{"id":580,"date":"2009-01-30T18:44:47","date_gmt":"2009-01-30T23:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/congratulations-to-kirsten-gillibrand\/"},"modified":"2009-01-30T20:06:44","modified_gmt":"2009-01-31T01:06:44","slug":"congratulations-to-kirsten-gillibrand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/congratulations-to-kirsten-gillibrand\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations to Kirsten Gillibrand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congratulations to Kirsten Gillibrand on her appointment to the New York senate seat.\u00c2\u00a0 Governor Patterson was considering Caroline Kennedy, whose qualification consisted entirely of her last name.\u00c2\u00a0 Gillibrand will replace the horrid Hillary Clinton<\/a>, who carpetbaged<\/a> her way into the state knowing there were enough stupid people here to vote for her.<\/p>\n

While I don’t agree with her on a lot of issues (she voted in favor of SCHIP, and I’ll have more on that nasty piece of socialism later) I voted for her because she voted against the initial bailout, twice.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s also one of the few Democrats who can read the second amendment and understand what it clearly says.<\/p>\n

I met her a couple of months ago at a town hall meeting she held in Borders, in Saratoga.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s smart and forthright, but the thing that impressed me most was she didn’t<\/em> tell me what I wanted to hear.<\/p>\n

After she talked and took questions there was a line of people waiting to talk to her.\u00c2\u00a0 She was surrounded by aids who took notes and paperwork that people handed her.\u00c2\u00a0 When it was my turn I asked her if she was familiar with Downsize DC’s Read The Bills Act and One Subject at A Time Act.\u00c2\u00a0 She wasn’t, and asked for details.\u00c2\u00a0 The conversation (from memory, not verbatim):<\/p>\n

Me: The Read The Bills act would require all bills to be read in their entirety in front of a quorum, and be posted on line for a week before they were passed.<\/p>\n

Kirsten: That will never work.\u00c2\u00a0 Some bills are five hundred pages long.<\/p>\n

Me: That’s the point \u00e2\u20ac\u201c bills will have to be simplified.<\/p>\n

Kirsten: Even if you get it down to a hundred pages no one is going to sit there and pay attention.\u00c2\u00a0 It would be a waste of time, and it will never get passed.\u00c2\u00a0 What was the other bill?<\/p>\n

Me: One Subject At A Time.\u00c2\u00a0 It would prohibit adding amendments to bills that weren’t related to the bill.<\/p>\n

Kirsten:\u00c2\u00a0 That won’t pass either.\u00c2\u00a0 We add amendments because we have to to get things done.<\/p>\n

(Me, thinking, but not saying, – the whole idea is to get fewer things done, to reduce the size of government.)<\/p>\n

Kristen: But what was that part about putting bills online?\u00c2\u00a0 I really like that idea.\u00c2\u00a0 That way everyone effected by a bill would have a chance to read it and enough time to contact us about it.<\/p>\n

She then directed me to one of her aids to take down more information on that part of the bill.<\/p>\n

Most politicians would have listened to me, nodded their heads, and said “Yes, those sound like great ideas, I’ll look into them” while thinking “no way in hell, Bucko.”\u00c2\u00a0 She didn’t.\u00c2\u00a0 She told me why she thought it wouldn’t work.\u00c2\u00a0 No bullshit.\u00c2\u00a0 No pretending to agree.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s extremely rare, and it earned my respect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congratulations to Kirsten Gillibrand on her appointment to the New York senate seat.\u00c2\u00a0 Governor Patterson was considering Caroline Kennedy, whose qualification consisted entirely of her last name.\u00c2\u00a0 Gillibrand will replace the horrid Hillary Clinton, who carpetbaged her way into the state knowing there were enough stupid people here to vote for her. While I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions\/586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}