it may come as a shock to you, but i hate the 24-hour news cycle

As a proud liberal/progressive/fascistcommiewhosupportscrazysocialistthingslikepeoplebeinghealthy, it's always easy for me to say that the discourse in this country is full of crap and then point to Fox News as an example. But really, they aren't the only ones. This was actually on TV:



CNN, a news network, was fact-checking Saturday Night Live, a comedy show. I find it odd they they take the time to bring in non-partisan fact-checkers when a comedy show runs with what an emerging perception of the President is, but go ahead and just rebroadcast and debate talking points like "death panels" as if they were somehow valid.

I get that CNN has 24 hours to fill. I get that they're being spanked by more sensationalist and less news-oriented competitors. So they want to jazz it up a little bit. I even understand that what's happening with the political sketches on SNL is usually a pretty good indicator of what's resonating with the American people. I'll even support a little analysis in the 24-hour period about what those sketches may mean in terms of where public opinion is. CNN is still in the business of attracting viewers.

Still, I'd rather you interview a fact checker when an elected official makes a baseless claim about what health care reform is and then let Screamy McOpinion and Yelly McViewpoint go after each other about whether or not the cold opening on SNL is indicative of the actual job President Obama is doing.

When you do it this way around though, you're holding comedy shows to a higher standard of truthfulness than you are Congresspeople or even your own reporters. I stopped wondering why the American people seemed so ill-informed a long time ago.

we lost one of the good ones, and there weren't that many of them left

Ted Kennedy is gone. He did the good fight proud more often than anyone else who's been elected to national office in my lifetime. He didn't get to see a United States where everyone had access to health care. And that's sad.

what would Jesus damand as a co-pay?

I had wanted my glorious return to semi-regular blogging to be ushered in with football predictions, but I have something else on my mind at the moment and it won't go away until I share it with a wide and largely anonymous audience. There's this little debate going on around these here United States of America where health care is concerned. I'm certainly not going to be the first person in access to the internet to weigh in on this, so there are a few things I'm going to skip over for your sake.

The misdirection, misinformation, and outright lies coming from the right, for example, are documented by my heroes over at Media Matters in a far more thorough fashion than I'd be able to muster all by my lonesome.* I'll also skip my rallying cry to do whatever it takes to get the "blue dogs" out of office via their next primaries if they don't feel like health care should be accessible to everyone. For good measure, I'll even move on past the part where I lay out the reasons that anything less than the single-payer, universal health care we're all supposed to be afraid of is a cop out.

No, what's annoying me the most in this debate is the silence. A deafening silence coming from the Church. Now, to be fair, there is some good stuff being done quietly. There's The 10:10 Challenge, for example, which I think is fantastic. However, there isn't one loud voice coming from the big, honkin', capitol "C" Church.

This wouldn't be such a big deal, but apparently the Christian faith has pockets that can get bent out of shape over the need for legislation to remove the rights of gay folks. Heck, there's even a very vocal group of Christians who scream and contort their faces in front of anyone with a camera because they hate the idea that evolution is being taught in science classes. These two issues are things that the Church is divided on, though, as we disagree over the interpretation and study of the surrounding scripture.

So certainly on this issue, where there is absolutely no reading of any scripture that would translate to Jesus being of the opinion that there are people who don't deserve access to health care, the Church should easily rise up and in one unison voice demand that health care be treated as a human right. On this issue, shouldn't the side the Church takes on this issue - and we're talking the entire Church, lunatic fringe and all - be a slam dunk? Shouldn't this be the modern Church's finest hour, where we put aside the issues that divide our faith and rally behind the teachings that tell us, unequvically, to take care of those who need it?

Apparently, the Church is afraid of what compassion would look like on our pay stubs underneath Social Security. Apparently, the Church is too busy letting Dobson scream bloody murder over fictional "death panels." Apparently the Church, after being told for so long that only one political party has any of our interests in mind and seeing that party work so hard to deny people the right to proper care, is just too confused to get together and push the government to do the right thing in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets (only probably without the pillars of fire...at least, I'd hope so).

The Church in America has its share of failings. This silence, especially relative to some of the noise parts of it have been allowed to make at other times, is probably our biggest.


*For example much of their information gathering comes from folks who, bless their hearts, can watch far more Fox News and listen to far more talk radio than I could stomach.

for the sake of clarification and directed towards someone who probably has never read anything i've posted here

You think that, based on your reading of the Bible, that God hates gay people. You also think that - and I'm assuming you somehow also have scripture to back this up - God is okay with torture.

Yeah, we can't be friends anymore. Not even on facebook.

a few super-late thoughts on the tea bagging of america

No, not this tea bagging of America, but the little parties that made the news rounds last week. You know, the gatherings of people who are protesting...something...maybe taxes?...because guys like Limbaugh have been screaming that the sky is falling.

Because I sometimes spend a few minutes listening to right wing talk radio (as I've said many times, it's important to know what they're saying no matter how crazy/asinine/evil it happens to be), I know that Hannity thinks that no one except the people at these little parties understands what they were about. He offered no explanation, just that the mainstream media missed the point. So what was the point?

- People are out protesting "tax hikes." I put "tax hikes" in quotes because, as you no doubt know if you've been keeping up with the pesky little facts out there, most people will end up paying less in taxes. These "tax hikes" they're protesting are largely the rolling back of Bush's massive tax cuts. Even if that weren't true, none of these people are being taxed into the poor house...or even the middle class house...or even out of their summer house on the beach...so I have a hard time seeing the problem.

- Some are upset because their perception of taxes is President Obama taking their money from them and giving it to deadbeats who are too lazy to pay their mortgages. Maybe none of them noticed the economy tanking, but there are people out there losing their homes right not largely because of the whole "suddenly not having a job" thing. There is absolutely nothing that infuriates me than the assertion the poor are only poor because they want to be/are too lazy to get rich. And it's being perpetuated when Limbaugh goes on the air and actually says that people who can are going to look around and stop paying their mortgages and just assume that the government will take it over for them. This is stupid. Of course people want to achieve on their own. Of course it stings when they have to have help, especially when it comes right after having their job and life pulled out from under them. The idea that this is suddenly going to create a "welfare state" (Hannity again) full of lazy people just waiting for President Obama to come and help them out is one that's being put out there to frighten people who don't know to think about things for a second. Guess who showed up at the tea parties...

- Some aren't protesting taxes so much as the notion that Obama is deficit spending. For the record, these are largely the same people who were okay with Bush the W borrowing tons of money for an ill-advised war that was sold to the American people based on the repetition of a lie...but they're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore when President Obama is spending money to, you know, help people live their lives and take care of that basic "pursuit of happiness" thing.

- But hey, maybe, just maybe there are people out there who opposed both the spending on the Iraq fiasco AND the spending on fighting off a depression. If someone truly believes that people need to be thrown to the wolves to fend for themselves in a sort of economic darwinism where only the people lucky enough to work for companies that aren't having to make massive cuts survive...I have nothing for you. We believe different things and your beliefs actually make me sad.

- What, in the end, I think most of these people were protesting - if they really knew what they were protesting at all - was a Democratic president.

i feel like i'm being rope-a-doped

I'm having a hard time believing that the Republican Party is actually imploding this hard. I'm a little late to the party for making fun of Bobby Jindal's hilariously and/or infuriatingly awful response to Obama's not State of the Union (which I'm also too late to the party to really get into).

What I can offer up, though, is that I'm baffled that no one in the Republican Party has come up with something other than what clearly lost them control of the government. Heck, the party that brought us misleading terms in order to frame issues to their favor ("death tax" and "pro life," for example) can't even bother to put a clever new name on their same old ideas.

I always think it's smart to keep track of what's going on with the other side of my political beliefs. That's why I will, from time-to-time, tune into talk radio. So yesterday, I spent a few of my lunch minutes with Rush Limbaugh to hear his response to Obama's speech. This is the man who masterfully and carefully (it doesn't matter that he used misinformation to do it, it just matters that he was good at it) undermined Bill Clinton at every turn. Even he was flailing. Just spewing bile and coming up with nothing more than to call President Obama a lying, power-grabbing, socialist. That's it. And when it came time to defend Bobby Jindal? He had even less. Just a vague promise that Jindal is "the real deal?"

