I Swear I Had Nothing to do With This

OK, so I made an offhand joke when talking about Barney Frank about how Air America is suprisingly still on the air. One short day later, voila! Air America is set to cease broadcasting and will file bankruptcy. Liberals and progressives sell conflict to advance their agenda, but Air America skipped the subterfuge and went straight for pure hatred. I guess now Montel Williams will have to spew his filth on the corner of a street like the rest of the crazy people (or move into the Senate like Al Franken). I suppose it's refreshing to know that hate doesn't sell.

Market Shockingly Behaves in Predictable Manner

In news almost as shocking as the statement "water is wet", stocks tumbled early today after President-for-life Barack Obama, may the Lord God bless him and protect him from (being) evil, announced new government restrictions on banks. How can anyone really still refer to this man as an intellectual without splitting in two from laughter?

Da, Dada, Da!!!! Barney Frank, Defender of the Constitution!

Congressman Barney Frank (D. Mass), who, when given a choice of definitions for "constitution" is more likely to come up with "statistic in role playing games often used to reflect a character's ability to take damage, expressed in hit points" than the governing document of the United States of America, has suddenly sprung to the fore with his concerns over the Constitutional usurpation inherent in the filibuster. On (How are We Still on the) Air America Radio, Barney the pimp dinosaur (OK, that's not fair, it was his "paid boyfriend" that ran the male hookers out of their home), blathered about how God didn't create the filibuster and that it is creating a Constitutional crisis (just 213 years in the making). Apparently Barney didn't have a problem with the filibuster until Scott Brown (R. Mass) was elected, breaking the ability of the Democrats to circumvent the filibuster through a vote known as "cloture" ending debate on a topic through a 60 vote majority.

Well, when Barney Frank talks Constitution, I just have to check in on it because he's more likely to identify constitution as the stamina it takes to find a male hooker willing to have sex with his fat ass than he is to relate it to government. (Please note that my ad hominem attacks are both funny, and backed up by addressing the substance of the argument, so here's the substance.)

The filibuster, according to the United States Senate, became popular in the 1850's and was based upon the idea that any Senator should have the right to unlimited debate on a subject (which jives pretty well with the First Amendment). Let's keep in mind that in the 1850's, there were probably still people around who had been born around the time the Constitution went into effect (it was adopted in 1787), though they'd be admittedly old, they'd be younger than Ben Franklin when he died. I'd say the memory of our Constitution was relatively fresh. In fact, the first use mentioned by the Senate website above is 1841. The United States Constitution empowers the Senate and House to enact rules to govern its own proceedings (Article I, Section V). According to at least one text, the ability to filibuster had been in place since 1806 and the mechanism argued for by Aaron Burr in 1789. Surely these people had a grasp of the Constitution, as the ink was barely dry. Currently, Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate provides for the filibuster and mechanisms such as "cloture" to overcome it.

The legislative tradition of the filibuster is a little older than this, however, and likely would have been understood as a process by the framers. In fact, the practice is so old it was used by the Roman Senator Cato to head off the activities of Julius Caeser. Again, I'm pretty sure the founding fathers were fully aware of the fillibuster (how's that for some alliteration?)

I would say the argument for the constitutionality of the filibuster is strong. So, Barney, please think before you speak, especially when your self interest is showing. Oh, and by the way, the cloture vote, which theoretically at least violates the First Amendment by silencing political speech (the most highly protected form of speech), was passed as a result of the urging of...wait for it...President Woodrow Wilson, the grandfather of the American progressive movement and a man with zero respect for the Constitution. He and Barney have a lot in common, come to think of it.

Big Blow to Obamacare

The ball is now in the Democrats' court regarding what steps to take in order to try to pass their health care bill as the AP has called the election, Martha Coakley has conceded, and a Republican who campaigned against the health care bill now sits in the Senate seat formerly occupied by Democrat Ted Kennedy. Don't bet that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take this as anything other than a bump in the road on the way to shoving through the bill.

Update on Tomorrow's Massachusetts Senate Election

According to the latest group of polls, all but one conducted by the Daily Kos (which is a hugely progressive website with no compulsion to deliver truth) which showed a tie, Republican Scott Brown is anywhere from 5 to 11 points ahead going into tomorrows special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy's seat. I am cautiously optimistic that Brown can win the election. Apparently so are the current Democrats in power as they continue to try to find ways to take voting out of play on the final health care bill. If they take this route after a Brown victory, they are going to have to try and distance the Massachusetts election and the health care bill. Given the Brown is strongly emphasizing that his election means a chance to kill the bill, this is going to be a difficult sell. Mainly because it will be a blatant lie. But they seem pretty comfortable with that idea.

Today's Recommended Reading

The Democratic need to blame everything on President Bush has officially become an unhealthy fixation. This article details the idiocy after a rally for Martha Coakley. In Michael Chricton's "Rising Sun", one of the characters talks about the Japanese business model and the attitude of "fix the problem, not the blame". I have no idea if there is any truth to this, but I love the idea. Democrats, faced with an inability to fix problems due to the flawed logic of social dependency, can only try to fix the blame.

Massachusetts Still in Play to the Stupid Voters

Keep an eye or ear closely tuned to the news on Tuesday to see if the Republicans can take former Democratic Senator Teddy Kennedy's seat. It should be exciting and I tend to think that the election, win or lose, is a referendum against Obamacare. Of course, if liberals have their way, the actual vote count wouldn't matter nor would the election rules. MSNBC commentator and radio talk show host Ed Schultz has declared that he would try to vote 10 times to swing the election to Coakley. This is, again, proof that progressives believe you are too dumb to govern yourself and their ideas are more important than democracy. This is again reflected in the liberal media where in an article critical of Coakley's campaign mistakes, the writer still feels the need to bash Brown saying "let's be honest, his nights probably aren't tied up with Mensa meetings". Conservatives are dumb, liberals and progressives are smart. It's a mantra that has been repeated so often that I believe many people become liberals and progressives to avoid being called stupid, which is, of course, stupid. Don't believe me? Think how Reagan was a bumbling fool but Carter a luminary, Clinton brilliant and Bush an idiot, Obama an intellectual who can't give a speech without a teleprompter while the big, fat, idiot (per Senator Al Franken's (D. Minn.) book) Rush Limbaugh gives one and a half hour extemporaneous speeches at CPAC. In fact, a hoax regarding the IQ of presidents over the last 50 years was widely circulated and bought into (my "ethics" professor in my master's degree program distributed it to the class) which showed every Democratic President being smarter than every Republican President with the exception of Richard Nixon.