A Real Democrat

Alan Grayson (D-Fl) gives a short, pointed speech on the House floor about healthcarereform:



Now that's how you do it. And Baucus, Conrad, Lincoln, Nelson, Carper, alleged Democrats who voted against the public option yesterday? I look forward to contributing to your liberal primary opponents. People who are willing to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, not spineless corporate whores. You're on notice.

Looking Forward to "Capitalism"

After watching Michael Moore demolish Wolf/Leslie Blitzer in this segment, I'm looking forward to his film:

And Now For Something Different

This artist won the 'Ukraine's Got Talent' show (who knew such a thing existed?) with this sand painting. I've never seen anything quite like it.




Telegraph (uk): Sand artist Kseniya Simonova, winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, becomes internet hit

The New Father Coughlin

This is a great video showing the true insanity of Glenn Beck. His crazy rants, shown at 2x speed. Half the time, double the crazy:



This is what all your teabagging friends are listening too. This is the person they are telling you is making sense. Whee!

The 912 Project

Didja watch the crazy march on Washington today? Whackadoodles with signs calling Obama a Communist and for the return of Joe McCarthy? Rachel Maddow deconstructs the teabaggers latest. The stoopid, it burns.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

We're #37

Today a lot of stupid people are protesting in DC against healthcare reform. Because they don't want their tax money spent on -- themselves, I guess? Just stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. I know some people who are there and while they are perfectly nice, they're not the sharpest tools in the drawer. If they have their way, we will go DOWN in healthcare ranking around the world. And right now we're number 37. This funny video tells us all the countries with better healthcare rankings than ours. I want to move to the Faroe Islands.

Never Forget

I'll never forget 9/11 or the lessons of 9/11.

The primary lesson, of course, is that who the President is matters. Whether or not the President was a good student or a C student matters. The person I vote for for President needs to be smart. The President needs to read his memos. If the CIA flies all the way to the President's vacation home to deliver an urgent memo, the President needs to take that seriously.

President Obama is annoying me mightily these days by acting as though he skipped negotiations in law school. His "fight" for healthcare seems a lot more like McClellan and a lot less like Grant. (C students, feel free to look up those Civil War generals.) But I know he's smart. And if the CIA goes to him with an urgent matter -- as they may have already -- he's not going to tell the briefer "You've covered your ass now." He won't go fishing afterwards. Obama will go to work on the problem.

So we as a nation have finally learned the lesson of 9/11. But we must never forget that having a stupid person as President can be deadly.

Tell Your Representative to Support Single Payer

Click here to fill out a form to automatically send a letter supporting Rep. Anthony Weiner's single-payer amendment to your U.S. representative.

From Physicians for a National Health Program.

Anthony Weiner Defends the Public Option - On Fox!

And now, representing the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, wearing the tan suit with a yellow tie, Jon Stewart's former roomate, New York Representative Anthony Weiner! I'll vote for this guy for President. I want someone to fight for what is right. Watch and enjoy.

Eulogy

Ted Kennedy Jr.'s powerful eulogy for his father:

Part 1:

Part 2:


Boston Globe

But today I'm simply compelled to remember Ted Kennedy as my father and my best friend. When I was 12 years old I was diagnosed with bone cancer and a few months after I lost my leg, there was a heavy snowfall over my childhood home outside of Washington D.C. My father went to the garage to get the old Flexible Flyer and asked me if I wanted to go sledding down the steep driveway. And I was trying to get used to my new artificial leg and the hill was covered with ice and snow and it wasn't easy for me to walk. And the hill was very slick and as I struggled to walk, I slipped and I fell on the ice and I started to cry and I said "I can't do this." I said, "I'll never be able to climb that hill." And he lifted me in his strong, gentle arms and said something I'll never forget. He said "I know you'll do it, there is nothing you can't do. We're going to climb that hill together, even if it takes us all day."

Sure enough, he held me around my waist and we slowly made it to the top, and, you know, at age 12 losing a leg pretty much seems like the end of the world, but as I climbed onto his back and we flew down the hill that day I knew he was right. I knew I was going to be OK. You see, my father taught me that even our most profound losses are survivable and it is what we do with that loss, our ability to transform it into a positive event, that is one of my father's greatest lessons. He taught me that nothing is impossible.

New Name for The Public Option

Teddycare.

