Your post is largely nonsense, and you get some very important things wrong.
In the Pentagon Papers case, the courts didn't say it was ok, but simply that the government couldn't stop the papers from publishing them. The option to prosecute them was left open, and has been so. It is just the case that the government generally hasn't pursued that option.
The US is still largely a nation of laws, even if there are issues that need to be addressed, and more trouble is on the horizon. Unfortunately some people are either ignorant about the law, or pretend the law is something other than what it is. A perfect example of this is the question of how the conflict with Al Qaeda is being pursued. Much of it is being acted upon under the Law of War, not under criminal law. This is intolerable to many people, so they pretend that the US is lawless rather than following the rules of a different body of law. Case in point - indefinite detention of enemy combatants without trial. That is not only permissible under the law of war, but in fact customary. That is how the US held 300-400,00,000 German prisoners in the US in WW2. They didn't get trials, and no habeas corpus. Don't like it? Don't take up arms against another state, especially if you are a non-state actor with a proclivity towards war crimes, as Al Qaeda is. Things are a bit more complicated now that the US Supreme Court has muddied the waters on the subject.
Crime rates in the US have been falling for quite some time, which baffles some people. And no, there is no dictate for people to engage in mass murder. The US isn't a large prison. It isn't related to police brutality. The police are not prison guards, nor are they thugs in general (specific exceptions made for behavior).
The way that things get better is by voting and the courts, not armed rebellion - the US isn't every anywhere close to that point once you move out of the realm of fantasy.
Christianity isn't a death cult. There aren't pervasive allegations of priests murdering children. The problem of sexual abuse by clergy is a drop in the bucket compared to sex abuse by teachers.
Consider the statistics: In accordance with a requirement of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002 the Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the school system.
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.
"[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?" she said. "The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."
So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a "Nationwide Teacher Molestation Cover-up" and by asking "Are Ed Schools Producing Pedophiles?"
No, they didn't. That treatment was reserved for the Catholic Church, while the greater problem in the schools was ignored altogether.
As the National Catholic Register's reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state's entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.
Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government's discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools. -- Has Media Ignored Sex Abuse In School?
If you think that sex abuse by clergy is an enormous problem, practically demanding blood, what will you do about the much larger problem of abuse by teachers and the education system that covers for them? Or does the outrage and interest fade when the object isn't the church, but agents of the state?
Seriously, though, I hear Julian is going to be out front on Sunday. It would be quite an art project if two hundred other young clean-shaven thin white men with white wigs, white button-down shirts, gray wool pants, black dress shoes and socks, and Guy Fawkes masks all swarmed him and then got into passing cars.
You do realize that was "out loud", right? I would rather not see how that fantasy ends.
Only a socialist planned economy on a global scale can deal with the environmental pollution crisis. Workers to power! Expropriate the bourgeoisie! Dogfart!
It won't work, based on the record of previous "Dictatorships of the Proletariat".
I don't think that's a fair deal. Assange may have committed, at most, espionage against the US (which isn't a crime if he's not in the US, which he isn't),
If he directly aided Manning in the theft of classified documents it would be a crime regardless of where Assange was.
and sexual assault in Sweden.
Another actual crime Assange is accused of.
Dick Cheney, on the other hand, has proudly proclaimed on CNN that he committed crimes against humanity.
And the above is false. Dick Cheney hasn't committed "crimes against humanity" despite the most fevered fantasies and claims. Bile and lies is all that it is. See this? (Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia ) A bunch of fringe activists (leftists and Islamists) get together and hold a mock trial, no more, no less, no official standing, no credibility, no truth to it. Just more political porn.
Your claims are wrong and your reasoning specious (not to mention that the US only waterboarded three people, the last in 2003*).
In short, you're completely wrong.
At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a.k.a. Tokyo Trials, . . . only seven Japanese war criminals were executed. Every one of them was convicted of either being complicit in or directly comitting atrocities and murder on a grand scale.
. . . it seems pretty clear we executed these men for charges that far surpass concerns about waterboarding.
Now it does appear that various forms of torture were a consideration in some of these cases that resulted in death sentences at the Tokyo Trials. Media Matters marshals some evidence to that effect, but again waterboarding was presented as just one of several types of torture, many of which appear to be more severe. (Media Matters also appears to cavalierly lump all forms of Japanese water torture together and, say, forced ingestion of water — an execution method centuries ago — is obviously very different from waterboarding.) . . . . There are examples of war criminals convicted of waterboarding, even alongside convictions for a number of harsh forms of torture, who were not put to death.
In no way, shape or form could waterboarding be said to have been the predominate reason any one of these people were hanged. Begala suggesting people at the Tokyo Trials were hanged for waterboarding is akin to noting that Charles Manson is guilty of trespassing on Roman Polanski’s home and then insisting that’s the reason he got a death sentence. (Not that I’m suggesting trespassing and waterboarding are equivalent crimes; I’m just making a logical point.) --- Sorry, Paul Begala — You’re Still Wrong
Well we all can't be NPR listeners I guess... But Daily Show viewers did rank right under them for answering the most questions regarding domestic and international issues correctly..
By the way, if you like NPR, you might find this program interesting. Host is a law professor, author, worked in public broadcasting for 10 years, and hosted his own national NPR series. Lots of interesting guests. Poetry segments are on Fridays. Nationally syndicated program.
You apparently didn't bother to actually read the linked document with the statement from the retired (2008) prosecutor. If you had you would have picked up the fact that the next step in the Swedish legal process is getting a detailed statement from Assange to decide if he should be charged and prosecuted - the very thing that Assange is resisting to the point of becoming a fugitive from justice, causing his supporters to lose the money they put up for bail, and causing an international incident and damaging the diplomatic relations of numerous countries*. The retired prosecutor says many mistakes were made, is highly critical of various actions, but ultimately the process emerges: Assange must be interviewed again before he can be charged. You did an inadvertent service - I thank you.
And they want him back in Gothenburg (Goteborg), not Stockholm, very, very odd --- oh yeah, that's where "Extreme Rendition Airlines" a k a, Jeppesen Systems AB is located!
The prosecutors are in Stockholm. The court that issued the warrant is in Stockholm. But where the Swedish government would really like to see him is in Sweden, before the prosecutor, answering the allegations against him, just like any other alleged criminal, and not being a fugitive from justice. Most fairy tales begin with "Once upon a time", but on Slashdot they currently begin with, "No, no! The US is too clever to extradite Assange from Britain directly, because the extradition treaty would make that too easy! Once the US gets Assange to Sweden they'll secretly. . . ". To be blunt, your post is pure bull - popular bull - but still bull.
On the other hand, this link [wikipedia.org] demonstrates that defense spending is on the order of 30 to 40% of the total government budget, and welfare programs including medicare/medicaid are below 50% (once the 'discretionary spending' component has been taken into consideration).
I don't think you've got that quite right. Try this chart. Social Security is bigger than defense spending by itslef. Entitlement programs are bigger than defense spending by themselves. Medicare, medicaid and related programs are bigger than defense spending by themselves. All other spending about equals defense spending. Now, guess which of these is a Constitutional responsibility of the Federal government? - Entitlement programs? No. Social Security? No. Medicare? No. National Defense? Yes.
Since 1970, the historical ratio between defense spending and entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has flipped. In 1970, total defense spending was 8.1 percent of our economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — more than twice the 3.8 percent of GDP spent on the big three entitlement programs.
Today, the core defense program has fallen to 3.9 percent of GDP, while entitlement spending has more than doubled to 9.6 percent of GDP. By 2030, the big three entitlements will absorb roughly 81 percent of all federal revenue if taxes are rightly held at historical levels. This crowds out defense and homeland security spending and threatens the historically low-tax, high-growth U.S. economy.
I suppose you could try to get rid of welfare programs, but then you have to spend more on prisons and other ways to "handle" the rabble and sudden rise in crime as people do whatever they can to feed themselves.
The way to handle that used to be called "jobs". It has always been a challenge to create jobs, but the Obama administration has been increasing the difficulty and risk with job creation since it took office.
Put another way, there's a reason we'll regime change Libya but have no balls when it comes to Iran's nukes.
The United States and the Soviet Union almost came to blows despite both being nuclear powers. If Iran gives the US sufficient cause, Iran will find its small number of nuclear weapons will be of little help in changing its end.
And his logic is hard to fault. He pointed to the B-52 as an example of a flexible weapons platform that had a wide variety of uses that didn't require stealth technology compared to the limited usefulness of the F-117.
But don't you know that there are a lot of scenarios in which the crews in the B-52s would be very grateful to have F-117s or successors flying ahead to suppress enemy air defenses?
Solid, reliable and flexible is more important than stealth, which was designed for a war we're likely never going to fight.
Sometimes the enemy picks your war for you - you don't always get a vote.
I'm sure that will keep us much safer and will cost us less.
The United States has already paid the price many times of having a military that wasn't ready to fight when a fight came to it. They would rather not go back to that as the cost in blood tends to be high.
But instead we spend our billions on arms and look for conflicts to use them in...
In other words, you don't know what you are talking about.
Maybe this app is not just to receive a text message. Maybe this app really is Mitt's VP, and he needs a few million smartphones to run the neural nets.
So, Romney & neural net artificial intelligence app on smart phone versus Obama & Biden? Advantage: Romney
. . ..it seems that some might need a refresher course on the history of Obamacare’s enactment. Reconciliation didn’t play a small role in Obamacare’s passage, as has been suggested. Without reconciliation, Obamacare would not have become law at all. It’s true that the main Obamacare structure was passed by the Senate in December 2009 under normal rules for legislative consideration. That’s because Democrats at that time had 60 votes (including two independent senators who caucus with them). They didn’t need to resort to reconciliation to pass the bill as long as all 60 of their senators stuck together and supported passage, which they did.
But then Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate race in January 2010; the Democrats lost their 60-vote supermajority and could no longer close off debate on legislation without the help of at least one Republican senator.
At that point, the president and his allies had two choices. They could compromise with Republicans and bring back a bill to the Senate that could garner a large bipartisan majority. Or they could ignore the election results in Massachusetts and pull an unprecedented legislative maneuver, essentially switching from regular order to reconciliation at the eleventh hour, thereby bypassing any need for Republican support. As they had done at every other step in the process, the Democrats chose the partisan route. They created a separate bill, with scores and scores of legislative changes that essentially became the vehicle for a House-Senate conference on the legislation. That bill was designated a reconciliation bill. Then they passed the original Senate bill through the House on the explicit promise that it would be immediately amended by this highly unusual reconciliation bill, which then passed both the House and Senate a few days later, on an entirely party-line vote. - - The Reconciliation Option
The Democrats own Obamacare, which may not be good news for them.
The latest New York Times/CBS News poll dives into public opinion on Obamacare following the Supreme Court decision and finds opposition to the law virtually unchanged from when it was enacted in 2010, with about half disapproving and one-third supporting the law.
And those who strongly disapprove (36 percent) continue to significantly outnumber those who strongly approve (14 percent) of the law.
Support for repeal also remains strong: 61 percent of those polled say they want Congress to repeal the individual mandate (27 percent) or the entire law (34 percent). Only 15 percent want to keep the law as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post is largely nonsense, and you get some very important things wrong.
In the Pentagon Papers case, the courts didn't say it was ok, but simply that the government couldn't stop the papers from publishing them. The option to prosecute them was left open, and has been so. It is just the case that the government generally hasn't pursued that option.
The US is still largely a nation of laws, even if there are issues that need to be addressed, and more trouble is on the horizon. Unfortunately some people are either ignorant about the law, or pretend the law is something other than what it is. A perfect example of this is the question of how the conflict with Al Qaeda is being pursued. Much of it is being acted upon under the Law of War, not under criminal law. This is intolerable to many people, so they pretend that the US is lawless rather than following the rules of a different body of law. Case in point - indefinite detention of enemy combatants without trial. That is not only permissible under the law of war, but in fact customary. That is how the US held 300-400,00,000 German prisoners in the US in WW2. They didn't get trials, and no habeas corpus. Don't like it? Don't take up arms against another state, especially if you are a non-state actor with a proclivity towards war crimes, as Al Qaeda is. Things are a bit more complicated now that the US Supreme Court has muddied the waters on the subject.
Crime rates in the US have been falling for quite some time, which baffles some people. And no, there is no dictate for people to engage in mass murder. The US isn't a large prison. It isn't related to police brutality. The police are not prison guards, nor are they thugs in general (specific exceptions made for behavior).
The way that things get better is by voting and the courts, not armed rebellion - the US isn't every anywhere close to that point once you move out of the realm of fantasy.
Christianity isn't a death cult. There aren't pervasive allegations of priests murdering children. The problem of sexual abuse by clergy is a drop in the bucket compared to sex abuse by teachers.
Consider the statistics: In accordance with a requirement of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002 the Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the school system.
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.
"[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?" she said. "The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."
So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a "Nationwide Teacher Molestation Cover-up" and by asking "Are Ed Schools Producing Pedophiles?"
No, they didn't. That treatment was reserved for the Catholic Church, while the greater problem in the schools was ignored altogether.
As the National Catholic Register's reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state's entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.
Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government's discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools. -- Has Media Ignored Sex Abuse In School?
If you think that sex abuse by clergy is an enormous problem, practically demanding blood, what will you do about the much larger problem of abuse by teachers and the education system that covers for them? Or does the outrage and interest fade when the object isn't the church, but agents of the state?
Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature
Seriously, though, I hear Julian is going to be out front on Sunday. It would be quite an art project if two hundred other young clean-shaven thin white men with white wigs, white button-down shirts, gray wool pants, black dress shoes and socks, and Guy Fawkes masks all swarmed him and then got into passing cars.
You do realize that was "out loud", right? I would rather not see how that fantasy ends.
Only a socialist planned economy on a global scale can deal with the environmental pollution crisis. Workers to power! Expropriate the bourgeoisie! Dogfart!
It won't work, based on the record of previous "Dictatorships of the Proletariat".
EUROPE'S ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARE: HARD ROAD TO RECOVERY
Dogfart!
A fair characterization of Communist governance.
I don't think that's a fair deal. Assange may have committed, at most, espionage against the US (which isn't a crime if he's not in the US, which he isn't),
If he directly aided Manning in the theft of classified documents it would be a crime regardless of where Assange was.
and sexual assault in Sweden.
Another actual crime Assange is accused of.
Dick Cheney, on the other hand, has proudly proclaimed on CNN that he committed crimes against humanity.
And the above is false. Dick Cheney hasn't committed "crimes against humanity" despite the most fevered fantasies and claims. Bile and lies is all that it is. See this? (Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia ) A bunch of fringe activists (leftists and Islamists) get together and hold a mock trial, no more, no less, no official standing, no credibility, no truth to it. Just more political porn.
Your claims are wrong and your reasoning specious (not to mention that the US only waterboarded three people, the last in 2003*).
In short, you're completely wrong.
At the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a.k.a. Tokyo Trials, . . . only seven Japanese war criminals were executed. Every one of them was convicted of either being complicit in or directly comitting atrocities and murder on a grand scale.
. . . it seems pretty clear we executed these men for charges that far surpass concerns about waterboarding.
Now it does appear that various forms of torture were a consideration in some of these cases that resulted in death sentences at the Tokyo Trials. Media Matters marshals some evidence to that effect, but again waterboarding was presented as just one of several types of torture, many of which appear to be more severe. (Media Matters also appears to cavalierly lump all forms of Japanese water torture together and, say, forced ingestion of water — an execution method centuries ago — is obviously very different from waterboarding.) . . . . There are examples of war criminals convicted of waterboarding, even alongside convictions for a number of harsh forms of torture, who were not put to death.
