Jim Robinson hates this deal with all his might:



(Just because he hits return doesn't make it a paragraph, does it? If so, I'll edit.) Anyway, I continue to find it fascinating that pretty much EVERYONE hates this deal. It's fascinating enough to distract me from how much I don't like the deal

Because 2010 gave the house and control of the purse to terrorists.

You can rant and rave all you like but that's the bottom line.

Lefties, I think, shouting, "JOBS JOB JOBS!"

The. End.

Hey, if we're so deep in debt that we can never get out, why quit spending now???

Dems still have two out of the three pieces - the Senate and the Presidency. The Repubs can't pass anything without cooperation from the Senate and the President. Why the Dems aren't using that to their full advantage, I don't know. My biggest complaint is the President has come out of this looking weak. He can't go campaign about jobs because when he signs this bill, he will be signing against jobs and casting all the unemployed people to the wind. He's got 15 months to change that, but he's caused himself to be playing from a disadvantage. He's painted himself as a Centrist. If I were an Independent looking for a Centrist, I'd vote for Romney not Obama.

Because the Republicans don't care about governing. As long as the military gets paid they couldn't give a shit about anything else. Budget smudget.

OMFG they've Gabby Giffords there to vote!

The President, in this situation, was weak. He had zero good options available, and little leverage.

The real threat, at least as far as the economy is concerned, is not default. It's downgrading the bond rating. As Suranis pointed out from his own country's first hand experience, a downgrade has a huge impact on interest rates. How many US homeowners are barely able to make the monthly payments on their ARMs as it stands now? How many Americans barely have their head above water with their credit card debt? If the national credit rating is downgraded, is there any realistic chance that the prime rate isn't going to go up?

There were three basic options left available to the President as of yesterday. Option 1 - going past tomorrow without increasing the debt ceiling - would have resulted in a partial government shutdown for an indefinite period of time coupled with an all-but-certain downgrade. Option 2 - invoking the 14th or other justifications and ignoring Congress - would have avoided the shutdown, but I can't see how it would have made a downgrade any less likely. Option 3 - give in enough to get Congress to raise the limit past 2012 - avoids a shutdown and has the best potential for avoiding a downgrade.

Of those three options, I think the third is the one that is probably going to cause the least damage to the economy.

It sucks, but as long as the Teahadists were willing to strike a match in a crowded, gas filled room, I can't see what other real choice he had. The whole "don't negotiate with hostage takers" thing sounds good in theory, but only up until the point where it's obvious that the hostage is definitely going to get blown away. I think we were at that point. I don't think the lunatics on the right were bluffing, and I do think they had it in their power to take us past tomorrow without raising the limit.

She's getting sustained applause in the House

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN/

Passed 269-161

Yep. She told JimBot and he forwarded the info to me the other day. If you will scroll back you will see that we Obots have known about her return for several days.

The bill has passed the House.

The good news is Gabby is back. That's it.

Yep, she is back and she was looking good. What an amazing recovery.

The symbol of Gabby being there to vote is really beyond comprehension. I just cannon fathom the guts and strength of that woman. She is truly, truly awesome. I know it is political theatre but damn it is brilliant political theatre. It could have only been better if the vote had been even and she walked in and cast the deciding vote, as it was I will simply take the glorious picture of her being there, walking, talking, smiling and VOTING.

It says something to the rest of them who piss and moan about not getting the perfect deal. The Firebaggers and the Teabaggers are both pissed about this deal. That tells me that it is where it needs to be. If that wasn't enough both Limbaugh and Hannity are absolutely and utterly pissed off. I will take that. Let us get passed this and get onto the work of creating jobs and more importantly taking BACK the house in 2012, so that we can have four years of total control of the house, the senate and the White House, with a "lame duck" POTUS we can really get a progressive agenda rammed down their throats. The eye is on the prize of 2012, lets get Nancy Smash recontrol of the gavel and give Harry Reid a filibuster proof majority. I am willing to do what it takes to get it done. Are you with me?

