{"id":2574,"date":"2008-05-16T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2008-05-16T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2574"},"modified":"2020-12-21T05:35:06","modified_gmt":"2020-12-21T11:35:06","slug":"a-bill-so-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2574","title":{"rendered":"A Bill So Bad…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…that even the Strib, which has never met a spending program it doesn’t like, gets it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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A number of members of Congress have celebrated this week’s passage of the $290 billion farm bill as a great victory for bipartisanship in Washington.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Proof, if any were needed, of the dangers of “bipartisanship” on any issue that doesn’t start with Pearl Harbor being bombed.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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If this is what bipartisanship looks like, maybe we should hope for a return to gridlock.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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I’m going to bronze that paragraph.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The Bush administration initially took the right stand, proposing to eliminate any subsidy payments for farmers who make more than $200,000 in annual gross income. It later indicated that it could live with a $500,000 limit. However, the bill passed by the House and Senate embraces farm incomes of up to $750,000 and nonfarm income of $500,000 for individuals…A majority of House Republicans broke from the White House despite the president’s veto threat, and the Senate passed the bill Thursday in an 81-15 vote, making an override certain. That a veto-proof majority in both houses supported the bill is testament to the power of the agricultural lobby, especially in an election year.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It’s testament, also, to how the ag lobby makes people lose their minds – how it can make Norm Coleman sound more like Amy Klobuchar than Jim Ramstad does; how it can make the conservatives on the Plains keep electing the likes of Byron Dorgan and Tom Daschle and Kent Conrad and John Tester to Congress.<\/p>\n

Finally, it’s proof that the national GOP has lost its roots.\u00a0 If they can’t hold the line on a pork barrel farm bill in a season where the ag industry is doing better than it has in my <\/em>lifetime (half of which was spent in farm country, much of that <\/em>spent in ag-focused news media), when can<\/em> they?<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…that even the Strib, which has never met a spending program it doesn’t like, gets it: A number of members of Congress have celebrated this week’s passage of the $290 billion farm bill as a great victory for bipartisanship in Washington. Proof, if any were needed, of the dangers of “bipartisanship” on any issue that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-2574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money","tag-a-klo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76206,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574\/revisions\/76206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}