This year’s Satan Sandwich moves down the conveyor belt. Per the Washington Post, industry paper for the company town where politics is their manufactured good:
The Senate approved a sweeping $1.1 trillion spending bill Saturday night to fund most of the federal government through the next fiscal year.
A small group of conservatives, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had sought to slow debate on the bill by raising concerns with Obama’s immigration policy, forcing a marathon weekend session. The move infuriated their colleagues, particularly Republicans who complained that forcing senators to stay in session produced nothing positive for the GOP and only helped Democrats in their bid to approve a final batch of Obama’s nominees for government posts.
For several hours Saturday, senators held procedural votes to begin the process of confirming dozens of Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships and top positions at the State Department and other agencies…
Prolonged debate on the spending bill came after Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) late Friday night derailed a carefully crafted plan between party leaders to allow senators to go home for the weekend and return Monday to approve the spending agreement. The pair had sought to force a vote that essentially would block federal agencies from implementing the immigration policy changes ordered by Obama last month.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) blocked their request and angrily clashed with them on the Senate floor, ensuring that debate on the spending bill would spill into Saturday.
Democrats said the setback was an especially embarrassing blow to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is slated to lead the chamber next year and has sought to complete unfinished business before GOP control begins. Confident that he had a deal with Reid, McConnell left the Capitol before 9:30 p.m. Friday, telling reporters as he stepped into an elevator: “See you Monday.”…
Republicans later consented to allowing up-or-down votes on 24 nominees, including Antony Blinken to serve as a deputy secretary of state and Vivek Murthy to serve as surgeon general. The votes are scheduled to begin Monday morning.
If the Senate had voted Monday on the spending bill under the original agreement, Reid would have had to wait until Monday evening to start processing nominees, and Democrats feared that as the holidays drew closer, more of their ranks would have left town before confirming all the nominees. But with Cruz and Lee’s actions, Democrats were able to accelerate the confirmation process and made it far more likely they could approve every contentious nominee that GOP senators had been blocking…
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called her colleagues’ tactics “unfortunate” and “counterproductive.”
“This reminds me very much of the shutdown last year, where the strategy made absolutely no sense,” she said, adding that until Saturday, liberals were being faulted for holding up the spending bill. “Now, I guess the blame will be shared,” she said…
The 1,603-page spending agreement will fund most of the federal government until the end of the fiscal year in September. But it funds the Department of Homeland Security only until the end of February, setting up a fight with the Obama administration in the coming weeks over the future of the nation’s immigration policy.
In addition to authorizing $1.1 trillion in federal spending, the bill includes restrictions on the District of Columbia as it attempts to legalize the possession of marijuana. The legislation also weakens some Wall Street regulations and loosens campaign donation limits so that wealthy couples could give three times the maximum to the national political parties…
Ugh ugh UGH. Speaking of small consolations, I guess we’ll have to settle for (further) embarrassing McConnell, and also giving Tailgunner Ted Cruz one more chance to make even the people who should be on his side hate him a little more.
Omnes Omnibus
It’s a shitty bill. Straight majority votes on nominees is a good thing. Even if this somehow is a net positive, I am not at all thrilled with it.
ThresherK
Frontier Comm, taking over for ATT in CT, is for crap. Our service has been active about t0 pct of the time they activated it.
That’s POTS, the simplest thing in the world. And everytime I call their dedicated line for CT POTS I get a fiber optic support person for the midwest.
Belafon
Democrats keep getting donations from a large number of small cash doners, therefore to balance it out, Republicans have to end up more in the pocket of a shrinking few. Just remember to ask your Republican “friends” why they like an oligarchy.
srv
Tailgunner Cruz, or the Cruz of the Democratic Party, Lizzie Borden Warren, the Cruz of the Democratic Party?
Lizzie, Witches, Romneys, Emoprogs… so many fucking crazies from Massachusetts.
@ThresherK: That’s what happens when you let liberals run your intertubes.
