6-0 In the 1st? Hey, Canada, We're Your Fuckin' Huckleberry!

Canada, how about you win later on so you have to play the US for gold? Then we'll bend you over on your home ice. We're the cirrhosis-laden Doc Holliday and you're broke ass Curly Bill.

Ryan Miller has a shitty haircut in this picture, but 'dem colors don't run.

P.S. While I was posting this, the score went from 3-0 to 6-0. That, my friends, is JAF. Do Not Sleep.

What Republicans Are Up To

BMR, you asked "what the fuck Republicans are doing"? It's relatively simple: They don't see any electoral benefit in supporting anything Democrats do. If bills pass, the majority gets credit for them, which helps Democrats in November. If bills don't pass and Washington is seen as ineffective, the majority party gets punished in November. So the Republicans are doing everything they can to ensure that the latter is the case.

This is exacerbated by Obama's campaign focus on bipartisanship and reforming Washington, which means he'll get extra credit from the public if he is seen as actually delivering bipartisanship. And the GOP obviously doesn't want that.

A key problem here is that the filibuster gives the minority party a means of obstructing bills that have a majority of votes and the public doesn't necessarily understand this, so the majority often still gets punished. In some ways, the Democrats' 60-vote supermajority may have made this worse, because even informed members of the public could ask "well, you guys have the votes you need, so why are you complaining?" We may have seen this effect a little bit when a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to pass the HIRE act; I'm assuming that they felt the pressure of the bill's potential failure if they didn't vote for it. The crazy thing is that, after 5 Republicans joined with Democrats in voting for cloture, THIRTEEN Republicans voted for the bill's passage. This particularly ironic screengrab from Lamar Alexander's (R-TN) website pretty much sums it up:

The HIRE Act and the "Partisan Jobs Bill" are the same thing. The ironic thing is that this bill was (1) an effort to create jobs in the worst economy in 75 years and (2) was composed almost entirely of tax cuts and credits. In other words, there was virtually no rationale for this bill not passing with massive (think 90+ votes) majorities.

In summary:

• Republicans know that helping Obama hurts them, so they're not doing it, even on bills that make a ridiculous amount of sense.
• Democrats are pussies for not passing their shit with the massive majorities they had.
• Republicans' "no-to-everything" strategy may not work anymore because they now can actually block everything, as opposed to just slowing everything down. Of course, actually voting for things also may not work because they may turn on themselves.
  

Well, well, well, Boogers Speak da Troof?

Head,

Please tell me what the fuck the Republicans are doing. Between NPR and the Daily Show, I've pieced it together, but I was hoping you could break it down in smartpeoplese.