Sundering What’s Left Of The Founder’s Senate

Constitution, Democrats, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Republicans

Today, Senate Democrats “effectively overturned more than 200 years of Senate precedent, not only on the judicial filibuster, as the Washington Post notes, but by moving to change the chamber’s rules without the traditional two-thirds majority in support, something previously done only to alter relatively minor rules.” (Reason.com.)

Say bye-bye to the legislation-stalling filibuster.

The filibuster is a powerful parliamentary device in the United States Senate, which in recent years has meant that most major legislation (apart from budgets and confirmations) requires a 60% majority to head off a filibuster. In recent years the majority has preferred to avoid filibusters by moving to other business when a filibuster is threatened …

Harry Reid and Barack Obama once shouted from the rooftops in support of these venerated Senate rules that have enabled “a minority to thwart the agenda and will of the party in power. …”

President Pinocchio lied. Again. But who’s counting?!

Reminds Reason.com: “The ability of a minority to thwart the agenda and will of the party in power is a feature, not a bug, of the constitutional order, but ‘majority rules’ is, unsurprisingly, popular with the majority.”

The Word Slavery Doesn’t ‘Belong’ To Blacks

Debt, English, Political Correctness, Race, Sarah Palin

Now a Fox-News hire, the boring, liberal mediacrat Howard Kurtz had a go at MSNBC’s Martin Bashir. Barking-mad Bashir, an English import, swore at Sarah Palin on air.

Kurtz is as inspiring as the rest of the banal bobbing heads on the network. He uses a fancy, French word like “denouement,” but can’t conjugate a good old English verb: “lie,” as in “lie down.”

“You might think a mayor might lay low for awhile after admitting to smoking crack … blah blah,” wrote Kurtz of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Conjugate the verb “to lie,” dammit! It’s “lie low,” not “lay low,” stupid!

Repeat after me, Howard: “I am lying low. I lay low yesterday. I had once lain low after making another grammatical faux pas. And, for the same reason, I will lie low in the future.”

Still worse was Kurtz’ pathetic condemnation of Palin for “likening government borrowing to the awful legacy of buying and selling African-Americans”:

Now the issue on which [Bashir] went after the former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor is fair game. Palin had spoken in Iowa of borrowing from China to pay for the national debt, saying: “This isn’t racist. But it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due.”

Palin used a perfectly good noun—slavery—to denote the bondage that trillions in government debt imposes on citizens.

Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the idea that certain eternally aggrieved groups can stake out exclusive linguistic rights to words in our language.

UPDATED: ‘Knockout,’ Or, More Precisely, ‘Polar Bear Hunting’

Crime, Media, Race, Racism

Thomas Sowell mocks the piety of the likes of Bill O’Reilly in reporting about the “fun” ways black mobs choose to pass the time. “Despite such pious phrases as ‘troubled youths,’ the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing ‘knockout game,’ the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic.”

“New York seem to have been caught by surprise,” quips Sowell, “even though this ‘knockout game’ has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry.
Attacks of this sort have been rampant in St. Louis. But they have also occurred in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and elsewhere. In Illinois the game has often been called ‘Polar Bear Hunting’ by the young thugs, presumably because the targets are white.”

Nor is this game just a passing prank. People have been beaten unconscious, both in this game and in the wider orchestrated racial attacks. Some of these victims have been permanently disabled and some have died from their injuries.

In one murderous instance, a reporter comments facilely: “A man lost his life because a group of young people decided to play this very dangerous game.” Just like that?

A blogger responds appropriately by railing against the pathetic pattern one finds when a “Murdering Black Mobs Comes to [Town],” and “Local Media and City Officials Run Interference for Them”:

… And I don’t want to hear anyone making excuses for these little scumbags. I don’t want to read leftist hacks from Syracuse University writing guest editorials on how America’s “institutional racism” or “lack of educational opportunities” led these kids to murder this guy. I don’t care how poor or marginalized you are, there is no justification for seeking out someone at random and beating them to death. None.
I especially don’t want to hear [the reporter] blaming these attacks on “boredom.” When I was a kid and I was bored, I went outside to play, played video games, or read a book. Gang-swarming on some poor stranger and putting him in the hospital never crossed my mind, and anyone who would do that for fun is a sociopath with no place in civilized society.
These “teens” beat Michael Daniels to death for one reason and one reason only: they hate white people.
They’ve been told to hate whites since they were old enough to comprehend words. They’ve been told by their mothers, their teachers, their role models that whites are oppressing them, stealing from them, and are responsible for all the misery in their lives. Is it any wonder that blacks across America are beating up and abusing whites like this? You want to talk about “institutional racism?” Let’s talk about the institutions that tell poor blacks that stomping random white people to death is socially acceptable.
Again, … I’m not keeping my mouth shut on a disgusting story like this.

