But Congressman, however did you find the time? Did you finish up with Fast and Furious? Already?

Until now,  US Rep Darryl Issa been merely been a stupid congress critter. An irritation. Until now:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa(R-CA) compromised the identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government and placed their lives in danger when he released reams of State Department communications Friday, according to Obama administration officials.

Issa posted 166 pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department communications related to Libya on the committee’s website afternoon as part of his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the administration’s statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi . . .

. . . But Issa didn’t bother to redact the names of Libyan civilians and local leaders mentioned in the cables, and just as with the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables last year, the administration says that Issa has done damage to U.S. efforts to work with those Libyans and exposed them to physical danger from the very groups that had an interest in attacking the U.S. consulate.

Troll caution: Assange/Issa not equivalent. Assange not a US Congressman.

This is my favorite part:

[Foreign Policy Magazine] pointed out that even WikiLeaks had approached the State Department and offered to negotiate retractions of sensitive information before releasing their cables. [Committee Spokesman Frederick] Hill confirmed that Issa did not grant the State Department that opportunity but said it was the State Department’s fault for not releasing the documents when they were first requested.

Ezra Klein writes down the details: the 112th Congress is the. worst. ever. Really.

This, from Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog at The Washington Post today:

14 Reasons why this is the worst Congress ever

And he lays them out, clearly, with graphics and – in spite of his blogname – in a non-wonky way, focusing on comparisons between this 112th Congress and previous.

Guess what.

He starts with this week’s 33rd vote in the House to repeal the Affordable Care Act:

Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?

Well, it makes you the 112^th Congress.

Notwithstanding Mark Twain’s famous quip, Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress . . . but I repeat myself, these ladies and gentlemen – well,  not so many ladies – are, indeed, The. Worst. Congress. Ever.

They haz met the enemy, and they iz them

Lookee here.

Members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, a nearly 25 percent increase over the 2008 total, according to a Roll Call analysis of Members’ financial disclosure forms

Rep. Cantor dances to my drummer

Serendipity!!

It’s mere hours since I posted Uncle Jay and his delightful video mocking the House Calendar (from 2010), and here comes Majority Leader Cantor, of the United States House of Representatives with the official 2012 House Calendar. Looks like our congress critters are going to be in session a full 109 days. This is sadly par for the course and we know there’s no reason to work a little overtime.

 

Oh well, at least that means more cool CSpan programming.

I do not heart Maureen Dowd

But every once in a while she turns an especially good phrase. In a column this week, she describes our overlords and the city on a hill as:

. . . .a shrieking, destructive, primal, feudal, apocalyptic, wasteland of partisan banshees . . .

I would add ‘tribal’. And maybe ‘wholly owned’.

I’ll bet FOX News thinks these guys are patriots

From the LA Times yesterday:

Koch Brothers now at heart of GOP

The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch no longer sit outside Washington’s political establishment, isolated by their uncompromising conservatism. Instead, they are now at the center of Republican power, a change most evident in the new makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

(They pretty much own the committee and played a major role in electing and reelecting its members. Business, after all, is business. If the health of the US doesn’t align with the Koch goals for their energy companies, that’s just unfortunate.)

Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group — Americans for Prosperity — to oppose the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. . .

Koch Industries is the country’s second-largest privately run company, a conglomerate of refining, pipeline, chemical and paper businesses. . . .  Last year, Forbes magazine listed the brothers as the nation’s fifth-richest people, each worth $21.5 billion.

This is bad for America and bad for American.

People like the Kochs live behind walls with bodyguards; they don’t live in the same country as us.  The class divide in the US is now greater than that of Egypt. We should be paying closer attention to what’s happening in this increasingly corpratized country. (I’d say ‘our country’ but I’m not so sure of that anymore.)

I really like this part:

When the 85 freshman GOP lawmakers marched into the Capitol on Jan. 5 as part of the new Republican House majority, David Koch was there too.

The 70-year-old had an appointment with a staff member of the new speaker, Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). At the same time, the head of Americans for Prosperity, Tim Phillips, had an appointment with Upton [Chair: Energy Committee]. They used the opportunity to introduce themselves to some of the new legislators and invited them to a welcome party at the Capitol Hill Club, a favorite wine-and-cheese venue for Republican power players in Washington.

Wasting no time. Wish I could have been there. I have opinions too.

Who needs citizens when we have Citizens’ United

Eric Cantor (R-Va) has a cool idea

I must admit I never saw this coming. But then why not? We might as well go the rest of the way in corporatizing our government, er,  I meant our elections.

House GOP moves to end public financing of campaigns

” . . .  the House will vote next week on legislation that would end public financing of presidential campaigns and national party conventions.

The program, which Congress enacted during the aftermath of Watergate, is funded via voluntary $3 contributions when taxpayers file their annual federal income taxes. . . . Eliminating the program all together would save taxpayers $520 million over ten years.” (oooohhhh, $52million a year! )

In the understatement of the year, the story concludes:

It’s unclear how eliminating the program will actually make a dent in the federal deficit, since taxpayers voluntarily contribute cash to the effort.”

 

Send in the clowns? No! Let there be music.

It’s raining here, which is lovely – a long rainy day in South Florida is a treat. So CSpan is on the teevee while I await the imminent reading of the US Constitution. It’s not a bad idea – I could imagine opening every Congress with such a reading – but as a sign of respect,  not as a rebuke as today’s stunt is meant to be.

Rep. Joe Wilson, that son of the Confederacy, was accorded the honor of giving the first one-minute speech of the new Congress. A clear message there – Obama lies. Cheap shot.

And now begins an uncertain two years – two years which I think will leave the insurgent tea partiers will their jaws hanging open.

We need music. And here is something remarkable – the 4th movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. Stay with it and let him lift your spirits with that baton.