Miss Piggy Lunchbox

It’s time to fix the Senate.  The way you fix a howling male dog.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby has put a blanket hold on EVERY one of Obama’s 70 nominations currently on the Senate calendar for confirmation.  Because he can’t get some pork project for Alabama moved through.  Because, yeah, this is clearly what those rules are set up for.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reports. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

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According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track.

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A San Diego State University professor and “Congressional expert” told the paper “he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold” in recent history.

This is exactly the problem with our government.  Each senator has too much power.  You wouldn’t dream of writing up a system of government where you have 101 Presidents, yet that’s essentially what we’ve got, where any single Senator with a bone to pick can bring the government to a screeching halt.

Break up the Senate.  Blow up all of their rules.  Get rid of this individual hold BS, and destroy the filibuster so badly that it never ever comes back.  Hell, get rid of the chamber all together…what a waste of breath those people are.  Except for Franken, my all-time second-favorite senator.  He’s cool…and he holds the same seat as my all-time favorite senator: Paul Wellstone.

And Jesus H.  This is the group that thinks they’re going to design a college football playoff system?  I mean, even beyond being a waste of their time, I can’t even imagine what a playoff system would look like if it were designed by the same a-holes who crafted the Senate rules.  So let’s see, there’s 8 teams, and one-third of those teams changes every two years, and you have to beat six of the other teams in order to win the championship, and if nobody beats six other teams then there is no champion.  And there’s only a championship held every two years because everybody’s scared to play anybody in the year when the new playoff teams will enter so really there’s hardly ever any change in membership.

So, you might remember that Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats.  Thanks to funding from Washington Republicans, Franken still hasn’t been seated due to Coleman’s appeals.

To recap, Coleman was up by a mere 215 votes on election night, triggering an automatic recount.  Coleman said that if we were in Franken’s shoes he would concede because “the healing process is so impoatant.”  Screw that noise, Franken said.  After the recount, during which Coleman tried to keep votes from being counted, Franken was up by 225 and declared the victor.

Then Coleman, despite his earlier rhetoric, appealed.  And, naturally, during the court appeal reversed course and tried to get some 4,000+ rejected ballots counted.  The court decided that 351 of them had been, indeed, improperly rejected.  So they were opened and counted.  The results? Franken 198, Coleman 111, Other 42 (there was a strong third-party candidate in this election, as there has been in most statewide elections in Minnesota since Ventura’s success).  So now Franken leads by 312.  Nice appeal there, Normie.

Of course, Coleman is taking the appeal to the state Supreme Court while 63% of Minnesotans say he should concede and newspapers that endorsed him during the campaign are calling on him to do the same.

To those ends, the DNC is asking supporters to post these fliers all over the state.  Here’s my part:

Coleman has never done anything good.  St. Paul was a miserable, miserable place under his reign as mayor, making its fantastic comebackas a place you would actually want to go only after he left.  He lost in the gubenatorial race to Jesse Ventura, then served as Bush’s lap dog in the Senate for years.   His accomplishments amount to zilch…how he has risen this far in life is beyond me.  Thankfully he won’t be around much longer.