From the Washington Examiner:
Senate Republicans say they will likely have the votes to block the start of debate on a major financial reform bill, which would leave the legislation in limbo until a bipartisan deal can be achieved.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to hold a vote late Monday afternoon but so far appears to lack the 60 votes needed to achieve cloture and stop a Republican filibuster. Democrats control 59 votes and need to win the support of at least one GOP lawmaker.
“It’s my expectation that we will not go forward with this partisan bill tomorrow,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The top negotiators on the bill, Senate banking committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and the committee’s top Republican, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., met in an effort to put together a last-minute deal, but it was not expected to yield an agreement because the GOP says more time is needed.
“If nothing happens between today and tomorrow, Democrats will not get cloture,” Shelby said on “Meet the Press.”
Republicans object to several major aspects of the bill, in particular the language pertaining to how the federal government handles meltdowns at big financial institutions. The current bill establishes a $50 billion fund for winding down failed banks. But Republicans want to eliminate the fund and rewrite the language to prohibit the federal government from bailing them out.
“We need to tighten that up and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Shelby said. “The message needs to be unambiguously that nothing is too big to fail.”
Well, except for Chuck Norris.
Who can crack walnuts with his mind.
At any rate, should Republicans succeed in blocking the bill, it’s doubtful the Democrats will push the issue — preferring instead to move on to “immigration reform” in order to step-up their campaign to demonize opponents — including the private citizens engaging in civic protest through the Tea Party movement — as racists and xenophobes.
The move to push immigration reform center stage at a time of high unemployment and unsustainable debt — made worse by enormous increases in federal entitlement spending — will be a cynical gamble on the part of Democrats, who realize that come November, they are likely to lose significant numbers in Congress anyway, and so will make a last ditch effort to swing public perception back in their favor by casting their opponents as anti-immigrant. Even should they fail, the thinking goes, they’ll help perpetuate a branding of Tea Partiers as fringe actors and angry white Christian rednecks — marketing being, in a country filled with low-information voters (who, thanks to the self-esteem movement and the dumbing down of civic education, believe themselves to be “politically active” and “aware”), the most important aspect of politics.
And the GOP establishment and its pragmatist mouthpieces — always on the lookout to find a defensive posture from which to dignify such cynical attacks — might just play right into the hands of Democrats by their inevitable ritual scapegoating of at least one or two vocal conservatives, who they’ll deem unclean.
How successful the Democrats are will depend on how much backbone conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians can muster to refuse taking the bait.
Personally, I don’t hold out much hope.
I have a little more hope. People are starting to get the message. When they call you a racist for opposing their plans you simply respond something along the lines of ‘it’s a little more complicated than that, I thought you were interested in having a substantive discussion, but if all you want to do is throw around false insults then this conversation is never going to improve.”
People are sick of all the false cries of racism, when you hear them push back hard.
this bill codifies never letting a financial crisis go to waste and incentivizes policies that create them, for financial crisis is to the glory of the State, so say we all.
Loser. Nation.
Nah…financial reform will pass eventually because 61% of the electorate wants it.
The terebi is going to start spouting a bunch of commercials emphasizing wall street lobbying to kill the bill tied to republican obstructionism.
My quantum crystal ball says the GOP caves in a week or two.
There is plenty of time for Obamnesty.
I think….immigration reform will be timed to do maximum damage to Marco Rubio’s senate campaign.
lawl.
Well, he is off the plantation. Probably has it coming.
I heard an anti-Mitch McConnell commercial last nite joining the GOP at the hip with the bankstahs and wall street lobbyists.
personally, I think the GOP should get financial reform out of the spotlight as quick as possible, and try to get ahead of the wave on Obamnesty.
start now, and maybe the electorate will get bored by November.
Team R better get it together. The economic singularity approaches and it’s all gussied up in, wait for it, global progress.
Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
-Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Chuck Norris has never had a bowel movement. He scares the crap out of himself.
I think we should expect to see the Dems push all of their little pet projects in the next few months, as they have to know this is their last chance with both Houses of Congress and the presidency for a while.
How does amnesty fare in your imaginary polling, nishit? I love how the marxist/socialist/leftist wail about polling when they perceive it to be in their favor, but just skip right past that when they are pushing travesties like BarckyCare.
Timing could not be better for the D’s to scare away more folks from voting for them – “sure, unemployment is high for you blue collar peasants, but we have votes to buy with your money! So, sorry if you don’t want wages depressed and illegal competition for all the jobs we have saved or created…”
I think they have their feet right in the iron sights and are starting to squeeze the trigger.
