This also happened

Lost in all the hysteria about Barack Obama traveling back in time to help Benedict Arnold surrender West Point to the limeys and alternately murder all four of Thomas Jefferson's grandparents while they were children (that's why Texas had to erase him from history), was the fact that something else happened. Student Loans were reformed. And, in a break from tradition, was done so in a non-corrupt manner that didn't result in tons of shady giveaways to corporate interests, and could actually be classified as *whispers* liberal. Shh, don't tell anyone.

Now on any other week this would be hailed as some sort of massive progressive achievement. But this week also included the systematic dismantling of Abe Lincoln's log cabin or something, so it got lost in the shuffle. What happened?

Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.
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The Congressional Budget Office said the direct-lending approach would save taxpayers about $61 billion over 10 years. Roughly $40 billion of the savings will be redirected to higher education. Education programs will get an additional $10 billion from the health care package.

The bill includes some landmark changes, like automatic increases, tied to inflation, in the maximum Pell grant award.
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The legislation will make it easier to pay back student loans, by reducing the share of income that a graduate must devote to loan payments and by accelerating loan forgiveness

Wait, they ended the bank racket that allowed them to make risk free government backed loans, expanded access to college for lower income students, made serious investments in higher education, and making it easier to pay off those loans? I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this unless I'm assured there's some sort of crooked deal with banks and financial giants that we haven't heard about. This just isn't how the American government is supposed to do business! This is an outrage! Now Sean is going to have to stop stripping to pay off his loans!

Listen, I'd like to be able to explain to you just what all of this means. But unless I have Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or the Congressional GOP telling me specifically how this is going to rough up my mother in a dark alley, cause tiny Joesph Stalins to burst out of my ribcage, pour sugar in my father's gas tank, and date rape Betsy Ross I'm not sure how to grasp what I'm sure was an unprecedented assault on freedom.

Let's just assume they dug up the corpse of liberty that they had previously killed and buried during health reform and had sex with it while MSNBC filmed it. Deal? Deal. Now let's go cut the breaks on the car of some Congressmen who voted for it.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 03.11

Darfuristan
Remember Darfur? Of course you do. It was a big problem with genocide in.... Africa or someplace, Ryan Gosling wore that Darfur t-shirt, then everything got fixed. Not so much. In a sprawling Rolling Stone article, Ben Wallace-Wells takes a look at how the various international efforts and strategies have created a quagmire situation in Darfur and how the problems going on there are different, yet still as potentially bad as the ones that were occurring six years ago.

Florida Lawmaker Attempts To Deny Tax Credit To Movies Filmed With Gay Characters
That's right, a Florida legislator is trying to deny a tax credit to any film that lenses in Florida with a gay character or otherwise doesn't conform to his standard of returning America's wang and our meth and gator repository back to an imagined Mayberry like existence. Luckily this doesn't pertain to films that hire gays or were written, directed, or starring gays. Otherwise no film would lens in Florida. Sadly this means that Sean and mine's attempt to film and all-gay remake of the Passion of the Christ will have to find another state to film in.

Reconciliation Not Easy to Influence
Whither the scummy lobbyist and industry shill? It seems in all this talk of reconciliation this and "improving health care" that we haven't been considering the feeling of insurance and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. Thankfully Roll Call is there to let us hear their lamentations about how the reconciliation process will largely shut them out of making tweaks and suggestions to any bill. Oh sure, they've cut several pounds of flesh from the bills that were already passed, but how will they be able to survive unless they get a bill that completely caters to their whims? I don't want to live in a country that forces me to contemplate that thought.

Number of millionaires in America increased 16 percent in 2009.
Sure, you don't have a job and you just stole food from your cat, but thankfully our social and financial betters were able to become richer during these hard times. It's nice to know that most of this unpleasantness is being confined to the peasants classes. Rich getting richer? Poor getting poorer? I think we're right on track for a return to serfdom in 2019. That ought to make medieval studies students happy.

That's a hella number: Scientists call for new word to describe 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
,000
We mostly applaud scientists and the pursuit of knowledge around here. But that's mostly because we took them to be serious scholars. Who knew that there were corners of science filled with brew-dog chugging frat bros chest bumping to Limp Bizkit. Why else would they propose that 'hella' join the ranks of giga, mega, and kilo. Sure, 27 zeros would need to be involved before the word hellameter was invoked, but it's the damn principle of the thing. Can't we use something classy, like 'fuckin' or 'shit-ton'?

Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West
Earthquakes: they steal time, mess with our axis, and screw with out precise GPS and longitude/latitude systems. As of now, Concepcion is 10 feet west of where it used to be, Santiago moved 11 inches west, and even Buenos Ares moved an inch. Just imagine in Concepcion, you now have to walk a few steps further to get where you want to go. Also: your entire city was largely destroyed. Talk about piling up inconveniences. This is too much, I think we need to have a talk with the mole people or the CIA earthquake satellite so me can stop this time altering, geography shifting nonsense.

I like the sound of this

It seems that this might be the week that Democrats finally get off their asses to begin taken the steps to considering having the House vote on the Senate bill and the Senate using reconciliation to pass the conference committee changes to the health care bills that they already passed.

But that second part, the reconciliation part, has some of our friends on the GOP side screaming bloody murder. See, reconciliation isn't supposed to be used to pass things like health care, it's supposed to be used to pass things like tax cuts for the rich that add $1.8 trillion to the deficit. And even then, only Republicans are allowed to do it. But Sen. Lamar Alexander, not only sees the danger of reconciliation, he's warning us of possible horrible horrors that await.

"But the difference here is, that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate, it would really be the end of the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority."

