CONYERS:

I love these members that get up and say, “Read the bill!” What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you’ve read the bill?

That’s in a luncheon speech at the National Press Club in Washington last Friday.

Just to be sure everyone gets the point here…

… at the National Press Club.

I didn’t see it in any of the Obama-Media.  Did you?  Did anyone hear about this over the weekend?  It was a shock to everybody, right?

“What good does it do to read the bill if you don’t have a couple lawyers to find out what it means after you read it?”

This guy is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  So… Sometimes it’s just best to get out of their way and just let them go ahead and make fools of themselves.

They did not report it — and it was on, obviously, C-SPAN.

As reported by Yid with Lid, earlier this year Congress:

• This past February, the Congress voted on an almost $800 billion stimulus bill that they hadn’t read. This one bill single-handedly increased the national debt by 160%. The bill was over 800 pages, and the members of the House received the bill at 11 pm the night before they were to vote on it. The vote couldn’t be delayed because Nancy Pelosi was going on vacation to Italy.
• When the House Energy committee passed the “cap and tax” bill. The legislation was over 900 pages, once again the people voting for the bill hadn’t read it. In fact, committee chair and one of the bill’s sponsors, Congressman Waxman admitted that he didn’t even know what was in his own bill.

It’s bad enough, when they dumb down public schools to the point of illiteracy, but in an attempt to Socialize the country’s health system –  ignorance is the only hope of the Democrat lead government.

Simple truth: What the public doesn’t know can distroy the greatest economy on the planet.

If you turn your health care over to the state you’re giving up all control over your health care.  It’s a crapshoot.  You may as well have walked into a casino.

“Good luck,” takes on an ominous meaning.

The Obama campaign, as you know, is all upset about the Paris Hilton and Britney Spears ad.

It’s racist for having “phallic symbols” — the Victory Column and the Washington Monument — in there. They say these are women who are known to be scantily clad at times (but were not in the ad) with a black guy, and that’s a racist thing.

They also didn’t like the fact they were trying to portray Obama as a celebrity.

Well, it turns out that Obama was the first to compare himself to Paris Hilton, not McCain!

Obama did this himself.

Yes, folks, NewsBusters came up with this. They went back to their own archives.

February 24th, 2005, Washington Post article:

“There’s nothing exotic or complicated about how phenoms are made in Washington, and more to the point, how they are broken. ‘Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame,’

said Barack Obama.

‘Well, I’ve already had an hour and a half. I mean I’m so overexposed I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.'”

So Obama has already compared himself to Paris Hilton.

McCain didn’t break any new ground there.

O.K., maybe using “amazing” in the title was a bit titillating…

Most of us who pay attention to this empty suit running for president, know already – his actions, statements and predictions are a burger and fries short of a Happy Meal. Those who don’t pay attention… should. We are talking about the presidency of the United states here, not the local YMCA.

Reference:

McCain Not First to Compare Obama to Paris Hilton

Update: Time magazine had the quote as well. From their Verbatim section

“This is what USA Today had to say about your position on the surge. ‘Why can’t Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics thought that it would? That’s a conditioned response on their part. What is the stubbornness say about the kind of president he would be?'”

OBAMA:

There’s no doubt that the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain. If you — if you — if you had talked to them, uh, and — and said, you know, what, we’re going to bring down violence to levels that we have, I think — I suspect USA Today’s own editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that.

Pelosi today on The View says the surge isn’t working because the politicians of Iraq have not taken control of their country. Obama says it’s worked better than even Bush or Cheney thought, or McCain thought.

Now, that’s the first time he said this. I’m telling you he is running a dual or maybe a triple campaign. He is saying one thing to one group of people, another thing to another group of people, and he’s trying to have it both ways. That’s why he’s stuttering around.

Pelosi is just an idiot.

Obama said it wasn’t gonna work, had no chance of working. Then he said it’s done really okay, but it’s because the politicians came together. He said the reason the surge worked is because the great Sunni awakening and the Sadr army and the Shi’a all came together over there, this is while he was there saying this.

They’re all over the place, and Pelosi, a day after he says this, goes out and says, it didn’t work because the politicians have not gotten their act together.

Now, again, in Pelosi’s case, because she’s not the candidate here, in Pelosi’s case, she knows the audience. It’s an ultra-left-wing audience. They don’t want to hear about success. They don’t want to hear about how things work. They want to hear anything but failure. She knows that most of the hostesses on that show want to hear nothing but failure.

Now here is Obama saying on Meet the Press, no doubt the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including Bush and McCain. And if you want to talk to them and say, you know what, we’re going to bring down violence and levels we have, nobody would have — that was the objective.

Why do you think it was planned, Senator? What was the point of the surge? This is where his inexperience and his real lack of intelligence and judgment display themselves. Why plan the thing? They’ve got some polling data that says he’s on the wrong side of the surge business, the American people love hearing about successful military operations.

The American people don’t want to lose military operations, they don’t want to lose wars.

And Obama, he’s gotta get himself on the right, “Oh, yeah, worked better than anybody ever thought,” why plan it? You think they planned a 50% success surge? Why even plan the operation if you don’t plan for it to succeed as wildly and as thoroughly as possible?

It’s an emotional thing. It’s party loyalty; it’s ideological loyalty; it is devotion to a personality and a cult. Most people are not thinking about Obama. They just think they want change, the Bush administration has been bad, they’ve been led to believe the country is going to hell in a hand basket, he’s going to fix it, he’s going to make the rest of the world like us, that’s going to make us safer.

There isn’t a whole lot of thought going into Obama’s support and his campaign illustrates it. He’s all over the ballpark. He’s saying five different things about every subject.

PELOSI:

The surge’s purpose was to have a military time frame where there would be military, uh, security to enable the government of Iraq to make the political changes necessary for reconciliation. I said it before when I was here, and I’ll say it again. Even with all the time that has elapsed, they still have not done that. The purpose of the surge was to pass the laws to bring reconciliation, so we could bring our troops home safely soon, honorably and responsibly; and that has not happened. Now the government of Iraq is saying, “We want you to go home,” so maybe the time has come for us to sit down with them and figure that out.

None of what she said is accurate. The surge was not done to bring the troops home soon. The surge was done to help achieve victory to quell a bunch of violence, insurgent violence and defeat terrorists who are keeping that country just torn apart.

It has succeeded overwhelmingly!

OBAMA:

There’s no doubt that the violence, uh, has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain! Uh, if — if you had… If you talk to them, uh, and — and “You know what? We’re going to bring down violence,” to levels that we have, I think — I — I suspect USA Today’s own editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that.

The ego of this guy knows no bounds. Well, you talk to anybody, why, it’s worked better than anybody thought. Aside from having not heard that before from anybody, but especially from Obama, the idea that the surge worked better than anybody thought is akin to saying, “You know, those bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, man, they worked better than we thought.” Why drop the bomb, why do the surge if you didn’t intend it to work well? But aside from that, here you got Pelosi saying in one story that it didn’t work, didn’t accomplish anything, you’ve got the Democrat presidential nominee, presumptive, Obama saying, it “exceeded everybody’s exceptions.” I know what Pelosi is doing, and she’s just pandering to an audience that watches that stupid TV show. But this thing with Obama is what’s fascinating to me because with every story he tells about the surge, he has a different view.

They have been hoping for higher prices for a long time, to try to affect people’s behavior.

They don’t like the way people behave with affordable gasoline, they don’t like it. They want to control people’s behavior as much as possible.

The dirty little secret is they like you being unhappy with the gas price, they like you being on edge, they like you being ready to blow your top every time you pull in there to the gas station to fill up.

They want you mad.

They want you blaming it on Bush.

