Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

This blog will pay for itself.

He really is that stupid.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

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Slouching towards Sacramento

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Krugman and Kevin Drum both have pieces about the filibuster today. Drum on how to get the ball moving on filibuster-reform:

So what would it take to get people to care? One answer: a high-profile supporter. If Sarah Palin suddenly tweeted that the filibuster is a threat to democracy, for example, everyone would start talking about it. But who else is a plausible candidate for this? The president, of course, but he’s not going to. Anyone else?

Another answer: a popular, high-profile issue that gets blocked repeatedly by a 40-vote minority. Unfortunately, genuinely popular, high-profile issues generally don’t get filibustered. That’s why Supreme Court vacancies are filled pretty quickly but appellate court vacancies aren’t. So it’s not clear what issue would fit the bill here.

And a third answer: some kind of fabulously effective grass roots campaign. That seems pretty unlikely to me, though. Any other thoughts?

The filibustering of anything and everything is going to get worse, not better. Republicans are likely to break even or pick up seats in the Senate and they’re likely to attribute their gains elsewhere (the Senate is particularly unfavorable for them in terms of picking up seats, it’s almost a certainty that they’ll pick some seats in the House) to the power of teabagging.

Too many people outside California regard the California IOU disaster as some quaint thing that happened in a crazy part of the country. That crazy part of the country contains over 10% of the country’s population. If it can happen there, it can happen at the national level, not with IOUs per se, but with even more catastrophic results.

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Financial Reform

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How do we go about changing the way bonuses are paid amongst our bankster and financial betters? It seems to me one of the biggest problems is that the way their pay structure is set up, they are encouraged to do reckless crazy things in the short term to get insane bonuses, and then when the shit hits the fan, they can just jump ship and a bunch of people who had nothing to do with their decision making are left to pick up the pieces. Recently, that has been you and me.

Is there any way to curb this. Is there any way to structure bonuses based partially on the past performance, but paid out over a five year period, to take into account the future performance of the company. A huge tax rate on bonuses unless they are paid out over time? If the company does poorly because of your decisions the next couple of years, your bonus disappears. Ideally, wouldn’t we want these folks working more for salary than for bonuses?

Just throwing some thoughts out there.

And yes, I know this will cause all sorts of howls of socilaism and government control.

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Cloture Vote Open Thread

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The best part about a 1 am vote is that the average age of the Senate is about 132 years old, which means that they are all up about eight hours past when they are used to having a warm cup of milk and dreaming of Lawrence Welk reruns and the good old days before that rock and roll music and the internet tubes ruined everything, so their normally awful speaking style is worse than usual. Joy.

President McCain is speaking about majority will. Didn’t we see that last November?

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Fallows on the filibuster

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This should be interesting:

But somehow it isn’t familiar, in the sense of being part of general understanding and mainstream coverage of issues like the health reform bill. Talk shows analyze exactly how the Administration can get to 60 votes; they don’t discuss where the 60-vote practice came from and what it has done to public life. I have a gigantic article coming out soon in the Atlantic — long even by our standards! but interesting! — which concerns America’s ability to address big public problems, compared in particular with China’s. The increasing dysfunction of public institutions, notably the Senate, is a big part of this story.

As I think my article will make clear, this isn’t a partisan question — even though in any given administration it presents itself as one. (For the record, I support the health-care plan and am glad the Administration found the 60 votes.) Also for the record, as the chart below shows, the huge increase in threatened filibusters came from the Republican minority, after the Democrats took back the Senate in 2007. Since the time covered by this chart, the number of threatened (Republican) filibusters has shot up even more dramatically. Still, whoever is in control, this is a more basic and dangerous threat to the ability of any elected American government to address the big issues of its time. And the paralysis of working through the legislature is all the worse because of the contrast with modern presidents’ de facto ability to make war-and-peace decisions essentially on their own.

It will take a lot of work to reform the filibuster. Villagers will defend it to the death (there’s a natural kinship there, as the Senate is perhaps the one community in the world that is clubbier than the Village) and Republicans will have a slick set of talking points on the issue.

May I humbly suggest that the filibuster is a more worthwhile target for hippie rage than Obama is?

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Note To Our Progressive Masters

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Having been informed in the last few days that I am an O-bot, a cultist, and a Liebercrat by my progressive betters, I would like to note that if the hissy fits of the last week were, as I’ve been told, intended to shape the debate (I guess we all love 11 dimensional chess- hoocoodanode!) and you are going to throw similar amounts of outrage over financial reform, you might want to get started BEFORE the Senate has the bill for seven months.

Unless, of course, you would like to continue the winning strategy of prepping the battlefield with artillery after the battle is over, shooting into the backs of your fellow teammates, and then spend a few days on tv taking potshots at the President and Rahm Emanuel. Your call.

David Gregory sure loves the framing of the Health Care Reform as a total loss for Obama.

*** Update ***

Speaking of, whatever happened to the Audit the Fed/Grayson/Paul initiative?

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