An Appropriate Memorial to Ted Kennedy

firedoglake: Name The Public Option, Not the Bill, After Kennedy

Put Kennedy's name on a weakened bill, and you'll likely be able to break the progressive bloc in the House in two seconds flat when "the Kennedy bill" comes out of conference with the individual mandate but no public option, and progressives are faced with having to oppose "the Kennedy bill." As strong as they've been on holding firm in their demands, putting the Kennedy name on a weak bill -- and remember, nothing at all prevents this -- can only drain their resolve.

[]

With the Kennedy Health Care Plan intact in the bill, there's no reason the legislative vehicle that creates it cannot also bear his name. But while there's still a fight ahead about just what will be in this bill, if we're going to lend Ted Kennedy's name to something, let it be done in a way that keeps him in the fight to fulfill his vision right to the last, and which keeps his name on people's lips when they are finally able to take their families to the doctor without fear of financial ruin, saying, "We're covered by the Kennedy Plan."

Whip The Senate Into Supporting the Public Option

Time to get the pusillanimous Democrats off the fence and lined up to support a robust public option available on day one of the healthcare reform legislation. Please take the time to send a fax to each of these fine recipients of buckets of cash from the healthcare industry. The fax will be sent by Howard Dean's organization "Stand With Dr. Dean".

* Send a fax to Mark Begich, asking him if he supports the public option!
* Send a fax to Tom Carper, asking him if he supports the public option!
* Send a fax to Jon Tester, asking him if he supports the public option!
* Send a fax to Mark Warner, asking him if he supports the public option!
* Send a fax to Ron Wyden, asking him if he supports the public option!

I took great pleasure in faxing all of them. I'm tired of trying to get more Democrats into office. From now on it's only better Democrats. If you're not with us you're against us.

ActBlue — Standing Up For The Public Option

ActBlue — Standing Up For The Public Option

Barney Frank to WhackJob: "On What Planet Do You Spend Most of Your Time?"

Excellent job, Barney. Time for the Democrats to stop letting the fringe monopolize the discussion.

Obama: Stand Up and Fight for the Public Option

The last tough Democratic President

OpenLeft: Public Option or Primary!

Any Democrat who does not vote for a "public option" insurance plan in health care reform must be challenged in a primary. And this includes any President who does not go to the mat and fight 100% for a public option.

I'll camp out in front of Howard Dean's door for a year to get him to run for President if Obama abandons the campaign promises he made to us.

No public option, not one red cent to any Democrat who opposed the public option. It's that simple. And that includes one Barack Obama. I hope he realizes that. If he does not fight for us he is just another in the long line of corporate shills who talk a good game to get our votes then go off and vote with the money guys.

He's either with us or against us. Will the real Barack Obama please stand up?

Conservatives: Bringing the Crazy Since the 1800s

Rick Perlstein, WaPo: In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

[Rightwing anger is both crazy, and heartfelt.] If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

Read the entire piece.

Lawrence O'Donnell Needs His Own Show on MSNBC

Republican opposing "socialist" healthcare plan handed his hat by O'Donnell. Fun.

My Nominee for Post of the Year

From Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:

JANUARY 20 WAS BARACK OBAMA'S "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" DAY

His troops were valiant and he'd had a brilliant plan for taking the capital, but now we can look back to January 20, 2009, and realize that Barack Obama was naive to think major combat operations had ended. He never saw the insurgency coming. He and his people seemed to think that there simply wouldn't be that kind of factional strife after the old regime fell; they believed that, despite years of tension between the factions, it would end in an instant and the citizens of the country would immediately see themselves as united.

As the insurgency grew and began to make the country ungovernable, the Obama team and its allies downplayed it as a ragtag collection of end-timers who'd soon be irrelevant. His troops knew how to wage a traditional campaign, but hadn't given serious thought to the problem of dealing with a chaotic aftermath. When it came to the "postwar" period, Obama never really had a plan.

His forces simply have no training in this kind of warfare. Now they have to learn on the fly, and their learning curve seems to be slow. They appear to believe that the forces they're now fighting are thinking traditionally -- they can't seem to accept the fact that the enemy genuinely wants anarchy and a failed state.

How Obama deals with this insurgency will be the main test of his presidency.

Bipartisanship is a crock. I didn't vote for Charles Grassley for Congress, but Obama seems content to let that rightwing nutjob write the healthcare legislation. Get off the mat and fight Baracky or yours will be a one-term Presidency.

The Socialist Life of the Fox News Viewer

I am an American Conservative Shithead

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

This interwebs gem was originally published by Americablog.