Violet
No matter what it is, it has to be better than anything that comes out of Congress for the next two years. Which are going to suck. I can only hope for dead boy/live girl issues for the Republicans. Maybe another long distance medical diagnosis situation. Or maybe some of them can be caught on audio/video talking about how old white people on Medicare and Socicial Security are a bunch of takers and we’d all be better off if they could just set them adrift on ice floes. Better yet if the conversation included Roger Ailes and some of the on-air personalities over at Fox.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv: You are repeating yourself. Have some pride for fuck’s sake.
Another Holocene Human
OT: so some collidge perfessor (push up the owl glasses) actually did a STUDY on the premise that intercollegiate sports are separate from academics finances or pay for themselves or whatever and found out (surprise, surprise) that only the top schools (and only some of those) are covering their sports programs costs without charging the fucking students for it. Most of the schools are hosing students with non-transparent fees that, also big surprise here, would be very unpopular with students if they knew what the fees were going to:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/who-actually-funds-college-football/
Even schools where there isn’t direct subsidization the sports are sucking up alumni dollars that could go to basic academic needs (like programs that were cut due to the recession) or shit like dorms or classroom buildings. For example UF has a huge donation thing going for the Gator football program but they gave up on building dorms years ago and the existing dorms, well, some of them lack air conditioning! So frosh are crammed into ancient hellspaces (global warming, what’s that?) or kids pay double to live off campus. #winning
Aannnnnd the state corruption cycle building boom on campus has mostly gone to research buildings where they can do research with state dollars for patents and therefore profits instead of for the good of science or humanity or some tripe like that. It’s not that they’ve built no classrooms in the last decade but seriously they’re short because of course they are.
Dunno what happened with their last building project (NW corner Univ/13th) like somebody fucked up because they hired masons, like real honest to god fucking masons (and paid them good money, costs good money to hire masons) whereas when they built Pugh Hall which houses the Samuel Proctor Oral History Project which is all like lefties and Black people they hired Charles Perry Construction* which likes to cheat on its taxes so it uses small crews of Hondurans aaaaaaand well the “roofers” that they hired couldn’t fucking tile a roof properly if their life depended on it. Good times.
*-alumnus, donor, beneficiary, the circle of life, oh did I mention most of the Florida Lege was in Florida Blue Key some fratty polisci club at UF**? well, they are. so is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz but that wouldn’t seem so relevant until you look into her, um, checkered history vis a vis other Democrats in Florida
**-student senate is completely controlled by frat/sorority block voting, the last few insurgencies failed and no telling if there will be another since they’ve made it very tough for poor kids to attend … you can get in but you can’t afford it.
RobertDSC (PowerMac G5 Dual)
A real live Surgeon General? Perish the thought!
Perhaps he can recommend destruction of the Republican Party as they have becmoe hazardous to the nation’s health.
Another Holocene Human
Jeez, that sounded nutty. I need to have a beer and a smile and sit down. Anyway, so like them thar football teams cost money and surprise it is coming out of students’ pockets. No shocker but now there is proof. See linkie above. ^^
Another Holocene Human
@Belafon: Döner is delicious.
srv
@Omnes Omnibus: Dead threads tell no tales.
Except a lot of them end up on the FP the next day. Unvalued. Go figure.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Some of us went to D-III schools where people participated in sports simply because we enjoyed them.
ThresherK
Now the blame will be shared, Susan Cillins?
Yeah, fuck her.
srv
@ThresherK: Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, all the same to real Americans.
Where did Canadian Anchor Baby Cruz actually cross the border?
Oh, that other state. Now you know the rest of the story.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Mmmm.. Doner kebab…
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman: Probably maligned by corporate lobbyists because now citizen lobbyists can respond more quickly than they could in the days of newsletters and email blasts that told you to fax something in, or fax blasts that urged you to call….
Haven’t seen any hand wringing here but the Cromnibus (sounds Michelle Malkiny but all the MSM is calling it that so in for a penny–) looks to definitely include delaying implementation of the DOT’s new, stricter, but somewhat flawed hours of service regulations.
