You F*$@ing Donkey!!!

GED recipient and former $368,000-a-year CIETC head Ramona Cunningham with Senator Tom Harkin at the dedication of the "Tom Harkin Learning Center" at CIETC offices in October 20, 2004.

From the ASSociated Press:

With gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon, Senate Democrats want the government to grab some of the billions of dollars in profits being taken in by the major oil companies.

Senators were to vote Tuesday on whether to consider a windfall profits tax against the five largest U.S. oil companies and rescind $17 billion in tax breaks the companies expect to enjoy over the next decade.

"The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy," said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat

Don't forget that while Tom Harkin was assailing oil companies over "windfall profits" his wife Ruth was (and still is) a director at the oil company ConocoPhillips. That's how he's able to be worth nearly $20 million dollars.

And Harkin was able to waste over $10 million on nine electric buses that traveled a total of 200,000 miles for the people Cedar Rapids (that's $50 a mile, folks).

So what about windfall profits taxes?

This is from the Cato Institute and appeared in the Houston Chronicle in 2006:

What they won't get, however, is nearly as much money out of such a tax as they probably think. A windfall profit tax targeted at earnings far beyond the U.S. industrial average would return zero revenue to the Treasury because windfall profits in the oil sector are figments of the imagination.

While the raw earnings figures sound big, in proportion to the size of those companies, they are unexceptional. Divide profits by sales, for instance, and you'll find that in the fourth quarter of 2005 (the last quarter for which we have data available), profit margins were 6.8 percent at British Petroleum, 7 percent at ConocoPhilips, 7.1 percent at Shell, 7.7 percent at Chevron and 10.7 percent at Exxon Mobil. The 20 largest investor-owned oil companies earned a collective 8.8 cents on every dollar of sales for that quarter.

Now, it's not a stretch to note that the lady who sells us hot dogs on the street probably earns a better profit margin than that. But more to the point, the nation's most prominent critic of "oil profiteering" — Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly — works for a company (News Corp.) that reported a 10.2 percent profit during the fourth quarter of 2005. If you're after really big earners, however, check out Yahoo (a 45.5 percent profit margin), Citigroup (33.4 percent), Intel (24 percent) or Apple (22.7 percent).

Returns on invested capital over a longer time frame are even more telling. Analysts at Goldman Sachs report that returns on investment capital in the oil and gas sector from 1970 to 2003 were less than the U.S. industrial average over that same period.

Especially noteworthy is this section:

We've actually been down this road before in the form of the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax of 1980. According to a study published by the Congressional Research Service, the tax discouraged investment in the domestic oil industry to such a degree that domestic oil production was 3 percent to 6 percent less as a result of that tax, and foreign oil imports grew accordingly by 8 percent to 16 percent.

Doh!

Of course, Barack Hussein Obama would impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

Obama wants to go back to the days of failed Jimmy Carter policies, doesn't he?

These Senators think they have the answer for everything, don't they? The price of gas, health care, the war.... you name it.

But the Senate can't even manage to run a restaurant properly:

Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate's network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money -- more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another.

The financial condition of the world's most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won't make payroll next month...

In a masterful bit of understatement, [Senator Dianne] Feinstein blamed "noticeably subpar" food and service.

Perhaps they ought to bring in Gordon Ramsay to run things: