GOP Moderates Wary of Filibuster Curb

The Senate Republican leader's threat to outlaw filibusters of judicial nominees is running into significant resistance from his party's moderates, who may be poised to quash the GOP's most potent and controversial option for dealing with Democratic opposition to conservative judges....read on

Frist trying to end Democracy!

From Daily Kos Diary:

Wed Nov 17th, 2004 at 12:39:30 PST

So Frist will today "give his blessing" to a plan to change the Senate rules so that only 51 votes are required to end a filibuster of Bush's judicial nominations.

Here's the article from this morning's CongressDailyAM

SENATE LEADERSHIP
Frist To Go 'Nuclear' On Nominations
By John Stanton
Senate Majority Leader Frist today is expected to give his blessing to a GOP plan to dramatically change the Senate's voting rules -- effectively eliminating Democrats' ability to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees, aides said Tuesday.
Democratic leadership sources warned that a move to reduce from 60 to 51 the number of votes needed to end a filibuster of judicial nominees would be considered a declaration of war by most Democrats, could further weaken the position of the chamber's shrinking population of moderates and almost certainly would create new obstacles for the GOP's agenda.
During a closed-door meeting of the GOP Conference today, Frist will inform his colleagues that while the so-called "nuclear option" of changing Senate rules will be reserved as a last resort, Republicans will no longer tolerate Democratic efforts to block Bush's nominees to the federal bench, an aide to Frist confirmed.
According to this source, no immediate action on changing the rules is planned. Frist will wait for the next floor debate on a contested Bush appointee...read on

Frist is complaining because ten nominees have been stopped, when over two hundred have been confirmed.

MSNBC presented me with a panel discussion on moral values the other night that was moderated by Mike Barnicle, the famous literary grave-robber, that also featured Lawrence Kudlow, the famous cocaine-guzzling financier, and Joe Scarborough, the famous wife-dumping ex-congressperson. (Carl Bernstein was also there, running with a worse crowd than he ever did when he was hanging with Don Segretti.)

Anyway, this brood of B-list vipers blathered on from Hell until breakfast, driving me to one of the Internets on which I discovered this and then, this.

Consider: a plagiarist moderates a discussion on "values" with one guy who chucked the frau overboard the first chance he had, and a stock-market pimp who once put half of Medellin up his nose. The discussion is carried on further by a degenerate gambler writing on behalf of an institution that is giving its "Leadership Award" to a pill-popping creature of the strip-mall night who's currently working on Wife No. 4. Welcome to the mystical body of suckers, y'all.

As with most things, The Founder had a good eye for the likes of Bill (Sportin' Life) Bennett and the rest of the Green Room Sanhedrin: "Alas for you...you hypocrites! You who are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome on the outside but inside are full of dead men's bones and every kind of corruption." (Matthew 23: 27-28).

This week, high-profile Republicans, many of whom had opposed coastal drilling, enthusiastically reversed course and began demanding that coastal drilling begin immediately. This was especially jarring in Florida, where Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez — both Republicans who had opposed offshore drilling as recently as last week — came out in support of the Bush/McCain policy.

It appears that the GOP is just following the political winds. Drilling, all of a sudden, is enjoying broader public support.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey — conducted before McCain announced his intentions on the issue — finds that 67% of voters believe that drilling should be allowed off the coasts of California, Florida and other states. Only 18% disagree and 15% are undecided. Conservative and moderate voters strongly support this approach, while liberals are more evenly divided (46% of liberals favor drilling, 37% oppose).

Sixty-four percent (64%) of voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that gas prices will go down if offshore oil drilling is allowed, although 27% don’t believe it. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of conservatives say offshore drilling is at least somewhat likely to drive prices down. That view is shared by 57% of moderates and 50% of liberal voters.

The Rasmussen poll comes around the same time as a Gallup poll that found a similar result: “Fifty-seven percent of Americans favor allowing oil drilling in coastal and wilderness areas that are currently off-limits. Forty-one percent of Americans oppose allowing drilling in those areas, and 2 percent have no opinion.”

So, is this a political problem for opponents of coastal and ANWR drilling? Perhaps, but it seems easy enough to move the needle in the other direction.

Continue reading »

Via Kos, it appears the Kansas Republican Party, deeply divided between moderates and far-right activists, is pushing party loyalty to the extreme.