I find that a machine that was once so careful and deliberate can suddenly be spinning out of control this way is too good to be true. Don't get me wrong. They're still out there enough that going to the misinformation playbook managed to neuter a good chunk of the passed economic bill. It just may not seem like it with all of the wild swings they political right seems to have been taking.

Maybe that's it. Maybe they're just playing possum. Undermining things where they can (see: stimulus) to make sure that just enough stays wrong so they can score the big comeback. I'm just a little bit scared right now that a party that used to seem a few steps ahead is suddenly eating it, and wonder what - if anything - they have for the long term.

you know what? i like pork. pork is delicious.

Well, it doesn't have the glitz of people hurling insults at each other in an election season, but the stimulus bill has at least generated some conversation. Whether it's because of an actual attempt towards bipartisanship or because we need a handful of Republican votes in the Senate, what would have been a pretty awesome piece of legislation has watered down because of accusations of too much pork.

For example, family planning. One of the provisions in the House version of the stimulus bill was for the expansion of Medicaid for birth control.

Medicaid is already the single largest source of public funding for family planning nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The stimulus provision would have made it easier for states to cover family planning for low-income women who currently make slightly too much to qualify for regular Medicaid.

Seems pretty striaght forward to me, but is it stimulus?

The birth control expansion would simply have simply made it easier for states to relax the eligibility criteria to cover more women. Providing more services, to more people, with more money supplied by the federal government is textbook economic stimulus.

Then why haven't we heard about this wonderful textbook economic stimulus that is going to help more people? Oh, we have. My apologies for linking to the admittedly politically biased Daily Kos, but it's the first hit after four pages of sifting through Google News results that didn't refer to this provision as "giving out free condoms." Oh, what's that? You have heard about the cutting of the free condoms from the stimulus bill and that's all you heard about it? Must be that liberal media.

Of course, health care and family planning aren't the only "pet projects" that have been stripped from the House's version of the bill. There are also frivolities like...oh, I don't know...let's say education? Good thing we took care of that:

Gone entirely is funding for higher education construction, which, under the House-passed version, could have meant up to $242 million for the University at Buffalo.

Silly job-creating, education-friendly construction has no place in a serious bill aimed at helping Americans. Especially when it's aimed at an area that was in a bad economic way even before the sky started falling.

Similarly, the Senate eliminated funding for school construction. The House bill would have provided $31.9 million for the district of Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo.

Oh, and who needs schools?

For the love of all things holy, the Democrats need spines now more than ever. "Hey, jerk, you don't get to cut health care and education...especially health care and education that will help the economy." No one?

"Hey jerk, you don't get to frame an entire bill aimed at doing something to get us out of the mess that your side created as 'free condoms for deadbeats.' Oh, and while we're at it, come with something stronger than 'tax cuts' or please just shut up and vote for the nice, helpful stimulus bill." Anyone at all on the Democratic side?

No? Crap.

So this thing might not work like it's supposed to. And it will be the fault of the Republicans who led the charge to make sure it didn't. And in 2010, when people go to vote, will they remember that? Nope. By then this whole thing will have been framed as the first major failure of a President Obama who went unchecked by the Democratic Congress. I think I'm going to be sick now.

the parade lasted about a year-and-a-half

So I've had a while to digest the big Inauguration day hoopla. Leading up to Obama's speech, commentators were preparing for a soundbite on par with "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" or "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Instead, we got a President Obama who was very matter-of-fact about what we were facing. Instead, we got a speech whose tone wasn't looking to cap off the historic moment but rather focused on the task at hand. And that's what I'm always going to remember about the speech. Not any of the words, not even the subtle jabs at the Bush administration. I'll remember that Obama's Inauguration speech could be summed up simply with "Okay America, let's get to work."

nothing is more american than jamming a pencil under somone's finger nails

As far as I'm concerned, the politics of 24 have never really gone down smooth. I always tune in for the over-the-top badassery and things that blow up, but there's always been this creepy little undertone to each season. Last season's lesson was that if you hit enough brown people, eventually one of them will be a terrorist. This year, after having seen roughly 45 minutes of the season, I can already tell that this is going to be a great big love-in for the virtues of torture.

