Why you should be reading Ezra Klein :

Washington, DC: So do you think a constitutional amendment that gives more senators to larger states (from a range of 2 to, say, 8) would be feasible? I believe that is how it works in Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat. It would leave the system pretty much intact but a bit more realistic.

(While we are at it we could scrap the electoral college too.)

Ezra Klein: Not feasible. But still totally necessary. Hell, if it were up to, I’d abolish the Senate totally. It’s an insane institution. No one has ever convincingly explained to my why it is important for the country to give a Wyoming resident more political power than a New Yorker. I get why we made that compromise originally.I don’t see why we’ve kept it.

Of course, the answer is that smaller, more conservative states are the “real” America.

The United States Senate is our national shame. It was founded on the elitist notion that a people’s house would be subject to passions that the “upper” house would need to calm. Ironically, rather than be the intellectual bedrock that the founders envisioned, the Senate has evolved into an institutional roadblock which elevates the voices of the ignorant and makes a joke of the notion that anyone would ever consider this country a true representative democracy.

As long as a deep blue state like California only gets two Senators to represent its 36 million residents (vs. blood-red Wyonng who gets an equal number of senators for its half million residents), I don’t think it’s enough to have Democratic Senators like Dianne Feinstein who brag that complaints from the left “doesn’t move [her] one whit”. When it comes to counting votes for progressive legislation, I want a crazy-ass liberal who make Dennis Kucinich look like Barry Goldwater. Somebody whose liberal bona fides are so golden, no one would ever think to question whether or not they’d support a reasonably progressive agenda.

I’m getting really sick of sitting on the sidelines while people die because there are too many tiny state idiots in the Senate who actually believe their own bullshit (taxation is socialism, global warming is a myth, stem cell research is murder, etc.) . Even worse, the best our side can come us with is a bunch of more-or-less tenured cynics who dare not try to accomplish anything significant because they’ve been around so long they realize “the way Washington works” is to not do any work at all.

This goes far beyond right and left. I’m perfectly willing to have a reasonable debate and try to come to a consensus. Taxing emissions vs. cap and trade? A public option vs. a non-profit co-op? Cool, let’s find out the basics on where we agree and hash out the details on the rest. That’s the way things are supposed to work, but it’s increasingly hard to stay optimistic when it becomes ever clearer that “their” side isn’t bargaining in good faith and “our” side doesn’t share my values.

But, hey, there’s another election next year. Maybe THEN we’ll get something done.

NPR’s On the Media this week features a discussion with NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard about their news department’s refusal to refer to waterboarding and other — what’s the word? Oh, yes — torture techniques as torture. I urge you to listen to the segment, in which host Bob Garfield rightly poses an utterly logical case for using the word torture, using question after question for which Shepard has absolutely no satisfying answer. The following is the full text of a comment I left, edited for length because there’s some sort of foolishness about using fewer than 2,000 characters in comments. It outlines the case that basically anyone with an ounce of sense and half as much courage would make.

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During this week’s discussion of whether or not NPR should use the word torture when referring to waterboarding, Ms. Shepard stated more than once that it was not up to her or to NPR to define what is and is not torture. This is quite correct. In the process, she also mentioned enraged people e-mailing her demanding to know why abortion doctors aren’t called murderers on the air, though she did not follow that up with an explanation.

The answer is the same in both cases: Abortion doctors are not referred to as murderers because the legality of performing is not in question, nor is the proper terminology for referring to them. In other words, it has been determined by our nation’s legal authority that abortion doctors are not murderers. (more…)