You Can't Make This Stuff Up

by publius

Rep. John Mica, Roll Call Vote H.R. 1:

Nay

Press Release, Rep. John Mica:

 

(h/t Benen).

Comments

[evie]

There are no words anymore. Honestly.

[russell]

He was against it before he was for it.

And the folks in his district will sure as hell cash the checks when the money starts to flow.

[efgoldman]

Oh, there are plenty of words. I prefer not to use them in adult, polite company.

This must be driving the comedians crazy. How can you mock and parody people who have raised self-parody to impossible levels?

[stefan]

Isn't this just the same things as 'you voted to defund the troops' from the other perspective. So Mica didn't like parts of the mostly Democratic bill to vote for it, doesn't mean he cannot like the parts he likes. Don't we want Republicans supporting public transport?

[neff]

Oops, when I read it I assumed that he was bragging about his effort to kill the commuter trains that let the nigras come out to your nice white neighborhood (kind of like that infuriating congresswoman from Minnesota)

[ral]

In the words of Barney Frank, this gives hypocrisy a bad name.

[AIMAI]

No, its not the same as "you voted to defund the troops" because that vote wouldn't have "defunded the troops" in any meaningful way but would have defunded the war. The troops weren't going to be affected. Meanwhile, the entire argument of the republicans is that this is some kind of poisoned candy which is bad for the country. They have consistently opposed all aspects that included actually funding stuff so taking credit for funding something (as opposed to saying, more or less truthfully, "I would have liked to have voted for the tax cuts but I couldn't because of all that paying for stuff like railroads which I hate.")

aimai

[Brett Bellmore]

"This must be driving the comedians crazy. How can you mock and parody people who have raised self-parody to impossible levels?"

That's been a problem with politicians for quite some time.

Yup, pretty stupid. Fortunately for the comedians, he's a Republican, and thus fair game; They'll feel free to at least try.

I don't expect to see Obama mocked much, for all the opportunities he's already providing.

[efgoldman]

Brett - Neither Obama nor anyone else should be beyond parody - nor criticism.

But, agree with him, criticize him, hate him, whatever, at least its clear that he wants to have serious discussions about accomplishing serious (spelled "g-r-o-w-n-u-p") things.

I haven't seen any evidence in the last month that the GOP is serious about anything except the Limbaugh "hope he fails so we win next time" meme.

Its like they all went back to middle school.

[Rune]

Running as an incumbent, all Mica has to do is fool some of the people all of the time. That's setting the bar quite low.

The best solution is to divert the stimulus funds away from congressional districts whose Rep voted against it. Then redistribute the proceeds to the districts that supported it.

[Brett Bellmore]

You mean like we got to have a serious discussion of what was in the stimulus bill? Oh, wait, no, we had to vote on it before anybody had a chance to know what was being voted on. Even released it as scanned PDF to make sure nobody could run keyword searches on it.

But maybe we'll get to discuss the small things. Right? The things that don't matter. Only the big things will have to be signed onto sight unseen.

We can hope, anyway.

[McMartin]

Brett: Get news from sources besides Rush Limbaugh and his repeater stations.

[ral]

Um, Brett, "scanned PDF?" Nope.

[KCinDC]

Just saw you spreading the same propaganda on Crooked Timber, Brett. How many blogs have you hit with it? Are you being paid for this stuff now?

[Slartibartfast]

There are pdfs that are basically scanned text, and there are pdfs that can be text-searched. The image file can be converted to text, if you have a bit of smarts and Google.

I've got a 900-page spec that I still haven't gotten around to doing that to, but neither have I looked at it in years, so it's not really a priority.

[Slartibartfast]

That said, the file linked by Mediamatters is clearly a searchable one. Not because they said so, but because I opened it up and searched it myself.

[Brett Bellmore]

What Limbaugh specifically claimed was that some of the bill had been released as a text PDF, and most of it as image PDF. If you think a generic explaination from Adobe about it's capabilities with respect to PDF files that are formated as text refutes that, I'm not the one at the crack pipe.

You've got to watch what the Democratic party repeater stations say about Rush, they're usually not very accurate.

[efgoldman]

Now Brett, see what you've done? You've trolled the thread and hijacked it, and pulled us away from the main point, which is that Rep. Micah is an idiot and apparently thinks his constituents are too.

Of course if this totally cynical GOP ploy works, then once again it proves that Mencken was right.

[Warren Terra]

Stefan, the people who "voted to defund the troops" voted in favor of alternative plans to fund the troops - for example, plans containing timelines for withdrawal. The only Stimulus plan that I'm aware of House Republicans voting for (95% of them, so probably including this joker) consisted entirely of tax cuts (mostly for the wealthy, and mostly long-term) and so far as I'm aware did not include the sort of spending for which this yahoo is claiming credit.

