There Are No Expressions to Fully Convey the Extremity of This Hypocrisy
Eric Cantor, Republican House Majority Leader, said this about the GOP’s futile attempt to repeal health care reform:
The Senate ought not to be a place where legislation goes into a dead end. … The American people deserve a full hearing. They deserve to see this legislation go to the Senate for a full vote.
After Republicans spent the last four years in a historically unprecedented campaign of obstructionism, blocking votes at every single turn, even for legislation they themselves had approved of not long before, and abusing the filibuster to extents never seen before–suddenly they hate it when a bill can’t come up for an up-or-down vote in the Senate.
Had this come from a satire web site, I would have laughed. Coming seriously from the Republican leadership, it is at the same time pathetic and outrageous. They have no shame, and must assume that Americans are all unbelievable morons without the barest hint of memory.
Aren’t we?
Troy: Sorry, I can’t figure that one out…Never mind, I was just being an unbelievable moron. šAs an aside, something else occurred to me–another problem with Cantor’s complaint, that “The American people deserve a full hearing [and] to see this legislation go to the Senate for a full vote”–um, didn’t that already happen when the legislation was voted on and passed in the first place?
You’re looking for something from them that makes sense?
When’s the last time a Republican has made the barest sense about anything?
Maybe when GHWB said this in June 1990:
“It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform.”
This was the defining moment when the Republican party collectively lost its mind, in response to the Old Guard reversing Reaganism, the only brand that the GOP knows how to sell to the people any more.
@Troy
As an aside: how do you make strike through characters? what codes do you use? “…?”
As I’ve been saying the last couple of weeks, the Republicans cannot win any policy debates on the merits.
As an aside, I would be fully willing to join with the Republicans in to force constitutional change upon the role and status of the senate. I’m for writing them out of the constitution and adding another 100 or even 200 members to congress and run a unicameral legislature. If they are willing to abide by parliaments rules, they can even move to make the head of the legislature the executive, but, baby steps first.
At the very least, I would move that all legislative votes be conducted in a combined legislature, using house rules, except for those matters explicitly left to the senate by the constitution (ratifying peace treaties and judgeships, but only until that part of the constitution is modified)… also elections for both houses every four years, instead of six for senate, two for congress (save money).
I wonder if Kantor can get behind any of that? I doubt it. Republicans, are fundamentally interested in pursuing a very small minority’s interest and the Senate is the perfect place to do that.
You can use the <strike> tag:
This is strikethrough text.;Alternately, you can use CSS, e.g. <span style=”text-decoration: line-through;”>: This is CSS strikethrough text.
I am not 100% sure if visitors can use either or both, so you might want to experiment. In my post, I just used the WordPress text editor in my admin tools.
Ah, we can only wish. But the Senate gives far too much advantage to rural (red state) areas, handing them strongly disproportionate influence and power. Same reason why Electoral College reform won’t happen. For either one, we’d need a Constitutional amendment, and no way we’ll get 3/4ths of all states to approve either–too many states would essentially be giving up huge advantages which funnel billions of federal dollars into their states, as well as allowing them to set political agendas and sometimes put a stranglehold on the congressional process. In other words, for pretty much the reasons it would be an excellent idea.
by my reckoningBy my reckoning, the electoral college is a parliament, with representation proportioned the same as congress the house of representatives and the senate if they were combined. So a state with a low population, such as North Dakota, gets one representative and two senators then they send three electors to the electoral college. So it’s a parliament that sits only for one day to resolve only one issue, who will be elected their prime minister. Their Prime Minister is then made president. One big difference there, is a Prime Minister has to be a member of Parliament, like the speaker of the house.So, why not just save some money, have Senators and representatives get elected on the same day and have them vote to select the executive. Personally, I think we are over governed: two legislatures at the federal level, two legislatures at the state level (except for Nebraska: why do states need Senates? Why implement a federal system at a state level?) Then more legislatures at the county and town level. We should be voting for just one guy for the federal government, another for State government (though I’m not sure we need states… at least to provide a bunch of laws, eliminate the country governments (I believe Alaska doesn’t have counties) and just have municipalities.
