Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Dems vow change as Congress ends session

Jim Abrams writing for the Associated Press (via the Seattle Post Intelligencer), gives a summary of the last minute efforts of Congress.

Before the predawn finish Saturday, departing House Speaker Dennis Hastert acknowledged that after eight years, the longest stretch for a Republican in the job, he will welcome a return to the rank and file. "On Jan. 4, I will be privileged to rejoin you on these benches where my heart is," he said,

Some privilege. The way he said it, you'd think he planned on it from the start. If he didn't want to continue as speaker, he could have simply stepped down instead of engineering a defeat for the Republican party in the House.

Lawmakers ready to return home also were reminded of the corruption and scandal problems that helped sweep Democrats to power in the November elections.

Of course, this is an AP report, so there's no mention of the Democrat corruption from individuals like Rep. McDermott or Rep. Jefferson.

The House ethics committee, in a report Friday, admonished Republicans for turning a blind eye for years to the inappropriate conduct of former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. He resigned in September after it was revealed he had sent salacious electronic messages to former teenage pages.

Again, this is an AP report, so no mention of the fact that the ethics panel also found that Democrats were not blameless in this incident either.

As one of its final acts, Congress approved a stopgap measure keeping federal programs running at or slightly below current levels through Feb. 15. President Bush quickly signed it on Saturday.

The action was necessary because lawmakers failed to pass the annual spending bills covering the budget year that began Oct. 1, except those dealing with defense and homeland security.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who will become House Appropriations Committee chairman when the Democrats take over, said the bill was "a blatant admission of abject failure by the most useless Congress in modern times."

Of course, there's also no mention of the persistent obstructionism of the Democrat party during this "useless" Congress's tenure, which is also something that I'm sure Rep. Obey neglected to mention.

In the Senate, incoming Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he and new Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have agreed that all 100 senators will hold a private session on Jan. 4 to kick off what they hope will be a new era of civility and less partisanship.

I seem to remember someone talking about a "new tone" in Washington a few years ago. Civility and less partisanship were the goal then, but of course since the Democrats weren't in power, they would have nothing of it.

I'm sure that there must be a dictionary that covers the variants in language used by Equus asinus. Somewhere in that dictionary there's sure to be a definition of partisanship and bipartisanship.

Partisanship is probably defined as when Republicans insist upon holding to conservative principles when they are in power, and the Democrats are in the minority.

Bipartisanship is probably defined as the condition that exists when Republicans cave to Democrat demands, or whenever Democrats are in power.

The Democrats are vowing a change. They're calling the 109th Congress the most useless Congress in modern times, because so little got done. God help us if the Democrats manage to get their agenda through. Expect taxes to rise, government spending to rise even faster, and expect our national defense and intelligence services to be gutted.

They've done it before. They'll do it again.

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