Tag Archives: wiener

Reflections on the Federal Government Shutdown

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First off — this guy’s name is Boehner { kinda says it all, no? }

Between Anthony Weiner, John Boehner and some of our preceding leaderly name choices alone { Dick and Bush come to mind, ejaculatory pun definitely intended } — as American people we need to pick people to lead our nation and represent its citizens with names that don’t sound like they’d make my 10-year-old son start cracking up laughing. Its kind of embarrassing at this point. I mean, I guess if we really, really like the person and their name is something like Ben Dover or Michael Hunt, some sort of new policy for a name-change before entering an electoral race would really help. This shit’s making history and it’ll be on the interwebz for a while, right? Might as well at least attempt to clean up the comedy prior to these unwieldy predicaments our government gets us into, its the very least we can do.

Besides maybe seeing the writing on the wall when we put Weiners and Boehners in office, let’s recap what I think happened today with the United States of America’s Federal Government, because frankly, I’m not entirely sure I completely understand it.

According to the Washington Post’s aptly named ‘Wonkblog‘:

A government shutdown starting Tuesday, Oct. 1, is now upon us. The House and Senate couldn’t agree on a bill to fund the government, and time has run out.

To me, that sounds like somebody didn’t do their job.

It actually sounds like a team of people didn’t do their job, right?

Kind of amazing, if you ask me { and I know you didn’t, but, uhm, you’ve read this far, haven’t you? }

How the HELL does something like this even happen? I honestly just don’t get it at all.

Why do I pay taxes here? I seem to remember this dire need to revolt way, way back when due to the agreed upon citizen-driven demand, ‘No taxation without representation!’ and I thought that that was one of the reasons why the Minutemen fought off the British to free our colonial entrapment from the Mothership. Who’s been representing us? Don’t our taxes pay Boehner’s salary? Don’t they pay the salary of all these other supposed representatives that are apparently asleep at the wheel? What the fuck is going on here?

Now, let’s take a few minutes though to see this interesting news item from my perspective, as an actual living, breathing and working { well, uhm, we’ll save that for another blogPost, right? } citizen of these United States to see how the threat of the government shutting down effects me.

I heard about the Federal Government shutdown a month or so back and I sense that there’s this hard-headed, closed-minded resistance to what people have been calling ‘Obamacare’. So the shutdown is somehow tangled into the litigation and proceeds surrounding funding the government and somehow getting a universal health coverage act in place to maybe do something humane and far overdue in one of the most hypocritical nations out there when it comes to respecting the well-being of the people of the world. As far as I can tell, we’re not paving the way in a number of areas, and healthcare is the most ass-backwards monolithic system of bureaucratic waste going. Its not about health, its not about care. Its about making a buck, which unfortunately has been confounded with the notion of our ‘American Way’.

But, besides all that …

Personally, I felt no difference today.

The government supposedly shut down or is on the way to shutting down. So, they’ll do nothing for us until its back up and running. Well, nothing but take away billions upon billions of dollars from the taxpaying citizens of the USA without providing anything of value in return whatsoever.

Business as usual.

Its just like it was yesterday, right? Money comes out of my pocket in exchange for these vague, invisible and non-metrically-tracked and unaccountable non-services.

I went to the doctor this morning, first thing, for a blood test and no big changes there.

I put out the recycling and the trash and the magic town services du jour rid my household of our trash and refuse in the same exact manner as last week.

I stopped in at Bagel World to pick up a baker’s dozen and there was a rather friendly police officer standing in line, chatting it up as usual with a general contractor, getting ready for a bagel sandwich and coffee on the house while all sorts a crime and payoffs were probably goin’ down here and there about town.

Same ole same ole, huh.

I got home and the interwebz were still all up and runnin’. Television still seemed to work. Birds were still chirping. I could still tweet and lifestream with no unusual interruptions.

I even called unemployment to put in my claim { just opening a new claim during this ‘transition,’ if you know what I mean } and I went through all the voice-message roboPrompts to almost get shit done — but then I encountered a technical error and the phone autoSystem totally hung up on me.

Could this technical difficulty I encountered be due to the Federal Government shutdown?

I really fucking doubt it. Anyone that’s ever used these horrific systems would’ve probably expected to get the boot and need to run down to the Salem Unemployment Insurance offices tomorrow, which I don’t mind doing. If I find out this was a shutdown thing, I’ll let ya know, aight? But I highly doubt it was.

I went out to lunch with my wife. Picked up my son at a normal time from Spofford Pond Schools in Boxford — which is a public school that could’ve potentially been effected by the news of the day as one might assume, but … huh … strange, everything at the school seemed happy and cool. Teachers taught, kids learned or they didn’t and then everyone went home just as they normally do.

I feel no difference between yesterday and today.

Federal Government shutdown?

Big deal, right?

Who gives a shit?

I see no difference and these people in DC really appear to do absolutely nothing at all for me or most of the American people anyhow.

Which leads me to an interesting question, I guess.

Should there be some sort of consequence to the big-ass government shutdown?

I mean, these people seemed to purposely overlook, ignore and take no action regarding something that seems like it might be rather important to the United States. Maybe even more important than conducting constant global wars on terrorism in the name of democracy and freedom. Not sure, but it seems taking care of something like funding the government should’ve been higher on the radar for those folks twerking us around in Washington DC.

I mean, I don’t know …

If I were President Barrack Hussein Obama at this point, I would seriously consider this as a sort of passive-aggressive act of self-resignation on the part of those US Representatives that apparently do nothing for the peoples of this great nation anyways.

Why bother with any of these closed-minded, sedentary leeches at all anymore?

We should get rid of ’em.

I would.

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I no longer want to pay their salaries — especially if they’re not positively contributing to our country by representing what the people feel makes sense for our nation and its citizens. And especially if they’re sitting their asleep behind Boehner and the DC Clowns of 2013.

This event — letting the date slip at such an important time simply because Congress can’t agree on how to fund our government — feels, to me, like a silly little tantrum. These people are spoiled, plain and simple. And Congress letting it get to this point is just a childish, self-centered act of irresponsibility that offends me.

They should all be fired and then they should all need to go on ‘Political Shutdown Celebrity Apprentice’ to compete for their favorite charities, which is apparently themselves. And then, we the people of the United States should fire Donald Trump and cancel his stupid show and take all of the money we save by not paying their luxurious and unappreciated salaries, by not paying for their healthcare benefits { which I’m sure are well above the standard policies we’re all muddling through, spending a part-time job’s worth of personal time trying to get any of this shit taken care of as promised by the very notion of health insurance }, and by not paying for their pensions and retirement benefits { these monies they essentially steal from us by acting like imbeciles and assholes in front of the entire world } — we should take those monies we save by eliminating the irresponsible Congressionals that let it all get to this point and put it back where it really belongs:

  • Put the money back into education to strengthen and empower our children
  • Put it back into our cities and towns and the services they provide to us more directly at a more local level
  • Put it back into any and all programs that foster collaborative creativity and innovation over destruction and negativity
  • Put the money into investigating and righting civil injustices and hatred right here at home in the US instead of flushing it into a vacuum of neverending war overseas
  • Put it back into things that directly help the people, into the things that might actually make a difference and point us to a more positive and healthy American tomorrow

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