Me: Frank Lynch. Bio These are my daily rants, mostly political. For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes), perhaps your best online resource for insight into his thinking.
Click a product and buy something here or something else you want from Amazon, and I get a little change.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
For a sign-off, it sure beats the one Ernie Anastos came up with. Glenn Beck's show with Eric Massa is just going to be one of those recurring jokes. Too. Damn. Bad. Here's Jon Stewart...
Liberal pragmatism. Over at The Nation, John Nichols say that 83% of MoveOn Members Back Obama on Health Reform. That's a pretty stunning figure, if you think about it; it's kind of surprising that the leaders of MoveOn aren't on the news shows more often, as they, too, support the bill.
Last night Ed Schultz interviewed a young woman, all of age 24, who owes $280,000 in medical bills.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think Jane Hamsher and FDL are an important, valuable force, but Yglesias asked it well the other day: "How many divisions has Jane Hamsher?"
Vanishing Caucasian Americans? Don't know if you saw this yesterday, but the latest anti-Census rant from the wing nuts is that it asks people their race. (It's been asking this for several go rounds, of course...) The first to be mortified seems to have been the Corner's Mark Krikorian, who suggests checking "other" and writing in 'American.' It was picked up here and here.
Anyone with a brain of course knows that "American" is not a "race," and therefore answering the Census this way is not answering the Census truthfully.
But at the same time, anyone who does so is short changing themselves; ethinicity answers have a lot to do with Title IX funding, assessing workforce diversity, and so on. You're hurting yourself by answering "American."
And the next time someone complains about how much the Census costs, remind them about all the stupidity that has to be countered.
Massa on Beck. Did you see it? I only caught the last ten minutes or so, as I had to find Fox News on my system. But it looked like Massa was doing some back pedaling, and resorting to nonsubstantive lines (people should get involved and vote, for instance). Said he wasn't forced out by the party, he chose to leave the House on his own. When Beck asked him, point blank, if Rahm Emmanuel threatened, intimidated, or harassed him, Massa didn't confirm, instead opting for a line like "do I look like the kind of guy who could be intimidated?" Right about then Glenn Beck looked at the camera and apologized to the audience for having wasted their time.
A health care reform reference for the skeptics. Over in the Wall Street Journal, economist David Cutler argues that the Obama plan doeslimit health care costs. He acknowledges that he's not the CBO, though, and gives the plan more credit than they do. (Perhaps the WSJ should have given him more space for that part.)
One more time, into the breach! Obama gave a rousing speech today on health care reform to a bunch of Pennsylvania college students, and as Arlen Specter said, the fire could have helped at the SOTU speech. And as much as Obama looks like Henry V in this pic, it does seem a little comical that his sleeves are rolled up to invigorate such an audience.
I welcome the fire, and I hope it continues, and I hope it continues in other venues. And I hope that the entire job of rallying the cause isn't left to Obama alone: Congress is teeming with persuasive speakers (Harkin, Franken, Frank, etc.) who can all lend a hand: the point is to make Congressional Democrats start acting more like statesman and less like job applicants.
The premises behind health care reform aren't so many or so complex that they're difficult to explain. And polling shows that support for reform increases when people hear more about what's in the plans, and get past the ghost stories they've been fed by the GOP.
Oh, and by the way, the message that the GOP is full of hypocrites needs to become a never-ending drum beat.