In no way, shape or form could waterboarding be said to have been the predominate reason any one of these people were hanged. Begala suggesting people at the Tokyo Trials were hanged for waterboarding is akin to noting that Charles Manson is guilty of trespassing on Roman Polanski’s home and then insisting that’s the reason he got a death sentence. (Not that I’m suggesting trespassing and waterboarding are equivalent crimes; I’m just making a logical point.) --- Sorry, Paul Begala — You’re Still Wrong
More:
Holder on Waterboarding — Proving It’s Not Torture While Insisting It Is
The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden
Waterboarding and Torture
Regarding Those Claims About WWII Waterboarding
* Exclusive: Only Three Have Been Waterboarded by CIA
Well we all can't be NPR listeners I guess... But Daily Show viewers did rank right under them for answering the most questions regarding domestic and international issues correctly..
Always happy to go a round: The Truth-O-Meter Says: False
or two: Rush, ‘H&C’ Audiences Smarter Than ‘Daily Show’ Viewers
when I have time.
By the way, if you like NPR, you might find this program interesting. Host is a law professor, author, worked in public broadcasting for 10 years, and hosted his own national NPR series. Lots of interesting guests. Poetry segments are on Fridays. Nationally syndicated program.
You apparently didn't bother to actually read the linked document with the statement from the retired (2008) prosecutor. If you had you would have picked up the fact that the next step in the Swedish legal process is getting a detailed statement from Assange to decide if he should be charged and prosecuted - the very thing that Assange is resisting to the point of becoming a fugitive from justice, causing his supporters to lose the money they put up for bail, and causing an international incident and damaging the diplomatic relations of numerous countries*. The retired prosecutor says many mistakes were made, is highly critical of various actions, but ultimately the process emerges: Assange must be interviewed again before he can be charged. You did an inadvertent service - I thank you.
*How WikiLeaks Blew It
He hasn't been charged with anything, and he doesn't become a criminal until after he is convicted.
Assange hasn't had to be charged, tried, or convicted to demonstrate his dodgy nature: he has made himself a fugitive from the law.
Which explains the misinformed and ill-considered views of so many on Slashdot.
What he did was not even a crime, and the notion of extradition is dubious.
That remains to be seen. It would seem very possible, perhaps even likely, that Assange engaged in conspiracy and espionage.
It will all depend upon the evidence.
And they want him back in Gothenburg (Goteborg), not Stockholm, very, very odd --- oh yeah, that's where "Extreme Rendition Airlines" a k a, Jeppesen Systems AB is located!
The prosecutors are in Stockholm. The court that issued the warrant is in Stockholm. But where the Swedish government would really like to see him is in Sweden, before the prosecutor, answering the allegations against him, just like any other alleged criminal, and not being a fugitive from justice. Most fairy tales begin with "Once upon a time", but on Slashdot they currently begin with, "No, no! The US is too clever to extradite Assange from Britain directly, because the extradition treaty would make that too easy! Once the US gets Assange to Sweden they'll secretly. . . ". To be blunt, your post is pure bull - popular bull - but still bull.
4 posts: 2 "at nights", 2 "manned expeditions".
Carry on, Slashdot.
As you were!
On the other hand, this link [wikipedia.org] demonstrates that defense spending is on the order of 30 to 40% of the total government budget, and welfare programs including medicare/medicaid are below 50% (once the 'discretionary spending' component has been taken into consideration).
I don't think you've got that quite right. Try this chart. Social Security is bigger than defense spending by itslef. Entitlement programs are bigger than defense spending by themselves. Medicare, medicaid and related programs are bigger than defense spending by themselves. All other spending about equals defense spending. Now, guess which of these is a Constitutional responsibility of the Federal government? - Entitlement programs? No. Social Security? No. Medicare? No. National Defense? Yes.
Entitlements Crowd Out Defense Spending, and It’s Only Getting Worse
Since 1970, the historical ratio between defense spending and entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has flipped. In 1970, total defense spending was 8.1 percent of our economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — more than twice the 3.8 percent of GDP spent on the big three entitlement programs.
Today, the core defense program has fallen to 3.9 percent of GDP, while entitlement spending has more than doubled to 9.6 percent of GDP. By 2030, the big three entitlements will absorb roughly 81 percent of all federal revenue if taxes are rightly held at historical levels. This crowds out defense and homeland security spending and threatens the historically low-tax, high-growth U.S. economy.