So, to recap: voted against every version of spending of this sort, part of a caucus that loudly denounced spending of this sort, now claiming credit for spending of this sort.

A little different from denying you want to defund your country's troops because you supported some funding plans and not others and cast a symbolic vote against a plan you didn't like while knowing the troops would still receive their funding.

[Warren Terra]

Brett, I was reprimanded by Hilzoy for my response to one of your comments recently, so I'll try to play nice. In response to your concern about the non-searchable PDF, a couple of points come to mind:
1) As noted above, there is now very good OCR technology that could address your difficulty. Surely The Party Of Twitter can handle that?
2) There are sometimes good reasons not to release electronic versions of your documents, as you don't know what could persist in the final electronic file in terms of deleted text, time stamps, author information, comments, etcetera. On several occasions this has caused problems when people tried to redact classified information when releasing files electronically.

[Phil]

In addition, they have reformatted the bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it.

OK, which part of that says what Brett says Limbaugh said, and which part says what everyone else says Limbaugh said?

Which part of "they have reformatted the bill" contains the ambiguity between images and searchable text that Brett claims above?

Finally, which part of the linked PDF is actually formatted the way Limbaugh claims above? (Answer: 0%)

Brett, if you're going to both stick up for Rush Limbaugh and treat everyone with such contempt, you have to get something right every once in a while.

Here is the transcript of the relevant portion of Limbaugh's radio show, straight from his own site. If Brett can find something that supports his claim above, I'll make a $25 donation to the charity of his choice. If he can't, he makes a $25 donation to the charity of my choice.

Interested, Brett?

[KCinDC]

Warren, the vote I believe you're referring to was in the Senate, and it was 90% of the Republicans who voted for it (not counting Gregg, who was in his self-imposed recusal period).

[cleek]

That said, the file linked by Mediamatters is clearly a searchable one. Not because they said so, but because I opened it up and searched it myself.

i did a quick skim through it and did not find a single scanned page. it's all text. all 575 pages of it. Rush remains a big fat idiot.

Mica's a transparent flake. a typical party-first dittohead.

[russell]

A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it.

Rush Limbaugh: ignoramus or liar?

We report, you decide.

[243]

Actually Brett/Limbaugh is sort of right. The bill is divided into Div A and Div B. Div A appears to be a graphic, and Div B a text rendition. Div B is larger in pages at least so it would seem that the claim that most was an image pdf is incorrect. Lastly as to being searchable by Acrobat, both are searchable in my version 8.1.3, although I do not believe that image PDFs were searchable in prior versions.

[efgoldman]

Since the GOP clearly has become the party of Rush, why don't they just nominate him and be done with it?

Or maybe he could join Palin's ticket as VP candidate.

Wait. That means he actually might have to come up with, or at least sign on to, you know, policies or procedures or something like that.

That the craven GOP congresscritters defend him is is ridiculous. That commenters on this blog - one of the most intelliigent, reasoned and reasonable out there, left or right - dive right in to his factless pool of accusatory excrement is beyond stupid.

[efgoldman]

...and that I allowed Brett to bait me into flaming him is just as dumb. Apologies to the moderators and the commenters.

[Phil]

I've got Adobe 7, and both Div A and Div B are fully-searchable in it, as well as in Apple's Preview application.

In any case, though, Brett is certainly not "sort of right." While the bill may actually be in two parts, one of which is image (although still searchable), that's not what Limbaugh said according to his own transcript of his own show.

[Warren Terra]

KC, I was corrected similarly to the way you just corrected me in a comment thread this week, having similarly not noticed a House vote - the Senate vote on the DeMint amendment indeed got 36/40 voting Republicans, and it got a lot of attention, but there was a similar vote in the House on a conceptually similar amendment, and it got 95% of all Republicans voting for it, although it attracted less comment than the DeMint amendment.

[Bernard Yomtov]

Just to check, I downloaded div A from 243's link and opened it with Preview. I had no trouble at all searching it.

Maybe Limbaugh and Brett got confused because there's no "Search" command. There's only "Find," with some options. I can see how that would make it really tough.

[Jesurgislac]

(trying to comment, ignore me)

[KCinDC]

I stand corrected, Warren.

243, an image-based PDF file is searchable only if contains embedded text, normally produced by OCR. It appears that this one has such text. Probably that, rather than the version of Acrobat Reader, is what made the difference.

