No, this isn’t some flashback to the 1980s Faberge Shampoo commercial, this is your Congress “at work”.  The brilliant idea of the so-called “Super Committee” seems to be doing what the Congress does, just with fewer people….hmmm, that gives me pause.  Anyway, since there was no federal budget passed the federal government is operating under Continuing Resolutions (CRs).  GorT is familiar with these having lived through a bunch in the industry I work in.  Basically, the individual agencies look at their current spending and chunk it into monthly amounts and that is the money they have to operate with until a new budget is passed or the next CR is passed or the federal government goes into a shutdown waiting for Congress to budge.  It also means that (generally) no new efforts can be started…generally.  And it also means that people in each one of the agencies must stop and assess their current spending rate, budgets and plan for this month-to-month operating mode.  Of course, that effort was never budgeted for so it’s spending money that should have been spent otherwise regardless of how small it is.  Having lived through a few, it isn’t insignificant – in individual offices (50-300 people), it requires a handful of people to review the numbers, work with contractors to get updated projections, work with managers to understand plans, etc.

It doesn’t appear that Congress is ready to address this by the current deadline (Nov 18th) if you look at what they had planned for this week.  Not even a glimmer of a CR bill.  It doesn’t help matters that President Obama is touring the Pacific with various state visits so he won’t be around to help negotiate or even advocate for a budget let alone a CR.  Jay Carney, the President’s Press Secretary, fielded this question on Friday the 11th:

Q And the continuing resolution, assuming there is one on the 18th, is he going to robo-sign it? How will you guys handle this?

MR. CARNEY: I’ll have to take that question to figure out how that’s done. Let me check.

I’ll have to figure out how that’s done.  Pure genius.  Doesn’t get better than this, folks.  Does anyone else hear the circus music in the background?

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.