If Coburn wanted to be completely consistent with the idea he's expressing, he could just as well have refused to vote for anything to help his state at all. That even in deep red Oklahoma they made the calculation that this idea would go over like a lead balloon just tells you how shaky the claim Republicans have about their rugged individualism is.

It also shows how cynical the idea is. It wasn't ever about a lack of dependence on the Federal government. It's about using the leverage of a disaster that people will be screaming about in order to cut something else, somewhere else.

I know some folks can't stomach Daily Kos, and most articles are built too much on opinion anyways to be useful to somebody like me trying to talk to a broader audience, but I think you all should read this entry. We have our resident experts, and this fellow, true to his screenname, deals with weather. He often comes in and blogs during the major events, like Hurricane Sandy. His most recent subject? Well, one of our weather satellites is failing, up in orbit. The National Weather Service, itself suffering under severe budget cuts, thanks to the recent fiscal hijinks on the part of the Republicans, finds itself strained to do its job.

Some would like private enterprise to do the job. That, of course, would make the data proprietary, rather than public domain, like it's been for decades. It would make some money, but it also means we won't have so many people dealing with the problem. It also means less worries about publicly available data out there to prove that pesky global warming theory.

I've talked multiple times about how I changed party loyalty, unluckily enough, right before the Republicans took over. Why did I do so? There's a number of reasons, but I think the one that struck to the core of my personality is that the party showed a great deal of contempt for the means of decision-making I felt was best. Bluntly, I think making decisions from pure politics, from ideological principles is stupid.

Right and wrong aren't simply about principles, they're about causes and effects. In a perfect world, we would just look at the facts, and derive the solution from our understanding of that. All too often, though, not only are people refusing to factor in glaringly obvious truths into their equations, they're actually spreading around BS about what's actually going on in order to manipulate people into supporting policies that benefit them, however rightly or wrongly they perform for everybody else.

Total selflessness is not human nature, even in response to others disapproval. Some folks have the money and the power to just say "F U" to others outrage. The system, in other words, is not inherently just. Tumors of selfish, sociopathic behavior can grow, can even corrupt good people as they simply adapt to survive, adapt to do well by their own.

So, sometimes we have to come together and just agree that some things are bad, and just won't be done.

It's been the practice of some on the right lately to show how hardcore they are by going after former sacred cows. But there was often a reason why certain things were set off limits. Things like the Weather Service. We actually derive an economic benefit from knowing what the weather will be like. Would people have gotten sixteen minutes warning on the Oklahoma City tornado if the satellite over that part of the world was on the blink? And what happens to disaster funding for Oklahoma if the Democrats decided to be as shortsighted as the Republicans when it comes to dealing with disaster recovery and remediation?

Rather than jockey for selfish benefit, we should consider our common needs. Oklahoma shouldn't get special treatment that New York doesn't get, and vice versa. And we should all look out for the welfare of the nation as a whole, making sure that the infrastructure and information necessary to run our nation's economy and our daily lives is available to us.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their loved ones, the survivors, and all the rescue teams involved with the devastation that has hit Moore, Oklahoma.

How You Can Help:There are many ways we can all help, and CNN has a list of needs and ways that we can all pitch in. Every little bit counts!

What's next for the committee is getting answers from victims and witnesses who were present during the attacks. Republicans are banking on someone eventually revealing what happened.

This isn't the first time since 9/11/01, that Americans have died in an attack. What about the 20 people killed in 2008 at the US Embassy in Yemen? Democrats were labeled unpatriotic if they pointed blame of President Bush for the attacks. How is this any different?

Yemen certainly isn't the only example, but apparently it's a patriotic thing to do if Republicans question Democrats.

There's been a lot of concern about the effects of the sequester. If the sequester is having an effect already it's not that clear yet as far as jobs go. From what I'm seeing economic data is mostly in line with what we'd expect right now though just a tad bit disappointing overall for the month. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Weekly Unemployment Claims declined again this week though. This is a number that when it spikes upward one week critics of the President like to roll out and use as a gotcha. Of course when it declines several weeks in a row following it's overall trend, I don't see as many people talking about it for some reason.

There's a lot of economic pessimists on this site and others. The way a few folks have said each month that a crash is right around the corner is strangely similar to some Christians who say Jesus' return is nigh and these are the end of days. In religion that's the sort of thing I always think comes with an agenda and I think it may be the same in politics. But for now we have another decent month and the end of our economy and our way of life is on hold for now.

Here's the question: Where's my obligation to help you? You forced a compromise on me, a compromise you later failed to reciprocate in good faith. The penalty we both agreed upon was inflicted, but apparently some parts of this penalty embarrass you, make you look bad in the eyes of the rest of our corporate body, so you want us to save you that embarrassment.

Well, after being humiliated, after having my armed twisted behind my back for a compromise you failed to live up to, I'm fresh out of goodwill, and so are many Democrats.

The Democrats never wanted the cuts, Republicans did. They had a chance to bargain for less painful, less stupid, less penalty-oriented cuts, and they decided that they didn't want to look bad to their constituents by accepting anymore tax increases.

