Senator Bernie Sanders has been speaking since 10:24 this morning on the floor of The Senate chamber. He is the Senator from Vermont. I wish he was my Senator. What he is doing is what most people think of as a filibuster. The Senate has a rule that the members are allowed to speak as long as they want to on what ever issue is being debated unless there is a vote of 60 members to stop all debate and vote on an issue. A member who does not want a vote or does not like a bill can take their turn during the debate and just keep speaking. They do not have to stop if the do not want to. Now that has historically been called a filibuster. Recently the minority party in the Senate has just made sure that the party in the majority could not get to 60 votes to close the debate. They have called this a filibuster but it is not really. It is a parliamentary procedure to stop the Senate from taking action. It would not allow for anything to be discussed or to be voted on. Senator Mitch Mcconnell, who is one of my Senators, is very good at the parliamentary procedures in the Senate. As the minority leader in the Senate he has very successfully stopping many bills that needed to be brought to a vote. He has also pushed forward the present tax bill Senator Sanders is filibustering. I really do not think Mitch could ever do what Bernie is doing. I do not think he has either the guts or the smarts to pull it off.
The tech portion of the posting is this. Bernie is trending #1 or #2 on the world wide twitter feed for today. This shows what the future of media and the internet can and will be. Here is a social tool made famous by an idiot actor sharing something that is much more important than 144 characters could ever convey. Bernie is on twitter. I would bet he has a staff person making his posts but he does understand how to use the internet to get his points out. I follow 86 people on twitter. A lot of them are political people and so my feed has been heavy with Bernie posts today. But I knew something was going on beyond politics when 1 of the people I follow in the tech world tweeted he was turning on C Span to find out why Bernie was atop the twitter feed. Then a person who is into comics but follows the tech person asked them what was going on. They then went and watched. I am not sure if either watched for long or even cared much after watching. The idea that both of them saw something online and not spun but others and went to find out about it was wonderful to see.
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