What You Really Voted For

If you’re wondering whether President Obama’s ambitious second-term agenda has a chance to make it through Congress, this little fact might be worth keeping in mind. Pessimistic analyses of the prospects for the Obama agenda have mostly focused on the recalcitrant, GOP-led House of Representatives. But Obama’s problem may actually be with the house of Congress his party controls. House Speaker John Boehner has signaled that he’ll consider proposals that make it through the Democrat-controlled Senate. Based on recent history, that could be a tall order.

Lest you think this is about Republican obstruction of the Democrats’ Senate majority via the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome, that’s only part of the problem. Note that this period of inaction doesn’t quite correlate with the last time Democrats had 60 votes, which was January 2010. And the Senate has actually done plenty of things in the past two years and seven months — the deals that ended the 2011 debt-ceiling fight and the recent “fiscal cliff,” for example, as well as contentious items like the highway bill and the reapproval of the Export-Import Bank.

Do your US Representatives promote income inequality? See how they did on the inequality report card.

(As always, click the image to follow the link.) 

Don’t know who is running in your state?

We live in a country where congressional approval ratings are at an all time low, yet when asked about their own congressmen, people overwhelmingly approve of them.

Remember, the President cannot and will not determine everything this country does. The President has to be able to work with Congress. All congressional races are just as important as the big presidential race.

So, it’s an election year and you don’t even know who the hell is running in your district? Wait, you don’t even know what district you’re even in? 

Welcome to the club.

You can use this handy tool to figure out what house district you’re in:

http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Once you have that figured out, follow the link below and click on your state to show a list of districts in your state, and a list of who’s running for what party in each!

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Portal:Congress

There are also quite a few Senate seats up for contention this year, you can use the above link to find out about those races as well.

“Early in the year, the economy seemed to be gathering momentum. In February, it added 220,000 jobs. In March, it added 246,000 jobs. In April, 251,000 jobs. But as markets began to take the Republican threats on the debt ceiling more seriously, the economy sputtered. Between May and August, the nation never added more than 100,000 jobs a month. And then, in September, the month after the debt ceiling was resolved, the economy sped back up and added more than 200,000 jobs.”

“Even as Countrywide’s CEO Mozilo mocked Fannie Mae and top executives for its crony capitalism business model, he would nonetheless personally intercede to ensure executives had access to discounted Countrywide loans,” Issa said in his statement. “These relationships helped Mozilo increase his own company’s profits while dumping the risk of bad loans on taxpayers.”

“The 111th Congress in 2009 “was exceedingly productive. It was a time of unified government,” said Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of“It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.” “If you look at major legislation passed, it ranks with the most productive in modern history.”“