WAht a goddam DISGRACEFollow

Politics IS dirty, that's why ordinary people don't want anything more to do with it than to exclaim about the things politicians do.

Somewhere a little otter is crying.

I'm crying for you too budy.

Is this more or less disgraceful that filibustering? I'm confused.

Or did you mean that some politicians could have their votes changed in 45 minutes. Cuz that's pretty bad too.

I'm a political scientist in training, and I'm neither surprised nor particularly upset by the procedural gimmick. You see, in a representative democracy that involves parliamentary procedures of any kind, people will be able to make use of the rules to influence an outcome one way or another. Oftentimes there are very good reasons for this. For instance, the minority party of the United States Congress has the important right to filibuster a bill if it is so greatly offensive to the principles of liberty, or is so destructive to the integrity of the nation, that it must be delayed as long as possible to get Americans interested and hopefully lead to a dropping of the issue.

In return, the majority party gets a limited power to head off those sorts of filibusters, and to employ temporal management to make it more likely that their position will win. The American people, in their infinite wisdom, has put an anti-environment, pro-business, anti-worker's rights party into power in the United States Congress. Those who are educated in the way Congress works expected that the Republicans would engage in these various legal and, quite frankly, appropriate measures to advance their agenda. Those who were not should educate themselves.

As for the merits of the bill itself:

It is disgraceful and a slap in the face to anyone who believes that Republicans actually believe in states' rights. On the President's orders, oil companies can ignore local environmental and zoning laws, and even ignore federal environmental laws. It allows the cartelized oil industry to collude to refuse states with high environmental standards their product.

I say kudos to the brave Republicans who stood up and flipped a nice big middle finger to their leadership, and kudos for the Democrats for standing firm for the principles of states' rights. The Republican majority is doing good things for Democrats: it's making them rethink some of their less intelligent philsophies and policies while refocusing on the important issues of jobs for Americans, environmental protection, collaborative international policy, aid to the poor and infirm, freedom of choice, and other such important platforms.

Pity we have to put up with this sort of slime as part of the process.

(Edited due to a belated recognition that Allakhazam is mostly not FFXI players)

Edited, Sat Oct 8 04:37:41 2005 by captainktainer

I agree with that but the reply was rather Gbaji like, don't you think?

Filter, I damn thee!

Getting rid of the {FFXI} brackets would be a solid plus.

Don't freak out...yet