Democrats, then would not be facing a compromise, but would be asked to completely screw over their people, something that Republicans, in their own sphere of influence, held as unthinkable. Well, if you can't accept any tax increases, Democrats aren't going to go to their people and say "we're just going to let the Republicans walk all over us." If the name of the game is going to be perfect representation, then you will see many Democrats say "no spending cuts without revenue increases."

An impasse, of course.

So, the sequester kicked in. The punishment both sides agreed to, as part of the agreement forced by one side's decision to extort a certain outcome.

Republicans want a "get out of jail free" card. They want to pass go, and collect $200 dollars, having forced a huge amounts of spending cuts by unscrupulous methods. They want Democrats to have to absorb the blame for all the spending cuts, but with Obama having successfully convinced people that negative consequences were likely, they want to get rid of all the little cuts that might embarrass them.

Well, I'm sorry, they are there to embarrass you. You agreed to be embarrassed by them.

You were supposed to work with us, so we could come up with a smart plan, one that, while not totally palatable to both sides, would be tolerable enough to pass both sides of Congress and get the President's signature. You didn't.

So now you claim, Obama's doing nothing to lessen the pain for consumers from the cuts you yourself agreed to, cuts nothing compared to what you were demanding in the first place. Well, isn't this strange? Government seems to be a good thing, or at least one you think Republicans will suffer for depriving the people of.

And you want Obama to put it back the way it was. At least where the consequences of the cuts stick out like a sore thumb. You say it's the Washington Monument strategy, or something like that, but of course, there wasn't enough time to get the austerity properly organized when the time came that a deal had to be made.

Funny how potentially economy-destroying hostage situations do that. The debt ceiling had to be liberated before we passed it by and screwed everybody in the process.

We've gotten nothing but rushed, stupid legislation out of all this, hardly in anybody's interests, much less The Republican Party.

It was going to come back and embarrass Republicans, and it should embarrass them, especially if this is going to be the way they try to seek big spending cuts to boast to their constituents about.

If they want smarter austerity, smarter budget planning, they can quit demanding grand bargains, quit insisting on a police state tactic of power grabbing by constant emergency, and just come to the tables in Congress in good faith.

Good faith will me that they will admit that really, they will not get away with an ideologically pure, or even all that strongly conservative of a plan. They don't have the control of Congress to deserve it.

That doesn't mean that they can't represent the wishes of their constituents, but they'll have to represent them as negotiators at a bargaining table, bargaining with all the other representatives of all the other districts.

I mean, that's the annoying thing to me. You think that Boston, MA representatives citizens don't deserve to get their way just as much? To see their representative do exactly what they want? But neither will get that, maybe not ever. The Republicans and conservatives are arrogant to believe that their constituents alone get that privilege, while all others must just capitulate, all others must watch as everything they want goes down in flames.

The Framers didn't want one group or another grabbing power, and holding it for good. They created a system where different factions, different parties would counter each other, both within branches and between them.

With the House of Representatives in one party's hands, and the White House and Senate in the others', it's simple logic: nobody's getting the pure essence of political win! I even have to remind my own people about that some times. Simple fact is, whatever passes will have to be a negotiated agreement.

If we're going to undo one part of the sequester, we undo it all. We get to work on a detailed, comprehensive plan, not more fixes designed to salvage the public image of the GOP from the consequence of its clumsy, machete style cuts.

It is not the Democratic Party's job to save the GOP from itself. The bargaining table is open whenever you feel like getting off the high horse.

What could have prompted the above announcement? Well, as per Edgar Online, Frederick W. Smith, who is the company's President and CEO, sold 202,000 shares of FedEx. In addition to this insider selling, there were about eight more insider sales, in the past six months, compared with only two insider buys. (Source: Thomson Financial). Also, there has been selling by institutions. As a result, if we consider the quarter -to -quarter results, there has been a drop in the ownership by 6.1%. When there are such observations about a company that reflects the state of the global economy, it does send out a message that conditions going forward may prove to be tough.

According to a report from the World Trade Organization (WTO), there could be a meager rise in the global trade by about 3.3% this year. As compared to the rise last year; i.e., only 2%, this is not much of an improvement. And the guidance calling for growth this year was 4.5%, according to Associated Press, April 10, 2013 in "Global Trade to Be Weaker than Expected." With the recent two decades having witnessed average growth of about 5.3%, the situation could possibly affect the recovery of the economy.

The Baltic Dry Index, which is a measure of the shipping demand, is negative and has remained so since some time. The stock market today is abuzz with talks of a near-looming market correction. Technical analysis by gurus suggests that this correction could further deteriorate. This has led to a growing demand for blue chip stocks and S&P 500 stocks. Small cap stocks and also technology stocks seem to be the less favored ones.

The scenario at the beginning of 2013 painted a bullish picture as far as investment was concerned. But investor sentiment seems to have paused, especially with stock readings being indeterminate in four straight sessions on the NYSE as well as on the NASDAQ. It would be advisable to wait before putting money into stocks at present as the stock market is susceptible to risk.

First there was the weak growth in the growth of the American economy in the last quarter of last year. It looks like in this first quarter of 2013, the results will be no different. Consumers have become cautious about their spending habits. The month of March this year saw orders for new durable goods in America suffer a drop by 5.7%. It is the second time that this has happened so far in the year, according to the United States Census Bureau, April 24, 2013.

Economy is slowing down in China, Germany, France and Italy as well, with manufacturing sectors of the first two nations suffering setbacks. France is ridden with a grave unemployment problem and could soon fall prey to recession, as Japan has. Italy too is riddled with the need for growth. Revenue growth has been troubling the U.S. multinational corporations and all these factors will be bound to affect the stock market.

On one hand, the American economy is being made to look robust through the money-printing strategies by the Federal Reserve. But in the event that this ploy had not been employed, would the U.S. not have been technically "bankrupt"? Where does that leave the U.S. economy and the stock market today?

http://www.profitconfidential.com/stock-market/

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1360551-is-this-an-early-warning-sign-of-a-stock-market-collapse

Do not let this discourage or let you lose faith. In the past 12 years, our justice system has tackled many terrorist related trials, and we should remain hopeful that justice will be served to the Boston bombing suspect. I understand people were hoping he'd be tortured in the worst way possible with a military trial, but that's not to say justice won't be served in federal court either. Not to be presumptuous, but there is already sufficient evidence in this case and we just have to put our faith in the federal court.

Really, if I can live my life, and you can live yours, you should be able to enjoy your freedom. And yes, people will criticize you, but it's America. Nobody goes uncriticized. The far right religious types criticize the far left atheists and vice versa.

The people who do this kind of thing are either looking for attention, looking for fear, or looking to force people into doing things the way they want to. The last bombing of this kind was the work of Eric Rudolph, who also bombed an abortion clinic.

The motivation may not make rational sense.

But whatever it is, violence of this kind shows people with so little faith in the power of their ideas to convince others, whatever they are, that they feel that others have to be coerced into agreement.

I believe that my ideas don't need that kind of force behind them to be accepted, and neither do most Republicans, especially those who post on this site. Our Democracy is built on the notion that we are rational creatures, adults able to maturely discuss and negotiate matters, resolve our differences with maturity. Our demonstration of this hoped-for ability has not always been perfect, but the fact that most of us discuss politics without the prospect of violence is a testament to the Framer's lack of naivete on that count. It wasn't a vain hope, and our nation's continued, and continuous existence as a representative republic is a sign of this.

Unemployment continued it's trek downward though that was mainly on a drop in the participation rate more than anything.

The participation rate has been cited as a failure or a sign of manipulation depending on which Obama critic you're talking to. Neither one is true though. It's just a trend that started in the mid 1990's when the rate started to level off. We'll see this decline level off just a bit probably after a few more years of recovery but for now each new month holds a chance for critics to remind us that participation rates haven't been this low since 1985, 1984, 1983, 1982, and so on.

One chart I like to look at is this one comparing the other recessions. Notice we're more than half way up out of our trough. Folks like to say Obama failed because this was not a V-shaped recovery. The suggestion is that the sharper the fall the sharper the recovery.

Looking at the chart you'll notice that all recessions shown, deep or shallow, up until 1990 had mostly V-shape recoveries. The 1990, 2001, and 2007 recessions have all been L-shaped recoveries. Many conservatives predicted, some even hoped, the 2007 recession would be a W-shaped or double dip recession. That would have been ironic since the recession started under President Bush who was often called W by friend and foe alike.

But to be W shaped you'd need a sharp increase followed by another sharp decline. We'll just have to settle for L which has us low and staying low for sometime. This L-shaped recovery came as a surprise to many folks thinking with their hearts and not their minds. But I always remember Krugman saying back in April 2009:

I'm in the camp that really worries about the L-shaped recession. We level off but we don't get the recovery. We hope it isn't, but it has all the markings of it. This looks like the kind of slump that has all the markings of where normal recovery forces are very, very weak.

Krugman was right again, despite being a liberal and all. I've been of the mind for several years now that the only thing that will speed our economic growth is the housing market and I've kept my eye on that every month. The housing market seems to have leveled off and is starting to improve so I'm personally hopeful that growth accelerates. New home sales have increased in the last few months and existing home sales have continued to grow at a similar rate.

Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims increased to 385,000 but are still within the normal range. It sounds worse than it really is but even at the height of the 1990's economic expansion this number barely stayed below 300,000 a week.

One of the most useful charts visually for me is this chart of the so-called "Big Four" indicators for recession. Folks constantly tell me that things are getting worse and not better, and we're doomed economically speaking. That isn't supported by reality but that's just par for the course for many of President Obama's critics.

Despite continued improvement over the last few years I can still bring you this sad graph showing the long term unemployment. Not even under the double dip of the Carter/Reagan years did we have long term unemployment this high or for this long. It's a national tragedy. This is a good chart to show folks who try and tell us this recession wasn't as bad as Reagan faced. In many key ways this recession was worse than any since the Great Depression.

