I just can't even handle this any more.
The Daily Show episode you posted made me cry when we watched it--a comedy show shouldn't do that. When he had the first responders on and they were talking about how they were all very sick/dying, I was just distraught because A COMEDY SHOW SHOULD NOT BE THE ONLY ONE TO CARE ABOUT THIS SHIT.
It is the fault of politicians--BOTH sides, for being weak and corrupt and shitty people. It is the fault of the media for not caring about the things they should and caring a WHOLE lot about pushing their own agendas. It is the fault of the people who believed Fox News and the Tea Party and held these terrible people up as champions and told themselves that this was what they wanted--these people who are now spitting and fighting like toddlers in a sandpit, only it's affecting everyone living here and, really, a large part of the world. Sometimes it reminds me why I want to be a citizen. I want, more than voting rights, the ability to USE those rights to add another voice to those saying "this is what we want" and actually have some say in it. Sometimes it makes me wonder why I ever wanted it in the first place. I look at stuff like this, and sometimes I just feel so done with it. Maybe I should just drop it and be like those people on my Facebook who only care about TV shows about hoarders and people from New Jersey. At least they seem less angry.

I think, if this was Rome, it would be time to appoint one of those temporary dictators with complete personal power for six months. One of those would at least get some shit done.

Yeah, sure. Worked out great for them.

The repeal amendment is the best thing I've heard all year. There's a much simpler way to handle it, though. Repeal the 17th Amendment and there's a pretty good chance things will fix themselves soon enough. Our essential problem right now is that both houses of congress are populist corporate whores. The House is sort of supposed to be like that, that's why they get shorter terms, less power in general, and the budget. The Senate does a bunch of important shit that does not need to be in the hands of big business. Giving the Senate back to the state legislatures ensures that screwheaded overreaching legislation and unfunded mandates don't get passed in the first place.

One thing I think would really help is if Congress would remember that we are actually supposed to be a federal republic, and not try to solve all problems at the federal level. A prime example of this is health care. The way the government should (or should not) regulate and/or fund the health care industry is a very divisive one, and opinions on this issue do tend to vary on regional lines. Why not let each state decide how to handle this on their own, then? If you could get 75% approval for a single-payer system in California, and 75% approval for the status quo in Texas, why not let 75% of the people in both states get what they want?

Instead, we rammed a piece of legislation through on a national level that a slim majority can tolerate, and everyone else hates it. The passage of that bill also paralyzed the Congress by royally pissing off the Republicans, at least one of whose votes are needed to pass any bill. So now here we are at the end of the session when we really have to pass some stuff that does need to be resolved at the federal level (military policy, national defense treaties, federal tax policy, etc.), and there just isn't enough time to get it all done.

Yeah, sure. Worked out great for them.

Well, this was INTENDED as cynical sarcasm, but it actually worked out pretty well for them for a good few hundred years. The process had started to change to something else rather naturally by the time Caesar resurrected the idea to grab power--really something that can happen under any system. Judging an idea based on how it all went wrong centuries later is... well, that's how people will probably look at us and our system.

Uh... isn't Germany part of the EU anyway? So, doesn't France basically write their laws?

Well, to keep it short (since it's wildly off-topic), keep in mind that Germany is the biggest player in the EU and so it's more like Germany writes everyone's laws these days. But that's secondary to the real problem.

Which is that if there is a law proposal that is so revoltingly stupid that they'd never get it passed on a national level and survive the aftermath, they kick it up to the EU level, which is unaccountable except to the EU member governments (which are either running the show anyway, like France and Germany, or are financially dependent on EU subsidies. Which effectively means that there is no accountability at all). And then Shitty Law gets passed as a EU directive that is mandatory to incorporate into national law in each member state, with the politicians now looking like they valiantly fought, and lost, the battle against Shitty Law while secretly rubbing their hands because they got what they wanted without looking like they're responsible.

Well, to keep it short (since it's wildly off-topic), keep in mind that Germany is the biggest player in the EU and so it's more like Germany writes everyone's laws these days.

Well, 'biggest player' is one way of putting it. The other way would be 'they're the only ones left who've actually got any money'.

And then no one gets medicare or unemployment insurance

Alternately, those things are handled by the states, which is probably a better idea.

re: accountability. For the state level of government, yes it is. Except in the very populous ones, state government is small enough than an individual who pays attention has a decent shot at getting their head around the whole thing so that their opinion is legitimate. Furthermore, since we do not and will not have fifty different multi-billion dollar lie generation industries to muddy the waters, people are able to act on generally reliable information. In most states, it remains true to this day, rather than a romantic myth as it is at the federal level, that the people governing you could be your neighbors rather than business magnates or the yes-men they hand-picked.

If you give people a reason to care about state government again, they will, and that will be a wonderful thing.

You know, it's not like we haven't gone through times like this in our country's history before.  You wanna talk about nasty campaigns where both sides hated eachother to bits?  Try the beginning of the Jacksonian era, 1820-'28.  Adams essentially gets elected president due to backroom deals after a long protracted campaign that was widely regarded among historians as one of the dirtiest in history.

And during that era, we have the Nullification Crisis, where South Carolina nearly seceded over tariffs and leading to one of the early states rights arguments (echoes of Texas' supposed secession over health care anyone?).

And you want to talk about a president in the pocket of a powerful lobby that ended up supporting legislation that was terribly unpopular because it worked to undo a lot of the compromises in the past?  Franklin Pierce.  He supported the Kansas-Nebraska act and was generally sympathetic to the slavery cause.

Pierce also was a bit of a warmonger, allowing the Onstend Manifesto to float through his diplomatic corps, the one that allowed for the annexation of Cuba (as a slave state) and to go to war with Spain if they didn't cough it up.

Then there's another part of history, someone who lost the popular vote, but just barely hung on to the electoral college after a deal with the Supreme Court- that would be Rutherford B. Hayes.  And his deal was largely in order to get Reconstruction killed way earlier than it should have been, which was argued that it was as bad as it was only because Johnson had a particular hate-on towards the South (historians theorize that Reconstruction would have been a lot lighter under Lincoln).

The only reason that FDR's New Deal stuff went through as much as it did was because of a combination of Democratic control of both houses and a minor schism in the Republican party between (get this) outright blocking it due to the harm it would do to big business or barely tolerating it in order to make it more efficient.  And even still half of it got thrown out by a conservative Supreme Court or shut down as quickly as some legislators could get it.  It was also widely criticized by conservatives as "Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect" (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Tax-spend.JPG)  Sound familiar?

My point?  Yes, it sucks right now.  We've seem to lost the old notion of the "loyal opposition", the party on the other side of the aisle that pokes holes in legislation in order to actually debate it and test it rather than just to block it for their own gain.  But to be honest?  That's the way American politics has worked since at least the 1820s.  We've gone through ups and downs, we've had presidents and legislatures press forth stuff based on their own opinion and loyalties rather than "the good of the country".  That's what happens when ambitious people become the leader of a country.  

We've been trying to get health care reform passed since Truman.  It took 100 years to get a decent Civil Rights deal passed and it still was full of holes (think of the arguments over affirmative action to this day, FIFTY YEARS LATER).  Maybe JFK really was a weak president with good speechwork (sound familiar?) that only was remembered fondly because he was assassinated mid-term.  

History is cyclical.  It always has been.  History is also full of arguments and people hating eachother.  Hell, we had a ten year argument that had to be settled with some very big compromises that nobody liked at the time just to get the Constitution signed.

Uhmmm... Actually remember that there's been an argument to repeal the Federal Tax even as is was becoming an Amendment.  And tariff arguments were always because "it hurt business interests".  There was a severe hulabaloo over TR's anti-trust stuff because it would hurt business owners.

And you're right, the filibuster wasn't used as casually.  We just had people breaking out in fistfights beating one another nearly to death with a cane over the aftereffects of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  (Brooks v. Sumner- 1856)

Though English Parliament is infamous of filibustering EVERYTHING to death particuarly in the late 1800s.  In the US HoR, there wasn't a need to filibuster in the early part of its history because there was unlimited debate till the 1840s (and you can guess which topic is probably what killed THAT rule).  And the Senate didn't even enact cloture rules till 1917.

The Senate also didn't really need to have to worry about filibusters because a) it gradually got bigger so there were always brand spanking new people to test their waters for their consituencies so they often just stayed out of the process and b) there was always the threat hanging over the minority party's heads that the majority could just "You know what? Screw filibusters."  Hell, that tactic STILL gets used to this day. (The GOP nearly snipped the filibuster process out of the whole shebang when they were still in power.  Boy wouldn't that have been ironic?)

The rules on cloture and against unlimited debate imply that they were a lot more common than we think at the time, or at least were beginning to be a problem enough to create regulation.  We see it now more often because there's two channels literally devoted to watching congress (both C-SPANs) and someone can just barf the congressional record up on the net the moment it gets published.

It's kinda like disease; we seem to be more aware of them today because news trumpets it 24/7, but in fact we're probably even healthier than after Salk introduced the polio vaccine.

And we whine about our Coalition government that's mostly just an excuse for the Lib Dems to eat humble pie and remain a club of ineffectual nice people.

I wish America had a proper three-party system. Pledging cooperation beyond the traditional party boundaries is one thing, but there's no real incentive for anybody to actually do it. I'm not saying we should fuck things up further by going all Italian on it and making it so you have to court some bunch of assholes with 11 seats total just to get the simplest shit passed, but... I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. Forming into a giant mass that always Toes the Party Line shouldn't be the winning tactic, and shouldn't be the only way to counter that tactic from your opponents.