Flying Ms. Pelosi and other capitol conundrums
What’s with the recent uproar about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desire to fly non-stop from Washington DC to San Francisco? As is typical of the folks we pay in the nation’s capitol to do the people’s business, they’re hung up on issues that they’ve made worse through the attention they’ve drawn to the matter.
A little background from Yahoo News for those of you too engrossed in the Anna Nicole story to concentrate on anything else:
Republicans are taking issue with the size of the plane Pelosi would need to fly in to reach her hometown of San Francisco without refueling. There are three Air Force airplanes that have the fuel capacity to make the trip nonstop, with the largest being a C-32 plane, a military version of the Boeing 757-200
Ms. Pelosi’s position is that (from FOX News):
reports filtering out into the media regarding inquiries about the use of a military plane nearly the size of Air Force One for her travel to and from Washington, D.C., shows a “misrepresentation that could only be coming from the administration … one would wonder why the practice deemed to be necessary from a security standpoint would be mischaracterized in the press.”
To which White House Press Secretary Tony Snow according to the Associated Press replied:
“This is a silly story, and I think it’s been unfair to the speaker.”
It looks like they’re on the way to a well-earned non-resolution solution…
…which brings me to another thing - how is it that the Senate has spent the last week politically jockeying about whether or not to take a vote on a “non-binding” resolution on the escalation of troops in Iraq without actually accomplishing anything?
Just another example of our tax dollars at work.
Gee I wonder what they would do if they had something really important to work on like
editor’s note: the following are 2006 Democratic party election initiatives in bold, Republican initiatives have been italicized. Some are from both parties and thus indicated as such
stopping terrorism, or securing our borders, or feeding the hungry, or dealing with homelessness, or ending our dependence on foreign oil (Bush didn’t get wise to this one until after the election), or decreasing the cost of higher education, or improving the quality of education, or making health care affordable, or ensuring retirement solvency, or creating new good paying jobs, or well, I think you get the idea.
