November 28, 2012 archive

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these featured articles-

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Modest Proposal For Commonsense Spending Cuts

First remove the trough of federal spending from moocher states as requested by their tea party majorities to save the income of hard-working people in giver states.

Such states could include Texas* as well as others such as West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arizona, Tennessee.

With such a bounty one might as well give a tax break to hard-working people of giver states and make an exception for such as the majority African-American congressional district that has elected a pale Jew to Congress.  Such extraordinary intelligence and morality should qualify for an especially high bonus in federal spending and tax forgiveness.

*Texas is claimed to be giver state instead of a moocher state but who can believe that and who cares even if it is true?

Eliminate ACA and convert to universal one-payer health care.  The savings in dollars and increase in health and life expectancy will be immense.  Unemployed unskilled health insurance executives should be able to find work emptying bed pans in hospitals that will now be filled to capacity.  They could be supervised by insurance clerks who once made medical diagnoses and prescribed treatment rather than doctors.  Other former employees of the insurance companies should be able to find employment as lobbyists, writers of fantasy explanations for the failings of the “capitalist” system blamed on Adam Smith of all people, orderlies in recovery establishments for former tea partiers and rightwing pundits,

produce pickers will be needed to replace Latinos free to work at better jobs.  The list is endless.

The federal debt should turn into a surplus in no time.

Best,  Terry

Cartnoon

Originally posted August 23, 2011.

Porky’s Road Race

On This Day In History November 28

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 28 is the 332nd day of the year (333rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 33 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1970, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” is released.

Austerity Bomb

Washington should stop fighting the “fiscal phantom” of the deficit and start worrying about the coming “austerity bomb,” warns Paul Krugman in his New York Times column.

http://www.moneynews.com/Stree…

This seems to me a rather odd place to find economic wisdom.  Rightwing rags, which I take this to be, are not notable for truthfulness in my experience.

Sure liberal websites are full of Krugman but they are also heavily contaminated with the atrocious nonsense about the need to cut the deficit in the midst of a depression.

How this translates into no need to worry about the fiscal cliff is beyond my simple mind.

Cutting to the quick:

The real danger, according to Krugman, is the “austerity bomb,” otherwise known as the fiscal cliff, the tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled for next year.

A rose by any other name is a rose.  So is a skunk.

If anyone knows of a single elected politician, even an Alan Grayson, who warns we should increase, not lower, the current deficit, I would love to know his or her name and see evidence of this heresy from establishment religion.

I would expect such a man or woman would be quickly eliminated from Congress at the first opportunity voters have to do so.  That was the case with two formerly impregnable senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who dared vote against the Vietnam War – the only two out of the whole damn Congress.  [I am talking of LBJ’s concocted Tonkin Gulf Resolution.  The Vietnam War had been going on a very long time.  Gruening was even eliminated by later peacenik hero, Mike Gravel, in a primary.]

True prophets have been known to lose their heads.

For what good?

Ummm, I dunno but I like such martyrs for my own twisted reasons I am unable to explain.  Perhaps it comes from being a Vietnam veteran before there was even a Vietnam War.

Best,  Terry

 

Post Election Redux: What Republicans Have Not Learned from Losing

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

While Republicans at the federal level appear to understand that they have a huge demographics problem with Latino and women voters, the lesson of the loss has failed to reach the Republicans at the state level. As Rachel Maddow explains in states where Republicans control the legislature and governorship, they are taking further steps to pass legislation that cracks down on undocumented immigrants, gay rights and women’s access to abortion and reproductive health care:

But where Republicans are really in control of government, as in Kansas for example, Maddow said the party is taking steps to “crack down on immigrants who want to go to college.” She also said that the Republican leadership in Indiana is moving to add a constitutional ban on gay marriage to the state constitution-in a state where gay marriage is already illegal. In Ohio, Maddow said, one of the first things the state government did after the November election was hold a hearing on defunding Planned Parenthood. [..]

Maddow added that Republicans at the state level are still “waging wars” on issues like immigration, abortion, and gay marriage, even though members of the party seem to be saying otherwise on a national level. Speaking of the differences between Republican messages, Maddow said, “Somebody should tell the Beltway, or maybe it’s funnier if we don’t.”

Keep in mind some of these same Republican governors, like Wisconsin’s union and women hating Scott Walker and Louisiana’s creationist Bobby Jindal, are considered top contenders for the 2016 presidential ticket. And you thought they couldn’t do worse that Mitt Romney.  

Congressional Game of Chicken: Fixing Filibuster, Part II

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Jon Walker at FDL Action was pretty miffed at this editorial in the Los Angeles Times regarding filibuster reform, especially this really stupid paragraph:

One response would be to eliminate the filibuster altogether. As a Senate rule, it can be changed by the majority party, and Democrats could eliminate it (though, of course, Republicans would almost certainly filibuster such a move). That, however, would also do away with the filibuster’s legitimate and historic place. Rather than eliminating the rule, the better approach would be to amend it in such a way as to preserve the ability for minorities to fight against one-party steamrolling while scaling back the filibuster’s capacity for obstructing everything.

Yikes! This is not only stupid, as Jon said, but it is wrong about how the Senate rules can be changed. Rules changes can’t be filibustered. While making such a rule change in the Senate would normally require a 67-vote majority, but when the Senate comes back into session in January, Democrats could use a set of procedural rules often called the “nuclear option” and pass the changes with a simple 51-vote majority. That scares the pants off the Republicans and had Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blustering and making:

The Kentucky Republican said changing the filibuster – which was designed to protect the minority but has become a tool for constant gridlock in the modern Senate – would fundamentally alter how the Senate operates.

