Four days later …
Please wait …
Four days later …
Category Archives: #DearCongress
Four days later …
Half Staffed
The shutdown has hit backcountry guides in the Florida Keys. The National Park Service told charter guides that they cannot take clients fishing in Florida Bay until the Feds return to work. That puts the prime fishing between the southern tip of the mainland to the Keys — more than 1,100 square miles — off limits until further notice.
The shutdown has hit veterans who demanded access to the World War II Memorial following the government shutdown Tuesday. The site is one of several hosting protests. Park rangers erected barricades and police tape to block veterans and other visitors. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) confronted a ranger for keeping visitors out. “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves.” (Say what? The park rangers didn’t shut down the government. Mr. Neugebauer and his 534 Congress Critters did.)
The shutdown has hit Vermont’s Billings Farm and Museum of Woodstock in the wallet, too. The Billings Farm and Museum is the gateway to Vermont’s rural heritage and a working dairy farm but it is also right across the road from the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.
“It’s a national disgrace,” a visitor from London said. “You don’t get government shutdowns in Germany, in China, or other civilized places. It’s a disgrace. What does [your] government normally do that makes it safe to walk” around there?
The shutdown has not hit the U.S. Congress who appear to be on vacation. Again.
Even Mark Halperin, the senior political analyst at Time Magazine, acknowledged that the Demorats’ strategy depends not on the facts but on the mainstream media blaming Repuglicans for the shutdown.
Determined to jettison the Constitution, this Administration and this Congress don’t know how prescient the Founding Fathers were. After all, if the framers in that hot, sticky, Philadelphia hall had hewed a little more closely to our British cousins, we would have already had the No Confidence vote and recall election.
(‘Nother Nearly) Wordless Wednesday
Sayin’ a mouf full.
T-Day
I’m of the age that I get a tube stuck up my butt every few years. Tomorrow is T-Day.
I saw the tube doc last week for the standard pre-procedure visit, got my instructions. They asked how I was going to pay.
“With Blue Cross, of course,” I said.
“Your last colonoscopy was November 3, 2003,” the doc’s insurance clerk said. “You haven’t passed 10 years so I don’t think they’ll cover it.”
<sigh>
“Please call BC/BS right away to get the authorization then. I won’t fill this prescription for Reglan™ unless we’re go for launch.”
Remember Fleet™? The FDA has become aware of reports of acute phosphate nephropathy, a type of acute kidney injury, associated with the use of oral sodium phosphate products for bowel cleansing prior to colonoscopy or other procedures. Not only that, the explosive results were … uncomfortable. Docs use Reglan™ followed by magnesium citrate plus half a gallon of clear liquid now so we patients slosh ever so briefly as we run.
The doc’s office promised they would call back the next day. That was a week ago.
I called them this morning. “What’s the verdict?” I asked.
“She hasn’t had a chance to call your insurer,” the receptionist told me after a brief 10-minute wait, “but it’s OK because you’re just coming in for the checkup.”
Say what? I’m due on the table at noon tomorrow. She did promise then to call me right back and she did. “Blue Cross says you should be covered.”
Should be? SHOULD BE?
I did what I should have done in the first place. I called Blue Cross direct. Their advisor, Matt, thanked me for my call and told me I was covered 100%. Including the Reglan™. He saw that the doc’s office had called not long before and got the same answer.
It’s lunchtime here in North Puffin. I’m on clear liquids for the day, now, and grouchy. And I haven’t even gotten to sign up for Obamacare yet.
Later today, in a small and echoey room, I shall express my real opinion of all this.
Shut Down
For 10 days, every MSM news outlet and every elected Demonbrat reported that the House Repuglicans “refuse to pass a budget unless it shuts down ObamaCare.”
That, of course, is not exactly true.
For 10 days, the House Repuglicans have passed about 47 budgets so far; the Senate Demonbrats have refused to consider any of them and Obama has stated publicly he will “veto any bill that shuts down ObamaCare.”
Who is refusing what?
For 10 days, John Boehner (R-OH) and Harry Reid (D-NV) lobbed the spending bill back and forth.
Mr. Reid sent the Senate home on Sunday.
The bill would have prevented the government from running out of money at 11:59:59 p.m. last night.
Mr. Reid sent “his” Senate home when Mr. Boehner passed “his” conference request last night.
And we pay these airheads to work for us?
There are 800,000 “furloughed” federal workers this morning. Each and every one of them should go to the Capitol and demand our money back.