They want you blaming it on the Republicans. They want you suffering.

They want you in the frame of mind that you’re in.

That’s why Pelosi’s out calling the drilling a distraction, it’s a hoax, it ain’t going to happen for ten years.

It’s not even ten years. You know, that’s another myth about this. Where did this get started, takes ten years, that’s another one of these Media figures like there were three million homeless when there never were, probably get this done in four or five years in certain places. But that’s not the point.

They don’t want to drill for anything. They don’t want a bigger supply. As it turns out they’re going to get one anyway because people are using less.

Pelosi, she had a press conference in Washington, a portion here of what she said.

PELOSI:

It’s the economy, Mr. President. It’s the economy. It’s about jobs and people not having them. It’s about their standard of living and purchasing power, their income going down because of the increase in the price of gasoline and groceries and health care and education, as others have mentioned. This economy needs the president’s attention, and he doesn’t need to have any diversionary tactics about drilling offshore, what did he say the other day, if we could only drill offshore, the economy would be better. That is a poor excuse from a president of the United States.

She’s not irrelevant because she’s speaker of the House, but frankly it’s embarrassing to me to have somebody this willing to sound this naive. I don’t know how naive she is. I don’t even know how stupid she is. I don’t know her personally. But she’s willing to sound dumb, if she isn’t dumb. She’s willing to sound ignorant, if she’s not ignorant. She’s willing to sound obtuse, if she’s not.

I think this woman is so partisan politically that it clouds her perception and view of reality at all costs. I think this woman is 100% total politics, and the political prism through which she looks through everything is destroying President Bush and Republicans. Which is fine, by the way, if that’s what you say, that’s politics as it is; but these people hide behind the notion that what they really want to do is help you, what they really want to do is elevate you. They’re standing in the way every opportunity they get. They’re the ones that like you suffering.

I know that sounds brazen, and I know it sounds a little harsh, but they do.

Folks, it isn’t me saying this. They’ve said it themselves over the years. Back in, I guess, the early 2000s, when Dick Gephardt was still around, he was all excited the stock market was plunging. He said that every ten point drop or every hundred point drop in the stock market, we pick up another seat in the House. They were looking happily at the misery that some Americans were experiencing.

She sits there and calls it a distraction. Barbara Boxer’s out there contradicting her, saying we want to drill, too.

Hardball with Chris Matthews, and he said to her, “Senator Boxer, do we need to start drilling in places we haven’t wanted to drill before?”

BOXER:

I maintain that when you have two oilmen in the White House for eight long years and you see gas prices go up 300%, to turn around to blame the Democrats in Congress just…doesn’t…wash. The oil companies have gotten everything they want. It’s time to say, “Use it or lose it.” Of course there are places we can drill, but I want you to know something. There are a lot of jobs that also come out of a beautiful, pristine coast, in certain areas of our country. In my own state, for example. In Washington state. In… Off the shores of New Jersey, for example, and many other places. North Carolina. I could go on. The fact is that is a $70 billion coastal economy, two million jobs. So of course we want to drill.

Oh! Of course you want to drill! How did I miss that? Of course Pelosi wants to drill, and “two oilmen in the White House for eight long years as the gas price go up 300%”?

We didn’t see gas prices go up for six long years, Senator Boxer, we saw gas prices skyrocket when Pelosi took over the House of Representatives.

I mean, them’s the facts, ma’am.

Here’s Mitch McConnell, Fox & Friends. The question: “Senator, Nancy Pelosi was talking about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve yesterday, releasing ten percent would barely affect the price of gas. The approval rate you mentioned of Congress 18%, so how long can they afford to sit and not approve drilling and not reverse that ban?”

MCCONNELL:

That silly proposal to open up 10% of the SPRO, strategic reserve, that’s about three and a half days’ worth of oil. They also said we ought to prohibit American exports of oil. You know how much oil we export every year? It all goes to Puerto Rico, by the way, an American territory, and it’s about a half a day’s use of oil in the country. I mean, this is absurd. Nobody’s going to believe that any of these proposals they’re talking about are real.

