Nope. That card can be used an infinite number of times. It's like an ace of spades with a tiny flamethrower that can set fire to other cards on the table.

The point of the whole "Obama had a filibuster-proof majority" line is to imply that the President had a free hand to institute whatever policies he wanted. Therefore, the thinking goes, the state of the economy can be blamed entirely on Obama's bad policies, not at all on Republicans stopping him from instituting his policies. Which is a load of crap. There are a lot of things Obama could have done had he actually had the Rasputin-like mind control powers over his congresscritters that Republicans seem to be blaming him for not having.

What is well-documented is this: Obama did not control Congress. Health care reform could have taken a couple of months, if only three or four Republican senators had been willing to take Romneycare national. It was originally the Heritage Foundation's idea, and something very similar was proposed by Republicans twenty years ago when Clinton was trying to pass his own health care legislation. How did such a right-wing friendly plan go from The Official Position of the Republican Party to something the Republicans were able to unite 40-0 against? Simple: back in 1992, Republicans actually wanted to increase the number of people with health insurance. Today, their number one goal is to deny President Obama any legislative victories.

And no, the fact that a few minor, "uncontroversial" bills managed to pass during that period doesn't change anything.

Your question presumes that both sides are equally bull-headed. The truth is, they aren't. The Democrats have made at least an effort at bipartisanship. The Republicans think "bipartisan" means "Democrats vote for the Republican agenda, no questions asked." Just look at the way Republicans use filibusters these days. They're breaking all the records.

More examples:

* Obama's health care reform plan got zero Republican votes, despite the fact that it was just "Romneycare on the federal level," was originally proposed by The Heritage Foundation, and bears a strong resemblance to the Republican alternative to Clinton's health care proposal.
* Obama wasted months and months during the same health care debate, waiting for negotiations with Senate Republicans. In the end, they had to do it without Republican votes. Arguably the Republicans weren't even negotiating in good faith, but were simply trying to run out the clock.
* During the (Republican-manufactured) debt ceiling crisis, Obama went to the table with a proposal that included $4 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. That was a great deal for Republicans. It would have greatly reduced the deficit and shrunk the size of government, two things the Republican Party supposedly favors. But they stonewalled. Not one penny in tax increases, they said. Republican unwillingness to compromise was directly responsible for America's credit downgrade.
* When Obama was trying to get the Stimulus passed, he tried to court Republican votes by 1) shrinking the size of the plan from $1T to $700B, and 2) loading up the plan with tax cuts for individuals and small businesses. He did so even though his economic advisors were warning that tax cuts wouldn't have as much of a stimulus effect as more direct forms of spending. Long story short: his compromises made the plan worse, and nonetheless attracted no Republican votes.
* The Dodd-Frank bill, a half-hearted attempt to rein in the excesses of Wall Street that caused the financial crisis? Got four Republican votes in the Senate, zero in the House. And if you think that the Republicans were holding out for something stronger, or more effective, or that really stuck it to the banks, you're entirely kidding yourself. They fought like hell to weaken every single provision, then to deny the new consumer protection agency funding, then to deny it a director. The Republicans absolutely cannot compromise on this bedrock principle: the wealthy should be able to do whatever they want.

By "two years" you actually mean "six months." Senator Al Franken's election was disputed until July 2009, giving the Democrats vote #60 (if you count Joe Lieberman, which I don't). Senator Ted Kennedy died two months later, and when Scott Brown took over in January 2010, it gave the Republicans 41 votes, the number needed to keep a filibuster going.

Also, there's no filibuster in the House of Representatives.

Also, senators don't have to vote along party lines, or even be members of a political party. Even a filibuster-proof majority doesn't ensure that the President will always be able to get whatever he wants done. Obama made a concerted effort to get Gitmo closed, and bring the prisoners back to U.S. soil for trial. But cowardly idiots from both sides of the aisle warned that doing so would lead to terror attacks inside the U.S. Too many Democrats chose to demagogue rather than risk being labeled "soft on terror."

And what was Obama doing instead? Fulfilling other campaign promises. Overhauling health care. Economic stimulus. Supreme Court appointments. Regulating the financial sector (over the mad howlings of Republicans, who even today are promising a "repeal and replace", minus the part where they actually replace). Expand CHIP, ensuring that kids get health care. Clean energy. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Singlehandedly snuck into Pakistan, put a bullet in Osama bin Laden's head, then lit a cigarette and said, "Don't fuck with America." *

Sorry, but the people who ask why Obama hasn't gotten more done seem to imagine that presidents hold Rasputin-like sway over Congress. I blame the Republicans for filibustering, the Democrats for not pushing harder against the filibuster, Connecticut for electing Joe Lieberman, and Republicans (again) for being utterly amoral and unwilling to compromise with either the Democrats or reality in general.

* I've heard there's evidence to disprove this account of events, but it's all hidden in Mitt Romney's 2005 tax returns.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

--John Donne

By that reasoning (which I'd only slightly dispute), the massacre in Iraq began long before we invaded. The sanctions on Iraq were undermining its infrastructure since 1990.

Which is something I think about every time Obama brags about how tough the sanctions against Iran are, and every time Romney brags about how much tougher he'd make them. The whole point of sanctions is to make life under the sanctioned government so awful that they have to either do what we tell them or risk open revolt by the common folk of the country. In other words, they use the suffering of the masses as a political weapon.

Something ain't right there.

Translation: You're mad that the ARRA actually built things, rather than just handing out money to a handful of lucky Americans.

Sure, we could have just bought 2.4M spoons, and had every new "worker" go out, find an empty plot of ground, and spend their hours digging holes and filling them back in.

But if you want to actually build stuff, you gotta buy some actual backhoes. You've got to buy cement, and lumber, and steel, and nails, and wiring. The value of the things that actually got built by those jobs has to be accounted for.

And let's not forget that $288B of the ARRA's price tag actually did exactly what you're suggesting: handed money back to people in the form of tax credits. This was Obama trying to make the bill "bipartisan", giving the Republicans some of what they said they wanted. Result? Zero Republican votes in the House, two-and-a-half in the Senate.*

Obama's own economists told him that these tax breaks would have little stimulus effect, but the Republicans demanded that they be included in a bill that they had no intention of voting for anyhow.

There's also a lot of other "just give money to people" provisions, like unemployment benefits, food stamps, WIC, TANF, etc. These transfer programs incur very low overhead. There's $80B in direct giveaways under "aid to low-income workers, unemployed, and retirees," the aforementioned $288B given away in tax credits, and a couple of other nickely-dimey programs that amount to handing deficit money to people in the hopes that they spend it.

Given that the ARRA basically followed your source's "hand out money" plan for about half its budget, by The Weekly Standard's reasoning, the other $400B spent on scientific research, weatherizing buildings, energy efficiency, upgrading the electrical grid, building roads, and a laundry list of other things... all that may as well have been flushed down the toilet.

The point is, the ARRA did so much more than just put people to work. It invested in scientific research, improved the energy efficiency of homes and businesses, modernized health care records and information services, sent young men and women to college, and a bunch of other things that will pay long-term dividends.

* I'm counting Arlen Specter's vote as half a vote, because he switched to the Democratic party a few months later.

RELEASE THE MORLOCKS!

I will totally donate $100 to the Kickstarter for this one.

Define "should be." Most users are never going to download an extension and install it themselves. There's even risk of shipping it with a bunch of extensions included and enabled, as somebody will go in and disable them by mistake.

Now, if those default extensions were only disablable from about:config, then maybe we'd be talking.

But if we have no way to distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones, how do you know that good CEOs are rare?

I'd also point out that, while the supply of good CEOs may be small, so is the demand. I mean, c'mon, how many Fortune 500 companies are there?

My suspicion is that, once you eliminate the most obvious ways to run a company badly, it's all a big crap shoot. I mean this in the same way that you don't see heavily managed investment funds outperforming index funds over the long haul. So it's not clear what value is being added.

You're wrong. Preaching abstinence is great... for making yourself feel morally superior to all those knocked-up sluts.

For preventing pregnancy, not so much.

By analogy, if we cleaned the mercury from the city's water supply, people would be liable to drink more water, resulting in greater exposure to mercury.

Me, I never asked to be in the gene pool in the first place. And I've noticed that the gene pool is already seven billion strong. I understand why my genes might want to stay in the gene pool, but guess what? I'm not my genes. I'm just this contraption the genes built, in the hopes that I might fulfill their vision. Well, they dun goofed, and I'll choose my priorities for myself, thankyouverymuch.

>> "I remain similarly unimpressed by the blind stereotypes you put out. Human existence is far more, and I repeat this, far more important to me than the existence of a certain number of species that are specialized to a very particular environment and can barely hold on."

Well, yes, it's obvious where your priorities are. And if it were a question of "our survival or theirs", I'd choose ours. But that isn't the choice we face, not by a long shot. The choice is actually between "their survival" and "our making a few mildly inconvenient changes to the way we do things." So again, yes, I consider your attitude pathologically selfish.

>> "Further, the people who complain about mass extinctions are very capable, just on their own, of moving species around so that the plant or slow animal that can only tolerate certain conditions can live a little distance away where those conditions still exist."

So, I'm supposed to devote my life to tranquilizing and capturing woodland creatures so as not to trample on your inalienable right to use incandescent light bulbs and to pay 5c/kWH for the electricity to power them? Please explain to me why I should have to clean up your messes for you. Why is it fair that I should pay to prevent the damage that your choices inflict on the broader ecosystem?

Introducing a species into a new environment isn't a quick or simple process. The way you're describing it reeks of scientific ignorance of the "I don't understand it so it can't possibly be hard" variety. Did you know that reintroducing wolves to the Yellowstone area cost $200K-$1M per wolf? And we're supposed to transplant every single plant or animal in the entire ecosystem a few hundred miles north, so that you don't have to insulate your house? I don't know whether I'm more in shock of your ignorance or your laziness.

