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Saturday, November 21, 2009



Vote 


The Senate voted 60-39 to allow a vote on whether to debate health care reform, strictly by party lines

In other words, Olympia Snowe just voted to obstruct a vote on whether to debate health care reform on the floor of the Senate.



Localism 


Scroll down to the bottom of this post. See the temperature anomaly maps? See how despite the world being really warm this year, much of America (including the northeast where most of the media live) was normal.

Friday, November 20, 2009



Freaks 


Shorter people mindreading John McCain: "I used to want to fight climate change, but Barack Obama was insufficiently nice to me, so fuck the environment."



Culinary 


How to cook a fucking steak.



Sigh 


I shouldn't have followed the link on Adam Baldwin's new twitter feed. I mean, really?



Read 


Kim Morgan on ten years of Fight Club.



Cloture 


Here we go:
The Senate will be in session this Saturday evening, ahead of a scheduled 8 pm cloture vote on the motion to proceed to debate historic health care legislation, TPMDC has learned. Assuming Majority Leader Harry Reid has the 60 votes he needs to leap that hurdle, Democrats will likely have to eat up 30 hours before they can hold the actual vote--at a 51-vote threshold--on the motion to proceed itself. Still with me?

Doing some math, that means the bill won't be cleared for debate and amendments and so forth until, at the earliest, 2 am Monday morning. Even if that happens, the bill will likely have to be read aloud (another two day process) so we're still looking at debate in earnest after Thanksgiving recess.
Four days just between a vote on cloture to begin debate, and the actual vote to begin debate. And the, you know, the debate.

UPDATE: Good point. The Mr. Smith filibuster (which remains the popular conception) was a tool that allowed for unlimited debate. Talk until you drop. Now it's a tool to prevent debate.

UPDATE 2: Zombie comity:
Now, I've confirmed that the Republicans have agreed to back off this plan in exchange for Democrats allowing a full-day's debate on Saturday, before the scheduled evening vote.

Also, and importantly, as part of a unanimous consent agreement, the Saturday vote will serve as the motion to proceed itself. If there are 60 votes on Saturday, the bill will be on the floor, and debate can begin.
Gee how nice of them, not to ruin some poor clerk's Thanksgiving vacation.

UPDATE 3: Not to mention Coburn's own Thanksgiving.



Journalism 


Was this so hard?
“It’s classic politics of our time that if you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform — insurance market reforms, cover people, cover people who are not covered.

In fact, the 2008 Democratic Party Platform referred to the need for a “public plan,” and candidate Barack Obama referred more than once to the idea of providing people who can’t get private insurance with government-backed insurance similar to that which members of Congress get.
I mean, I'd prefer "Joe Lieberman is an ignorant liar" in there somewhere, but I'll take what I can get.

Then again, the missing quotation mark in the first paragraph is pretty sloppy.

Thursday, November 19, 2009



Candidate 


Few things could make me dislike New York more, but sending Rudy Giuliani to the Senate would surely be one of them.

UPDATE: Whew?



Scheduling 


Lost returns on Tuesday, February 2nd at 9:00pm. That's Groundhog Day. Given what happened in Season 5, might we expect Jack to be stuck in an infinite loop of futility? Oh, wait, that's his life already.

Meanwhile, Chuck returns on Sunday, January 10th with two episodes, with a third in its regular slot the next night at 8:00pm. That's two months early! Hooray!



Copyright 


This may be the worst thing the Obama adminstration is up to. And I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere besides Boing Boing.



Trails 


You know, the Republicans have a point here (among their bullshit). There really does seem to be no principled distinction between trying some of these detainees in federal court and some in military tribunals. The adminstration is trying the ones it thinks it can convict in federal court in federal court, and the rest in tribunals.

They didn't make this mess, and they don't seem to be adding to it, but they're also not doing much to prevent the next administration from making a similar one.



Babysteps 


Now that the Senate has a bill, the next things to happen are:

A cloture vote on the motion to procede (60 votes required).
A vote on the motion to procede (51 votes required).
Floor debate, with amendments requiring 60 votes to pass, bypassing cloture votes.

In other words, Harry Reid needs 60 senators to vote to agree to let 51 senators vote to talk about the bill.

