Want to irk a liberal? I’ve got just the word for it — "filibuster."

Hardly a waking hour passes these days without an indignant left-winger in the media condemning this arcane procedure requiring 60 votes to pass major legislation in the Senate.

In the process, dubious claims are being made. Here, for example, is John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation, on Ed Schultz’s radio show this past Wednesday (click here for audio) –

NICHOLS: The fact of the matter is that the founders of this republic believed in an arcane, almost forgotten concept called majority rule. They thought that a majority got to decide things. And it is extremely important that these senators, and it’s not just Feingold, it’s also quite a few other Democratic senators, who think they are defending some sort of structural tradition, some sort of American way of doing things.

Recognize that there is nothing, nothing constitional, nothing, you know, historic about a 60-vote rule in a hundred-member chamber. That is merely a structure put in there, frankly, to be quite blunt with you, put in there long ago by people who didn’t want the Senate to act on issues like slavery and civil rights, and this is an absurd rule to try and defend. It ought to be, it oughta be jettisoned. They oughta go to majority rule.

There is "nothing constitutional" about the Senate requiring more than a simple majority when voting, Nichols claims. That being the case, why did the founders specify several scenarios where a supermajority was necessary?  

As George Will wrote in an op-ed in Thursday’s New York Post headlined "Stop whining about the filibuster" –

Some liberals argue: The Constitution empowers each chamber to "determine the rules of its proceedings." It requires five supermajorities (for ratifying treaties, endorsing constitutional amendments, overriding vetoes, expelling members and impeachment convictions). Therefore it doesn’t permit requiring a sixth, to end filibusters.

Ah, that dry Will sarcasm.

Not incidentally, delegates to the Constitution Convention in Philadelphia decided that a supermajority of nine states was needed to ratify the Constitution itself — not a simple majority of seven. 

Nor was a bare majority deemed sufficient at the Second Continental Congress in 1776 when delegates argued strenuously over severing ties with Britain. In the end, 12 of 13 colonies voted for independence, none objected and only one, New York, abstained. 

Nichols isn’t the only liberal in the media driven to contortion by the filibuster. Just as unsettled is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who vents about it on a daily basis. Maddow even held a contest for her viewers to rename the filibuster. Winning submission: The Tarantino — an allusion to director Quentin Tarantino, a recent Maddow guest — because it "kills bills".

Here’s Maddow right at the start of her show on show Feb. 22, talking about Senate Democrats overcoming a GOP, ah, Tarantino to pass a so-called jobs bill —

MADDOW: But we begin with the Republican Party’s failed effort to stop America from getting a jobs bill. While the country is mired in double-digit unemployment, Republicans voted today to filibuster the jobs bill. It was only able to advance when five Senate Republicans bucked their own party and voted with Democrats to allow the bill to move toward a final vote. Every other Republican who voted today, aside from these five, plus conservative Democratic senator Ben Nelson, voted to filibuster. To be clear, they didn’t just vote no on a jobs bill. They voted to not even allow it to pass if it got a majority vote. They filibustered it, because they filibuster everything.

This is The Tarantino in action. It kills bills.

Except when it doesn’t, as was the case here. But why let an inconvenient detail like that derail a good rant?

Nichols told Schultz that Democrats may think "they are defending some sort of structural tradition, some sort of American way of doing things."

Another explanation for Democrats’ ambivalence about ending the filibuster — their sobering fear of reverting to minority party after this year’s mid-terms. Because as both major parties have demonstrated in the last decade, one’s views on the filibuster appear dictated entirely on whether one is looking up or down at it.

Spare us the Obama nanny-state PSAs . . .

There I was, harmlesly Olympics-watching something called the "men’s snowboard parallel giant slalom"—quite a cool event, actually—when we were suddenly subjected to a commercial telling us not to phone or text while driving. 

And of all people, it was terminally un-cool Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood inflicting the message and directing us to some website called www.distraction.gov. 

Now, it might be one thing if Shaun White were the spokesman.  But Ray LaHood?—and yeah, I know he used to be a Republican.  Odds he’s ever texted in his life?

PS: I note that all the phoning/texting drivers escaped without a scratch. So what’s the big deal? 

PPS: If that blonde believes that "time travel is totally possible," who am I to disagree?

CNN’s Rick Sanchez Saturday actually needed someone to explain to him what nine meters measures in feet.

As tsunamis approached Hawaii following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile, CNN rushed in a scientist to discuss what wave detection buoys in the ocean were showing.

After CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras set up Dr. Kurt Frankel of the Georgia Institute of Technology, the professor explained that a nine meter drop in the ocean didn’t necessarily mean we’d see waves of that size hitting Hawaii.

Sanchez interrupted asking, "By the way, nine meters in English is?" (video embedded below the fold with transcript): 

RICK SANCHEZ, CNN: So Jacqui, let’s us know what’s going on.

JACQUI JERAS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: So, these are the detections that are out there in the Pacific Ocean. And you can see the flashing ones. These are active. These are the ones that we’re going to be watching. And there’s Hawaii right from there. About 140 miles away from the Hawaiian Island we’ve got a buoy out there, and this is what it is showing here. There you can see the line, and notice this big drop down here. We have this big drop. This is about a nine meter drop.

RICK SANCHEZ: Nine meter drop. What does that mean?

JERAS: Well, it means that the ocean waves are doing something, that we’re seeing some changes. It’s been going down, and look at that. We’ve got a big rise. And so we’re going to get our expert in here who is way smarter than you and me put together. It’s Dr. Kurt Frankel. Dr. Frankel, tell us a little bit, you know, we talk about how the tsunami waves will come in, or how the water will pull back before we start to see. Is this a sign of that?

DR. KURT FRANKEL: I think that’s a sign of that. I don’t think you can translate that nine meters into any specific wave height that will hit Hawaii. So, may be careful about that. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be nine meters of runup in Hawaii. But it is showing that you the tsunami in fact did pass by…

SANCHEZ: Nine meters. By the way, nine meters in English is?

FRANKEL: Oh, about 27 feet.

SANCHEZ: 27 Feet.

FRANKEL: About 30 feet.

SANCHEZ: So, we’re seeing a 27-foot drop in that area right there? Sorry about that.

FRANKEL: That’s right. And so this is recorded by a pressure sensor on the bottom of the ocean that is attached to a buoy. So that pressure sensor feels the pressure of the ocean changes as the wave comes through, it sends a signal up to this buoy which relays it to satellite and then down to NOAA.

SANCHEZ: Well, hold on a minute. Wouldn’t it follow that if all of a sudden a part of the ocean just dropped 27 feet, the reaction to, you know, the yang of that yin is that it will also go up at some point?

FRANKEL: It will go up. But that does not mean, again, that there is not going to be 27 feet of water…

SANCHEZ: I’m not asking you to do 27 to 27. I’m saying if there’s a drop, will there be an increase?

FRANKEL: There should be an increase.

SANCHEZ: So, so there will be some kind of wave activity there. What you’re saying is we can’t exactly measure …

FRANKEL: You can’t extrapolate that to what’s going to happen in Hawaii. Okay, it’s the function of the coastline topography, of how the — of the slope of the continental, well those no continental shelf in Hawaii. But, the slope of the land coming off of the coast, and so forth. So, there is a whole other number of factors that play into this.

SANCHEZ: But what we can say is, tell me if I’m wrong, there is a tsunami there, and it was just detected that it caused a 27-foot drop?

FRANKEL: Yes, we recorded the tsunami passing that buoy, yes.

SANCHEZ: That’s important. Sorry. Well, this is interesting. I mean, I have never seen something develop like this and science being used the way that you guys use it to get all your material.

Amazing. Kind of reminds you of the newscaster in the first "Die Hard" film: "As in Helsinki, Sweden."

For the record, the folks at the left-leaning Mediaite also found Sanchez’s performance to be rather pathetic:

While networks scramble to come up with original content on the tsunami coverage, CNN’s Rick Sanchez has taken an interesting approach: acting like he’s talking to a bunch of 9-year olds who don’t deserve to be on big-boy news. 

As such, it appears left and right agree: Nice job, Rick!

"So live news coverage in America is basically staring at webcams and reading wikipedia?"

Such was marvelously Tweeted by programmer and blogger Matthew Haughey Saturday referring to media reports from earthquake rattled Chile as well as Hawaii as citizens awaited tsunamis (h/t Instapundit).

I was also struck by this as I watched CNN much of the day for updates about the disaster. Much of the reporting was from citizen journalists via webcams, Skype, and Ustream.

Meanwhile, anchors were regularly referring to information coming to them by social networking websites such as Twitter.

Isn’t it fascinating that as the ratings for most television news outlets decline, they’re becoming more and more reliant on New Media?

Adding insult to injury, it’s becoming clear that Old Media needs us more than we need them.

Somebody cue Alanis Morissette.

The past several decades, Americans have seen the disaster unionism has wrought on Detroit’s Big Three. The auto-makers, saddled with powerful unions, fell victim to a combination of labor inefficiency and premium worker pay that proved unsustainable.

And while much of the rest of the private sector long ago realized the sots, government apparently has not. So, for the first time in history, public employees comprise the largest segment of unions today.

Save for New Jersey or New York, the pending public pension crisis is nowhere more evident than in California. Currently the state is on the hook for $100-300 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities with no end in sight – on top of a projected $25 billion budget deficit.

The Fox Business Network’s John Stossel recently brought on Matt Welch, editor-in-chief at Reason Magazine, Steve Greenhut of the Pacific Research Institute, and David Low, the president of a coalition of public employee unions in California to discuss California’s taxpayer-funded public employee welfare state. 

Low defended the unions and attempted to shift the topic and blame to Wall Street: "The reality is state employees have taken 15-percent pay cuts in California, we’ve cut the budget by $30 billion out of a $70 billion budget," Low argued. "And the blame is not to be placed on the public employees but the fact is we’re in a budget deficit because Wall Street abuses have caused so many stock losses that all of us have been hurt."

But Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out California’s contributions to pension funds have increased by 2000-percent the past ten years and touched upon the cronyism the Obama administration is becoming known for.

"When Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed cutting state employment by even two percent in the middle of a huge meltdown – maybe two percent – the president put it on a conference call and put on the other line a guy that has been in the White House more than any other person and that’s Andy Stern out of SEIU," Welsh said "What is a labor person doing on the phone with Arnold Schwarzenegger?"

(The answer, according to Michael Barone, is that "Barack Obama is probably the most union-friendly president since Lyndon Johnson," and has used federal funding to state and local governments to "bolster public-sector unions.")

Greenhut added that, "The increase in unfunded pension liabilities, the debt that is being left for our grandkids before the huge drop was over $63 billion in California and $118 in retiree health care. And those numbers are going to going up and up and up."

Low argued the numbers are actually lower the past 30 years and argued a different tack. Referencing an unnamed actuarial study, he stated employees deserve extra breaks because the average lifespan is shorter for most police officers and firefighters.

But Greenhut had heard the argument before. "What happens is I’m always told is policemen and firefighters die 3-5 years after they retire, so I called CalPERS, the employee system and they gave me the data and they lived to an average of 82.6 years – the exact same age as ‘miscellaneous,’" he said. "That’s all the other government employees – and they all live longer than the rest of us. That’s why we have an unfunded liability problem!"

Joy Behar of ABC’s The View has had a talk show on CNN Headline News for less than a year, and she’s already receiving an "Excellence in Media Award" from the hard-left Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, presented to "presented to media professionals who have increased the visibility and understanding of the LGBT community."

In a press release announcing the award will be handed out in New York on March 13, GLAAD touted how "A number of episodes have featured discussion of LGBT issues and LGBT guests, including a segment featuring Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black speaking about his Mormon upbringing as a gay man. The episode is nominated for a GLAAD Media Award this year for Outstanding Talk Show Episode." Past recipients of the Excellence in Media Award include ABC’s Diane Sawyer.

In a similar vein, the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association are holding their annual "Headlines and Headliners" fundraiser in New York on March 25, co-hosted by NBC’s Today fourth-hour co-hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. NBC Universal is a "diamond sponsor" of the event and will have a heavy NBC contingent attending, including other female Today co-hosts and news anchors:

Steve Capus (NBC News president), Natalie Morales, Amy Robach, Meredith Vieira, Alexandra Wallace (NBC Nightly News executive producer), and Jenna Wolfe.

Other NBC Universal stars listed as attending are MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, CNBC’s Mike Huckman and Trish Regan, and gay Bravo host Andy Cohen. CNN’s Jeanne Moos and Soledad O’Brien are also slated to attend, and Jane Velez-Mitchell of CNN Headline News.

"Silver" sponsors include Fox News, and "Bronze" sponsors include The New York Times. The press release oozed:

"We are incredibly pleased that Kathie Lee and Hoda are kicking off NLGJA’s twentieth year working for fairness, accuracy, and diversity in news coverage," said NLGJA Managing Director Michael Tune . "While many media organizations are in a financial crisis and LGBT issues continue to garner headlines, our nation cannot afford to have journalists or journalism silenced. This benefit helps keep our voice strong."

The GLAAD Media Awards dinners also have media-company sponsors including Time Warner, Comcast, NBC Universal, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

This is not the first time Behar’s been offered an award from the gay left. In 2000, she won the New York City Public Advocate’s Special Advocate Award for her "outstanding friendship to the LGBT community."

GLAAD also touted her liberal advocacy on The View:

For over a decade, Ms. Behar has used this nationally televised platform to voice her support for LGBT equality on a number of issues, particularly during the show’s "Hot Topics" segment at the start of every show. Her no-frills, common sense approach to these issues has won her numerous supporters in the LGBT community.

For those who have neither the time nor the Red Bull required to wade through Al Gore’s windy "We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change" in the New York Times, permit me to summarize:

• Record winter storms and revelations of warmist fraud notwithstanding, we "face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."

• Unfortunately, "television" has replaced newspapers as the dominant medium.  And "television" serves as the tool of powerful forces favoring "unrestrained markets" and opposing regulatory "reform."  Though Gore stops short of naming television names, you don’t have to read too hard between the lines to see that he’s pointing the finger at Fox News in general and Glenn Beck in particular.

Key excerpts [emphasis added]:

• "It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it. . . But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at leas t two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

• "[C]hanges in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace."

Gore scores bonus scare-mongering points by his mention of how the same supposed hate-filled tactics of which he accuses his opponents "in times past . . . has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic." Wonder which times, which bodies politic Al has in mind?

How do liberals really think journalism can be improved? By shrinking the amount of time and space Republicans have in the media. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas lamented on Friday that John McCain would continue his streak as a go-to spokesman on Sunday morning news shows. Citing fellow liberal blogger Steve Benen, he complains McCain’s appearance on Sunday’s Meet the Press marks the 20th appearance on a Sunday morning talk show since Obama’s inauguration: he’s appeared on ABC three times, CBS 5, NBC 4, CNN 4, and Fox 4:

Quite the schedule for a backbencher with no power base within the party, a loser whose re-election to the Senate — heck, survival in his own primary! — is in serious jeopardy.

When I was on Meet the Press in December, David Gregory asked me what he could do to make the show better. I said, "stop having John McCain on". He and his producers nodded, seemingly acknowledging the ridiculousness of McCain’s incessant appearances.

And yet there he is again. They really just can’t quit him.

To Moulitsas, even moderate McCain is incessantly ridiculous, not worth considering the air time. The networks should "quit" him (complete with gay "Brokeback Mountain" humor, which apparently liberals can get away with.) So when Keith Olbermann doesn’t allow one Republican to get a word in edgewise year after year, he is truly acting and echoing the Daily Kos spirit.

