We Are In Agreement

Seniors' Vehement Opposition to Public Healthcare is the most persuasive argument for it

Ezra Klein

But taken as a whole, the attitudes seniors express on health care are arguably the greatest vote of confidence anyone has offered reform. Seniors live in America's version of Canada. They have single-payer health care. And they love it. They love it so much that they've got the chairman of the RNC swearing to protect it.

Ugh

TPM

Chris Broughton, the man who brought an assault rifle and a handgun to the Obama event in Arizona last week, attended a fiery anti-Obama sermon the day before the event, in which Pastor Steven Anderson said he was going to "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell", Anderson confirmed to TPMmuckraker today.

Crap!

Anderson also said Broughton had informed the pastor about his planned show of arms-bearing, but "he planned out the AR15 thing long before he heard that sermon," delivered Sunday August 16 at the fundamentalist Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, AZ.

Oh, sweet. Nevermind.

Clintons wait ELEVEN HOURS to release statement on Kennedy passing

Scandal!

Amid the steady stream of statements mourning Ted Kennedy's death this morning, several political observers have noted that two are missing: Bill and Hillary Clintons'.

The Clintons parted on bitter terms with Ted Kennedy in January of 2008. The Clintons and Kennedys were old friends. Hillary Clinton and, particularly, her husband sought the endorsement intensely, with a barrage of calls that went on after Kennedy had made his choice. They saw the power of his endorsement, and their senior aides believed that he cost Clinton the nomination.

Very coy, Ben. Which "senior aides?" Mark Penn?

If they release something immediately, they're grandstanding, too late, and it's evidence of a bitter split.

Ben Smith: the Goldilocks of right wing bloggers.

This is very exciting

Dan Savage is one of the most consistently entertaining writers currently in syndication.

Savage Love adapted for HBO

Why do we need to come to an "understanding" on evolution?

This is rich

Evolution isn't a dispute over the greatest point guard, or Haggar v. Roth (v. Cherone?), it's a dispute over the fossil record. Which is to say, a dispute over the indisputable.

From the op-ed

Sure, Lewis said, evolution could have rendered humans capable of nice behavior; we have affiliative impulses — a herding instinct, as he put it — like other animals. But, he added, evolution couldn’t explain why humans would judge nice behavior “good” and mean behavior “bad” — why we intuitively apprehend “the moral law” and feel guilty when we’ve broken it.

Hilarious.

We apprehend and apply moral law out of convenience. We stopped arbitrarily hacking each others heads off not because we felt guilty about it, but because arbitrarily hacking people's heads off isn't a sound way to run a municipality.

We live in a nation of laws because it protects property and equity, not because we have some deep moral guidance preventing us from doing so.

Or at least that's what stops me from doing it.

Glenn Beck being coy

Research topic: Can Obama be compared to Khmer Rouge in batshit segment using grainy footage, skulls, and split-screen comparison between inaugural address and climactic scene from The Killing Fields?

Answer: yes.

The father in this audio has makes every Scorsese villain sound like Ponyo

Craptacular

AUSTIN — Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks.

I wonder if Fox News will weigh in on this one

DES MOINES, Iowa - The Des Moines Regional Transit Authority has suspended a driver who refused to drive a bus bearing an ad for an atheist group.

[...]

Shiel says the message is against her Christian faith.

Good thing she's suspended, she'll need the free time to appear on Huckabee.

This is such bullshit

The American Prospect

Contrary to some overwrought reactions on the left, if a public insurance option fails to make it into this year's health-care legislation, it does not spell the end of worthwhile reform.

[...]

Because the public option has stood no realistic chance of being enacted in the form it was conceived, its main value all along this year has been as a bargaining chip.

I though the single payer option was the bargaining chip. Why didn't we start there? This is like losing but celebrating when you cover the spread.

[...]

The Republicans have focused their opposition on the bugaboo of "government-run health care." By jettisoning the public plan, swing Democratic senators can tell their constituents that they prevented a government takeover. This argument will not sway die-hard right-wing voters, but it may suffice for many others and thereby help give those senators confidence they can vote for the bill.

Why couldn't we have decided on a coherent message that told people that the public option wasn't a fucking government take-over in the first place?

In addition, unlike traditional Medicare, which benefits from being the default option for the elderly, the new public plan would have to advertise to compete effectively. So the differential in administrative costs between the public option and private insurers would be much less in the exchanges than the comparisons of Medicare and private insurers in the current market suggest.

Really? A public insurance option and private insurance would have similar operating costs due to advertising considerations?

Really??

What about bunch of signs that read:

Enroll in the new Public Option: It's Cheap, Comprehensive and You Can't Be Denied Coverage

Color suggestions: Black, White.

Throw in a talking chihuahua if it blows your skirt up.