David Kaiser. Please read the whole thing.
The enduring Republican victory
… Something even more striking is happening with regard to health care. Everyone seems to understand that we spend too much on it and can’t afford to go on at this rate. But Republicans and lobbyists seem very close to having killed the public option because [...]
From the comics section. Ruben Bolling in Salon.
Saving the country from the scourge that is Obama:
Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM
By: John L. Perry
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup [...]
Via Josh Marshall, a New Your Times/CBS News poll just out.
“Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans?”
Favor 65%
Oppose 26%
That’s a net 13% swing in favor in [...]
I suppose that this is almost too obvious to point out. Almost.
Representative John Kline Argues for Government Waste
The NYT felt the need to present at length the unanswered complaints from Representative John Kline about a bill eliminating federal subsidies for private lenders in the college student loan program. The article concludes with Mr. Kline [...]
Matt Taibbi, entertaining as usual, on Glenn Beck and his ilk.
The peasant mentality lives on in America
… This is not a simple rhetorical accomplishment. It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to [...]
This is DougJ at Balloon Juice quoting Colin Powell’s former chief-of-staff Larry Wilkerson. There’s more where this interview fragment came from.
Kook leader
Well, to keep it brief, I think the problem is that this is a national security issue, and there are so many more challenging issues — as one official put it to me the [...]
Al Franken draws a very respectable map of the fifty US states from memory [1:20 video]. No doubt, it took some practice and a degree of skill at drawing, but one can’t help but wonder how most national politicians would do at even being able to name all fifty states.
(The linked video is sped-up without [...]
It’s a reasonable guess, don’t you think, that there’s a broad intersection between the folks shouting about “death panels” and the folks who would be inclined to support the decision of Texas and its governor to execute an innocent man?
Thus The Mudflats, whose father was a WW2 POW. Here’s the end.
… I remember as a child I was not allowed to watch Hogan’s Heroes. It wasn’t a joke in my house. There was nothing funny about prisoner of war camps. There were no handsome well-fed prisoners with secret tunnels under [...]
I’ve certainly been puzzled for some weeks about all the hubbub over healthcare reform – not that it’s controversial, but that the debate and tactics have strayed so far afield. This opinion piece gives some historical perspective that helps understand, and also highlights how are much-changed media pour gasoline on the fire of the crazies [...]
Well before Mao’s “continuous revolution“, Thomas Jefferson suggested that revolutions should be, if not continuous, at least fairly regular.
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts [...]
Paul Krugman invokes Yeats today at the end of a column on the town-hall mobs.
… But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.
And if Mr. Obama [...]
About a week ago, Nate Silver posted an interesting piece on Arlen Specter’s recent voting behavior. Here’s the most interesting graph:
The key events on the timeline were the Quinnipiac poll, which shows Specter losing badly to a right-wing Republican challenger, Specter’s subsequent switch to the Democratic Party, and finally the prospect of a primary challenge [...]
A new Research 2000 poll conducted for Daily Kos, via Steve Benen.
Part 1 here
James Surowiecki: Fifty ways to kill recovery
If you came up with a list of obstacles to economic recovery in this country, it would include all the usual suspects—our still weak banking system, falling house prices, overindebted consumers, cautious companies. But here are fifty culprits you might not have thought of: the states. Federalism, often [...]
Three Vanity Fair editors have marked up Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. Here’s the first page of eleven.
Editors are your friend.
click for a bigger image
Glenn Greenwald wonders.
What if the Uighurs were Christian rather than Muslim?
According to The New York Times this morning, violent clashes between Chinese government forces and Muslim Uighurs — that country’s long-oppressed minority — have left at least 140 people dead and close to 1,000 injured. This incident in Western China highlights an important fact about America’s “War [...]
According to Politico, the publisher of the Washington Post was planning to sell access to elite government officials and its reporters and editors to lobbyists. The event is now canceled after a flier leaked offering to deliver the paper’s “health care reporting and editorial staff.” Blame fell on the marketing department for “misrepresenting” the event [...]
The great thing about procrastinating is that, much more often than not, somebody else does it for you. Better than you can.
Better than I can, anyway.
Who Are You and What Have You Done with the Paul Krugman I Used to Know?
I would have thought it impossible for Krugman to cite Robert Reich completely approvingly, [...]