>> "A lot of this sounds like "coming to the nuisance" where the externality is created because someone built near an existing coal mine."

A couple of points here: California's air quality is made significantly worse by coal burned in China. So where exactly were these people supposed to move to avoid the burden of being "near" a coal mine? Iceland?

In the same vein, during the summer, half of Maryland's ozone pollution comes from out of state sources. This line of reasoning ignores just how difficult it is to avoid the pollution of others.

But even if we assumed that the coal plant was there first, why does that make it reasonable to pin the costs on the person moving in? Say I have a thousand acres of land that I'm considering putting residential housing on. But it's downwind from a coal plant. By operating the way they do, say that every person who moves into my planned neighborhood incurs $500/year in medical/cleaning/bottled water/whatever costs. As a landowner, my land is therefore less valuable than it otherwise would be. The coal mine is making my land less valuable.

Or, to put it another way, if your house is adjacent to my empty lot, and your dog craps on said empty lot, when I decide to build a house you don't have an easement for your dog to crap on my lawn.

Regardless of who ultimately pays the costs, shouldn't these costs be subtracted from the economic benefits of "cheap, abundant coal (TM)"?

"A similar situation occurs with the cost of monitoring. This cost should be borne by the party that wants the monitoring, namely, the taxpayer. I don't even consider that an externality since it is not a cost imposed by fossil fuel burning, but by politicians and bureaucrats allegedly acting on behaft of the public."

That makes perfect sense, in some make believe world where the stuff coming out of the smokestacks smells like fresh pine and cannot be linked to any negative human or environmental effects. In the real world, those who do the damage (and profit mightily from doing that damage) should be responsible for mitigating that damage.

Of course, you believe none of this. Since you believe in the free market, and you seem to believe that we have a free market, it's hard to imagine trillions worth of lucrative investments just being ignored by the markets.

Apparently not hard for you.

Well excuse me for trying to engage with a potential objection.

Are you even glancing at the links I've been providing? The list of misaligned incentives alone should be enough to convince you that there are at least a handful of opportunities for wringing CO2 from the economy at a net profit.

I would think that the Empire State Building case study would get you thinking. I guess not. Did you think, "There must be something unique and weird about the Empire State Building to make that sort of ROI possible?" Because opportunities for lucrative energy efficiency investments like this exist within pretty much every structure, every appliance, every vehicle on the planet. Is your free market ideology so immune to evidence that you deny the existence of the $20 bill on the ground in front of you?

When I write the sentence, "in this project, carbon emissions were cut at a net profit to the economy," do any synapses fire? Explain to me, very carefully, what you conclude from the case study.

>> "I don't buy it. This anti-science crap has to stop and here is a good place to start."

Says the guy who has no training in climate science, hasn't made a single argument against the actual science, and defers to the expertise of a college-dropout-turned-weatherman-turned-blogger rather than people who are active and publishing within the field.

>> "I find the comparison of evolution to anthropogenic global warming a good analogy. Evolution didn't become the dominant explanation for biological diversity and hereditary traits through the playing of political games, an insistence on consensus, or developing a complex, opaque theory that couldn't be understood or checked by the layman. Nor did it become standard theory by changing the name to hide what it was about."

Sorry, but anthropogenic global warming is the dominant explanation. The fact that the media and the public is still arguing over what the scientific establishment considers settled says nothing about the science. The public doesn't accept evolution, and a number of individual scientists also consider evolution unsettled. So, according to your criteria, evolution hasn't yet achieved scientific legitimacy.

As for the name change, you clearly think that there was something nefarious going on. I don't see why, unless you're one of those deniers who actually believes that global warming stopped in 1998 and the name change was a clumsy attempt to cover up this made-up fact. As far as I'm concerned, both names are valid, but "global warming" better describes the cause, and "climate change" better describes the effect.

>> "Exceptional claims require exception evidence. If you're going to claim that we should radically change our society to protect against a threat far in the future, you need to back that claim up with exceptional evidence. That's just how it should work."

I don't think the changes needed to halt climate change are particularly radical. Solar isn't as expensive as you claim, and is getting cheaper every year. Energy efficiency is a cheap and abundant source of clean energy, and harvesting it will actually improve our standards of living. Coal is far more expensive than your electric bill indicates, and every step we take to wean ourselves off it benefits to our economy. In short, we can make a huge dent in the problem without demanding major sacrifices to our bloated consumerist culture. So by your reasoning, my burden of proof is lowered significantly.

You know what I think is radical? Thinking that we can pour trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, with no consequences whatsoever!

As for your demand for evidence, it's the easiest -- and most useless -- thing in the world to sit back, demand evidence, ignore the evidence presented, demand more, and then call the evidence "unexceptional." The evidence is out there, but I can't read and comprehend it for you. Tell you what: read the How to talk to a climate skeptic series, starting with whichever article titles make you nod in self-satisfaction. If you find big holes in their reasoning, then show me the specifics.

But I'm not going to regurgitate easily available material for you.