Posts by jason330

A couple of takeaways from yesterday's NJ front pager from Adam Duvernay. 1) Coons is signaling a desire to just be left alone for four years. Fat chance of that happening. History has its eyes on this Congress. Will it be the one that sells out the Republic for a little peace and quiet and some highway money? The coons response to that appears to be a stage whisper, "Hell yes"

The Constitutional principle of civilian control of the military is a bunch of old-timey bullshit in the opinion of Senator Chris Coons. It might be anyway. He is studying it. I wonder what other parts of the Constitution are relics that might need shit canning? It isn't an idle question because trump's cabinet is shaping up to be one that will challenge Senators like Coons to decide how much of the Constitution still matters.

If you want to get past the hackey "purisists" vs. "pragmatists" arguments, this is a pretty good read.

…from the desk of R.E. Vanella. Like a Woodpecker With a Headache The house at 1410 Quotidian Street was not the nicest on the block. It was in a category neighborhood people referred to as run-down. Not dilapidated or unoccupied, but in some manner of general disrepair and lazy upkeep that usually suggests one of two situations; an elderly or infirmed homeowner who lacked the resources or ability to manage proper maintenance, or occupied by a renter. In this case it was the latter.

While the Senator resist going on the record as being for or against the Trump/Ryan plan (which technically isn't a fleshed out plan but an expressed desire to end Medicare) a Carper aide has provided me with this:

Nov 30th, 3:20 pm UPDATE: I just called Carper's DC office at (202) 224-2441, and Senator Tom Carper "has no position" on Paul Ryan's plans to phase out Medicare next…

How utterly sick would it be for Carper to be the Senate minority leader? The answer is, so nauseatingly sick.

The Republicans want a big bipartisan vote on banking de-regulation to gauge how cowed Democrats are by the election results. If past results give any future guidance, I'd bet that they are very cowed indeed. Congressional Democrats do not require election results to be cowed. That is their natural state. A bright spot could be a "No" vote from Lisa Blunt Rochester, but I'm not holding my breath.

As early as Wednesday, the House will take up H.R. 6392, the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act. This bill would lift mandatory Dodd-Frank regulatory supervision for all banks with more than $50 billion in assets, meaning those financial giants would no longer be subject to blanket requirements regarding capital and leverage, public disclosures and the production of “living wills” to map out how to unwind during a crisis.... You can see with this bill’s framework how financial regulation in the Trump era will be relaxed, not by outright repeal but through deliberate atrophy. Republicans want to replace any mandatory rules for regulation with discretionary ones. That way they can claim that they’re merely improving the system by putting the decisions in the hands of the experts instead of members of Congress.

I have a horrid wish that I recoil from as it rises in my heart. I wish that Tom Carper would go ahead, as he as he seems willing to do, and vote for the Trump/Ryan plan to phase out Medicare. Then he would be beatable in a primary and it he survived the primary he would certainly lose in the general.

I just can't get my head around how binary our choices as Democrats are right now. It is all so stupid and reductive. There are Democrats here who were flat out wrong and have been wrong for years about how to fight Republicans, but they can't budge. It would reveal that they were wrong. That Clinton was the wrong choice, who made poor campaign choices... whatever. That's yesterday's news. I don't mind revealing when I'm wrong, and I've tried to think through what I've been wrong about on this blog. So much... where to start? I made a game out of the Republican primary race. I thought Trump was a joke. Wrong and wronger still. As much as I know that it is naive I still thought that "the truth" would matter. Wrong. I'm still searching for something productive to do or say to get beyond how wrong I've been. Hopefully what I come up with will be something to "do" and not something to "say" as I think the old adage from fiction writing is fitting - show, don't tell.

I'll be back next Monday, but in the meantime, I'll be giving some serious thought to what I can and should be doing in the next 24 months. The challenges we now face demand some serious consideration, planning, and execution. This lazy dilettante blogger stuff is done. El Som got a ball rolling with operation Carper, and I definitely want to figure out I can best help out that initiative. But there is a lot that needs doing. Whether we are talking about blog activities or off-blog activities, I'll need your help to establish some real goals and start grinding out some progress in the direction of accomplishing those goals. We have some tough times ahead of us and I need to figure out where to apply my energies and my meager talents. Peace.

The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: The Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds

Midterm Examination

Ms. THODE

November 7, Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment

KEEP YOUR ANSWERS BRIEF AND GENDER NEUTRAL

In David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, students enrolled in the above-mentioned course were asked, as the midterm examination, to solve a Double-Bind. If on one hand you were a kleptomaniac, pathologically driven to steal everything you could, but on the other you were also a crippling agoraphobic, paralyzed by the fear of ever leaving your home, how could you satisfy these two totally opposing and overwhelming compulsions?