…Once the national debate has moved away from health care to financial regulation, job creation, and energy policy, Scott Brown will remain a Republican in a very Blue state. He will face largely the same dilemma that Landrieu, Nelson and Lincoln face in their own states: reelection. His party’s platform and current strategy damage his chances of keeping his office come the 2012 election. I seriously doubt that the Republican leadership will be able to count on Brown’s vote down the line.
Brown (R-MA) is taking heat for voting with Democrats. He'll just have to get used to it.
Lo and behold, yesterday Scott Brown voted ‘yea’ in a procedural vote as the Senate gets ready to bring the jobs bill up for an actual up-or-down vote. Predictably, as this Raw Story post outlines, conservatives are hopping mad about that. They apparently haven’t realized that Scott Brown wants to keep his job and that means doing what the voters in Massachusetts want him to do. That is his constituency, not the Far Right.
If I were Scott brown, I’d settle in for a lot of angry Tea Party calls in the months ahead.
Keith, I like you. I really enjoy your show. I think it’s a great shot-in-the-arm of liberal attitude and I think it’s necessary. Most nights, I’m pretty much right there with you. Tuesday night was different.
Barack Obama, in order to improve the environment, wants to, among other things, build new nuclear power plants here in the United States. To that, I say, “Huzzah!” Excellent. Thank you. I don’t quite understand the “We won’t store it in Yucca Mountain which was designed for exactly that purpose,” bit of the policy, but okay, fine. But Keith, you you ridicule the idea. You seem scared of the idea. And for no good reason. This is one area where I have never understood the environmentalist position. You pointed to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but did you take the time to think about and research those two events. I don’t think you did. Continue reading…
What is chalkblocking, you ask? Well, Rachel Maddow on Friday called for ideas for new terminology to replace the stiflingly boring “filibuster”. She has billed it as an effort to reinvigorate the somnambulant national conversation over the Senate’s inability to pass legislation:
Have you ever heard the phrase “chalk one up to…”? It’s a sporting reference, from back scoring was done on a board, with chalk. A point would be “chalked up to” which ever team.
The filibuster is used to prevent the Senate from taking a vote (or tally the score) on a particular bill, so to filibuster is to chalkblock.
I think this term fits rather well. The fact that it is derived from “cockblock” means it conveys a certain malicious intent and evokes a deeply indignant feeling from anyone under the age of 45. Plus, it has the added virtue of rhyming. The chalkblocker, like his clubbing counterpart, should be regarded with derision and ridicule.
As far as usage goes, here are some examples;
“Lieberman’s a giant chalkblocker.”
“Olympia Snow just totally chalkblocked me!”
“Health care reform is a socialist plot, and I, Mitch McConnell, am committed to chalkblocking it!”
For more on Rachel’s campaign, and to submit ideas of your own, check this out.
It’s been a while since I really delved into purely philosophical waters here on Radical Rationalist and when that happens I start to get very self-conscious about using the adjective ‘radical’. Today I feel like the best way to remedy the feeling is to set out one of the two most radical (I think) philosophical positions I hold: that religion, in any guise, is innately immoral.
There are several issues I want to deal with right at the start. The first is that in making this argument I refuse to use specific individuals or historical events. Too often, people in my position point to these kinds of specific examples in an effort to demonstrate the larger point. This approach is pointless and self-defeating. Pointless because specific examples are just that. They can easily be dismissed as the misapplication of whatever teaching that the event is being used to refute. Plus, under the best circumstances, it would only function to demonstrate the immorality of one specific doctrine, rather than the idea of religious faith as a whole. The tendency is self-defeating because any sufficiently large group of people or sufficiently long period of history will contain examples of people behaving badly. If I should point to the Crusades, my opponent could point to the French Revolution. If I point to Osama bin Laden, they can point to the Unabomber. That kind of back-and-forth bickering doesn’t move the debate at all, in any direction. Continue reading…
The political world is abuzz with stories of Republican ascendancy. Scott Brown’s come-from-behind victory in Massachusetts gives these stories considerable weight. Forgotten, it seems, is the Democratic victory in historically-Red up-state New York. And perhaps it should be. Both of these elections are single data-points (and small ones at that) along a trendline spanning decades in which the switching of a single seat by itself is almost meaningless.
The Scott Brown Problem
Yes, the Democratic Party no longer has a nominal super-majority in the Senate, but, let’s be frank, the party wasn’t doing anything with it anyway. Red-state senators like Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln, and bat-shit crazy senators like Joe Lieberman made sure that the Democratic Party could never capitalize on it’s numbers. The recent election in Massachusetts has only functioned to quell unrealistic expectations. Continue reading…
