Yesterday Dennis Kucinich announced he was reversing his position on health care reform and would now vote for the bill. And today Talking Points Memo reports that is also actively urging other wavering House members to join him:
A few hours after Rep. Dennis Kucinich switched his support to become a critical vote for the health care bill, he took to the House floor to ask wavering colleagues to join him. Astonished colleagues pointed to Kucinich (D-OH) darting from member to member on the House floor yesterday, saying privately they’d never seen him get so involved in whipping a vote.
It’s not just progressives he’s targeting to keep in the fold, it’s everyone, a top Democratic aide told me. Members know that Kucinich - a staunch antiwar liberal long in favor of a single-payer system and often going out on a limb with his own agenda - is setting aside deep ideology to help get something passed. “It’s a totally new dynamic. People are realizing he’s doing it for history,” the aide said.
Wingnutstan has a new hero—Fox News correspondent Bret Baier, who possibly set a record for most interruptions by a reporter during an interview with President Obama that was broadcast last night. NRO’s Seth Liebsohn’s description of the interview captures the general rapture on the right:
Bret Baier just concluded the single best interview of President Obama in a year, by any reporter… It was a model of how not to be cowed by a strong and charismatic leader and a model of a truly independent anchor/reporter. President Obama knew he didn’t have Bret at the very end when his last effort at victimhood was to sarcastically hang his head to the side in response to Bret’s saying he didn’t mean to interrupt, as if Bret were being insincere—which he wasn’t.
Now, I don’t believe reporters are required to be deferential to presidents and other powerful leaders; they should ask hard-hitting questions. However, it is a good idea to let interviewees, you know, answer the fooking questions they’re asked. Baier fails that test spectacularly, interrupting and talking over his interviewee like Tweety Matthews on crack and gushing GOP talking points like a demented Gipper geyser.
But, hey, maybe that’s just Baier’s style: Maybe when he interviewed former president Bush, Baier approached the conversation from the perspective of Nancy Pelosi and talked over Bush to insert Democratic Party perspectives at every opportunity. Let’s compare the two interviews, shall we?
Inquisition vs. tongue bath. Yep, that’s fair and balanced alright.
And the third time was just the other day. An acquaintance who is much younger than myself and progressive, whose dad had been very much a political activist. By this time I pointed wearily but confidently at the arm band, grateful she was asking. I looked her in the eye and instead of being skittish and apologetically overtalking it as I had on the first day I had worn it, I simply said, “I have been wearing this since last May. It started out because of the torture. But I added on the wars and now health care.”
She looked at me not with an understanding I expected, but what seemed a bit of reined in “get the net” disdain and quietly but deliberately moved away. End of conversation. I felt disappointment and confusion. My chronic confusion, actually, as to why the amorality of my government is not being seriously challenged by more people in my immediate life network.
Now, I am sure my black arm band is gossip fodder at the office. Or maybe that is narcissistic of me. Sadly, my clique of those truly politically outraged at her government, at the workplace, has one lone member, me. It is eerie to me that it seems like an “eccentricity” that is too troubling for people to address with me. Though I am sure it is sending out some quiet truth ripples.
If “quiet truth ripples” (*must not chortle*) makes you feel better about the consistently averted gazes and unrelenting hum of muffled snickering in your “immediate life network,” well, goddammit, quiet truth ripples it is!
Cincinnati hate-radio host Bill Cunningham—the tongue that licks the toilet seat of Rush Limbaugh’s Port-O-Pee—just declared on his national Sunday night Drudge-replacement broadcast that the one and only true, perfect shoo-in Conservative candidate for President in 2012 is Sean Hannity.
No media yet, since the show is live. However, you may remember Bill as the human slime John McCain rebuked for humping the “Hussein” Obama slur at a McQueeg primary rally in 2008.
In the immortal words of Was/Not Was, “Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks.” These loons don’t know anymore which side of the donut hole to screw.
I was totally happy to see this piece by Paul Krugman in the NY Times today. It’s been driving me crazy to hear Rethugs repeat these lying talking points over and over.
Myth Number 1: Obamacare will result in a government takeover of 1/6 of the U.S. Economy
Myth Buster from Krugman:
Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.
The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?
Myth Number 2: Obamacare will do nothing to control costs.
Myth Buster from Krugman:
[C]ritics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.
Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.
As this race unfolds, the winning coalition for us is clearer and clearer. There are three demographic variables that explain almost all of the voters in the primary—gender, party, and income. Race is a factor as well, but we are fighting hard to neutralize it.
We are the candidate of people with needs.
We win women, lower classes, and Democrats (about 3 to 1 in our favor).
Obama wins men, upper class, and independents (about 2 to 1 in his favor).
Edwards draws from these groups as well.
Our winning strategy builds from a base of women, builds on top of that a lower and middle class constituency, and seeks to minimize his advantages with the high class democrats.
If we double perform with WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS, then we have about 55% of the voters.
The reason the Invisible Americans is so powerful is that it speaks to exactly how you can be a champion for those in needs [sic]. He may be the JFK in the race, but you are the Bobby.
Quelle surprise!
Too bad Lambert wasn’t an Obot. A much more skilled operator like Axelrove would have been manipulating him by remote control to terrorize Hillary’s angel-like supporters by the time the Iowa caucuses rolled around. Thug 4 Life!
Palin propagandist John Ziegler warns that unless God Himself sends a golden chariot drawn by legions of cherubs to elevate Sarah Palin to the presidency, she is toast should she choose to disregard his advice and run in 2012:
[B]arring a literal act of God, there is absolutely no chance that Palin can beat Obama in 2012.
[snip]
[T]here is no doubt that her celebrity power keeps her theoretically viable to do literally anything she wants, except the problem here is that huge portions of public believe, wrongly, that they already know the real Sarah Palin… [A]re Republicans really going to run against an over-hyped, inexperienced, charismatic celebrity by nominating someone who is already thought of exactly that way by at least half of America?
Glenn Beck made a big deal out of landing an exclusive, hour-long one-on-one with outraged, seething, ready-to-go-Krakatoa Dem Congressman Eric Massa. Malkin and Limbaugh both warned him that interviewing Massa was likely to be the “Al Capone’s Vault” of misbegotten on-air scoops, but Beck predictably followed his gut straight into this year’s Christmas party reel of TV’s Queasiest Moments.
I haven’t screened the entire show, but this clip is guaranteed to make you feel like Emily Litella watching a live performance of “Who’s On First?” featuring Bob Dole and the ghost of Brother Theodore. The other segments can be viewed here.
From the comments on the Freeper live-thread, I get the feeling Beck was as bored as his audience by the end. Bored—but, surprisingly enough, not to tears.
Fulfilling his bloggy mission, Zandar points out the stupid in this wingnut-prØn poll, which finds that, according to Americans, the US has lost international standing during the Obama administration:
What a ridiculous poll. If you want to know how the US is perceived internationally by non-Americans, why are you asking Americans?
Good question, Zandar. As it turns out, Gallup released a poll last month that actually did gauge non-American perceptions of American leadership and presents data from 2006-2009:
Everyone knows squishy, effete, elitist Kenyan lawyer Barack Obama is just longing to coddle America’s enemies! Unlike Dick Cheney, who once shot an old lawyer in the face (it was just Dick’s manner of saying, “Outta my way, motherfucker!”), Obama wants to serve terrorists glasses of warm, halal milk, read them Koranic bedtime stories and tuck them into comfy featherbeds with extra-soft pillows.
But damn it all, whenever secret Muslim Obama tries to deliver engraved invitations to Islamic terrorists to please come dine on pork-free goodies on the East Lawn, he keeps accidentally blowingthesumbitchesup with Hellfire missiles! It’s all a horrible, horrible misunderstanding.
Dan Riehl’s by-God had enough of getting elitist, America-hating arugula jammed down his throat. From now on, it’s Leafy Green Spinach, or Death.
Granted, the Right doesn’t have much to celebrate lately. Their leaders seem silly, obtuse, feckless and prone to spontaneous performances of Comic Opera on the public stage. Warring bloggers, dueling Tea Parties and freelance IEDs like Palin and Beck have unleashed Open-Source Lunacy on a 4th Generation political battlefield where Republican message-control is proving increasingly vulnerable to “Black Swans” and systempunkt attacks.
With contrarian surreality, wingnut blogs announce that the never-before-thus-unified Right is inexorably “in the Ascendant.” Conservative pundits claim Obama is “finished” and the Democrats are “committing suicide.” The Hill is alive with vows to “recapture Congress” and “take back the Country.” Nonetheless, the USS Usurper steams blithely ahead, intent on reaching its destination and indifferent to the Conservative howl that “reconciliation” is a legislative equivalent of the Black Mass, with Orc-eyed Obama presiding over a blasphemous procedural peversion where Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi dance widdershins whilst reciting the Constitution backwards.
On a cinematic scale of vengeance-spawning insults, last week’s tableau of senior Congressional Republicans seated in a Kindergarten-desk semicircle as Prof. Obama distributed juice boxes, Fruit Roll-Ups and stern upbraids rivals Capt. Kirk’s stranding of Ricardo Montalban on Ceti Aplha V. But it’s the prospect of reconciliation that finally has Conservatives channeling Ahab.
