Follow this link to the article in Slate about getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate.

I didn’t pay any attention to the details of how it could be done when the Republicans proposed this in 2005.  This article lays out the possible procedures and some possible dangers.

The Republicans got what they wanted out of the Democrats just be threatening to do this.  I doubt that the Republicans would cave so easily.  Of course we could go back to the old filibuster rules which required the stamina to keep talking without stop to keep the filibuster alive.  This seemed to hold the number of filibusters down to a reasonable level before the change in 1975.

In the meantime, at the suggestion of MoveOn.org, I made a call to my representative, Rep. Richard Neal, urging him to go along with the plan to get the health care reform done through reconciliation.  Before I called, his position had been to slow this health care reform process.  I told his office that the political dangers to him were the same whether he voted for the reconciliation process or not.  If he was going to suffer the danger anyway, he might as well get an accomplishment out of it.

They promised to pass the message on to Rep. Neal.

Just to prove that the Worcester Telegram & Gazette can sometimes publish comments that run contrary to the party line, I post the following message board comment that they chose to publish in the hardcopy version of the newspaper.

Maybe it is my constant repetition of this theme that has finally persuaded them to give in.

You can guess who the poster SteveG is.

If I can, I am going to repeat the truth as often as the misinformation is repeated.

There was an item Winning 101 – – Brown worked the basics in the Worcester T & G.

I know this is starting to get repetitive, but here is my response to this one:

Well you are right about Scott Brown going back to the basics. That is exactly what Martha Coakley failed to do.

She assumed that people understood the reasons and the rationale for the stimulus spending and the health care plan. She assumed that she had to go negative on Scott Brown. I kept sending her emails to stop the negative and go back to basics, but she didn’t listen.

When the economy is nose-diving, no individual in his or her right mind would boost their spending and their investment on factory capacity when they need to horde their reserves in case of Armageddon.

The only entity that can take a countervailing stance against the decline is the federal government. It must invest its spending on useful projects that assume that this is not the end of the world. This requires deficit spending.

After the economy is righted and the private sector is functioning again, then the Federal government can start to run surpluses and pay off the debt it ran up during the recession.

This simple explanation would show that an immediate cut in federal spending would be a disaster. It would also show that our children will not be paying off this debt for generations.

Without even mentioning Scott Brown, she would have shown why two pillars of his campaign were disastrous mistakes.

Remember, that the Clinton administration was able to run surpluses with policies that the Republicans said could not work. It took the Republicans and George Bush to reverse the Clinton policies and show us what really wouldn’t work.

As a practical matter, there is no reason why the presumptive leader in a race has to run against the underdog.  You just need to keep explaining what you want to do and why it will be good for everybody.

If you start running against the underdog, then the focus shifts to his message, away from your own.  You have just given up on your greatest advantage.  As long as you stick to what is right with your ideas, the underdog has to keep focusing on your message.  This is really what Winning 101 is about.

Of course you have to adjust your explanations to make sure the electorate sees why an attack on your plans is wrong.  However, you don’t even need to mention the other candidate.  Just keep selling your ideas.  Do not assume that everybody knows just because we have spent two years on these topics.  Memories are extremely short.  That is why we go back to the basics.

Well at least that was the point of the letter that JOANNE C. DELALLA wrote to the Worcester T & G

I keep trying to explain as in this reply:

Joanne doesn’t get the economy. The Obama stimulus plan has worked amazingly well for as far as it went. The stock market is up 60% from its low last March, before it started to tumble after Scott Brown’s election.

The health care mandate will ease the burden on corporations of rapidly rising costs of health care insurance that they provide for their employees.

The President has taken action to spur the private sector at the very same time that Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (R. Maine) removed the part of the stimulus that would have prevented rising state and local taxes and state and local layoffs. When you stimulate one part of the economy and shrink another, you are canceling out your attempts to help.

How do we stimulate new capital investment when huge parts of the industrial sector are lying idle from lack of demand? You would have to be a pretty foolish capitalist to invest your capital now when you already have idle capacity and you may need that capital to stave off financial disaster.

A strong dollar will make it more difficult for our industries to export. Since the local consumers have finally realized that they cannot count on rising real-estate values as extra income, they are cutting back on purchases to pay off debts. If they won’t provide the purchasing power to stimulate demand, exports are our next best bet.

If Scott Brown succeeds in immediately cutting government spending, the economy will go into a nosedive the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression when such foolish policies were last practiced.

Those of us who understand that the federal government’s interaction with the economy is on a scale unlike any average consumer, will try to continue to explain that you cannot model government policy solely on what a small consumer should do with their own budget.

If people start to open their eyes and learn, perhaps we can avoid the disaster that their misdirected ideas will bring about.

I ran out of characters before I could get in the last little dig.  If only Martha Coakley could have explained this, perhaps she would be a Senator elect.

Any interest in the emergency rally mentioned in this email that I received?

In the post Alzheimer’s/CellPhones/Turmeric–Call me and let’s do curry RichardH discussed a study that found:

Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows. The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease. The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

I just saw an article that mentioned a study that corroborated this result.

I started to imagine how a cell phone company could cause such publicity.

If you were a cell phone company, you could fund a study in which the mice were deprived of enough heat to be healthy.  In the study the researchers could then subject some of the mice to enough cell phone radiation to provide the heat they were missing.  The result would be mice that were healthier for the application of cell phone radiation.

Now everyone knows that you should not take a single scientific study as proof of anything.  You need some independent entity to replicate the study to see if they get the same results.  So as a cell phone company, you fund a second study that uses the same methods as the first.  Then you issue press releases about the study that corroborates the first one.

I am not saying that I have any information that this is exactly what happened or is anything like what happened.  It is not out of the realm of possibility, though.  The tobacco companies were notorious for funding studies like these.

This is why we need to know who funded the studies and we need to know the exact methodology of the study.  We also need a study by a truly independent group of scientists to corroborate or refute these results.  Of course, how do you know that the people refuting the study haven’t pulled some trick whereas the original study was completely honest?

To protect myself against these kinds of possibilities, I have decided that the amount of attention you need to pay to these studies depends on the seriousness of the consequences of any decision you make that depends on this knowledge.  If you make no decision or the decision is not very important, then who really cares.  If you are making a life changing decision, then you need to be a lot more sure of what you think you know.