MackMarkstein

The Squad was nowhere in the names mentioned of course. Rep. Jayapal did introduce a different “but related” bill in 2019 to eliminate the absurd concept of corporate personhood. Not to harp on The Squad (which the PTB probably want us to do) but Rep. J. is said to be a mentor of them. And I wish Rep. J. a complete recovery since she had Covid…[Read more]

Part of it was.
The part that everyone remembers, probably because of loud Rethug objections that this was back-room dead-of-night stuff affecting the lives of Americans, etc.:

“The Democrats played by the rules in 2010 in overcoming a filibuster to first pass the ACA, and then using the reconciliation process to pass a second bill making…[Read more]

What was the maneuver that Nancy used when the ACA first passed? It wasn’t gonna get a majority, probably in the Senate, otherwise. This was 2009 I believe.
I believe it was reconciliation. It involved a budgetary meeting between the House and Senate.
If the Dems claim that’s out of the question now, that’s just the latest foul-smelling decision…[Read more]

Back during times I still watched MSNBC (pre-2016), one of the rare actually valuable Maddow segments had some statistics and graphs showing how often the filibuster had been used pre-Mitch and during the Time of Mitch. It was impressive; It did skyrocket during Mitch’s years of Obama-blocking.

Memories from childhood: We still had a “vacant lot” on one end of our block, in the suburbs. Pretty small, became a house and yard after a few years. I learned to recognize the milkweed because it was where the the monarchs and their caterpillars were hanging out. That was one of the more common plants, and one of the more common insects, in…[Read more]

Mitch is a disgrace to turtles. Or, the implied neckless turtle associations with Mitch should include…”with all due respect to turtles.” Much as when many politicians are described as snakes or weasels, it may offend people who have good snakes or weasels as pets.
I’ve had a few turtles as pets and one or two were gentle, comforting, not even…[Read more]

Admittedly that would be a stressful thing to experience: Breaching of the Capitol by the Duck Dynasty hordes (comical looking but dangerous, a characteristic of these minions). Anyway, this caused the Yang Nancy to come out: Demanded and got resignation of local police leaders, got quick impeachment. If she thinks a foreign power is behind…[Read more]

Trump liked to grab the news cycle in order to distract from anything shifty he was up to. With only 1 day or so left, what may he be considering evil enough but maybe hide-able so that he wants the conversation to be about something else? We know there will be conversations about who he’s pardoning, whoever that will turn out to be.

Yes, what a madman, and the phrase “control freak” does not come *anywhere* near what he must have been.
But he brought beauty here. I think I mean mostly in those years up to ’66 when he retired the first time. Haven’t heard much of his later work.
Two hopefully funny glimpses from my reading lots of alleged rock musician autobiographies:
1)…[Read more]

Katie was allowed to stay on an Oversight and/or Natural Resources committee but, go figure, was not allowed to be on too many at a time, so was booted from the Financial committee. Probably there was too much Truth slipping into the House: Bankster criminals being confronted verbally face-to-face live on CSPAN and in the Congressional record.

has been in hiding since 01/06/2021.

I think everyone in government, at least Pres./Congress/Court system, can be impeached in theory. So if someone’s using the impeachment lever too casually, I say impeach them!
Actually, being serious for a moment, every time since ’72 when a Pres. was being considered for impeachment, some people were concerned about devaluing of that mechanism…[Read more]

That huge crowd of stirred-up people seems like an extension of the Tea Party, which always seemed initiated by Rich Folk behind the scenes, maybe Kochs. I remember that Dick Armey was caught funneling money to them. The idea was to have a front of people from here, there, everywhere in the sticks babbling about The Constitution and such, while…[Read more]

To say the typo is amusing. We need amusement in this day and age. At least I assume it is a typo:
“…on the lawns where huge crows traditionally watch the new president taking his oath of office.
“

The Congresscritters had been personally threatened. Not a very bright thing for the terra-rists to do, …maybe next time they will breach National Guard Headquarters.
I think by proxy the Congresspeople want to punish Trump for the riot, though like any Mafia boss he didn’t give direct unambiguous orders to commit any crime, unless it was in…[Read more]

…there won’t be lots of actual evidence required. It would be like most political decisions from Congress, decided in the back room and any stated reason for the decision will do.

Dick (Cheney) and Dubya were part of the never-Trumpers; Remember Trump was not verbally kind to Jeb. But it’s deeper than that. Anyway, the Rethugs never liked the T-Man, probably a majority of them. Now they can officially pretend that he’s the only goat that the Rethugs need to scape. Back to old-style Rethug evil! And it was obvious…[Read more]

Sometime around Sept. it was reported that staff of Mitch had said he expected Trump to lose, and all his Senate actions (really I should say inactions) would be planned around that. For example, opposition to any Covid-relief bill to the Little People, because allowing one to go forward would give Mitch less of a pretext post-Biden-inauguration…[Read more]

Quite possibly Biden won the actual vote count, but how would we know or how could we verify? With electronic tabulators counting the votes, I only trust any precincts or counts or states that did full manual recounts of paper ballots, to be trustworthy.
Other, civilized, countries do that for the entire country. What are the odds that our Fed.…[Read more]