The Jokes:
A New Years bug on iPhones is keeping users in Do Not Disturb causing them to miss phone calls. It’s Apple’s way of forcing us to have a peaceful new year.
Google is making progress on it’s wearable computer glasses. It doesn’t have a Do Not Disturb mode, it just lets everyone who sees you think you are Disturbed.
A new study suggests babies start picking up language before they are born. That would explain why my kids all answer to “worst mistake ever” and “money drain.”
Why Washington sucks, and will keep sucking:
On early Tuesday morning a bill averting the Fiscal Cliff was passed by the Senate by a majority of both Republicans and Democrats. It was thought to be a shoe-in to be voted and passed by the House, but yet didn’t actually finally come up for vote until about 11PM.
On Wednesday a bill to provide aide to those suffering as victims of Hurricane Sandy was not even brought up to by voted on. This angered not only Democrats, but Republicans as well.
So what happened? Why is the congressional house so broke? Well, the answer isn’t that surprising: politics.
The speaker of the house, Jim Boehner, wouldn’t bring the hurricane aide bill up for a vote because the majority of Republicans didn’t want it to. Even though the Republicans make up a majority of the congress and the most of them would not want to vote on something that involves spending money enough of them most likely would of voted along with Democrats to get the bill passed. But now it seems the majority isn’t good enough. You need the majority of the majority.
Think of it this way: The majority of Americans are still white. Most of them voted for Romney. If we went by the same rules as Congress he would be our president instead of Obama.
The real problem is the fear of not getting reelected. Not in the general election, but the primaries. Each election cycle people from the same party may challenge the sitting candidate to run in their spot. Republicans have been split between moderates and the tea party in recent elections. The tea party will not vote for anyone who is extremely to the right. Republicans fear that if they do anything that pisses off the tea party, not only will not get elected but they won’t even get that chance.
This is why Mitt Romney went from being a moderate republican governor of Massachusetts that implemented universal health care to moving to the right during the primaries.
How the Fiscal Cliff aversion bill got passed is a bit of a miracle. It seems that Mr. Boehner actually decided to do what was best for America instead of himself.
The approval rate for Congress has stood at less than 10% for a while. So why do the same people keep getting elected. Two reason:
- Voters think their farts don’t stink. Yeah they admit that congress sucks, but not the congress representative they voted in. The only way things will get better is if we vote new people in instead of the same old same old.
- Gerrymandering. After each census the government redraws all the congressional districts to fit where the population is. The problem is that this is pretty much done by the party in charge at the time. This time it was republicans in charge. They purposely redraw each district to include as little democrat voters as possible. An example can be seen in this graphic below (stolen from electoral-vote.com):
Imagine this is six districts. Each icon represents 100,000 voters. Each district gets to elect 1 person to congress. This would be a fair way to divide it up:
But here is how republicans might divide it:
So what can we do to stop it? Not much. Make sure you write/tweet/smoke signal your local representative to tell them they suck and hope they get the hint. Hope for a viable third party, which with the way the Republicans are divided it may not be that much of a stretch. We may someday see the Tea Party become it’s own party. If the people remain republicans move a tad to the left you might get a party that Americans will stand behind.
