The Stupid, Cruel, and Dickish Riders to the House Budget Bill (Plus Fun with Planned Parenthood Funding):
Your cost-cutting Republicans have attached dozens and dozens of riders to H.R. 1, the budget for the rest o' the fiscal year. They are almost all just ideological turds shat on the American people by the squatting extreme right (either of the teabag or evangelical variety, sometimes one and the same, sometimes not). And they are what's holding up the passage of a budget, even if Democrats have given in on the punitive cuts that Republicans want and will probably be why the government shuts down at midnight. Let's remember that the riders don't actually cut the total of the budget; they merely prohibit various ways of using the money. Here's a few in their dickish glory:

1. Sec. 1284 - "That none of the funds made available by this division or any other Act shall be used to pay the salaries and expenses of personnel to carry out section 19 of the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act." It also prohibits any additional funds being spent on the mysterious section 19. What in the world could this be? Force feeding kids gold-coated aborted fetuses? Not quite. This is the program that provides fresh fruit and vegetables for students at public schools in an attempt to put something not plastic-wrapped and filled with high fructose corn syrup into the bloated tummies of our nation's tubby children.

2. Sec. 4035 - "None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to implement, administer, or enforce the rule entitled 'Water Quality Standards for the State of
Florida’s Lakes and Flowing Waters.'" Or, in other words, we must allow agriculture and other industries to keep fucking up the drinking and swimming waters of Florida. Between this and the more than a dozen other anti-EPA riders, the GOP's obvious goal is to destroy land, water, and air so that we have to pay corporations for tanks of air we'll have to strap on our backs to walk through the climate-changed horror landscape they're giving us.

3. Sec. 4009 - Funds cannot be used to pay for the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission. This is in a big list of what the right considers all of Obama's "czars," people he appointed to various positions. The FCC guy deserves highlighting because this poor schmuck, Mark Lloyd, has been labeled "the Diversity Czar" or, even better, "the Fairness Doctrine Czar" by conservative radio talkers who, for fuck's sake, need something to fill up the hours and hours of their useless air time. By the way, Lloyd has explicitly stated that he doesn't want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, which, to your rational right-wingers, means he absolutely will do it.

Oh, hey, here's a fun quote from yesterday's House debate on a useless stop-gap spending bill: Indiana Republican Mike Pence on Planned Parenthood funding: "It seems like liberals in the Senate would rather shut the government down so they can continue to borrow money from China to support the biggest abortion provider in America." Yeah, he really did say that. If he'd have figured out a way to work in gay people, it would have been the scariest statement ever heard by his constituents.

Fun facts that you should have heard elsewhere but probably haven't: Federal funding of Planned Parenthood was started by President Richard Nixon with the support of Congressman George H.W. Bush. The rumor is that they were once considered Republicans. Conservatives supported it because contraception kept women from having more babies and kept them all off welfare. An ounce of prevention, you know. But that's when "conservative" didn't simply mean "bugnuts." History is awesome.