Stop Me Before I Vote Again

So now we got a House bill that purports to take a crack at saddling Wall Street and the rest of the limited liability Laputanians. Okay, rangers, I know it's a fleabitten piece of class pornography, and yet it glimmers in my yearning eyes like... well... the Wilmot Proviso.

But damn the sky gods, here cometh -- for time 13 zillion -- the jounalistic caveat: "but it must pass the Senate." And of course from the collective mouths of that General Nivelle of legislative bodies, one can only hear the lapidary sociopathic reply "It shall not pass".

Yup, like health care, like glass-walling the Fed, like decent cap and trade -- it's the Senate's diehard willful muscle-flexing minority that stand athwart reform's passage to a better place There they stand, holding the narrows like so many easy-chair Spartans.

Fellow disloyal American skunk apes, can we not unanimously agree an institution that is precisely designed for nasty loon muppets like Joe Lieberman has begged for Clio's dust bin for generations since our constitutional patriarchs drafted her up?

Wasn't resort to a full-blown blood monsoon of a civil war simply to "contain" slavery impudence enough? Wasn't 100 years of unashamed protection of Jim Crow worthy of constitutional incineration? Not to mention more mundane outcomes, like the utter paralysis of the New Deal?

But the corporate center aisle party requires just such an institution, with its qualified majority ready and able at the drop of a stitch to disqualify any semblance -- yes semblance -- of anti-corporate progress.

But hey, times are a changin'. The left has seen the light... maybe. So I suggest we start a movement to repeal the Senate once and for all, or at least render it harmless, like the modern House of Lords.

Ahh, but lads and lasses, where's our Lloyd George to lead us? Where's our "small Welsh bruiser " willing to make a laughing stock out of this lethal gas works?

Starting to look like 1994 all over again. Massachusetts -- Massachusetts! -- with an unusually high turnout, has elected a Republican to replace good old steak-and-Scotch Ted Kennedy, the only halfway likable member of his family.

All the pundits seem to agree that this happened because "independent" voters deserted the Democrats in droves.

Well, why shouldn't they? They voted for the Dems in '06 and '08 because they were disgusted with what the then-incumbent malefactors were doing.

What they got, once the Dems were in, was, of course, more of the same.

I can't tell you how happy I am. At this point the best I have to hope for is that the Democratic Party evaporates entirely, and this particular banana republic becomes a downright one-party state, like Mexico in the palmy days of the PRI. Then at least nobody will be able to expend any mental energy on elections -- everybody will know they're a joke.

I look forward to reading the geschrei and gevalt, and the whistling past the graveyard, on Daily Kos and Firedoglake, but I'm saving that treat for tomorrow.

Goodnight, Mr and Mrs America, and all the Arks at sea.

Every so often, when no old girlfriends have shown up on Facebook, when the weather has kept me off the boat, when the clavichord is so out of tune I can't play it, or face tuning it -- on such occasions, I may in despair pick up the New York Times.

Tonight was such a night. Here's what I found, O joy -- I should read the damn thing more often:

So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator?

Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators.

Away with the figleaf! Anything that tends to bring the Senate into further discredit is a good thing -- as with the Supreme Court, come to think of it.

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(*) "Like an obscure tropical fruit not much prized even by the natives," as I believe Kingsley Amis wrote somewhere. Although Kingsley, if memory serves, was speaking of an organ considerably more prepossessing than the US Senate, if you ask me.