HOME | BIO | MUSIC | JOURNEYS BY DJ | STUDIO BLOG | POLITICAL BLOG | BOOKING INFO | CONTACT

This article about the debate over the future of drilling rights in ANWR is pretty good, until this section at the end:

It's "backdoor budget chicanery," complained Rep. Edward Markey (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., an ANWR drilling opponent. "By shoehorning the Arctic refuge into the budget, they are making an end-run around the legislative process, knowing it cannot pass the Senate any other way." But drilling advocates accuse opponents of also having relied on parliamentary maneuvers, the filibuster, to keep the issue from being decided on a straight up-or-down vote.

How the author feels these two things are worthy of comparison is beyond me. Using the filibuster, a legitimate parliamentary procedure with long roots in the Senate, to block legislation isn't even remotely similar to sneaking otherwise unpassable legislation into an unrelated bill. Granted, it wouldn't be the first time that's happened - far from it in fact. But to suggest these two things are equivalent, as this article does, is both lazy and irresponsible.

--------