By tipping, I didn’t mean cash, I meant a thank-you card and a gift cert. to a restaurant or Starbucks, etc. Would that be ok?
The Mind Is Willing But The Flesh Is Weak Rulebook Weighs A Ton
Not necessarily a bad sign. Hopefully these fledgling efforts to rescue HCR will not get trumped by Charlie Brown taking another run at the bipartisan football tonight.
The Mind Is Willing But The <del>Flesh Is Weak</del> Rulebook Weighs A TonPost + Comments (105)
Open Thread
I have to admit that there’s something to the strategy of lying to make big headlines, only to recant later when your bullshit has become conventional wisdom.
Try this out for yourself. The next time an uncle or someone at work claims that waterboarding works because someone at the CIA said so, point out that they guy who said so admits that he lied about it. Send the guy a link to Kirikaou’s original statements and a link to his recanting if you want. Think it’ll work?
I’m Alive
But in really bad shape.
The surgery took almost twice as long as they expected, with significant damage to the cartilage and ligaments. They cleaned that up the best they could, and then discovered that the bicep was disconnected, so they had to reattach that. They also had to deal with some bone spurs and the labrum was a torn mess, and when allthat was donr, they used pins and screws to put the Glenoid back together. I’ll scan the scope pictures another day.
At any rate, I’m in a helluva lot of pain, but they did give me the greatest thing ever-this brace that goes over the shoulder and is filled with tubes that pump cold cold water through it constantly- it does more for pain relief than the meds.
Picked up Chuck Season 2, so my next two days are accounted for, and I start rehab on Friday. I won’t be online much because right now I am pretty gimped up atm. Thanks for all the kind words in previous threads.
Btw- What is the etiquette for tipping nurses. I had a great one last night who was just awesome, and I was going to get her a thank you card and a gift certificate somewhere. Is that appropriate?
Meta
I can’t speak for anyone else on the front page, but I just don’t find the question of blame very interesting. Maybe someone did contribute to this present clusterf*ck more than someone else; if so I don’t really know or particularly care. It feels like a waste of time to piss on him or her or them while the game has minutes on the clock.
House Dems can still pass the Senate bill, and then we’ll have a HCR win with some shitty elements that Congress can fix later. Senate Dems can pass a fix through reconciliation and we will have something close to a complete win. It has to happen now, before campaign season heats up and Democrats commit themselves to something even stupider than changing the subject (e.g., the Snowe option).
I started with the House because (1) everything starts with the House passing the Senate’s shit-and-banana sandwich, and (2) the House responds to day-to-day constituent demands more than any other branch of government. Framers meant to insulate the Senate and especially the White House from quotidian voter angst, and for the most part their system works. My plan morphed when I understood that the House and Senate were standing around like a married couple in a Noel Coward play, neither willing to act unless the other makes the first move. So I pushed for peeps to call their Senators as well. Hard as it can be to move members of that august body, we don’t need to swing very many wavering Senators to get this done.
All along I figured that Obama had some sort of preferred plan that he would reveal in due time. Thus part of my urgency – if pressure from us and others could get the House to commit before Obama’s SOTU then events would more or less compel the White House to come along even if he prefers some milquetoast fail plan. Now I hear via Ezra that Obama still has no idea what to do, so I decide that the small (tiny) but real chance of making a difference is worth potentially wasted time and long distance fees.
None of this apportions any blame at all. I certainly don’t blame the House for getting stuck with the Senate’s malnourished bill. I just think that calling them would do the most good. Same with Senators wavering over reconciliation. Ditto for the White House. Historians (and virtually every other blogger on the internet) will work out who gets to own this colossal disaster. Right now I honestly don’t care. As long as it’s not over, and as long as we still live in a participatory democracy, I just want to do what works.
Whom should you bother? You have my thinking; make up your own mind. Then pick up a phone and call.
Up To Obama Now
If Ezra’s right then the White House itself still hasn’t decided which way to go on HCR. Given the number of legislators have decided to wait for his leadership, that essentially puts the entire game up to an argument between Rahm and David Plouffe.
Until now I have resisted siccing you guys on the White House for reasons that mostly have to do with how the Executive branch is (and should be) institutionally protected from swings in popular opinion. Still, Obama’s talk tonight may decide the game. If the President says PTDB then the damn bill gets passed and our job narrows down to pressuring the Senate to pass a fix, which I think we can do as long as step (1) gets done. If the President asks us to pare down our expectations, then the ballgame’s over.
Imagine for a second that Olympia Snowe does come up with some compromise that will not get her thrown out of her caucus. Needless to say it will take her three or four months to make up her mind, assuming (to the point of idiotic gullibility) that she doesn’t pull a Lieberman and back out on her own deal. So that puts us at the height of campaign season. Granting that liberal Senators can choke down an even worse bill, which I doubt they will do, do you suppose that the House liberal caucus will turn around and support a shit-and-banana sandwich after the banana gets taken out? Get real.
The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414. Call and give them your mind.
***Update***
The White House might be unsure about what to do about their signature piece of legislation, but that hasn’t stopped them from whipping senators on Bernanke.
Priorities.
Might want to ask about that.
Yes, We Can (Read Before the SOTU)
I finally got around to reading my dead-trees copy of James Fallows’ “How America Can Rise Again“, the cover story in the Jan/Feb. Atlantic. It’s an excellent article, which deserves to be read in its entirety — especially since the online version actually makes use of all those intertoobz goodies, like embedded video and links to the books and websites discussed in the article itself.
That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.
The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation…