Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., sent out an appeal that questions whether “right-wing reactionaries, through threats and acts of violence, intimidated people with different points of view from expressing their political positions.”

Sanders goes on to cite the death of U.S. District Judge John Roll in last weekend’s shooting spree, which left Giffords, D-Ariz., gravely wounded as examples of such violence. Sanders mentioned in the fundraising letter that his friend Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., had to shut down his congressional office last summer after someone shot a bullet through it.

All I can say is ” What A Douche”. This Loughner fellow was ticked off at Gifford since 2007, way before Palin came on the scene, let’s not shift blame and make crap up. The Targets on the map have been used over and over by both sides of the Aisle for years. But since the liberals felt it was a good reason to take a potshot at Palin they decided to make themselves look like morons.

Senator Sanders definitely takes the 1st Stupid Senator Award of 2011. Do Not Campaign on the misfortunes of others, let these people Mourn in peace. And do not try to use a tragedy like this and Beg for peoples money, and spew filth out of your mouth when in your Begging Letter you are doing the exact same thing that your supposedly so

So glad they got that taken care of for me. Actually, I would rather them regulate the volume of my tv and not pass a budget. Who needs a budget.

Gay Hate Speech straight out of Georgia?

Saxby Chambliss is coming under heavy fire from the Senate Sergeant at Arms for Gay Slurs that may have been placed on blogs by one of his staffers.

The slur was posted Tuesday afternoon to an online article on Joe.My.God about the Senate’s failure to advance a bill repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which prevents gays from serving openly in the military.

The comment, “All faggots must die,” was posted by a user going by the name of “Jimmy.”

blog author Joe Jervis looked up the sender’s IP address and posted it, apparently on a whim.

“I very uncharacteristically checked its IP, which I normally don’t do,” he said. “I have a lot of IT geeks among my readers and they geo-located it immediately. … It was definitely coming through an official federal U.S. Senate server.”

Jervis said his readers traced the address to the local office of either Chambliss or Sen. Johnny Isakson, both Georgia Republicans. The offices are located next to one another.

“My army of geeks was unable to penetrate it directly to the specific computer,” Jervis said.

Isakson’s office flatly denied being the source of the remark, telling FoxNews.com the address “does not match any computer assigned to our office.”

A Chambliss spokeswoman, though, said the incident is under review.

I guess the moral of this story is Don’t make slurs towards Gay Geeks who know how to Trace an IP address. But even better is that the Senator and his staff seem to be trying to sweep this under the rug. Not such a great time in this political season to be making disparaging remarks against any voter blocks.

Maybe the Senator should make his whole staff sit through all three of the High School Musicals and some re-runs of Fame!

Harry Reid has the Hots

Well the election cycle is in full effect! Time for incumbents to limit their gaffes, get more face time and appeal to their bases.
Well that is the goal for most politicians. But not ole Harry Reid. For someone who has been representing his fine state since 1983, you would think he would know how to utilize some type of damage control. It was reported today that while referring to U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand calling her the “hottest” member of the Senate. It has caused quite a controversy with the feminine, anti-sexist crowd. The gaffes just really keep coming. He, we would think would be more focused on fixing his states 14+% unemployment rate, 25% underwater/foreclosure rates instead of eyeballing one of his pretty co-workers. Well I guess it is best he said ” She was Hot” instead of calling his Pet in Deleware Hot.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves,” President Abraham Lincoln

This is not the Hat mentioned in article

Sen. John McCain brushed off the semi-controversy over his former running mate’s visor Sunday, attributing the blog and talk show chatter about Sarah Palin’s vacation attire to “hysterical attacks” from the left.

The former Alaska governor was photographed wearing a “McCain-Palin” visor with McCain’s name crossed out while she was on vacation in Hawaii. She claimed she was just trying to go “incognito,” but reportedly cut her vacation short.

McCain told “Fox News Sunday” he understands Palin’s explanation, and said he has a “wonderful relationship” with her family.

“Can’t you take her at her word?” he said. “She’s going to be a force in the Republican Party for a long time and the hysterical attacks on her from the left continue to validate that.”

FOX NEWS

The White House on Sunday sought to preserve the fragile alliance of Democratic liberals and moderates backing broad healthcare reform legislation, with tough decisions looming on abortion and a new government-run insurance program.

Republicans vowed to continue to fight the measure, but admitted they probably were helpless to stop it in the Senate.

Senate Democrats planned a series of crucial procedural votes scheduled to begin at 1 a.m. on Monday, with debate possibly concluding with final Senate passage on Christmas Eve on Thursday.

Asked if Republican senators could do anything to stop the Senate from passing it by Christmas Eve, Republican Senator John McCain told “Fox News Sunday,” “Probably not. But what we can do is continue winning the battle of American public opinion.”

The White House predicted that the bill, President Barack Obama’s top legislative priority, will win final congressional passage, and called it a major achievement even if it does not give Obama and his fellow Democrats everything they want.

