Sen. Rand Paul Is Still Filibustering the Brennan Confirmation

As the New York Times reports, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been speaking on the Senate floor since before noon in an effort to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor and nominee to lead the CIA. Watch the filibuster live on C-SPAN here. In the course of his speech, Paul has admitted that his filibuster is meant to raise the public profile of the targeted-killing debate and that it has no chance of ultimately succeeding in preventing Brennan from being confirmed. To his credit, he has not yet begun to read from the Joy of Cooking or the phone book, but the night is still young. And proving once again that the mainstream media sometimes really is “lamestream” (to quote Sarah Palin wildly out of context), some news outlets (and Paul’s own office) have taken to calling his action a “filiblizzard.” This is of course an execrable pun on the current “snowstorm” that’s dusting Washington, D.C. (what we up in Boston call a nice spring day). And don’t even get me started on the portmanteau monstrosity (portmanstrosity?) that is the “snowquester.” Awful, just awful.