Posts Tagged ‘House of Representatives’
Wednesday!
* Matt Taibbi: The People vs. Goldman Sachs.
* Slavoj Žižek: Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic.
* Rand Paul has one of the best “freedom is slavery” riffs to come along in some time.
* Democrats retake edge in generic ballot. It’ll be interesting to see how the Democrats manage to squander the opportunity if they do retake the House.
* And Florida Republicans just accidentally outlawed sex. Nice work.
Ryanocracy
This rule change has immediate, far-reaching implications. It means that by voting to adopt the proposed new rules on January 5, a vote on which party discipline will be strictly enforced, the House could effectively be adopting a budget resolution and limits for appropriations bills that it has never even seen, much less debated and had an opportunity to amend. (There is no requirement for Representative Ryan to make his proposed spending and revenue limits available to Members or the public before the vote on the new rules.)…Once Rep. Ryan places in the Congressional Record discretionary funding limits set at the [2008] level, they will become binding on the House, and any attempt to provide funding levels that allow for less severe cuts will be out of order.
So apparently Paul Ryan runs the country now. Happy New Year. Via Benen.
Official 2010 Prediction Thread
As usually is the case with these things I’m taking a much more optimistic tack than is properly reasonable, but here goes:
* Democrats take at least 5/7 of PA, CO, IL, WA, WV, AK, and NV. This is basically running the table of what’s left to them, but I think they can do it due to GOTV advantage, cell phone effect, under-the-radar surges, etc. (Deep down I really think they take all 7, but I want to hedge the optimism at least a little.)
* Republicans take WI, KY, and of course my beloved NC (sigh).
If I’m reading the FiveThirtyEight average right that puts the Dems at -6 in the Senate, 53 Senators, safely outside the Lieberman/Nelson betrayal threshold.
I think the House is probably lost, but not by as much as the worst polls suggest: call it Republicans +40. Bring on the shutdown, bring on impeachment, bring on the end of all good things.
Select Links While I’m Away (Part 1)
* The team behind Logicomix explains structuralism.
* It really does look like health care will pass. The CBO score is good. The left is (mostly) happy again. The votes are (mostly) there. Insurance companies keep turning out to be totally terrible. Rahm is stretching for his totally undeserved victory lap. Alterman says Kucinich gets a victory lap too. Steve Benen thinks we all get one. Hooray!
* Obama Economic Team Outlook Presumes No Job Growth For All of 2010. Yes, we … oh, forget it.
* 1st Lt. Dan Choi arrested after chaining himself to the White House fence in DADT protest.
* Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness.
* A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Wow. More here.
* More March Madness: America’s Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tournament.
* NC-Sen: Richard “Dick” Burr still leads his opponents but remains under 50%. This is winnable.
* The Hobbit begins filming in June.
* Viacom is suing Google for hosting videos it uploaded to Google. (via and via) Related: When Wells Fargo sued itself.
* Please be advised Avatar is the work of the devil.
* Okay, fine, one more. That’s what Bea said.
3/16
* News that a Mississippi high school has canceled prom rather than allow a lesbian couple to attend has caused a “lesbian prom pictures” meme to ripple across the Internets.
* Inside Higher Ed has an article concerning (another) recent spate of suicides at Cornell.
* Saudi Arabia may not worry about Peak Oil, but they’re definitely nervous about Peak Demand.
* If David Brooks had a point, he might have a point. More from Taibbi and Chait.
* More Congressional procedure! Just because “deem and pass” happens all the time doesn’t mean it’s not tyranny when Nancy Pelosi does it. Ezra Klein is right when he says we should simplify Congressional procedure, but I think our friends in the GOP would be the first to tell us we can’t just unilaterally disarm.
* Avatar will be rereleased with an additional forty minutes à la Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, bringing its total running time to three days.
* But what the world needs most, of course, is another Battlestar Galactica sequel. I’ve fallen off watching Caprica, but from what I hear it’s at least good enough to Netflix—but I’m really not sure what’s left for a third series, except (perhaps) something pre-apocalpytic set on contemporary Earth using the BSG mythology as its starting point. Still, and it’s just a crazy idea: why not something new?
Saturday Night
* The House vote on the Senate bill should be this week, with the final reconciliation markup beginning on Monday. I consider myself fascinated by the self-executing legislative trick the Democrats may use to “consider the Senate bill passed” without actually having to take a vote on it.
* More on SAFRA, the student loan reform package that may get passed alongside health care.
* Here’s Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on the campaign to convince people, contrary to the facts, that everyone killed the public option.
* More from Chris Hayes, whose “The Breakdown” podcast is now a weekly listen, in Time: In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment…
* Howell Raines: One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration—a campaign without precedent in our modern political history? More on this at Crooks & Liars.
* And “a debacle for public education”: Steve Benen has your full report on history education, Texas-style.
* McCarthyism: History lessons must tell students that Joe McCarthy’s suspicions were later “confirmed.”
All right, that’s it, I give up.
Pass. The. Bill. You. Idiots.
Krugman to House Democrats: Do the right thing. Bonus points to Matt Yglesias, who writes of the equally terrible Senate:
I was in the Russell Building yesterday and kind of wanted to run around the halls grabbing Democratic staffers and yelling at them, like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, “You’re already dead! Everybody dies!”