So President Obama has pledged to veto HR 3808, the e-notarization bill that was so incredibly short, and so powerful, that nobody was quite sure what it would do.

It passed both houses of congress on votes with no records attached (voice vote in house, Unanimous consent in Senate), so nobody had to go on record for voting for it; did you know that could be done on a major bill? Fascinating.

The bill in question passed the Senate on Sept. 27 by unanimous consent. The House passed the bill by “voice vote” in April. Many bills that aren’t considered controversial pass this way, with members of both parties essentially letting it move through Congress without debate.

Pfft, ‘uncontroversial’, huh?

At its core, HR 3808 is a brazen, illogical, irrational power-grab by the Federal government over the states. Basically, it opens the bottom up on notary seals at a national level, much like credit card de-reg did for that industry; whatever the cheapest, easiest, laziest, most industry friendly state on notarization is, that’s where everyone will get everything notarized, and all other states have to approve it.

But beyond that, and this is where it gets murky – it might also force a new and undeserved legal status akin to public records on notarized documents, and it could, in some interpretations, allow retroactive, forged notarizations to be made legal.

Call me a skeptic, but I expected Obama to sign this one in a hot second. It’s awful policy and terrible politics, which is his recipe for destroying the country; yet he didn’t; seemingly, this is a bridge too far even for the modern Democratic party, and he shelved it back to the House, which seems to be scurrying around in shame looking for a way to fix it.

Hmm.

Beyond the obvious, that Obama has the potential to surprise me, I wonder what this all means. That Congress is a completely vestigial organ of government that may have come within a hair’s breadth of blowing a gaping hole in the legal system? Well, yeah. That our Federal government is run on autopilot by corporate stooges who find it completely uncontroversial to gut state regulations to serve their masters? Duh. That even ‘Progressive’ politicians like Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold are either co-opted or asleep at the switch on important economic matters? Yep.

Keep in mind that the Senate is currently, as of this moment, holding up 420 bills from the House just to be obstructionist jerks. Some of those are ‘uncontroversial’ measures too, like renaming post offices.

But not this one; in a year of gridlock, a bill that just happened to go below the radar and gut important state protections on legal process sailed through in record time.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Jim Moss has a piece up on FDL outlining the realistic limitations of the scare scenario Dems are peddling to get Progressive votes this fall. Shorter version: Republicans might take the House, but can’t take the Senate and obviously Obama’s not going anywhere, so don’t worry too much, the Senate will gridlock anything important.

Slight quibble. Yes, the Dems retain the Senate under Moss’ scenario, going down to 52-54 seats, enough to block by majority vote anything patently offensive. *But* that’s including wastes of human skin like Joseph Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad and Max Baucus.

Now, will these tools get in line behind some theocratic Republican pipe dream? Probably not, except with abortion, as many of said wastes of skin are also vicious panty-sniffing misogynists. Will they side with Republicans to pass overtly corporatist bills which our corporatist President can then sign with lightning speed?

Absolutely. So the idea that the bulk of the Republican agenda will be stymied by a narrowly Democratic Senate just doesn’t fly. In reality what you can expect is that the Corporatist wings of the Republican and Democratic parties will, in everything but name, merge into one unholy amoeba of suck, and pass bill after bill to take us further down the road to serfdom, which President Obama, as the duly appointed rubber stamp of the gentry won’t hesitate to enact into law.

In spite of all this, I approve wholeheartedly of the plan to punish dems in the fall election; I will participate in doing so myself by voting against Russ ‘Where are my Principles Now?” Feingold and Tammy ‘Who Said Healthcare was my Signature Issue?” Baldwin, because, as letsgetitdone says summarizing my post on game theory and the 2010 elections, the only way to induce cooperative behavior in a treacherous potential ally is with a big stick and a sharp whack now and then.

Heh. I am a tiny bit amused by the idea that the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is experimental, though; the actual experiments and theory were conducted before I was born, and I’m getting *old*. That aside, he’s right; unlike the standard iterated prisoner’s dilemma, where the costs/benefits of winning and losing don’t vary from round to round, in the real world they do. This is a non-Presidential election, and the costs to Dems of losing power are far higher than the costs to us of gaining temporary Republican overlords, at least in comparison to a Presidential election year.

I mean, rain or shine, Democrats can cash campaign checks, so it matters to them that they stay in power; if they don’t, who’s going to pay them to sell out their voters?

I don’t know why people find this so hard to understand. Matt Yglesias is never going to issue a mea culpa for his role in promoting Obama’s disastrous health care ‘reform’ bill, nor will he ever own up to his own egregious ‘mistakes’ in reporting on said legislation and its process, because being accurate or providing useful commentary is not his job. Matt Yglesias’ job is to push pro-corporate weasel policies into the ‘Progressive’ blogosphere by laundering them with pseudo-liberal language and his trademark yuppie perspective.

Relieved of the need, or even desire, to be correct, Yglesias is free to pursue the agenda that favors yuppie technocracy, and employs members of the yuppie technocratic class (like, of course, Yglesias himself). In other words, the continued privatization of core government functions and outsourcing of key government responsibilities to white collar technocrats, bureaucrats and functionaries. To that end, the health care bill creates a massive new government bureaucracy that was supposedly friendly to a Progressive goal (universal health care) but in fact advances only standard corporatist Third Way kleptocracy and lines the pockets of white collar businesses, like health insurers, drug manufacturers and so forth.

This will create many thousands of jobs for corporate tools who know how to publicly feign concern about the poor and the uninsured, while allowing Yglesias to continute penning new, equally inaccurate analyses in favor of further ‘reforms’ whose only unifying characteristic is their continued obedience to this particular, and peculiar, form of class warfare.

Hence the lack of an apology, or sense of shame. Hence his piece dismissing the confirmation of the Obama White House’s backroom deal against the Public Option and their subsequent lies and fake support for said plan, while advancing the meme that, as unfortunate as the, err, miscommunication might have been, it was all for the greater good anyway, being necessary to buy off the support of the industries that the general public is so foolish as to trust.

Or, say, his post panning a book by Markos Moulitsas about the radical right wing in this country, which he hadn’t read, for being too uncivil. Ironically titled, ‘It’s Important to be Right’

Well. Unless you’re Matt Yglesias.