The Wall Street Journal: Democrats Jones, Smith sworn in as senators

There will be no Dalton McGuinty moment — that’s the incoming Liberal government’s intent. But making this stick will call for toughness, patience and a willingness to disappoint. It also requires that the current residents of the unelected Senate be shown their place by the elected House of Commons, in a round of “chicken.”

By Ryan Powers Both the Hill and Roll Call have accounts today of an apparently testy exchange between Obama and Sen. Corker at a lunchtime, closed-door meeting yesterday:

OTTAWA — As a modernization committee debates the future of the Senate with no conclusion in sight, the leader of the Senate Liberals argued Wednesday that senators shouldn’t be discouraged from banding together along partisan lines.

Authorities in northern New Jersey say a body found this week in a river is that of a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had been missing for more than a year. Morris County Prosecutor Fredric Knapp announced Thursday that the body was positively identified as that of David Bird, who was 55 when he disappeared in January 2014 while taking a walk near his home in Long Hill Township.

Yves here. Although Bill Black’s post starts with how the Republicans have linked their attacks on the IRS to a broad-brush effort to depict any and all government oversight as an evil plot to destroy the profitability of upstanding businesses, he includes how the Clinton-Gore “Reinvent Government” initiative set out to cripple the IRS, and how that has hurt enforcement generally.

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Back in January 2014, freshly anointed Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau sent shockwaves through the Red Chamber when he announced that, effective immediately, the 32 senators who had previously sat alongside as members of the Liberal caucus would no longer be considered part of the family. This was not, he stressed, as punishment, but as an “immediate remedy” to the partisanship and patronage that had rendered it effectively incapable of fulfilling its primary duty.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog, Please don't claim anything changes if one party or the other is in the majority. Anyone clinging to that fantasy is delusional. If you really think it matters which political party controls the U.S. Senate, please answer these questions. Don't worry, they're not that difficult: