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.
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.
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?
It’s been a busy few weeks for religious zealots with a hate-on for Atheists, I have to say.
First up, Rabbi Lapin, a member of Glenn Beck’s little Black Robe Regiment group of creepy theocrat wannabes, had this to say on the September 3rd episode:
“I tell them directly, I do believe, that Atheists are parasites.”
(my transcription, so if I got a word wrong, try not to burn me at the stake or what not)
You see, we’re ‘benefitting’ from the ‘energy’ put out by religious folks without putting anything into the system. Honestly, it sounds like some nerdy explanation of The Force as much as anything else.
However, as the Young Turks and David Neiwart have documented, Lapin’s hardly new to Atheist bashing, and perhaps worse. About the religious vs. the non-religious in the US, Lapin said:
“I am absolutely convinced that God is far from finished with the story of the United States of America,” he said by way of summation. “First of all, [there's] the matter of the little battle that must be fought, just as it was in the 19th century.” There were, and are, “two incompatible moral visions for this country. We had to settle it then. We’re going to have to settle it now. I hope not with blood, not with guns, but we’re going to have to settle it nonetheless. The good news is that I think our side is finally ready to settle it. Roll up its sleeves, take off its jacket, and get a little bloody. Spill a little blood. We’ll settle it. And we’ll win. And then there’s no holding us back.”
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”.
Of course the idea that Nazi Germany was Atheistic is utter nonsense, and the idea that Hitler was an Atheist rather dubious at best. He certainly claimed, over and over, to be a Christian, and had effusive praise for the power of religion, specifically claiming to be a Catholic, and that Christianity informed and guided his particular brand of insanity.
Considering the Catholic Church’s troubled relationship with fascism, ie, its often open support of Fascist dictatorships as a bulwark against Communism, I’m somewhat amused by the sheer unmitigated gall the current leader of that religion has to lay Hitler at *our* feet.
Ah well.
Needless to say this speech hasn’t gone over well with the UK’s large Atheist/Irreligious community, or, say, Richard Dawkins:
This statement by the pope, on his arrival in Edinburgh, is a despicable outrage. Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII. Even if Hitler had been an atheist (he certainly was not), the rank and file Germans who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians, almost to a man: either Catholic or Lutheran, primed to their anti-Semitism by centuries of Catholic propaganda about ‘Christ-killers’ and by Martin Luther’s own seething hatred of the Jews. To mention Ratzinger’s membership of the Hitler Youth might be thought to be fighting dirty, but my feeling is that the gloves are off after this disgraceful paragraph by the pope.
I shy away from the Hitler Youth thing, if only because he’s currently, as we speak, the head of an international conspiracy to hide child molestors from the law.
There is perhaps a bright side though; attendance at the Pope’s events is far, far below expectations, and the Humanists in Scotland are ready for his visit with some hilarious billboards touting the country’s rapidly growing secularism.
Heh heh. Made me laugh, anyway.
Still, I see stories like this and I can’t help but wonder at the whole spectacle. Religious figures really can get away with saying whatever ignorant, hateful thing they want about atheists, can’t they? There’s really no consequence for doing so. It’s completely within the scope of acceptable political discourse.
(Inevitably necessary disclaimer: Yes, they have the free speech right to say these things, at least here in America, though Lapin’s edging pretty close to inciting violence. The point is that, come next week, Lapin will still give appearances and go on tv without being noted as a vile eliminationist, and the Pope will still be ranting about Atheists causing all the woes in the world, and that’s apparently perfectly acceptable. Imagine the outcry if you substituted ‘Islam’ for atheism, or ‘Jews’ for atheist, in this type of speech. Don’t you think the reaction would differ?)
