It would make your posts a lot more readable - and probably more consistent as well. That goes for the endless Egwene rants as well as for this kind of post.


That is idiotic to say the least. If you don't want the Senate to do anything, abolish it. But having it, having it be so powerful, and then wanting it to function badly, that is idiotic. You seem to be advocating a fairly extreme case of cutting off your nose to spite your face - letting the budget deficit and all kinds of other problems spiral out of control just so you can keep up your petty resentment of the Senate. Because if the past few years have proved anything, it's that the Senate being dysfunctional doesn't stop it from spending money, perhaps even on the contrary. But it does stop it from working efficiently to control spending, or from tackling undeniable problems like the out-of-control health care costs in the best way they can find.



Admittedly, a somewhat utopian-sounding and not very practical proposal - or one that would necessarily help much.




I can only call that last sentence either idealistic and naive, or intentionally wrong. Since the former seems unlikely, I'll have to assume the latter: it's bullshit and you know it. Senators have to vote on so many amendments and bills, many of them compromises somehow, that one way or another they end up casting votes for a lot of things that can look bad out of perspective, and even for things that they're actually against but have to accept to obtain other things. Nothing's easier than finding some things like that and putting them in a negative ad. Every Congressman has to worry about negative ads, regardless of how good he is or how closely he tries to stick to his principles.

As for members being beholden to their constituencies, I think it's rather clear what he means, but then I wouldn't expect you to ever give anyone the benefit of the doubt if you have some way you can attack them on it instead. Obviously senators and Congressmen have a responsibility to defend the interests of their constituency, but when it leads to cases like Richard Shelby's a few weeks ago, who was blocking the appointment of dozens of officials in order to force concessions on some issue affecting his constituency, obviously the interests of the country as a whole are endangered.


So you want to see a Congress in which every Congressman follows the bidding of the company or organization that offers him the most money? Is that really what you're saying? That you want to go match your pockets with Boeing's?



Oh really? Restrictions on how companies can spend money in the elections "hampers normal people who try to express their own views"? Am I to take it that your magical PAC with the impressively deep pockets of the previous paragraph is then going to become an incorporated company for the purpose of publishing attack ads, instead of doing them as a PAC?

I don't disagree that powerful corporations will do their best to evade whatever regulation Congress proposes, and to a certain extent they may succeed, though not to such an extent as to make the attempt pointless, I dare say. But it doesn't make any sense to whine that such regulation would limit the ability of "normal people" to express their views any further than said ability is already limited by the simple fact of their being one citizen out of 300 million.



See above, really - this is just more of you being quite content to let the budget deficit spiral out of control and the country get into increasingly bad financial straits, just so you can feel morally superior and smug.


See, this is what I mean when I talk about how you'd probably be more consistent if you didn't try to have a sneering comment on every paragraph of someone's post or article. Here you are complaining about how legislation can be passed when 40% of the elected officials disagree - in other words, advocating legislation that has broader support among the elected officials. Above, you were talking about how you wanted Congressmen to be fighting each other and certainly not cordially work together with the other party. You have to know what you want. Do you want the parties to fight each other constantly and hence write rather partisan legislation that lacks a broad consensus, or do you want them to work together more and produce bipartisan legislation?


They most certainly aren't doing what you want, that's the one thing that is consistent about your rant, and judging by the approval ratings of Congress, I'd say it's safe to say that the public as a whole doesn't approve of what they're doing either. The massive imbalance between the approval rating of Congress as a whole and that of individual Congressmen is a big part of the problem, a big part of why it's so hard to fix the mess Congress is in: a classic, gigantic prisoner's dilemma. And anyone at all familiar with game theory will understand why Bayh and Graham have made the comments they have, and expressed those wishes for a better atmosphere and working relationship within Congress.


I'm not a big fan of your radical, absolutist outlook on life in any situation, but it most certainly isn't a way to govern a country.



I'm kind of having a hard time telling if this is sarcasm or meant seriously. On the one hand, I imagine you oppose the 17th amendment on the grounds of it being a rather radical innovation to the Founding Father's vision of the American political system, but on the other, repealing it would reduce the direct power of the voter, which judging by most of your remarks you'd be against as well - and you seem to be a big fan of corporate influence for some reason, judging by the big words you sling around while defending that recent Supreme Court decision. So I don't know.