Cathodic protection (CP) is a technique used to control the corrosion of a metal surface by making it the cathode of an electrochemical cell.[1] The simplest method to apply CP is by connecting the metal to be protected with a piece of another more easily corroded "sacrificial metal" to act as the anode of the electrochemical cell.

Even with ordinary petroleum, you have a problem with corrosion. Keystone won't be carrying ordinary petroleum.

When I was a kid I would go to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and one of the prominent exhibits included stuff about oil drilling and oil refining. They had this nice light display which showed how fractionating columns and catalytic cracker units worked, the different layers of refined product, ranging from tars and asphalts, with their long chain molecules at the bottom, to the more volatile products, the methane and ethane up at the top.

Petroleum's not one substance, but it's many. Of course, the reason for a catalytic cracker, as the name implies, is to use chemical processes, in addition to heat, to separate out and create the different elements of the petroleum.

You ever tune into a financial report, and hear about "light, sweet crude?" Or Brent Intermediate? They're talking about grades of petroleum. But more particularly, they're talking about the chemistry of the oil. Is it dominated by big molecules with sludgy tendencies, like Paraffin, Asphalt, and the like? Or does it have the lighter, more volatile stuff, the octanes and the hexanes? Does it have high sulfur content?

That question can be particularly important. When they talk about sweet or sour oil, they're not talking soy sauce, they're talking sulfur content, among other impurities Catalysts can be fouled by sulfur, even before the environment gets its turn being polluted by it. More to the point, though, sulfur also makes oil more corrosive. Sulfur atoms are not friendly to steel alloys, making them much more brittle.

Let's face it: if oil companies had their druthers, they'd be piping light, sweet crude out of the ground. For one thing, being light is a good thing for oil, since the viscosity makes it easier to flow. You don't have to heat it up as much, you don't have to dilute it with something else. They'd also have to worry less about corrosion, since they'd be pumping lower temperature oil with less sulfur content.

The thing to understand about what's coming out of the Athabasca tar sands, and other similar deposits, is that this is the stuff that's more or less leaked to the surface. You know the La Brea Tar Pits? It's almost the same thing. Essentially, oil leaks to the surface, and there, the more volatile parts just boil off, turn into vapor.

What's left is close to, if not precisely, literal asphalt. Bitumen, paraffin. The stuff that is too heavy to simply boil away. The asphalt you're familiar with is asphalt concrete, essentially rocks bound together with the heavy oil product. Solid, or close to solid at room temperature.

That's an important point to keep in mind. Have you ever seen highway workers put down that stuff? You see that big machine with the flames and heat coming out the bottom to melt and form the stuff. That's instructive when thinking about the tar sands, both in terms of how much your net energy balance is (That is, how much it takes to extract and move the heavy oil) and how hot you have to get the stuff to make it flow through your pipeline at an appreciable rate.

Remember that fractionating column? The Catalytic Cracking? To get gasoline (among other petroleum distillates) out of this gunk, you have to expend a lot more energy, and deal with a lot more sulfur, since these tar sands style-surface deposits tend to be more sour. And that is at the refining end.

What is the natural gas requirement relative to oil sands production?

It takes about 34 cubic metres (1 200 cubic feet) of natural gas to produce one barrel of bitumen from in situ projects and about 20 cubic metres (700 cubic feet) for integrated projects. Currently, the oil sands industry uses about 21 million cubic metres (0.7 billion cubic feet) per day of purchased gas, or about five percent of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin production. By 2015, this increases to about 60 million cubic metres (2.1 billion cubic feet) per day, or nearly 12 percent, assuming gas production remains at 482 million cubic metres (17 billion cubic feet) per day.

On the production end, we're burning one of the lightest and cleanest burning hydrocarbons to harvest one of the thickest and most foul, stuff so viscous it has to diluted by other, lighter hydrocarbons to flow down the pipeline.

They also end up running the oil down the pipeline at hotter temperatures, which increases the likelihood of corrosion. Heavier crude creates additional stresses on the pipeline structures, too.

In my opinion, admittedly not professional, the question of when, not a question of if. Pipelines will age, as this one did, and this recent spill tells us that it won't necessarily be the few gallons that the oil companies are now insisting are the usual output.

And it's important to consider what's at risk. We're not simply dealing with a potential eyesore, or a minor inconvenience. When you have news crews complaining about the smell from hundreds of feet up, you know you're not dealing with something benign.

I think sacrifice is the key question in terms of the Keystone XL pipeline.

What are you willing to give up, to take advantage of this fuel source? Are you willing to waste billions of cubic feet of natural gas just to extract this stuff?

Are you willing to create lakes of tailings so toxic they kill the birds that land on them?. Are you willing to accept the possibility of a leak like that in Arkansas, over some of our nation's most critical watersheds?

And to do what? To give the oil companies of another nation a clear shot for exporting oil off the gulf coast refineries in my neck of the woods?

To bring oil prices that are high, even higher?

That's to say nothing of the global climate change impact of exploiting among the dirties of the fossil fuels, stuff so thick that when it spills on water, it sinks.

