The question is why Obama did not dispatch help to the people under attack at Benghazzi...

And the fact that the PUBLIC was not briefed. Instead we were all told it was outrage over the movie.

Their package would eliminate the ability to filibuster motions to proceed to new business. Under current rules, a senator can hold up a motion to even begin debating legislation.

The majority leader would be able to bar a filibuster on a motion to proceed if he allows each side votes on two amendments, according to a Senate aide familiar with the package. Non-germane amendments would be subject to a 60-vote threshold, under this scenario.

The tentative deal would expedite the process for sending legislation to conference negotiations with the House. But lawmakers would still be allowed to filibuster any effort to send legislation to a Senate-House negotiation.

SNIP

In return for these concessions from McConnell, Reid will hold off from using the nuclear option to change Senate rules unilaterally. The controversial tactic allows the majority leader to change the Senate rules with a simple majority vote.

Under regular order, it takes 67 votes to enact a permanent rules change. Sixty votes are required to modify the rules under a standing order.

Reid and McConnell have also agreed to some informal changes intended to push senators to play a more active role if they choose to filibuster legislation or nominees, according to a Senate aide familiar with the talks. Bill managers and the Senate leaders will from now on ask senators who want to hold up a bill or nominee to come to the floor to announce their objection.

The leaders will henceforth require lawmakers to actually debate on the floor if they seek to slow the agenda by using a full allocation of time after the Senate has voted to end a filibuster.

If Republicans understand one thing about practical politics, it's that they're not elected to be everybody's pal. When they're in power, they do everything they can to advance and implement their own agenda, whereas Democrats waste far too much of their time worrying about comity and bipartisanship, or how mad their GOP colleagues might get were they to ever -- heaven forbid! -- assert their majority to get things done.

Speaking as someone who has two decades of experience in a legislative capacity, I would contend that truly effective bipartisanship only occurs in politics when one or more of the following three conditions are present:

• The party that's currently in the minority gets punchdrunk from having their a$$es handed to them on a regular basis by the majority;

• Select members of both sides share a mutual concern or interest, and choose of their own volition to work together to attain a common goal or objective; or

• Both sides simultaneously perceive a mutual threat to their collective existence, and therefore consider it in their respective best interests to share the political risk in confronting the problem.

As the late Tip O'Neill was wont to quip, politics ain't beanbag. And in my honest opinion, seeking out comity and cooperation merely for their own sakes is really a slippery slope to political nowhere. The worst legislation is often that which has been hastily enacted without due regard for political debate and proper deliberation.

And, like slavery once did, this metastasizing cancer guarantees that our Founder's dream of us becoming the democratic ideal envisioned in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution will remain just that....a dream.

It is also the reason I refrained from joining the almost universal praise of Obama's Inaugural Address. I couldn't help getting the image out of my mind of those millionaires & billionaires, on their yachts and at Davos, laughing their heads off with each standing ovation. "The People" sent Obama to Washington to attack this cancer; his puppet masters told him, "give'm a good speech instead."

Though there are a lot worse countries to flee to, and of course she'd be well positioned to open up one of those fancy Swiss Bank accounts.  Of course, neither Switzerland nor Europe are quite what they used to be a few decades ago, with economic stresses and immigration issues.

Still, if things don't improve over here in the new Obama admin, if the right choices aren't made and right principles fought for, I might be doing a Tina Turner by 2016.

Mitch spent much of his working life in the public health field. So, he often thinks of things within a public health framework. Last session he proposed a ban on those carts that attach to bicycles and are used by parents to haul their small children around. Portland is, for an American city, very bike-centric. So, one sees those carts filled with babies and toddlers all the time. Mitch was concerned that those carts were so flimsy and did not protect the kids very much at all in an accident.

That bike bill was never going to pass, but it did spark a lot of discussion in and out of the legislature, and people gained an awareness of the need to better safeguard the babies on bikes.

I expect that there will be much talk about the cigarette ban, some serious and some mocking, that the awareness of the dangers of smoking cigarettes will get some press, maybe a few people like teenagers maybe decide not to start smoking. And the bill never sees a vote.