Photo caption: "This is how much I care that my selfish, petulant conduct hurts the American people at a time they truly need help."

OMG! He just flipped off and screamed at an ABC reporter!

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2010/03/01/bunning_flips_the_bird.html#033875a

This is going to be fun.

its, not it's

this guy is toxic

And this is NOT on the front page of the NY Times and the WaPo websites just why, exactly?

Join the Act.ly petition on Twitter telling Bunning and Senate Republicans to stop holding unemployed Americans hostage to their obstructionist agenda: http://act.ly/1qo

This guy is comedy - in a major-league asshole sorta way...

I just submitted a comment with a couple links to his prior voting history pertaining to budgets in the past decade and it got held by the filters. Bummer I spent some time researching it.

Over at Salon Conason has a great piece about a charity fraud Bunning is running.

If the recently passed paygo law is his crutch for obstruction, why aren't dems making a complete spectacle out of this hypocrite (i.e. Medicare part D and other past unfunded initiatives/laws he's voted for?) Allowing silent fillibusters to occur shows that dems care not to show up their advasaries. I mean, what's left to do at this point? Let the ill old man stand there until he is hoarse and falling down, no other business is being completed anyway.

my letter:

Senator Bunning,

You are a selfish bastard regarding unemployment benefits. Even members of your own party have a modicum of compassion for the unemployed. You however, have the temerity not only to deny people the ability to survive, but whine about missing a fucking basketball game.

You sir, are the epitome of the word ASSHOLE. I assume you wear that appellation with pride, but I pity your constituents and the rest of the unfortunate in this country who have to live with your callousness and inferiority complex.

Senility is not an excuse. I realize my words mean nothing to you, but for the record I'd like to say that if you weren't a dumb ex-jock who got lucky enough to pitch a perfect game, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to smear your feces across the Senate floor.

You can't leave soon enough.

Yours,

I wonder if all the Seniors who think that its the Dems and Obama who are about to screw them are aware that its the GOP who's doing the most harm.

Josh's front page article twice refers to this stunt as a "filibuster," although this article calls it a "blockade."

I'm not enough of a parliamentarian to know the difference between a filibuster and a blockade, but why can't Harry Reid or some other Senator call for a cloture vote, and either shut this idiot up or get all of the Republicans on record as supporting this bullshit?

If Democrats "hate America", then it's fair to say that Republicans hate Americans.

The Senate is an awful institution..How can one person from anywhere let alone from a tiny state (pop. 4.2mm) effect the entire country..It is absurd!!

If the republicans, with the retiring Bunning as their hit-man, wish to play with American lives with such abandon and glee - and do so in such an horrifically callous way(eg "tough shit")- then it's time for the president to call this what it is - a constitutional crisis. If the republican party can hold the nation to ransom so easily, as displayed by this relatively minor but constitutionally terrifying taste of what the right will do if they don't get their way 100% of the time, then this nation is ungovernable.
It's time to make sure this kind of thing can not happen so easily.
Bunning may be enjoying his little 'Dictator in the sun' moment, and the republican party may think they're fooling the country by pretending they can't "rein Bunning in", and that his behavior is his alone - but that's simply false. The republican leadership is behind this 100%, and they're giving the nation a taste of what will happen if they don't get their way - that is, a full halt to the agenda the Democrats and Obama were elected to do.

Nobody can tell me Obama and the majority of the Democratic Party aren't trying to do what they campaigned on, and were elected to do - when the lobbyists and their corporate masters are in a mass panic 24 hours a day, and the republicans are threatening to shut down the entire nation.

This is political terrorism perpetrated by the republican party - not just one lone gunman - and it must be stopped.
Get onto it Obama!

Maybe the NRA has a point. We need the right to bear arms so we can hunt down and cull the herd of an excess of Republican Senators.

Thank goodness the press it out there exposing Republican misdeeds and chicanery! Right? Anyone...?

Jim Bunning is nothing less than a cold-blooded murderer. In a better time someone would have called him out on a field of honor to account for his churlish behavior.

Tea baggers in Georgia ought to be up in arms at the Senator. Bunning's renewed 'hold' today on legislation impacts not only unemployment and COBRA benefits extension, it brought to a halt many DoT construction projects across America. In Georgia, the Chickamauga Battlefield, Chickamauga - Chattanooga National Military Park, memorializing the site of the worst Union defeat during the War Between the States, aka the War of Northern Aggression, has been brought to a screeching standstill! Strangely, not ONE project in Kentucky was shut down...Doo Da Doo Da!

So, Senator, how many people did you help kill today?

I cannot believe this. Medicare taxes have NOTHING to do with UNEMPLOYMENT taxes. Both are collected separately and kept in separate accounts. The man is an idiot and has truly hurt people all across America.

