I don’t usually like to post these, but this one from Mary Matalin just floored me:
The majority vote is tyranny of the minority.
I agree that context is everything, so please, go ahead and read the whole bit. (You’ll have to search through the transcript; I’ll wait.)
Update: Also, news comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the
Is the Senate broken? Or is the recent fretting over the filibuster just myopic whining that misunderstands our history? The following graphs and links indicate that, in fact, the Senate is broken — the filibuster has been deployed more often, than before. Details below the fold.
I know I’m not going to convince anybody, and this is far from the most important place to make this point, but I feel like I have to weigh in:
Record snowfall does not “disprove” global warming.
To advance the opposite proposition seriously, you’d have to do one or more of the following:
More than likely, most people braying that this is God’s message to Al Gore are committing all three mistakes at once.
News comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the chance of cloture on these holds seems remote. So the Senate is even more broken. The danger is that this will accelerate our move towards government by other means, including increased use of recess appointments.
Oh, and what the heck is a hold? David Waldeman explains.
Also: a pretty funny reimagining of the note that Shelby must have given Harry Reid and the President.
Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists. I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life and not that we are afraid the city would be attacked. (As if Al Qaeda needs another reason…)
But I simply cannot abide the weak-kneed wimps who think that “the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security”. How absolutely bat-crazy stupid do you have to be to write something like that? Note that it’s not even that the ultimate right is actual security — it’s only that we have a sense of security. So apparently, in order that Richard Cohen can sleep at night without worrying about the monsters under his bed, we should sacrifice legal standards, integrity, freedom itself. It turns out I wrote my rebuttal of his argument about two and a half years before he even wrote his article, and I stand by it:
We are stronger than that.
We are smarter than that.
We are better than that.