What are the House Dems up to?

Final Warning of the Week: As bad as the stuff I sent you earlier in the week was, this next item may be the worst. Prepare thyself.

Intelligence: Last night (or actually about 12:30AM this morning), the House passed a bill to fund our intelligence operations (CIA, NSA etc.). Many of the details of this bill are classified. But here's what I can tell you. Included in this bill you will find a directive from Congress that makes our intelligence agencies study global warming. Regardless of what you think about global warming, I think we can all agree that our spies should not be spending their time researching it. This literally diverts funds now being used to keep us safe by learning where our enemies are and what they are doing. Instead of pursuing terrorists, the Democrats would turn our spies towards global warming studies. By the way, we are already spending $7 billion per year in the federal budget and have 14 government agencies learning more about the issue. Instead of spying, our spies will be measuring water temperatures. This is not just bad, it's reckless.

So, that I do present the other side, you should know that global warming has become such a religion for some people in this town that they legitimately believe that global warming is the cause of terrorism. They have said that global warming causes drought and famine which causes poverty thereby leading to terrorism. So, they argue that if we stop global warming, we stop terrorism. That is so absurd that you probably don't believe it. So, here is a clip from part of the debate early this morning in which Congressman Markey (D-MA) says that the deaths of American soldiers in Somalia in 1993 was caused by global warming.

Additionally, scarce funds for intelligence efforts are being diverted to earmarks. Publicly, it is known that there is at least one such earmark put in the bill by Rep. John Murtha (D-PA). His earmark would direct $23 million to continue running a drug intelligence center in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that both the Government Reform Committee and GAO have criticized for being wasteful and unnecessary. These oversight panels and the press have found that because of the center’s remote location and the fact that there are 19 other operations just like it, the places major function is to serve as “a jobs program that Mr. Murtha wanted for his district.” Not a wise use of our intelligence funds.

Situations like this are exactly why the process of earmarking must be cleaned up. Three times last night, motions were made to take the House into secret session so that we could discuss any such earmarks and the merit thereof. Three times on near party-line votes, these motions were defeated. Also, an amendment was offered to strip just the Murtha earmark and use the money for more human intelligence resources. That too was defeated. Why? Did the majority party not want to open up their earmarks even to the rest of us in Congress? How much money will not be spent on real intelligence efforts because of secret earmarks?

We know what happened when the Clinton Administration in the 90's started changing the priorities of our intelligence community from spying to other things. It's happening again. And it jeopardizes our very safety. If there is only one thing that raises your ire from this week, this should be it.

Head Start: Last week, The House voted to reauthorize the Head Start program. I would have opposed it on the basis that it spends $7.35 billion this year and $38 billion over 5 years without addressing our massive deficit. Up to 20% of this money is earmarked for the "education" of children under the age of 3. This is clearly a move towards the universal government run and taxpayer-paid pre-school that the teacher's unions so badly want in order to increase their membership.

But on top of that, any faith-based schools or organizations were explicitly excluded from applying for grants under the bill. A number of attempts were made to offer amendments to allow faith-based schools to apply for these grants. Even though lots of this funding is set aside for tribal schools, these amendments were all defeated under the excuse that it violates the establishment of religion clause of the Constitution. So, in spite of all the evidence that faith-based organizations provide superior educational opportunities for many kids, particularly underprivileged ones, those organizations need not apply for the head start program.

War and Spending: You'll read it in your paper this morning, but also last night the House passed the latest spending and war funding bill on nearly the same party line vote as before. It will likely meet the same fate as the prior one. Furthermore, a separate bill was passed that spent an additional $5 billion on all kinds of new special interest spending. So much for the Democrats interest in not increasing the deficit.

End of the Week: This is your last laptop for this week and I expect to go back to my rough weekly schedule. Why did I do one almost every day this week? I wanted to give you a sense of the enormity and the breadth of the bad stuff going on back here. Majorities matter. They matter a lot. And whether it’s attacks on people of faith, or disarming our spies, or encouraging more illegal immigration or taxing you more and wasting your money, this new majority is trying to do it all. But they don't want you to know about it.

Much of this will not pass the Senate or it will be vetoed........for now. But their quest to create a country with less freedom and less safety will not stop. Our quest to oppose them must not stop either.

Washington is totally out of control...pandering to liberal politics. Well, perceived global warming must be a much greater threat to national security than our wide open borders, jihadist illegal aliens in the USA, and millions of unknown illegal aliens walking our steets freely...

I sure am glad the Congress has straigtened out our priorities and is providing the intelligent leadership America needs....

If these intel agencies are properly run (highly doubtful), there is a way for this to be useful. How about some intel assets dedicated to investigating the nuttiest of the global warming nutters? After all, they make it pretty clear that they detest modern civilization, all the stuff we do, like produce energy, manufacture goods, drive cars and trucks, all that stuff. So if the global warming nutters are self-declared enemies of our civilization, don't we want our spies tapping their phones, reading their email, following them, mapping the networks of their associations, and so on?

If the intel agencies weren't populated by Valerie Plame - Joe Wilson type liberal idiots, this is how it would be played. The problem is not that resources are being assigned to "global warming," it's that those resources will be used by the leftist nutters who have wormed into and entrenched themselves in the agencies. So the resources will be used to aid and abet the global warming nutters, and possibly surveil the "deniers," rather than rationally investigate the backgrounds of those who are openly seeking to reduce our level of civilization.

Visualize how the CIA and FBI would have dealt with political groups who were screaming for a reduction of power production, gasoline use, etc., in, say, 1951, versus today, if they were assigned to develop intelligence on the subject of claims that such production was somehow harmful. If Greenpeace had been around then, they would have been lumped in with the Communist party and many intel assets would have been dedicated to fighting them. That’s the model of how “global warming” should be researched by intel agencies.

“They have said that global warming causes drought and famine which causes poverty thereby leading to terrorism.”

The Domino Theory of Global Destruction!

And all of us who are at or near Social Security age remember the Domino Theory.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.