As someone who makes most of their money currently gambling, I would like to point something out in this rather brief diary.
Everyone is Reid's top fan right now, and I am no different. I am thrilled to have a leader willing to take chances and mix it up. Reid is gambling though make no mistake. He is not guaranteed to win at all.
Much like the judge compromise we all cheered about Frist rejecting, Reid is making another gamble by asking for a vote on the filibuster. I think its a good, ballsy move like everyone else. However, it CAN go badly, and it very well might, such is the nature of a gamble. Please, if/when Reid inevitably loses a round, remember your opinion of his ballsiness before your hindsight becomes 20/20. I have a feeling many of Reid's fairweather fans will quickly move to crucify him, if the tide turns against him. please dont be one of them. If it was impossible to lose a gamble, it would be called something different.
I received my first piece of hate mail. man, i feel special. I decided to highlight the ignorance with a diary. Here's my reply, to the dumbass. I think his emotions in the letter are representative of conservative, populist, American fascism.
The final vote in the Senate mattered. Votes matter. While the vote for cloture was the last realistic chance to stop the bill, the final vote was not an exercise in nothingness. Armando cites the figure that 1.3 million file bankruptcy per year. He then says that these bankruptcies affect 3.5 million people each year. Seeing that 3.5 million is only a touch more than 1% of the population, Armando goes on to argue that it doesn't matter. No one cares about bankruptcy, and no one will remember. People will remember, but more importantly, they will learn.
The president wants to lower the maximum subsidies that can be collected each year by any one farm operation from $360,000 to $250,000. He also asked Congress to cut by 5 percent all farm payments, and he wants to close loopholes that enable some growers to annually collect millions of dollars in subsidies.
After looking at the votes on the Bankruptcy reform bill alongside the charts for political donations from credit card companies, a few clear patterns emerged. The Senators, who abandoned the party to vote for this monstrosity, were on the take.
Republicans appear to be side-stepping the filibuster in Congress:
After years of watching Democrats block President Bush's plan to allow oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, Senate Republicans say they are planning a legislative maneuver to push it through that would avoid the threat of filibusters, which have killed the measure in the past.
"Thousands in the vast crowds waved Lebanese flags, as called for by the head of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who made a surprise appearance and reiterated his opposition to a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate pullout by Syria and Hezbollah's disarmament."
The Bush 'democracy at gunpoint' policy racked up another defeat today in Syria. Instead of ourse, our P.R. fiend of a president stuck his finger the pie and screwed it all up.
In an earlier stage of my political evolution, I was under the impression that Democrats and Republicans were just two sides of the same coin. People became attached to a political parties, for the same reasons they become attached to their hometown team. Parties both have different constituencies, but they both are fundamentally trying to make the country a better place just in different ways and with different opinions. I now disagree. This diary is not a rant or a "reasons I'm a democrat" post (which i have written elsewhere, not to disparage those). I firmly belive, wait, make that have concluded that the political situation in this country is not a push-and-pull between two evenly-matched tug of war teams.
Greenspan goes before Congress alot a witness before committees. His opinions are generally respected as unbiased in the media. He didn't really make a point of repeating ANY of his negative points on Social Security Privitization during his recent tlaks with Congress. When Clinton is proposing add-ons that would fund Social Security without carving it out of the fed chief goes back into the arsenal to whip out all the negatives he can. He has been strangely silent this time around.
Greenspan is a famed figure in the objectivist movement. That's gross in case you didn't know.
To describe him as a partisan hack would be far too kind. In reality, he is an objectivist hack. Objectivism is so far out on the fringes of libertarianism that it scares most rational, empathetic people. (Empathy is a four-letter word in objectivism.)
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the Ten Commandments cases yesterday. I do not understand the hysteria that accompanies the cases for from both sides.
After watching hometown (anti)hero, Bill Frist, wax poetic about the constitutional perogative to give judges an 'up or down' vote, I decided to look up some history on the Republicans role in the judicial nominee disputes of the 90's.
It is true that after 220 years of history in this country in the last Congress for the first time in history a judicial nominee came from the president to our body and we denied them, we denied them because of the use of filibuster in up or down vote for the first time ever and it didn't happen one time, it happened two, three, four, five, six, seven; it was a tool that's unacceptable and inconsistent with that advice and consent clause of the Constitution.
In the fine history of U.S. 'big stick' foreign policy, it looks like the insurgency may finally wind down. While we won't have defeated them, we may have succeeded in getting them to stop terrorizing Iraqis.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden recently asked his chief ally in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to consider the territory of the United States as a target for terrorist attacks, a U.S. counterterrorism official said on Monday.
WASHINGTON - Sen. Rick Santorum, the conservative from Pennsylvania who ranks third in the Senate Republican leadership, said Sunday that he is willing to discuss increasing the Social Security tax rate as a way of helping to assure the program's solvency.
Santorum said on NBC's Meet the Press that raising the Social Security payroll tax might be the price Republicans have to pay for Democrats' support for diverting some of the tax revenue to private retirement accounts, as President Bush has proposed.
Senator Santorum outlined a load of crap for his social security compromise. Most of you have probably heard the financial expression that "there's no free lunch." Hopefully most of you also believe it, because unless you are George Soros or Eddie Lampert there is no such thing. Mr Santorum, however, disagrees. Does his $2,000 per child per year annuity really turn into $1,000,000 at the end of the rainbow? Get your head out of your own santorum, Mr. Santorum.
This diary attempts to explain how terrorism can be successful. Terrorists commit atrocities in search of a reaction. Lucky for them, the American Right rarely hesitates to grant their wishes.
