Lest no one say that I do not give credit where credit is due: Kudos to Commissioner Karen Weldin Stewart for doing her job in fining State Farm Insurance for shafting its insureds. Granted, 150K is a mere pittance to these multi billion dollar monsters who are awash in cash but still immorally deny coverage, but still. If there is one area where I am a socialist, it is on the issue of insurance. Private Insurance is nothing for than a fraudulent scam, and the entire industry should be nationalized.
All 22 Delaware Republicans in the General Assembly have written to the Delaware Compensation Commission and demanded that they not be given a pay raise. It’s the first fiscally responsible thing they have done in a few centuries.
Andrew Reding at the Los Angeles Times has a take on the unconstitutionallity of the filibuster that I had not considered before:
The Senate filibuster as presently constituted is arguably unconstitutional. It effectively negates the only constitutional authority of the vice president, other than succeeding the president: breaking tie votes as president of the Senate. With a de facto requirement of a 60% supermajority to pass a bill, there are no “equally divided” votes to break.
State constitutions also limited supermajorities to constitutional amendments or overriding gubernatorial vetoes. But they have been circumvented by powers not in the federal Constitution: initiatives and referendums.
Jonathan Bernstein on the lack of any Republcian “Big Ideas:”
“I think a large part of it is that there’s very little incentive from conservative audiences or conservative voters for policy; what gets them excited (and reaching for their wallets, in many cases) is partisan rhetoric, not policy. For the last several years, the way to get a big reaction in conservative circles is to make a teleprompter or a birther joke, not to bring up unsolved problems in the nation. Just as Swift boats and flip-flop jokes were all the rage before that, and Whitewater, Travelgate and the rest of the nonsense they threw at Bill Clinton was popular in the 1990s.”
“Of course, attack politics is always popular with partisans; Democrats certainly had their share of fun with Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, and earlier generations of Republicans enjoyed attacking Walter Mondale or Jimmy Carter (and certainly enjoyed attacking Ted Kennedy). But Republicans then (like Democrats now) also attempted to find real solutions to real problems.”
So the Dems are the ones serious about governing, and the Republicans are the petulant unserious children getting in the way? Sounds about right.
“I don’t know what she’s going to do, but I do know this: The Democrats want her to run. And I don’t just mean a lot of Democrats. I mean a whole lot of Democrats, like 90 percent across the country. We just want to win. We think she’s the best person and shut it down. And that’s across the board.” — James Carville, on This Week on Sunday, on Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects in 2016.