Four Amendments & a Funeral (Matt Taibbi's exposé just went live!)

[johnfunk]

Matt Taibbi's exposé of "your" Congre$$ at work -- including some cutting comments by Bernie Sanders -- has just been posted to RollingStone.com:

Four Amendments & a Funeral
A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress
By MATT TAIBBI

It was a fairy-tale political season for George W. Bush, and it seemed like no one in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba and a scandal curling up on the doorstep of Karl Rove, Bush's Republican Party quietly celebrated a massacre on Capitol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club -- an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill -- breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time.

...

"Nobody knows how this place is run," says Rep. Bernie Sanders. "If they did, they'd go nuts."

Sanders is a tall, angular man with a messy head of gull-white hair and a circa-1977 set of big-framed eyeglasses. Minus the austere congressional office, you might mistake him for a physics professor or a journalist of the Jimmy Breslin school.

Vermont's sole representative in the House, Sanders is expected to become the first Independent ever elected to the U.S. Senate next year. He is something of a cause celebre on both the left and right these days, with each side overreacting to varying degrees to the idea of a self-described "democratic socialist" coming so near to a seat in the upper house.

Now you can understand how Congressional sausage -- better known as pork -- is made. Worth a complete read.

[Dudley_DUright]

1. As a physics professor, I would be honored to be compared to

future senator Bernie Sanders any day.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. :^D

[Greeby]

2. After reading that

Hold on to your jaws :wow:

[donkeyotay]

3. We are sinking under the corruption. Not even America can survive this.

By my last week in Washington, all of his (Bernie Sanders) victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today's U.S. Congress. What began as a tale of political valor ended as a grotesque object lesson in the ugly realities of American politics -- the pitfalls of digging for hope in a shit mountain.

Sanders, to his credit, was still glad that I had come. "It's good that you saw this," he said. "People need to know."

The corps are looting us into bankuptcy. Bribery has been legalized and the needs, hopes and wants of the people aren't even in the talking points let alone on the GOP agenda.

[DrZeeLit]

5. Go Bernie! I love my Rep...soon to be My Senator. He's awesome! n/t