doors of the Bush administration. To be fair, I'm not sure how much control even the President has over how much transparency Congress is willing to allow, but that doesn't mean we're not going to remind him of his campaign promises:

My colleagues Igor Volsky and Matt Yglesias have eloquently argued on ThinkProgress that C-Span’s cameras should not be allowed to film the final negotiations between the House and Senate as they hammer out health care legislation that President Obama will soon sign into law. While I respect their arguments, I take a very different view. I have long believed that openness and transparency are essential bedrock measures for ensuring public accountability of our government. Letting C-Span cameras into health care conference meetings will keep negotiators honest, give the public an opportunity for input, and allow the process to be more collaborative.[..]

Critics have argued that the presence of cameras is likely to produce political posturing and grandstanding by politicians. And indeed, with the cameras rolling, Republicans have said health care reform is a bigger threat than terrorism, claimed that seniors would be told to “drop dead,” and even called the President a liar. But I’m glad cameras were there to capture those demeaning comments. They have helped all Americans gain a better understanding of the unwillingness of some on the right to engage in a rational debate.

The presence of cameras has also produced some beneficial outcomes. For instance, C-Span cameras exposed House GOP efforts to silence members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus when they tried to speak on the floor. The cameras also shamed Senate Republicans when they tried to filibuster the debate by forcing the reading of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer amendment.

Democrats have nothing to fear from an open debate. They are working to expand affordable coverage to 31 million uninsured Americans, lowering premiums, ending the insurance industry’s denial of pre-existing conditions, and ensuring women will no longer be charged much more for the same coverage as men. When the House and Senate meet in the coming weeks to discuss this historic legislation, I would humbly urge them to let the cameras roll. We can handle the truth.

First of all, this isn't all that unusual - the Republicans used this exact same procedure more times than I can count during the Bush administration - and no, they didn't allow Democrats to take part. (I guess it's just that Selective Media Amnesia that sets in whenever the Democrats are in control.)

But using the tactic known as "ping ponging" is going to minimize formal input from the liberal House side, and for that, Reid is going to have to cough up some kind of significant concession.

And just to make things interesting, C-SPAN is asking Congress to open the meetings to live coverage - something I'd love to see:

WASHINGTON - House and Senate Democrats intend to bypass traditional procedures when they negotiate a final compromise on health care legislation, officials said Monday, a move that will exclude Republican lawmakers and reduce their ability to delay or force politically troubling votes in both houses.

The unofficial timetable calls for final passage of the measure to remake the nation's health care system by the time President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address, probably in early February.

Democratic aides said the final compromise talks would essentially be a three-way negotiation involving top Democrats in the House and Senate and the White House, a structure that gives unusual latitude to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

These officials said there are no plans to appoint a formal House-Senate conference committee, the method Congress most often uses to reconcile differing bills. Under that customary format, a committee chairman is appointed to preside, and other senior lawmakers from both parties and houses participate in typically perfunctory public meetings while the meaningful negotiations occur behind closed doors.

In this case, the plan is to skip the formal meetings, reach an agreement, then have the two houses vote as quickly as possible. A 60-vote Senate majority would be required in advance of final passage.

"I look forward to working with members of the House, the Senate and President Obama to reconcile our bills and send the final legislation to the president's desk as soon as possible," Pelosi said late last year as the Senate approved its version of the legislation.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

On Sunday's Q&A, host Brian Lamb sat down with National Review columnist Kathleen Parker to discuss her take on the comings and goings in Washington DC. My buddy Heather noted this odd little bit of unsound morality and logic. Parker wrote a scathing piece on McClellan's book What Happened for the NRO, coming thisclose to likening him to a serial killer (No, I'm not kidding, read it yourself). See, for Parker, McClellan has reached the apex of immorality, because he listened to the Bush administration's plans, apparently put up no fight (of course, this is according to the White House, whose veracity should have dubious credibility) and then said nothing until he left the White House and wrote a book.

Don't get me wrong, if I had been in Scott McClellan's position, you could be damn sure I would be speaking up loudly and longly while in the White House. And I'd probably be out of a job and smeared within an inch of my life by the Karl Rove machine (see how they treated Paul O'Neill as an example). But for Parker, the fact that he left the White House and then spoke up makes him more deplorable than those he spoke up against.

Parker: ... I've met Scott and he is, comes across as just the sweetest, nicest fellow. I took great umbrage at this primarily because, whether the... you know, if... if he were... if he sat in those meetings where evidence was being trumped up and people are actually dying and never so much as cleared his throat or raised an eyebrow--which is what I'm told by everyone in the White House--then I think that he is guilty of something much greater than whatever he presents to the public in this book. You don't sit there and listen to what you now consider lies and know... you walk out the door. An honorable man walks out the door. And you can go and call a press conference if you are the Press Secretary of the President of the United States. You can call a press conference. You can walk out and get a book contract that day, but you don't sit through it for years and years and then say 'well, I think I'll go get a book contract and you know present basically my notes that I've taken all these years knowing that these people were doing wrong.' So I simply don't trust a person like that.

But you'll trust the ones that did the lying and put the Americans in harm's way and continue to do so? They are actually LESS offensive to your mind than someone whose conscience was so burdened that he left the job and spoke out against what happened?

Methinks someone needs their moral compass re-calibrated.

Transcripts below the fold: (thanks to Heather)

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Off the Cuff:

"When has France ever been a friend to America? They have never been a friend to America." - Bush-loving C-SPAN caller this morning.

Umm, when they helped fund the American Revolution?

When they gave us the Statue of Liberty?

When the French Resistance helped us win World War II?

Remember, caller: Friends don't let friends drive drunk.

Thanks http://www.suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/