It’s 1,434 pages long. If you don’t have to read that much, you can at least skim through it. I guarantee that will be more than most members of Congress do who will soon be voting on it. Go here to download it.
HT: Michelle Malkin
UPDATE: The Democrats purposefully posted the bill at the last minute and formatted it so that the document is not searchable! Read this. Neither the Congressmen who are being asked to vote on this bill nor the citizens of this democratic republic are being allowed full access to what is in this bill before it passes. This is tyranny and corruption.
HT: Strange Herring
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PDF files are completely searchable. I downloaded it and ran a few searches in about 10 seconds time. That article is nothing but link bait; I’m kind of disappointed you fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
Will. Not all PDF files are searchable. It depends on how they are created. We run into this problem all the time with electronic court filings. It appears that the bill is searchable but the article said it was in unsearchable form at the time they went to print. How do you know if that is true or not?
GOP Leader Boehner Floor Speech Opposing Democrats’ Trillion-Dollar Spending Bill:
“Not one member has read this bill”
They’re not demonrats for nothing.
OK, Will, what you can download here is a searchable PDF. The newspaper account, though, maintains that the first version to be posted was intentionally made to be not searchable, so that people wouldn’t be able to find things.
The Guardian’s list of the 25 people at the heart of the meltdown.
No. 24 looks especially guilty to me.
So much for transparency. And hope for that matter.
Elderly beware – (if some of the health care stipulations are in this bill – and I’m not sure) but if your health care becomes too costly – parts of this bill will possibly prohibit your doctor from providing some care for you. How’s that for hope? Isn’t it stimulating?
This is what happens when the American people elect an inexperienced empty-suit, Democrat President and a liberal Congress. We as a people get the government we deserve at the local, state, and national levels. Those fastidious and righteous conservatives who opposed McCain and sat out the election are also getting the government they deserve.
Conservatives can whine and whimper about this parlous scene, though most of them do little financially and otherwise to strongly support fiscally sound candidates.
We all shoulda been listenin’ to Ron Paul (and voting for him).
Ron who?
Ron Paul, the only one in the government who really understands what’s happening with the economy. Ron Paul for President, 2012!
Here’s an update from Ron Paul talking about his experience as a congressman in having to deal with this monstrosity. 1500 pages and the members of congress were given one night to look it over.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hlszHekH6I
When and where are the demonstrations in the street? I am there as soon as I find out.
When the tax revolt comes,I am completely on board with that too.
We need to not let this pass quietly.
If a million of us who owed taxes just didn’t mail in our returns, there is no way they could deal with that.
Just prepare the return and leave it where you keep your mail. If you are pressed or audited by the IRS, you could give it the Tom Daschle, Timothy Geitner “oops I’m sorry, I forgot to pay that. Let me take care of that right now.”
A couple million people doing that would entirely crash the system.
Work on creating alternative streams of income that rely on cash or barter, and therefore won’t be taxed.
Use open source encryption to keep your email and other important data away from those who woulld rob you of privacy. This is one of the best:
http://www.truecrypt.org/
This is the biggest bank heist and power grab in our history, and they aren’t done yet. The Republic is almost gone.
The ridiculousness of the stimulus bill aside, I would caution against screaming that anybody purposely put the bill forward as being unsearchable. Whether or not the original bill was searchable, the writer of that particular column did not cite any evidence for it being intentionally unsearchable, and extra effort is usually made to make a pdf searchable (particularly if by an IT inept crew), not the other way around.
TOW – good point. We should not assume it was done intentionally.
Bill Kristol today writes as follows : Obama Levitates But the train goes off the rails.:
One of many highlights of the stimulus bill the Democrats just rammed through Congress is $8 billion for high-speed rail. What makes this appropriation special is that there was no money for high-speed rail in the original House legislation. The Senate bill had $2 billion. The legislation coming out of conference “compromised” on $8 billion.
How did this happen? Well, some of that $8 billion, as the Washington Post reported Friday, seems intended for “a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.” Reid of course played a major role in putting together the final bill.
That’s the kind of policymaking the new Obama administration has embraced in its signature legislative proposal: a congressional process as unseemly as ever; an emergency bill that barely addresses the emergency; a “stimulus” bill short on stimulus (is that magnetic-levitation rail line “shovel-ready”?).
The symboism of Disneyland/Vegas/Reid is marvelous.
Peter @#8
I became more involved in this last campaign more than I ever have. Even to the point of donating money, sending emails, and actively trying to convince family, friends and co-workers to vote for Ron Paul. (I still proudly have his bumperstickers on my cars) I also had his huge car magnet sign on the side of my car for the duration of his campaign. Many of my friends supported him to the same or greater extent.
TOW and Joe, really….?
You guys have obviously never been a victim of a scam or theft, or if you were, didn’t learn anything from it. Of course this was done on purpose.
We need to call a thing for what it is..
This is like being a passenger on a bus with a drunk driver at the wheel who is driving it over a cliff and there isn’t a darned thing you can do except scream.
And pray.
Calvin and Hobbes explaining the need for the stimulus bill.
How does one even find the pork infested welfare bill, anyway? been trying to find the final version w/o any success.
“Want to read the stimulus bill?”
No thanks…I just ate.
Patrick Kyle@8:
It may be that the document was purposely manipulated to be unsearchable, but until I have more than a journalist’s say in the matter, my experience with PDFs is that the opposite is most likely true. Just because our current president and congress are wicked (particularly in regards to their stance on abortion), that does not mean that I, as a Christian, must believe every dark rumor about them that happens to float my way. To do that would make me no better than the critics of President Bush I’ve listened to for the last eight years who believed every rumor conceivable about the him and his administration. As Christians, we must hold the higher ground, and part of that means not being so gullible as to believe every rumor.
If there is more evidence to substantiate this rumor, then I’ll reconsider. Until then, I know from nine years of experience in IT that 1) Making it into an “internet document” is more difficult than turning it into a pdf due to html formatting issues, 2) Turning it into a searchable pdf is more difficult than turning it straight into a pdf, particularly if bits of it were originally handwritten, 3) the haste with which they tried to get it online would entail using software that quickly scans the pages, turns them into pdfs, and then you can put those online much faster than going through the hassle of making it into a readable html document or a searchable PDF.
With all of that said, I do agree that the stimulus bill and the rush to vote on it before anybody could read it are both disgusting.
Creating a PDF from a hard copy is typically done by first scanning in the document as a “picture” which is non-searchable. Then an OCR program (optical character recognition) program is run on it to “read” the picture into text which is searchable.
OCR programs vary in quality as do the quality of the pictures they are working on. Depending on the quality, there can be a significant amount of work to clean it up.
Like TOW said, depending on their software, their scanning mechanism, etc, putting out the “picture” document which wasn’t searchable could have been much faster than waiting until the final, searchable product was done.
I echo TOW’s final paragraph too!! The entire rush on this thing is atrocious!
Sorry, I should have said “was” atrocious. Having lived in Pennsylvania, I feel a particular shame in Specter supporting this bill in the Senate. I voted against him, but still….
TOW,
Maybe so… However the whole thing was put together, put out at the last minute, and voted upon in the last minute. This broke Obama’s promise to allow ‘transparency’ and time for the public and legislators to read this stuff.
Haste and and being forced to do something because of an ‘emergency’ of some sort are hallmarks of various scams. We will see in the coming weeks what we will reap from that Stimulus Package.
The fact that the quickest way to create the document was one in which it was impossible to search was no doubt viewed as an ‘unfortunate’ side effect by those who wanted to ram this thing through.