“While it is not perfect, the bill pending in the Senate today is not just good enough — it is very good,” Vice President Joe Biden wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.

Democratic holdout Ben Nelson announced his support for the Senate legislation on Saturday after securing language aimed at ensuring federal funds are not used to pay for abortions and winning extra healthcare funds for his home state of Nebraska.

Nelson’s support gave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid the 60 votes he needs in the 100-seat Senate to pass Obama’s top domestic priority by Christmas.

But Democrats still have a lot of hard work ahead as they look toward ironing out differences between the healthcare bill already passed by the House of Representatives last month and the version Senate Democrats hope to pass this week.

The Senate bill would extend coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans, expand the Medicaid government health insurance program for the poor, provide subsidies to help some people pay for coverage and halt industry practices like refusing insurance to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

House and Senate negotiators will have to work out abortion language that satisfies abortion opponents like Nelson and Representative Bart Stupak without chasing off liberal abortion rights supporters. Stupak, who pushed more restrictive language on abortion in the House bill, said the compromise Senate language crafted by Nelson was “not acceptable.”

PUBLIC OPTION

Democrats must decide on including a government insurance program to compete with private insurers. Liberals want the “public option,” which is in the House bill, but not the Senate one. And they will have agree on how to fund the reform, with the House and Senate versions taking two different approaches.

Nelson told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday that if the final bill that emerges from the House-Senate negotiations includes a public option, he could not vote for it. He also indicated that if the legislation is paid for the way the House measure proposes, “That would break it.”

Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, a fiscal hawk and chairman of the Budget Committee, said the final bill will have to hew closely to the Senate’s version in order win final passage.

“Anybody who’s watched this process can see how challenging it has been to get 60 votes,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Congress has been tied up for months in acrimonious debate over healthcare reform legislation, with Republicans saying the Democratic measure is too costly and too intrusive into the healthcare sector.

Healthcare costs devour 16 percent of the U.S. economy — burdening states and the federal government while also hurting the competitiveness of U.S. businesses — even as tens of millions remain with no public or private health insurance.

White House senior advisor David Axelrod predicted congressional passage but declined to say when he thought the two chambers would iron out their significant differences, or which version he preferred.

“I think it will pass the Congress,” Axelrod said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I think we’re going to get it done.”

Republicans said they would continue to erect procedural roadblocks even with Senate passage likely.

More improvements are possible after the bill becomes law, Axelrod said. The Obama administration will seek to allow Americans to buy prescription drugs that have been imported from other countries such as Canada, where medicines often cost less, he said. The Senate turned back efforts to include drug re-importation in the healthcare bill.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria, editing by Vicki Allen and Will Dunham)

REUTERS

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort,” President T. Roosevelt.

Someone beat me to this. When posting a previous article, I noticed there was a string similarity between the two.

With the Senate meeting for the second weekend in a row, Democrats assembled the minimum 60 votes needed to force a final vote on the omnibus spending bill, which pays for transportation, justice, foreign, labor, health, education and veterans programs.

The roll-call vote extended for more than an hour as supporters of the measure were rounded up and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an observant Jew, walked more than three miles from his synagogue to the Capitol. “Shabbat shalom,” Mr. Lieberman said in the traditional Sabbath greeting as he entered the Senate chamber still wearing his jacket and scarf.

Three Democrats and 31 Republicans sought to block the final vote, pointing to increases in many agency budgets and the 5,000 home-state projects, typically called earmarks, included in the bill by lawmakers of both parties. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a critic of earmarks, took the floor to list many of the projects, which he said totaled nearly $4 billion.

“You are spending money like a drunken sailor, and the bar is still open,” Mr. McCain told his colleagues.

Republicans also criticized the fact that six different measures were rolled into one.

“We don’t have this money,” said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. “We are borrowing it.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat and a member of the Appropriations Committee, pointed out that the individual measures had all been approved by the committee with bipartisan support.

“To come before us today and argue that the majority is cramming these votes and bills down the throats of members without giving them opportunity is to ignore what came before,” he said.

The six bills represent a spending increase of about 10 percent over last year and include a 2 percent pay raise for federal workers. When required spending for Social Security, Medicare and other programs is added in, the measure tops $1 trillion.

The bills were due Oct. 1, but, as has been the pattern in recent years, Congress failed to complete them on time. The government is currently operating under a stop-gap spending law that expires on Friday.

With the omnibus measure headed for passage, the lone spending bill still to be approved is a $600 billion measure that pays for Pentagon operations. Since that is always a must-pass measure, Congressional Democrats are planning to use it to carry along a hodgepodge of final bills for the year.

In addition, Democrats plan to attach a provision that would raise the federal debt limit by $1.8 trillion — a move that has taken on new political significance given the increasing political fight over federal spending.

NY TIMES