Thanks for the memories

So yesterday I got an email from a family member, forwarded along by and to who knows how many others which said in the subject line, "VOTED AGAINST ENGLISH IN AMERICA!!!!!"

Uh-oh.

The text is copied and pasted below -

WHAT A SHAME

38 SENATORS VOTED TODAY AGAINST MAKING ENGLISH THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF AMERICA.

HERE THEY ARE, ALL 38 WHO VOTED AGAINST ENGLISH IN AMERICA ARE DEMOCRATS.

Akaka (D-HI), Bayh (D-IN), Biden (D-DE), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-C A), Cantwell (D-WA), Clinton (D-NY), Dayton (D-MN), Dodd (D-CT), Domenici ( D -NM), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Feinstein (D-CA), Harkin (D-IA), Inouye (D-HI), Jeffords (I-VT), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Kohl (D-WI), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Lieberman (D-CT), Menendez (D-NJ), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Obama (D-IL), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Salazar (D-CO), Sarbanes (D-MD), Schumer (D-NY), Stabenow (D-MI), Wyden (D-OR)

REMEMBER THIS THE DAY YOU VOTE. PLEASE PASS THIS ON

So I sat there reading this and thought, "I should for the good of familial relations and happy smiles at Thanksgiving just give this a pass." But being that my own best interests never seem to rate high on my priority list I got pissed off and started thinking further about the person who sent this to me, a person that while I love has never done a good goddamn thing for themselves and has taken whatever handout has been proferred possible. I got mad, did some reading to make sure my facts were at least pretty close to accurate, and responded thusly. Should make for some good times round the turkey!!

Dear *unnamed family member*

I deleted anyone I don't know from your distro from this insanely long response but this kind of stuff just drives me crazy, (hence the length...and accompanying insanity).

The issue that the email refers to was not a simple “Let’s make all people in America speak English”, (which in and of itself is wildly counter-productive from a social, educational and fiscal level), at all. In fact that had so little it was almost nothing to do with it. So bear with me if you want to and apologies for the length but hey, what else do I have to do but talk politics at 8:30 in the morning.

First off, this vote took place in April. Congress is now in recess. No one is voting on anything until after the November elections.

Second and most importantly the vote was whether or not to continue floor debate on a comprehensive immigration reform bill, sponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy, (strange bedfellows indeed!!). The bill had been sheperded through committee proceedings by Arlen Specter a Republican Senator from Pennsylvania. The bill passed through committee with bipartisan support but when it hit the Senate floor, 435 Amendments were added to it. 435 with many of them being nothing but earmarks, or pork, that had little to do with immigration reform and NOTHING to do with mandating English as a National language. To break the impasse and pass a pork laden piece of crap bill the Senate would need a 2/3 majority vote.

The 38 Senators referenced blocked that majority, this was the vote in question, and sent the bill back to committee where, it was amended closer to it's orignal form and passed by the Senate several weeks later.

The newly passed bill was then taken to a caucus with the House of Representatives who had their own bill which focused solely on border enforcement. The President had said he would not sign a bill that did not include comprehensive reform (the Senate Bill was more like that type). In caucus our spirited majority lawmakers were supposed to work together on a compromise bill that would pass muster with the White House but it simply died due to an inability to compromise.

Like almost everything else with this Congress, it never saw the light of day again once the news started focusing on who killed Jon Benet and/or Natalee Holloway instead of immigration as the hot point of the day. The closest we got to immigration reform was a bill tossed to the White House right before the recess to build, but not fund (that probably sounds familiar to those who have dealt with "No Child Left Behind") a 700 mile section of fence along our 2,300 mile southern border.

If you want to hear more about it watch Lou Dobbs on CNN, he talks about it seemingly 24 hours a day.

So if you want me to remember something about 38 those Democrats, I will. They made a deal with John McCain on a bill, passed it through the proper channels with Republican leadership at the helm and when it hit the Senate floor and was turned into a pet project money vacuum they kept the now completely fiscally absurd bill from being railroaded through the Senate. I will remember them for that.

The rest is long winded political venting so read it at your leisure, (or peril!)

There are some other things I'm going to remember come election day.

I'm going to remember that in the last six months Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley have been so disgraced and/or found guilty in a court of law that they had to leave their seats in Congress with Duke and Ney heading to prison. Curt Weldon, you're next up to bat.

I'm going to remember Jack Abramoff buying members of Congress and people given the public trust like David Safavian, (pleaded guilty too!), the government's chief procurement officer, and defrauding constituents, American taxpayers, to the tune of millions of dollars.

I’m going to remember that just yesterday a bill was signed into law that undermines the basic tenets of Habeas Corpus, (innocent until proven guilty) not just for gun-slinging terrorists but for anyone the Office of the President decides to label an enemy combatant or who “provides material support” to such. What does that mean? Right, it’s up to the President at his whim. You know anyone with family in Northern Ireland that could have inadvertently donated money to a front organization for the I.R.A.? See you in Guantanamo Bay. Think that sounds crazy, it is. But as of today it’s entirely legal for the President to punch that ticket with no formal charges brought.

