Giving credit where blame is due

By all means, let's commemorate the job that A-list bloggers did in saddling America with a half-assed "public" "option" "plan" that ensured that Big Insurance would maintain its iron grip on health-care access and $$$.

Aetna, CIGNA, Blue Cross, and company couldn't have done it without you helping mute single-payer advocacy, substituting a placebo agenda, and letting Obama, Daschle, et al. off the hook for lying their asses off about conducting an "open and transparent process" that "considered all options." Please take a bow!

Every 1's a winner

msnbc.com home page:



Like the 1964 World's Fair, there's something for everyone in Obama's new Af-Pak spin! More war... now in less-war packaging!

This bad cop / 2%-less-evil cop routine lets Obama amp up America's national pastime, while simultaneously burnishing his Peace-Prize-winning wonderfulness. Toke on that, hippie freak!

Painted lady

Maybe they should make Sarah Palin wear a scarlet W, lest we forget her shameful womanhood.

While Obama was pledging Kumbaya with Republicans, some of us expressed our revulsion at the retrograde politics Palin and company represent. For lack of a Democratic politics that stands for anything much different, "progressives" have consistently latched onto the most pointlessly and personally demeaning ways to belittle her, with sexist put-downs as the low-hanging fruit.

Whether it's their slutty makeup or their frumpy pantsuits, those bitches do make such excellent targets.

MoveOn's latest message: if you like Heather Graham's body, you'll like "public option"

Ian Welsh: the "public option + mandate" Democrats are committing political suicide

When you put it that way, suddenly I don't feel so bad!

Anyway, I hope Ian will answer some questions I've been repeatedly apprised aren't really appropriate for polite company:

• How did “public option” become the health “reform” goal uniformly pushed by progressive opinion-leaders (e.g., A-list bloggers, MoveOn)?
• Why did these opinion-leaders fail to criticize the outright lies by Obama, Daschle, Baucus, et al. about an “open and transparent process” that “considered all options,” even though that dishonesty plainly served to protect corporate interests at the expense of Americans’ physical and economic health?
• Why did these opinion-leaders endlessly dodge the question of how many Americans would get access to the “public option”?
• Why did these opinion-leaders fail to promote the remarkable and unabashedly progressive actions taken by single-payer advocates?
• Are there systemic, cultural problems in the way consensus is formed and defended among progressive elites?

Obama To Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire

I expect that the wildfire will convince him to use half as much water as is necessary to stop the burning.

After all, to provide an ample amount of water would offend generations taught to abhor any and all government intervention (except, of course, for any and all wars, regardless of the rationale).

Religious People Are the Best People

Privileging superstition and tribal imperatives like patriarchy leads to some pretty dark behaviors. Why this is not commonly understood is simply tragic.

Five women were paraded naked, beaten and forced to eat human excrement by villagers after being branded as witches in India's Jharkhand state.

Local police said the victims were Muslim widows who had been labelled as witches by a local cleric.

The incident occurred on Sunday in a remote village in Deoghar district.

Correspondents say the abuse of women who are branded as witches is common, but rare footage of the incident has caused outrage across India.

The atheist is always wrong

The implicit meaning in this "positive atheism" stuff is that atheists are distressingly mean and are underachievers at doing good works.

Non-believers, their frame plainly tells us, need to prove they're worthy fellow-citizens to their religious betters and must stop making them feel bad about their cherished untruths.

Obama administration sells out free speech to religion

No problem. Because no one cares!

How to help those who won't help us help others who won't help us help us

DCBlogger:

If you have a Republican Senator, please write a letter to your local newspaper saying that you expect him/her to work in good faith with Obama to make things better for the country.

This is some sort of analogue to the old joke: "Hey, Doc, will I be able to play the violin after the operation?" "Sure." "That's funny, I never could before."

How could anyone, let alone a Republican Senator, interest Obama in making things better for the country?

Why I don't write (much)

Looking around what passes for a "progressive" blogosphere, I can't be moved to say much more than "puh-leeze!"

Little kabuki altars everywhere.

Now I try to be amused

Sorry, I'm finding it ever more difficult to justify a lot of time writing blog posts, given how incredibly pointless "progressive" "discourse" has become.

If I had the time and interest, I'd summarize the "moves" in this interchange with John Emerson and company at Open Left. It's pretty funny to see how one's Betters completely go off the rails when their tribal perfection is questioned in any way, shape, or form.

No matter that the path to the improved, populist politics they claim to seek is in large part gated by the truthiness and tribalism of their own clan (the progressive elites).

When push comes to shove, guess which is more important to them — real change or smugly defending the flawlessness of their clique? That's a tough one, I know.

Update: more here!

All hail the king of Fuh!

A little chapter of Apple Records I'd somehow missed until now.

I hope my health insurance covers head-on-keyboard injuries

Mike Lux at Open Left:

Take the public option. In what is either a sign we will pass health reform, or sign of the apocalypse (or maybe both for certain fundamentalist Christians), conservative Blue Dog Mike Ross and I, one of the original hard core public option advocates, actually agree on something related to the public option. Ross is now suggesting that "instead of creating an entirely new government bureaucracy to administer a public option, Medicare should be offered as a choice." I have fought like crazy for a new public health insurance option to be created for people under 65 years old, but I actually think that this idea is a very reasonable compromise: don't create a new entity, just open up the perfectly good public option we have - Medicare - to anyone who wants to buy into it. That would actually strengthen Medicare because younger, healthier people would be joining the risk pool. And it would satisfy progressives by giving some real competition to the private insurance industry.

Wow, expanding Medicare to cover everybody. What a concept!

Michael Moore: "Get off Obama's Back"

There really was a love story in Capitalism: A Love Story. In addition to being a timely if murky tract on populism, it was a love letter to both the Obama presidency and the Catholic church.

It shouldn't be a surprise, then, for Moore to utter something like this:

Thank you, Barack Obama, for giving us the opportunity to redeem ourselves.

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Elegance in blogging

As our "progressive" politics digs ever deeper into its rococo phase of rot, I'm increasingly posting items with little comment, because the brain-deadery at hand speaks for itself.

Thus it is that Dr. Violet Socks employs a certain economy of gesture.

Won't someone, anyone let Obama be clear?

He keeps saying he wants to be clear, yet who the fuck has any idea what his actual agenda is?

Perhaps he means it in the Scientology sense, in which case I can't see why we shouldn't just grant him that designation on the come, like his Veterans of Future Peace award.

Without comment

Glenn:

I'm sure there's lots of people who would take exception to the idea that authoritarians would be more likely to be attracted to Clinton, I think some people would say, the Obama campaign itself sort of resembled this in group personality cult -- that's the opposite argument -- was more likely to attract people who would find that appealing.

This is the dumbest fucking planet I've ever been on

More highly rated commentary (19 recommendations, +24 in the "tip jar") equating any disappointment in Barack Obama or any criticism of the absurd hype perennially surrounding him (most recently seen in his Nobel Participant Prize) with racism.

(via)

Without comment

Currently, one of the most popular posts on Democratic Underground, with 29 recommendations:

"He hasn't done anything to deserve the Nobel Prize" = "Who does this nig**r think he is?"

Yeah, I said it.

And they're getting madder and madder and sloppier and sloppier to the point that one of them is going to slip up and say it for real.

Making sense of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

At first, I was a little confused at how a warmongering president whose ardent defenders are quick to tell you he hasn't had time to accomplish anything yet won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Thankfully, prior winner Desmond Tutu has put it all in perspective:

It's an award coming near the beginning of the first term of office of a relatively young president that anticipatesanevn gratr onriutontoars akngou wrl asaerplacefo all," Tutu said.

I reckon that's as good an explanation as we're likely to hear.

Naturally, Obama says he's "humbled" by the award. I would expect no less.

The less things change...

... the more they're like Barack Obama.

In which I don't quite post about Roman Polanski

But Arthur does, observing how narrow and paltry is our outrage at the abuse of children (and others).

There is a sanity clause

And Chris Floyd just uttered it:

If Obama and crew actually had an agenda....

It's amazing how almost no one has noticed that he doesn't seem to have one, beyond conferring ever more status upon the status quo (not that he isn't fully committed to that).

At the dawn of the Age of Obama, I supposed this:

"What Does Obama Really Want?" (WDORW) will rightly become a national obsession.

In these tumultuous times, perhaps we should fixate less on his melanin count and more on his poker face.

Obama's described himself thusly:

I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an Oval Office.

Does recall of the late unpleasantness tell us what to expect? If you haven't been flashy-thinged by Tommy Lee Jones or memory-cleansed by Jimmy Jean-Louis, might you have a little more insight than the next generation of "no one could have anticipated" folks?

Or is William Goldman right, that "nobody knows anything"?

What, beyond the certitude that he'll fall short of Progressive Panacea, does anyone really know about what to expect from President Obama? WDORW?

My best speculation is that he wants to be a Zen-like ethereal leader for the ages, on a plane higher than the dusty heads on Rushmore. What that translates to in deeds, I simply do not know.

While I was correct that Obama has never shown any sign of standing for anything whatsoever, I failed to realize that hardly anyone would ever notice or care.

What Anglachel said

The "creative class," whose Wall-e taught a generation of young-uns that mocking fat people wasn't just fun, it was socially responsible, loves to change the subject on health reform to a referendum on po' people's eating habits.

The obsession of the well-off upper middle class with the eating habits of the barely scraping by poor is both domineering and obscene, a deep desire to force their food choices (too little for too much) onto others who have little choice, and to closely observe, weigh, measure, and manipulate the bodies of subjects unable to avoid this invasion.

Hey, it would be swell if everybody had the time, money, and inclination to look like the cast of Californication. Until that happens, how about offering them the chance to see a doctor now and again. M'kay?

If this be "great news," pray tell what "no news" is?

E-mail from MoveOn.org, with the subject line, "Great news":

Dear MoveOn member,

Great news: Senate progressives are organizing their colleagues to fight for the public health insurance option. Can you call [your senators' names here] and urge them to join in?

Right now Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Senate leaders are deciding what to include in the health care bill that goes to the Senate floor this month—and he's paying close attention to what his fellow Democratic senators are saying about it.

So Senators Sherrod Brown, Jay Rockefeller, and Russ Feingold have written a letter to Reid insisting that the bill include the public option, because it's the only way to create real competition and hold insurance companies accountable.

The Brown letter is a big opportunity to build momentum for the public health insurance option in the Senate.

Dare I believe my eyes? Are some Democratic senators actually sending a whole letter! And not just any letter, one that promotes "a/the public option," a "plan" that may possibly offer something-or-other to less than 5% of Americans sometime-or-other!

Who'd have believed such a development could occur in our lifetimes! It's not just a Brown letter day, it's a red-letter day!

What Chris Bowers said. Really.

Given his advocacy for "public option," I could snark a little about this:

If we keep suggesting fake, bullshit solutions to serious problems, then we will never get to the actual source of those serious problems and thus have no chance of solving them.

OK, I could snark a lot about it. But Chris has got a great point: whatever's ailing us, it ain't an excess of incivility.