Partisan warfare has erupted over Richard Cordray, Obama’s nominee to lead a new consumer finance watchdog, whom Republicans filibustered in the Senate last week, raising concerns that the agency would become a “ Stalinist ” enemy of Wall Street. But waiting in the wings is another Obama nominee who’s long raised hackles of the country’s biggest financial institutions. And this time, Republicans have resoundingly embraced him. Read full article > >

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Meet the big-bank critics Republicans love.

For most folks, the holiday season is a time for serious shopping. In the Senate, it’s a time for heated and nasty negotiations over nominations — and the clock is ticking. The Obama administration and Senate Democrats lost a bitter fight Thursday over the nomination of former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection — or Wall Street watchdog — when they failed to end a GOP filibuster. Obama indicated he may make a one-year recess appointment for Cordray. Read full article > >

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Obama ambassadorial nominees face a ticking clock

This week, Senate Democrats will break up President Obama’s jobs bill and begin voting on the pieces separately. First up is the $35 billion to state and local governments, $30 billion of which is earmarked for retain and rehiring teachers and $5 billion of which is meant to go to public-safety personnel. Senate Dems are proposing to pay for it with a 0.5 percent tax surcharge on income over $1,000,000 a year. Senate Republicans are proposing to filibuster. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the bill is further proof that Democrats “are still focused on the same temporary stimulus spending that’s failed to solve our jobs crisis.” Read full article > >

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Wonkbook: The case for rehiring public workers

Measure fails to overcome GOP filibuster.

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Senate Blocks Obama Jobs Plan

Senate Republicans have filibustered the nomination of Goodwin Liu to the federal bench. By a 52 to 43 margin, Democrats failed to get the 60 votes required to hold an up-or-down vote. President Obama has twice nominated Liu, a Berkeley law professor,…

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Senate Blocks Vote on Judge Nominee

Under a Senate rules truce, Republicans did not filibuster, and Democrats let them offer amendments, one of which would have repealed the health law.

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Meant to Be Broken? Maybe Not This Time

Do we really trust these guys to behave like gentlemen still? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have reached a “gentleman’s agreement” to scale back filibusters-a measure well short of the reform some Democratic…

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Senate Waters Down Filibuster Reform

Debate over whether and how to change the filibuster has, ironically, stalled the Senate, which has been on recess since January 5 while leaders negotiate filibuster changes. With 47 Republicans and many senior Democrats against any adjustments to the…

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Filibuster Debate Stalls Senate

Legislation is needed to prevent filibustering in the Lords, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Goodhart has said.

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Lib Dem peer calls for ban on filbustering

The Senate is considering reforming the rules for filibusters. In the last few years the filibuster has been used so frequently that it is now conventional wisdom that “it takes 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.” This is because the public, and apparently even much of the news media, does not understand how the Senate operates. In fact, when you hear that something takes 60 votes to pass it is because it has been filibustered. read more

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Dave Johnson | Filibuster Make Them Talk

A band of Senate Democrats signaled that it would press forward with a proposal to curtail filibusters, but procedural sleight-of-hand could delay any floor fight.

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Democrats Plan Push to Curtail Use of Filibusters

Why the next Congress should alter this outdated and anachronistic tool.

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Filibuster reform at last?

