-By Warner Todd Huston
The New nine-month budget bill called the CR/Omnibus spending bill is a $1.01 trillion spending bill that is over one thousand pages thick. But it takes care of spending for most of 2015 and one has to wonder why the Republicans pushed a spending bill that will prevent them from affecting spending for most of the entire first year they will be in control?
It is absurd that the GOP didn’t push a continuing resolution that only tides the government over for a few short months because next year the GOP will be in full control of both houses of Congress. Yet, the GOP was not just *sighing* and agreeing with this nine-month spending bill, GOP leadership was pushing it. This is a bill that will cut the GOP out from having any influence on spending for most of their first year they are in control.
Still, many of the hundreds of policy riders–little bits of instruction that affects spending–are good for the conservatives. Of course, some will upset Democrats and some Republicans.
Anyway, here are some of the riders of interest in the new budget bill (in no particular order):
Obamacare Fully Funded
The bill fully funds Obamacare, though it does put a limit to any growth in spending and cuts the budget by $10 million for the “death panel” board called the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It also does not give the IRS any new funding so that the taxing agency can implement the Affordable Care Act.
Clean Water Act
In a victory for farmers, the spending bill will prevent the EPA from taking upon itself the power to regulate farm ponds and ditch water. This is also a victory for Republicans–not to mention the country!
EPA Funding Cut
Speaking of the EPA, its budget was cut by $60 million over last year’s budget. The EPA will get $8.1 billion. This is another decrease. Since 2010 the agency has lost 21 percent of its budget.
No Pot Legalization for Washington DC
The City Council of the District of Columbia will be prohibited from legalizing marijuana and will be forced to hew to the federal ban on pot. On the other hand, federal drug enforcement agencies and law groups will be prevented from interfering in state-based pot industries.
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The New Budget Bill: Still Funds Obamacare, Still Bans Abortion Spending, Still Bans Internet Taxes”
Illinois Senior Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin was forced to respond to a Chicago Tribune story that revealed that his wife is a lobbyist who received high-dollar federal contracts. Durbin said it was purely coincidental… then offered to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.
Politics might make strange bedfellows, but this one really takes the cake. In California Elizabeth Emken is running for the 7th District U.S. House seat in an attempt to unseat Democrat Ami Bera. But even though Emken was a lobbyist for Obamacare, she is strangely running as a Republican and using Bera’s support for Obamacare as a weapon against him.
Started in 2004, the left-wing propaganda website Media Matters for America has been spreading lies about Republicans and conservatives for a decade, now. Naturally the site has always claimed the center-right coalition is “anti-worker” for opposing unions, but this organization itself has never been unionized. Now the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) is agitating to organize Media Matters and the propaganda outfit is fit to be tied over the union’s efforts.
Recent polling of likely voters by the Rasmussen polling firm finds that trust in government is at a low ebb with nearly half of voters feeling that the Justice Department’s seizure of reporters’ phone records and the IRS targeting of conservatives are serious scandals. Yet the media is still not widely trusted.
Buried in a recent Politico story is a line that reveals the utter corruption of “money in politics.” But not that of money spent electioneering, but that spent by government from the assumed bottomless pockets of the American taxpayer. It is a corruption that has destroyed the Constitution, laid waste the rule of law, perverted our system, and crushed the American way of life and it must end.
Remember when Obama took office and one of his biggest promises was that lobbyists would never gain a foothold in his Administration? Well, now that he doesn’t have to stand for election again he’s doing his level best to give lobbyists one of their biggest perks yet. He’s trying to make it legal to give them your tax dollars so they can lobby to increase your taxes. And in fact he’s already broken laws governing lobbyists several times since 2009.
After buying Current TV, Al Gore’s struggling cable TV network, Al Jazeera has now hired a lobbying firm to push its interests in Washington D.C.
This may sound like a contradiction, but tax-supported National Public Radio is hiring more lobbyists to help get more tax dollars sent its way.
Barack Obama made a big show in 2008 of attacking evil Washington lobbyists. He campaigned on “change we could believe in” and aimed one of those things to believe in at
What’s the best way to counter what you think are the lies coming from your opponents? Is it to make up lies of your own? Apparently MoveOn.org thinks so. On June 9, MoveOn admitted using lies, subterfuge and fraud to “counter” what they maintain is the wrong-headed thinking of Fox News. I guess to a left-winger, lies are just the ticket to get people to trust them! In fact, this whole story is just downright silly as MoveOn.org not only perpetrated a fraud, they made a big production of it all in the process.
This could shape up as a major battle between supporters of infanticide and pro-lifers in 2014. Pro-abortion forces will likely flood the Volunteer State with out-of-state money to defeat a
First Congressional Democrats offered a national forced unionzation bill, and now Republicans have countered by putting forth a national worker’s freedom bill. With the luck breaking against unions in Wisconsin and the issue in an uproar in Ohio and Indiana it is now surprise that Congress has come to loggerheads with the same issue.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has decided to flock to the side of thug Wisconsin teachers on Friday. This should not be much of a surprise. Trumka understands that this battle could serve to galvanize anti-union sympathies all across the country, and rightfully so. With the hate and “violent rhetoric” being employed by these thug teachers with very little legitimate provocation these teachers are quickly proving that they aren’t sympathetic figures. In any case, Trumka hopes to turn the sliding sympathies back in his favor.


Now this is more like it. Back in October of 2010 the Summer County, Tennessee School Board decertified the Sumner County Education Association (SCEA), the union for county teachers, because it no longer satisfied the law by counting as members fifty percent plus one of the total number of employees requiring a teaching certificate. This, school board officials said, means that the SCEA can no longer engage in collective bargaining for teachers.
They gave him hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaign for president and for that Barack Obama has given Big Labor many, many payoffs, sweetheart deals, and regulatory favors. And this week he met in the White House with members of Big Labor and told them that he was sill on their side.
Jonathan Strong of the Daily Caller has
Harry Reid survived his brush with electoral death winning yet another term as Nevada’s Senator. Reid knows what side of his bread is buttered, too. Big Labor gave him millions in campaign donations and Reid knows who he owes — or rather who owns him. Now that he’s fairly won he’s promising his patrons in Big Labor that he intends to push one of their favorite laws.
With a
Bloomberg News is
Last week the House Republicans issued their update of the 1994 “Contract With America.” They have labeled it the “