The state Republican Party is forming a loyalty committee so that it can punish officers who endorse or contribute to Democrats. [...]

Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist, suggested the loyalty committee could prove a "public relations disaster."

"Ironically, it smacks most of the Communist Party," Beatty said Monday. "That's the kind of public irony that most parties try to avoid -- the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom."

As TBogg said many years ago, “Nothing quite says ‘freedom’ like being compelled to recite a loyalty oath.”

Digby:

Blaming the American people is an excellent political strategy, however, and I hope these conservatives keep it up. There's nothing that betrayed voters like more than to be called stupid, cowardly and traitorous. (I know I've been enjoying it for the last couple of decades.) I'm sure all those independents and moderates who now see through Bush and the Republicans are going to love it too. It really clarifies your thinking.

This isn't the 1970's. They aren't going to get away with blaming the cowardly public this time. There are no hippies to hate ---- just millions of average, taxpaying, middle class Americans who know damned well when they've been lied to. And if they don't, there are many of us out here who will remind them...read on

Ann Coulter at CPAC on "Ragheads" and Assassinating Bill Clinton (and Dr. Bill Frist's Diagnosis)

And they call us grubby-angry leftist bloggers.

Max Blumenthal infiltrated CPAC and here's what she said to an adoring audience. Frist of course instead of denouncing her- tosses the "no comment" line:

"I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'" (This declaration prompted a boisterous ovation.)

"Coulter on killing Bill Clinton: (Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemna) "There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'"

"Coulter on moderate Republicans: "There is more dissent on a slave plantation then amongst moderates in the Republican party."

After Coulter's speech, I approached Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in the CPAC exhibitor's hall. I asked him what he thought of Coulter's characterization 15 minutes earlier of Muslims as "ragheads." HIs reply? "I wasn't there so I better not comment."

Sen. Chuck Hagel was on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer today and had a few interesting things to say.

Download | play -WMP

Hagel called Dick Cheney out on his" last throes" assessment of the Iraqi insurgency.

"I don't think there's panic, I don't think there's cynicism. cynicism. I think there's this steady unsure sense about where is this all leading -- the constant daily reports on Iraq, our people being killed there, the money being spent there," he added...read on

Atrios: Though, as is general the case when the moderates and mavericks stick their heads up for a bit he'll probably not take any constructive steps."

Emailer Jillian: "Hagel said that the compassionate thing for Bush to have done was to invite Cindy Sheehan into the Ranch. It should have been done immediately."

As many right wingers have been doing, Hagel did not paint Cindy as being a puppet of interest groups and actually talked about other families that are protesting that have lost loved ones. Cindy has to leave Crawford because her mom had a stroke.

Cindy also spoke out today against Matt (The Eggman) Drude: Memo to Drudge, et al: It's Not About Me, It's About the War

The Carpet Bagger Report: "To understand why the Senate fight over judicial nominees went from imminent compromise to inescapable confrontation in less than 12 hours, look no further than James Dobson. Bush doesn’t do nuance, and Dobson doesn’t do compromise. Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, denounced the notion of a compromise in a radio broadcast over the network, owned by American Family Radio. The network is based in Mississippi, home of Senator Trent Lott, one of those working on a compromise.

“If this is true,” Dr. Dobson said in an interview Tuesday, “it will represent an end run around the majority leader and will quite frankly be seen as a betrayal of the millions of people who put George Bush and the Republicans in office.” Within a few hours, Lott was telling reporters that his effort to reach a compromise wasn’t sincere and that it was just an attempt to convince moderates who “have to feel assured that every avenue has been explored.” In other words, just a few hours after Dobson calls Lott out, Lott started telling people that his negotiations are just part of the nuclear option game plan so there’s nothing for the far-right to worry about...read on "

WASHINGTON - Amid the backdrop of soaring oil and gasoline prices, a sharply divided Senate on Wednesday voted to open the ecologically rich Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, delivering a major energy policy win for President Bush. The Senate, by a 51-49 vote, rejected an attempt by Democrats and GOP moderates to remove a refuge drilling provision from next year’s budget, preventing opponents from using a filibuster — a tactic that has blocked repeated past attempts to open the Alaska refuge to oil companies ...read on