Two problems: first, the regulations totally fuck crew drivers for no good reason that I can figure out
Secondly, the regulations over-emphasis a solid 8 hr sleep block even though RR regs have done 4 and 4 for years very successfully, and they overemphasis a diurnal cycle ignoring the reality that our roads are used by a lot of users and it may be safer to drive OTR in the wee hours (as long as you are successfully sleeping during the day) than to drive in daylight hours with the, oh how shall we say, non commercial drivers
The BAD thing is that if they delay the implementation we’re back to the relaxed regs that were implemented when they went to electronic log books, and there will be more fatal crashes, no if’s and’s or buts.
It may be that the perfect has become the enemy of the good, IOW USDOT regulators loved the 1-5am blackout “in a perfect world” but that screws drivers in the real world, while exploitative trucking companies want that 84 hour week, it’s not that drivers are doing 84 hours but they may be doing days and nights in a single week on an 84 and that is VERY dangerous, but, hey, the load got delivered on time and that’s what capitalist Jesus wants! Also, some drivers are too doing too many hours and the trucking industry reps calling that “hysteria” are lying through their fucking teeth and oh by the way fuck them, also, too, fuck. them.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: I didn’t go to UF, I just can’t escape it.
I think my school was DIII too if it was any division at all. That is, we had hockey and soccer but actually no football team. I was very okay with that.
ETA: yup DIII but they did have tryouts you couldn’t be like sorta good or yah I played travel league, however we did indeed have intramural pickup sports as well
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Christ, you type a lot. Do you ever consider that people go all tl;dr on you on occasion?
srv
@efgoldman: Well, the only important thing is if I have another Federal Judge in the family.
Alas, you have to give up one to get one. Even judges miss the small print sometimes…
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: D-III means you can’t give athletic scholarships. It changes thiing a lot. The student-athletes need to be students. And at the the D-III level, most people play because they like to. There is no money in it.
Amir Khalid
@Another Holocene Human:
Does not compute.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid: Dude, work with us. I am trying to explain to AHH that there are institutions of higher learning exist that do not act as conveyor belts to professional athletics. There are places where sports are undertaken because they are believed to have intrinsic value.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
LOL. I’ve gone tl;dr for a week or two and counting.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: At the D-III level, no one will be a pro. People play because they want to do it. I played rugby. My team did damned well (I even did some cool individual shit) but no one cares.
Mike J
Is this why Boehner is orange?
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I played rugby; believe me no one cares. It doesn’t matter.
ETA: At the collegiate level in the US the only people who care about rugby results are the players and their girl/boyfriends.
Redshift
@srv:
Uh-huh. Confirmation bias is impressive – a single anonymous quote from a “Democratic staffer” and you take it as gospel. Are Democrats not allowed to oppose anything supported by the leadership without becoming wild-eyed radicals, or do you get to magically choose which bills cause that?
srv
God Bless Montana
Amir Khalid
@Omnes Omnibus:
Which is, indeed, the prevailing ethos of university sports everywhere outside the US.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amir Khalid: I disagree. It is the ethos of a certain type of Anglo-American university. Continental European universities are different.
BillinGlendaleCA
Snow in Glendale(every day @ 7 and 8)
srv
@Redshift: “Consider, just a few examples…”
I don’t know how you spell out Obama is Citigroup’s Biotch, but perhaps you should watch this out-of-control Senator.
You people need to pick a messiah.
jl
So, meet the New McConnell, same as the Old Boehner?
Maybe we can hope that the GOP wingnut crazies in the Senate are so out of control that with the (now, sadly and widely accepted) 60 vote hurdle to get anything done, the Senate will be in total gridlock and the GOP Congress will be able to do absolutely nothing.
@BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks, that’s cute. I hope you get just enough to make a teeny tiny snowperson! If it a snowflake ever drops in the lowlands of the SF Bay Area, I promise to post a pic, if I can get one.
jl
I have no clue what srv is trying to say.
MomSense
The Cromnibus stinks but I’ve got bigger problems. I think the 11 year old’s hormones kicked in all of a sudden. We went from sweet “Yeah sure Mommy” to growling and arguing about evey little thing. Oh and the BO arrived with the attitude.