Oil companies may be able to assure you that nothing bad will happen, but that's probably because they're fibbing you. Pipelines break. pipelines corrode. Pipelines age.

These things happen.

They will happen with the Keystone XL line, and regardless of what happens, we will pay extra costs for this pipeline and what it carries. And to whom? Who will benefit for everything we could potentially sacrifice for this tar sands oil? Just a few people, mostly, squared away in safe little offices, insulated from the consequences of what their project could do to the country.

You can cite the need for oil, and everything. You can hold the gun of your argument to the head of the American jobs market, and say that if we don't approve it, the employment numbers will get it. But the reality is, there's a cost that it seems that the people trying to run this pipeline down from Canada don't want you to see, don't want you to consider. They just want your quiet acquiescence. By the time you think better of it, by the time the oil is spilled somewhere on the ground, oh, you might be loudly outraged, but your voice won't matter half as much as it matters now.

Tell your Congressperson and Senator to oppose this deal. Tell President Obama to oppose it. We have quite enough problems with leaky pipelines to add one more at our general expense.

I do like Democratic Party positions better. I don't see them in the caricatured terms Republicans repeatedly read into my positions. I haven't spent the last couple decades getting all my information about the Democrats from the very people who wanted to defeat them in elections.

I haven't seen the repentance of the right regarding so many mistakes. The joke has become that after every political defeat, every fiasco, that the Republican Party should do some soul searching, but won't. Instead, the GOP will just keep on insisting that it not only has every right not to change, but in fact has the right to keep everything as it was before people decided to reject their domination of American politics.

The last decade played out as a sad history of proud boasts undermined by squalid results, the excuse being given that government sucks anyways, or maybe that people didn't practice conservatism purely enough. Now as this new decade proceeds, we find ourselves stuck in limbo, the Republicans with hardly enough strength to advance an agenda which most people don't want, and the Democrats hindered from changing anything by the GOP's obstructionism.

I do not believe our system was meant to stay the same. Jefferson himself, in a quote featured on his memorial, said:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Jefferson did not aim to create a cult that worshiped the Framers as infallible founders whose beliefs and philosophies we were bound to follow. He wanted America to advance, and have a government to suit, tailored to our needs.

There is no arguing that America has changed. It's no longer a rural frontier nation. We have a vast communication network, now connected to the whole world, of voice, data, and video. Would people in Jefferson's time have dreamed of bouncing signals made of invisible cousins of light waves off of artificial moons shot by rocket into outer space?

Would they dream that even the poor would be able to afford personal, motorized chariots that can drive faster than the winds of a hurricane?

They would not be familiar with the language about cold fronts or warm fronts. They wouldn't be familiar with supercomputers, or forecasts that gives several days advance with relative accuracy. The idea of actually being able to track a storm like Sandy, and predict where it will hit with the level of accuracy we did would be pure fantasy.

And nor would they be capable of knowing the problems that come with having that technology. With no knowledge of satellites, they would not understand the need to pay for new satellites when the old ones run out of fuel to keep their orbits. With no knowledge of cars, they might not see the need to force the builders of those car to build those cars safely, or to keep higher fuel economy. They would not know a world where the great powers had receded, with America left to deal with the centuries of mess that came from that.

Americans of the twenty-first century are better qualified to govern ourselves than they, because we have experience dealing with the problems of this modern age. Heck, we could say we know better how to run our country as it is today, than folks from just a hundred years back!

The old way of governing, in my opinion, simply doesn't fit our more interconnected, complicated, and crowded nation. It isn't that we were once living in a utopia, and somehow the mean ol' progressives took over and forced "big government" on everybody. Americans took on greater regulation, greater social spending of their own free will. They changed the government to match their experiences, to deal with the problems they saw in their lives. It isn't that Americans got up in arms about a possibility or an abstract political problem. When folks created the FCC, and the commission that preceded it, it wasn't because folks theoretically would start broadcasting on the same frequency, or say hateful things, or push out objectionable content over the public airwaves. Radio Stations did set themselves up, and put up mutually interfering signals. Folks did push out objectionable content.

Just look at the ads for laudanum, and other snake-oil cures, or read about what kinds of things happened at slaughterhouses, and you'll know why we have an FDA.

Just look at the kind of crap they pulled with the Stock Market in the Roaring Twenties, and you'll see why the SEC, the FDIC, and other government agencies were set up.

When we see rivers on fire because of the pollution on them, when DDT has the Birds dropping dead, You're going to get an EPA.

The Right Wing in this country has a problem: As they have claimed that this problem or that would not recur if regulations were cut and the laws returned to what they were, the outcomes have put this claim in doubt. Polluters pollute, Financial Schemers continue to destabilize the economy with their BS, agribusiness continues to get contamination into our products, and drug companies continue to push out drugs that don't exactly do good for the patients prescribed to them.

Folks are just as willing to lie, cheat, and remain purposefully oblivious of the consequence of their actions as they were before. So what's the point of continuing to try and shrink government? The experiment is failing. People haven't gotten more virtuous. The constraints and moderations of a more active, involved federal government are still necessary.

