Sorry, just realized I'd never sent the Rolling Stone article I referred
to.
The worst Congress ever <http://www.rationalreview.com/content/19553>
Rolling Stone
by Matt Taibbi
"To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological
cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of
bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one
long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism.
... But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight
deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less
than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who
control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their
revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to
fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political
minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the
Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and
unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms
for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed
far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their
target." (10/17/06)
How to Make a Power Grab Mundane
James Bovard
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu
_content_id=1003284714