She can sing this to John.
Little dogs are experts at the oooooo choruses!
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Lily, Open Threads
She can sing this to John.
Little dogs are experts at the oooooo choruses!
by DougJ| 128 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Well, there’s a pretty good chance now that the Republicans will have tebagged away what should have been an easy win in NY-23. There’s talk about the tea party candidate, Doug Hoffman, winning, but I think that’s quite unlikely. I doubt his base of support is much higher than the percentage of the district that consists of single issue pro-life voters (probably around 20% in the district — thrown in a more oddballs and you might get to 30% but not much higher). If you read between the lines of this NYT piece, that’s what is going on in the race:
“The No. 1 victory will be to defeat Dede,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect candidates who oppose abortion.
Ms. Dannenfelser, along with members of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes efforts to legalize same-sex marriage, are helping to coordinate efforts on the ground in support of Mr. Hoffman.
At the Days Inn on Sunday, Ms. Dannenfelser, 43, of Arlington, Va., and three other organizers from the Washington area who have temporarily relocated to Watertown joined a conference call with conservatives from across the country. A small picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary rested on top of the television, while the Pittsburgh Steelers game played with the volume muted.
Now, Scozzafava may be a bit of an outlier with her support for reproductive rights and same sex marriage, but Republicans in NYS are not, in general, that conservative. In much of the state, union support is crucial, so Republicans generally suck up to unions. Moreover, they tend to support spending on health care, education, etc. This is why the Republican party remains relevant in a state that Obama won by 26 points.
There are also lots of third parties in NYS — a Conservative party, a Libertarian party, etc., and they all have some amount of infrastructure. So it should be pretty easy to teabag Republican office-holders — specifically state legislators — all over the state. My two local State Senators are Republicans — one is a former Democrat who is in the pocket of unions (for better or worse), the other is best known for supporting local arts with earmark money. Neither is as left as Scozzafava on reproductive rights, but both would probably lose if there were a Conservative party candidate pulling even 10-15% of the district vote. They both should be teabaggable.
I’ll be curious to see if the teabagagers teabaggers are emboldened to wage a scorched earth campaign against moderate Republicans statewide. It would accomplish nothing in terms of winning races, but it might radically change the state Republican party and energize the state’s Conservative party.
This post is in: Open Threads
Made it to my destination- flew Southwestern for the first time, and man the open seating is genius. I found the fattest guy I could sitting by himself in a window seat, and I took the aisle seat. I knew no one would sit between us. It also seems like there is a helluva lot more leg room.
BTW- I’m laughing at the Lieberman stuff. Will all the folks who spent the last few weeks trashing the WH for being insufficiently aggressive with the public option please write up your apologies long-form? I’ll check memeorandum for you later. Pretty clearly, the swarthy guy knew the whip count better than Harry Reid. Imagine that! Of course, by noting that Team Obama has more political awareness and skill than Senate Democrats just makes me an O-bot.
Although I hear if you wish really hard and scream “Just words” at Obama, Lieberman might change his mind. That is how this shit works- I read it on the internet!
by DougJ| 283 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
Hating Joe Lieberman a lot isn’t really my thing, but this is ridiculous.
I think that if he gets enough shit from constituents, he’ll back down.
by Tim F| 139 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture
In my opinion Steel Wheels marked the moment when the ‘Stones demoted themselves from legitimately cool to a legacy band on permanent tour. Discuss.
by Tim F| 113 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
As a preface to this post, I should point out that to say Ezra Klein has read circles around me on health care is an insult to circles. That said, this is a blog and I have an opinion, so I might as well write it.
Ezra writes about Harry Reid’s take on the public option:
In many ways, this is a fundamentally conservative approach to a liberal policy experiment. It’s only offered to individuals eligible for the insurance exchanges, which is a small minority of the population. The majority of Americans who rely on employer-based insurance would not be allowed to choose the exchanges. From there, it is only one of many options on the exchange, and only in states that choose to have it. In other words, it has been designed to preserve the status quo and be decided on the state level.
It seems beyond argument that Reid proposed a plan so compromised from liberals’ preferred single-payer system that Olympia Snowe’s staff might well have written it before the entire GOP zigged frantically to the right (ref. her or Mitt Romney on the individual mandate). Nonetheless, I have to disagree with Ezra on the option’s potential impact. Yes, most Americans on employer-based insurance would find themselves left out, but we already know that employer-based insurance is trending downward faster than newspaper readership. Entire sectors of American business already admit in private that they will phase out their insurance plans no matter what comes out of DC, and another chunk will certainly dump their plans as soon as a credible public option exists to absorb their workers.
If we take into account the desperate state of employer insurance and the huge number of people who would take anything over plans steadily deteriorating from draconian to outright sadistic, the public option will potentially absorb a much larger number of Americans than appear eligible today. Plus, the government plan will certainly outlaw revoking plans after the fact (“rescission”) to protect itself from dumping. That alone will improve the lives of everyone on the individual market.
Additionally, it is not hard to imagine cost pressure from a non-profit plan driving private insurers out of already low-competition markets. Buyers in those areas, which in some cases encompass an entire state, would effectively be left with a single-payer health plan. Granting my earlier argument that even ‘opt-out’ states will eventually give in to a national public option, the deal seems like a workable, if compromised, way to set in motion an irresistible ratchet towards affordable national health care.
***Update***
Read Sullivan’s take on this. My feeling is that Andrew has the politics right, but he is trying too hard to squeeze in his thesis of Obama as a nearly omnipotent sleight-of-hand artist.
This post is in: Open Threads
Here’s a thread for you all- I’m off to catch a flight. I’ll check in this afternoon, but you kids behave.
Also- this has been my earworm for the past two days:
There are worse earworms to have…
Oh, one other thing- Mac users, I can not tell you how much I love Song Sergeant. Merged my itunes folders using the external HD, Song Sergeant went right through and cleaned everything up.
BTW- I think I finally understand phantom leg syndrome. Every time I walked around my house last night and this morning, I kept looking behind me for someone who was not there, but I expected her to be there.