I think Jeff has amnesty exactly right.
….to swing public perception back in their favor by casting their opponents as anti-immigrant.
But it’s not swinging so much as energizing hispanic voters for 2012, which have yet to have ever voted in their numbers.
identity groups get a kick out of being oppressed and persecuted… it’s very exciting for them and it makes them feel important.
The idea that anyone is anti-immigrant is laughable on its face, but I have no doubt that Barcky and his minions will push that meme, and nishit will willingly gobble a mouthful.
I’ve no sympathy for Goldman Sachs, and what’s coming their way. But the (well-timed; no, perfectly timed) 2008 Crash stinks of heavy-handed interventions, and deserves a lot more scrutiny than it’s getting.
Plus, who doesn’t love social justice?
But the (well-timed; no, perfectly timed) 2008 Crash stinks of heavy-handed interventions, and deserves a lot more scrutiny than it’s getting.
Scrutiny from whom? Congress? They’re hip-deep in it as it is, D and R alike.
You might as well ask the Burmese junta to investigate their own human-rights violations.
On the other hand, perhaps we should point out that our only crime is “Protesting While White.”
And also that the protesters in Arid-zone-a were throwing water bottles at cops. Which never happens at a tea party.
It’s scary that I agree with Nishi on something – but I think the GOP will cave on “wall street reform,” too. If they radically expand the size and control of government and then take over in November, it’s all win-win for Team R!
Sigh.
It is a never ending wonder that those who wish to destroy all that I hold dear offer, and expect me to take, their advice on how to counter their moves to destroy what I love. It displays fully the contempt in which they hold me and mine.
That is a great comment, geoffb.
I have no doubt that the Republicans will agree to some kind of “financial reform”. None. They are legislators, and they believe the solutions to problems that they created with legislation and regulation lies in legislation and regulation.
you have to figure though that breathless reports of a superduperific dirty socialist economy can help mitigate the immigration damages for Team Dirty Socialist
“It is a never ending wonder that those who wish to destroy all that I hold dear offer, and expect me to take, their advice on how to counter their moves to destroy what I love. It displays fully the contempt in which they hold me and mine.”
Aye geoffb, and their watchword as they loop the garrotte, “Civility Now!”
I think the only reason we’re seeing it stopped now is the Tea Party movement and a fear that just because you have an R before your name doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get conservative / classical liberal / libertarian support these days.
If they cave, that’s more garbage for the electorate to kick to the curb.
The best solution is to remove all the safety nets for Finance and to sell of Freddie and Fannie: no gubmint guarantees for any bad financial decisions.
But those who can fix the problem are the same people who are profiting from the problem.
Like putting lawyers in charge of tort reform.
Filthy SOBs anyway. Why do we have to share the planet with such scum?
OH NO! THOSE WERE PERMISSION WORDS, WEREN’T THEY?
CIVILITY NOW, you fascist, Nazi, xenophobe, cousin-humpin rednecks! CIVILITY NOW or those FEMA camps you’re always on about?
Yeah, you got the idea…
only a third of the Senate homos give a flying fuck about the American voter in any given year, and they’re not all R ones
LTC John has it nailed at #10, IMHO.
look at Princess Lindsey sashay and pirouette without a care in his little head
And that is the only way the progressives can win with such a terrible issue at such a terrible time.
How will the proposed “financial reforms” effect Fannie and Freddie? Is anyone in the media asking simple questions like how much Rahm, Gorelick, Raines, etal took from these organizations?
Jeff…… classical liberal == unicorn I think.
I don’t believe they exist.
What you believe, nisht, and what is reality, very rarely intersect.
I am objectively anti-imbecile.
Okfine…..
Jeff…where do classical liberals fit in this taxonomy?
I see the genocidal eugenecist is positing some more false choices, kind of like the way her McSteamy Barcky does in every one of his speeches. No wonder she drops to her knees for him.
I’m reading … so far it’s total bullshit, nishi.
#34 in other words.
Nice little thread you got there. Would be a shame if someone took it down an unrelated rabbit hole.
Okay, I made the mistake of reading through a portion of nishit the lying cunt’s linkie thingie above, and it is breath-taking in its asshattery.
For example …
Reading this kind of drivel explains a little about how imbalanced nishit the idiot is.
Issues of the individual versus authority are not fundamental to the left-right axis. Rather, this axis is defined by attitudes towards success.
Yea. Umn. No.
Carin – Their ability to simply make shit up is breath-taking.
Dicentra said:
Eh. Maybe not all the safety nets. I think the bankruptcy code is plenty of safety net, though. No need for Uncle Sam to hurt his back holding up financial middlemen.
Someone on here a while back hit the nail on the head when he described investment bankers as the middlemen, the aggregators and distributors of investment power. Why we’re so keen on holding them aloft — the actual effect of the legislation meant to “regulate” the financial markets — at the expense of wealth creators doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Say what you will about the 5,000 year leap, it’s got a GREAT chapter that breaks down the right/left dealo- the true differences not being the political “parties” but where the political power resides. Sitting at opposites sides of the spectrum is Tyranny and Anarchy. The differences between the right and the left is where, in that spectrum, they reside.
You can see how Obama is increasingly taking the power from the people … shifting it toward the Tyranny side of the scale.
The Dems will take a pass at the big issue–The GOP wont even go near it–which is reimplemenatation of Glass-Steagall. McCain made some really, really clear sounds about putting it back in place and blinked once the bankers started crowing.
Thats pretty much the key.
On Fannie and Freddie, NO ONE will do anything sensible there either. The GOP likes them because they facilitate red-state, and GOP-leaning, workfare. By buying up the conforming loans of middle-class houses, the builders and developers (who pretty religously vote R) get tons more work than they would in a scenario where banks had to portfolio the loans they make.
The Dems like it because it allows tons of government credit to be extended without having to authorize tons of government credit to be extended….especially to the minority and lower-income borrowers who would almost certainly not qualify for loans.
The GOP is gonna killed on this though. This is pretty naked water-carrying in broad daylight. I’d really curse them but the Obama admistration’s proposals are rank idiocy….we dont need consumer protection dumb-asses, we need to forcibly reconstruct the financial system.
The old rules, the ones that Clinton took apart (FYI NISHI), worked. We could use them.
I don’t know, JD; the griefer is clearly “driving out a taxonomy [sic] for american [sic] christians [sic] at Protein Wisdom [sic].” Driving out ’em taxonomies like the childrens out of Egypt.
It’s like a majority of wishfulness: the reality of party party. And it is mad.
The GOP is all gayed up six ways to Sunday Mr. mcgruder.
America is in big trouble I don’t know how to help.
We know.
I dunno, JD — that definition of Liberal is the classical definition (or close to it). I’d take issue with the author’s use of Conservative, as I believe the definition he’s using would be better suited to a label such as Statist or Totalitarian.
I’m just wondering why Eugenia takes issue with Jeff when he defends the classical definition of Liberal, and then links with tacit approval to a guy who does the exact same thing. But then, a lot of what Eugenia does leaves me scratching my head.
Back on topic: in the end, what really matters is that we elect people who not only understand the proper role of the federal government, but who can articulate that role in a package that regular folks understand. Such people might be called great communicators.
Re: #38
That is the old mask. The last year has left it in tatters. Why Nishi, who flaunts everyday the face beneath that old covering, would think it is still an operative camouflage is another example of her contempt for the minds of those who read here.
Squid – I was just thinking about how the modern liberals are almost the exact opposite of what he describes.
I think the bankruptcy code is plenty of safety net
Doesn’t sound very “safe” to me. I do support bankruptcy court, as long as it helps investors get back what’s theirs when there have been shennanigans.
A conservative by temperament takes the opposite side in this dispute. Most human beings are naturally afraid of freedom, eager to hand over decisionmaking power to some authority.
That certainly explains why conservatives are always droning on about gubmint overreach and Constitutional limits and NO SOCIALISM and the Tenth Amendment.
You’ve convinced me, Nishi. I’m an effing progg.
We could just as easily taxonomize liberal as a division that separates those people who think the government can and should supply safety nets, redistribute income & act as Handicapper General from those who think it ought to keep its nose out of micromanagement of contentment.
Or, semi-equivalently, liberal as being a distinction that separates folks who want to purchase the votes of the poor and discontented from the treasury from the folks that don’t.
As long as we’re devising self-serving taxonomies, we might as well consider what competing self-serving taxonomies might look like.
Self-serving taxonomies is a very good description of what that drivel amounted to.
