"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Thursday, December 23, 2010

The Lesson of the Lame Duck Congress
Posted by Jill | 4:54 AM
And so the 111th Congress goes home, after a flurry of actually quite huge last-minute legislation. The repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Extension of unemployment benefits. The START treaty. The Zadroga bill (albeit a scaled-back one).

Is this what 11-dimensional chess looks like?

If so, then what we are left with is an appalling reality amidst all the accomplishments: that all we need do in order to get worthy legislation that costs either nothing or comparatively little through the legislative sausage grinder is to shovel billions of dollars into the pockets of 0.3 percent of the population. If billionaires get their money, we can pass anything else we want. Because the bottom line for Republicans is this: It's never "country first", despite what the former "straight-shooter" turned senile, angry old man John McCain claimed during his failed 2008 presidential campaign. It's all about the greed. You can have health care reform, you can have health care for 9/11 responders, you can have extended unemployment benefits for people who are casualties of outsourcing and the greed of executives who made bad business decisions. You can have gays serving openly in the military. You can have all this -- as long as people who already have more money than they can spend in 1000 lifetimes get even more money. As long as Rush Limbaugh gets to pocket an additional seven figures in tax cuts every year, the Republicans really don't care about how much anything costs.

We already knew that almost everyone in Congress can be bought. The Republicans have historically been the expensive whores, while Democrats tend to settle for table scraps (though that is changing too). But now we know exactly where they stand: It's all about the Benjamins. As long as the people they serve -- the billionaires -- get more and more and more, Republicans have no principles and they don't really give a damn about anything but nurturing the plutocracy.

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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Because there just aren't enough hours in the day
Posted by Jill | 8:53 PM
Sometimes I think it's me; that I just don't do a good job managing time. I look at people who are on top of a story the minute it hits, and I wonder how they do it. I know that some of the Big Boiz make a living (such as it is) from advertising, but there are plenty of us out here who work Real Jobs and have lives and marriages and some have kids and other things that we do other than blog.

But it seems sometimes that others have a much easier time keeping on top of what's going on. It's not that my life has so many demands. I don't have kids that need help with their homework and rides to soccer practice. I'm an indifferent housekeeper at best. I don't have a long commute; at most it's 25 minutes. And yet most days, if I don't get with a story in the morning, I don't cover it till the next day.

It isn't that I sit staring off into space. I get up most mornings at 5:30 AM, have coffee and spend about eight minutes with Mr. Brilliant before he heads off for work. Then I have an hour and a half in which to read what's going on in the world, decide what to write about, and try to dash off 2-3 posts before either going for a walk or doing a half-hour of yoga before getting ready for work. I'm home by 6 PM, make dinner, clean up, watch Olbermann with Mr. B. and then either collapse into an unconscious heap or grab a few minutes of blog time -- which is what I'm doing now, when I should be working on my new template.

So those of you who DO manage to cover the news comprehensively and hold down a job, how the heck do you do it?

Tonight I really can't complain about the Democrats. Yes, the Webb Amendment was defeated, despite Olympia Snowe, Chuck Hagel, and Gordon Smith daring to risk the Wrath of the Bush Junta by voting with the Democrats in an effort to do the right thing. It's sad and it's tragic for the troops -- the soldiers being worn down to nothing by a president who cares only about trying to save his own legacy. But every Democrat plus Bernie Sanders did the right thing today in voting for the measure. Holy Joe Lieberman, of course, voted to continue to break the military, but that's expected of that particular piece of human excrement that continues to occupy the junior Senator seat from the great state of Connecticut.

But the important thing is that with this vote, the Democrats made sure that at least for now, Republicans own this war. That idiot Lindsey Graham (cue Sam Seder's sound clip of a closet door) blathered "The idea of winning the war in Iraq is beginning to get a second look." Then what the fuck have we been doing over there for four years? How many times does George W. Bush get a "do-over" in this war, using the blood of other people's children? I don't know who is giving "the idea of winning the war in Iraq a second look", when according to the latest Zogby poll, Captain Codpiece is sitting with a 29% approval rating overall and a 73% disapproval rating of the way he conducts his foreign policy; and in the latest USA Today/Gallup poll has 59% of Americans favoring a timetable for withdrawal. Still -- the Democrats did what they had to do: stand up for doing right by the soldiers fighting this war and dump their exploitation right in the laps of the Republicans. Call it stagecraft if you like, call it political posturing. If the Democrats don't have the votes to end this war, they sure as hell DO have enough votes to make damn sure that the Republicans who continue to support squandering America's future in Iraq have to take responsibility for what they support.

Similarly, the Leahy/Specter amendment to restore habeas corpus failed by four votes. That Republicans who claim to stand for the rule of law voted this down is even more disheartening, especially after a day that saw a college kid busted and tasered for the crime of being a pain in the ass. Americans are beginning...slowly...to recognize what the loss of civil liberties means. Whether it's enough to forestall the kind of police state for which the Bush Administration clearly salivates at the mere prospect remains to be seen. But again: if you don't have the votes, while it still matters that you didn't win, at least you made sure that it's Republicans that defecated on the Constitution, and it's Republicans who believe that nineteen guys with box cutters are enough to overturn not just the Constitution but the Magna Carta.

In making the Republicans own, as a party in its entirety, all of the most insane and egregious of the power-mad Bush Administration's policies, at the very least, it makes clear what voters' choices are going to be next year.

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