I want to capture this moment.

1. It was like Christmas come early. I saw it first on my feed reader from Talking Points Memo, with the title, “Senate Passes…Everything.”

2. Stupid Republicans…. *grumpy*

3. This is why I voted for the guy. Not because I thought he would bring every single one of my far-left/quasi-socialist dreams come true–I knew that wouldn’t happen. But because everything about him screamed “guy who can talk with people, not just to people, guy who cares about getting shit done rather than striking a pose, guy who doesn’t make perfect the enemy of good.” I voted for him because I was tired of ideologues yelling past one another and posturing for their constituencies.

   Also, guy who knows a lot a lot a lot a lot.

4. It’s amazing what lame duck status can accomplish!

5. They did more in two weeks then they’d done in two years. Sad it took their own impending unemployment to light fire under their asses. Maybe term limits isn’t a bad idea…

6. Yesterday’s events reinforce my belief that the president is going to thrive under a Republican congress. The fact that congressmen have a “(D)” after their name had nothing to do (or, rather, not enough to do) with whether they supported the president’s agenda, leaving him to put together his own coalitions. My hope is that he’ll be able to peel off the reasonable Republicans from the new crazies, something that Republicans may do for him.

7. Unfortunately I have lost the link, but I did read somewhere an evaluation of the lame duck that said moderate Republicans rebelled at their own incoming class and realized that while they may not like these measures they were the only opportunity to do anything on them and get something out of the deal. It was an opinion column, so clearly biased, but an interesting point. Whether or not this continues after January will be seen, tho.

8. The more I read about the so-called “First Responders” medical bill, the more it looks like a PR stunt by the Democrats.

   1 – 97% of eligible victims have already received, on average, two million dollars.

   2 – Early estimates show that 99,000 people will be eligible for money under this bill. I find it hard to believe that 99,000 people can reasonably qualify as 9/11 First Responders. I imagine it’s a lot like Woodstock. 500,000 people were actually there, but about 10 million people say they were.

   3 – Is NYC police & fire health insurance SO BAD that emergency personnel have been denied coverage? I’d like to see some evidence that ANYONE has been denied care.

9. IP,Aren’t you one smug little rear observer.

   It is important to note that in the aftermath of the WTC building collapse hundreds of people were trapped either dead or alive, many of them friends and colleagues, brother responders. Responders from Roanoke and further ran in. Unless you were there, it is impossible to understand the effort to find survivors, and later to recover the remains. In the midst of this agony huge numbers of completely unqualify, and untrained people entered the Hot Zone and were exposed to dangerous levels of hazardous particulates and gases. Included were Federal law enforcement working a crime scene, and largely dismissive of proper protective procedure. For that you can thank in large part George Bush’s EPA appointees whose constant refrain was that those bullshit paper dust masks were adequate and their “testing” indicated that the site was safe to work with a level of PPE that criminal in itself. But these incompetents sure did keep us safe from the science of toxicology! So yeah, all Americans should expect to pay for the lung transplants, and long term care of the people our elected officials, and their appointees failed to protect.

10. “It’s amazing what lame duck status can accomplish!”

    I forgot that Congress only serves 1 year 10 months in the House or 5 years 10 months in the Senate. If you don’t like it, talk to your Congressional representative to make results of an election happen a week after.

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