[243]

KC, I just figured that out on my own, but thanks. I was unaware that they had added this to PDF creation, so I learned something. ;-) It would seem that Limbaugh needs to learn that PDFs are generally searchable, and since this one was specifically made to be searchable, it really negates his point.

[Slartibartfast]

I think possibly Rush is several years out of date WRT what an Acrobad document is.

Either that, or mendoucheous liar. Or both! Why can't he be both?

Never been a Limbaugh fan, me.

[Slartibartfast]

Acrobat. I do know how to spell; sometimes my fingers fall down on the job.

[243]

Darn, I thought Acrobad was clever.

[fostert]

Reality is truly stranger than fiction. I always thought that was true, but it wasn't until I started hanging out in Bangkok bars that I really knew it was true. In most bars, people exaggerate their stories. In Bangkok, people tone down their stories to make you believe them. I know exactly why they do it now because I do the same thing. Travel alone in this world, and you'll know what I'm talking about. We live in a very strange world, but that's what makes it so fun.

[wonkie]

Arlen Specter told a reporter that he believe that there was a significant number of Republicans in Congress who, while voting against the stimulus, wereactually in favor of it's passage. In fact he describ ed a R Senator who thanked him (Specter)for votying in favor and stated that he(the other Senator) could not vote for it although he wished to.

SO there's your Republican party for you. Not able to discuss issues honestly, afraid of Rush Limbaugh, hostage to the craziest elements of their base, arging against what they know is good policy and hoping the Democrats will save the nation for them so that they can come back later when times get good enough for their core ideas (fear, hate, jingoism) to be appealing once more.

[cleek]

Darn, I thought Acrobad was clever.

Acrobad is StrongBad's flexible cousin. he's clever, but only when it comes to the trapeze.

[OCSteve]

Searchable or not – does anyone believe that Congress-critters read and digested this monstrosity before they voted for it? Lobbyists got it before Congress? Transparent huh?

This thing is a fiasco, crammed down our throats…

[now_what]

OCSteve, what percentage of bills passed during the last eight years do you think were read in their entirety by all the Congress-critters voting for them? Because if you think that percentage is greater than zero, well, naive is not in the dictionary.

It didn't seem to be a problem when the Republicans were the ones voting, now all of the sudden, you think it is a big deal.

I somehow can't bring myself to care what you think. When your guys do it, it's ok, when someone else does it, the sky is falling.

The world's tiniest violin gets broken out for another round.

[Slartibartfast]

Darn, I thought Acrobad was clever.

This is my personal tragedy: I am only ever clever by accident.

[Tsam]

I understand that the stimulus bill that came out of conference was a combination of provisions that were in the House and Senate passed bills. Given that this bill has been the main Congressional activity, it is reasonable that a representative (with focused staff help) would understand before the conference report what was in the House bill, the relatively few parts that were added or removed in the Senate bill, and therefore could be quickly briefed before the final vote on how those already known items were arranged in the final bill. This is not an ideal of being informed, but it is better than the spin put out by its opponents.

I would have preferred another day for Congress to read the bill. It seems that the rush was more made to reduce their exposure to outside pressures than to reduce their exposure to the text of the bill. Given that the outside arguments on both sides did not pay much attention to the actual text, this reason for a hurried passage does not particularly disturb me.

[Hartmut]

Given the explicit statements of GOPsters about why they voted against the bill, the claim that some might (hahaha) not have read it in its entirety is totally irrelevant.
"I vote no because money is spent on infrastructure" or "I vote no because it should be tax cuts only" or "The tax cuts are targeted to benefit the have-nots instead fo the haves and have-mores, so I vote no" are so fundamental that no knowledge about the details of the bill are required. On the other hand there were lies about the content so specific that a knowledge of certain details has to be implied.
The o-tones of some GOP congresscritters should be manna from heaven to all campaigners on the left and/or Dem side (especially those about tax cuts being only legitimate if they benefit the rich).
---
As for the: no money for the districts of the hypocrites. That would be a fundamentally bad idea and would be no different from the Bush Administration doing the same (e.g. with Homeland security money). That's about the worst bribe/extortion tool there is in the (formally) legal arsenal. Beating the drum about it, informing the constituencies about their elected representatives' hypocrisy on the other hand would be fully legitimate.

[just me]

OCSteve, what percentage of bills passed during the last eight years do you think were read in their entirety by all the Congress-critters voting for them?

Should this matter?

We weren't doing it right for the last 10 years, so let's keep doing it wrong?

Sounds like a pretty poor argument to me.

[russell]

This thing is a fiasco, crammed down our throats…

Here is an executive summary of the original draft bill presented by the Democrats. This is dated January 17, 2009, which is actually a couple days after the bill was original presented.