The "do whatever it takes to keep people safe" message, delivered from a heroic Jack Bower to a smug Senate that wants him to know the US doesn't torture, has already been echoed three times either directly or indirectly. It's clear what they're driving at, and it's making my stomach a little queezy. Then again, it's on FOX.

Really and truly, it's the return of Tony Almeida that has me intrigued enough to keep going...but if that payoff isn't huge, I may finally be done with 24.

they will pardon a tasty swamp bug on thanksgiving

I have no concept of how long this has been floating around the interwebs, but there are some photos of the contested ballots in the Franken/Coleman senate election in Minnesota.

Of particular interest to me is this bad boy right here:



Is there more to this than meets the eye? Does this voter know something about Al Franken and the other candidates he or she voted for that we don't? Is there a secret cabal of lizard people infiltrating - nay dominating - our highest branches of government?

I, for one, welcome our new lizard overlords.

north carolina went blue - anything can happen

So. The Chicago Bears will take the field against the 8-0 Tennessee Titans. At quarterback, Kyle Orton - formerly the "rookie sensation" - formerly the "game manager" - formerly the "pro bowl slam dunk" - won't be playing quarterback. Rex - formerly "means king" - formerly - injury prone - formerly good/bad Rex - Grossman will. Brian Urlacher is a shadow of his former self. The secondary is decimated. Can the Bears get a win on Sunday?



Yes we can.

what i would do, not that anyone asked

I'm still not sure I believe it, really. North Carolina is a blue state, and the Democrats have all but a stranglehold on the Senate. You'll have to forgive me, but all I can think right now is "don't screw this up." The Democrats, with Obama as their leader, now have a serious chance at making good on the change that has been promised. Both in the tone in DC and in the policy in this country.

I believe Obama will reach across the aisle. But if he's going to do it well, some of us will have to wait on some of the grand designs we might have for a government operating from left-of-center.

At this point, taking some measures to stabilize the economy is job one. There's a lame duck session of Congress to go, and maybe something will get done there, but we'll need something real and something strong to bounce our economy back all the way. No-brainer. Everyone wants that.

So Mr. President-elect, work with some Democrats and Republicans on getting that taken care of. Let them have some input. Let them propose things. Compromise. In the midst of all of this, though, remember that you're in charge and they'll have to concede more than you will. You have, with the Democratic party, a pretty strong mandate.

Up next, it will be time to start dotting the final Is and crossing the final Ts in Iraq. Also, it will be time to focus on the hills between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is also something that both sides can be even quicker to come to an agreement on, as we all know it needs to be done.

Suddenly, you've reached across the aisle, just as you promised on two pretty large issues. Then you have your political capital. Then it's time to look at health care and the other issues that have divided the political leaders for so long. That will be when we see just how far we've come.

there's plenty to talk about, but...

For now Media Matters has the best point: will the media-at-large remember that they actually called Bush's 2004 victory "a mandate?"

how has this been around for nearly two months without my having seen it!?!?!?!!?

BarackRoll'd!!!



Brilliant...

i voted today, but the political ads didn't stop

Andi says "go vote, it's fun and easy!"

winning the hearts of millions of joe six packs and one joe the plumber

Because general televised punditry will cover the rest, only two thoughts on last night's debate:

1. Senator Obama started droppin' the letter g from the end of his "-ing" words. We noticed this for the first time while he was declining talking about Sarah Palin, and thought it might be a subtle jab at her folksyness. He kept doing it throughout the rest of the debate, though, and now I'm wondering if he was actually coached into it because of the way the folksy talk has supposedly resonated with people.

It's also possible, I suppose, that Obama could have been doing this all along and I never noticed. It's something I'm going to be actively looking out for now, at any rate.