Hear, hear.

UPDATE (11/20): WND:

After scores of reports by WND about the problem of black-mob violence in the U.S. and a lethal practice of attacking random whites and Jews called “the Knockout Game,” Fox News has launched a full-frontal assault on the shocking phenomenon its own analysts say is intentionally suppressed by national news media.

MORE.

CNN White-Noise News Conceals ‘Massive, Fraudulent,’ Indictable, Obama Scheme

Barack Obama, Ethics, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

The thing that’s on every American’s mind—breaking news about the consequences of Obama’s devastating (developing) lies to their medical and financial well being—CNN has been concealing with the following white-noise news stories:

* A state senator’s stabbing
* George Zimmerman’s ongoing antics.
* JFK.
* The Jonestown massacre’s 30th anniversary.
* Ted Turner (“who,” you ask) turns 75, and CNN profiles him for hours on end.

National Review and Powerline have filled in the gap in reportage magnificently. In “Obama’s ‘5 Percent’ Con Job,” Andrew C. McCarthy expounds on the developing impeachable offenses of O:

… Unable to deny that millions of Americans have lost the coverage he vowed they could keep, Obama and other Democrats are now peddling what we might call the “5 percent” con job. The president asserts that these victims, whom he feels so terribly about, nevertheless constitute a tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things (“scheme” is used advisedly). They are limited, he maintains, to consumers in the individual health-insurance market, as opposed to the vastly greater number of Americans who get insurance through their employers. According to Obama, these individual-market consumers whose policies are being canceled make up only 5 percent of all health-insurance consumers.
Even this 5 percent figure is a deception. As Avik Roy points out, the individual market actually accounts for 8 percent of health-insurance consumers. Obama can’t help himself: He even minimizes his minimizations. So, if Obama were telling the truth in rationalizing that his broken promises affect only consumers in the individual-insurance market, we’d still be talking about up to 25 million Americans. While the president shrugs these victims off, 25 million exceeds the number of Americans who do not have health insurance because of poverty or preexisting conditions (as opposed to those who could, but choose not to, purchase insurance). Of course, far from cavalierly shrugging off that smaller number of people, Obama and Democrats used them to justify nationalizing a sixth of the U.S. economy. …

But that’s not the half of it. Obama’s claim that unwelcome cancellations are confined to the individual-insurance market is another brazen lie. In the weekend column, I link to the excellent work of Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who has demonstrated that, for over three years, the Obama administration’s internal estimates have shown that most Americans who are covered by “employer plans” will also lose their coverage under Obamacare. Mind you, 156 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs.
John cites the Federal Register, dated June 17, 2010, beginning at page 34,552 (Vol. 75, No. 116). It includes a chart that outlines the Obama administration’s projections. The chart indicates that somewhere between 39 and 69 percent of employer plans would lose their “grandfather” protection by 2013. In fact, for small-business employers, the high-end estimate is a staggering 80 percent (and even on the low end, it’s just a shade under half — 49 percent).
That is to say: During all these years, while Obama was repeatedly assuring Americans, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan,” he actually expected as many as seven out of every ten Americans covered by employer plans to lose their coverage. For small business, he expected at least one out of every two Americans, or as many as four out of every five, to lose their coverage. …

… October 17, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services, represented by the Obama Justice Department, submitted a brief to the federal district court in Washington, opposing Priests for Life’s summary judgment motion. On page 27 of its brief, the Justice Department makes the following remarkable assertion:
The [ACA’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. [Citing, among other sources, the Federal Register.] Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. Defendants have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013.
HHS and the Justice Department cite the same section of the Federal Register referred to by John Hinderaker, as well as an annual survey on “Employer Health Benefits” compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012.
So, while the president has been telling us that, under the vaunted grandfathering provision, all Americans who like their health-insurance plans will be able to keep them, “period,” his administration has been representing in federal court that most health plans would lose their “grandfather status” by the end of this year. Not just the “5 percent” of individual-market consumers, but close to all consumers — including well over 100 million American workers who get coverage through their jobs — have been expected by the president swiftly to “transition to the requirements under the [Obamacare] regulations.” That is, their health-insurance plans would be eliminated. They would be forced into Obamacare-compliant plans, with all the prohibitive price hikes and coercive mandates that “transition” portends. …

MSNBC at least broaches the topic of healthcare today, but not to break the aforementioned news.