Friday, February 13, 2009

We want to see it too, Nancy

While I'm thankful for the no votes on the 'Stimulus Bill' from Alexander, Corker and Cooper, and I dearly hope they will continue to vote no, I am absolutely livid that no one really knows what's in this monstrosity. As near as anyone can tell we've got spending out the wazoo and no idea where this money is going to come from. DEBT is not the answer to our being in debt! Good grief, have these people lost their minds? WHERE is this money going to come from?????????????? Seriously, folks where?

This from US News and World Report:

Congressional Offices Don't Have the Stimulus Bill, Lobbyists Do

February 12, 2009 04:14 PM ET

By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers

We're receiving E-mails from Capitol Hill staffers expressing frustration that they can't get a copy of the stimulus bill agreed to last night at a price of $789 billion. What's more, staffers are complaining about who does have a copy: K Street lobbyists. E-mails one key Democratic staffer: "K Street has the bill, or chunks of it, already, and the congressional offices don't. So, the Hill is getting calls from the press (because it's leaking out) asking us to confirm or talk about what we know—but we can't do that because we haven't seen the bill. Anyway, peeps up here are sort of a combo of confused and like, 'Is this really happening?'" Reporters pressing for details, meanwhile, are getting different numbers from different offices, especially when seeking the details of specific programs.

Worse, there seem to be several different versions of what was agreed upon, with some officials circulating older versions of the package that seems to still be developing. Leadership aides said that it will work out later today and promised that lawmakers will get time to review the bill before Friday's vote.


Note, he's published this on Friday before dawn, he's been told legislators will get to review it on Friday...that's just not possible. According to ReadTheStimulus.org this legislaton is over 1,400 pages! You'd do well to read and comprehend half of it in a weekend...but in just hours before the vote? This from the ReadTheStimulus folks
The total size of the four major files is over 100MB, and consists of 1419 pages. Three of the four files are huge "scanned" PDFs, meaning they were created by printing the original document and then scanning it in again --- and therefore contain no real "text" that can be easily searched. This will make our parsing process difficult and more time consuming, so we most likely won't have our versions ready until midday tomorrow. But we'll see...
That's a cleaver trick....not giving anyone time to actually read it and then not giving them the tools to actually search it either. They quote Speaker Pelosi:
"Around here language means a lot. Words weigh a ton and one person's understanding of a spoken description might vary from another's. We wanted to see it. And not only just I had to see it I had to show it to my colleagues and my caucus. We wanted to take all the time that was necessary to make sure it was right."
Her colleagues. Her caucus. What about the rest of us, Speaker? Is there no legislator out there willing to demand the time to actually read and understand this before it's put to a vote or are you ALL going to enable this nail in the US coffin? We are not being allowed to read it because it would fail if America had half a chance to really know what's in it. What is in there they do NOT want us to see? THAT may be more scary than the trillon dollars in debt that will shackle the US for--only God knows how long. It's time to stand up on the House and Senate floors and start reading this bill from beginning to end and expose it to the light of day.

No comments: