Friday

Are you being persecuted because of your faith?  Because claiming you are persecuted is cool and makes people bond together against the bad guys and give money to churches and stuff.

We knew this when it happened.  It was obvious to those who could watch the news and think for themselves.  Bush and Cheney knew a lot more than they shared with us about Bin Laden and 9/11.  So when's the war crimes tribunal?

Jupiter saves Earth ... again.

If You Plan On Ever Getting Old And/Or Sick, You Need To See This

When the buffaloes roamed the prairies... and then when they didn't.

Should women be criminalized for having abortions?  Are we that close to losing the right to choose?  On the edge.

Scott Walker has a goon squad because 8x11 1/2 signs are a threat.  And being a mayor means you can do what you want.

Elizabeth Warren:



Rachel Maddow:  (sorry for the ads)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

OMG!!

Grenades!

Wild leopard attacks!!

Colorado burns!

The bomb in Obama's health care explodes!!

Ancient mammals as big as cars!

But none of this matters because we are cooking ourselves right off the planet.



Sorry about that.

Weird, wise and wonderful... and simply stupid

21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

Dog

The dangers of privatizing things that governments do.

Solar cell breakthrough taps previously unused energy source

11 Bizarrely Wrong Beliefs Americans Have About Themselves

Throwing trash into a volcano as an experiment. I'd be freaked out.





11 facts about the Affordable Care Act

Krugman:

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them. And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.

Standing up for logic and reason

Missouri tries to pass a 'Right to Pray' act that sneaks in a part about kids being able to refuse to be taught about evolution and science.  Death threats to the woman reporter who wrote the expose.

Teaching people not to smoke:



A simple explanation of how 'Obamacare' works.

Birth control pills work.

Protecting our bees.

History is one damn thing after another....

And if you're not paying attention you ca... arrrghhhh



Antarctic ice shelf has shrunk by 85 % since 1995.  So stop exhaling!  It's all that carbon dioxide!

One kid saved by Obamacare.

So what is your opinion of protecting pedophiles then?

Yum yum... arsenic in chicken!

Vikings being maligned in movies.  Vikings having fun.

Dinosaurs were fluffy.  We've been looking at them nude all these years....

Obamacare has impacted hospitals in a good way

Chris Hayes has the info.

It looks like Newt Gingrich is as faithful to his words as he is to his wives.

Quote of the day from this article:

Kama Sutra for policy wonks: Newt Gingrich takes multiple positions on Medicare repeal.

Blog sprinkles

Friggatriskaidekaphobia!

War on reproductive rights. What Health Reform means for women.

"Non-toxic" chemicals that can kill you

10 Worst States To Be a Woman

Defining Natural Born for the last time

Eight facts and three thoughts about Social Security by Ezra Klein

The Information Sage: Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.

Full meltdown

Perspective on Chomsky

Why Ayn Rand and Her Legion of Followers Are Hopelessly Wrong

The universe.

Welcome to the party, pal!

Ask any House Republican about repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law, and you’ll get the same fiery, self-assured talking points about tearing down what Speaker John Boehner has called a “monstrosity.”

But talk to some of the 16 freshman lawmakers who have declined their government health benefits, and you’ll hear a different side of the story — about tough out-of-pocket expenses, pre-existing conditions and support for health reforms that would help those who struggle with their coverage. As they venture into the free market for health insurance, these lawmakers — many of whom swept into office fueled by tea party anger over the health care law — are facing monthly premiums of $1,200 and fears of double-digit rate hikes.

What on earth do you think we've been yelling about for years?

Facts are difficult things to silence

ARMAGEDONNNN!!11!1

Or not...

Headlines

Sometimes earlier technology is better:

Rare Austin which stood in garage for 50 years discovered... and starts first time!

Try not to piss off your crazy armed-to-the-teeth base!:

In the Wake of Arrests in Three States, Right-Wingers Rush to Defend Terror Suspects, Criticize FBI

In one word: No. In three: PLEASE GOD, NO!:

Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?'

Frank Rich tries to explain the fever pitch of hysteria:

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

In one word: Yes. In elventy: WTF, just do it! We're drying up and blowing away here!:

Can Wastewater Save California's Parched Farmland?