McConnell’s right. Why did they make them, then? Why does Pelosi say get 10% of the strategic reserve? And why does Pelosi say we need to stop exporting oil? Is it because they’re stupid? No. It’s because they know (or they think) that most of their voters are stupid. So they will say what they think most of their voters will believe.

So Pelosi says, “Well, release from the strategic reserve. Why, there’s no reason for the government to hoard that oil,” and she has visions in her head of stupid, idiotic Democrats and liberals out there cheering, going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and you throw in the, you know, “eight years of two oilmen in the White House.” They’re counting on the stupidity of their own voters. Look, these are liberals, folks. They look condescendingly and arrogantly at people.

So it’s not that they’re necessarily stupid, although the jury is still out on Pelosi — well, and Boxer, too. But it’s they know that their voters are stupid. And they think more than just their voters are stupid.

Stop exporting oil from America? What they realize is that their dolt voters will hear that and go, “What? We’re exporting oil while we’ve got gas prices this high,” and that will make ’em even madder. ‘Cause they know they’re not going to follow up and listen to Mitch McConnell hours later with the truth.

So this is how they operate, and this is precisely because they want you mad. They want you upset; they want you suffering. They want you so ticked off that you can’t wait to go into a voting booth in November and just literally scratch out every Republican name you see.

That’s their objective.

Bin Laden did say he wanted to bankrupt America. This is before 9/11, I believe, and he hoped that 9/11 would do it. He hoped that taking down the World Trade Center would do it. They had some other plans, too, that went awry. But Bin Laden did, I think, also suggest that he hoped to be able to get the worldwide oil price up to $144 a barrel, which it has been.

The oil price dropped like eight bucks instantly today, started creeping back up. But nevertheless, this stuff happening in the United States right now, is not happening because of Osama Bin Laden.

This is the problem with it. It’s a very complicated thing. I read an analogy today that perhaps is a good illustration of what happens.

Take a water supply for a city, for example, and let’s say somebody very slowly but surely starts poisoning it, not enough for it to be noticed any time soon, but the poison continues to build up and build up and build up, and finally a bunch of people start getting sick.

That is what’s happened here.

The government, because of unbridled growth and tampering with free markets, with things like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and insuring mortgages and lending money to people or directing money be lent to people who couldn’t pay it back, what’s happening is that a financial system has been poisoned.

The problem is that just as when the water supply of the fictional city has been poisoned what people didn’t do then was go, “Okay, who put the poison in here?”

What they did was blame the water.

Right now people are blaming our system rather than figuring out and understanding why the hell this happened.

This happened because the government got involved, government grows, government knows no limits, government knows no bounds, and we have been papering over credit problems for years and years and years and pretending that we didn’t have them, and now all of a sudden a lot of institutions that we thought were solid and had assets backing their worth, don’t. And we don’t have the money in this country to put every American in a 3,000-square-foot house.

Bob Casey, Senator from Pennsylvania, before a Senate committee with the fed chairman today read a letter he got from a constituent named Tammy May. She is a working mother, a single mother with two kids, and she wanted Casey to re-prioritize things: House first, day care second, gasoline third, food fourth.

Note what’s not on there.

No climate change. No global warming. No health care. No Iraq war.

We can’t put everybody in a 3,000-square-foot house in this country and pay their electricity and pay everything else and yet the government has sought to make people think that’s what the government is there for because people in government want to get elected, they want people’s votes.

So the financial system here, the analogy is flawed a little bit, but it’s been poisoned and right now we’re not looking at who poisoned it, we’re blaming the system. There’s nothing wrong with the system. It’s like campaign finance reform, McCain said, “The system is corrupting us, we are good politicians.”

No. The system is fine. People corrupt themselves. The system doesn’t reach out and corrupt anybody.