they're off and running

With inauguration still nearly two months away, the Republicans have wasted no time in pushing an appalling agenda. In merely the last few days alone, we've seen:

• Republicans sneaking language into the federal spending bill that would permit two Republican committee chairmen and their staff to demand, without regard to any privacy protection, income tax returns of any American.
• A paving of the way, in that same spending bill, to cut back college loans for as many as 1.2 million low-income students, with nearly 100,000 losing their federal grants entirely.
• Inclusion in the spending bill of far-reaching anti-abortion language.
• Oh, but the spending bill does include $2 million to buy back the presidential yacht Sequoia, sold by the government 30 years ago, for Bush, even though the present owners have said they do not want to sell it.
• Republicans killing a bill that would have implemented the major recommendations of the 9/11 Commission in regards to creation of a cabinet-level national intelligence directorate.
• Approval of the third increase in the nation's debt limit under Bush's watch, to $8.184 trillion.
• The party allegedly of "high moral values" changing their own rules so that a leader indicted by a grand jury will no longer have to step down from a leadership role.
• A Senate subcommittee hearing on pornography (wonder how much something like this costs to hold?), including testimony by The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality which said that porn can do even what heroin can't and noting how dangerous the Internet is as an efficient porn-delivery platform.

There's more, but it's depressing enough already. Welcome to the next four years.