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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Republican Senators Have Unanimously Refused Even to Allow Financial Reform to Be Debated (UPDATED)

According to Ezra Klein our best hope for an end to this initial Republican obstruction of Wall Street reform is the fact that Mitch McConnell wants to get back to Kentucky to watch the Kentucky Derby this week-end. Now, isn't that special? The level of reckless irresponsibility, grotesque preening, cynical deception, and outright dysfunction in the Senate is simply not to be believed.

Here's hoping the narrative announced in this DNC ad manages to echo enough to check the mid-term bloodbath being predicted ever more breathlessly in the pundit-pile on these days, so that Democrats manage to hang on to their House and Senate majorities whatever their losses.



UPDATED: Republicans finally cave in Round One of the Obstructionism Waltz. More dreary whirls along the creaking dance-floor to come, be assured.

If the Senate Democrats stick a fork in the filibuster at the beginning of the next session as they should, the pace of reform should quicken rather than slack even with slimmer majorities in the lead up to a strong campaign for an Obama second term. It's going to be a nail-biter though.

It is crucial that folks of good sense and good will fend off the literal authoritarian insanity of contemporary Republicanism even if they are rightly disappointed by the appalling slow-moving compromised pragmatism of contemporary Democrats (who have their own drooling corporate tools and whiny white guys to contend with in the caucus).

The fight to push the country back from the brink through the most progressive tools actually on offer is different from the fight to push the Democratic Party to the left where it belongs from within -- but neither of these fights benefits from petulant relinquishment of the field just because the ongoing struggles are hard and their opponents so relentlessly mean, wrong, and stupid.

Stay engaged, keep pushing, use the tools on offer, don't confuse the personal edifications of righteous declarations with the collective achievements on which pragmatic reform endlessly keeps building on and on.

Vote, for heaven's sake, if nothing else. Vote.

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