In a shocking development Thursday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) triggered a rarely used procedural option informally called the “nuclear option” to change the Senate rules.
Reid and 50 members of his caucus voted to change Senate rules unilaterally to prevent Republicans from forcing votes on uncomfortable amendments after the chamber has voted to move to final passage of a bill.
Reid’s coup passed by a vote of 51-48, leaving Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fuming.
The surprise move stunned Republicans, who did not expect Reid to bring heavy artillery to what had been a humdrum knife fight over amendments to China currency legislation.
The Democratic leader had become fed up with Republican demands for votes on motions to suspend the rules after the Senate had voted to limit debate earlier in the day.
Read the rest.
There is something very wrong with this picture
Despite their honest intentions, many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are being suckered into a trap and calling for the very “solutions” that are part of the financial elite’s agenda to torpedo the American middle class – higher taxes and more big government.
Watch the clip below in which journalist Adam Kokesh talks to Occupy Wall Street protesters.
The ignorance displayed in these interviews knows no bounds. The protesters just don’t get it. They are calling for the government to use force to impose their ideas, all in the name of bringing down corporations who they don’t realize have completely bought off government regulators. Corporations and government enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship – getting one to regulate the other is asinine and only hurts smaller businesses who are legitimately trying to compete in a free market economy that barely exists.
The zeal for totalitarian government amongst some of the “protesters” is shocking. One sign being carried around read, “A government is an entity which holds the monopolistic right to initiate force,” which seems a little ironic when protesters complain about being physically assaulted by police in the same breath.
Can Harry Reid wait out the Tea Party?
The Senate majority leader seems to think so.
Reid sat down with more than 30 Review-Journal staffers Friday afternoon for an hour-long Q&A session at the newspaper’s offices. The bulk of the back and forth was dedicated to federal spending and how Congress might tame exploding budget deficits.
Reid blamed everything that ails Washington and the nation on Republicans. He slammed the GOP for its refusal to go along with tax increases as part of this month’s debt-ceiling deal, saying hard-core fiscal conservatives are making it impossible to strike a long-term deal that slows the growth of the national debt.
“(Senate Minority Leader) Mitch McConnell has done a good job bringing the country to a standstill,” Reid said.
The reason Republicans have drawn such a deep line in the sand on tax increases, of course, is the Tea Party movement. The populist uprising that was born from Washington’s bailouts achieved critical mass after Democrats decided to start spending like no government before. The stimulus. The ObamaCare overreach. Budget deficits that made President George W. Bush look like a piker.
A speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush, Andrew Ferguson is now a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. The author of Fools’ Names and Land of Lincoln, Ferguson’s most recent book is entitled Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.
What does the experience of getting our children into college tell us about the state of higher education today and about ourselves? Recounting his experience in guiding his son through this process, Ferguson discusses the voluminous amount of information available today about colleges and universities (from the U.S. News rankings to the glossy brochures sent out by admission departments) but insists that it remains impossible to get an answer to the one essential question that every parent has, “Is there any learning going on at this school?”
The news to be culled from this latest Federal Communications Commission (FCC) attempt to usurp Internet regulatory authority and impose Network Neutrality is – there really is no news. At least in the broadest – and most important – sense.
What was true before FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s Tuesday midnight run to grab power over the Web remains true today – the FCC does not have the authority to do what they have just announced they will do on December 21st.
Unless and until the Congress enacts law making it so, the FCC doesn’t have the authority to do anything. December’s vote to commandeer control of the Internet is no more legitimate than – and just as capricious as – if they were to vote themselves masters of all the nation’s pizza joints.
The FCC – no government agency – can just decide they want to regulate an industry – and then vote themselves power over it. That’s not constitutional, representative, limited government – that’s Hugo Chavez-style expropriative despotism.
And it’s not as if The Chairman has been suffering from a dearth of people pointing out his lack of authority. We have repeatedly pointed it out. And it hasn’t just been us.
In an e-mail to supporters the day after the 2010 midterm elections, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards wrote, “There’s no getting around it: the results of yesterday’s election are truly alarming.” She lamented the “extremists” who have been elected and who will “pursue a dangerous agenda.” That agenda, of course, is saving unborn children from being murdered.
Still, amidst the doom and gloom of her correspondence, Richards pointed to one shining success for the movement of legalized child-killing: Colorado’s ballot initiative 62 — an amendment that would have defined the child in the womb as a person and therefore entitled to legal protection — was defeated by voters 70% to 30%.
Remarks on the nation’s serious problem of illegal immigration, so keenly felt here in Arizona that we set the standard with our own law to address the issue, were uttered today by Barack Hussein Obama. His entire speech can be read here.
Some highlights:
Obama attempted to draw parallels between legal immigrants responsible for scientific breakthroughs such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla along with visionaries such as Andrew Carnegie and the flood of uneducated illegals entering our country in violation of our laws.
He spoke in terms of an “estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants” in the U.S., citing the same numbers that have been used for nearly a decade, and employs the soft term “undocumented immigrants,” clearly intended to deceive.
The AP story announcing the shift in Administration policy is incorrect. The Obama Administration has, in fact, redoubled its efforts to rid the world of extremist jihadists and terrorists — as long as they are connected with the Tea Party movement.
Even as it continues to do its Orwellian best to redefine our enemies from U.S. Hating Religious Fundamentalists to “disgruntled foreign nationals,” (as if they were a particularly impatient man on line at the Post Office), it has, using the full force of the government and mass media, begun scouring the country for genuinely disenfranchised Americans it can re-brand as dangerous — excuse me, “potentially” dangerous domestic terrorists.
