US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

yah i was correcting ed

ok i'm confused

The actual real vote is here.

quality GOP governing in action

This is what I'm seeing o_O

#66 = BILL TITLE: Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 2701) to authorize appropriations for FY 2010 for intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the U.S. Government, the Community Management Account, and the CIA Retirement and Disability System, waiving a requirement of clause 6(a) of rule XIII

Democratic 237(yea) 10(nay)
Republican 166(nay)

#67 = BILL TITLE: Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act

Democratic 162(yea) 87(nay)
Republican 153(yea) 10(nay)

hmmm try this one here

Boner tired of reading long legislation, fantasizes about being Speaker

"And if I become Speaker there will be a 72 hour reading period before any bill is brought to the floor," the Ohio Republican added, repeating a pledge he made at CPAC.

"We don't need these really big bills," he said. "We can keep these bills smaller, more targeted, so that people actually can read them and understand what they are voting on before they come to the floor."

what america REALLY needs is for government to be EVEN SLOWER and legislation EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TO PASS

^most accurate picture of the house floor ever

xpost

Guys I'm confused about why Pelosi would not be on that roll call as well.

so that people actually can read them

lolz c'mon Boner we know you can't actually read, no matter how much time you're given

Speaker would only vote in the event of a tie

huh must've forgotten that bit from civics class my bad

she can vote, it's just customary not to

I don't really know how the government works. ILX is here to help me learn!

"I would have preferred to add oversight and judicial review improvements to any extension of expiring provisions in the USA Patriot Act," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "But I understand some Republican senators objected."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PATRIOT_ACT?SITE=NVLAS&SECTION=WEATHER&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Yeah we wouldn't want to upset the republicans.
Good job, fucking pussies.

David Price votes Nay on USAPATRIOT, fuck yeah - gotta take what good news I can get

The Patriot Act vote was a resolution to concur on the Senate's ammendment to H.R. 3961, a bill originally about the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. So yes, the page that says Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act is the correct vote. The one Ed posted is not directly related.

I'm glad to see Blumenauer was a nay.

Small comfort.

(amendment of the renewal of the Patriot Act onto H.R. 3961, I should specify)

weirdly, my current liberal-democrat congressman (rangel) voted aye, but my soon-to-be conservative-republican congressman (duncan) voted nay. duncan also voted against the iraq war. he's a hard-right guy, but he's an old-line conservative who really believes all the small-government stuff (e.g., doesn't like unnecessary foreign entanglements). so... knoxville represent.

does he hate fags?

yes. he does. he is an east tennessee republican. just one with a little more consistency to his views than most.

Charlie "Four Rent-Controlled Apartments + Villa in the Dominican" Rangel -- NYC's kinda liberal

yeah. i couldn't bring myself to vote for him last time. i guess if he'd had any actual opposition or chance of losing, i might have. but yeesh.

Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), you may well go down in November for being relatively principled, but I salute you. On climate change/energy reform:

"That’s more insider baseball crap. I don’t really care. I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets its head out of its rear end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country is literally at risk. Our economy is at risk, because these jobs are being created overseas. It should have the same urgency with this problem that it had bailing out Wall Street. We are swearing an oath to do what’s necessary to protect this country, not do what’s necessary to get a bill through the Senate."

– This is the challenge of our time—the jobs opportunity, the national security challenge, the scientific challenge of our era. Any plan that uses market forces to signal a carbon-constrained environment is going to move us in the right direction. People who don’t support this kind of aggressive energy independence are just selling Americans short.

– We’re so far behind China, Europe, and other areas in the energy jobs of the future because neither party has had the guts to take this on. There are so many spineless people in D.C.

– Every week the Senate doesn’t act, it either freezes that investment and innovation or it sends it overseas. We’re giving up jobs. The Senate—the ridiculous tactics of the Republicans and the timidity of the Democrats—is standing in the way of the kind of job creation we need.

– Unfortunately, good ideas, ideas that could save our country, sometimes take 30 minutes to explain and only 30 seconds to demagogue. In between those two things is leadership, and we haven’t had the moral courage to take this on

Pretty good stuff but I wish cap and trade weren't just an enormous giveaway to the exact same people that send us over the financial edge

I assume that's what he means by a "plan that uses market forces to signal a carbon-constrained environment"

let's get real here, people think "regulation" means forcing people to pay for owl habitats and jobs for crackheads. you try to point out that it means no thumbs in your meat, no viruses in your lettuce, and stairs that don't collapse...

