Just because I don’t believe in religion doesn’t mean I can’t sift literature for relevant material. There’s plenty of wisdom in the Bible, and one can appreciate it even if it was written by cruel, primitive men.

Or the orginal assumption of ‘smart’ was false.

What part of “Collins is a Republican, without whose vote the measure couldn’t pass” do you not understand? None of it, I suspect. You know perfectly well what the numbers in the senate are, and you know perfectly well that Collins is able to make some demands in exchange for her vote.

The only purpose served by this display of willful faux-ignorance is to allow you to blame the Dems for this outrage.

I don’t know why Collins has chosen to spend her chits on this. It seems like a win-win to me. Democrats get expanded whistleblower protection, and you know how we’re always whining about the little guy getting screwed by the system, boo hoo. Republicans win too–they’re looking at a long stretch of enemy control of the government. Any whistles that get blown will most likely embarrass the party in control, rather than the minority.

So often when someone says “I don’t understand why politician X did Y” they understand it perfectly well and it’s just a rhetorical device. But here, I’m genuinely baffled. I’d really like to know what Collins is thinking here, because when smart seem to be doing obviously stupid things, that means the observer is missing some important information.

Personally, I think they’re all cut from the same cloth and “doing the right thing” is not on the to-do list of any of them.

#2 Michael Chaney
I’m sorry – blaming a Republican for this is possibly the most pathetic bullshit I’ve yet seen. The Dems control both houses and the presidency, they and they alone now take the blame for 100% of the stupid shit that’s going on. If they can’t even take responsibility for something like this, God help us

Actually, you need 60 votes in the Senate to be able to push any legislation that you want. Since the Dems only have 58 right now (59 if Franken is seated), they do not have a big enough majority to push a partisan agenda without two Republicans joining their ranks. You need a 3/5ths supermajority (60 votes) to invoke cloture and end a filibuster (as threatened by the Republicans).

That’s what happened with the Stimulus bill. Three Republicans joined the 58 Democrats to give them the 61 votes (one more than they needed, actually) in order to get the bill to the Senate floor for a vote. If they made two of these Republicans mad enough, they would revert back to 59 votes and not be able to vote on the bill.

I guess they had to remove that language in order to get the votes needed to pass the bill. So, the blame doesn’t fall entirely on the Democrats (just mostly).

BTW, the GOP should spend like $25 million dollars in the primaries the next time Susan Collins has to run, just to get someone who isn’t against what they claim to stand for 70 percent of the time. And, if the new candidate loses to a Democrat nominee in the general election, who cares? If she can’t maintain at least a patina of fiscal responsibility during the first chance the GOP has to try to salvage its badly tarnished reputation on that count, then she’s dead weight anyway. And, I am not just being snide; if the GOP can’t convince voters that it’s learned that it most at least try to resist bigger government, then it is sunk.

(And, this isn’t me endorsing the GOP. It’s just an acknowledgment that, if our recent experience of having the same party in Congress and the White House points to any prediction for the next several years, it’s that the Democrats won’t be a party of fiscal restraint any time soon.)

By their actions you will know them.

She apparently objected to the protection of whistleblowers who divulge classified information, though that language could easily have been removed.

What is there in this bill that can legally be subjected to classification in the first place? There are federal laws that strictly regulate that sort of thing.

Of course, procedural bullshit makes such calculations even much more difficult.