Update: Also, news comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the
Is the Senate broken? Or is the recent fretting over the filibuster just myopic whining that misunderstands our history? The following graphs and links indicate that, in fact, the Senate is broken — the filibuster has been deployed more often, than before. Details below the fold.
I know I’m not going to convince anybody, and this is far from the most important place to make this point, but I feel like I have to weigh in:
Record snowfall does not “disprove” global warming.
To advance the opposite proposition seriously, you’d have to do one or more of the following:
More than likely, most people braying that this is God’s message to Al Gore are committing all three mistakes at once.
News comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the chance of cloture on these holds seems remote. So the Senate is even more broken. The danger is that this will accelerate our move towards government by other means, including increased use of recess appointments.
Oh, and what the heck is a hold? David Waldeman explains.
Also: a pretty funny reimagining of the note that Shelby must have given Harry Reid and the President.
Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists. I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life and not that we are afraid the city would be attacked. (As if Al Qaeda needs another reason…)
But I simply cannot abide the weak-kneed wimps who think that “the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security”. How absolutely bat-crazy stupid do you have to be to write something like that? Note that it’s not even that the ultimate right is actual security — it’s only that we have a sense of security. So apparently, in order that Richard Cohen can sleep at night without worrying about the monsters under his bed, we should sacrifice legal standards, integrity, freedom itself. It turns out I wrote my rebuttal of his argument about two and a half years before he even wrote his article, and I stand by it:
We are stronger than that.
We are smarter than that.
We are better than that.
So why isn’t any of the so-called leadership — in the Capitol or in the Oval Office — listening?
On the Huffington Post, Paul Begala offers his own, lucid take on the choice facing Democrats: Pass the Senate bill, or collapse completely come November. It’s worth the time to read.
Now, here’s hoping the Democrats in charge get their acts together, get their courage on, and get moving. Pass. The. Damn. Bill.
David Plouffe, campaign adviser to the Obama campaign and author of Audacity to Win, has written a much-needed op-ed in the Washington Post. In it, he outlines the shape of a legislative strategy that would allow the Democrats to survive the coming midterm elections. It’s worth a full read but the bullet-point summary is
Good advice from a guy who’s shown he knows how to win. Let’s hope someone in Washington is listening.
This is the day.
This is the moment that some clever historian — not the first to consider this sweep of time, but rather someone turning over the leaves looking for a more subtle causation — will draw a slash on the timeline of history and write: Here began the fall of the American republic.
(a) The rite in the Catholic Church formerly known as penace.
(b) A process whereby congressional resolutions are harmonized with the budget. Under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, it provides a procedure to consider (certain types of) bills without allowing a fillibuster in the Senate. As such it’s suddenly become the hot topic legislatively. I would explain further but I’d muck it up. Instead, read this by Sarah Binder over at the Monkey Cage. It’s very lucid.
in convenient cartoon form.
I got this via Ezra Klein’s fantastic blog, but apparently it’s by Tom Toles.
I haven’t really gotten involved in haranguing my elected representatives before, but the possibility of health care reform is so tantalizingly close — and the apparent drift of the Democratic so-called “leadership” is so grindingly predictable and frustrating — that I’ve felt compelled to contact my representative several times. Below the fold is the email I’ve sent.
UPDATE: I claim no particular credit, but according to Talking Points Memo, Rep. Holt has in fact come out in support of (what I feel to be) the correct option, passing the Senate bill. (I am indifferent as to whether it needs to be done straight up or with amendments via reconciliation.)
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