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Ha, it’s at our local fancy outdoor mall, they turn on snow machines for about 10 minutes at 7pm and 8pm and play White Christmas and Let it Snow… I does look quite nice. I’m trying to get a pic of their 100ft. Christmas tree with the snow, so far I’m not happy with the results.
BillinGlendaleCA
@MomSense: Maybe we should have FEMA camps instead of Junior High School.
MomSense
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Or for the parents.
BillinGlendaleCA
@MomSense: As long as there’s a well stocked bar.
SWMBO
@BillinGlendaleCA: I have several relatives who teach in middle schools across the country. They all think the kids this age should be put in (FEMA) camps and just throw food and water in over the fence. They tell you they aren’t really learning anything academic and it’s a waste of time and money trying to. When they get to freshman high school age, they may have had some sense knocked into them and they might listen. The middle school years are a desert.
Joseph Nobles
I was watching the “angry clash” between Cruz, Lee, and Reid. My take on Reid was not anger, but the cat sipping on the cream.
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yes, I spent some time at that mall when i lived down there. I don’t remember snow machines, but don’t remember if I hung around there during Holidays. Enjoy the snow, if you can get there while it lasts.
MomSense
@BillinGlendaleCA:
And a laundry service.
GregB
Is CRomnibus a cross between a croissant and an omnibus?
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: You time down here must be more recent than I thought. My cave is only a few blocks from the mall and my nightly walk generally goes though the malls(I might not do this on holiday weekends). This is the first year I’ve heard about the snow, they send us flyers since they have fireworks and warn the neighbors.
Anne Laurie
@MomSense:
Why I chose to live with dogs rather than kids! Just be grateful you don’t have to prevent him from literally peeing in every corner (I hope).
IIRC, the ‘Tiny Twin Vampires’ incident I mentioned in the last thread happened when my brothers were 14-1/2 and almost-13. Big enough to do each other serious damage, not old enough to inhibit those impulses…
Mnemosyne
We drove two hours to Solvang to get some California Christmas and it was all very meh. A few cheesy wooden decorations and that was about it. Feh. We should have gone to the Americana like Bill did instead.
We did also take a driving detour through Los Olivos and will probably wander up there the next time we do a weekend in Santa Barbara. And Santa Barbara had some decent decorations on State Street, so I at least felt like I got some municipal decoration satisfaction out of the trip.
Xenos
@Amir Khalid: In terms of financial costs and social externalities, it makes all the difference in the world.
Imagine a giant frat house which sucks a huge amount of money out of a university, causes brain damage to its members and then gives many of them a direct ticket to Wall Street. That is a fair description of the Harvard football team. Replace Wall Street with regional business communities and elites and you have described many other elite universities and colleges.
Then there are the big univeristy programs in American Football that coddle and then exploit their players like so much livestock.
I appreciate why so many people love the sport, but it really is a menace in the end.
Football-football has its issues, but at least it is relatively safe to play.
The Raven on the Hill
I think Ted Cruz is bucking for Senate Majority leader. If he doesn’t get it, he’s going to keep dragging the Senate around. Be interesting to see how that works out. And my own Democratic Senator, Patricia Murray, voted for this thing. I remember when she made the deal with with Rand Paul that cut the unemployment extension on the birthday of someone close to me who needed it. I wish she’d just become a Republican, so we could vote her out already.
NotMax
Another day, another outrage. It’s become endemic.
SRW1
@Amir Khalid:
I have kind of taken to the classification of one being the ‘handegg’ version to keep things clear.
Also, too: You cranky about Basel kicking Liverpool out of the CL? I don’t particularly like Luis Suarez, but in retrospect one does have to admit that his presence in the Liverpool team covered up a lot of cracks there.
Cervantes
@Xenos:
Stark.
Look here for a glimpse of how the athletes see it.
It is.
ThresherK
@srv: Really, little shite, try better. (If you have better.)
ThresherK
@srv: That all you got?