I’m going to remember the unending stream of lies that have come from the people who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, not their stranglehold on political power.

I'm going to remember the Senate calling a special session so they could attempt to walk all over the Constitutional rights to privacy between a man and his brain dead wife. I'm going to remember the majority leader of the Senate, Bill Frist M.D., saying that he could make a definitive medical diagnosis that Terry Schiavo had cognitive thought and should be kept on a feeding tube against her husband’s wishes after watching three minutes of videotape and trying to ram through illegal legislation to make that happen. I'll also remember Frist's silence when her autopsy revealed that her brain was more than 50% water and the only sensation it could possibly register is the most primal, pain.

I’m going to remember that those self-same rights to privacy are the ones so adamantly "defended" against gay marriage by way of the Defense of Marriage Act. That act makes it unlawful to pay pensions to survivors of Federal employees in these circumstances; Under federal law, pensions can be denied only to lawmakers' same-sex partners and to people convicted of espionage or treason. Nice.

I'm going to remember Hurricane Katrina and the fact that they're still pulling bodies out of houses in New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. I'm going to remember what a heck of a job Brownie was doing.

I'm going to remember the absolute betrayal of our public education system by the Federal Government with the passage of "No Child Left Behind" and the cutting of funds to support it. Anyone who is up in arms about government mandated English and a one size fits all Nation and then needs a government funded special needs program for their child, watch out, you might get the kind of government you're voting for. Oh wait, you already have it!!!

I'm going to remember Ted Stevens, Republican Senior Senator from Alaska, blowing a gasket when he was questioned about an earmark to build a $212,000,000 bridge to the 50 (yeah 5 and 0) residents of Gravina, Alaska to connect them to the bustling metropolis of Ketchikan, Alaska. Right now they have to take a ferry that only runs only every 15 MINUTES!!!! HORRORS!!!! That $212,000,000 is approximately 30 (yeah 3 and 0) times the budget that was just halved for brain injury research at the Veteran's Administration. "Honestly, they would have loved to have funded it, but there were just so many priorities," says Jenny Manley, spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee, "They didn't have any flexibility in such a tight fiscal year."

I'm going to remember that our "this is unacceptable" foreign policy has led the "Axis of Evil" into a full scale Sectarian civil war, (Iraq), thumb nosing and continued development of a nuclear program and vastly more influence in the greater Middle East than they could have ever dreamed of (Iran), and oh yeah, the detonation of a nuclear bomb last week and a declaration of War yesterday, (that would be North Korea). I'm going to remember that after six years in office with a same party control of Congress, Bush still blames these things on Bill Clinton and, at times, his own father.

I'm going to remember that we still can't seem to find Bin Laden.

I'm going to remember the innocent Americans that were murdered on 9-11 and how their deaths have been bastardized and used for political gain. You can reference Ohio Republican Senator Mike DeWine's campaign ad where his staff photoshopped smoke coming out of the South Tower of the WTC for dramatic effect, because the real pictures just weren't dramatic enough. It was pretty easy to spot it as a stock photo as the North Tower, the one that was hit first, wasn’t smoking at all and the position of the sun placed the shot at about 4:00 in the afternoon. In March.

I'm going to remember how Americans that served this country in combat like Jack Murtha (37-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps, Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts), Jim Webb, (rifle platoon and company commander with the Fifth Marine Regiment in the An Hoa Basin west of Danang; was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts and has a son serving in the Marines in Iraq), Patrick Murphy (Bronze Star in Iraq, JAG), and lost limbs like Tammy Duckworth (Iraq, lost both her legs) and Max Cleeland (Captain, U.S. Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, lost three limbs), have had their patriotism and courage called into question by people like Dick Cheney (five Vietnam deferments for "other priorities"), Jean Schmidt (unadaulterated idiot...there's really no other way I can more clearly put it when she called Jack Murtha a coward from the floor of the House and then later said, "oh I didn't know he had been a Marine for 37 YEARS...my bad yo) and Senator George Allen (Vietnam deferment, some of that time spent working an internship as a "buckaroo" on a dude ranch during the draft period...you don't believe me look it up.), when they had the “audacity” to call B.S. on the Iraq policy. My favorite though was Tom Delay saying why he didn't volunteer for service in Vietnam, "So many minority youths had volunteered ... that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself." Right.

I'm going to remember how less than one month before this election we had an official White House commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the bombing of the USS COLE. Sad though, that we never had one for years 1-5. I guess they were too busy.

I'm going to remember that if the Johns Hopkins study that was released last week and the low end estimates are only half right Iraq has lost over 1% of its total civilian population since 2003 to violence. That percentage would, as of today, translate to 3,000,000 American lives. This violence was referred to as “a comma in the history books”, by our President last week.

I'm especially going to remember that as of today we have lost 2,761 Americans in a war built on ineptitude at best and nothing but a pack of lies at worst, a war that has cost over $300,000,000,000 of our tax dollars and has no end in sight.

Mostly I'm going to remember to vote.