Indefinite Detention? But I Have Soccer Practice at 4: U.S. Politics 2012

FYI

disgust with the NDAA not overwhelming enough to keep me from lol'ing at Republicans getting endrun on the Cordray appt

did he end up going with Rob or Nate

@natecordray
Nate Cordray
X Games party tonight at the Conga room
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I wanted really badly to post that as an image but am too dumb :(

Recess appointments for the NLRB too...

MITT ROMNEY IS ANGRY!

“President Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is perhaps the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the history of our nation, headed by a powerful and unaccountable bureaucrat with unprecedented authority over the economy. Instead of working with Congress to fix the flaws in this new bureaucracy, the President is declaring that he ‘refuses to take no for an answer’ and circumventing Congress to appoint a new administrator. This action represents Chicago-style politics at its worst and is precisely what then-Senator Obama claimed would be ‘the wrong thing to do.’ Sadly, instead of focusing on economic growth, he is once again focusing on creating more regulation, more government, and more Washington gridlock. As President, I will focus on turning around our economy so that America can once again lead the world in job creation.”

commenters on speaker.gov demand impeachment!

no one knows what they're talking about!

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/recess-graph.png

on twitter: "Romney, if recess appointments are 'Chicago-style politics, then Reagan is Al fucking Capone."

To be fair, doing it the way Obama has is pretty unprecendented...but I'm sure he'd be willing to promise to do it again in return for an up-or-down vote on the rest of his slate...

"not to do it again"

not unprecedented

unprecedented in the sense that the Senate is not technically in recess due to ridiculous GOP antics

the resistance in the senate is totally unprecedented too

xps

^^^^^^^^^^^^

unprecedented in the sense that the Senate is not technically in recess due to ridiculous GOP antics

^^^ I had misgivings too until I remembered the reindeer games Senate GOP has played the last three weeks.

Recess appointments....

recess appointment = getting high with the choom gang

Password case reframes Fifth Amendment rights in context of digital world

i'm a little skeptical that ramona fricosu was such an advanced user of encryption that the prosecution can't break her password (did they try "password"?) but it's interesting

Another proud moment in Obamaland

In a crushing blow to the healthcare community, President Obama is expected to sign new legislation that prohibits federal funding on needle exchange programs both domestically and abroad -- a federally funded program that he himself signed into effect in 2009.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/needle-exchange-programs-san-francisco_n_1184420.html

click link, find out it's a poison pill in a much larger bill.

wow that fuckin sucks

then that's just fucking fine, Matt. Goddamn you all to hell.

fuck

fuck this fucking guy

I can't even from the degree of assholism necessary to oppose needle exchange programs. That is just next-level asshole

saying

like there's "oh this will affect people a few-levels-removed down the bueraucratic chain" and then there's "actual irl people will get fucked the fuck up thanks to this particular thing"

Thre's actually people in the huffpo thread saying this is a good thing, they should be left to die because its their choice to do needle drugs. I mean... I just...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/a-telling-sign-scott-brown-comes-out-in-support-of-cordray-recess-appointment/2012/01/04/gIQA8r68aP_blog.html

too bad the rest of the country isn't massachusetts

only w/r/t politics obv

I get in arguments with Dems who, clawing for reasons to defend Obama, say "politics is the art of the possible." Jay Rosen interviewed by Greenwald:

I think it’s crippling sometimes to our own sense of efficacy in politics and media, if we assume that the media has all of the power to frame the debate and decide what consensus is, and consign things to deviant status. That’s not really true. That’s true under conditions of political immobilization, leadership default, a range for normalcy, but in ordinary political life, leaders, by talking about things, make them legitimate. Parties, by pushing for things, make them part of the sphere of debate. Important and visible people can question consensus, and all of the sudden break it. These spheres are malleable; if the conversation of democracy is alive and if you make your leaders talk about things, it becomes valid to talk about them.

And I really do think there’s a self-victimization that sometimes goes on, but... there’s something else going on, which is the ability to infect us with notions of what’s realistic is one of the most potent powers press and political elites have. Whenever we make that kind of decision — “well it’s pragmatic, let’s be realistic” — what we’re really doing is we’re speculating about other Americans, our fellow citizens, and what they’re likely to accept or what works on them or what stimuli they respond to. And that way of seeing other Americans, fellow citizens, is in fact something the media has taught us; that is one of the deepest lessons we’ve learned from the media even if we are skeptics of the MSM.

