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Week of October 11, 2009 - October 17, 2009

Voices


The forums created by modern technology allowing for the expressions of pain that some of us feel so often to be heard by those willing to listen provide for sort of an inexpensive therapy, and there is always the chance somebody will read what is posted and be motivated to do something good for us all. We are reaching the point, though, where those voices better start getting louder and louder because we are in real danger of destroying whatever it is that has connected us as a nation.

Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed. 

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Filibusters (a special midweek post)


The link here is to the Official Explanation of why, in the current view, the mere threat of a filibuster, is the same as an actual filibuster and why it takes sixty votes to pass a bill in the Senate and not just a simple majority. The link does not explain how, in that event, major legislation has been passed with fewer than the votes needed for cloture nor why advocates for, say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, stayed with the bill until they got the votes for cloture, rather than just mark it off calendar.


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Winter


I know.  These pages are meant for the weighty issues of our time, but I have written my diary of the week about such things and now find it is time to contemplate the winter.

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barth

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  • Favorite Blogs Firedoglake HuffingtonPost.com Talking Points Memo FiveThirtyEight.com Daily Kos Media Matters for America Electoral-vote.com SCOTUSblog Borrowed Suits Robert Reich's Blog Eschaton The Public Servant White House Watch/Dan Froomkin Salon Extra Bases - Red Sox blog The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
  • Favorite Books currently reading the autobiography of one of the greatest public figures of our time: Senator Edward Moore Kennedy
  • Favorite Quotes "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine..." (Edward R. Murrow) "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" (President Kennedy)"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." (Pres. F. D. Roosevelt)"So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other." (President-elect Obama)

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A dedicated public servant, as discussed at some length at http://edsbarth.blogspot.com/

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