Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, brought a snowball in a plastic bag onto the Senate floor Thursday, carefully removed it from the bag, and lobbed it at a congressional page. This was the kind of spectacle I never want my preschool child to see.
Why did it happen?
As heavyweight boxer Larry Holmes once told Larry Merchant when asked why he let a lighter Michael Spinks push him around the ring, “I dunno Law-ry, why do anybody do what they do? Why do Gaddafi do what he do? I dunno Law-ry.”
It had something to do with there being snow on the ground outside the Capitol Building, and he might have remarked about it being unseasonably cold for a February day, which it really wasn’t. As far as the Senate historian knew, however, this was the first time a senator had used a snowball while speaking from the lectern.
Technically, the Oklahoman violated the rules of the Senate, not by lobbing an icy projectile at an unsuspecting aide, but by using a prop without asking for and obtaining the unanimous consent of the other 99 senators.
Confident in his own sanity, he proceeded to question the president’s mental acuity.
“It’s just another illustration that the president and his administration are detached from the realities that we are facing today and into the future,” he said. “His repeated failure to understand the real threat to our national security and his inability to establish a coherent national security strategy has put this nation at a level of risk that has been unknown for decades.”
A sparse crowd of touristy onlookers in the gallery muttered among themselves, wondering what exactly was going on and how it might affect the future of the country.
Yet more evidence that for the good of the USA these insane people need to be removed from office. Wow a demonstration that shows to all just how many voters out their have lower intellects then the GOP in Congress. Stupid is as Stupid does for all to see.
Gibbon? Does this mean you’ve come around to the Roman Empire/USA comparison? I always felt it wasa good one.
Bread and circuses, my friend…and snowballs.
Is it at all possible to explain, calmly, to Sen. Inhoffe that the climate does not affect THE TILT OF THE EARTH??
Nah. ‘Course not.
No wonder they’re trying to destroy public education. These guys aren’t as informed as third graders.
It’s been insanely cold the past week or so. Nasty, bitterly, horribly cold. At least for this area. Not only that but we’ve had a spat of back to back snow storms. One of them was Thursday morning. It dumped snow over the snow that wasn’t cleared out, and over the ice that was still there. There was also a two hour weather delay.
So, locally at least, the damn cold and snow have been something people have been bitching about for two weeks now.
Also, in Washington DC impromptu snowball fights at major landmarks are a thing. And it’s not done by children, it’s done by adults. If there is a federal day off, or delay, you can count on all sorts of places getting flash mobs of adults starting snowball fights. It’s also an upper class white thing
But yeah, if you’re completely unfamiliar with Washington DC you wouldn’t know any of these details.
IOW, it was like a normal Chicago day. Yeah, I remember one of those. I think it was President’s Day Sunday 1979 or maybe 1978, but I think it was 1979. People freaked out. Jimmy Carter gave us all an extra paid day off for Tuesday and Wednesday was back to DC normal (no snow).
I live in the DC area now after growing up in Illinois and, no, it’s still warmer than a normal Chicago winter day. But that doesn’t negate what SiDC said; it’s the coldest it’s been since I’ve moved here and we’ve seen some record or near record lows for the area. On the western edge of the DC metro area, it seems like schools have been out at least one day per week for the last couple of months.
I remember that from the ’70s also. I was actually referring to snowfall. For reference, born in Chicago, lived in NoVa 1973 to 1979, moved back to Chicago Metro area. I think the lowest it ever got was four degrees at night. We recently here had one degree for a daytime high. That’s low, but not unusual. In the ’70s I NEVER saw anything worse than a normal Chicago day, even that 150 year record snowfall. I had called a friend back in Chicago who said their snowfall was beyond all records since the Chicago Fire and there were no records before.
Also regarding snow – my heart goes out to those living in Boston.
From this resident of the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, thank you. We’re on track for yet another storm late in the weekend. It should push Boston’s total snowfall, which has already climbed to 101.8 inches, past the 107.6 inch record. Lots of roof collapses; two horses killed in one barn collapse; people getting hurt falling off roofs or through skylights while clearing snow off; people struck by snowplows because it’s impossible to walk anywhere but in the severely narrowed streets; huge traffic pileups; public transportation gone to hell and only slowly, painfully crawling back towards normal; fires from falling icicles smashing into gas lines; heck, I’ve seen a report of a horse stuck in (and rescued from) a ten-foot snowdrift — I mean, CRAP! We’re used to winter, we can handle a normal one, but this has been four-plus weeks of insanity.
A disaster should be declared by FEMA.
Probably doesn’t meet the guidelines. But the state has been getting National Guard help for snow removal from other states.
I heard that they’re taking the snow to “snow farms” because there’s no place to put it in the cities? where are these farms?
Any open unused space they can find to dump it, pile it multiple stories high. For example, in my town of Ipswich there’s a large parking area for Crane Beach, big enough for hundreds of cars in the summer but little used in the winter, and that’s where the town puts dump truck loads of snow. Haven’t gone down to look at it but I’d wager the mound is 30 or more feet high and over a hundred feet long, dozens of feet wide.
Some towns have received environmental waivers that let them dump snow into the ocean or other sensitive waterways: http://patch.com/massachusetts/salem/five-massachusetts-towns-begin-dumping-snow-waterways-0
So far Boston itself hasn’t dumped it in the harbor, although they’ve been considering it. Since one of the major snow farms is right next to the harbor and the meltwater will run off into it, it’s sort of a moot point environmentally.
wow!
lots of links with pictures from your link also
Yeah. That’s what Chicago did in ’79. Mike Royko at the Sun-Times wrote an amusing article in which he advocated mailing the snow in boxes to friends on the West Coast and in the South who would enjoy receiving a box of genuine Chicago snow.
3-6 inches due here tomorrow but it pales in comparison.
