Posts Tagged ‘parliamentary procedure’
Sunday Morning Links!
* Somehow this one dropped out of the link post yesterday, but you know it hits all my buttons: Senate Parliamentarian Challenges Key Provisions of Health Bill.
* itshappening.gif. Democrats should be prepared to litigate pardons on every level, in advance. This is good too: Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes. We’re on the Brink of an Authoritarian Crisis. The Crisis Is Upon Us.
* Five poll numbers that should make Democrats uneasy. The fire next time. Signs of sanity from Chuck Schumer of all people, who’s been saying such things lately. 6 Months in, Is Trump’s America Living Up to Liberals’ Worst Fears? If Clinton Had Won.
* Connecticut mother facing deportation seeks sanctuary in local church.
* My Daughter Was Murdered in a Mass Shooting. Then I Was Ordered to Pay Her Killer’s Gun Dealer.
* The Millennials Are the American Earthquake.
* The year is 2525. All life on Earth is extinct. Jared Kushner has just submitted a final corrected SF-86.
* Presenting Anthony Scaramucci’s deleted tweets. Inside Hunt & Fish, where beauties trawl for sugar daddies. One last time. And of course.
* Why does DC Comics hate Superman? It’s bizarre.
* Game of Thrones’s Medieval Crap.
* Rhapsody for the Anthropocene.
* The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel. Against Academic Conferences. I’m a long-married introvert who doesn’t drink, so if they outlawed conferences I’d probably come out pretty far ahead of the game — but I will say that #notallconferences are like what Matthew describes here: when I give a talk at the specialist conferences I usually go to there’s usually at least 20-30 people in the audience at each panel. (Maybe not at the early morning slot, but…) If panels are being that poorly attended as a rule, it’s likely a problem with the organization of the conference itself. I know my career has benefited a lot from finding out early which conferences were the right ones for me to be attending, and all of the opportunities that have made my career what it is came out of them. So it’s tough for me to say they’re not worth doing.
* I Studied the Humanities, and Now…
* Is the person naming these colors of yarn okay?
* Mapped: the United States and Canada at the same latitudes as Europe.
* Cool world history visualization project at chronas.org.
* Adam Roberts previews what everyone says is the best European SF no one in America has ever heard of, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
* Die old and leave an incredible story.
* From this point of view Strange is perhaps the first postcolonial superhero, the first who taught the youth to ‘provincialise the West’, to paraphrase Dipresh Chakrabarty’s slogan.
* 29 minutes from New York to DC is a thing that is never going to happen.
* Chipotle Suffers Another Setback As Rats Fall From Restaurant Ceiling. Still, when you’re in the mood, Chipotle can really hit the spot.
* 7 Black Alt-History Projects That Would Be Better Than Confederate.
* 21 Today: The Rise of Speculative Fiction in Africa, year by year.
* Comic-Con seemed fun this year: Star Trek! Westworld! Stranger Things! Thor! Infinity War! Ready Player One! Ted Chiang! Flashpoint? Even Justice League looks reasonably competent. This seems… important for the sequel? And the dream of the 90s is alive in Captain Marvel.
* Lean in.
A Few Links for Monday Morning
Yes, it’s only been one day, but I’m trying to get back in the habit of doing these more regularly…
* Following up on yesterday’s bonus Hugo’s post: This Is What The 2015 Hugo Ballot Should Have Been. Notes from the WSFS business meeting (read alongside this description of what all the voting propositions were).
* Mindfulness on the academic job search. I was fully prepared to mock this based on the headline, but I was actually won over, and I won’t beat myself up for that.
* Now the Ransom Center has gotten Ishiguro’s archive, too.
* I’m not lawyer, but wouldn’t this be a pretty clear violation of employment law if Duke and UNC were traditional corporations?
* This is the most common job held by immigrants in each state.
* Jon Stewart’s post-Daily Show career is weird.
* Vulture interviews Tarantino.
So all the potential movies you’ve mentioned through the years — Killer Crow, The Vega Brothers, the Django/Zorrocrossover movie — those will probably never happen, right?
No. I don’t think I’m going to do Killer Crow anymore, but that’s the only one that could possibly be done.
Is Kill Bill 3 also off the table?
No, it’s not off the table, but we’ll see.
I’m bummed about Killer Crow, but I’ll always keep my Kill Bill 3 hope alive.
* And new from #BlackLivesMatter: Campaign zero.
Tuesday Night Politics
* I think the Obama administration may have finally found its answer to the Great Society and the New Deal: The Big Fucking Deal.
* A Gallup poll shows an immediate bump in popularity for health care now that it is law. Nate Silver considers whether the bounce will hold. The GOP is already pulling back from “repeal” talk, though they are still using dickish parliamentary procedure to try to obstruct any action in the Senate.
* Without dickish parliamentary procedure at their disposal, right-wing activists are reduced to throwing bricks through windows.
* A great post at Daily Kos analyzes how Fox News does it work: Anatomy of Fox’s Reality Distortion Field.
* Related: science proves Republicans believe weird things.
* Another poll shows independents may already be turning against Republicans again.
* The idea that “national greatness liberalism” is something new that Obama has cooked up in response to a crank like Charles Krauthammer is just totally incorrect. This has been his favored rhetoric since he first rose to prominence at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. And it was quite literally the foundation for his 2008 campaign: just listen to the first words of “Yes We Can.” It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation… Or his Nobel speech. Or any other speech you’ve ever heard him make ever.
* And Rachel Maddow for Senate? I know she’s not actually running—but yes please.
All Health Care All the Time
* The chart at right is from the L.A. Times.
* White House talking points on the “immediate impact” of the bill.
* I am a self-employed single mother. I cannot afford health care for myself and my children. I made $38,000 last year and I expect to make less than $35,000 this year.What does this health care reform mean for me? Will I be able to get coverage for my children and myself in this first year?
* The Republicans’ next move? Parliamentary nonsense. Via Kevin Drum, who wrote:
This is mind-bogglingly convoluted. It means that anything that ever had even the smallest and most roundabout effect on wages would be ineligible for reconciliation. Using logic like this, I doubt that any budget bill ever passed has met reconciliation rules.
* What if reconciliation fails?
* As noted in the comments, McCain has vowed obstruction today, obstruction tomorrow, obstruction forever.
* With repealing health reform the right-wing fetish point of the day, it’s worth observing that it’s literally not possible for Republicans to win enough Senate seats in 2010 to pass anything over Barack Obama’s veto.
* Bad health care predictions.
* More Pelosi triumphantalism.
And let’s also note that while health care reform was the biggest lift, Pelosi has also passed an economic recovery package, a Wall Street reform bill, student loan reform (twice), and cap-and-trade. All, by the way, in 14 months.
They tend to name buildings after leaders with records like these.
* From Ezra Klein: The Five Most Promising Cost Controls in the Health-Care Bill.
* And from the Firedoglake caucus: Six Big Flaws Need Fixing to Make New Law Meaningful Health Care Reform
Hypocritastic
Senate Republicans, last seen firing their parliamentarian for ruling the wrong way, are concerned the post may have become politicized.
UPDATE: Oh, and I didn’t even know the half of it: they’re the guys who hired this parliamentarian in the first place, as the replacement for the one they fired.
Gerry Canavan 