So, in short, it is "Democrats are good, Republicans are bad." if in a relative sense. Even in absolute terms, I still think Democrats are the better party.

That will be reflected in what I write, of course. But hell, if I believed any differently, I'd be in the Green or Red Column. It's stupendously pointless to knock me for taking sides on a consistent basis against the Republican Party, unless you can explain to me why, with my philosophy of things, my beliefs, I should like a particular thing that the Republicans are doing.

It's not merely a matter of explaining to me why you believe your policies are justified, and then complaining when I don't agree. It's a matter of explaining why it would be rational at all, much less emotionally consistent, for me to agree with the Republican position. And as long as I perceive that the legislative agenda of the Democrats is stalled, there's not much else to talk about than the fact that the Republicans are in the way, and I don't like this. With Republicans moving the goalposts anytime we meet them halfway, declaring that position forbidden socialism, it just seems like the GOP is expecting the country to chase bipartisanship rightward, as they pull it along like bait for an animal they're leading into a trap. The fact we have stopped chasing their bait, and started confronting them is what they can't stand.

Republicans these days are relentlessly negative about Democrats, relentlessly opposed. Yet they expect the same concessions they always have. They expect the Democrats to simply give up on what they believe, and what they want.

That's not happening. Republicans pushed that past a breaking point during the Bush era, and the trail of destruction they left through the more conservative ranks of the Democratic Party make today's Senate majority and House Minority even less willing to deal with them. They burned their allies in elections, and burned their allies in negotiations. They pushed, and continued to push their policies past the limits of public support, yet expect to be treated as if people have to come to them for reasonable compromises.

I don't feel much like complementing the Republicans. Their policies failed. Their rhetoric assaults people like me every day, and they continue to try and nullify the results of all the elections that went against them. They oppose the mainstream science that gives us our best picture of what good judgment looks like in technical matters, and continue to encourage Americans to take up our worst habits.

I really don't see the point of quitting what I'm writing, or going easy on the GOP, if they're not going easy on me or not being cooperative at all in Congress. If you asked me what my ambitions were ten years ago, "to be a doormat" wasn't one of them.

My posts are what they are. If you don't like the fact that my posts have a common theme and a common target, and that this target is the GOP and it's uncivil, uncooperative, obstructive behavior, nobody's holding a gun to your head making you read, much less comment. If you think another point of view needs to be expressed, by all means, join the Red Column or Green Column, or do something to express your point of view elsewhere. If you got a factual critique, by all means, let's see it!

But if your main complaint is, "Your posts strongly favor the Democratic Party, and badmouth the GOP"?

My response is:

Good Heavens, didn't you read the sign on the door? I'm a literal card-carrying Democrat. What did you expect me to write, what sentiments did you assume a modern, Millenial generation Democrat to have of your people's current behavior?

Yes I'm going to write posts like that. I am going to expose the hypocrisy of a party that used the nuclear option as a threat to try and get five judges past Democratic Filibusters, and then turned around to set records for the number of officials they have blocked, the number of bills they have killed through threat of filibuster.

I am going to talk about how Republicans are burning their bridges and hardening resistance to their policies by going about their politics in such a ruthless, obstructive, party-line fashion.

I am going to express my anger and frustration at the stupidity of it all, and try and convince more Americans in my tiny corner of the internet that the GOP is wrong, and that the power they've been lent should be taken back.

My question to any Republican who objects to my negativity about their party, is why should I like your party or its leaders at this point? What's the bloody point? You've made the game a smashmouth wrestling match, rather than a civil negotiation. You've set the terms as mutually exclusive, and insisted on having your party take an unbending line on just about every policy front.

The people in my party who try to make deals, who try to find a compromise in the center end up with nothing to show for their efforts. The bills remain filibustered, the agenda remains stalled, and all they get out of it is greater political vulnerability. It simply doesn't pay to concede things to Republicans, because they'll take any concession given, and insist on more. There's no give to the Republicans these days, just take.

And somehow, some way, despite only being the majority party in one house of Congress, they find fault with anybody wanting to pass anything but their own agenda. Hell, they were acting that way even when Democrats were in control of everything! They feel entitled these days, or worse, actually think their morally obligated to push their political power past the limitations of our constitutional system.

I see all this, and wonder what the redeeming feature of this situation is. I didn't plan, this many years on from the 2008 election, to see so many of the problems that lead into that election unaddressed. I saw the Democrats trying to deal with them, and the Republicans not only trying to stop them, but raising a whole bunch of BS fear-mongering in order to get back into power quickly.

Worse yet, the GOP seems intent on creating even more problems, from the Citizens United result to the Debt Ceiling Crisis. They want to use political blackmail, their failure to keep basic fiscal and governmental systems going, as a tool for blackmail to promote their agenda.

So tell me, since these are my perceptions, those are my fears, and I have the philosophy that I do, the perspective on the facts: Why should I do a damn thing to help the Republicans look good? Why should I do a single thing that would help them keep power? Why should I not be constantly beating the drum to get them out of Congress in a bum's rush?

