This Modern World

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Conniving and Sinister

From Shakesville:

Daily Humor

Stewart parodies Becks' paranoid conspiracy charts, Nazi rhetoric:

National Politics Round-up

This is our regular feature where every day I do a post with the top 5 Florida political blog posts about national stories. They are ranked according to quality, importance of the story and relevance to the present.

1. Brian Winfield - Justice for Ryan and Something More: "A jury convicted one of Ryan Skipper’s two killers of first-degree murder just hours ago. It’s all over the evening news. My how times change. Today was the second of two trials, both resulting in a life sentence for each of Ryan’s killers. Three young Florida men whose lives are ended in one way or another. There is no joy, no celebration, no closure, but there was justice and that’s something."

2. Reid Report - Meanwhile, a lesson for Democrats: "Bottom line: the base didn’t come out for the Dems yesterday, in Virginia in part because the candidate, Creigh Deeds, was such an incompetent, he ran away from Barack Obama rather than toward him (Obama has a 52 percent approval rating among those who voted in Virginia according to exit polls, and 57 percent in New Jersey. Sorry, RedState…) In New Jersey, there was simply no rallying the troops for a former Wall Streeter who was as unpopular as he was unpleasant."

3. Blast Off! - Clarence Thomas: oral arguments are pointless: "I guess it's not surprising when a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who hasn't asked a question of a lawyer in oral arguments since 2006 says that he doesn't see a reason even to have oral arguments. But as a lawyer, I find it a little distressing to hear it said so plainly."

4. Pushing Rope - Max Baucus Facing His Public Option Moment: "Sen. Max Baucus has reiterated he supports the public option. In the Senate Finance Committee, Baucus said he voted against Sen. Chuck Schumer's public option amendment because there wasn't enough votes in the Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid believes there are 60 votes to stop a Republican filibuster of the public option. Reid would only need 51 votes to pass a public option health care bill. ABC News reports Baucus got wind of Reid's plan and went ballistic."

5. Reid Report - Snowe job: is President Obama putting ‘bipartisanship’ before principle?: "It’s not clear whether the 'bipartisanship above all' strategy is coming from Rahm Emanuel, who is essentially on record as wanting something –anything — for the president to sign, regardless of what’s actually in the bill — or whether the fecklessness is coming from higher up the food chain, including from the president himself."

Conniving and Sinister

From Shakesville:

Right-Wing TrollWatch, Part 1

From the comments in my FoxLand post from last week, Rex has this to say:

Logic 1 invalidates nothing. The fact that they can’t do anything with a super-majority is THEIR OWN FAULT. Saying there’s too many moderates and Republicans is simply an excuse.

This one comes out of a very basic misunderstanding that you can only buy into if you ignore all reality. Lots of people operate under the basic belief that Republican = conservative, Democrat = liberal. This is not true. It has never been true. Conservatives have been trying really, really hard to make the first half of that true in the last few years, but no one is really trying to make that happen on the Democratic side. Democrats have a supermajority, liberals do not. The public option (which is the root of this conversation's beginning) is a liberal policy. In the house that is based on democratic principles (direct election of the people based on population), there are more than enough liberals to get the policy passed. In the other house, the one based on states and not based on democratic principles, liberals still have a majority, but they are far from having a supermajority. In a straight up-or-down vote, it would pass. But Republicans, conservative Dems like Joe Lieberman and the Blue Dogs have enough votes to filibuster the bill, that is beat it with a minority. Seems to me it wasn't that long ago that up-or-down votes were a good thing. Now, conservatives hate them. Hypocrisy much?

So, here in the real world, saying that a bill can't be passed because there aren't enough votes for it isn't an excuse. Even if it were an excuse, it'd be a quite legitimate one based on what's really happening. If a public option doesn't pass, it'll be because conservatives, a minority, used a archaic rule to stop it.

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