Apparently Sen. Byrd was muttering, “Shame! Shame!” when he was being wheeled in as other senators clapped at his arrival. I don’t think he was too happy to be dragged in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately that’s the price we pay for Senate rules that sometimes give people that represent small minorities of the U.S. population effective veto power over proposed legislation. I’m thinking of states like Utah, Wyoming, Kansas etc. Not too hard to put together 41 Senators from Deep South states + sparsely populated Plains and Mountain West states to keep something from going forward.
Lum
1583
And let’s not forget Senator Coburn literally praying for Byrd to fall down in the shower or something on the Senate floor.
At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon – nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation’s passage – Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. “What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight,” he said. “That’s what they ought to pray.”
That’s a nice Senator you got there, West Virginia. Be a shame if something happened to him.
In case praying for the crippling of elderly Senators as a parliamentary tactic wasn’t enough, Coburn then announced that maybe those Confederates were on to something (because what else could he mean by “150 years ago”, the horrible crisis of the Mexican War?):
“The crisis of confidence in this country is now at an apex that has not seen in over 150 years, and that lack of confidence undermines the ability of legitimate governance,” he said. "There’s a lot of people out there today who…will say, ‘I give up on my government,’ and rightly so.
One can only imagine his reaction if someone said that on the Senate floor 2 years ago.
JeffL
1584
BTW, for those who feel the right thing to do was coddle Lieberman for fear he would jump ship and later legislation (though again, what is more important than this bill?) will be tougher to pass until Lieberman loses his seat in 2012:
What are the odds the Democrats are going to maintain their 60 seats through the midterm elections? I’m seeing a lot of predictions of the loss of a few seats in the Senate for the Democrats. In which case Lieberman no longer represents a #60 vote and not threatening to take away his chairmanships and perks is really a wuss move.
shift6
1585
Not to derail the focus on intra-Senatorial gamesmanship, but there’s a good brief opinion piece on CNN today about what healthcare proposals shoulda been focusing on the whole time IMHO (in other words, this article is a “me too!” to my own posts earlier in the thread):
Unhealthy habits are what’s killing us
http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/12/28/frum.unhealthy.habits/index.html
Health care reform is proceeding toward the president’s desk, likely to become law in the new year. Supporters promise the bill will cut costs and extend coverage. But here’s the real test: What will the trillion-dollar expense of this bill actually buy? Will it improve America’s health? My guess: No.
Papageno
1586
Not a bad column, and he does give the nod to various public policy actions we could take to help Americans to eat better and do more exercise, although of course in the end he drops most of the problem on the individual’s doorstep, as a good conservative always does.
The food, zoning and physical education policy changes he barely mentions, however, would be huge. Just as a start, not subsidizing corn for the ultimate benefit of ADM et al. would mean that high fructose corn syrup wouldn’t find its caloric way into most all of our processed food, because it wouldn’t be as cheap. “Supersizing” wouldn’t be as cheap as it is with a different food policy in force*.
Look, millions of years of natural selection has hard-coded into our genes that we should stuff our faces at every opportunity, and in our current food environment, that is making us sick and killing us, especially as we get into middle age and older (I’m writing as a 48 year-old here), but now it’s hitting ever-greater numbers of kids (from what I heard someplace, in 1970 the child obesity rate was at 15%, now it’s at 30%).
What is easier, to fight our genetic programming all by our lonesomes or to change our public policies?
*Please please please do yourself a favor and watch Food, Inc.
Well who else other then the individual should be held at fault? Its should be just common sense that says its the responsibility of the individual, not the state for that person to eat well. It has nothing, or at least should have nothing to do with conservative or liberal ideology.
Pogo
1588
It’s in the state (and everyone else’s) best interest that people live longer, healthier, more productive lives.
So the food corporations have nothing to do with any of this? Billions of dollars of research every year to see how marketing could be doing better at getting into people’s heads with brand recognition and catchy phrases, and then pumping those through every media channel and public place possible, and it’s ALL the individual’s fault?
Brett, obviously, in the end, you’re in control of what goes down your own gullet, at least from an abstract philosophical perspective-there’s a growing body of research that suggests that our intestinal tract + the more primitive parts of our brain conspire to make it almost impossible for us to resist eating tasty food that’s easily available to us, especially if we’re tired and not at peak alertness.
The food policy changes would simply make superabundant cheap processed food somewhat less easily available (by raising its price, primarily).
Not just that, but publicly held food corporations face the problem that they have to keep their profits and sales growth up (to have people keep buying their stock) at levels that often exceed the growth in population. So it’s in their interest to find ever more creative ways to have us stuff more calories down our throats, and damn the torpedoes in terms of health consequences for the nation–that’s someone else’s problem.
Yes it is, there isnt someone holding a gun to your head and a funnel in your mouth forcing you to eat anything you dont want to. There is enough information out there for anyone who wants to eat healthy to be able to do so with no real problems. If you dont want to that is your choice, but its not the fault of anyone else.
Conservatism in a nutshell: sure, there’s a billion industry out to trick you and we do nothing to stop them, but if you engage in lots of effort you can work around it. So it’s your fault.
Liberalism in a nutshell, no person is ever responsible for anything, there is always some big bad evil corporation at fault, and the only thing that can ever save you is the government.
I’d say let’s stop subsidizing the holy fuck out of corn – that’s as good a place as any to attack the cheap empty calories industry. I’ll bet Brett might even be in favor of ending needless government handouts.
Of course, farm welfare and other corporate welfare needs to end just as much as social welfare does.
You mean the government that explicitly subsidizes the corporations under discussion? It’s the government that created this problem in the first place, probably going to have to go back there to fix it, I think.
One would hope so. A principled conservative would. Of course, there’s that sort and the sort that doesn’t care about principles and believes that the megacorps are wealthy and powerful not due to specific government policies and subsidies over the decades, but because they’ve been chosen by the Lord Almighty Himself to serve as exemplars for all of us lesser beings. It’s straight-up neo-Calvinism.
Describing modern conservatism as neo-Calvinist is good, I should trot that out when I’m trying to troll the kids in the Republicans club at college.
End the subsidies, that is the only thing I think the government should do in this case.
I guess any of you Americans who have traveled (as well as foreigners who have visited the US) could point out a few things that would help with the weight problem. For one, I would love to see more PAVEMENTS around the US. Why are there so few? I tried to walk from a hotel in Maryland to a mall about 400feet away and there were no pavements from the hotel to the roadside (and across to the mall’s car park). Am I expected to drive?
On the other hand vast tracts of the US are so damn hot or so damn cold you don’t want to leave your air conditioned environments. But there has to be room for more cycleways, pavements, public transport hubs etc? I noticed, for example, that New York has a pretty slim population (or heavily surgeried - I noticed lots of hot women is what I’m trying to say) and I figure that the wide use of the underground and consequent walking at each end helped people stay in good shape.