Hell, one freeper compared this vote tonight to 9/11!

As long as there is such a difference in voting power to federal offices, it will very difficult to retake control of the House and to get a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. There is a great inequality in populous blue states and sparsely populated red states. I never hear talk about this structural inequality that makes a joke of one person/one vote. Perhaps there should be a movement to combine Wyoming, Montana and Idaho into one state. North Dakota, South Dakota added to Minnesota.

Because the Repubs don't give a shit. They pass crazy shit and then it gets voted down in the senate and they they run onto their constituents and say "Look its the Dems being obstructionist. This is proof government doesn't work" Congress has passed a total of 14 (well 15 now) pieces of Legislation in 8 months. If the dems try and pass anything its filibustered in the senate, tabled by their own guys in committees and generally frozen. The shit the tea party is proposing is so outrageous there is no point in trying for a deal to get it passed. No-one sane would look at it.

Frankly Obama can do a lot worse than totally ignoring congress from now on. hes gotten the debt ceiling pout of the way and hes gotten a no vote deal on the budget. And the triggers are so weighed on the side of the Dems that I can see no reason for the dems to even go into the Budget committee at all with an intention to really make it work . I'd just let it fail and snigger as the repubs scream about the hammer coming down on the pentagon.



I will say one thing I never talked about, the collective psychological hurt. All Mike said is true but having you bond rating lowered is utterly humiliating as a country. Its all over the press, you cant get away from it, its like a dark cloud has come over the country. Everyone around you is not only hurting from the interest rates, they feel humiliated and the whole world is laughing at you. Your country has been downgraded to second class. That's a very hard thing to bear.

Given Citizens United Fuckjob by the SCOTUS, I'd say with the capitulation of Dems and the WH, our odds of retaking sufficient power in 2012 is waning badly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/po ... cotus.html

There's probably no way to get a filibuster proof majority in the senate in 2012. But considering the recall elections are hammering the shit out of the republicans in state legs I think your odds of an electoral victory in 2012 are pretty decent. But its gonna require a feckload of work, and you can forget help by the media.

That is true by design for the U.S. Senate. Most of the time I think that is a fundamentally anti-democratic device left behind by founders who were unwilling to give up the concept of states as sovereign entities. The rest of the time I think it would not be such a problem if the filibuster did not exist. Once in a blue moon I am grateful for the filibuster.

It is not so true for the House of Representatives. Yes, every state gets at least one representative. For the states with tiny populations, that introduces an inequity. But after that rule is satisfied, the Census Bureau does its best to assure proportionate representation.

A problem with the Census Bureau's numbers is that there is still a known undercount of the population of inner cities, especially of minority young men. This affects more than representation in the House.

Ya know, I watch all the special elections that come up for various reasons. Seems like the Goopers always lose. Before the general in 2010, the GOP had lost every special since 2006.

WTF is wrong with us in the General Elections? Oh, having some on the left get mad at the Pres for something and telling people to stay home doesn't help (Ed Schultz).

I believe the Senate is anti-democratic on purpose, too, but not for a specifically states' rights reason. Madison believed that pure democracy would simply be mob rule, and wanted procedural safeguards against a temporary minority unsettling the order with stupid decisions. So the presumably more populist House, consisting of those close to the people of their specific districts, could be expected to run rampant from time to time.

Therefore, there should be a more calm, deliberative body, chosen for expertise by state legislators, presumably better able to judge the talents of potential Senators. I am not sure whether it was less democratic, in the sense of people being picked for irrational reasons, but it was probably pretty inefficient. Doing direct elections on the same ballots may, I suppose, be more populist. I'm not sure. It was a big goal of the populists and one of their few unalloyed successes. It's definitely more efficient, though, to do it the way we do.

I honestly doubt it matters all that much, other than that it would be incredibly inefficient to change it back, which is why whack-a-loons like Keyes are the only people calling for it.