The Power of the Gavel
Posted in Current Events by John E. Pannell on January 15th, 2007 at 4:16 pm Sorry folks, this is another non-patch related post. I find this priceless. Skip the rest of this post if you don’t want to read such things.
By the way of background information: American Samoa was recently granted an exemption to the minimimum wage increase in a bill recently passed by the House. Star Kist is a major employer there. Their headquarters is in Nancy Pelosi’s district and her husband owner several million dollars worth of StarKist stock.
With that in mind… Courtesy of CSpan and YouTube, here’s how Barney Frank answers a parliamentary inquiry in the House of Representatives from Patrick McHenry of North Carolina:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWxY-5FS2Bc
Perhaps we should all use this as an example in training course topics on Roberts’ Rules of Order? Sure, the representative was trying to make a point about the previous amendment by raising a point of order, but is this how a mature person handles such a question? I expect talk radio to have fun with this excerpt.
Perhaps I should try this at work when I have to deal with someone I disagre with! 
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The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon of this field.)"
The Representative was clearly trying to embarrass Barney “my boy lollipop” Frank and did a great job of showing how these folks run things. His goal was to get Mr. Frank blustering and he suceeded there.
Of course, if what he really wanted was to know if American Samoa was exempt from the bill, all he had to do was READ IT!
Then again, this footage could make a great ad against McHenry–I suspect the people of his district might well wonder why he seems so interested in American Samoa rather than North Carolina.