Wait, so not only would this country improve it's health care and coverage systems... it would also end the Senate? Theoretically end, fundamentally end, or end in a fiery explosion that sends flame covered blowhards from Tennessee cartwheeling through the sky and into the Potomac? And it's it's the third one, can the Senate end that way by the weekend and can we get extensive HD coverage of it?

I just want to know how the four previous times Alexander voted for reconciliation didn't end the Senate. Maybe it's a cumulative thing.

I wonder why Democrats would have to take this extraordinary, Senate murdering step to trample over the "minority right" of the GOP to completely halt any attempt at governance? Could perhaps an unrelated news article explain it to me?

Last year, the first of the 111th Congress, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the first two months of 2010, the number already exceeds 40.

That means, with 10 months left to run in the 111th Congress, Republicans have turned to the filibuster or threatened its use at a pace that will more than triple the old record.

Seems to me like that's the sort of thing that should be combated with the tyranny of majority rule. Majority rule, of course, being confined to measures that slightly modify already passed bills that only affects the budgetary process and does not add to the deficit.

So sure, I'd like it if we might get to have a semi-functional government again and get health care. But if it throws GOP Senators into a hilarious hissy fit and destroys the US Senate? Then I'm doubly for it. Triple even. Get destroying.

Governmental hilarity

Missed amongst all the the summit coverage is the simple fact that none of it would be necessary if the Democrats could, how should I phrase it... get of their fat lazy fucking asses and pass small tweaks to the bills they already fucking passed.

This fact does not seem to be lost on Nancy Pelosi, who has to pass the Senate bill, and Senator Kent Conrad, Chairman of the Budget Committee who is going to have to handle the reconciliation part of the tweaks the Senate is going to have to pass. But you see *laughs* there's just a *laughs* hilarious mix-em-up that's preventing it all from happening.

Democrats finally seem ready to act on health care reform, and for perhaps the first time in the entire year-long health care reform debate, they're speaking--openly--about the likelihood that they'll invoke the budget reconciliation process to make some tweaks to the Senate's health care bill. But there remains no clear path forward, with the House and Senate still jockeying over who will make the first move, and even Senate Democrats divided on how the process should work in their chamber and who among them gets to decide on it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she won't pass the Senate bill until the reconciliation process is complete. And Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) says the Senate can't do reconciliation until after the House acts on the Senate bill.

I imagine the conversation goes some thing like..... "You got legislative peanut butter in my chocolate!" "No, you got legislative chocolate in my peanut butter!", then they both try to speak at the same time, do that whole "You speak" "No, you speak" thing for a few minutes, both end up speaking at the same time again, give up, then both attempt to walk away..... except they both step in the same direction, almost bump into each other, get stuck doing the whole "After you" "No, after you" thing, until hours later staffers have to come and physically remove them from the scene as they've devolved into simpering, weeping messes.

It would all be hilarious if it didn't effect tens of millions of people without health care, the hundreds of millions that need better access and cheaper prices, and a massive chunk of our economy.

So that's why Democrats can't move forward on health care. There's a charmingly befuddled argument over turf, who moves first, and whether Kent Conrad likes Nancy Pelosi or likes likes her. This is important shit people. Until they work out their sexual tension and basic fucking legislative procedure, you're just going to have to will yourself better or hope that money you buried in the back yard sprouts a money tree with which you can use to actually pay your skyrocketing premiums.

Reconciliation: resolution without resolution

It seems that after numerous statements by Republicans that they aren't going to support any real effort at health care reform, Democrats are slowly coming to the idea that Republicans aren't going to support any real effort at health care reform. See? All it takes are 60-70 well placed kicks to the gut and groin area before the Democratic leadership realizes it has a problem in the gut/groin area. Who said they weren't perceptive? It even turns out they're starting to formulate a plan around this opposition and, surprisingly enough, it doesn't involve taking the fetal position, shrieking like a wounded animal, and hoping the GOP either takes pity or walks away in disgust.

Senate Democrats said Sunday that they were fleshing out plans to pass health legislation, particularly the option of a new government-run insurance program, with a simple majority, instead of the 60 votes that would ordinarily be needed to overcome a filibuster.

After consulting experts in Senate rules and procedure, the Democrats said they were increasingly confident that they could legislate creation of a public plan in a way that would withstand challenges expected from Republicans.
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In the last week, Democrats have begun to talk openly of using a procedure known as budget reconciliation to pass a health bill in the Senate with a simple majority, assuming no Republican support.

Ahh the reconciliation process, in which a problem is deemed a budgetary matter and thus rendered unfilibusterable. But there's a hitch: a Senate parliamentarian will have to look over the bill and will have the ability to throw out provisions and policies that aren't deemed strictly budgetary matters. That is, unless the Senate Democrats appoint a crooked parliamentarian who allows them to put whatever they want into the bill under some loose definition of the word "budgetary". But as doing this would fit under the definition of "devious", "cunning", "underhanded", and, worst of all, "beneficial to the American people", they will probably not attempt this type of GOP-esque maneuver.

So the question remains: what would a reconciliation type health care bill look like? Ezra Klein of the Washington Post looked at the possibility and came to a few conclusions. Namely that it won't work for comprehensive health care reform, but that it will result in the removal of Health Insurance Exchanges, insurance market reforms, and prevention and wellness, modernization, delivery system reforms, not to mention no public plan. What you do get is the ability to get more people into government programs that already exist, like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP, and the ability to levy taxes to pay for it. In other words: another way to make a minor or negligible step forward. Just remember to thank Democrats for their ability to not even get their caucus to stick together on the general idea of "not filibustering something". At the end of the day, it'll be the single biggest reason nothing substantial gets done.