Wasn’t there a long running feud in Biology between traditional taxonomists on the one hand and the upstart genome readers on the other? “We group it over here on account of they look like one another.” “Well, you’re wrong to group them that way, because they aren’t related at all in fact, but should be grouped like this based on their heritance.”
That was kind of my point, JD.
Oh, I understood that, I was just noting that I liked the way you said it.
Oh. Well, then. *bows*
TTP drivel should simply be disregarded, rather than derail yet another thread…
GOP says it has the votes to block Dems’ bank bill. I guess that is good news, but I suspect that their bipartisan compromise will turn out to be pretty craptacular, only lesser so by degrees of craptacularness.
“…only lesser so by degrees of craptacularness”
If not by mere minutes.
Minutes and degrees always confuzzled me.
A minute is a mile, JD. A minute of latitude, anyway.
Sorry: a nautical mile.
Call it a statute mile plus another seventh or so.
Or 1/60th a degree, so lots less.
A minute is also a fraction of a degree. Confuzzling.
See, hence my confusion.
I was too late with the comment again. I blame George Bush. I think there’s still a lot of mileage in blaming him.
I blame nishit. And Bush.
“The current bill establishes a $50 billion fund for winding down failed banks. But Republicans want to eliminate the fund and rewrite the language to prohibit the federal government from bailing them out.”
As they should. It’s not the number, it’s the fund that’s the problem. If Fred’s Bank and Tanning needs 2.4 trillion dollars or else it goes belly up, then magically that fund will get 2.4 trillion dollars and Fred’s will get paid off and a name change to Bob’s Bank and Colonic.
LMC – Sadly, many in the MSM, and Team R, think that the size of the fund is the biggest issue, as opposed to the existence of the fund.
LMC – and how many folks from the “D” side of the aisle will end up with a Raines-Gorelickian sinecure there too?
LMC….i just realized your acronym is identical to one of my fav j-pop bands…..lovely mocochang.
How fabulous is that????
There are arc-minutes and arc-seconds, which are to degrees what minutes and seconds of time are to hours of time: 1/60 and 1/3600, respectively.
It’s handy if you’re an inertial navigation kind of person: in that event, one degree per hour of gyro bias equals one arc-second per second.
Now, to re-confuzzle: the Earth rotates around 15 degrees of latitude per hour, so for each second of time, the sky (or celestial sphere, if you will) rotates 15 arc-seconds.
Careful, Slart — it’s only a matter of time before this thread explodes into a GPS vs sextant flame war. I get enough of those over at the sailing forum.
#68: Me, I blame nishit’s bush — for the demise of ‘feets, anyway…
That $50 billion figure is bullshit of the purest ray serene. The actual amount is infinite — until the printing presses melt.
[…] at Protein Wisdom thinks the Democrats will move onto immigration for a number of reasons: The move to push […]
Given the Dems fail fail failure today, Teh Narrative will be Republicans side with Wall St cronies over Wall St.
[…] at Protein Wisdom thinks the Democrats will move onto immigration for a number of reasons: The move to push […]
“GOP says it has the votes to block Dems’ bank bill”
Yup. That’s what they always say. And then start licking Democrat’s balls because they have illiterate’s votes plastered all over them. The GOP needs those illegal votes just as much as the Proggs do. (As if they’ll EVER get them)
More freebies for morons, you assholes! That’s the way to get the loser’s vote in this country.
What? Are they stupid? They should just lick Lindsay Grahamnesty’s butt. They would probably be quite surprised to find out that Lindsay Grahamnesty’s butt tastes a lot like John Kerry’s frontal unit…
But, please, don’t take their private congressional gym away. NO CONSTITUENTS ALLOWED! They are touched by Jehovah – and we arer SHIT!
But, hey. They are the GOP, after all, and are allowed to blow smoke through their asses.
Really…
[…] at Protein Wisdom thinks the Democrats will move onto immigration for a number of reasons: The move to push […]
[…] at Protein Wisdom thinks the Democrats will move onto immigration for a number of reasons: The move to push […]
76.Comment by SDN on 4/26 @ 2:47 pm #
That $50 billion figure is bullshit of the purest ray serene. The actual amount is infinite — until the printing presses melt
The fastest production machines in existance are weaving machines, looms.
Soon our currency will be printed on handkerchiefs.
Paint is very thin veneer, easily washed off or changed. Your bullshit is much the same PE.
It’s hard to paint the GOP as friends of Wall Street when twice the donation money goes to Democrats.