In other news, after 166 days, the Senate managed to unfuck itself long enough to hold a five minute vote, and Loretta Lynch was confirmed by a vote of 56-43. Profile in courage Ted Cruz did not vote.
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sparrow
Excellent. Finally.
OT, but not — here is a local blogpost about the Freddie Gray case. Way down at the bottom you will find an opinion about O’Malley that is not uncommon in these parts of (pretty liberal) Baltimore.
http://baltimorecrime.blogspot.com/2015/04/freddiegray.html
Zandar
The HOT TAKE on her being worse than Holder from “even the liberal” journalist of your choice in 5…4…3…
srv
Harry Reid held us all hostage and lost.
BillinGlendaleCA
Turtles mover very slowly.
rrollhattan
@srv:
He make you take yet another sister wife, or something?
trollhattan
@srv:
Did he make you take yet another sister wife, or something?
Howard Beale IV
Thread needs kitteh belleh skritches.
Amir Khalid
I assume Ted Cruz didn’t have an actual objection to Loretta Lynch, or he would have voted against her confirmation. Did he say why he abstained?
nominus
@Amir Khalid: According to TPM, he wasn’t there, in typical Cruz fashion.
Howard Beale IV
BREAKING: Petraeus’s sentence: 2 years probation, fine upped from $40k to $100k.
He should have lost his military pension.
Tom Levenson
@Amir Khalid: Assumes a coherence intellectually not in evidence. The only way to unpack the Cruz’s action is to ask what effect a given decision has on the upcoming apotheosis of his Cruzedness.
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
Probably file under “games were played.” Perhaps he’s afraid of the “Obstructionist” label as he enters his doomed WH run. But it’s what he does, so a head-scratcher.
askew
Finally some good news today. Figures that Cruz wouldn’t show up. He has skipped a lot of time in the Senate out on the campaign trail. I wonder if it burns him up that Rubio is doing better in the polls than him against Hillary right now and Rubio is an imbecile.
trollhattan
@Howard Beale IV:
Wow. How much time did Manning get, again?
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
If 43 GOPers voted against Lynch, I don’t see how Cruz votes for her. In this case, I don’t think his absence had anything to do with cowardice.
Hill Dweller
Tom Brady couldn’t be bothered to attend today’s WH ceremony honoring the Patriots’ Super Bowl victory, because freedom or tyranny or some other Tea Bagger bullshit. Did he attend the ceremonies during Dubya’s time in office?
BruceFromOhio
What shiny new toy will Mitch and his hatchlings find to plague the Legislature with next?
askew
@Hill Dweller:
Brady didn’t attend due to a family commitment. The screenshot that is going around about Tom Brady not attending b’/c he’s a teabagger was photoshopped from some nobody on the Patriots who skipped today.
Baud
@askew:
I can’t believe the internet lied to us again.
Howard Beale IV
@trollhattan: 35 years.
David Hunt
Was Cruz actually in Washington? I kind of assumed that he’d be spending a huge amount of time in Iowa seeing how far up his ass he could stick an ear of corn.
Hill Dweller
@askew: Thanks for the clarification.
gratuitous
Rafael seems to be missing a lot of votes and committee meetings lately. I wonder what’s up? Some rumor going around that he’s looking for a new job. Usually someone missing work as much as Rafael has, and maybe dipping into the labor pool, the boss fires that person.
Texas is probably in thrall to some union, though, which means it can’t fire such an irresponsible and incompetent employee.
gene108
@sparrow:
I have family that lives in Baltimore and their opinion of O’Malley is mixed at best.
Howard Beale IV
BREAKING: Comcast plans to abandon TWC take-over
Woodrowfan
thanks for that image. You owe me a large bottle of brain bleach.. ew
germy shoemangler
@Howard Beale IV: Ha! excellent.
askew
@Howard Beale IV:
Excellent. Two pieces of good news today.
boatboy_srq
@Baud: Indolence, yes; cowardice, no.
BTW:
That’s probably the most despicable part of this. This is the ATTORNEY GENERAL – the chief law enforcement officer in the entire US of A. Eminently qualified. And she got 43 NO votes.
boatboy_srq
@David Hunt: @Woodrowfan: Meh. It’d just replace the broomstick that’s usually there.
Amir Khalid
I see. So the most likely explanation for Ted Cruz’s non-vote is just “absent as usual”. Doesn’t Mitch expect his caucus to show up and do the Senatoring they were elected for? Isn’t Ted worried about a primary opponent using that poor attendance record against him?
Baud
@boatboy_srq:
I blame Hillary.
Elizabelle
From The Hill:
Elizabelle
No Democratic defections. Joe Manchin did the right thing. John McCain voted against, as did Lisa Murkowski.
Thomas roll call vote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Three of those are scared of 2016
Brachiator
Well, this is kinda interesting:
Today is NOT a slow news day.
Not too sure what this might mean in the long run.
Bill Arnold
@Howard Beale IV:
Whew. I have had both Comcast and (currently) TWC as providers, and TWC is better, mostly. Except when it snows. TWC starts dropping packets when it snows.
(Really. a router nearby me gets overloaded.)
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yup.
And Lindsey Graham, Thad Cochran and Mitch McConnell are the only Republican votes yes from the South. They each beat back Tea Party challengers in 2014.
And get my hearty appreciation for supporting the nomination.
Hal
43 no votes? It’s amazing the level of disrespect Republicans have shown Loretta Lynch.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elizabelle: the only vote that surprises me, really, is Murkowski, who sometimes seems better than her party. IIRC it was 2010 when she lost the primary and had to run as an indy? So I guess she doesn’t want to go through that again.
I knew as soon as old man McCain announced he was going to vote against the nominee that he had a few days earlier called uniquely or supremely or somthingly qualified that he was running again, and a couple days later, he announced he was. Like Byrd, he wants to die in office and get the fancy funeral, one like old King Tut.
Germy Shoemangler
@Bill Arnold: I have TWC. My monthly bill went up the same time the pending merger announcement went out. And today, when the merger is kaput, I feel like it’s 1999 dial-up time, my computer has been so slow. A coincidence? Most likely. [LOOKS NERVOUSLY AROUND]
Germy Shoemangler
Just saw this news item (one egg for each “NO” vote?:
In Southern China, 43 dinosaur eggs were discovered by construction workers as a road was being upgraded, state media reported.
The fossils were discovered in recent weeks in Heyuan in Guangdong province, the website Chinanews.com reported. From South China Morning Post:
The fossilised eggs were large with one 13cm in diameter, Du Yanli, the director of the city’s Dinosaur Museum, was quoted as saying. Nineteen were completely intact.
Experts at the Chinese Academy of Sciences will examine the eggs to find out what species of dinosaur they belonged to, the report said.
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, real disappointed in Murkowski.
Yatsuno
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: To be fair, so is Ayotte.
MattF
I’ve had a suspicion that Cruz doesn’t really belong in the Senate. He’s a lot of things, many of them unpleasant, but he’s not one of the boys.
Rex Tremendae
I don’t see how Cruz’s absence could be due to cowardice. Of course he would have voted against. If anything, he’s exposing himself by not voting against. Practically no one who will vote for Cruz wants Lynch to serve.
philpm
@Germy Shoemangler: Heard about this a couple of days ago. My daughter wants them to hatch.
MattF
@Germy Shoemangler: First time I read that, I saw ‘dragon’ eggs.
Germy Shoemangler
@philpm: If they hatched, they’d be preferable to the 43 “nay” senators.
Germy Shoemangler
@MattF: Me too! As I get older, I find my mind rushing to fill in more blanks.. Can be colorful and fun, but it’s wreaking havoc with my reading comprehension.
43 dragons hatch and circle the Capitol, demanding campaign finance reform. There’s a scenario.
Aleta
@sparrow: thanks. lots of information.
MattF
@Howard Beale IV: Y’know, the local news/traffic/weather station has been running ridiculous “better together” pro-merger ads in the minute before the traffic report (which is, by far, the most expensive ad time on the station)– and they’ve been running every time I tune in for the traffic report for quite a while– demonstrating that Comcast wanted that merger and was willing to spend lots of money. Then, just a couple of days ago, they stopped. Hmmm.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@BruceFromOhio: Think debt ceiling is coming up in June. That should be fun.
Howard Beale IV
@Elizabelle: I live in one of those areas which would have been spun off into a new corporation (saddled with massive debt, BTW) had the deal gone through.
Funny thing happened today, BTW: CenturyLink came knocking at my door asking who my ISP was (like that’s a real tough question) as asking if I knew about the upgrades that they did in my area. Being the technical bastard prick that I am, and knowing full well that they haven’t done shit in this immediate area for years, I fire my Stinger:
That usually gets them to start mumbling and then I put them out of their misery by saying unless you’re FTTP, no deal. Especially when I have to take their POTS at an obscene rate when I pay just $10/month for T-Mobile @Home?
MissBarbie
@MattF: Yeah, me, too!
VOR
@Howard Beale IV: CenturyLink keeps sending mailers advertising their “new” high speed rates. But when I check my address on their website I see there is nothing but 1.5 Mbps available to my house. Maybe if they spent more money on their network and a little less on Marketing?
Howard Beale IV
@VOR: Crazy thing is that there’s been some significant progress made with twisted pair and getting the speed up-problem is that the maintenance costs of keeping POTS alive is nibbling the bottom lines of AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink-that’s one reason why AT&T and Verizon have been hell-bent to trying to trying to kill POTS and force everyone onto wireless networks. What’s surprising as all get out tho, is that Dish (yes, Dish) is sitting on (and just bought a metric shitton of spectrum with the recent AWS-3 auction) and hasn’t done shit with it.
@MattF: Within the last three days both USDOJ and the FCC started to sqwak. Just even one of them sqwaking was enough to put the blade to the AT&T-TMobile merger-which, right now, turned out to be the right call-ya got to love TMUS’s foul-mouthed CEO John Legere-go look at YouTube between the T-Mobile US capital markets day from 2012 and 2015.
Hungry Joe
@askew: “Rubio is an imbecile.”
Oh yeah? Obviously you didn’t read David Brooks’ column titled “The Talented Mr. Rubio.” (Of course, David Brooks is himself an imbecile. So there’s that … )
burnspbesq
@trollhattan:
Manning got a sentence that was commensurate with the severity of the crimes she committed. That Petraeus arguably didn’t doesn’t change that.
Howard Beale IV
@burnspbesq: 18 USC 1001 usually commands a prison sentence. And he was charged with more than one, IIRC.
As usual: “only the little people get prison sentences.”
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Germy Shoemangler: TWC has been for sh#t for the last two weeks. Word is that they’re upgrading their services ahead of the Google Fiber rollout. I’m thinking that they’re not very clear on the meaning of the word “upgrade.”
Davis X. Machina
Did she get any D ‘no’ votes? Because Digby thinks she should have.