Speaking of Olbermann clones, the Kosmonaut diarist known as "sowsearsoup" simply cannot believe that everyone hasn’t seen the historical parallels between witch-hunting Puritans of the 1600s and today’s conservatives.

The Puritan persecutors of 1692 and the modern conservative movement of 2010 are the same. They are not just infected by the same sickness, the same blight, but are carriers of that illness as well, contaminating their respective societies with a disease of fear.

The author Frances Hill is cited on the witch hunts: "the steps are easy to trace by which a few deranged, destructive human beings led ordinary mortals down the dark paths of fear, hatred and envy to demonize and destroy innocent victims." Eureka!

Does this sound familiar to anyone else? FEAR – of "Demons" (terrorists) and "witches" (liberals). HATRED – of "Spells and witchcraft" (socialism and taxes). It all clicked in my head. The vitriol, the hatred, the racism, the vile attacks of the right: It all resembled the past in a specific way….

How many times have we heard the right repeatedly and relentlessly call Democrats and Democratic leadership all kinds of weighted names ("Hitler", "Stalin", "socialist", "marxist", "brutal dictator", "communist", or god forbid even a muslim) because they hope the negative connotation sticks even if it’s patently untrue.

What obviously links the two scary social movements together, in a liberal’s mind, is the religious impulse. That is the "sickness" and the "blight" that holds society back. But the Kosmonaut gets this backwards:

The tendency for witch-hunts to start, and continue, is exacerbated by a society or group’s insistence on its monopoly of righteousness. The countertendency is promoted by an understanding and acceptance of the fallibility of all human beings, including ourselves.

You can smell the anti-religion theme in that thought. Christian conservatives would not insist they have a personal "monopoly of righteousness," even if they would insist they have in Jesus the one "answer," the "way and the truth" of it. But a true believer begins with the fervent belief in human fallibility — especially one’s own — which is why the Founding Fathers set up our government to be limited.

It is the left that believes in the perfectibility of man, and perfection achieved by government action, a worker’s paradise where unintended consequences never ruin wonderful intentions.

"Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds."

So began an article published at CNN.com Friday guaranteed to anger conservatives from coast to coast.

The piece continued, "Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs."

Folks are warned about proceeding further, for the content might be really offensive to some (h/tips to NB readers Stan and Chesley):

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly. [...]

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

Interesting. Sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism, and atheism wouldn’t have benefited our ancestors. 

Regardless of the evolutionary significance, wouldn’t you normally expect liberal, atheist men to be less concerned with monogamy?

Unfortunately, the study never dealt with this seeming incongruity:

Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger.

"It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere," Kanazawa said. [...]

Atheism "allows someone to move forward and speculate on life without any concern for the dogmatic structure of a religion," [George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study] said.

And that allows them to necessarily become more intelligent? 

Regardless, here might be the problem:

The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines "liberal" in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. It does not look at other factors that play into American political beliefs, such as abortion, gun control and gay rights.

Is that how YOU define liberal and conservative? 

With virtually zero debate – or media attention – President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension for what many considered the most crucial and controversial aspects of the USA PATRIOT Act. The provisions, set to expire Sunday without the signature of Obama, include extensions to allow:

-1) "roving" wiretaps, permitting surveillance on multiple phones and e-mail addresses.

-2) court-approved seizures of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

-3) surveillance on "lone-wolf" foreign nationals, who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

Originally set to expire in December, a two-month extension was passed by Congress late last year.

For many on the left, the Patriot Act is the defining pillar and symbol of the previous administration, emblematic of a totalitarian police state they allegedly suffered under George W. Bush. And what does not come as a surprise is the fact Obama’s signature comes on a Saturday night – when all the world is surely clamoring for the latest political news.

Expect a buzzsaw of media scrutiny from the champions of the so-called candidate of "change" in mainstream media the next several news-cycles?

Me neither.