Drudge Headline: MERRY CHRISTMAS: GOVT GOODIES FOR ALL! EVEN PORK FOR PIGS
Cromnibus: a winter festival of unrestrained spending By: John Hayward 12/10/2014 10:07 AM
As they had a habit of saying throughout the interstellar empire of “Dune,” the spice must flow. Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively neutering freshly-elected conservatives. The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied. Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s to be expected when you tie your own hands. It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way.
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Anyone who raises the slightest objection to this panicky spending bonanza is denounced as a penny-pinching extremist monster who just wants to kill children, puppies, and kittens for fun, by shutting down the government that keeps them alive. You don’t want Obama to throw up barricades around your national parks and memorials again, do you? No? Then shut up and spend.
The sole reservation in the winder spending festival is the Department of Homeland Security – which, as Fox News explains, is only funded through February, so the GOP leadership can pretend it’s going to stage a huge fight over Obama’s illegal amnesty orders next year. This is supposed to mollify the starchy citizens who still care about antiquated notions like the rule of law, the separation of powers, the value of citizenship, and national security long enough for the Establishment to enjoy its holiday vacation.
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Wonderful. Let’s have a big round of applause for the GOP Establishment, ladies and gentlemen! They managed to throw away the most remarkable electoral victory in a generation in only one month, maneuvering themselves into a position where the losers who got crushed will be making demands to win their support for a bill that effectively ratifies their will through half of their sojourn in electoral exile.
Gee, it’s too bad the Republican leadership can’t play a hand well against Democrats, isn’t it? They only turn into card sharks when they’re playing against the conservatives in their own party. Don’t expect them to be pulling any cards from their sleeves when they sit down for their scheduled February game of Amnesty Hold ‘Em, and the dead-eyed Democrats on the other side of the table begin screaming “Republican extremists want to defund Homeland Security!”
The only reliable bipartisanship in Washington is the agreement between both parties to serve and protect the permanent system of regulators, appropriators, lobbyists, and Big Media, which have fused together into a single organism with a shared bloodstream, through which well-connected individuals and flow from lobby organizations, to bureaucratic appointments, to media sinecures with ease. Look at the resume of a Beltway power player, and you’ll have a hard time telling the difference between elected officials, the agencies they nominally control, the special interests they serve, and the media that’s supposed to keep them all honest. The same person can work for all of those entities in the span of a decade. The only thing they really cooperate on is the care and feeding of the Cromnibus, the misshapen thing that feeds them all through its multitude of teats.
Enjoy your latest round of desperate last-minute must-pass emergency spending from the same arrogant elites who claim they alone have the wisdom to manage every aspect of your life, and be advised you’ll be getting the same “present” from them next Christmas, and the one after that.
Headline: "GOP Cave: CRomnibus Will Not Include Relief from Michelle Obama's School Lunch Program"
"Though school officials, nutritionists, parents, and students have decried First Lady Michelle Obama’s school lunch program, the $1 trillion CRomnibus (part “continuing resolution” and part “omnibus”) does not include relief from the unpopular meals standards after all.
Daren Bakst at The Daily Signal notes that the spending bill does not include, as was anticipated, a temporary waiver, so that schools could get some relief from the onerous standards."
Spending Bill Grants Half-Billion to ISIS-Linked Syrian Rebels "Moderate" rebels openly admit their alliance with ISIS by Kit Daniels December 12, 2014
ZitatThe $1.1 trillion federal spending bill rammed through Congress provides a half-billion dollars to arm and train ISIS-linked Syrian rebels who could potentially launch terrorist attacks against the U.S.
Section 9016 of the spending bill authorizes the Secretary of Defense $500,000,000 to equip “appropriately vetted elements of the Syrian opposition” who will defend “the Syrian people from attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” but back in September ISIS signed a truce with the remaining rebel groups and they are now working together against the Syrian government.