Three contractors were bidding to fix a broken fence at the U.S. Capital.  The first contractor told the Congressman, “I figure the job will run about $900.  That’s $400 for materials, $400 for my crew, and $100 profit for me.”

The second contractor announced, “I can do this job for $700.  That’s $300 for materials, $300 for my crew, and $100 profit for me.”

The third contractor leaned over to the Congressman and whispered, “$2700.”

The incredulous lawmaker asked him, “How did you come up with such a high figure?”

The contractor smiled and said, “$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the second guy to fix the fence.”

More Funny Stuff

President Obama signed legislation today designating 2 million additional acres of public wilderness areas.  The federal “wilderness” designation provides the highest level of government protection from logging, mining and other forms of commercial use and development.

“This legislation guarantees that we will not take our forests, rivers, oceans … monuments, and wilderness areas for granted, but rather we will set them aside and guard their sanctity for everyone to share,” Obama said at a White House signing ceremony.  “That’s something all Americans can support.”

The 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act is a compilation of over 160 separate legislative proposals, extends across nine states.  It establishes 10 new National Heritage sites, creates 21 new wilderness areas, expands 19 existing wilderness areas in 10 national forests, and grows several national park boundaries.  One of the largest newly protected wilderness areas is 380,000 acres in the eastern Sierra Nevada and San Gabriel Mountains in California.  (More National Park News)

President Obama’s Speech

Following is President Obama’s speech, as provided by the White House:

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Iowa Senator Charles Grassley suggested Monday that AIG executives should accept responsibility for the company’s collapse by resigning or killing themselves.  During an interview with radio station WMT in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Republican lawmaker said:  “I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.  And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”

Grassley spokesman Casey Mills quickly responded with damage control:  “Senator Grassley has said for some time now that generally speaking, executives who make a mess of their companies should apologize, as Japanese executives do,” Mills said.  “He says the Japanese might even go so far as to commit suicide, but he doesn’t want U.S. executives to do that.”

The senator’s remarks added to the public outrage over the disclosure that AIG intends to pay its executives $165 million in bonuses after causing the company to fail and accepting billions in federal bailout money.  President Barack Obama criticized AIG for “recklessness and greed” and pledged to try to stop payment of the bonuses.

Story at FoxNews

Where were our fiscally-conservative Republicans when President Bush and the U.S. Congress took a budget surplus and turned it into a $1 trillion budget deficit, and doubled our national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion?

The Republican concern for fiscal responsibility in the recent budget debate rings hollow.  I think it’s clear that NONE of our elected officials on either side of the aisle have any clue what it means to balance budgets and be financially responsible.

Check out this political cartoon

Brad Pitt can make any woman hot, even our esteemed House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi:

A quote from former Senator (R-Alaska) and convicted felon, Ted Stevens:

“The Internet is not something that you just dump something on.  It’s not a big truck.  It’s a series of tubes.  And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

At the time, Stevens was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and was pushing a rewrite of the nation’s fundamental communications act.  Would you want this man in charge of the debate on net neutrality?  This is why it’s important for everyone to pay attention to politics.  Quite often our political leaders are simply not qualified to make the decisions we’ve elected them to make.

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More stupid stuff
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It’s official, trillion is the new billion.  The U.S. Congress is no longer spending our taxpayer money in terms of a mere ten digits.  With the recent flurry of government bailouts and stimulus packages, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all.

One trillion dollars; it’s a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator.  There have been attempts to put this number into perspective before.  A trillion one-dollar-bills laid end to end would reach the sun; or you spend one dollar per second for 32,000 years; or one trillion dollars in pennies would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses (the largest known dinosaur).  Fanciful as this may be, the real story behind one trillion dollars is in its economic impact.  Mint.com investigates what one trillion dollars can do.

One Trillion Dollars at Mint.com

The U.S. House of Representatives rejected an amended omnibus package containing significant conservation projects and advancements.  This represents a major loss to the conservation movement in the United States. 

The bill would have established:

• More than 2 million acres of wilderness in nine states
• Three new national park units
• Three new national conservation areas
• Ten new national heritage areas
• A new national monument
• Four new national trails
• Enlarged boundaries for more than a dozen existing national parks
• More than 1,000 miles of national wild and scenic rivers

“This is the most important piece of conservation legislation we will likely consider this year and possibly in this entire Congress,” House Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said on the House floor before the bill was rejected.

As usual, the Republicans were the major obstacle to the land conservation and killed the bill for procedural reasons.  There was also pressure by the National Rifle Association (NRA), which objected to items in the bill that would restrict hunting on some federal land.

Story at New York Times

White House officials say that President Obama will sign the $410 billion omnibus spending bill to keep key government agencies funded in 2009.  The bill contains nearly 9,000 earmarks totaling tens of billions of dollars.  Congressional members use earmarks to direct funding to unrelated pet projects.

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to end wasteful spending, with a focus on reducing or eliminating earmarks altogether.  Many lawmakers including some key Democrats have urged Obama to veto the bill to prove he’s serious about cutting pork.

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Late Night with Jimmy Fallon got off to a quick start as Fallon slow jams Congressional news with his band, The Roots: