The filibuster is, of course, very important, because only the Senate confirms judicial and executive appointments. The GOP's hold of the House blocks most of the worst legislation, but for appointments, we need the filibuster to stop the worst of Obama's nominees.

Harry Reid is thinking of the next 40 years. He hasn't delivered for liberals all that much, but he certainly could pay them off big time if he stacked the court with left wingers. And he'll get that chance, alas.

The GOP's counter to this is to simply stop all business and freeze the government.

Here’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is considering: banning filibusters used to prevent debate from even starting and House-Senate conference committees from ever meeting. He also may make filibusters become actual filibusters — to force senators to carry out the nonstop, talkathon sessions.

Republicans are threatening even greater retaliation if Reid uses a move rarely used by Senate majorities: changing the chamberÂ’s precedent by 51 votes, rather than the usual 67 votes it takes to overhaul the rules.

“I think the backlash will be severe,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the conservative firebrand, said sternly. “If you take away minority rights, which is what you’re doing because you’re an ineffective leader, you’ll destroy the place. And if you destroy the place, we’ll do what we have to do to fight back.”

“It will shut down the Senate,” the incoming Senate GOP whip, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, told POLITICO. “It’s such an abuse of power.”

I don't believe the GOP would shut down anything. We have orgasms, but they have wargasms.

Posted by: Ace at 09:08 AM | Comments (208)
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Slublog sent this in, wondering why we should even bother with these nitwits called "Americans."

But the numbers here -- 45% would blame the GOP more, 34% would blame Obama more -- are mostly reflective of the general base of both parties. Among all adults, I mean, not just voters or likely voters.

It is frustrating being a political minority. There's no getting around that.

Meanwhile, while the idiot public plans on blaming the GOP, the Democrats are actually plotting to take us over the cliff. And then blaming the GOP, of course.

A growing bloc of emboldened liberals say theyÂ’re not afraid to watch defense spending get gouged and taxes go up on every American if a budget deal doesnÂ’t satisfy their priorities. Â…

Bolstering the Democrats’ strategy is the belief that the “fiscal cliff” is actually shaped more like a “slope” where the economic effects will be felt gradually, not immediately. That theory gives Congress some time at the beginning of 2013 to set tax rates and configure budget cuts in a different political environment and with a new class of lawmakers.

The Democrats couldn't pass these tax hikes affirmatively, of course. They are only occurring because Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (and the late Arlen Specter) demanded that the Bush tax cuts be sunsetted, with a date certain of expiration. This date was later pushed back but the expiration remained intact.

And yet spending plans are never sunsetted. That just goes on and on, infinitely.

Let me put it in Oliver Stone terms: Our tax cuts are orgasms. Their spending plans are wargasms.

I think that explains it.

Posted by: Ace at 08:11 AM | Comments (269)
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Happy Monday.

On Friday, while almost nobody was around to see it and object, the cowards of the WaPo editorial board played the race card to the max. Not only did they lack the stones to do this on a day when people actually read the paper, but they decided that they couldn't really call opposition to Amb. Rice racist, so they added a question mark to soften the accusation. And, of course, because it was written by "the editorial board," no one had to sign their own name to this garbage. Convenient.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:58 AM | Comments (124)
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Over the holiday weekend, the Daily Caller published a piece on Team Romney's failed Project Orca that can only be described as odd. Well, it can also be described as "late", "incorrect" and "pointless", or, as the cobs refer to it, #DCBreaking (where DC stands for Daily Caller).

Since the piece was also typical of the DC's practice of chumming for hits by being ridiculous, I won't link it, but you'd need a bigger boat (SWIDT) to fit all the errors and strawmen in.

The central point of the piece appears to be that the failure of Project Orca has been seized upon as the reason Romney lost the election. But has anyone really made this claim? The piece was devoid of any links, and we certainly didn't make it here.

So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

We focused from the very beginning on Project Orca itself being a waste of financial and human resources as well as a nonsensical centralization of a task that had been done successfully for decades at the local level.

Put more simply: if Orca was mission critical, it should've been done right, and if it wasn't mission critical, it shouldn't have been done at all. I'm in the latter camp.

But the Orca debacle was also emblematic of a campaign that had serious problems that went beyond the candidate. The root cause was pretty well identified in the Pat F'n Caddell piece RD put in the sidebar this weekend.

“No presidential campaign should be run by consultants,” Caddell said. “They should be run by people who are committed to the candidate and not into making big money.”

See also: Newt (from 2007).

I think Republican consultants are mostly very stupid. I think they have no education. I think they have no sense of history. ... If I throw away African Americans, and then I throw away Latinos, and then I throw away suburban women, and then I throw away people under 40, and then I throw away everything north of Philadelphia -- there's a morning where Republicans can't get to a majority.

Spot on.

We've reached the point where campaign consultants have placed themselves so at odds with the goal of actually winning elections that losing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's no better example of the consultant mindset, IMO, than this statement from Team Orca:

The disturbing pivot on the call was when it was turned over to Rick Beeson, political director, and Zach Moffatt, the campaign's digital director [sic]. They were totally unlike the assessment given by Rhodes and Newhouse. It was at this point the call turned into a furious spin-cycle. We were assaulted with a litany of "metrics":

• we knocked on 14 million doors


• we had over 40 million voter contacts


• we hit all our targets


• we had X amount more contacts than 2008


• we had Y amount more contacts than 2004


• Obama had 6 years to run, we only had 6 months


• we had to hire over 100 staffers in only 60 days


• the staff we had is now available to run campaign across the country


• ORCA had problems, but we now know the exact time people voted, that can be used for future campaigns (emphasis added)

Got that? We lost the big game but our quarterback threw for 300 yards and we converted 85% of our 3rd downs. Who. The hell. Cares? (Bonus video commentary below the fold)

But the boldfaced points are the kicker. We can use the staff and data for future campaigns? What are we running here, a jobs training program? An IT consulting firm?

I want people working for our nominee who treat the race like it's the last campaign ever and the future of the Republic is at stake. People who focus on building their little empires for future campaigns clearly have incentives that are misaligned with the task at hand.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have built a huge technological advantage that, at the very least, will allow them to make more efficient use future campaign contributions. And we have ... Beeson, Moffatt and Orca. That's just swell.

Patrick Ruffini had some good ideas on how to address these problems in a piece at The Atlantic that was followed up on the Coffee and Markets podcast.

The 2012 election should be a wake-up call for those who raise and spend money for the Republican Party.

All too often, how we run campaigns has been untethered from scientific rigor, and without any real-time certainty whether something is working or not. Aggressiveness is praised, and hard-hitting TV ads have come to be seen as the sine qua non of an aggressive campaign. Thanks to this worldview, billions were poured into presidential and down-ballot television advertisements out of a conviction that these ads would move numbers.

Ruffini makes the point in the podcast that the GOP data operation needed to make us competitive in 2016 should be built outside of any campaign and outside of the RNC. Thanks to Team Orca, whoever takes on this monumental task has a bigger hill to climb, but they'd better get on it.

Democrats push to redeploy ObamaÂ’s voter database

Democratic super PACs get jump on 2014, 2016 more...

Posted by: andy at 07:38 AM | Comments (193)
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Turkey: It's what's for dinner the next 4.62 nights.

Does Too Much Education Make People Economically Dumb?

Well it sure seems that way.

In the wake of the election, I've heard five Obama supporters - all of whom also voted for all the California Democrats and for all the California taxes - complain that their taxes are going up next year.  The cognitive dissonance is almost painful.  All of them consistently embrace big spending - and, therefore Obama and his fellow Democrats - because they've been trained to believe that the spending on welfare, entitlements, and "select" businesses is a "good thing."

And here's a graphic making the rounds which is supposed to show that all the 'smart' states voted for Obama.

Yet when you look at their real world performance, the 'smart' states all seem headed for a giant fiscal implosion.

Some ideas such as spending 130% of your tax revenue year in and year out are so stupid that only the highly educated could possibly believe in them. Yet they're also likely too educated to learn any economic lessons from the coming tutorial in Real World Econ 101.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:49 PM | Comments (697)
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• A Physicians New Reality, Patients Ask Them To Break The Law
  
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• Morgan Stanley's Doo m Scenario: Major Recession In 2013
  
• Deer Attacks Two Men, Then Steals Their Cigarettes
  
• Major Elections In Spain Could Determine Future Of Catalonia
  
• Growing Food In The Desert As A Way To Solve Food Shortages
  
• You Can Balance The Budget Without Raising Taxes
  
• Welcome To The 20th Century: China's First Successful Landing On An Aircraft Carrier
  
• Funny Black Friday Prank (video)
  
• Egypt Stock Market Drops 10%
  
• WW2 Carrier Pigeon Message Found And Modern Code Breakers Are Stumped
  
• Newspaper Bankruptcies Hit Germany
  
• Powerball Jackpot Up To 425 Million
  
• Woman Faces 60 Days In Jail For Living AoS HQ Lifestyle
  
• Harry Reid Trying To Mend Fences
  
• Pat Condell On Peace In The Middle East (video)
  
• Teachers Pay People To Get Certified For Them
  
• Looks Like The Race Card Still Works, GOP Opposition To Rice Begins To Crack
  
• WH To Adopt "Kill List Rule Book"
  
• Rust Belt Growing In China
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:20 AM | Comments (352)
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steve_in_hb told me what a horrible movie this was. It's Oliver Stone's most recent bomb. I thought it was so bad it deserved a mention on the blog, and I sure the hell am not going to watch it.

His review below, including a good nominee for the worst line of dialogue in any movie this year. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (223)
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There are large protests against the Muslim Brotherhood tyranny (and it is a tyranny, given that its second or third move was simply to vote itself all political power without check).

So the Muslim Brotherhood is promising to bring even more protesters to the streets, in its favor.

I suppose there is some risk of serious violence, though perhaps I'm just an optimist.

It's worth remembering that when Mubarak was threatened with ouster, one middle-course plan suggested that elections be schedule in a year, permitting political parties to form, in a year of transitional democracy overseen by the Army. The only truly organized party in Egypt was the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was widely predicted that if elections were held immediately then what would happen is... exactly what has happened. The Muslim Brotherhood would win, then declare an Islamic tyranny, and then blow up the pyramids.

They haven't done the latter yet but there is talk. (No, really.)

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (335)
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If you can't trust a conservative stalwart like Lindsey Graham, who can you trust?

On ABC’s This Week, Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin discussed the fiscal cliff and the possibility of a bipartisan deal on tax increases and spending cuts. Graham repeatedly indicated to host George Stephanopoulos that he is open to raising revenues, though not through raising tax rates, saying, “I will violate [American for Tax Reform's] pledge for the good of the economy.”

As the South Carolina electorate knows, D.C. doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.

I know Graham thinks he can trade tax increases for spending cuts, but history has proven time and again that neither the new revenues nor the promised spending cuts ever arrive ("Doc Fix" anyone?). And the deficit and debt keep on growing.

Here's an idea: cut federal outlays back just to 2007's bloated, exorbitant total that makes a mockery of the term "limited government" and then we'll talk.

Posted by: andy at 09:58 AM | Comments (251)
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Good morning, 'rons and 'ettes, and welcome to the Sunday Morning Book Thread.

All Hail Content Providers!

You might not think so, but coming up with new material each week for the book thread, to avoid repetition and banality, can be frustratingly diffiult. That's why I admire guys like ace who can crank out the content week in, week out, and not be boring, and even come up with fresh, now ideas now and again.

I think one of the most amazing content providers ever was this guy, novelist, poet, newspaper columnist, and playwright Don Marquis. One of his earliest jobs was as a newspaper columnist, and during the 1910s, he worked for The Evening Sun, a New York Newspaper that required him to deliver 'x' amount of content every day, where 'x' is measured in column inches, and I think the value of 'x' Marquis had to produce was 24. That's an amazing amount of material. He did this 6 days a week, month after month, for 11 years. And when he wasn't cranking out his daily column, he spent his time writing poems, essays, plays, short stories, and novels.

Naturally, in order to make the production of content less burdensome, Marquis had themes and characters he returned to again and again. Probably the most famous of his creations is archy the cockroach and his flighty feline companion, mehitabel the alley cat (the lower case is intentional). The story Marquis told was that archy had been a free-verse poet who had died and whose soul had transmigrated into a cockroach (Marquis apparently hated free-verse poetry). So archy would come out at night and type his observations on life and current events on Marquis' typewriter by jumping on the keys, only he couldn't jump on the shift key simultaneously in order to make capitals, so there weren't any, nor any punctuation. Which made an 'archy' column look like a rambling pile of free-verse poetry or the sort that Marquis hated.

A number a number of Marquis' archy compilation books are still in print (for example, this one, and this one, and this one.) Even though the Kindle editions are somewhat pricey, I do not hesitate to recommend them all.

Marquis also developed other characters for his column material, such as Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers, Pete the Pup, and Warty Bliggins.

I wonder what kind of man he was. I commented last week on the tragedy of CS Lewis losing his wife and how it irreparably changed him, but Marquis' life was arguably more tragic. According to the wikipedia entry, Marquis was born in 1878, married in 1909, had a son in 1915 who died in 1921, then his wife died in 1923, but not before having a daughter who died in 1931. Marquis' second wife, whom he married in 1926, died ten years later.

I wonder how he he dealt with so much death and grief. It appears as if he had to watch anyone he loved die. That's got to take a lot out of a man.

Marquis himself died in 1937, after a series of strokes. Below the fold is one of my favorite archy pieces. It was written during Prohibition, about which Marquis, who was known wet his whistle upon occasion, complained bitterly.
more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:01 AM | Comments (152)
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