OK, back to business. A physics professor from a college in the East replies to this item , in which a software engineer explained why new “enhanced” backscatter-radiation TSA machines can’t be assumed to be safe. The physics professor writes: > > There is no such thing as a risk-free dose of ionizing radiation. The federal government studied this using beagles right after World War II and found no safe dosage level. And for good reason. The reason Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize was for explaining the photoelectric effect, not for relativity. His explanation involved the discovery that light is absorbed and emitted in discrete energy packets called photons, like a stream of particle. Photons are only absorbed or emitted one at a time, and their energy depends on their frequency. We learn two things relevant to current news from this:    1. All microwave photons are far too weak to cause damage to molecules through their absorption. The energy level of a microwave photon is sufficient to cause a molecule to rotate or vibrate (this is how microwave ovens work) but not to cause it to disintegrate or modify its structure, and those are essential requirements for causing a DNA molecule to mutate into a malignant strand. Epidemiology cannot answer this question because its methods are not aware of physical laws. They can place a statistical limit on mutagenicity, but physics actually rules it out as physically impossible. Lesson? Cell phones do not cause cancer. Period.   2. On the other hand, X-rays cause molecular damage very easily because they are extremely energetic. In fact, this is the reason why they permit you to see inside things. Anything further up the spectrum than the near-UV is capable of causing cancer. But UV is not energetic enough to penetrate. It is absorbed in the outer layers of the skin, and so can cause skin cancer but not, say, lung cancer. X-rays penetrate. They cause cancer everywhere. And dosage is cumulative over your entire lifetime. Every time you have an X-ray, you slightly increase your chances of contracting cancer. This is why the radiologist always goes into another (shielded) room and puts a lead blanket over parts of you that they aren’t interested in. Now each additional dose is a small risk increase, to be sure, and the benefits of medical treatment are generally worth the risk (though I am frequently irritated by the tendency of dentists to X-ray my head with wild abandon). So I will not go into the naked scanner under any circumstances. It is only for PR purposes, and I don’t give a shit about helping Obama or Pistole or anyone else primp their public image. Millimeter wave is safe, X-ray is not, but you never know which one you’re getting. TSA workers should be up in arms since they’re standing around the machines unshielded all day long. This will eventually come back to bite the government. You can take that from a physicist. Oh, and by the way, being afraid of irradiated breast milk is idiotic. That radiation is not entering your body and so can’t damage it. On the other hand, so long as the TSA has a policy [of treating breast milk as a "medical fluid'] , they need to honor it. > Very exciting; I was selected and opted out. It was pretty thorough; the guy kept telling me “I’ve reached a sensitive area, I will now use the back of my hand.” Lo and behold they found nothing. Although they were very interested in my belt loops and pant cuffs. The guy was talkative and noticing a scar on my elbow (which I got hiking with enough pack weight I barely noticed it, but it is quite prevalent now) tried to talk about that–it was clear he didn’t want to be doing this but had found a way to cope. Rather professional–I was somewhat impressed. I think that, in the future, I’ll forgo the radiation again.

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Boxing Day Special: A Physicist Opts-Out

Frustrated by regular filibusters and other blockades, Senate Democrats are urging their leadership to change the chamber’s rules.

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Democrats Seek Changes to Senate Procedures

… to get these out of the inbox, and then offline: 1) Many people have sent in mentions of this story from Sacramento, about an airline pilot who posted a YouTube video of what he considered “security theater” aspects at an airport. (Thorough inspection of air crews; no inspection whatsoever of baggage handlers, maintenance people, and other ground crew.) A few days later federal agents and sheriff’s deputies arrived at his house, and he is apparently under investigation and in trouble for disclosing “sensitive” security info. A few weeks ago, the TSA actually apologized for the episode in which a young mother was detained in a glass security cube, and missed her plane, because she didn’t want to send a container of breast milk through the X-ray machine. We’ll see what the TSA administrator John Pistole says about this one. 2) Last month I quoted a software engineer, William Vambenepe, on why he wouldn’t go through the advanced TSA scanning machines: not that he was prudish (“I’m French”) but because his professional experience made him doubt that new radiation-producing machines with new software could be faultlessly safe. He writes today with this update: > > My fears seem validated by this report that no-one is inspecting the machines and ensuring that they don’t deliver 100x the normal radiation level. Choice quote: “While the TSA claims that entities like the FDA, the US Army and Johns  Hopkins all regularly inspect their machines, none of these groups  agrees, and they all disavow any role in regularly maintaining and  testing the TSA’s equipment”.

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Quick Catchup Items: TSA, ROTC, Filibuster