It's bizarre, seeing somebody shocked to find me not being so friendly, given all the nasty things they've said to me, all the horrible things they accused me and my fellow Democrats of.

You want me to be more positive about the Republican Party? Give me a real reason. Give me some glorious compromises, some grand bargains that don't leave Democrats feeling like they need to primary their leaders. Pull the slider on your rhetoric down a couple hundred decibels, and ditch the fat bastard with the golden mike. Put the freaks and the fringy folks back wherever they were hiding before they surfaced to try and take over the party.

Then we'll talk about posting more positive things for a Democrat like myself to say about Republicans. Then I'll actually have something I want to praise them about. Until then, expect me to pull no punches here, as a Democrat, in the Democrats and Liberals column.

Despite all this, I am not actually all that concerned with what transpires in the Supreme Court. At this point the pro-equality movement has gotten the ball rolling with legalization schemes in roughly a dozen states already implemented. For the past decade, I have spent all my time living in states where gay marriage is legal and none of the cataclysms predicted by the Right have come to pass. People go about their lives as before, not caring about others' sexual orientation. Justice Louis Brandeis once labeled the 50 states as "Laboratories of democracy"; in the case of gay marriage, the experiment has been conducted in a many states successfully.

Combined with the steady trend in public opinion, this means that at this point it is simply inevitable that gay marriage will be legal in the entire country in the next 15-20 years. So at this point, the question is how will it be done? There are certainly arguments that make it likely that plausible that the High Court will use these two cases to "go big" and legalize homosexual marriage in a grand watershed moment. After all, I am sure our nine justices do not want to be remembered in the same vein as those who upheld discrimination in cases such as Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson, so there will a great deal of pressure from the history textbook writers of tomorrow.

Nonetheless, I am confident that the Court (and its conservative majority) will not be comfortable abrogating State Constitutions across the country. Such a decision would create considerable discord in much of the country in the same manner that Roe v. Wade has done. With this said, I think the likely decision will be a limited one that both saves the court's face in the eyes of history while also placating today's mob of religiopolitical activists. Prop 8 in California not only discriminates between heterosexuals and homosexuals, but it also discriminates between homosexuals who married before it and those who tried to get married afterwards. This temporal discrimination also violates the 14th amendment and could serve as a basis to strike down Prop 8 in California while leaving it illegal in much of the rest of the country. Likewise, the Court could eliminate DOMA's discrimination of benefits, but not its discrimination of terminology.

In my opinion, I think this would be the best course of action. A watershed decision could serve to delegitimize the legalization of homosexual marriage, whereas a continuation of the slow & steady route of legalization on a sate by state basis through legislative processes would allow the legalization of homosexual marriage to occur at the same rate at which its support amongst American voters grows. Nonetheless, I will not be disappointed if five of the Justices want to go big and legalize gay marriage nationwide.

Conservatives have claimed that the lack of a Senate budget resolution was evidence that Obama and other Democrats were not interested in negotiation or compromise. Although this argument was absurd from its inception, the Senate has now undermined its premise. However, I doubt conservatives will follow their own logic and take the budget resolution as evidence that Obama and the Democrats are willing to negotiate and compromise.

In any case, the Senate accomplished nothing today. The resolution is nonbinding and any appropriations bills must garner support from both houses of Congress as well as the President. Now, House Republicans need to sit down with Obama and find a solution to our financial woes. However, this was also the case yesterday; so I safely conclude that today's budget vote was simply a sham. The only purpose of the exercise was to put on a show whereby conservatives could offer one ridiculous non-germane amendment after another only to see them defeated.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2013/0323/Senate-s-first-budget-in-four-years-A-chip-off-partisan-gridlock?nav=87-frontpage-entryLeadStory

They think they're entitled to it, that the forceful conversion of the rest of the country is necessary for its future. Like many political factions of this nation's history, and the history of so many others, they believe its essential that people do what they want, and absolutely necessary that the others are kept from power.

And there's no back-up plan. When you have a political bubble, like a financial bubble, you walk on eggshells, doing your best to avoid puncturing the fantasy.

How's that despair-y, status quo-y thing working out for you?

The simple truth is, Republicans have structured their current political strategies around resistance to Obama, opposition, and contradiction to his policies. In doing so, they've stuck themselves in a position where they really aren't doing their own thinking. They're reacting to Obama's strategy, and making plenty of mistakes doing so. In making it absolutely necessary that Obama be the irredeemable enemy, Republicans have put themselves in a rather nasty place.

Just look at the tax cut vote, earlier this year. Ask yourself: four years ago, would you imagine that the majority of the Republican Caucus would vote against a tax cut for most Americans?

They're doing it because it isn't everything they want, because it doesn't have that flavor of absoluteness they require.

I mean, really, if the tax cut vote had failed, then all taxes would have gone up, across the board, in a weak economic time, and the Republicans would have been seen to allow this to happen, simply to defend their friends at the top of the economic pyramid.

Only by allowing Democrats to be the majority of yes votes did this actually pass. That's another difficult to believe consequence of this oppositional logic: Republicans actually gave up on being the majority supporters of the bill in the House.