The destruction of the ocean habitats continues:

Mysterious whale die-off is largest on record

When in doubt... take off clothes:

Man cites boredom after arrest on streaking charge

Remember when President Kennedy had to reassure the nation

That his Catholicism would not affect his ability to be president? (my bold):

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe.

Thank you, President Kennedy. Now look at who had the attention of Rep. Stupak:

Doerflinger has a lengthy title—he's the associate director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. But he's better understood simply as the point man on abortion issues for the most powerful institution in the US Catholic Church. Most people have never heard of him. However, Doerflinger helped write the Stupak amendment in the House bill that placed tight restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion. He amplified spurious charges that the Senate bill would use government money to fund abortions. Doerflinger fought to the bitter end for the Stupak amendment to be included in the final legislation—even after Stupak himself had abandoned the fight. By refusing to compromise on what was, in the end, a minor difference between the House and Senate bills, Doerflinger—the man behind the curtain of the abortion imbroglio—very nearly killed health care reform.

Which America do you want to live in?

I'm so sorry my neglected and abused pit bull ate your kid

That doesn't reflect on me now, does it?:

Tea Partiers and others on the right are starting to distance themselves from the recent spate of violence and racism that has characterized the opposition to health-care reform.

In a letter to President Obama and Congress released yesterday, an alliance of Florida Tea Party groups called the Tea Party movement "a peaceful movement" and declared that they "stand in stark opposition to any person using derogatory characterizations, threats of violence, or disparaging terms toward members of Congress or the President."

A similar coalition in Colorado -- where the office of Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO) recently notified police about a phone call it received threatening violence -- released a similar statement. "Tea party and similar groups across Colorado are saddened tonight to hear of threats made upon Democratic lawmakers in response to the passing their recent health insurance reform legislation, specifically ... Rep. Betsy Markey," it said.

And FreedomWorks, the Washington grassroots lobbying group that has helped co-ordinate Tea Party events put out a statement declaring "political violence is both immoral and ineffective, and will only set the movement back."

Apparently you guys haven't been paying attention to what you've been encouraging, egging on, inciting. We sure have.

I fully expect teabaggers and wingnuts to go into a tizzy of mock surprise when an elected official is shot at. But it would be really interesting to watch the reaction if such a despicable action was aimed at a Republican.

Pit bulls often turn on their own family.

*edited to fix quote

Update: Digby nails it:

They know that serious violence is very likely. They are simply inoculating themselves against the charge that it was their inflammatory rhetoric that caused it. It will be the Democrats complaining about their inflammatory rhetoric that made the teabaggers snap. If they'd just stayed quiet and not made daddy mad, he wouldn't have had to hit them.

The only thing these people should be doing is calming down their crazies. Instead they're ginning them up. Heckuva job.

Update 4/1/10: Kelly Kleiman of the blog The Reality Based Community touches on this very thing: Health care reform politics and Kristallnacht 2010.

Holding their breath and turning blue

Do we reward tantrums?

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly: (my bold)

In terms of messaging, though, I think Ezra has the right idea:

I could imagine a lot of smart ways to begin obstructing the chamber and making life miserable for Democrats. But declaring that you won't work after 2 p.m? Do Republicans really think the average American is going to rally to that battle cry?

If Senate Dems want to see Republicans scramble, they'd run with this one. Have the leadership hold a press conference and announce, "We're stunned that Republicans won't let the Senate function after 2 p.m. American workers don't the option to just stop working at 2 because he or she feels like it, and there's no reason their Republican senators should just call it a day after lunch. Republicans have gone from the party that only says "no" to the party that's too lazy to say anything at all."

Look, Democrats. We're helping you here. Expose this tantrum for the idiotic behavior it is.

Blog sprinkles

Sailor at SteveAudio tracks the Media's weird tilt to the right.

Biden at the top of his game:



What you can do with a bunch of kids.

I thought Bryan had found the worst webcam ever with the cheese webcam, but these might actually be the most boring webcams EVER.

Teachers having to think about murderers and killers as they practice lockdowns.

Skinheads sentenced to work in Holocaust museum. Good idea, hope it works.

So we finally passed a health care bill... NEXT.