And one of the things I see on the left that really bothers me is the ease with which people skeptical of the media will talk about what the masses believe and how the masses will be led and moved in this way that shows me that the mass media tutors them on how to see their fellow citizens. And here the ‘Net again has at least some potential - because we don’t have to guess what those other Americans think. We can encounter them ourselves, and thereby reshape our sense of what they think. I think every time people make that judgment about what’s realistic, what they’re really doing is they’re imagining what the rest of the country would accept, and how other people think, and they get those ideas from the media.

http://ggdrafts.blogspot.com/2012/01/jay-rosen-on-political-possibility.html

click link, find out it's a poison pill in a much larger bill.

I've seen far worse rhymes.

too bad the rest of the country isn't massachusetts

thank god it isn't. brown's just triangulating his position b/c of warren, who came out crowing about the wonderfulness of the appointment that she really deserved. i've said it befor and i'll say it again, scott brown is a really nice dude but he is just so fundamentally ... opportunistic that it makes me question everything about his careeer.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2012/features/what_if_he_loses034501.php

more on the needle exchange funding ban

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2011/December/21/needle-exchange-federal-funding.aspx

x-post

Will have to read this whole What if He Loses series later, but Lithwick's court piece leads with this:

For anyone considering the 2012 election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out: next November, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be seventy-nine years old. If a Republican wins the presidential election, he or she may have an opportunity to seat Ginsburg’s successor, replacing the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal jurist with a conservative.

obama? seems like this is what happens when you elect a republican house majority.

the ban stood for 21 years, was lifted in 2008, now reimposed. what do you think happened in that time?

xp

the excuses just never end

for what, your high blood pressure?

For anyone considering the XXXX election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out...

just fill this out every 4 years, DNC, and your work is done.

The current administration has not done much to restore the ideological balance of the federal appeals courts. For one thing, this was never Obama’s priority the way it was for Bush, his father, and Ronald Reagan. Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has selected lower court judges more notable for their racial and gender diversity than their hard-left judicial orientation. And he also has failed to seat them in numbers comparable to the Bush record. Republicans have used Senate rules so effectively to block Obama judges that the judicial vacancy rate currently stands at eighty-four vacancies, with thirty of those designated “judicial emergencies” based on courts’ inability to manage caseloads. Filibusters, holds, and other arcane Senate rules have brought the system to the point where civil litigants may wait years to get into court. And the unprecedented waste of time that results from GOP obstruction of Obama judges has led some of the most interesting and thoughtful jurists, most famously California’s Goodwin Liu, to withdraw their names from contention.

Why have the Republicans been so much more effective at dragging the judicial branch rightward than Democrats have been in yanking it back? Focus, mainly. Since the Meese revolution of the mid-1980s, the GOP has been better at constitutional messaging, better at mobilizing the electorate, and better at laying out a judicial vision than liberals, who still seem to believe that unless the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade (or perhaps the Affordable Care Act), judges are not really a voting issue.

Libs need to wake the fuck up: they're as embattled now as when Ed Meese took over the Justice depts and saw post-New Deal judges everywhere.

Points off for none of these posts using the word "sheeple."

And yes the Dems filbustered a few Republican judicial nominees way back when and voted down at least 1 other, but when they were in the minority the bipartisan gang of 14 or something agreed to let votes on many Republican nominees go ahead. Surprise surprise, no current such agreement exists in the Senate.

And Obama will likely pick a moderate Dem to replace liberal Ginsburg, but at least that's slightly better than a right-wing Federalist Society type that a Republican will choose and get on the court.

nice mischaracterization of sound & impassioned opposition, Phil, it'll serve you well for making excuses when the Republicans are in power again

I was referring to Alfred.

SO THERE.

only "sheep" use "sheeple."

http://mediabreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Sheep-the-Man.jpg

Ram tough.

yeah he was being extra sneaky today, fuck him forever

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0aKPIse1bbtAHD3LIdkpTfHfw7g?docId=c116e763ff084c0289aa2bd1b519032d

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The California man behind an anti-Muslim film that roiled the Middle East was sentenced Wednesday to a year in prison for violating his probation stemming from a 2010 bank fraud conviction by lying about his identity.

U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder immediately sentenced Mark Basseley Youssef after he admitted to four of the eight alleged violations, including obtaining a fraudulent California driver's license. Prosecutors agreed to drop the other four allegations under an agreement with Youssef's attorneys, which also included more probation.

American Politics Thread 2013: Bangs, Whimpers and Filibusters