N.B. - 51 can equal "50 plus Joe Biden."

Assuming all that happens, one senator, in this case Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), can force some poor senate clerk to read the entire bill aloud on the floor, basically to an empty chamber presided over by a rotation of, likely, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Cardin, Jim Webb, and Mark Warner (the senators from Maryland and Virginia), who have easy commutes and can come in over the weekend.

The Senate is deeply stupid.

UPDATE: See also here. Read the comments for the explanation.



Cool 


Interstate highways as a subway map.

If only all our cities had such nice transit coverage.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009



Score 


The Senate health care reform bill will cost $849 billion over ten years, cover 94 percent of the population, and reduce the deficit by $127 billion.



Marathon 


I have a forced, unscheduled day off from work today.

Left 4 Dead 2 came out yesterday.

Do the math.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009



Conservatives 


It's nice when they just come out and admit that they don't care about the Constitution.



Sunny 


Burn Notice returns on January 28th.



Law 


I bow to our Google overlords. This is fantastic. The only thing wrong with it is that it wasn't available to me in law school.



Waiting 


Left 4 Dead 2 is all installed on my computer. Stupid work.

I'm hard to scare, although I've had a few hair-raising moments in the first L4D, but I think these zombie clowns might fuck me up for life.



Competition 


Go be doctors.



Doom 


Our infrastructure sucks (relative to our peers), it's falling apart, and few seem to care.



Cycles 


No deflation in Red Sox Nation.



Cycling 


Why you should stop at red lights, and how to do so safely.



Reversal 


Bill O'Reilly grosses out Glenn Beck.



Economy 


This is one map where I don't like seeing my state a darker shade of blue.

I suppose that's also a map of how fucked incumbents are.

Monday, November 16, 2009



Mugging 


That's some good use of improv skills.



Caution 


Just because KSM has not yet undergone a genetic mutation to give him mastery over the forces of magnetism doesn't mean he won't during trial!



Yowsa 


We're about 16% of the way towards having an army of Six Million Dollar Men.



Adjectives 


It takes a mighty thesaurus to truly catalogue the Bush administration's lies.



Data 


More please!

Though it would have been more helpful pre-bike.



World 


I saw a better map than this once, where Africa was left off entirely.



Math 


So I hear there was a football game yesterday:
Going for it on fourth and 2 from your 28 with 2:08 left and a 34-28 lead says one of two things.

You either have supreme confidence in your offense’s ability to convert or you have no faith in your defense’s ability to stop the opposition on a subsequent possession.

Maybe it was both for Bill Belichick last night.

You can argue his offense piled up 468 yards prior to that call. You can also say his defense’s effort against Peyton Manning, while admirable, hardly would inspire confidence that a punt would lead to a game-ending stand by that still-growing unit.

What’s hard to disagree with is that it was, at the very least, a jaw-dropping move. The Patriots coach sent his offense out there, called his final timeout, then trotted Tom Brady and Co. out there once again, this time with a well-thought-out play call that would determine whom walked out of this one with a win.
I can't decide which of the lack of any discussion of the probabilities, the logical fallacies, or the poor grammar here is more annoying to me.

This is not a logical fallacy: if CHB thinks it was a bad call, it probably wasn't.

N.B. - I have no idea what the correct decision was, mainly because I don't really give a shit, but it seems like people who do give a shit aren't interested in actually investigating the matter.

UPDATE: More from Matthew Yglesias, a bold advocate of sabermetrics in basketball who defends Belichick despite his general hatred for Boston sports, and from Nate Silver, who needs no introduction.

Friday, November 13, 2009



Best 


I guess we're getting upon that time, the time of lists. The Onion presents the 30 best television shows of the decade. I've seen every episode of 18 of them!



Menaced 


Y'all remember Paperboy, right?

Well, this morning I was pulling up to my door coming home from the gym, so I was briefly riding on the sidewalk. A car had been behind me, and I noticed it was slowing down. I thought the driver was looking for a parking space. She had her window rolled down, which didn't register as odd to me (it was cold and windy this morning).

All of a sudden, three or four newspapers went whizzing by my head.

It was an interesting role reversal, since I was the one on the bike.