And just so you know:

The following Democrats voted against the House's effort to pass the Senate health care bill: Adler, Altmire, Arcuri, Barrow, Berry, Boren, Boucher, Bright, Chandler, Childers, A.Davis, L.Davis, C.Edwards, Herseth Sandlin, Holden, Kissell, Kratovil, Lipinski, Lynch, Marshall, Matheson, McIntyre, McMahon, Melancon, Minnick, Nye, Peterson, Ross, Shuler, Skelton, Space, Tanner, Taylor, Teague

Help vote Stupak out of office. (Btw, Stupak backwards is kaputs....) And oh, my... they are turning on him already. Update 3/23: REALLY turning on him!

What ever has happened to Riverbend of Baghdad Burning? Does anyone know?

Sadly, this is true.

"....these [health insurance] companies they profit by denying health care, not providing health care." Marcia Angell to Bill Moyers.

Would Health Care Reform Help You?

A post by Barbara O'Brien of Mahablog:

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with peritoneal mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.
— Barbara O’Brien
March 4, 2010

Republicans embrace teh stupid

Cantor: We need ‘to get people more uninsured’

Read all of Tom of Inverse Square Blog. I've stolen his beginning sentences:

The GOP War On Knowledge…or how the skids are being greased for America’s decline and fall.

I’ve got a backlog of stupid and dangerous ideas and claims out there I want to blog about — one of the nice things about being a self-selected watchdog for duplicity and useful ignorance on the web means I’ll never lack for targets — but I want to highlight a theme that links a lot of what I’m raging about these days.

That would be the escalation in the Republican and right wing’s Thirty Years War on the idea of knowledge and the significance of expertise in public life. You can see it everywhere these days, and I’ll be blogging over the next several days about the latest forays in this from all the usual suspects in this, from the incomparable (and I don’t mean in a good way) George Will, to that genial tribute to mediocrity in high places, David Brooks.

Those tw0 — and many others — share this particular incoherence: they stake their claim to authority through an assertion of a peculiar kind of expertise, in particular, the ability to interpret technical knowledge and to divine social patterns, while at the same time decrying the authority of the more specialized skills that produce facts and interpretations with which they disagree.

More simply: no one knows anything except me.

Actually, Republicans think everyone should have their mental difficulties:

Orrin Hatch Thinks You're Stupid

At the very least, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) thinks the readers of his op-ed piece in the Washington Post that takes the Democrats to task for "misusing" the rules of the Senate don't remember that the Republicans have used reconciliation more often than the Democrats and that as far back as 1982 it was used to pass major pieces of legislation like COBRA, CHIP, and more recently, the Bush tax cuts.

In fact.... the Republicans are COUNTING on the fact you're stupid:

PUTTING A 'PREMIUM' ON THE TRUTH.... At last week's health care reform summit hosted by the White House, there was a key and contentious point that came up very early on. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) argued, in the Republicans' opening statement, that the CBO found that health care premiums would go up under the Democrats' proposal. President Obama said that was incorrect, and explained why.

Over the course of the next seven hours, Republicans kept repeating the same claim, ad nauseum, even after Obama had explained why the talking point was wrong.

Several major media outlets looked into this -- it was, after all, one of the bigger areas of debate -- and the independent fact-checks concluded that the president was right, and Alexander and his GOP cohorts were wrong.

And since the fact-checking, what have Republicans done? They've repeated the exact same claim as if it hadn't been corrected.

Fact-checking the lies.

Reconciliation will not be used to pass health reform

That's already been done, fer gawd's sake!

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly: (my bold)

The whole discussion seems badly off-track. Democrats and other proponents of health care reform have invested so much energy in questioning the merit of the GOP argument -- pointing to all the other times reconciliation has been used, for example -- that they forget to question the premise.

Whether Grassley and his cohorts realize it or not, let's emphasize what the NYT did not mention: reconciliation would not be used to pass health care reform in the Senate. The Senate has already approved health care reform, with 60 votes, through an entirely conventional process. The next time the Senate votes on a reform-related measure, it's very likely to a small budget fix -- not the huge legislative package -- after reform is already finished.

The Democratic arguments in response to Republican complaints are plentiful and accurate, but ultimately irrelevant. The GOP is arguing that it would be outrageous to pass health care reform through reconciliation, but no one is recommending passing health care reform through reconciliation. The other talking points don't much matter when the premise of the Republican argument is proven to be inexorably flawed.