My job is to protect the interests of the people of Minnesota. Now, how are they to trust you, when you come in and to my face say something that either you know wasn’t true, or you didn’t know, and I don’t know which is worse. How are the people of Minnesota supposed to trust you?
As you can see, Al Franken is not happy about the proposed merger of NBC and Comcast. I can’t really blame him. After all, Comcast, as one of our very few cable companies, is responsible for the fair distribution of content. But they would also become creators of content with their purchase of NBC. It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t become a conflict of interest.
And I would get even more nervous, as Al clearly has, if the CEO of Comcast gave me a reassurance that was the exact opposite of what his lawyers had just argued in front of the FCC.
The whole video (after the break) is well worth a watch. Al Franken is steaming mad at Comcast, and he’s mad because he thinks Comcast is going to take advantage of us here in Minnesota. To be honest, I wish all of our public servants would get so serious about things they think are threats to their constituents.
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Great news! It looks like Barack Obama has finally figured out how to get Republicans on board with health reform! The answer was so simple the whole time:
Hold another summit.
President Obama made a dramatic attempt to jump-start the stalled health care debate Sunday, inviting Republicans in Congress to a half-day summit on the subject to be televised live later this month.
No doubt, by the time the summit is over, Republicans will be ready to move forward on health reform. After all, I think the only problem is that we haven’t discussed this enough yet.
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In January, the economy shed 20,000 jobs, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.3% percentage points, to 10%. Considering that a year ago, the economy had shed 779,000 jobs, we are making excellent progress. The usual caveats apply — it’s going to take a long time to dig out of this recession, etc. — but it looks like a real recovery is beginning, and hopefully within the next few months, we will start adding some jobs.
The Speaker of the House’s office posted the graph below, showing just how far we’ve come. It’s taken two years, but it looks like things are finally stabilizing.
Talking Point Memo says that
Republicans will filibuster a jobs bill in the Senate.
Well, of course they will. Because it’s a bill proposed by a Democrats; that’s what they do. Forget about jobs; they have a duty to force the Senate into complete and utter inaction.
Surely this will be the last straw for people who are fed up with Republicans’ outrageous abuse of arcane Senate procedures. Richard Shelby (R-AL) is now holding up
all of President Obama’s nominations until he receives two large earmarks for his home state.
Here’s the gist of the story:
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.
…
According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track [get more details at Talking Points Memo].
There’s a word for this: extortion. It’s not just unacceptable — it’s downright criminal.
In a strange way, though, I’m glad he did it. His move is so completely outrageous that maybe it will finally get people talking about the minority party’s use of arcane procedures to take over a body that is supposed to be democratic. At first, they were simply stalling and keeping the Senate from its business. Now, Shelby has taken it far beyond that and is actually using Senate procedure to commit extortion. This has to stop.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive to say that the bonding proposal with the higher price tag is more fiscally responsible. But it’s not nearly as simple as looking at the size of the proposal.
Over the long run, a large bonding bill this year will save us a lot of money, in addition to putting people back to work.
Because it is spread out over 15 to 20 years, the annual cost of a larger bonding bill would be relatively small. Even a very large increase in the size of the bonding bill costs relatively little on an annual basis. This isn’t just financial sleight-of-hand, though; it is a well-accepted budgeting practice to spread the cost of large infrastructure projects over many years, so they are paid for by the people who use them throughout their life span.
In addition, we’ll be getting more bang for our buck on everything we build this year. Right now, interest rates are down, making bonding cheaper, and contractors’ bids are likely to be significantly lower. We can fund critical infrastructure needs more cheaply today than we could in a couple of years. That’s why spending the money today, instead of in two years, will save us money in the long run.
Given the small difference in annual payments, we should spend more on bonding when it’s the most affordable. It would be extremely unfortunate to allow our budget deficit today to stop us from saving money over the next 20 years.
In an age when political and policy discussions are often crammed into soundbites, President Obama and the House Republicans advanced transparency and honest debate with their unprecedented live, televised question-and-answer session on January 29. Since then, people of all political persuasions have been talking about the value of what’s being called “Question Time.” It’s time to start a new American political tradition. We, the undersigned, call on President Obama and the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress to hold regular, frequent, and public Question Time sessions between the President and the opposition party.
Sign the petition at DemandQuestionTime.com
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Minnesota has a $1.2 billion shortfall for this year, and that’s on top of $6 to $8 billion in the coming biennium. So it makes sense that our governor would be talking about new ways to earn revenue.
Except that he’s not talking about using it to ease the deficit; he’s proposing that it go to pay for subsidizing a new Vikings stadium. Pawlenty suggested that we could raise funds from new lottery games to help pay for a new stadium.
My favorite part was when he all but acknowledged that there were better uses for that money:
Although 40 percent of those funds — $ 8 million — is constitutionally dedicated to an environmental trust fund, “the other $12 [million] can be used for other stuff. People will say it should go into schools or roads or whatever, but … that’s another way to do [the stadium].”
Yeah, I’d be one of those people who would say it should go into “schools or roads or whatever.” We are hemorrhaging money right now, so much so that we’re taking it from our schools to keep the state financially solvent. It would seem to me that before we could talk about new revenues going to pay for anything, we need to pay our schools the money we’ve taken from them. I know that people don’t want to lose the Vikes, but can anyone justify taking money from our schools and then using new revenues not to pay them back, but to build a professional football stadium?