McConnell accused Democrats of trying to employ a “naked power grab.”

“In the name of efficiency, their plan is to use a heavy-handed tactic that would poison party relations even more,” McConnell said in a lengthy floor speech Monday. “In the name of efficiency, they would prevent the very possibility of compromise and threaten to make the disputes of the past few years look like mere pillow fights.”

Sen. McConnell was exaggerating since no one, not even Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said he “favors” filibuster, has suggested eliminating it entirely. But who would expect anything less than hyperbole from a man whose party has set a record for filibusters with over 360 since the Democrats came into the majority. But not to be outdone by their fearless leader other Republican senators voiced their objections in strongly worded terms:

Republicans are threatening even greater retaliation if Reid uses a move rarely used by Senate majorities: changing the chamber’s precedent by 51 votes, rather than the usual 67 votes it takes to overhaul the rules.

“I think the backlash will be severe,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the conservative firebrand, said sternly. “If you take away minority rights, which is what you’re doing because you’re an ineffective leader, you’ll destroy the place. And if you destroy the place, we’ll do what we have to do to fight back.”

“It will shut down the Senate,” the incoming Senate GOP whip, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, told POLITICO. “It’s such an abuse of power.”

I’m not exactly sure how they would accomplish a “shut down” if the tool they’ve been using to shut down the senate is taken away from them or changed so that they can no longer obstruct the business that the majority was elected to do. After all for six years the Republicans, with Dick Cheney George W. Bush in the Oval Office, used the threat of the “nuclear option” to end any Democratic attempt at filibuster. Now the shoe is on the other foot and suddenly ending filibuster will destroy democracy.

We’ve been down this road before:

With the obstruction of a very united minority, there has been a great deal of debate about the filibuster and the reform of Senate Rule 22. In a New York Times op-ed, Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, recalls how in 1975 when he was a Senator, the Senate voted to reduce the number of votes required to end filibuster from 67 votes, a super majority, to the current 60 votes. Clearly, he states this was not enough. Filibuster threats and cloture votes blocked legislation nearly 100 times in the 111th Congress.

Mr. Mondale argues that essentially, these rules abrogate the Constitution which only requires a 67 vote majority for the approval of treaties, “in all other instances it must be assumed that the Constitution requires only a majority vote”. In other words, many of the Senate rules are unconstitutional and could be done away with on a simple majority procedural vote under Parliamentary rules. That was the “[nuclear option ” that was used as a threat by the Republicans to force the Democrats to capitulate when they were in the minority.

One more time from me:

I have said this a number of times, the filibuster as it is currently being used to obstruct the Senate is unconstitutional. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land and cannot be abrogated by the Senate merely making a rule. The Vice President presides over the Senate and has a duty to make rulings on order and procedure when the Senate is in session. The Constitution provides for “one-person-one-vote” and “majority rules”, there is no mention of “filibuster”.

It is amazingly simple:

  1. During debate, a Republican Senator engages in a standard obstruction tactic, such as a hold, actual filibuster, or proposing numerous, non-germane Amendments.

  2. The Vice President, as Presiding Officer, rules that Senator’s hold, filibuster or spurious amendments out of order.

  3. The Senator who holds the floor, and had attempted the hold (filibuster, or amendments), could then appeal the decision of the Presiding Officer to the Senate as a whole.

  4. A simple majority (51) can then vote to uphold the ruling of the Presiding Officer that the hold (filibuster or amendments) were out of order.

 

This mechanism is not without precedent:

In 1975 the filibuster issue was revived by post-Watergate Democrats frustrated in their efforts to enact popular reform legislation like campaign finance laws. Senator James Allen of Alabama, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate and a skillful parliamentary player, blocked them with a series of filibusters. Liberals were fed up with his delaying tactics. Senator Walter Mondale pushed a campaign to reduce the threshold from sixty-seven votes to a simple majority of fifty-one. In a parliamentary sleight of hand, the liberals broke Allen’s filibuster by a majority vote, thus evading the sixty-seven-vote rule. (Senate rules say you can’t change the rules without a cloture vote, but the Constitution says the Senate sets its own rules. As a practical matter, that means the majority can prevail whenever it decides to force the issue.) In 1975 the presiding officer during the debate, Vice President Rockefeller, first ruled with the liberals on a motion to declare Senator Allen out of order. When Allen appealed the “ruling of the chair” to the full Senate, the majority voted him down. Nervous Senate leaders, aware they were losing the precedent, offered a compromise. Henceforth, the cloture rule would require only sixty votes to stop a filibuster.

And what Jon said:

There is no legitimate reason for allowing the minority, the party which lost the recent election, to have a veto in the Senate. The founders never intended a Senate minority to have such awesome power over basic legislation. The Constitutions clear stated the few  very important issues that should require a super majority in the chamber, everything else was intended to be a simple majority vote.

The idea that without a filibuster a majority in the Senate is going to steamroll are system is laughable. A senate majority is already checked and balanced by the House, the President and the judiciary. If a party does manage to dominates multiple elections allowing them to full control, they should be able to enact the agenda they run on. That is how democracy are suppose to work.

The US Senate has always been the slow deliberative body, it was not the intent of the Founders that it become bogged down to a halt by the minority misusing a rule that is probably not even constitutional in the first place. Sen. Reid was far too trusting of the duplicitous Republican leadership at the start of the 112th congress when he accepted their “gentlemen’s agreement”, shutting down the reform proposed by Sens. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). The Republicans are not to be trusted.

I’m with Jon. It’s time the Senate ended the obstruction and put an end to Rule 22 altogether. Neither the Senate or the world will end and our elected officials will get back to governing.

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these featured articles-

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette