If I said something I should apologize for, here, let me say it again

Apparently I said something the other day that upset Matt Entenza’s people. I didn’t bother to check to see what it was, but it undoubtedly stemmed from my complete mistrust of anyone who’s married to the former CEO of UHG’s Ovations, a healthcare insurance company that bled their policy holders to the point where the now retired Bill McGuire “earned” one billion dollars as their CEO.

Quam’s got an op-ed in today’s Strib on the public option, and has been pushing that button for a while now. I’m not clear if she was in charge of Evercare, but it would be nice to hear her thoughts about that UHG venture that so thoroughly screwed over seniors. (Whoops — I guess there is a connection!)

Evercare is not an easy google, but was clearly a big player in Bush’s efforts to privatize Medicare. Given that Candidate Enteza’s wife was ranked #24 on Forbes’ Most Powerful Women list a few years back, I think some straight talk from Lois Quam would be in order. After being paid to push the Medicare privatization hooey, excuse me for not trusting her sincerity on the public option.

But thanks to all of Matt’s people for taking me seriously enough to bitch about what I wrote, whatever it was. (sniff) It’s nice to know that someone reads me.

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Betty McCollum made Jane Hamsher’s list.

It’s not a good list to be on.

In other healthcare reform related news:

Texas’ Joe Barton says GOoPers will repeal healthcare reform if they retake the House

New video shows an Iowa Republican farmer/veteran ripping on Chuck Grassley over public option

Texas’ Pete Olson got booed for trying to use a private sector FAIL as an argument against the public option

Veterans’ group goes after the ridiculous Fox/GOP claim that a VA handbook is pro-euthanasia

Fetishizing death by chocolate

Romancing the stoned

Not only is Obama not promoting euthanasia, his administration is trying to kill off one of the few euthanasia orgs we’ve got

Teddy’s actual plan (way better than the crap currently on the table)

Maha draws what in retrospect is a very obvious parallel between healthcare rationing and food rationing — we’re not short on either, just short on money to pay for what’s available

ATR on Daschle (but I’m sure Tom and Lois Quam and Matt Entenza are great friends, or at least they should be)

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The Minnesota Nurses Association is HQed just off Snelling on Energy Park, maybe  a mile and half from my place. They’re the kind of union that drives serious union people to drink (more).

Jason Bauman is running for three elected positions within the MNA. If you’re a union nurse, not only could you do worse, you probably have, repeatedly.

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One of the smartest things I ever did was to stop seeing doctors. Frankly, you can get the best of what they have to offer over a beer or two. In an office setting the quality of advice goes downhill pretty quickly.

I also quit taking meds and started using vitamins and diet to address whatever health needs I thought needed to be addressed. That’s also worked out quite nicely, or at least better than the meds ever did.

Now a behavorial psychologist and a psychiatrist have teamed up to explain how depression aids in problem solving. (I’m very big into problem solving.)

Maybe not in my lifetime, but I strongly suspect we’re not too far off from the day when real experts look back on 20th Century medicine and condemn it for trying to “cure” some of our best natural coping mechanisms.

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57% of Americans would say yes to booting every member of Congress and holding new elections.

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Good luck finding any U.S. media that will explain to you that Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party was the conservative party in Sunday’s elections.

Hatoyama, the man who would be prime minister, has promised to boost welfare and socialize the country. He has said, “I want to create a horizontal society bound by human ties, not a vertically connected society of vested interests.”

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Republicans:

Ripping on Herbert Hoover for being too liberal

The myth of Karl Rove

Jenna

I guess these people must all be turncoats

Pastor Steven Anderson doubles down

Little crook ripping on bigger crooks

Lying about Van Johnson Jones

Because if there’s one thing the base can’t get enough of, it’s Mitt singing Bony Moroni(e)

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Max Sparber with the latest on the Twin Cities’ worst cops ever, and here’s a good Rubén Rosario story on the Metro Gang Task Force that I missed. Jonathan Turley with more cops gone bad,

Jeralyn has more on wrongful executions, and more from Turley, this one on how it’s impossible to rape a prostitute. (It can be done, and is done quite often. I lived with a prostitute once — don’t try this one at home — and one of her coworkers was raped. Not a very bright woman, but what was done to her was wrong and she called the cops. They laughed at her. That was 25 years ago in Des Moines, but hookers still don’t call cops because they get the same reaction. A bullshit reaction not unlike saying a professional boxer can’t be mugged, or that an investment banker can’t be swindled.)

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Honduras.

Honduras.

Lies about Honduras. (same lies as before, all already debunked but the Wall Street Journal seems to have become the print edition of Fox News)

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Teddy at Liberty University, and some unkind words from Alexander Cockburn.

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More religion:

What would Jesus really do?

PZ with a video designed to explode Bill Donohue’s head

Married in Iowa (should be a bumpersticker — the rainbow stuff is getting old)

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Business robocalls will be illegal as of tomorrow.

So is spam. Somehow I doubt my life will change, or that I’ll stop getting them. I’ve always suspected I’m on a DO CALL THESE LIBERAL FUCKERS list as I’ve no doubt but that most robocallers are Republicans.

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New LA-centric Clusterfuck Nation.

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Public art that anyone could love, as opposed to political art (that I really love).

Dragging Nixon into it

There’s been some kind of buzz that I’ve been ignoring about the deal Teddy could have cut with Nixon to get healthcare settled back in the day. Paul Krugman admits that Nixon almost sounds good, given the crappy state of the modern right.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money….

I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.

Fight the right. Fight the DLC.

And let’s have some bloody primaries next summer.

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A surprisingly pro-reform op-ed from Bob Dole in the Washington Post. Then again, I don’t think he’s talking about the kind of reform you or I would want to see enacted. [more from Digby] [see also Machine, The Republican Death]

Maybe Obama could warm up to the kind of strong arming Dole’s recommending if he first cracked down and got the federal government to obey his order that they report all contacts with lobbyists.

The Pentagon is an especially egregious violator of this order, but I’m sure they’re in a hurry to cut as many deals as possible while Obama’s new Secretary of the Army cools his heels waiting on Republican senators to confirm him. It’s mindblowing to me that this deep into Obama’s term of office he still doesn’t have half his appointees confirmed.

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Healthcare etc:

Maha on Wellstoning Ted

Steve Benen on the lying liars

Jesus loves insurance conglomerates

Mick with a cartoon so true it isn’t funny

Another unfunny cartoon

Blue Texan on the America hate

Digby on strategy and counter strategy

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How strong is Bush-Cheney thinking in the military? The VA is refusing benefits to a Marine who was seriously messed up by a smallpox vaccination the military all but insisted he get.

Obama would do well to investigate garbage like this, then stake out the responsible bureaucrats for the press vultures to pick clean.

Bureaucrats fear exposure. Confronted with the possibility of losing their pension and becoming an object of public scorn, they start standing up to the bullying of political appointees. No consequences; no fight.

Obama needs to put the fear of Obama into the ranks of our bureaucrats, most of whom still shit themselves when they hear Cheney’s name mentioned.

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More shitfits on the horizon: the FBI’s investigating a Bible study group.

And with damned good cause. Likewise with the Secret Service’s meeting with Pastor Steven Anderson.

More law and disorder:

Some people fight back after cops kill a teen (just not in America)

Appeals Court upholds $100 million verdict against FBI for a massive frame job

Taser death in L.A.

Woman surrenders, on her knees with hands up when tasered

How white collar crimes destroy our economy

Stanford was all Ponzi from the start

More Republican thugs

Charlie Rangel: unindicted felon

Cop arrested in Memphis coke ring bust

Illinois busts State Police reserve officer for drug running and weapons dealing

Speeder cop cripples teenager, no sobriety test, no charges

Colorado medical marijuana users evicted from federal housing

Argentina legalizes personal possession

Hit and run Fail

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It’s looking like Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was in fact given a compassionate release in exchange for oil rights in Libya.

The UK is fucked. The only politicians that can deal with both the people and the oligarchs are so weak-kneed as to be worthless as leaders. They’re ripe for a fascist demagogue, mark my words.

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Sarah Palin is going to Hong Kong.

I cannot begin to imagine what they’re paying her to speak to the CLSA Investors forum, but the fact that she “will follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Alan Greenspan” doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

More on governor-quitter Palin from TBogg.

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Virginia Heffernan on the fading Facebook scene.

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More on the rave reception Katherine Kersten’s latest slut-fighting post is getting from Spotty,

More on religion and moralizing:

Stealing babies for rich Christians

CEO worship

Penn & Teller v Pope Natzinger (video from PZ — long, but very enjoyable)

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Republicans behaving badly:

Digby on the Villagers being coopted by the right

Neiwert on Beck

Tenthers go after the federal highway system

Still waiting to see the complete passenger list

Pawlenty smears while McElroy touts

Three-quarters geographically illiterate

Brodkorb’s mini donut boycott

Still borked, still getting over it

Glenn W. Smith, trying to talk everyone down off the ledge

Bill Moyers, dirty fucking hippy

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Leftover links:

The Management Myth

Obama and Katrina

More on Katrina

Music industry fucking up

Rendon contract terminated

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After about 40 in-town miles, I’m coming to appreciate just how big the Park Avenue is. I’ve yet to find a parking spot with more than six inches to spare on either side, and the gas gauge moves visibly when you accelerate.

Otoh, it’s a quiet ride with room enough in the trunk for half a truck load of supplies.

Science vs emotionalism, economic justice vs gun-toting feudalism

A tale of two whatever it is that the Strib calls Katherine Kersten and Nick Coleman now. Not columnists . . . bloggers? Whatever, their “columns” today make for an interesting contrast in polemics.

Coleman writes about Tim Pawlenty’s betrayal of Will Steger over global warming. Steger says Pawlenty was doing the right things until ambition overtook him and he began pandering to the Republican’s Christianist base. Gospel-fed prudes who padlock their knees together whenever science comes a knocking.

Kersten writes about how colleges are secular hotbeds dedicated to deflowering virgins. Put more rationally, colleges are places where young people are free to make their own choices, and some are overwhelmed by that freedom and immediately withdraw from social activities because they’re not ready to interact with people who hold different views about life.

Coleman writes about how our planet is changing in predictable ways measured by good science, Kersten writes about how terrible people are for not seeing the world exactly as she does. Coleman writes about facts and climatology, Kersten writes about feelings and touchy feelie polls.

Both are paid the same but I would argue that in Coleman’s case he earns his pay, while Kersten is getting wingnut welfare. Yes, she pulls in the ad impressions, but so would a page three topless 20-year-old co-ed. Some columnists get read, others get gawked at. Click her link to read this week’s train wreck of scattered emotional baggage and frantic finger pointing.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, it turns out that it’s national let’s talk about campus promiscuity week in wingnuttia. Katherine Kersten, always pushing the meme.

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The real outrage in the Strib this Sunday is Lora Pabst’s story about a woman who passed out in a Target and woke up on an ambulance to billsville.

Something like Kerra Cameron’s experience happened to me once, and I’d now rather die unnecessarily than surrender myself to our hospital fascists again. This farm kid has been to slaughterhouses and I understand how the ER works. You enter in through the chute, and chances are you won’t come out again.

Why in a free society aren’t we allowed to wear medallions that say: DO NOT CALL AN AMBULANCE!

Nick Kristof on Until Medical Bills Do Us Part

Bill Bradley on passing health care reform

Antidepressant sales climbing

Ezra Klein on the doubletalk

Terry Schiavo’s father passes at age 71 from heart failure. Rehabilitation efforts are ongoing.

LeRoy Carhart, M.D.

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Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan just kicked the old guard’s ass in elections today. The Japanese voted for change, including higher minimum wage, less temporary work and more real jobs.

Let’s hope they get what they want. We could all use some of that.

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These conservatives today are heartless. They are really heartless.

And they make very bad jokes, too.

Always have.

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How extraordinary rendition works.

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Teddy’s last words, as read by Cardinal McCarrick at Arlington Cemetery.

I want you to know, your Holiness, that in my nearly 50 years of elective office I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I’ve opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States Senator.

I also want you to know that even though I am ill, I am committed to do everything I can to get access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life. I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and will continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national policy that guarantees health care for everyone.

The funeral

Each step of the honor guard brought new pangs, the steps to the basilica were like volleys from a graveside ceremony.

Layers of ritual smothered by family and friends.

Thankfully the CBS hacks shut up for the most part once the service began.

John Culver, grief lining his face as he worked his way through the family using an old man’s cane with his other hand on the pews, a former Marine captain showing his age.

George W. Bush, standing at a 45° angle from the other presidents, rocking back and forth autistically.

The fussy way in which Victoria Reggie Kennedy unfolded the “Paul” that replaced the American flag in covering the coffin for the funeral ceremony.

The slightly lurching walk of Patrick Kennedy as he helped bring his father’s coffin to the front of the basilica.

A non sequitur memory of going to my car to give Teddy Jr. a lift to his hotel in ’80, and then slowing down as I noticed his hop-step as he tried to keep up with his union ride followed by an artless apology from me that referenced his leg and which elicited a Kennedyesque laugh from the one-legged oldest son of Teddy.

The brothers faces revealed in various way in the faces of the younger Kennedys.

Hearing ‘clunker’ notes in Yo-Yo Ma’s performance and knowing this is live, and not Obama’s inauguration.

Obama showing grief and proving that he would have made a great Vice President.

The haunted eyes of the Vice President contrasted with the eye-rolling boredom of George W. Bush, seated behind Biden.

The Eucharist, more astonishingly pagan to me with each passing year of Christlessness, balanced by my appreciation that I retained the teachings and not the trappings of religion.

Grief highlighting the widow’s Lebanese features and Maronite eyes.

Ritual as empty in its profundity as any Mormon flapdoodle of more recent manufacture.

A deeper appreciation for family.

An awkward kiss between the widow and the First Lady (who turned her head to receive when she should have given — I’ve been sensitive to this issue ever since Ethel Kennedy turned her cheek to me in Spencer, Iowa, one night in 1980, and the moment almost passed before I realized what was expected of me).

Victoria Reggie Kennedy, now composed, eyes darting back and forth as she monitors the proceedings as a choir sings.

The whiteness of the basilica’s interior, the weight of history.

Ave Maria. I hope whoever’s sitting next to Bush keeps nudging him back awake.

Watching the rotating CBS logo as the camera angle superimposes it over Kennedy’s coffin.

Ted Kennedy Jr. now reminds me more of a tall Al Franken than of his father.

Ted Jr. eliciting a sad, wry smile from Biden, a lopsided fierce grin from George W.

“I know you can do it….we’re going to climb that hill together, even if it takes all day.”

David Hasselhoff. God help me, Teddy Jr. looks like David Hasselhoff.

Bill Clinton, appreciating the Civil War story, Hillary Clinton drinking in the moment.

Teddy Jr.’s joke about Republicans, the camera showing a real smile on Biden, a “ha. ha.” smile from Bush.

A hurt look from Orrin Hatch who I don’t think appreciated John McCain getting a mention.

Patrick, more eager to please, more human, more personal. Definitely a politician.

It’s staggering to think of how many millions watching today also saw Jack’s funeral. I cannot recall Bobby’s although he was also buried on a Saturday. I suspect my 15-year-old self was working in the fields.

More emotion from the President than I would have expected. That gives me hope.

A fleeting look of genuine contrition on W’s face as Obama speaks. Today’s events could prove to be an opportunity for him to turn his life around, letting the right say he was a Kennedy all along.

The sudden, almost unimaginable thought, that maybe the light Fair traffic is because people stayed home this morning to watch this service.

In profile, Ethel Kennedy looks a bit like Joe Lieberman. Yes, Obama’s running a bit long.

I’ll never accept applause in a church. It’s unLutheran.

More men in white dresses now. If I outlive my mother, there’ll be none of that at my service.

I don’t recall seeing a single nun today.

Waving the incense over the coffin, because for most of the history of the church dead bodies smelled bad. Now it’s just the incense that stinks.

The curious way in which the Irish brogue has slowly become more full of itself than it could ever be in Ireland, a nation humbled by circumstance and the British.

Turning the coffin around. I assume you go in and out head first but if it were me I’d be getting a little car sick.

Traffic is still very light. Not Vikings playing a big game light, but for the first Saturday of the new Fair? Amazingly light.

America the Beautiful is a lousy organ tune.

Raining in Boston, blue skies here, but a certain sadness everywhere. I told my restaurant client this morning that for me, this is Princess Di’s funeral.

Bob Schieffer emphasizing the word “flaws” before drawing on the redemptive aspects of Teddy’s legacy.

More Kennedys, more of the brothers reflected in faces that make me thankful this dynasty is drawing to a close.

Amazing, really, how easy it is to sort the Kennedys from their spouses.

A private burial service at Arlington. Recognition of his service in the Senate, not his two years as an Army private.

A life that defined who I am politically, initially in opposition to, for a while in exploitation of, and over recent decades in admiration of.

My support for Kennedy in ’80 was opportunistic. I did not see him as a likely President, only as our best shot at deposing Jimmy Carter. Once Carter was out of the way, I expected to jump to another candidate much as those a bit older than me went from Bobby to McGovern or McCarthy.

Seeing the Kennedys in action had an impact on me. If you were a part of what they were about, you were one of them. By the time the Iowa caucuses rolled around in 1980, I was in it for Ted for the long haul. It was a very short ride. I remember buttonholing Tom Miller, our state campaign chair and the Iowa Attorney General and insisting to him that we could undo our caucus night loss at the county conventions, that Carter’s support was soft.

Tom, to his credit, did not whack me up side the head as I would do if one of my nephews babbled similar nonsense to me now. Ted got his ass kicked, but not because his family wasn’t there for him. The hangers on were too many, rivaled only by the opportunists climbing aboard and the McGovernites fucking up everything in between.

Most would have kicked back and settled in for the long haul after losing to an unpopular president. Teddy did not. His personal and public growth since then is tribute to the strength of family, and how the children of flinty pricks like Joe Kennedy can go on to change the world. Just don’t expect much from the grandkids.

For of those to whom much is given, much is required.

A debt honored and paid many times over.

Rest in peace, Edward Moore Kennedy.

Saying goodbye to Teddy

If there is one state where government bureaucrats are harried and overworked, it’s tax-starved California. It now appears that Phillip Garrido kept an 11-year-old girl in his backyard for 18 years because the appropriate authorities were understaffed and never had time to check him out properly.

Because it sucks to pay taxes, shit happens. The more that comes out about this case, the more obvious it was that Garrido should have been a suspect from day one, he should have been caught by his parole officer, and he should have been caught when neighbors called in sightings of children in the backyard.

Tax-hating Californians didn’t abduct and rape Jaycee Dugard, but they sure as hell are responsible for her living 18 years of Stockholm syndrome hell.

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Major media keeps trying to figure out why Americans aren’t spending their money.

Talk about Stockholm syndrome. I guess if you sell ads for a living, you really can’t see what’s wrong with having a consumer-driven economy.

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Fred Hiatt calls for a Souter-O’Connor Commission to look at torture.

The establishment really has no clue how dangerous real conservatives are, or how quickly Souter would shoulder O’Connor aside to get to the truth, truth Fred Hiatt would rather see buried, as would O’Connor.

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Damn but the coffee tastes good this morning. Accidentally got just the right grind and coffee to water ratio, and the French roast has a subtle nutty taste. Makes up for waking up to Charlotte Moorman, a composer from the Fluxus school who sounds like Karlheinz Stockhausen would if Stockhausen had died of breast cancer.

Tried to record a bit of it for your edification, but discovered that my copy of Wiretap wouldn’t work with the new operating system (registration snafu).

Count this as one of your luckier days. A drone piece by Maryanne Amarcher came up next, and throbbing insects do sound much more ambient after sour strings and klanging percussion.

Left a comment at the WaPost on Mac security and people who hate “their” as a singular non-genderized pronoun, but I took took long composing my comment and two others slipped in between me and jamshark70.

Thanks to 10.6 giving screenshots unique names, these images will now have boring names when you mouse over them, instead of the little easter yeggs I used to use. Except, of course, when I have to rename the file and then yeggs it will be.

Fair traffic is still light (the farmers came through with feed, bedding and more animals earlier this morning). I’m sure Snelling is a living hell right now.

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Nothing has to be the way it is.

A few minutes before the seventh-inning stretch, a man in a Derek Jeter jersey seeking a snack made a comment to his 13-year-old son that might sound absurd in most baseball stadiums.

“I’m more of a nectarine person than a peach person,” said the man, Tony Vecchio, a 42-year-old New Jersey firefighter.

Mr. Vecchio and his son were standing in a wide corridor inside the new Yankee Stadium, around the corner from concessions selling 1,341-calorie Nathan’s cheese fries for $7.25, 500-calorie Nathan’s footlong beef hot dogs for $6.75 and 290-calorie Budweisers for $10. They had stumbled upon a fruit stand: green and red apples, pears, bananas, oranges, nectarines and peaches, each $1.50.

Mr. Vecchio bought two nectarines for himself and a $5.50 pineapple cup for his son, Anthony. “It’s a great idea,” Mr. Vecchio said. “I started a diet with my wife yesterday.”

The new stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets have been quietly offering fans an unlikely concept in ballpark cuisine: fresh produce.

Sometimes things can be the way they should be. The article goes on to imply that this was a private sector decision, and not one forced on the Yankees (or Mets) by city negotiators during stadium planning meetings.

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More Kennedy links:

Bob Herbert

Post-Kennedy liberalism

Boston says goodbye

Photos

For me, at least, the stories aren’t getting tiresome, although I’m sure wingnuts can’t say as much (how often can you read about Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick, Bork, Chappaquiddick, Bork and Chappaquiddick?).

From every perspective Ted Kennedy and his family are the stuff of Greek tragedies. The future I assumed I’d be living in was one that was premised on a continuation of LBJ’s policies. I never once dreamt that we’d actually win (I was a Republican back then), or that winning would mean that the Republicans would surrender their values to race-baiting, poverty-embracing, xenophobic Dixiecans.

The more extreme religion gets, the more bitterly agnostic the marketplace becomes. The more Dixified our Republicans, the more vicious and predatory our society becomes. The more castrated the Democrats, the more acquiescent our government to the depradations of a frankenstein right stitched together from the corpses of John Birch, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.

Focus on Teddy’s shortcomings if you like, but I’ll cling to the highlights reel because I don’t have anything to replace it with and because the best in Teddy Kennedy’s life reflects the best of America accomplished in my lifetime.

I’m celebrating Teddy Kennedy’s life today. The mourners are the Republicans who’ve flogged Teddy’s foibles throughout his public life. They’ve lost their top fundraiser with Teddy’s passing. Hillary Clinton is no Ted Kennedy, and that’s why the right worked so hard to hang Vince Foster’s suicide around her neck.

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Hatch, Grassley, Snowe . . . any number of Republican Senators have had the chance to become their party’s Ted Kennedy, and all chose time and again to acquiesce to their base instead. Leaders lead, followers follow.

Liberals and progressives are better people for having had Ted Kennedy’s leadership and exemplary activism. How fucked would we be if Teddy had instead catered to us, picking up on every liberal fad, every progressive jihad?

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Charles Blow on how the erosion of trust in government allows the lying liars to sway the arguments from what’s best for us to bullshit in general (if you don’t trust government, why live in a country that has one?).

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The ever helpful Washington Post asks some “experts” to tell Obama how he can regain his political footing.

No link as the experts are Scott Keeter, Michael S. Berman, Newt Gingrich, Donna Brazile, Robert J. Blendon, Christine Todd Whitman, Dan Schnur, Ed Rogers, Harold Ford Jr. and Ed Gillespie.

If you think any of them have anything to say you need to hear, you’re reading the wrong blog.

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I’d be having sea bass on a stick for breakfast this morning, but I don’t have any sticks and I ate all the sea bass last night.

A politically incorrect gift that tasted wonderful. Buttery, satisfying fish flesh. No wonder they’re being fished into extinction.

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Finally thought to check the outside temp. 54°? No wonder it seems chilly in here.

Obviously there is no global warming and we need more coal-fired power plants STAT!

And congratulations to NPR for realizing how significant it is that Teddy Kennedy is being buried on Michael Jackson’s birthday.

Teddy tunes

No clue what Teddy Kennedy actually listened to, but I think this set is safe for old people. I doubt very much any of these are the playlist for the Basilica.

Thirty songs coming in at just under two hours. 164MB, Rapidshare as usual. Scroll down, click free, and wait for the countdown to start your download.

Hypercourtesy, or Mn nice gone bad

Snow Leopard showed up about 11:30, so I spent my lunch hour watching the mini upgrade itself. Or rather I fixed lunch, watched State Fair traffic and bemoaned the continued decline of common sense among Minnesota motorists while the mini upgrade itself to 64-bit technology most of my software can’t use.

Minnesota nice has achieved a devolutionary point wherein I suspect the state’s population will begin to decline as the number of Darwin awards to Minnesota residents continues to climb. The latest imbecility comes from drivers who, after painfully working their way through the intersection, immediately throw on the brakes to allow right turning traffic from the east onto northbound Raymond. Without the slightest regard or seeming awareness of the two cars they’re usually leaving stranded in the intersection thanks to their irrational compulsion to FUCK UP TRAFFIC THROUGH MORONIC HYPERCOURTESIES.

I exaggerate not. I’ve been watching them do this over and over and over again. It’s not the turning traffic forcing its way onto Raymond, it’s Minnesota nice drivers yielding what is not theirs to yield.

You cannot yield right of way! You should be shot for evening thinking about it. And the same idiots gridlock Raymond and Energy Park with their hypercourtesies then slow down to “create space” between them and the car in front of them, a car that is also not moving. A space that would allow the poor schmuck stranded in the intersection to get the fuck out of the intersection.

I’d normally fault the stranded motorist but all too often they can see the space ahead of them. Their only error is in not realizing the car in front of them is about to prove how nice they are by breaking the law and waving someone into traffic in front of them.

Horns are being used with greater frequency this year. Horns are a primary reason why I don’t own a gun. If I did, I would have used it several times already today.

It’s called park and ride. I’m sure park and ride offends the Republicans among us as some kind of socialized transportation, but it beats getting shot at by a local resident driven mad by the idiot drivers clogging our streets.

I’m thinking maybe idiots on a stick. Pull the worst of the horn honkers and MinnNicers from their vehicles and impale them on big sticks set into the parking. I think that in no time routes so lined would become a favorite with Fair goers, especially those on Park’n'Ride buses.

If you think Raymond’s your family’s secret backdoor route into the Fair, think again.

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Seed art at the Fair gets political, and in ways you’ll probably appreciate.

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Traffic all over Midway is cocked up. Forget about right turn on red until after Labor Day because outstate Minnesota doesn’t just come for the Fair, they come to shop and sightsee. And, of course, there are hordes of “clever” drivers who know to avoid the freeways and clog our streets instead.

Yes, it causes some traffic jams, but since they’re on vacation it’s all good. For them, that is.

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Family and friends, James Bond movies with butter crunch ice cream. Ted’s final days were as good as it gets.

Even the bottom feeding Chamber of Commerce is holding a $7.5 million ad buy until after the funeral. Why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would oppose legislation that would save their members money, I don’t know. I think the Chamber represents business owners like the AMA represents doctors.

More praise from John Cole for the Democratic farm system that was Teddy’s Senate staff, and more insults from Wolf Blitzer.

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Ezra Klein says Chuck Grassley isn’t getting mau maued by his talk radio listening townhallers so much as he’s getting beaten up by his peers in the Senate Republican caucus.

The fewer of them they are, the crazier they get.

[Obama Brown and Chuck van Pelt courtesy of Koski (not sure who he got it from)]

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Mark Penn is still a bottom feeder, but at least he’s found a happy home with the Wall Street Journal thank to their now being owned by the world’s biggest bottom feeder.

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Florida’s biggest bottom feeder.

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DougJ:

I just don’t buy the idea that Obama is likely to lose in 2012, regardless of what approval ratings say, with all due respect to the Tim Pawlenty juggernaut.

I hope you recognize sarcasm when you see it.

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Kids are eating better now in part because they’re learning how to do their own lobbying.

I’d hate to be the poor marketing bastards who try to sell anything to this new generation.

And I’d hate to be a Republican candidate being pushed further to the right even as the American people continue to move to the left. To the left of Congress, to the left of the President, to the left just about everyone except Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich.

Via a reader, here’s Randall Terry doing some “gorilla” theater:

And here’s a fairly unbalanced Iowan mouthing off to Chuck Grassley:

Eisenhower is hard to make out, and once he’s spoken his piece the rest is just mostly Grassley bloviating. Call the President a Hitler, and talk about going to DC with a gun and rural Iowans will applaud you. If you’d said that about Nixon when I was young you’d have been beaten to a pulp by the same seniors who were applauding Eisenhower’s senior moment.

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E&P picks up on David Brauer’s Strib coverage.

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From a D.C. source, a .pdf of the FEC’s decision on the Alliance for a Better Minnesota complaint about Norm’s fast and loose money handling.

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In other news from yesteryear, Bernie Goldberg tries to polish George W. Bush’s war record.

It’s not even very good spin.

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Had to do an emergency Chinese warehouse run before finishing this post up. The quality of driving out there is frightening. Cluelessness mixed in equal parts with reckless angry drivers trying to make up for lost time.

I’m still stunned by all the cars I saw piggybacking on four-way stops. It appears locals have had it with the slack-brained Fair goers who shut their noggins off when they leave home and don’t turn them back on again until they return.

My earlier “kidding” aside, I would not be surprised if we experience some serious road rage incidents on the main Fair arteries this year.

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Bernard Chazelle on Lester Young.

Music tonight. A set I’d like to think Teddy would have enjoyed.

Bachmann’s townhall

I give my neighbors plenty of space, but I always make it a point to have a clue as to who they are. I don’t think there’s any way I could live next to someone for 18 years and not figure out they were holding a child, now woman and mother, against her will.

An incredible story out of Placerville, California, of an abducted child finally returned to her family.

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Michele Bachmann didn’t really hold a townhall in Lake Elmo last night. It was more as if she presided over what flew over the loon’s nest. Like talk radio come to life, Bachmann spouted crazy talk while some constituents cheered and others jeered.

How do you debate a crazy woman? According to Bachmann last night every provision to empower the consumers will be controlled by the government. Every last one. Panels of doctors? Those doctors will be picked by the government. Abusive insurance companies? Just pick a better policy. WTF?

Does it ever occur to Bachmann that she’s part of the government?

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Brian Dockstader has a great mini-movie on healthcare

Pro Publica on the post-Katrina triage at Memorial Medical Center

Tedicare!

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The New York Times calls Cedar Rapids the “forgotten disaster.”

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The Times finally mentions the filibuster threat as something other than just something that’s always been there.

Like the nation itself, [the Senate] has become coarser, more partisan and, many scholars and politicians argue, more dysfunctional. As both parties have moved to their ideological extremes, the center is all but gone.

“When Kennedy came, both political parties in the Senate were internally divided,” said Don Ritchie, the associate Senate historian. “There were as many Eisenhower Republicans as Goldwater Republicans. There were more liberal Democrats but a sizable number of conservative Democrats. There was never a party line vote on anything. There were ideological coalitions rather than partisan coalitions.”

One measure of that partisanship is the rise of the filibuster, once a rarity that was reserved for the great legislative debates of the day. Today, rare is the bill that does not face a filibuster threat. In 1963, Mr. Kennedy’s first full year in the Senate, the leaders filed just one “cloture motion,” Senate parlance for the procedure that can end a filibuster by cutting off debate. Last year, 50 cloture motions were filed.

I was disappointed a while back to read an explanation of why rules changes now make it impossible to stop filibusters. For one thing, the rules say you filibuster in the morning, then do Senate business in the afternoon. No Mr. Smith Goes to Washington about it, 41 Senators can halt any bill they choose to obstruct.

When you add up their constituents, you find these small state Senators represent only a fraction of the American people, but nearly all of its corporations.

Figure out a solution to that, and then you still have a judiciary appointed overwhelmingly by Republican presidents.

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With Ted dead, will Hillary regret taking State?

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Too big just got bigger.

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The Vatican is investigating U.S. nuns who, apparently, are getting uppity.

I don’t expect the Catholic church to survive this century, at least not in any recognizable form. The prejudices of history are, in this case, untenable. The Catholic church, like many others, was created to consolidate power in the hands of a few men.

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More Ted:

Harold Meyerson on the Irish in American politics.

Kos: Kennedy hasn’t even had his funeral yet, and conservatives are already whining about it.

Conservative bloggers are angry at an imaginary Ted Kennedy funeral in their heads. It would seem odd for Kennedy’s family, friends, and colleagues to arrange his actual funeral to appease conservatives, but if they do not, conservative bloggers might go after health care reform.

Bush Sr. won’t be at Teddy’s funeral. Animosity towards the Kennedys possibly, but I’m guessing he just doesn’t want to be seen with his son.

Toons

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HOUSTON, Aug. 27 — Texas financier R. Allen Stanford, jailed on charges of bilking investors out of $7 billion, was hospitalized Thursday with an irregular heartbeat and high pulse, just hours before his former finance chief became the first person to plead guilty in the case.

Stanford was set to appear in a Houston federal courtroom for a hearing on whether he can get a new attorney. His current lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, has asked for permission to quit the case because he doesn’t have assurances that he will be paid.

Justice does that to some people.

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It appears that fan cans are irritating colleges nationwide.

Some schools are even saying upfront it’s about trademark infringement.

I hope this is the straw that breaks the NCAA’s back. You can’t fight for branding rights when you don’t pay your “workers.” School colors are all about sports, and it’s past time the NCAA plantation system was abolished.

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Slope-browed, drooling assholes outside my window keep hitting their car horns. They can see the light change, but they can’t see the backed up traffic on the other side of the intersection. The same morons who hit their horns every year because they can’t remember from one Fair to the next how backed up traffic gets.

I hate people who use their horns for anything but the avoidance of imminent death, and would not mind seeing legislation that would make death imminent for gratuitous honkers.

More on the Fair from Dusty, a Democratic guv debate, and some food on a stick you won’t get at the Fair.

Bachmann embraces LaRouche talking points

Paul Demko on the gang strike force scandal.

It takes a biased local media to NOT lead with this story every day and in every newscast. For Minnesota this is much bigger news than Teddy’s passing.

Much bigger, and vastly more significant. We’ve been engaged in a war on the underclass, and no one bothered to tell most of us about it, especially the so-called news media.

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Freedom of religion? When do we get freedom from religion?

And a big surprise: a gun-toting townhall protester turns out to be one of the gay-bashing pastor’s parishioners.

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Machiavelli on why mercenaries suck.

It’s ironic that the Mayberry Machiavellis were so ignorant of what the master actually wrote.’

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Maybe the bad pennies in the DOJ are being kept on until they get done burying all the scandals….

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If picking up a fallen warrior’s banner is exploitation, history is nothing but one big P.R. scam. David Waldman has a better idea, btw: name the public option after Teddy, not the bill. As DarkSyde says, healthcare without a public option would be another Hindenburg.

As for corporate America, sometimes I think they work in mysterious ways. If this rumor from Josh Marshall is accurate, expect insured Americans to suddenly develop a much greater interest in the public option.

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A mental exercise for you: Which Americans who are alive today will occasion eulogies and media attention like Ted Kennedy has?

Speaking for myself, I can’t think of any living politician I feel a connection to, or deep admiration for — certainly no one of national prominence. Plenty of villains, but they grow smaller over time.

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More on the thuggery at Jim Moran’s townhall.

Talk of a “great white hope” from Kansas. I shit you not.

And count on Michele Bachmann to drag things down to her level by claiming that “Democrats” are calling Obama a Hitler. Using Bachmann’s reasoning that LaRouchies are Democrats because they say so, I should declare myself to be a Republican so like-minded Dems can quote me to equal effect: “Republican blogger calls Bachmann a mindless twit!”

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A. Feingold and Kucinich.

Read Paul Schmelzer for the question.

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Factchecking Cokie Roberts, circa 2006.

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Sara Robinson on fascism, part III:

No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There’s no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that’s so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy — who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves.

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Tim Fernholz:

If the latest budget projections are keeping you up at night, the best way to ease your troubled mind is to support health-care reform. Otherwise, costs will keep rising, and deficits along with them. Opportunities to improve health care only come along once in a while — the last major effort was 15 years ago. Fifteen years from now, it’s possible that nearly one-quarter of every dollar spent in the U.S. will be spent on health care — much of that coming, directly or indirectly, from the government. That sounds fiscally responsible, doesn’t it?

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Mark Schmitt on The Lion of the Senate.

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Listening to Media Blitz Radio last night I heard a Jello Biafra rant. Then this morning I saw that today’s vintage TCB post from April 22, 2003, cited Jello as the Quote of the Day:

Quote of the day

“The worst form of censorship in this country now is not Tipper Gore or Jerry Falwell or John Ashcroft or even the recently deposed Kansas State Board of Education. It’s the deliberate omission of important, facts and issues from the mass media (that) most people believe is telling them the truth. Forget Fox News, CNN and NPR might as well be stenographers for the Pentagon at this point. Maybe we should give them cheerleading uniforms.”

– Jello Biafra

It’s really sad how little things change, but in this case the media’s gotten worse, not better. Lies in support of a war are defensible to some, but how could anyone ever justify parroting lies about healthcare insurance?

For some truth, see Digby on Henry Waxman’s upcoming hearings.

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Nothing particularly new on torture in this Rob Levine post, but I like the way he says it.

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More from Mary Jo Kopechne, this from the equally unforgiving hard left.

Tristero has a great point: Stopping Robert Bork was Teddy’s finest hour. Hate Scalia? Imagine the Supremes with Bork driving the ideology.

Jane Hamsher has video of Teddy’s ’68 speech in Alaska on King’s assassination. Even in real time as a Republican high school student in Iowa, I could tell that Ted Kennedy’s critics were usually out of bounds. His passion, his insights, his belief in the goodness of humanity was always on display from his earliest years to his final days in the Senate.

Ted Kennedy understood the minimum wage in a way no other Democrat seems to. I especially appreciate how he would lose his temper when confronted by fraudulent opposition hiding behind the petticoats of pettifoggery and the faux concerns of big business’s stalwarts.

Via Spotty, Obsidian Wings on Teddy, and from WINston smITh, a dead parrot analogy. Al Franken pledges to carry on the fight.

Thanks to Big Tent Democrat for this link to Jack Newfield’s 2002 bio of The Senate’s Fighting Liberal. I read it while listening to Teddy’s Alaska speech, and they went together well. As I finished the fifth page Kennedy’s speech ended and the applause began. As well it should.

Now that Teddy’s gone, I feel much less attachment to the Democratic party as, from where I sit, it’s now the party of Amy Klobuchar and Matt Entenza, Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha.

Being better than the Republicans isn’t reason enough to support a party that can’t pass a public option.

If a public option is not passed this fall, I’ll be severing all ties with organized politics once and for all. I stopped watching broadcast news because I hate being lied to, and I won’t stick with a party that lies and then whines about why they had to lie even after receiving the gift of an opposition party best categorized as having special needs.

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Driving the “new” Buick Park Avenue is a trip, but I’m sure the joy of good wheels will wear off the first time I have to fill’er up. That’s the price you pay for a big trunk, but a big trunk was #1 on my needs list.

The absolute best thing about the Park Ave? It has a cassette slot so I can keep using the same CD mp3 player. I’ll have to plan some road trips so as to get the full benefit of the new wheels.

Sumpthin’

Slept in. Woke up on time, heard the fair traffic and pulled the covers back up over my head.

Then when I did get up but before I had my coffee, I was challenged to name my fifty favorite bands I’ve seen live. As it turns out, I have seen fifty bands live (but just barely):

Art Ensemble of Chicago
ATOY
Bachman Turner Overdrive… Read More
BB King
Big Sky
Buddy Guy
Clarence Gatemouth Brown
David Byrne
Eek a Mouse
Fela Kuti
Foghat
Frank Zappa
General Public
Grateful Dead
Greg Brown
Ides of March
Itals
Its a Beautiful Day
James Blood Ulmer
Kronos Quartet
Little Green Men
Machete
Manu Dibango
Mason Profitt
Mighty Mofos
Moody Blues
Pat Boone
Patricia Barber
Phil Collins
Pink Floyd
Rural
Scott “Mateo” Davies
Shangoya
Sly & The Family Stone (this could have been my 1st concert)
Stiv Bator and the Dead Boys
Sunny Ade
Talking Heads
Tequilla Jazz
Tetes Noire
The Bad Plus
The Bangles
The Beach Boys
The Commodores (maybe the 1st band I saw, they opened for the Jackson 5)
The Jackson 5
The Ramones
Thomas Mapfume
Violent Femmes
Waylon Jennings
Wayne Kramer
Wilco

I assume your list would vary but if not, PLEASE STOP STALKING ME!

I’m also thinking there should be a lot more jazz on that list, and definitely more rock bands.

Bonnie Raitt. I’ll be thinking of people I left off all day.

MDC. Willie and the Bumblebees. The Clones. The Beveragemen.

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Speaking of geezers and their hobbies, more on organ harvesting in New Jersey. Tons of information and disinformation out there on this topic and I don’t know this source but I think it may be one that has been fairly or unfairly labeled as agitprop.

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Another gang of criminals who’ll go free thanks to the Bushies’ curious inability to operate within the bounds of the law.

As with Ted Stevens, I think there’s a good chance this one was bungled on purpose.

Prosecutors may appeal to the Supremes, but if not 100 high profile druggies will never end up in court.

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The NYTimes editorial eulogy for Teddy starts with Mudd and ends with the mantra. No mention of the years in Tibet studying under Ras al Ghul….

I didn’t learn anything from the Times, but it’s an adequate summary for people who didn’t really pay attention to all that this Kennedy did. At any rate, not quite as offensive as the WaPost’s mega-columnist coverage: GWill (smarmily respectful to Teddy, shamefully delving into cheap shots at all his siblings but Eunice), EJDionne (hagiographic yet personal), Richard Cohen (dives into the failed ’80 campaign and then works to reduce Kennedy to just another man).

Random typography, but a screenshot from the front page summarizes Cohen’s contribution quite well:

Further down the page the bit players the Post plugs (much like the Strib and KKersten) all slipped knives of various shapes and sizes into Teddy’s legacy, and the ChiTrib’s lustful John Kass even went so far as to dig up Mary Jo Kopechne. Natterings from negativistic nabobs, churlishness from haters, hate from churls.

If you define a man by his enemies, maybe Teddy wasn’t the greatest Kennedy after all. For all the talk of his ability to work with Republicans, his passing has provided further proof that you when you work with swine, the stink follows you home.

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McCain gets townhalled.

The base really, really doesn’t like him. I’m not a fan of McCain’s, but if only he’d learn to stick his little finger up their ass and wiggle it around like Sarah and Huck do, he’d be much, much more popular with them.

Republicans don’t want policy or history lessons, they want red meat and lies and they don’t like it when you don’t give them exactly that.

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Why does it take a national newspaper threatening bad P.R. before private sector debt collectors back off?

Legislation to criminalize this behavior would do much to restore civility in a country that’s more about debt collection than jobs creation.

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Everyone to pay more taxes in California, even the folks who got nothing to give.

I could balance their budget.

1. Audit the bejeezus out of every movie studio, and hit them with crippling fines for criminal bookkeeping offenses

2. Legalize marijuana and subject it to a 20% sin tax.

3. Jack up tax rates on the wealthy, and change the law so that anyone with a residence valued at more than a quarter million dollars is defined as a resident (this would lead to more affordable housing as the mobile rich would be forced to rent, not own).

4. Slap annual fees on all non-commercial vehicles that weigh more than a Ford Explorer. Very high annual fees.

I honestly think that’s all it would take. Raising sales taxes and fees will just bankrupt more of the little folks who are already suffering enough.

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The Kennedys and the Culvers.

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More nattering nabobs.

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Good question.

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Mike Barnicle on the brother with the loudest laugh.