Here is an executive summary of the bill as passed.

Yes, it's a PDF. Ctrl-F is your friend.

Let's pretend we're members of Congress. Further, let's assume that we have a deep and thorough understanding of what's in the initial draft. Since we have a staff to help us, and we've had a month to study, and it's our freaking job to do so, we are *of course* experts by now in what was in the original.

Let's also pretend that we've been paying close attention to the month-long debate over what would be in, what would be out, the various counter-proposals from the minority party, the various arguments for and against changing the balance of expenditure vs tax cuts, etc etc etc.

Compare the two executive summaries and let me know how much time you and your staff would need to be able to cast an intelligent and informed vote.

[bobbyp]

Well known, self admitted liar: "You can't lie, it's wrong!"

Reply: "But you are a liar."

Thief: "That doesn't make lying right."

Reply: "Then why don't you stop lying?"

I find this a very effective line of reasoning, since the original charge is, as russell effectively demonstrates, a total lie.

[OCSteve]

It didn't seem to be a problem when the Republicans were the ones voting, now all of the sudden, you think it is a big deal.

Baloney. My first complaint with Republicans was their abandonment of any sense of fiscal responsibility. They spent like drunken sailors for the last 8 years and I complained about it plenty.

I somehow can't bring myself to care what you think.

Heartbroken, I am. It was my life’s ambition to get you to care about what I think. I guess I’ll just have to find another goal so that life is worth living.

russell: It’s been widely reported that almost nobody read the whole thing before they voted on it. It came out of committee on Wednesday (and we know no hanky-panky ever happens there…). It was made available to the public on Friday, passed by the House before dinner, and passed by the Senate before bedtime. Whatever happened to this?

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Or this:

End the Practice of Writing Legislation Behind Closed Doors: As president, Barack Obama will restore the American people's trust in their government by making government more open and transparent. Obama will work to reform congressional rules to require all legislative sessions, including committee mark-ups and conference committees, to be conducted in public.

Or this:

… not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days

Sure, you can say this is an emergency. But that was the justification for the Patriot Act…

[russell]

It’s been widely reported that almost nobody read the whole thing before they voted on it.

I'm sure that's true. My guess is that the number of members of the House who read any given bill in its entirety before voting on it is fairly low.

How many voted without any understanding of what was in the bill? Of those, how many had no opportunity, in the month since the original draft of the bill was introduced, and during the ensuing weeks of debate about the bill, to get themselves an understanding of what was in the bill?

This isn't something that was thrown over the transom in the dead of night. It's been a month since the original draft was introduced, and it has been the topic of unending debate, commentary, analysis, and discussion during that time.

I took a few minutes to look over the House legislative calendar for the month from 1/15 until last Friday. Lots of things, from the silly to the very serious, were discussed and voted on during that period. But in terms of bills involving allocating and spending money, there was the TARP and there was H.R.1, the stimulus bill. The number-crunchers on the various members' staffs had little or nothing to distract from getting their homework done on H.R.1.

If anyone found themselves in the position of voting on this without understanding what was in it, they are either profoundly lazy or they didn't care to understand. Their constituents should vote them out at the next opportunity, because they're not doing their job.

[Hartmut]

Sorry, I can't see any closed doors the bill was written behind. GOPsters would claim to have been excluded and kept in the dark even if the bill was dictated to official scribes in Times Square and they had received personal invitations (daily for 4 years in a row) to attend and make amendements at will .

[now_what]

Baloney. My first complaint with Republicans was their abandonment of any sense of fiscal responsibility. They spent like drunken sailors for the last 8 years and I complained about it plenty.

That wasn't the complaint in question. The complaint in question is that the bill was voted on by people who had not read it in its entirety, which is probably true of most of the bills passed during your lifetime.

The question is why is it all of the sudden a big deal now? The answer is that it isn't.

Or this:

… not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days

You could at least wait for him to sign the bill before complaining about him signing it too soon.

[cleek]

if a legislator did not read the bill, then abstention would seem the appropriate vote. a No vote is no more honest than a Yes vote, if you don't know what you're voting on.

[The Eclecticist]

There’s a strong argument to be made that one of the reasons for a lack of “bipartisanship” in the stimulus bill vote was the early decree that there would be no earmarks in the bill. Maybe a few hundred million in pet projects for key Republican legislators would have drawn more Republican votes. Bacon grease is the essential lubricant for bipartisanship. Check out my full post: http://eclecticdialectics.blogspot.com/2009/02/bacon-grease-essential-bipartisan.html. Thanks.