I don't think the Democrats failed to notice this. See, the problem is, any kind of logic, applied rigorously enough, can be turned to contradict itself. We have to test facts and realities, as well as relying on the logic itself. The mark of (not to mention the advantage of) a moderate is that they can let their common sense and observation of reality shape their actions, and not just feel themselves compelled to do something which in the back of their mind they know to be stupid.

Republicans should have understood that with Obama's re-election, they were not going to get what they wanted, but that they had the alternative of getting a good portion of what they wanted. Ah, but if they understood that, the zealots within their party would burn them at the stake, right?

Well, that's what you get when you are in such a rush to get back in power that you throw out a lifeline to the purists and the hardliners, the fearmongers and the folks without common sense, to get yourself back in power. The Tea Party, I think, was always a better political idea than a political outcome. It allowed Republicans to come back just two years after the bitter defeat of 2008 and take back the House, but at a price.

The first part of the price is this: while Tea Party Republicans could get elected in small house districts, they made a lot of marginal Senate elections, especially Harry Reid's and Claire McCaskill's go the Democrat's way in the last two elections. So, the Tea Party rescue only extended to one house. This wasn't Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole collaborating together so that Clinton had to play ball. No, this is John Boehner and his less than cooperative caucus having to try and force Harry Reid in the Senate, and Barack Obama in the White House to give them what they want.

The constitutional reality is, there's only so much you can do to force those two guys and the Democrats they represent to cut their own throats. I mean, heck, that's the whole point of the Senate, if you know your actual framers. They wanted the Senate to put a curb on wayward, impulsive populist movement (and no, the filibuster was not part of that, it wasn't to be invented for another half a century) That's the point of the long, six year term.

Congress itself is a compromise, a compromise between those who wanted all states represented equally, regardless of size or population, and those who wanted their population to count for something in the kind of say they had in Congress. It's a compromise between long term and short term thinking.

But Republicans are so convinced of their political indispensability, of the apocalyptic results of letting Democrats have their way, that they think they're entitled to get what they want, regardless of the fact that the system the Framers designed is built to get in the way of zealots just like them.

If we had followed the original design, the Congress before theirs would have been fairly successful at passing legislation. The Filibuster, a product of mid-19th century loophole exploitation of Senate Rules, would not even have been a factor. And what would have determined whether voters re-elected them? The merits of what they passed. If that huge raft of legislation screwed things up further, Republicans could have jumped on that and taken back seats on that accord. That's the sort of moderation the Framers envisioned.

That's not the kind Republicans actually practiced. Democrats never actually got the chance to truly screw up. Republicans interfered, blocking whole rafts of legislation, whose outcomes are now strictly hypothetical. The plus side for the Republicans is that they can pretend anything they'd like to imagine would have happened. The downside is, Republicans have little else but what the Democrats did get passed to sneer at.

And now? Well, if you take over a majority, you get the mortgage of accountability that comes with this particular house. The purpose of Congress is not to be a platform for the grandstanding of politicians, who want people to keep them employed in this job. The purpose of Congress is to make this nation's policies, and on that front the Republicans have been terrible, in no small part because they think they're better than the design of the framers. They think that they, above all others in this country, deserve power.

Well, they're not alone, in a sense. Very few of us would disparage our own ideas of what we would do if we had our druthers. But while they preach to the Heavens and Earth about the Constitution limiting government, they seem to strain at those bindings themselves, dissatisfied with doing what people in their position, of being in charge of one chamber in a mixed Congress would be doing: compromising.

It's very easy for parties to get into that adolescent wish-fulfillment phase, where they essentially promise the moon, and set expectations for their voters that they'll get it. But really, this was a government designed to be run by adults, who would yield when it became abundantly enough clear that they didn't have the consensus backing them to get what they wanted. The Republicans do violence to the intention of the Framers with their hostile unwillingness to compromise with the Democrats. They're not there to be impressive to their voters, not primarily. They're in that place to pass policy, for which they will be accountable to their voters.

I think ultimately function wins out over politics, at least in our kind of government. When everything becomes ideological, you find yourself painting yourself into a corner, trying to use the alchemy of PR to get for yourself something you're not really supposed to have by the rules.

It's been six years since the Republicans lost complete control of Congress, and still, they have not made their peace with that rejection. 2010 was a mixed return from that wilderness, and 2012 makes it look like 2010 was not really the return home that Republicans really wanted from voters.

The question is, can the Republicans survive the recognition, the admission that they no longer have the benefit of the doubt from the American people? Can they make the transition to the kind of party they have to be to win in a land where multiculturalism isn't simply a nice idea, but reality? Or will they be so politically wound up about remaining like they once were and conceding nothing to the Democrats, that it'll be a case of damned if they do, damned if they don't?

The question is not whether somebody like me sees a way for Republicans to remain true to their values, yet deal with the demographic and political realities. The question is, will the Republicans allow themselves a path out of that corner, or will they be like that guy in the commercial who storms out of the house with footprints of red paint tracking behind him?