And I do ask, Why did Harry Reid let this happen? I am very disappointed in him as well. I think these older fellows are actually afraid of a filibuster. There is a reason Nancy Pelosi gets higher favorables than Harry Reid. People do notice leadership, or lack thereof.

That's funny. Basically Bunning's move today will save more federal money in one day than the entire Obamacare bill will save for next 20 years. :)

And why are you complaining? Don't you want to cut health care costs? No guts, no glory, TPM?

Please tell us, you Reid-bashers, what specific procedural options were available to Reid to stop Bunning's 'hold' once he acted to revoke "unanimous consent" rules so late pn a Friday afternoon? A Senate 'hold' is similar to a filibuster. One individual can can unilaterally prevent a vote on a bill in order to pursue his own selfish agenda; all any senator has to do is let it be known to Senate leadership that, when a bill comes up for a vote, he/she wishes to dispense the “unanimous consent” rules.

How does it work?

"Any Senator who wants to get really pissy and play hardball can go sit in their desk all day and just object to all verbal unanimous consent requests. It would bring the Senate to a grinding halt (although it wouldn’t win the Senator many friends or future allies)." Since Bunning is retiring, what does he have to lose?

The 'hold' can be defeated through cloture like the filibuster, however, the time required to bring around a cloture vote requires several days to put together as has been witnessed over and over again in the 111th Congress. So what exactly is it that you think Reid could have done? From what I've read, nothing Reid could have done on Friday would have changed the outcome for those needing an extension on unemployment or COBRA benefits, funding for DoT projects, payments to Medicare doctors, etc. before the deadline Sunday evening.

I've not been happy with everything Reid has done, but he can not be blamed for this boondoggle. There is only one person to blame and that is Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY).

This 'cut' in reimbursement for doctors has been part of US law for more than a decade. Since Medicare is a government run health care system, the government sets the payment rates. As a way to get a handle on the budget back in 1997, as I recall, there was a series of small reductions in the amounts that doctors were to be paid for some of their services. This amount was supposed to reflect the amount of over paying that had been discovered as a result of a massive, multi-year and nonpartisan study.

Well, the normal politics happened and the doctor and medial lobbies went to work on getting this reduction in fees taken out of US law immediately after the compromise budget was passed. And every year since, they have won. This is the so-called "doc fix", you hear about being included in the end of year omnibus spending bills.

But what has happened now is that in order to get them onto the payment schedule they are supposed to be at, it needs to be a whopping percent whack all at once as opposed to a little bit each time accumulating up to the current rates set by law.

Both parties have been in control of Congress since the 1997 budget law was passed, and both have caved in to the political pressure.

So now of course, we are talking about reforming health care all over again, and yet still no one wants to deal honestly with this issue, most especially the Obama Administration.

The doctors, hospitals and other providers are the real cause of heath care inflation, not the insurance companies. As is always the case, follow the money. Vastly more of it ends up in provider pockets than stays with the insurance companies. Yet, all we are doing so far is rearranging the insurance deck chairs.

It's time to let the doctor cuts go into effect or to change the budget law and accept the several hundred million dollar increase in projected baseline.

The right wing base again seem to have been utterly lied to about what is going on here.
They think it's only a couple thousand federal employees, and some doctors who will be paid what they consider a 'few dollars less'. Of course, for a party who consider 'rich' to be over 5 million, I guess a 20% cut is only a few dollars. Of course the drop in services to the elderly is exactly what they terrified the elderly with when lying about HCR. But here they are, doing exactly what they were pretending to warn the elderly we would do, with absolute righteous glee.

I wonder if they realize the full consequences of this issue. This one action by Bunning.
It's gong to affect over a million people very negatively. It's put to a stop numerous large scale roading projects - which will costs a hell of a lot to start up again.

This is NOT about a couple thousand workers and doctors fees. But I'm sure the Fox/RNC channel very easily convinced the gullible right that is all it is. And to them, anything different is a part of the commie plot to take way their freedom.

Their ignorance is just sad.

Why don't they change the rule so that any objection would require a second to the motion. Then jerks like Kyle and Cornyn would have to step forward and put their names on the line.

If the republicans, with the retiring Bunning as their hit-man, wish to play with American lives with such abandon and glee - and do so in such an horrifically callous way(eg "tough shit")- then it's time for the president to call this what it is - a constitutional crisis. If the republican party can hold the nation to ransom so easily, as displayed by this relatively minor but constitutionally terrifying taste of what the right will do if they don't get their way 100% of the time, then this nation is ungovernable.
It's time to make sure this kind of thing can not happen so easily.
Bunning may be enjoying his little 'Dictator in the sun' moment, and the republican party may think they're fooling the country by pretending they can't "rein Bunning in", and that his behavior is his alone - but that's simply false. The republican leadership is behind this 100%, and they're giving the nation a taste of what will happen if they don't get their way - that is, a full halt to the agenda the Democrats and Obama were elected to do.

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