2. In the latest battle in the Republican war on all things intellectual, Senator McCain actually managed to talk about Senator Obama being eloquent in a way that suggested that eloquence was a bad thing. I should make it clear that I know that McCain was trying to say that Obama was obfuscating his intentions behind some well-placed words.

That's not what McCain said, though. He could have simply pointed attention to the phraseology Obama was employing and picked at it as he saw fit. Instead he specifically and repeatedly derided Obama for being eloquent. The message was clearly that since Barack Obama doesn't talk like you, he can't be trusted.

Because what we really need is four more years of someone stumbling over his made-up words to inspire confidence...

even i know that this is the most important endorsement you can get in this state

Dean Smith. As a State grad who was raised on Duke basketball, I will always acknowledge Dean Smith's place in basketball history. Also? I'm perfectly happy that his politics are very often in line with my own.

even when you see it coming, it's gratifying

Philly hates Sarah Palin.



What you should treat this as, though, is another indication that the McCain/Palin ticket is dangerously incompetent. They get a half-good idea, the idea to play up the "hockey mom" angle on opening night for an NHL team. Okay. Maybe put her in an important swing state to get their ever-tumbling numbers up. Still good politicking. Then, as they try to figure out where this stunt will work, someone in the McCain war room says "Philadelphia! It's perfect!"

Philadelphia, a section of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that is likely overwhelmingly pro-Obama. Philadelphia, where everyone gets booed anyway (even Santa Claus). What did they think was going to happen?

As a hockey fan myself, I'd like to think that Sarah Palin would get booed out of any NHL arena she showed up in. However, if she'd tried the same stunt in Columbus or with one of the Florida teams, someone might have been able to point to her appearance as a success. Then again, maybe she's such a hockey mom that she couldn't bring herself to show up in a non-traditional hockey market. Or maybe, just maybe, the McCain campaign is completely and utterly clueless.

at least i can be sure that Obama isn't going into the prevent defense

Barack Obama, according to nearly every available poll, is leading the presidential race by a pretty wide(and ever-widening despite some filthy tactics from 2008 McCain that would make 2004 McCain wonder if he actually did father a black baby) margin. So what's Obama's next move?

It looks like he's about to try and score the knockout punch in the form of 30 minutes of network prime time.

I don't trust polls very much in spite of my near obsessive checking of FiveThirtyEight on a daily basis. I do little dances as it looks more and more like North Carolina just might go to Obama(something I began to realize as a possibility back in July), but it's all still with a doubt in the back of my head about a country that saw fit to give George the W the presidency* because hey felt like Gore came off as too much of a know-it-all. The doubt gets deeper when I remember that the same country, after looking at the consequences of that action, decided to give him a second chance.

I do believe there's a fundamental difference this time around, though. This time, the Democratic candidate isn't an uninspiring John Kerry. This time it's a guy who's bringing new voters to the table and genuinely exciting people. Despite this, I still won't believe it fully until I see Obama named as the winner on election night.

If this TV time can be the knockout punch, though...if people tune into this and Obama opens up a lead in the polls so big that it passes even my doubting-because-I've-been-burned-so-many-times-before brain's margin of error...well, I won't mind doing the tiniest of premature celebrations.

*[normal claims about elections being stolen]

i'm not even going to think about what would happen when a kitchen knife, a torch, and a chainsaw are thrown in

So, two things about John McCain have stuck with me lately.

1) The country is in financial crisis. McCain suspends his campaign so he can only focus on the economy. Let's just pretend that this move wasn't at all politically motivated. For the sake of argument.

2) McCain thinks government spending is out of control. His proposed solution from last night's debate? Freeze all spending(except, of course, defense and veterans affairs).

So my problem here is that McCain seems to want to deal with problems by stopping the world. If this guy somehow manages to win the presidency, what's going to happen when he faces his first crisis? Is he going to shut the country down? He can't. When the $#!% hits the fan, a president can't just pretend there's nothing else going on. A president is going to have to juggle. McCain has conceded that he can't even manage running a campaign and delaying the passing of the bailout legislation.

Just spitballing...