A little politics a little tech.

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.

A Blackberry post

I have tried not to be overly political lately but I can't stop myself.  I do not like the idea of paying higher taxes any more than the next guy. It does not feel good with a smaller paycheck. I do like having Government programs that help the poor, the old, and the young. I like having national defense. I like roads (those that know me know I can not say and bridges).

I think NASA and OSHA and all the other accronymes are for the most part helpful. To pay for all this and more we have to pay taxes. The last 10 years tax policy has not worked. Trickle down, supply side, voodoo economics by what ever name you want to use does not work. It did not work for Bush. It did not work for Reagan. It did not for Thatcher government in England. The issue with it is the falacy that the wealthy will create jobs if they have enough money to do so.

The only time jobs are create in the private sector is when there is enough demand for the goods or services that job will produce. So lowering taxes on the rich just makes them richer. The second issue that has been bothering me is the belief that uncertainty is why business have not been creating jobs how does a temporary extension of the tax cuts help with that. It just gives business another 2 years to not hire people while bringing in record profits. So let the tax cuts expire. Put a cap on spending. Find places to cut the budget and try to balance it. This will help the economy as much as extending the bad tax cuts would. Find a replacement for oil so the trade deficit and national debt both can go down. A stable economy will come back.

Snowy weekend

We had a snowy weekend in Lexington.  The boys got their first basketball games in.  Es team kicked butt.  Lots of bigger kids on the team but he had fun.  Gman's team got roundly beat 60 to 15.  The bigger kids on his team are not really athletic.  Gman had 7 of the 15 points.  He can shoot much better than I can.  He needs to get in and rebound and move to the ball.

Beth has most of the Christmas presents done.  Still working on a few but the majority are finished.  Looks like we will be going down to western Ky on the 18th.  The back on Monday so it will not be to much driving on  back to back days.  

Still thinking and missing.