Sen. Richard Burr

After Hurricane Sandy struck the greater New York/New Jersey shore, Republicans in Congress (including NC's finest Sen. Richard Burr) held up disaster aid funding for exactly 91 days, with the "good Senator" voting in the end against the aid bill.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. Burr approaches aid for Oklahoma tornado relief.

How can you tell when he's lying? His mouth is moving:

Burr: We'll Talk Taxes If Democrats Ease Entitlement Stance

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) told WFMY News 2 he'd be willing to discuss tax increases for the wealthiest Americans if Democrats are willing to make cuts to "entitlement" programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

This non-offer offer is probably in response to some negative exposure he's going to get today:

And skewers his own party in the process:

“Rome didn’t fall apart because the Huns came out of the Ardennes Forest or the Scots came over Hadrian’s Wall,” Burr said in reading the excerpt. “Rome fell apart in Rome. It became complacent, lazy, and indolent. Its citizens stopped caring for each other. It became a society for the selfish. Its people concentrated on their rights, not their responsibilities."

I agree. So we should forget about extending and increasing tax cuts for the (selfish) rich, and fight any attempts to cut programs that allow us to care for each other in a fair and comprehensive fashion.

Faith is believing in something in the absence of evidence:

U.S. Sen. Richard Burr said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney shouldn’t release any more tax records. "He’s probably lived exactly by the letter of the law"..."I think he pays a pretty good amount of taxes," Burr said of Romney.

Excuse my French, but that's some silly shit right there. "Probably" and "I think"? This guy is sitting on the Senate Finance Committee now, which has jurisdiction over all forms of taxes, tariffs, etc. And he's on the Select Committee on Intelligence. That second thing would cause my mom to say, "Steve! Why are you just sitting there staring with your mouth open like that?" if she saw me right now. Non-plussed, I believe is the proper adjective.

And he's on the wrong side:

Why would Republicans start throwing at roadblocks at a demonstrably successful program? Because the Tea Party-style conservatism that is ascendent in the Republican Party has always loathed the Violence Against Women Act from the very beginning. And why is that? Because the Violence Against Women Act doesn't counsel marriage as the solution.

And the reauthorization dares to extend protections to gays, immigrants and injuns:

Apparently we don't need to know who's paying for political advertising:

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to require television broadcasters to put their public files online would be "burdensome and unnecessary" in a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski earlier this month.

Watching this guy operate is like watching a really bad episode of the Twilight Zone. You know, where somebody in a coma wakes up, and at first, everything seems normal, but then he begins to notice little things that people say and do that are slightly off, and then he turns on the TV and Richard Burr is giving a press conference, and the coma patient slowly comes to the realization the world has changed horribly...okay, I still need to work on this screenplay a little. But it's got promise.

Pretending to be a defender of Social Security:

He talked of changing Medicare and Medicaid and reforming Social Security "so that the solvency of Social Security guarantees every person in this room when they get 65, they're actually going to get what they were promised and not half of what that amount should have been."

Once again, what he says and what he does are two totally different things. Earlier this year, he voted to allow the Social Security retirement age to rise up to 69 or higher, making that statement above pure deception on his part. And not a damned soul in that room called him on it.

I can't resist sharing this. It's the Mayberry Solar Farm in Mt. Airy.

Pictured at the dedication are Sen. Richard Burr and Rep. Virginia Foxx. Nevermind that both vote in lockstep with the Republican anti-clean energy agenda.

Never mind that Richard Burr voted no on the tax incentives that encourage clean energy development, voted to bar EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and introduced legislation to abolish the EPA (which employs more than one thousand North Carolinians).

Never mind that Virginia Foxx voted in lockstep with every House Republican effort in the last few months to kill off alternative energy and defang the EPA.

When it comes to a local solar farm, hey, let's cheerlead at the ribbon cutting!

And if you don't already know the difference between the two, you haven't been paying attention:

A bill that would earmark $6.9 billion dollars for disaster relief failed to get enough votes to move forward in the U.S. Senate Tuesday, with Republican North Carolina Senator Richard Burr voting against and Democratic Senator Kay Hagan voting in favor.

The crop losses from Irene are the worst many of our farmers have seen in decades, yet their Senator keeps whining about offsets:

Holding his own constituents hostage:

“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”

Aside from the fact that you're (once again) throwing people who depend on you under the bus, if it takes a fricking hurricane for you to focus on waste, fraud and abuse, then your own public "service" falls into that "waste" column. And we keep sending him back...