All Life Is Problem Solving

Earlier today, I wrote about “sidecar reconciliation” and the difficulty of passing it, and concluded, in light of Lawrence O’Donnell’s remarks on MSNBC about parliamentary maneuvers, encountered a number of times each day, still needing 60 votes to overcome them, that Republicans can block HCR through reconciliation if they want to. I said, further, that […]

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Well, it’s official, or pretty official anyway. Scott Brown has been elected to Teddy Kennedy’s old seat and Martha Coakley has conceded. Some Democrats are blaming Coakley for running an inept campaign, and this may well have accounted for Brown’s margin of victory. But the real question is what allowed him to get close at […]

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Over the past four days two mega-threads appeared at Firedog Lake’s (FDL’s) Seminal web site. The first was created in response to a diary by “realworld” called “Why I won’t be voting for Martha Coakley on Tuesday” received 604 comments, a very large number for that site. And the second responding to a diary by […]

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Here’s Cromwell’s Again Hey, Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd, while both of you have been doing too little good for my taste, Cromwell’s plea: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” was never […]

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Absent a substantial change in direction by Congressional Leadership and the President, I think it’s time to do whatever progressives can to kill the health care reform legislation currently moving through Congress, and then to immediately reset to Medicare for All, single payer. As HR 3962 bill sits now, it’s worse than no bill at […]

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Harry, this is real simple. You’re making the American people pay much too high a price for 60 votes. You’ve got other fish more important than getting 60 votes to fry. The first is that you’ve got to get a strong health insurance reform bill with a PO that will cut costs. The second is […]

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A few weeks back I did a diary called “Mis-directed Fury.” It focused on the reaction to the State opt-out idea on health care reform at FDL, and basically made the point that there are a lot more important things to get furious about than the State opt-out proposal. Today we have another explosion of […]

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In my last post, I railed against the 60 vote frame and outlined the “nuclear option” procedure which allows escape from that requirement for passing reform and also makes clear that the frame that 60 votes are necessary is at best a half-truth, and at worst a lie. Of course, I didn’t expect that post […]

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A number of diaries at Firedog Lake today, frame the coming phase of the legislative process in terms of the need for 60 votes to get cloture and pass the PO. For example here’s a quote from one of today’s diaries by David Dayen: “Left out of this story is the fact that any amendment […]

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ralphbon asks: ”In the days and weeks following 9/11 did any legislator insist that we bring the perpetrators of that slaughter to justice, but only if we do it in a deficit-neutral fashion?” I thought this was a great question and merited creating lots of variations and also some statements about “deficit neutrality.” So, here […]

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