It seems that it is now in vogue for folks on the left to attack the filibuster rules in the Senate as unconstitutional and blahblahblah. Personally, I love the filibuster. For those Dems that want to kill it, remember, we’ll be the minority party again someday.

What I don’t love about the filibuster is how it’s used by Harry Reid and, indirectly, President Obama. If they have a piece of legislation and cannot get 60 votes they don’t bring it to the floor. They negotiate and water it down and bribe enough moderates to get their 60 votes which, I think, in most cases leads to a dramatically sub-optimal legislative outcome. I don’t blame the Republicans, nor am I pissed at the Blue Dogs. If all I had to do was threaten a filibuster to kill a piece of legislation or to get myself on the pork train, I’d do it.

What’s maddening about Mr. Reid is, given his long tenure in the Senate, he knows filibusters are rare and they are extremely difficult to pull off. You have to get enough Senators willing to rotate 24/7 to keep it going long enough to get the other side to give up. It’s really, really hard to do.

Imagine a filibuster on the stimulus plan. Imagine enough Blue Dogs and Conservatives actively holding up legislation that would have a real, material, and immediate positive impact on their constituents. This isn’t quietly voting against something…it’s actively telling the people who voted for you to go suck wind. Imagine those folks on the fence who wouldn’t filibuster but for various reasons don’t want to vote for the stimulus getting hammered by consituents with real life horror stories of how the Great Recession was killing ‘em. What do you think the likelihood is that they’d vote for cloture? Quite high, I should think.

The problem isn’t the filibuster. The problem is that the mere threat of one forces all meaningful legislation to have a super-majority. That’s not a process or a structure problem…that’s a failure of leadership and courage by Reid and Obama.

No longer having a guaranteed 60 votes may well force them to force Republicans to make good on their filibuster threats. How would you like to be a Republican in an election year and be either directly guilty of or indirectly supportive of bringing legislation, like healthcare, that a majority of Americans want (according to pools, anyway) to a state of complete gridlock? I’m pretty sure the Dems could use that as one hell of a campaign issue. It’s time for Obama and Reid to take off the kid gloves and force the obstructionists to actually obstruct as opposed to theoretically obstruct. And let them live with the consequences.

Watching the dumber wingnuts scramble over the next few months to make their party trivial is gonna be kind of fun. The Tank doesn’t represent the majority of congressional Republicans but given that the party has no real leader at the moment, with the closest thing to one being Rush Limbaugh, you gotta figure that the boneheads among them are going to run wild. The Tank lives in a district where this kind of stupidity seems to play well. There are other representatives in that category. In improving their own chances in 2010 by issuing such absurdities they are going to drag the rest of their party down farther than they already have.

Good Times!

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was a major policy initiative of Herbert Hoover. Authored by Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Ore) was signed into law on June 17, 1930 by President Hoover, and was in fact the law of the land for almost 3 years before FDR was sworn in as president on March 4, 1933.

In 1976, during Gerald Ford’s last year in office, there was a Swine Flu scare leading from the death and hospitalization of several Army recruits at Fort Dix, New Jersey. President Ford ordered nationwide vaccinations beginning the following fall. However the innoculations led to serious health problems, and 30 deaths and were discontinued in December, 1976, roughly a month before Jimmy Carter took the oath of office.

For the record the Hoot-Smalley Tariffs are entirely fictional, and sound amazingly like something from an SNL skit featuring (Senator) Franken.

I will point out this quote from one of the West Coast organizers (from the AP…I seem to keep screwing up the link)…

“What is happening now is unfair,” said Alice Broich, who was organizing a protest in Palm Springs. “When you see mom and pop businesses going under and people losing their homes while these big businesses and CEOs are getting bailed out, it’s wrong.”

Apparently, to Ms. Broich, the people going out of business and losing homes are being taxed out…or something.

And, as proof of the wingers assertion that this is the beginning of a new grassroots Republican effort that will rival the Dems…

Several dozen people in Boston rallied, footage from CNN television showed.

That’s right, y’all. Several whole dozen. If that ain’t a groundswell then I don’t know what is.

Upon further research, something really, really cool happened there today.

Rock on, Iowa.

Signed into law:

Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act.

SCHIP

An 800bn Stimulus Bill

The FY 2009 Budget

Omnibus Public Lands Act (I’m a big fan of this one, protecting over 2 million acres of public land, and over 1,000 miles of rivers, and other waterways. Awesome!)

Executive Orders:

Opening Presidential Records.

Banning Torture

Closing Gitmo

Lifting the ban on stem cell research.

Presidential Memoranda, other actions.

Overturning the Mexico City Policy.

Fast-tracking fuel-economy standards to the 2011 model year.

I could go on. The complete list is found at Whitehouse.gov.

More progressive goodness has come from this man’s first 72 days in office than the previous 8 years. And he hasn’t been in the job for a full 3 months. I think all the hand wringing, consternation, doubt and concern are, at this point a little premature.

Let me be clear, I do have concerns. The Geithner-Summers duo have me concerned. They seem to be of the mindset that dragged our economy into this mess, and don’t quite appear to have any good ideas to get us out. Granted, the mess is so completely intractable, I don’t think anyone has all of the answers, but I’d at least like to see a Krugman or a Stiglitz at the table on this one.

I also fail to see how contracts with AIG are somehow infallible, yet contracts with UAW and other unions need to be revisited, revised, and reduced every time corporate America feels their profits being pinched. That seems to be a double-standard the Administration has embraced.

So far he’s accomplished a lot. The big fights are yet to come, and they will certainly take all of us keeping on him and Congress to get the job done right.

Enjoy

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.

”I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ”I wasn’t around during the 1930’s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980’s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ‘’seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.”

”Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,” Mr. Wellstone said. ”Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.”

Source: NY Times, 11.5.1999

Jack Welch, who is regarded as the father of the “shareholder value” movement that has dominated the corporate world for more than 20 years, has said it was “a dumb idea” for executives to focus so heavily on quarterly profits and share price gains.

and

Mr Welch last week said he never meant to suggest boosting a company’s share price should be the main goal of executives.

“It is a dumb idea,” he said. “The idea that shareholder value is a strategy is insane. It is the product of your combined efforts – from the management to the employees”.

Ooopsie Daisy, I guess.

But I can pimp it for him.

A great read.  Doubly so because I found while browsing the job listings.