Blue Crab Boulevard

As The Goalposts Recede Majestically In The Distance…

The Influence Peddler examines the rapidly moving goalposts of Nancy Pelosi's much vaunted "first 100 hours". And they are approaching escape velocity at this point. 100 hours becomes 100 "legislative" hours, then morphs into yet another definition of 100 hours that could last weeks.

The incoming Democratic leadership promised a fast start to the new Congress, with an ambitious '100 Hour' agenda. They then restated that they didn't actually mean the first, you know - 100 hours, or anything. They meant the first 100 legislative hours - a period that could stretch over a number of weeks, actually.

Now, they further clarify that they don't really mean the first 100 legislative hours - they mean the first 100 legislative hours not counting the new House rules package:

Time spent debating changes to the rules package will not count against Pelosi’s 100-hour legislative blitzkrieg, set to begin the week of Jan. 8 and last approximately 10 legislative days, ending when President Bush delivers his State of the Union address on Jan. 23.

This is some of the best doubletalk in recent memory. And they apparently really believe that the voters won't notice. I promise you, they will. They voted for a change and are getting more of the same only worse. This is going to be an immensely entertaining two years! (Influence Peddler has video, too! Crank it up and sing along. You know the words!)

Politics | Gaius Thursday, 4 January , 2007

By Tom, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 3:55 pm

This is some of the best doubletalk in recent memory. And they apparently really believe that the voters won’t notice. I promise you, they will. They voted for a change and are getting more of the same only worse.

Please stop. Are you really serious? You think pelosi has a stop watch going all the time? After 6 years of constitutional shredding, cronyism to the heavens, incompetence to the point of losing an entire city, failure in his vanity war, spying, secrecy, classifying unclassified documents, etc…The list goes on and on. Give the dems a little time before you throw rocks at your fellow Americans. Dems love this country as much as anybody else. thinking otherwise is a lie.
By Gaius, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 4:11 pm

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> Ah, yes. You post a comment full of acusations and demand I stop throwing rocks. When Pelosi's publicly stated strategy to gain power was to tear down the adminstration by any means available at all costs. Fantastic. You just actually raised the bar for doubletalk.
By Quilly Mammoth, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 4:45 pm

incompetence to the point of losing an entire city

Can’t we just leave Ray Nagin and his kleptocracy alone? Why must the failures of the governments of NoLa and the State of Louisiana constantly be brought up?
By Tom, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 5:58 pm

When Pelosi’s publicly stated strategy to gain power was to tear down the adminstration by any means available at all costs.

comment by Gaius

I searched nexis/lexis and a few other search/archival sites and found NO reference to the words you attributed to Pelosi. If you have a link to those words, I would like to view it - but you won’t find it. So sir, at this point you are pulling stuff out of the air to better support your crumbling confidence and this administration. That is sad and pathetic. At least be more creative towards lying about the new leadership in Congress.

Canâ€™t we just leave Ray Nagin and his kleptocracy alone? Why must the failures of the governments of NoLa and the State of Louisiana constantly be brought up?
comment by mammoth

Not funny at all. Sarcasm in that regard was mean and wrong. The FEDERAL GOVT has jurisdiction and authority in the levies (Army corp of engineers), not local or state people. Avoiding the responsibility of the Bush administration is a full time job for some, but thoughtful people know the truth. Reaching for anyway to defend the indefensible is clear for all to see. Is the Bush administration responsible for anything? They have been in power 6 years and we are still blaming other people for the administrations failures.
By Gaius, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 6:26 pm

Tom:

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2006/07/pelosi_says_key.html

Try your propaganda shoutdown elsewhere. Also learn to use a search engine. It will be a lot harder to try your big lie strategy in the internet age.
By Gaius, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 6:28 pm

Oh and by the way, the problems with the NO levees were known for more than forty years and nobody did anything to fix them. Nice try at another rewrite of history.
By TC@LeatherPenguin, Thursday, 4 January , 2007 @ 8:33 pm

Tom, as per Katrina, did you happen to notice that a section of the United States just got buried under a humongous amount of snow, threatening lives and livelihoods across a couple of states, yet there is barely a mention on the cable news channels; just quick clips and short reports.

Wanna know the reason? Because those folks didn’t automatically expect the feds to come save their asses and head for the closest camera crew. Their local and state officials–and more importantly, the people themselves–saw the problem and reacted, and basically have only asked the feds to be aware there was going to be an agricultural emergency saving all the livestock from starving.

And since it didn’t provide the cameras with a bunch of black folks screaming that BUSH WANTED THEM ALL DEAD, the media skipped the wall to wall coverage.
By Quilly Mammoth, Friday, 5 January , 2007 @ 12:26 am

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

The FEDERAL GOVT has jurisdiction and authority in the levies (Army corp of engineers).

Not true. Just because you shout it does not make it so. I guess you missed the vore in October of this year to consolidate all the local levee boards.From AP and CBS News

AP) Louisiana voters on Saturday approved consolidating the New Orleans area's levee boards, the generations-old agencies whose politically appointed members were criticized after Hurricane Katrina for failing to maintain the area's levees and floodwalls. The constitutional amendment _ passing with about 80 percent of the vote _ will combine 10 southeast Louisiana boards into two, one for each bank of the Mississippi River. Members of the new boards will be required to have expertise in engineering, geology and hydrology, mandates that advocates of the new structure hope will convince Congress and the nation that Louisiana has shed a system mired in cronyism. {emp. ed.}

The actual truth is the the ACE origianlly became involved in 1965 after Hurricane Betsy. In the wake of that the ACE decided to build the huge Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier. Funded in 1971 work was stopped in 1977 because of Eco law suits. The ACE gave up in 1985. At _that_ time they decided to help by working on NoLa's canals through the continued construction of levees. Building more extensive and durable flood gates at the mouths of the canals, where the breeches actually happened, were blocked by the local levve boards. Every single one of NoLa's canals were developed by local people or institutions.