Tag: Congress

 I am feeling better today so I thought I would tackle a “Crayon Marks” post about one of your favorite topics, Congress.. 🙂 

America needs more congressmen. Hundreds and hundreds more congressmen.  I love my friends over at The Week for regularly looking over the sides of our nationalist boxes for new solutions and this is one of them a few weeks ago.  Gerrymandering has skewed the representation of our country so that it is no longer about who gets the majority of votes and that takes power away from the people. It seems without the court skewing the vote will never get solved so we need to look at other solutions.

The first thing you must realize is that everything that happens inside the Beltway Loony Bin is about posturing. It’s primarily about getting and holding power for as long as possible and getting re-elected. So, how do you reduce the power struggles?  Right now we have one representative for every 700,000 people. That’s not mandated by the constitution or anything so we can change it. What would happen if we reduced that to 50,000? Crazy you might say but hear me out.

That would result in about 6,000 representatives in DC. Of course, we couldn’t put all of them in a room at the same time so many would have to telecommute. But they go home at least three days a week now anyway so that is not much of a change. That alone will keep the posturing to a minimum. Secondly, it would also be nearly impossible to draw up all those crazy maps that they make for who has the privilege of voting for them. With only 50,000 citizens keeping an eye on a representative it would allow us to see just what they are really doing for us and not for those other folks.

Let’s go one step further and make a “virtual” House of Representatives instead of a brick and mortar one. Amazon has shown that there is vast efficiency in that process and that is exactly what our government needs, efficiency.  I know I haven’t worked out all the details yet, my brain is still a little fuzzy, but this idea could have some interesting consequences.

What do you think??

I need a smart TV, no I am not talking about one that connects to the Internet and has streaming features for Netflix and Amazon, I have that but not the bandwidth needed to use them from my snail’s pace Internet from AT&T. I am talking about a smart TV with facial recognition. I need one that whenever it sees the face of our soon-to-be president the screen blocks out the image and mutes the volume.  Another feature is whenever the words “Oval Office” or  the”T” word is spoken the same muting happens. I kind of figure that is about the only way I will be able to watch any form of TV newscasts without losing my mind. Even the PBS Newshour is almost beyond my tolerance lately and his time in office hasn’t even started!

I have already promised here that I will restrain from talking about executive branch stuff as soon as this new guy takes over the Oval Office which is just a few days off. But I do plan on keeping track of all those yahoos in Congress and try my best to prevent them from destroying our country.  I figure with the concept of balance of power they, if they do their jobs and that is a BIG if, they can reign in a stampeding executive branch. How do I keep track of one branch of government without being exposed to the other?  A SMART TV… and if I can’t get that maybe the “Off” button is the next best thing?

I think one of my favorite hobbies is playing around with reformatting the States that make up the U.S. with the goal of obtaining more equal representation.  It just seems that the present setup is so much out of skew with our times.  When 10% of the country’s population can control the other 90% simply due to having an vastly over proportionate number of representatives in our national congress things need to change.

• I’ve made posts in the past explaining how the low population States became States mainly because of 200+ year old transportation methods or simply because of regional differences.
• I have also had posts about given the fact that the Senate makeup is near to the bedrock of our constitution it is very unlikely to be able to change that.
• So, here is another idea to get away from giving some of our citizens ten times the power of the rest of us.

Here goes….

Lets start with the State of Wyoming as the template. I seem to pick on them  a lot but since they are the smallest State by population per square mile it seems appropriate. I know some of you will tell me that Wyoming has 6 people/square mile and Alaska has only 1.3 so they are the smallest.  But, as I have said before Alaska is not really a State in my mind, they are more like a holding tank for our oil while Wyoming is in the center of the country.  Anyway I am using Wyoming as the standard for this post.

Wyoming has a population of about 580,000 people.  If we can’t force them to incorporate with their surrounding States then let’s join them.  Lets make a State by definition having no more than 600,000 people. Each of those 0.6 million citizens would have two Senators and one Congressperson as Wyoming presently does and is mandated by our current constitution.

My home State of Indiana would be split into 10 different States.  Just for fun I will try to name them. Of course there would be the States of North Indianapolis and South Indianapolis. Joining them would the States of Ft. Wayne, Gary, South Bend, Evansville and Marion, along with a couple of others yet to be determined.

The biggie would be California which would be broken down into 79 separate States.  I won’t even attempt to name all those.  As a total the United States would be 550 strong.  The tiny island of Manhattan would have to be broken up into three States. I’ll leave it up to them to figure out how to do that.

The overall result would mean 1100 Senators and 550 House representatives.  Having more Senators than Congressmen might just prove to be a good thing.  At least they would not have to be in a constant mode of re-election since they hold office for six years instead of two.  Maybe money would not be so prominent in national politics.

I don’t see anything in our constitution that says a State can’t split into more than one so it would not require a constitutional amendment to happen.  Having 550 States can’t be any worse than the 50 we now have.  Maybe we could even add a anti-gerrymandering provision to the new State makeup? Who know, as Martha Stewart used to say,  “it might be a good thing”.

But then again that would mean even more of those yahoos in DC to constantly be bickering with each other….

Take Action: Urge your member of Congress to close the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations account and to require all funds spent by the Pentagon to be part of its regular budget. Since 2011, almost the whole federal government has been operating under tight spending limits. Pentagon contractors (weapons manufacturers) were concerned about how these limits might affect their profits. Then their trade association leaders reminded them that the OCO account provides them a “cushion.” The Pentagon can use the OCO account to get around budget caps — and military contractors are pushing for even more money in this account. According to the Constitution, Congress controls military spending. Tell your member of Congress to take control of this slush fund, and require that the Pentagon be accountable for all of its spending through its regular budget.

The above notice came to me recently from my friends over at FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) which is a Quaker organization promoting peacemakers instead of our never-ending rushes to war. It seems that the outrageous military budgets are still not enough for some so they created a slush fund to tide them over from any budget cuts.  We seem to always have more than enough money to spend more than the rest of the world combined on our war machine but never enough to try to promote peace.

Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Orrin Hatch of Utah along with GOP Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan have put together a replacement for ObamaCare. And while neither their supporters nor detractors are likely to admit it, the plan bears a striking resemblance to, well, ObamaCare.

Health-care markets present a particular set of problems, with a limited range of possible solutions. So all realistic proposals for reform are going to have some basic structural similarities. The differences arise in what policymakers prioritize within those bounds.

That’s what really divides the left from the right on this issue. And that’s the reason Republicans seem perpetually doomed to keep offering replacements for ObamaCare that are basically suckier versions of ObamaCare.

SOURCE:  Why the GOP is forever doomed to try replacing ObamaCare with suckier versions of ObamaCare.

It’s nice to finally hear that after fifty some attempts to take healthcare away from millions, three Republican Senators have finally come up with a GOP alternative to Obamacare. But, guess what it is pretty much he same thing and I am not surprised given that Obamacare is nothing like we progressives would like to see. All the world, except us it seems, know that is a single-payer system is the only way to get our outrageously expensive healthcare system under control. But until we can wrench control of the congress away from the Republicans that simply will never happen.

But maybe we should salute those three guys for at least putting in an effort. I bet it took them and their staffs at least a couple of days to clip and paste their plan from all the GOP rhetoric and that was probably as much work as they did in the past year.  At least I see that they left the “preexisting conditions’ thing the same as Obamacare at least until your current employer lays you off and you lose your health insurance then it will go back to no insurance for you. Wasn’t that nice of them?

That moves on to the next topic as brought up by the editorial cartoon above. It seems that all these unregulated health supplement business are advertising things that are not in the products they sell.  These are billion dollar businesses supplying us with pills that consist of rice and wheat flour along with a minute amount of houseplants and calling them by whatever name they choose.  The GOP, who are big backers of Laissez-faire aren’t concerned about any of this. They say it is up to each of us to discover bogus things and that it is simply not the government’s business to get between businesses and their customers. Of course those progressives among us think that it very much is the government’s business to protect us from fraud and abuse.

Too bad we can’t label those in congress as “Bogus” “Misleading” and “Harmful”. In my mind those folks do more damage than anything else to our country. Let’s demand the truth in labeling both for the so-called health supplements and the people’s representatives.

I see that the latest poll shows approval ratings for congress is about 18%. In my mind that is about where it belongs. Those yahoos just don’t know how to play together. They are more dysfunctional than most marriages today!

So 82% of us don’t approve of how they are doing their jobs.  After thinking about it the most alarming thing about this latest statistic is that

18%  think congress is doing a great job!!!

I don’t think I have ever come across any of those 18%ers. Just who are these guys? I don’t know them but I think they are in need for some serious therapy.

Source: NBC Politics – Congress prepares for year-end spending and tax cut bazaar.

Complain if you will about congressional gridlock, but right before the holidays is often when the gridlock eases because everyone is focused on getting out of town and back to their families.

The extension of at least some of the 53 tax credits and preferences which Congress created or preserved last December. The platter of tax breaks includes something for almost all tastes: the deduction of state and local sales taxes, which is worth about $2.8 billion to taxpayers who itemize, the economic development credit for American Samoa, worth about $15 million, a tax break for mine safety equipment, worth about $20 million, and many others.

If Windows is a “giant hairball” as Steve Jobs joked that is was I don’t know what you would call the U.S. tax code except maybe “insanity”!  Come on guys, quit adding more complexity and special treatment to our tax codes and do the work necessary to simplify them.

Maybe one enticement to starting the simplification process is to require every congressman and woman to do their own tax returns for 2011. No outside help, no handing it off to an assistant. That is something that none of them have probably done since they gained their coveted office or probably even before.

But What do I know….