One reason Canada can have hand counted paper ballets is because they aren’t trying to tally a gajillion different elections on election night.
What I’d really like to see if one rep for 250,000 people. People get a two day holiday for elections. One election day, they go to their township polling place, like a high school auditorium, they sit, listen to two or several candidates present their debate, allow some interested parties to interject while the bulk of the people watch and listen like a jury. Then they go to a class room and vote a paper ballot. Then the boxes are brought out to the auditorium and the votes counted in front of everyone. Afterwords a big barbecue or party is held in the high school gym and everybody celebrates our democracy and what it means to be friends and neighbors in a civil democratic society. That night they can get drunk and take the next day off to appreciate the previous day’s activities and the results. A collection of 50 townships would send one representative to Washington as legislators and to select the executive. I had a dream.
thanks, Thanks for teaching me something new.
Knowledge is power.
Hey, this strike stuff is pretty cool!
Blocks are fun, too! Teach us some more fancy stuff, Dr. Techno…
Ken:
Well, the first thing I should point out is that once you start an HTML command, you should end it with a backslash-tag. For example, <strike>This text would be strikethrough</strike> and this text would not.
The end tag is a big thing–if you don’t use it where it is needed, the style you applied will just keep on going until the page (or the section of the page) runs out. The end tag is also used in written language sometimes, as a way to show you are ending something–e.g., </sarcasm> might be used to show that you were being sarcastic but from that point are not.
You may have noticed that sometimes the end tag is not necessary. For example, you can get away with it using my custom <bq> tag because it is a custom tag and I cannot find a way (at least not yet) to make it apply beyond a single paragraph. At present, if you try to use the <bq> tag to more than one paragraph, it doesn’t work. I am still trying to figure that one out, though there may be no simple solution.
If you’d like to play around with HTML in the comments, here are a few that you can copy and save in a text file somewhere, then use as you wish.
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Bold text: Two tags work for this:
<b>text goes here<b>
<strong>text goes here<strong>
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Italic text: Two tags work for this also:
<i>text goes here<i>
<em>text goes here<em>
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Blockquote: this tag usually just left-indents paragraphs by half an inch, but on this blog, the tag is modified to create the brushed-metal “plate” effect, with drop shadows (visible unless you use IE).
<blockquote>text goes here</blockquote>
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Inserting images
Find an image on a web site. Right-click on the image, and if there is an option to copy the image address, do so. Then, in the comments here, type:
<img src=”paste image address here” width=”400″ />
The “width” attribute is necessary if the image is more than 500 pixels across; the width attribute will limit the size so it won’t overflow beyond the right margin of the comments area. If the image is smaller than that, just don’t use the width attribute or the following number.
A sample image:
Note: there is no end-tag for the image command. You might notice that a backslash is used at the end of the tag, as a stand-in for the end tag. Only a few HTML commands have no ending tag, even though you can get away with not using one sometimes.
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Links
I allow a few links per post. If you want to link to a page in your comment, you can just paste the address and the blog software should convert it to a link. But if you would like to be a bit more fancy, you can use the <a> tag:
That would look like this:
Note that the address must include “http://” at the beginning, or the link won’t work.
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If you would like to learn more about creating HTML, maybe spending a weekend day on it, visit my site and just keep going through each of the pages (you can do the review quizzes too if you like). Several pages include “live exercises” where you can type in HTML and instantly see the results. By the end, you should have learned enough about HTML to make your own basic web pages.
One last point: I have changed the settings of this site to be fairly liberal in allowing visitors to use HTML in the comments. However, many web sites restrict the use of tags; usually they list what tags are available for you to use.
Thanks, Luis.
A constructive lesson in text manipulation.
A few basic tools can go a long way.