It’s time to finally make Republicans in the Senate put up or shut up and force them into what would essentially be a filibuster.
First, a little bit of background. The leading plan for health reform since the Democrats lost their Senate seat in Massachusetts has been to have the House simply pass the Senate bill exactly, so another vote wouldn’t be required in the Senate. Then, certain changes could be made through the budget reconciliation process, which requires only 50 votes. Now, however, The Hill reports that Senate Republicans have figured out a procedure for stalling even the reconciliation process:
Though it has never been done, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says he’s prepared to test the Senate’s stamina to block the Democrats from using the process to expedite changes to the healthcare bill.
Experts on Senate procedural rules, from both parties, note that such a filibuster is possible. While reconciliation rules limit debate to 20 hours, senators lack similiarconstraints on amendments and could conceivably continue offering them until 60 members agree to cut the process off.
The article concludes that without 60 votes to cut off debate, the Democrats would be unable to pass the bill. However, I disagree. As David Waldman points out, Republicans would be required to stay on the Senate floor, continually proposing amendment after amendment. If they stopped at any point, debate on the bill would expire. In other words, this would be a good old-fashioned filibuster — except tougher, because the Republicans wouldn’t even really be able to make speeches, they’d just need to keep proposing amendment after amendment. So I say let’s do it. Let’s force them to stand in front of the American people and offer hundreds of useless amendments. It’s time we had our showdown.
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Sorry for my absence over the past week; I’ll be back to posting more regularly tomorrow.
Very early this morning, nothing has changed from
Matt’s last update. I’d like to add a few thoughts on the results that are in so far.
First, all I have to say about the results on the Republican side is that sometimes I envy the Republicans. They’re now down to two candidates, with a clear frontrunner in Marty Seifert. Man, is that going to be a lot easier to narrow down than the DFL’s options. Once again, the GOP will have their choice early while the DFLers attack each other going into the primary.
On the DFL side, a few thoughts:
- This looks like a big win for RT Rybak. I don’t know if the percentages will hold, but with 77.04% reporting, he’s on top with 21.8% of the vote. Going into the straw poll, all the discussion was how much MAK would win by, so if Rybak can hold on, it will be a bit of an upset. Perhaps more importantly, MAK has to worry about her performance during the legislative session, while all Rybak has to worry about is campaigning. (And, you know, governing Minneapolis, but given our weak mayor system that’s unlikely to get in the way too much.)
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It’s pathetic, to put it mildly, the hoops through which our system requires people to jump just to keep themselves healthy. And people with pre-existing conditions, such as
Terri Carlson, have it worst of all. Carlson is currently counting down the time until she loses her eligibility for COBRA, at which point she will have absolutely no access to health insurance because she has C4 Complement Deficiency, a rare immune disorder. Carlson is just one of millions of people in the private insurance market who are denied insurance precisely because they need it so much.
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The recovery is now well underway, it appears. The
Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated on Friday that Real Gross Domestic Product grew by 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, which is the fastest rate of growth since mid-2003.
So where are the jobs? They’re coming. In the language of economics, jobs are a “lagging indicator” — meaning that the economy has to be steadily and consistently improving before employers are willing to hire. But job losses have tailed off, and we should begin to see some job growth, although probably meager, this year.
A caveat needs to be made here, as well. First, a significant portion of the GDP growth we saw in the last quarter was likely driven by Federal spending measures that are still in place. We need to resist the urge to reduce spending now that the economy is “fixed.” It isn’t necessarily fixed, and we could easily still slide back into another slump. In fact, the Senate should pass the jobs bill passed by the House to pump additional money into the economy.
Overall, things are looking hopeful, but it’s going to take a long time for a full recovery. In part, that’s because we haven’t had a “real” economic recovery in a long time — we’ve replaced one bubble with another, and our economy hasn’t been based on us actually producing useful goods and services in over a decade. For a truly sustainable recovery, we need to start producing again — and that’s going to take some time.
I wrote last week that the Democrats should be making a stronger case against Republican obstruction in the Senate:
If the Democrats want to get anywhere, it’s time for them to make Republican obstruction the issue. Stop capitulating, stop sacrificing your agenda. Get a spine and use your massive majorities and Obama’s bully pulpit and demand that Republicans do some actual work for a change.
In case the anecdotal evidence wasn’t enough, a new Pew Public Knowledge Poll shows that only 32 percent of Americans even know that Republicans refused to support health reform. If that’s not serious proof of the Democrats’ communication failure, I don’t what is.
It’s not too late to turn this around, but the Democrats are running out of chances. Right now, they have one of their best chances in a while. After Obama’s State of the Union, they have what is perhaps their final opening to start making a bigger issue out of Republican obstruction. Will they take it? Given their history, I sincerely doubt it.
Six years ago, we launched two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on a 90-day mission to collect data about conditions on Mars. They’re still going. Or rather, Opportunity is still going, and scientists are looking for ways to turn the stuck Spirit into a
stationary laboratory; it can’t move, but it can still do science. That announcement was made on day 2213 of Spirit’s 90-day mission.
Every few months, after reading a report about one of the rovers, I marvel that they’re still going. In the span of their original 90-day mission, the rovers contributed immeasurably to our knowledge about Mars. They then proceeded to stretch their lifespan by 24 times their original mandate, and they haven’t stopped yet.
Below the break, as a Friday distraction, don’t miss webcomic xkcd’s take on the Spirit rover.
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People Are Shouting
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