The long term trends are not positive.
The Welfare State and Military Power
I suppose you could try to get rid of welfare programs, but then you have to spend more on prisons and other ways to "handle" the rabble and sudden rise in crime as people do whatever they can to feed themselves.
The way to handle that used to be called "jobs". It has always been a challenge to create jobs, but the Obama administration has been increasing the difficulty and risk with job creation since it took office.
In fairness, if Powell was acting with the stated virtues, he should never have backed Obama.
Put another way, there's a reason we'll regime change Libya but have no balls when it comes to Iran's nukes.
The United States and the Soviet Union almost came to blows despite both being nuclear powers. If Iran gives the US sufficient cause, Iran will find its small number of nuclear weapons will be of little help in changing its end.
And his logic is hard to fault. He pointed to the B-52 as an example of a flexible weapons platform that had a wide variety of uses that didn't require stealth technology compared to the limited usefulness of the F-117.
But don't you know that there are a lot of scenarios in which the crews in the B-52s would be very grateful to have F-117s or successors flying ahead to suppress enemy air defenses?
Solid, reliable and flexible is more important than stealth, which was designed for a war we're likely never going to fight.
Sometimes the enemy picks your war for you - you don't always get a vote.
I'm sure that will keep us much safer and will cost us less.
The United States has already paid the price many times of having a military that wasn't ready to fight when a fight came to it. They would rather not go back to that as the cost in blood tends to be high.
But instead we spend our billions on arms and look for conflicts to use them in...
In other words, you don't know what you are talking about.
And by 'controversy', I think they mean ...'interfere with the military industrial complex gravy train'.
I think you'll find the military spendin "gravy train" is over rated, and a fraction of what is spent on social welfare programs.
How long until the Democrats have something similarly ridiculous as a contact farming tool?
Probably not needed.
Unlike Biden. Obama will be kicking himself that he didn't think of it first.
Maybe this app is not just to receive a text message. Maybe this app really is Mitt's VP, and he needs a few million smartphones to run the neural nets.
So, Romney & neural net artificial intelligence app on smart phone versus Obama & Biden? Advantage: Romney
Mitt has a bad track record with phone apps.
I wouldn't get too excited about that, the people most likely to notice are in the 51-57th states.
I think you must be mistaken. I don't see that any Republicans voted for it in the Senate. Here is the list of sponsors of the bill. Charie Rangel - Democrat, and 40 co-sponsors. I doubt that any are Republicans.
. . . .it seems that some might need a refresher course on the history of Obamacare’s enactment. Reconciliation didn’t play a small role in Obamacare’s passage, as has been suggested. Without reconciliation, Obamacare would not have become law at all. It’s true that the main Obamacare structure was passed by the Senate in December 2009 under normal rules for legislative consideration. That’s because Democrats at that time had 60 votes (including two independent senators who caucus with them). They didn’t need to resort to reconciliation to pass the bill as long as all 60 of their senators stuck together and supported passage, which they did.
But then Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate race in January 2010; the Democrats lost their 60-vote supermajority and could no longer close off debate on legislation without the help of at least one Republican senator.
At that point, the president and his allies had two choices. They could compromise with Republicans and bring back a bill to the Senate that could garner a large bipartisan majority. Or they could ignore the election results in Massachusetts and pull an unprecedented legislative maneuver, essentially switching from regular order to reconciliation at the eleventh hour, thereby bypassing any need for Republican support. As they had done at every other step in the process, the Democrats chose the partisan route. They created a separate bill, with scores and scores of legislative changes that essentially became the vehicle for a House-Senate conference on the legislation. That bill was designated a reconciliation bill. Then they passed the original Senate bill through the House on the explicit promise that it would be immediately amended by this highly unusual reconciliation bill, which then passed both the House and Senate a few days later, on an entirely party-line vote. - - The Reconciliation Option
The Democrats own Obamacare, which may not be good news for them.
Poll: Obamacare Still a Huge Issue for the Voters This Fall - By Grace-Marie Turner - July 19, 2012 1:26 P.M.
Well, in fairness, some of them were a bit put off by Powell backing Obama in 2008.