Leave a Comment

DeMint Twitters Against Senate's Sunday Vote
News — DeMint Twitters Against Senate's Sunday Vote Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) took not only to the Senate floor but also to his BlackBerry in protest of today's first Senate vote, held during an atypical Sunday session. DeMint checked in from the upper chamber on his Twitter feed using the mobile program TwitterBerry, adding a simultaneous web protest of today's cloture vote on an agriculture omnibus bill. "On the Senate floor waiting to speak against [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid's pork laden, omnibus land grab bill," wrote DeMint on his Twitter page . The Senate managed cloture in a 66-12 vote on the bill Sunday before adjourning. 20 Senators, almost all Republicans, were ...

Amanda Carpenter: Reid's Sunday Vote
Townhall.com Blog's TownHall Blog — Majority Leader Harry Reid was successful in corralling enough votes to advance his $10 billion land grab , despite 17 Republicans who protested the bill by skipping the vote altogether. 66 senators supported the bill over 12 who voted "nay" on it. Not a single Democratic senator voted against it. Here is the link to the roll call vote. Yesterday, I wondered how Republican, and usually conservative, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming would vote on the bill. He supported a provision to prohibit energy exploration in state. He DID vote for the bill. So did Barrasso's fellow Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi. Other Republicans who crossed party lines with Barrasso and Enzi to ...

Do Democrats Need 51 Or 60 Or 80 Votes To Get Something Passed? They Just Managed A Big One Yesterday With Only 66 Votes
DownWithTyranny! — The Senate's two worst extremists-- DeMint and Coburn In 2006 we worked hard to make sure there would be at least 50 Democratic senators and we sorta/kinda managed... if you include Joe Lieberman as a Democrat (not to mention Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln). But then it turned out Democrats don't need 50 votes, or even 51, but 60 ...

Midday open thread
Daily Kos — In this post yesterday I attempted to list the Daily Kos staff list, and totally botched it. I said there were 8 full-time people working on the site, there are actually nine. Who did I miss? Jed, who is close to launching a new kick ass Daily Kos product. Yet another reason I suck. In a "stimulus" environment away with bailouts for unworthy industries, add another possible one to the list: A source of mine called to say that Obama's reached out to some newspaper publishers about giving papers a tax break in the stimulus package. Broadcasters are ticked that they're being left out. Hopefully, that's wishful thinking and ...

John McCain: Tap Dancer
DownWithTyranny! — When I'm looking for accurate news or unbiased reporting Rick Santorum's column in the Philadelphia Inquirer isn't exactly the first place I turn. However, when I want to gage the rumblings on the far right fringes of the Republican Party, Santorum is perfect. Never a fan of John McCain, Santorum was on the rampage against his party's latest presidential candidate today. He starts with a warning: Obama's popularity with ordinary Americans combined with the "Democrats' beefy congressional majorities, which can pass whatever the new president proposes, and a nation looking to Washington to ease its economic woes, and Obama seems poised to take Washington as the Allies ...

Tom Udall, Mark Udall, Jeff Merkley - and What the Bailout Says About the New Senate
Open Left - Front Page — The Senate today voted to give Wall Street another $350 billion today. The vote tells us a lot about the new Senate (you can see the full tally here - and remember, on this vote, a "yes" vote was a vote against releasing the $350 billion bailout tranche). ...

A Wag of the Finger to Jeff Merkley
BlueOregon — ... this evening for his vote to release the remaining $350 million of TARP funds without any new strings attached. In doing so, Merkley parted company with Ron Wyden, even though during his election campaign candidate Merkley ...

David Sirota: What Today's Bailout Vote Says About the New Senate
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — ... The Senate today voted to give Wall Street another $350 billion today. The vote tells us a lot about the new Senate (you can see the full tally here - and remember, on this vote, a "yes" vote was a vote against releasing the $350 billion bailout tranche). ...

Is Tom Coburn a Closet Progressive?
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right — I ask because Coburn, the Oklahoma senator who is generally regarded as a staunch conservative, voted yesterday to block the distribution of the $350 billion that represented the second half of the TARP bailout of the financial services industry. Coburn had originally voted to approve the bailout in October. It wasn't just Coburn, by the way. Evan Bayh, Bob Bennett, Kit Bond, Richard Burr, Saxby Chambliss, Susan Collins, John Ensign, Linsday Graham, Chuck Grassley, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Johnny Isakson, Blanche Lincoln, Mel Martinez, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter and John Thune have all seen the light and switched from a pro-bailout to ...

What Would a "Bipartisan" Obama Look Like? (Hint: A Lot Like the One We're Seeing)
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right — Over at RealClarPolitics, Jay Cost takes Obama to task for failing to live up to his promises of bipartisanship. Cost writes: Instead, my criticism of the President is that he promised to be above this. He made that the core pledge of his candidacy, the principal reason he should receive the nomination and ultimately the presidency over the dozen or so other contenders across both parties who had better résumés but had been part of the partisan hackery. It was always going to be damned near impossible to move beyond heated partisanship - given all the structural forces that have been at work since the founding, and the ones that have been increasing in the last ...