Xenos
@Cervantes: I went to a DIII school with a similar pipeline to Wall Street, and I am exaggerating the brain damage part. As someone who played tight-head prop on the rugby team I am really not someone in a position to make fun of football players.
I had a number of friends on the football team and they had a great experience, in part because everybody on campus was expected to be doing a sport of some kind every day and their coaches put the players’ education first. So scheduling conflicts like at Harvard did not happen.
As great as that program was, it really was and is exceptional and it not even a good model for the rest of the country. Intensive practice such as needed to perform at DI level is just not compatible with human health and well-being, and Universities should not accept that.
As far as Wall Street is concerned, my schoool managed to get one alum in the very center of the mortgage-backed securities scandal at Golden Slacks, but he was from the hockey team. And I don’t think he should be ashamed of the role he played, either , but that goes into way too much inside baseball.
SRW1
@ThresherK:
To continue receiving his/her creations that occasionally hit the bullseye, it should probably be kept on the down low, but in the interest of your blood pressure I’ll let it slip, just between the two of us, that his/her apparent awfulness you responded to has all the markings of a parody troll.
Hunter
@Omnes Omnibus: For a look at just how shitty it is, see this article by David Dayen at Fiscal Times.
Josie
@MomSense: Bless you, my child (makes sign of cross). Hopefully this is your youngest and you can repeat over and over to yourself, “Well, I won’t have to do this again.”
tybee
@GregB:
cromnes cromnibus
Josie
@SWMBO: I was a middle school librarian for 28 years. It takes a thick skin and a good sense of humor, but it can be entertaining. I had a mother in a conference once that told me she thought we should have dormitories and keep the kids day and night. She was absolutely serious.
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne:
Was hoping the Solvang trip would be more special. I’d like to spend some more time there.
Now look forward to seeing snow in Glendale one of these years! Remembering the Los Olivos tip too; never been there.
I shall move back to California within the next few years. It’s my hope. Love it out there.
Violet
@SWMBO: Wow. I learned things in middle school. I remember several very good teachers and, even though it’s been quite a few years, I remember quite a few things we studied and I learned. Maybe I was just a nerd.
In general, I think the separation of kids into schools by age groups is stupid and not all that productive. The rest of society isn’t separated by age like that. I wish we had more schools that had a wider range of ages, which would allow older kids to teach/mentor younger kids. You learn a whole lot when teaching someone else. I think the way our schools are set up is often counterproductive to learning and more about getting kids to sit down and shut up.
BubbaDave
@Josie:
My mom used to say that we needed a British boarding school system, where you pack the little
bast-tykes off when they’re young and get back relatively civilized adults. “We keep them around for the worst years and then just when it becomes possible to have a conversation we ship them off.”Patricia Kayden
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m trying to figure out what Democrats got out of it. They have no backbone so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Comrade Dread
I do think it’s telling that the Washington Post is entirely focused on the ‘who won, who lost, and who won’t be invited to Mitch’s Christmas Party” aspect of this story. The whole thing is a fucking High School drama to them, and not a sign that corporations have the best government that money can buy.
God damn them all. Okay, maybe not forever, maybe just God damn them until they all realize the pain their actions and this shitshow have caused other people… which might be forever.
Patricia Kayden
@Hunter: Wow. Nightmarish.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Patricia Kayden: Kevin Drum quoting Jim Moran from a couple of days ago:
It’s not perfect, and it’s got some bad provisions, but it’s not end-of-the-world horrible and could have been much worse. The FY16 is likely to be much worse unless the Democrats in the Senate find a way to prevent it.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Patricia Kayden
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Okay. I’ll take your word for it. You’re right that we can expect worse over the next couple of years. Sigh.
Steeplejack
@SWMBO:
When I was in Las Vegas in September I went with my teacher friend to pick up something from her seventh-grade classroom on a Sunday. The room smelled faintly odd, musky.
I asked her, “What’s that smell? Do you burn incense in here?”
“That’s B.O. and Ax.”
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Dead thread but SmartyPants has a good post on the bankster provision.
(via a comment at BooManTribune.)
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.