Your government at work

It's been a long held contention of this blog that the US Senate is where all things good and intelligent go to be made stupid and awful, slowly strangled in an abandoned alley by a cackling horde of willfully negligent septuagenarian bastards. And that's our opinion on a positive day. This can largely be seen in nearly any and all debate on matters of national importance, but is almost always most clearly seen during debates and bills dealing with the attempted economic recovery.

I mean unemployment is only at 10% and it's looking like we're going to enter an entire lost decade of growth.... so who needs to treat any of this with any amount of seriousness? The Senate GOP can keep trying to pull the country down on top of itself with procedural stalling and Senate Democrats can actually be the first group of people in history to die of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts.

Oh sure, the House has it's moments of horrid futility and stupidity explosions -like, say, when they're attempting to cut growth by $50 billion and cost this country 300,000 jobs in a myopic, ineffective, back-patting, meaningless snit about the deficit- but the Senate really takes the cake when combining large scale inaction and ineffectiveness with small scale fuck yous so petty that they should be delivered by 13 year old girls in text message form. Take the jobs bill the Senate is currently half-assing:

Senate Democrats are exploring whether to eliminate an extra $25 a week in unemployment benefits, part of the economic stimulus legislation passed in 2009, as a way to cut costs and attract Republican votes for a stalled package of tax breaks, tax increases on the affluent and safety-net spending.

Top officials said that change would save billions of dollars over the next six months and could lead to approval of an overall extension of jobless pay by making the legislative package easier to swallow for lawmakers worried about deficit spending.

Now they're just chintzing a couple of bucks out of people so that they can better pass a collection of half-measures that fails to fully address the actual problems this country is experiencing. And they actually want you to believe that knocking $25 bucks out of unemployment benefits is going to make people opposed to actions that might help an actual person, flip head over heels about the prospects of extending the entire program for another couple of months. But hey, I'm sure the deficit hawks and the Blue Dogs will feel good about the minuscule impact they had on the deficit when we're in year ten of a recession. I'm sure taking $25 bucks from the unemployed in the worst economic crisis since the Depression will get those people back on their feet and the economy back in shape in no time.

At least the Roll Down the Window of Your Bentley and Spit At Poor People In the Street Act is stalled in committee.