America's Hat Also Has a Stupid Senate

Looks like you dirty Yankees aren't the only ones with a phenomenally screwy legislative process:

The Senate is working quickly through many of the bills that were passed by the House of Commons in recent weeks but one controversial piece of legislation seems to be stalled.

Bill C-311, drafted by NDP MP Bruce Hyer, would require the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. It was supported in the Senate by Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell and has been read twice but has since been adjourned in the name of Conservative Senator Richard Neufeld. The legislation cannot move forward until he speaks to it.... Mr. Neufeld said on Wednesday that there has been no organized effort to keep the bill from being passed into law. If it is not addressed before the Senate rises, probably next week, it can always be raised in the fall, he said. “Our chamber has been pretty busy,” said Mr. Neufeld.

But the Liberals say they fear that the Conservatives are stalling until they obtain an absolute majority of Senate seats and can unilaterally kill the legislation - something that is likely to occur in November.

And Mr. Hyer said he has been told by Conservatives that the government has decreed that the bill cannot be passed into law.

“There are a number of Conservative senators who I have met with, who I am not going to identify, who are very sympathetic,” he said, “but they say they are getting tremendous pressure - they are being whipped.”

And guess what? It's been lazing around Ottawa since 2006!

The Climate Change Accountability Act was originally tabled in October 2006 in the Canadian House of Commons as Bill C-377 by Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. It passed 3rd reading in that House with the support of caucuses of the Liberal Party of Canada, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP (the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, voted against it). However, due to the 2008 Canadian federal election ending the parliamentary session prematurely, the bill did not achieve royal assent despite reaching the Senate. C-377 therefore died when the election was called.

The parallels here between the 110th Congress and our situation are obvious enough that I don't need to draw them out, but here's the kicker: we don't actually vote for our senators.

The Senate consists of 105 members appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the prime minister.[1] Seats are assigned on a regional basis, with each of the four major regions receiving 24 seats, and the remainder of the available seats being assigned to smaller regions. The four major regions are: Ontario, Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and the Western provinces. The seats for Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut are assigned apart from these regional divisions. Senators may serve until they reach the age of 75.

I just want to make two little points towards the end of this quote-heavy post. One, when the Conservatives were out of power, all that I ever heard from my friends and their parents and, well, random dudes in restaurants wearing suits and cowboy hats, was that a Triple E Senate was a necessity to keep Canada from eventually breaking apart. The three Es stand for Elected, Equal, and Effective, as the Tories were weary of a senate stuffed full of liberals gumming up the works and, in their own little way, filibustering. Now that they're in power, and have been there long enough to have moved a number of people into the Senate, obviously they're not keen. Two, this bill is basically only demanding that Canada get to work on meeting the framework it has already agreed to in the United Nations. It isn't radical or overbearing or anything, it's had a series of readings, and it's already four years too late. Good god.

Harmonic Convergence

Well, Lion's screed left me blog-satisfied for a while, especially seeing as how my opinions of Obama have gotten closer and closer to Mssr. Summerbell's as the days of incompetence and dithering have passed. I had a moment of particularly intense frustration today, possibly coming off the post (which has been stewing in my head for a while), and opened my computer to see this:

The old saw that there is no such thing as bad publicity could be behind the success of The Coming Insurrection, published under the pen name the Invisible Committee, which rejects the official Left and aligns itself with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe against immigration control and the "war on terror." Published by Semiotext(e), a small California press, best known for works of French cultural theory by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, the book has spent much of the week on Amazon's top 10 bestsellers list, alongside better known titles like Game Change and The Help...

But even before the official pub date, The Coming Insurrection benefited from an "endorsement" from Glenn Beck. As part of a seven-minute rant on Fox News in July, he said, "I am not calling for a ban on this book. It's important that you read this book." Since then, each time Beck has talked about the book, sales have spiked, according to MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner. It's latest jump came after Beck devoted an entire segment to The Coming Insurrection, which he called "quite possibly the most evil thing I've ever read."

First off, starting from a more meta-level, very interesting to see a book like that getting a real sales bump. Obviously, birthers and Beckites are out there picking it up in the hopes that it somehow reflects true liberal/progressive thought across all boundaries, and so not every purchase is a sympathetic one, but it's nice (having not read the book and all) to see a possible resurgence of radical political thought that seems to actually make a dent on the thinking of, say, more than some myopic university students. Also, I'm always happy to see a political book getting sales that isn't Wings of a Dreamer a glossy retrospective on Sen. Bumblefuck's life and calling that is unsubtly funneling profits into some PAC somewhere.

Second, I want to read it. I'm considering ordering it via the interwebs, but I wanted to know if you'd yet digested it, Lion, and if so, what your thoughts are. I'm obviously not expecting a revelatory experience or even really a convincing one, I'm just curious to see what the state of radical thought is in this particular mire of an era we live in.

Waiting for the end of the world

Huffington Post, via Political Wire:

Congressional negotiators and White House officials are moving forward with plans to add the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell to the upcoming defense authorization bill, Democratic sources tell the Huffington Post.

In Congress, members are being whipped to ensure that the votes will be there for passage, should the legislation be placed in the bill. At this juncture, aides say, the prospects look good. Meanwhile, a source close to the White House says the president has instructed the Defense Department that he believes the repeal of DADT should be placed in the authorization bill.

However, disagreements could emerge when it comes to crafting the actual legislative language, over which Defense Secretary Robert Gates will wield his influence. And at this juncture, few of the offices working on the issue said they were willing to take passage as a fait accompli.

I know it's Rush Limbaugh

But I will scream next time I read the words "post-racial" in referring to present-day America.

Seriously? Also, I kind of object to Raw Story's calling the remark "extraordinary by the standards of..," because it doesn't really speak to and do justice to the fact that he actually said it, and therefore has lowered his standards to a new level.

Hating AIG Made Easy

I don't have the energy to write a lengthy post about this. But lucky for me, armed with a link and what I'm sure is a fairly predictable and popularly-shared sense of outrage, I hardly think one is necessary either.

It's Monday everyone. Enjoy.