Senator George LeMieux (R-FL) is starting to feel the heat of pro-migrant voters, specifically Latino voters. Tonight, Univision will air a debate in which current Florida governor and U.S. Senate nominee Charlie Crist will come out in support of the DREAM Act.  The day before yesterday, Representive Kendrick Meek (D-FL), and also a nominee for U.S. Senate, hand delivered a letter to LeMieux.  This part of Meek’s letter says it all:

If you haven’t been on facebook, twitter, or following the news, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced yesterday that he would be introducing the DREAM Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.  Univision anchor Jorge Ramos tweeted last week that Reid wanted to move the DREAM Act before November.  Now we know how Reid wants to move it.  The DREAM Act could come up for a vote as early as Tuesday of next week.

Attorney Coakely has shown a fundamental inability to understand basic Constitutional principles like Due Process and Equal Protection under the laws, not to mention CORI violations that have resulted in a huge Defamation lawsuit against the Boston Herald, Reporter Jessica Van Sack and and Boston NBC affiliate WDHD Channel 7: They falsely reported that Joanna Marinova, an award-winning (video) prison reform activist had sex with an inmate, in order to shut her down.

It’s been a bit since the Massachusetts election, in which unknown Republican Scott Brown emerged to upset the favored Democrat Martha Coakley in one of union’s deepest-blue states. Since then, Democrats have been recalibrating their strategy.

In a previous post, I outlined the results of how a tied election might look like. Let’s take a look at the prediction:

The nation’s stupidest woman to ever be a national party’s VP candidate tried to explain why it was that Massachusetts’ Republican Senator Scott Brown would use the leverage Senate Democrats give to the 60th vote to water down and corrupt otherwise useful legislation.

Since the Republicans have managed to stand tall on their intransigence that up to 2 million unemployed Americans should lose their meager benefits, perhaps it is time to start introducing them to some of the unemployed. We have heard the Dickensian pronouncements on the Senate floor that the unemployed are lazy, that the benefits they receive are keeping them from looking for work, that it is more important in a financial crisis to cut spending (and thus cut the over all recovery off at the knees) than it is to help our fellow Americans who, through no fault of their own, are now paying the price for financial deregulation.

As long as this debate is kept in abstract terms it is easy for those Republicans who have a conscience (all three of them) to talk about how we should be burdening our children and grandchildren with debt. It is time to use the very effective method of hearings to bring the real face of the long term unemployed right into the face of the heartless and petty Republican majority.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Imagine the scene; there are the Senators all in their expensive suits, high end electronics at their sides, expensive watches at their wrists, sitting in the lovely hearing rooms at the Capital. In come the five witnesses, the laid off factory worker in his mid-forties, single mom who was an administrative assistant for a medium size company, the engineer who worked her whole life at one company and now is unlikely to find a job in her field again because of age bias, the construction worker who used to build houses and the coffee shop worker who lost her job to hours cuts.

After giving Senator Scott Brown exactly what he wanted and paying for the Wall Street reform bill on the backs of taxpayers by using TARP money instead of the proposed tax on big banks – which in Brown’s twisted world constitutes eliminating a tax – Brown’s still not on board with the final bill.

More than two years after the collapse of Bear Stearns, the House and Senate finally ironed out their differences on Wall Street reform in the wee, small hours of Friday morning. The bill now goes back to both the House and Senate for final approval, but it’s fate in the Senate is uncertain following the defection of Tea Party Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).

Two weeks ago, Senator Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) met with President Obama and “told him he would not support a cap-and-trade plan or carbon fee to limit greenhouse gas emissions.” In the Boston Globe, Brown is quoted as expressing how “excited” he is “about working with [Obama] in a bipartisan manner to come up with a comprehensive energy plan.”

Although the occasional cipher has been thrust into the highest levels of the Washington political scene in the past (see, for example, Dan Quayle) it seems that the process of driving substance out of the picture has accelerated since John McCain’s inexplicable choice of Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Now that President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court has been revealed to be Elena Kagan, whose primary accomplishment to date has been to leave no record, instead of the clearly superior and substantial candidate Diane Wood, it seems that substance is in retreat in a way never seen before.