Voters get one vote to elect three representatives, and the top three vote-getters win election. This way, many U.S. House district would be shared between Republicans and Democrats. There would suddenly be Northeastern Republican members of Congress, which would make the Republican Party more attuned to the needs of that region. There would also be more Southern Democrats, further limiting the regional segregation we see in Congress. What’s more, voters in strongly Democratic or Republican districts will no longer feel their vote doesn’t matter. If you’re in the minority party in your district, you can still get representation in Congress.

This sounds like a great idea. But until the actual effects are understood, maybe someone ought to try and take this up at the state level first. Proportional representation sounds great, but in a lot of countries that have it there aren’t stable governments, but they have elections whenever the government loses a vote of confidence. What would happen here? We’d wait two years?

Plus, you still have to draw district lines ,they’d just have to be three times as big. And in order for this to work at all, you have to multiply the size of the House by three, or else this whole thing is for nothing in states with only one or two reps.

I’d love to see this tried in California in the lower house, since we’re so fucking avant garde with this kind of thing here. But at least we’ve demonstrated a lot about government in the process. Term limits suck and actually make politicians *more* ambitious for a career and puts party aparatchiks in more control. Direct democracy is dangerous to people’s rights and leads to irresponsible budgeting. Supermajority requirements lead to obstructionism and extortion.

Why not show that quasi-proportional representation has its downside too?

But while we’re all laughing off Benghazi, it seems our liberal brains are forcing the concession of ground on this IRS issue and the AP wiretaps. Charlie Pierce, as fiery a liberal as you could want, is up on his blog saying “Eric Holder must go.” Shit, Charlie, this is the same guy they tried to scandalize with “Fast and Furious” already. And what do you suggest? We get an acting attorney general in there while the Senate filibusters any replacement.

And on this IRS thing, we have Josh Marshall posting all day long. The Senate is going to hold hearings. Why? I mean, what else do we need to know other than they quashed it. Did anyone overpay taxes? This is a non-issue.

The only reason these “scandals” are getting any traction is because as liberals we let ourselves be shamed into reasonableness. Targeting conservative groups is bad. OK, sure. But until this has anything to do with anything other than what happened years ago, I can’t understand why it is even news.

Of course the answer is because in order to tamp down Benghazi, we have to be “reasonable” about other things. This is how they beat us. Did they ever once admit that Bush did anything wrong? No, not even when he really did.

If Obama does something patently illegal, call me. Otherwise, I’m not going to be tricked into using my liberal inclinations to defeat a liberal agenda.

And since Boehner won’t “take impeachment off the table” (another memory of liberal “reasonableness” there, right?) I look forward to the House going forward and costing themselves the 2014 election. I ain’t even mad.

This is what the GOP is doing and has been doing since 1994. They have no intention of governing, just strip mining the government for money and then sabotaging it to leave a Galt’s gulch behind where their money talks.

However, as outraged as everyone will be, I say let them impeach him. They might just lose the House doing it.

Let me preview all of the talking head arguments coming up about this:

—-
CON: See, you stupid hippies said this was about workplace safety and blamed Texas for lax safety rules, but it was a criminal!

LIB: He’s white! So you called him a criminal instead of a terrorist! Are you going to see if he’s connected to al qaeda! Ha! No.
—-

First, this doesn’t disprove that there are problems with worker safety in Texas or that this place had way more explosive material on hand than it should have, so if it had complied this would have been less of a tragedy—and the other objection we heard was to the zoning problems putting schools etc. near a factory with explosive materials which works either way.

Second, unless there’s any indication he’s connected to terrorists or a militia, he’s just a terrorist on his own. By being the paramedic showing up to his own bombing (if that’s what happened), I think we have a psycho narcissist who might have been trying to copy the love we saw in Boston right before.

Third, the Boston bombers were connected to anti-American groups, but seem fantastically incompetent compared with the 9/11 folks or the operations being carried out against our troops abroad.

But, in the event he is connected with some fringe or militia movement, I hope people take notice.

Also, too, some kind of worker safety rules in Texas aren’t a bad idea, no matter what.

Keynes is famous for saying, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” This is his justification for expansionary policies in the present, even if they accrue debt later. More classic economists’ formulas don’t see much difference between spending now and spending later; it still has to be paid back.

Of course this highlights the sociopathy of classical economics: it not only discounts the human suffering that contractionary policy causes in the present, but when you say in retort that the future debts can be inflated away, they then want to bend reality to avoid inflation. This second point is the whole ballgame in my opinion: classical economists depart from any pretext of empirical science whenever the rentier/creditor/wealthy class’s entitlements are threatened. Some (few, I think) actually believe that this security in their property helps everyone, but in our political discourse it is mostly used as an ideological justification for kicking poors.

Remember this next time you hear a deficit scold talking about “our children having to pay off our debts.” It sounds like a good argument until you realize our kids wouldn’t have to pay it off at the same real value if they (the deficit scolds) weren’t agents of non-producing wealth trying to prevent inflation no matter what pain it inflicts on 99% of us. Also, too, they would have a growing and expanding economy giving them better and more secure jobs to pay it off with if we weren’t destroying it and the middle class so that the Koch brother’s ill gotten gains retain the same buying power.

So, the homphobic stab at Keynes—about him not having kids because he is teh icky geh—is as much about being a homophobic reptile brain as it is about keep up this legend/talking point that our kids will have to pay for our sins.

Printing more money and handing it out to everyone would solve all of our economic problems right now, but it wouldn’t tickle the ruling class’s kick-the-poors g-spot, so it won’t happen.

If you’re interested in paying down a debt that our children cannot inflate away and in doing a little suffering now to avoid a lot later, I suggest you ignore the deficit and worry about global warming.

He has had the Supreme Court declare that he can run for a third term because the Constitution wasn’t in effect when he ran the first time—a common legal ploy in Latin America that was not OK when Fujimori did it.

And now he’s kicking USAID out of the country because—wait for it—they’re plotting to overthrow the government.

Chavez did a decent job of filling in the void left by an aged Castro and had the oil to do it. Morales doesn’t have shit just pissed off his most important economic neighbor trying to fill that void. Mr. Morales, I knew of Hugo Chavez. I wrote about Hugo Chavez. You, sir, are no Hugo Chavez.