― goole, Thursday, February 25, 2010 1:54 PM (2 days ago)

i am cool with paying for owl habitats and jobs for crackheads fwiw!

but yeah, otm

the POTUS (politics of the us) channel on XM radio has been replaying the health-care summit this weekend. it is striking how far superior obama is to the GOP in terms of policy understanding and analysis (i mean, sure, the GOP is determined to be obstructionist for political reasons, but they sound so hamfisted and addle-minded in the process).

yeah as much of a pussy as i think he and democrats have been over this whole thing, he was consistenly otm and reasoned throughout all that i watched.

he was basically the scottpl of pitchfork clusterfuck threads

carpal24 (1 day ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam

Damn, that dark haired woman behind Robert Andrews is HOT!!

Medicare for all.

he was basically the scottpl of pitchfork clusterfuck threads

― idgi, mon (k3vin k.), Saturday, February 27, 2010 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

lmao at this

the scottpl of p4k threads makes me wince

Was punishing myself reading David Brooks and other neo-cons talking about the summit. They think that because Republicans pointed out that the Dems plan is expensive that the Repubs made good arguments and were better prepared than the Dems. These commentors also remains convinced that a modified version of the Repubs buying across state lines thing (that will magically not lead to a race to the bottom) and malpractice reform caps are enough.

anyone who thought the GOP looked more informed and more insightful than obama is smoking dope.

i saw an earlier david brooks column where he predicted the HCR won't get done now, but this summit was a step in the right direction "for future generations of health-care reformers."

btw, now that i think of it, my father-in-law thought the GOP was much better and more insightful than obama. don't think he's smoking dope, tho. just an unreachable conservative-type.

narrative will always, always trump facts - especially in 2010

They think that because Republicans pointed out that the Dems plan is expensive that the Repubs made good arguments and were better prepared than the Dems.

well i think republicans really think that saying "This is a GOVERNMENT plan," and "This will cost MONEY" are solid, irrefutable intellectual arguments. that's basically as deep as their ideology goes. and sadly it has a fair amount of appeal (tho less than they think it does -- for all that they talk about polls, they conveniently overlook how actually popular lots of government programs really are).

and i thought obama was way too conciliatory in constantly framing things as "a philosophical disagreement." philosophy is way too kind a word to characterize current conservative thinking. i wish he had said, "we do have a philosophical disagreement, but your philosophy is based on a childlike simplification of economic ideas that are comically wrongheaded to start with. you guys still believe all that supply-side bullshit!"

Yes it kind of drives me crazy that in any other framing of this situation, these people would be identified as meathead bullies and treated as such - by which I mean, refuted in passing, on the way to doing exactly what you'd planned. The problem for this President is the whole 'seen to be' phenomenon, where you have to make a bunch of conciliatory noises at people to underscore their bloody-mindedness and I think nobody was prepared for how deep certain heels would dig in, or the form culture wars would take once he was elected.

I also saw that Repubs were mad when Obama would say "those are just talking points" rather than responding. Perhaps he should have prefaced every answer by saying "we have philosophical differences regarding your talking points as your points are based on ideas that have failed under Bush and prior presidents and where instituted state-wide."

But yea, Brooks seems to believe that some sort of version of the 2 Repub items (across state lines and the malpractice insurance thing) are a starting point for future reformers even though he ignores every study saying how those things don't work and would only have a tiny impact in the whole scheme of things even if they did work.

re: framing and the appeal of the GOP's arguments. it's interesting to note that, when you poll republicans, "entitlement programs," e.g., welfare, do very poorly, but medicare and social security do very well. that's because, i think, when many republicans visualize "entitlement programs," they see immigrants, blacks, and other minority groups; when they visualize medicare and social security, they see their parents or other elderly whites who need a safety net. the gop has a fairly easy time convincing its consituents that hcr is another "entitlement," which means it's easy to whip up opposition to it, based on some deeply hardwired biases.

obv., this is an over-generalization, but i think there's a lot of truth to it.

Yep, and I read somewhere that Rush Limbaugh has been referring to the HC plan as "reparations" although naturally Limbaugh supporters say this was taken out of context and he simply meant when he used "reparations" and "the Civil Rights Act" in the same sentence that if the health care plan included the ability to correct for disparities in healthcare services arising out of income equality that it would be reparations. So its race based and income based bashing nonetheless.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/rush_limbaugh_health-care_refo.html

You could almost say Republicans and tea-partiers have entitlement issues...

i know people who are opposed to this just because it is 'government' and involves 'spending money' and is considered a give away to 'obama's base' who are 'poor' and 'freeloaders'. yes I do. and one of them is a doctor. so you know, fuck the usa.