Funny you should mention the selling snow idea — there’s a guy on the North Shore of Boston who’s doing just that:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/massachusetts-man-shipping-snow-england-foliage/story?id=29212889
Oh, and the cold is insane, too — we’re running 10 to 20 degrees below normal consistently. Should be getting into the low 40s in a normal year about now, but give us low 20s and it’s like hurrah summer’s here!
Same here for cold. Luckily for me I live on the West side of the Lake, about ten miles West of O’Hare, so we don’t get Lake Effect snow.
There are places like Buffalo where your snowfall is normal, but people know that upfront. You don’t expect to buy snow tires in, say, Miami.
Aren’t you glad that Climate Change isn’t real? :,)
Here’s the thing: Republicans blew their gaskets when a Democratic black man was elected President. Period.
So, because they are a special kind of idiot, Republicans decided that a black man as President was crazy and therefore the rules of order, not to mention the rules of common courtesy, were to be thrown out the window.
“You lie!” Remember that? That was an unspeakable display of rudeness, never before heard during a speech by a president. But now the rules of decorum are meaningless to them because, after all, he IS a black guy.
And Inhofe, King of the Idiots, tries to make a childish point about something he so patently knows nothing about: climate change. Pathetic.
at first glance. The Reality-Denying, irrational hatred and vituperation directed by wingnuts at Obama cries out for explanation, and racism is a handy one. And there is no question there is a significant strain of racism infecting the right wing. The evidence is everywhere, no matter how insistently they deny it.
otoh, I was an adult during the Clinton admin (he’s white, if that needs saying, even though famously declared “the first black president” by somebody or other). So I remember the ginned-up-fake-“scandal”-du-jour very well. And as we now know thanks primarily to David Brock, Hillary’s “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” was an utterly real thing that happened, and continues unabated.
(Back then, Scaife and ilk were the moneybags funding it; now they’ve been largely supplanted by the likes of the Kochs and Adelson. Different names, same scams.)
So, inviting as the racism explanation may seem for what seems otherwise inexplicable, I’ve yet to see Barack or Michelle accused of mass/serial murder, as the Clintons were (with these accusations given credulous attention in the “liberal” [hahahahaha!] corporate media! Chris “Fucking” Matthews devoted an entire show to letting Gennifer Flowers make them!)
No, though the racism strain infecting the right is undeniable, I think the Occam’s Razor explanation has to be that this is what the wingnuts now do and will do to ANY Democratic President. In their Bizzaroworld alternate reality ( = Unreality), it’s simply inconceivable that their extreme, Reality-Denying, dogmatic ideology could fail to resonate with an electoral majority; therefore all Democratic Presidents MUST be illegitimate, and so must also be resisted by any/all means available, no matter how dishonest, unethical, anti-democratic, and/or otherwise reprehensible.
Yeah, there’s some racism wrapped up in there with all that, but as the thoroughly irrational hatred and hounding (with full corporate media complicity) of the Clintons demonstrated, it’s not the core element of the loons’ lunacy.
As I’ve said many times, if anyone thinks having a black man in the White House makes their heads spin, just wait until we have a woman in the White House.
I too remember the Clinton years and the endless drumbeat of sensationalist crap. But I think racism IS an important factor in this way: not all conservatives are racist, but generally, all racists are conservative.
You could replace “racist” with “misogynist” and have it hold true as well. Other words that would also fit are “bigot”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, and so on, but the general theme is this: FEAR.
I agree that the Republicans have been at this place for decades now: all those in the Democratic Party, from their Presidential candidates to their rank-and-filers, are not only wrong, they are ILLEGITIMATE when they do hold power.
I would disagree with the premise that their insane Clinton-hating is not reflective of racism, however. Clinton-hating had and has racist stink all over it. And their hatred of President Obama takes off from the high floor of their Clinton hatred and vaults their Barack hating into the stratosphere, and that is largely inspired by their racism.
Look: McConnell, Boehner, the rest of the Republican House and Senate leadership, and tip-top GOP political operatives got together on the INAUGURAL NIGHT of the Obama Presidency and talked out their “deny Obama any support at any time while calling him a Communist Kenyan Usurper” strategy. That they gleefully formed that strategy at a time when the Federal government was needed to stanch the grievious bleeding from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression makes it particularly offensive.
But, after all, what communities were made to suffer most acutely from the financial crisis? African-Americans and other non-whites. “They’re animals anyway. Let them lose their souls,” GOP leaders have been quoted as saying, over and over and over and over and over again.
And I thought vaudeville was dead.
The Conservative mind is an anecdotal one. Take any topic and they’ll disconnect from reason with a swift personal snowball toss.
Inhofe is a Dominionist. He talks the talk and walks the walk.
Interestingly enough, when there’s drought there’re are no snowballs to moderate the bitter continental cold. Farming and ranching fail in western Oklahoma as well. That situation has occurred before.
But Imhofe is not interested in that because he is outcome-focused. Have the Exxon-Mobil, Koch, and Conoco-Phillips checks come yet?
Is vandalizing the Senate carpet and endangering historic desks punishable?
Sheldon Whitehouse followed him on the floor and did a brilliant takedown of ‘the Senator with the snowball’.
And here it is!!!
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/senator-whitehouse-rips-senator-snowball
OK, I’ll bite. What’s up with the reference to Gibbon? Did he throw snowballs in parliament, or something?
This is not rocket science.
Hey, up yours, too
the Google is your friend
… as to personally demonstrate for us what a snowball’s chance in Hell is.
With any luck, he’ll get to find out.
declared War Criminal Douglas Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth”.
Sen. Inhofe Begs to Differ, Stakes Own Claim to That (Fiercely Contested by the Wingnuts) Title.
He wins!
Judges’ decision final.