Linky Friday is Ordinary Times’ end of week tradition of bringing you linked stories from around the world and across the web. This week, “For the 116th Time…” a look at the many stories of the incoming US Congress, plus remembering the music of Roy Clark.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers is the highest ranking female Republican in Congress. And I thinks she is in BIG trouble.
An attempt to plant goalposts.
In which Burt Likko tries to convince you, and himself, that it’s not going to be that bad.
Looking for suggestions in the decidedly unlikely event of lunch with a member of Congress.
Congress is broken, argues Michael Cain — who offers some rule-changing fixes.
A brief summary of the “executive summary” of the Senate’s report on the CIA detention and interrogation program.
In which the necessity of a law is politically dismissed because of a massive public misunderstanding by a man with an eerily orange face.
An open thread on the President’s remarks on Syria and where the crisis currently stands.
The full text of the Senate’s joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Syria is now available.
Doug Henwood summarizes an important decline in the reading level of State of the Union addresses,
…may very well be in Arizona’s new Ninth Congressional District, which wraps around the eastern side of Phoenix like a crescent, including much of Tempe and parts of Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler, and Paradise Valley. If I recall correctly, this area also includes Arizona State University and substantial amounts of housing for ASU students, something of an…
I loathe Ryan, not least of all because I can now no longer sit in front of the telly (my Netflix queue has been full of British sitcoms) and let my frustration reservedly smolder as I watch the Sunday morning political shows while eating breakfast*, because doing so would inevitably entail putting up with the constant reprieve that, whatever…
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry will testifying before congress
This week on the op-ed page of the Washington Post three senators debated the how best to detain “terrorists.” The current annual defense authorization bill contains language introduced by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain that would codify the executive branch’s current practice of indefinitely detaining suspected terrorists. It would also renew the 2001 Authorization…
~by E.C. Gach Since S&P downgraded the U.S., Fareed Zakaria has been reminding people that currently, “no country with a presidential system has a triple-A rating from all three major ratings agencies.” The downgrade occurred, Zakaria notes, because of political dysfunction: “Listen to what the S&P actually said in its downgrade. ‘America’s governance and policymaking…
(cross-posted from my blog) If you look at the breakdown for the House’s vote on health care reform, you’ll see that of the 39 Democrats voting against reform, 24 were Blue Dogs. Nearly each of the Blue Dogs voting against reform came from districts that supported John McCain in 2008, and of those, fourteen were freshmen Democrats defending…
I can see where Jane Hamsher’s tea-party/populist left united front thing could seem appealing as a movement against something (the no-good politicians in Congress and their corporate special-interest shenanigans).
New York Times: The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds…
At least among liberal bloggers, it’s become a matter of conventional wisdom that Congress – and particularly the Senate – is fundamentally broken. Matthew Yglesias regularly points out our system’s absurdities, and various commentators have written very smart posts about our system’s complete inability to adequately address long-term challenges. Here at the League, Mark Thompson has written a great…
In my recently concluded interview with Publius from ObsidianWings on the role of the administrative state, a central question was how citizens can better hold the executive and legislative branches accountable and prevent regulatory capture. It seems clear to me (although Publius may disagree) that these issues are closely related to the issue of growth…
As many people should know, Obsidian Wings is often a bastion of worthwhile discussion and debate combined with unapologetic opinion in the sea of hackery and straw men that is the political blogosphere. Over the last several days, the site’s most prolific blogger, as well as an expert on communications law and a passionate advocate of…
Will is right to say that I didn’t fully address one of Douthat’s core points, which he summarizes (quite well, I should add) in the post below: The point of redistributive taxation isn’t to soak the rich – raising taxes, after all, imposes economic penalties. The larger goal is to improve the lot of poor…
Or, the one piece of legislation Congress isn’t anxious to claim credit for. Hint: it has something to do with debt.
Creepy admiration for China’s authoritarian government aside, the main point of Tom Friedman’s most recent New York Times op-ed is actually pretty sound: the United States has become something of a neutered one-party democracy. That is, for those interested in governing – at least on the national level – the Democratic Party really is the…
Among many – many – other things, I wish political commentators would stop explaining away our near-constant legislative gridlock as some inevitable, quasi-mystical part of the democratic process. For instance, here’s Peter Suderman (guest-posting for Andrew Sullivan) describing the “problem with politics”: No, I don’t think this is a failure of leadership so much as…
On my twitter feed (which you should follow, by the way), a friend asks what I think about the potential use of reconciliation to pass health care reform. For those of you unawares (or just need a bit more information), reconciliation is “triggered” when Congress passes a concurrent resolution (a legislative measured passed by both…
I’m not sure how well Freddie and I addressed the central question of our discussion last night, to wit, how to overcome the institutional problems in our representative democracy. But the discussion about health care alternatives and the lack of significant hope for Wyden-Bennett has gotten me thinking about the role of divided government not only…
[N/B: See below for a significant update/clarification] One of the criticisms levied at the alternative health care proposals discussed by E.D. and I over the last few weeks has been that these proposals, which rely heavily on vouchers and/or subsidies, are irrelevant to the debate that is actually taking place. Yet this is not really…
“If companies that are “too big to fail” are too big to exist, then bills that are “too long to read” are too long to pass. This sort of behavior — passing bills that no one has read — or, that in the case of the healthcare “bill” haven’t even actually been written — represents…
This is just nonsense. I swear, as hapless as the Democrats may be, every time John Boehner opens his mouth I realize just how much more pathetic the Republicans are. In the midst of a torture scandal, the minority leader thinks it’s wise to push Nancy Pelosi to “present evidence” that she was mislead or,…
Earlier, Freddie pointed to an excellent run-down of the various problems with the utterly thoughtless piece of legislation known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. No sooner did he post that than I learned that, after months of pleas from the small business community, the New York Times (the so-called paper of record) finally…
