Friday Open Thread

Welcome to your Friday open thread. It’s been a long week for me. It’s always tough coming back from a vacation. What’s on your mind?

I’m sure you’re shocked SHOCKED to learn that the House Tea Party caucus is full of hypocrites. They love them some of those earmarks, er I mean, important district projects funded by the government.

Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget.

According to a Hotline review of records compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the 52 members of the caucus, which pledges to cut spending and reduce the size of government, requested a total of 764 earmarks valued at $1,049,783,150 during Fiscal Year 2010, the last year for which records are available.

…

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), for one, attached his name to 69 earmarks in the last fiscal year, for a total of $78,263,000. The 41 earmarks Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.) requested were worth $65,395,000. Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) wanted $63,400,000 for 39 special projects, and Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) wanted $93,980,000 set aside for 47 projects.

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) takes the prize as the Tea Partier with his name on the most earmarks. Rehberg’s office requested funding for 88 projects, either solely or by co-signing earmarks requests with Sens. Max Baucus (D) and Jon Tester (D), at a cost of $100,514,200. On his own, Rehberg requested 20 earmarks valued at more than $9.6 million.

I’m sure earmarks are going to get renamed to something else soon, that way Republicans can technically be telling the truth when they say they ended earmarks.

The DADT repeal hearings made for some interesting viewing. Mean old man McCain was grumpy. In this clip he complains about not having enough time then pretends that the military should be a democracy. Good one, eh – why don’t they ask them about staying in Afghanistan?

This next set of clips is a compilation of the answers to right wing talking points.

– CLAIM: Should not lift ban in a time of war.

MULLEN RESPONDS: I find the argument that war is not the time to change to be antithetical with our experiences since 2001. War does not stifle change, it demands it. It does not make change harder, it facilities it.

– CLAIM: Combat troops believe repeal would be disruptive.

HAM RESPONDS: A subsequent question to that was, under intense combat, what would your response be. And we saw the negative rates drop dramatically.

– CLAIM: 28% response rate is too low.

HAM RESPONDS: Twenty-eight percent overall response rate is well within the historical range of Department of Defense surveys of military personnel.

– CLAIM: 265,000 servicemembers would leave the military.

GATES RESPONDS: Based on the survey itself, experience would dramatically lower those numbers. If I believed that a quarter of a million people would leave the military would leave immediately, if given the opportunity, I would certainly have second thoughts about that.

– CLAIM: Servicemembers should have been asked if they believe policy should be changed.

GATES RESPONDS: I can’t think of a single precedent in American history of doing a referendum of the american armed forces on a policy issue.

Would you have guessed that some of the fiercest advocates of equality are Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Gates?