Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Observations from the Window 12.5

Did you ever wonder why when Bill O'Reilly is talking the words type next to him on a split screen? I never thought about it before but I think the answer came to me last night watching The Last Word. They showed a clip from O'Reilly's show and two reasons hit me. One reason could be that his viewers, and Fox News viewers in general, are so old they can't hear what he is saying. More likely is that those viewers are just so thick they need to see the words just to understand what they are hearing.

Wingnutism reached a new low yesterday when the United Nations disabilities treaty fell five votes short of ratification in the Senate. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, based largely on the Americans with Disabilities Act, was negotiated by the Bush administration and signed by President Obama in 2009. It has been signed by 155 countries and ratified by 126 including Britain, France, Russia and China. Eight Republicans voted for the treaty but a two thirds majority was needed and it fell five votes short. The reason the wingnuts used for voting against it, home schooling. I have this vision of a wingnut fantasy, blue U.N. helicopters flying over America dropping wheelchairs.

John Kerry called the vote one of the saddest in his 28 years in the Senate, "a wake-up call about a broken institution that’s letting down the American people." I repeat, The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is almost a copy of the Americans with Disabilities Act, something that has been law in the United States for twenty two years. These people really are just pathetic and stand for absolutely nothing positive, nothing at all.

After that embarrassing display a petition currently on the White House website looks even better than it did when I first saw it. It says, "Cease paychecks and health benefits to ALL members of Congress and the President until the fiscal cliff is avoided."

Maybe it should say stop paychecks until the Congress of the United States of America starts acting a little more mature than a typical junior high school student council.