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How long will it take the real warriors like Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh to put these guys in their place.

Of course right now Rush and Michelle are locked in a heated battle with a 12 year old but they are such fierce warriors I am sure they can handle a battle on both fronts.

This is from an interview with Jon Cohn that I got Via Ezra Klien:

First, we have to remain committed to the goal of quality affordable care for everyone. If you don’t have that as a core principle, you’ll never get there. That has to be one of those principles that we’d take in to whatever the negotiations are. There are a lot of ways of getting there. Working to lower costs, and being able to improve quality by the changes we make with respect to prevention and chronic care management, will meet a second goal, which is that it has to be affordable. We’re going to have a system to include everybody, but it’s going to be affordable for everybody.

What she says about controlling costs is crucial.  It is time to stop treating imaginary diseases, or at least stop forcing other people to pay for the treatment of invented diseases like Restless Leg Syndrome;  plus, it would make more sense to focus on prevention, maybe a tax deduction for health club memberships or personal training.  Trying to treat every ailment with a dangerous and expensive medications, that generally have severe side effects, not only does not make people healthier it contributes to an expensive health care system that does not work. It looks like Hillary understands this issue and is saying some smart things about it, maybe she is presidential material.

Read the whole discussion here

Republicans pretty much suck at governing and it looks like many of their supporters know this.

“They are making a very grave miscalculation if they nominate a pro-choice candidate like Giuliani,” said Richard Land, a Tennessee evangelist and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

“Most evangelicals have been voting Republican because they were given a bright-line choice between a pro-life candidate and a pro-choice candidate. If that issue were taken off the table, then other issues get oxygen, issues where evangelicals are not nearly as certain that Republicans offer the best answer. Issues like economic justice, racial reconciliation, the environment.

So with the exception of abortion even Richard Land realizes that the Democrats are better equipped to govern.

Their was also this tidbit:

Another could be that issues like abortion, which were more prominent in the relative peace and prosperity of the 1990s, have been trumped by war and the threat of terrorism in the 2000s.

“Some of the social issues have receded a bit,” Green said. “The rise of the social issues was fairly dramatic toward the end of 1990s and start of the new century. But after 9-11, foreign policy again became a very important thing. People’s priorities do change with events.”

In other words, when things are going well the country can worry about stuff that really doesn’t matter, like whether or not the president is getting a blow-job in the oval office, when things get screwed up these same people go looking for people who can actually govern.  The republican party will make a come-back about the same time the country solves all the problems created by Bush and his pals, and people can start worrying about trivial stuff, like who is getting a blow-job or who wants to marry who. 

The whole article can be viewed here

At least republicans are consistant in their financial management style, where they borrow and spend and then hope that the Saudis will bail them out, the part about the Saudis bailing them out comes from when George Bush was a CEO.

A crucial GOP fundraising committee is nearly broke, according to its latest monthly filing with the Federal Election Committee last week.
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) reported $1.6 million in cash on hand and $4 million in debts as of Aug. 31. The group helps bankroll House campaigns for GOP candidates.

Its counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reported $22.1 million, more than 10 times its Republican counterpart.

on a more serious note this lack of fund raising may also show that the traditional GOP supporter, corporate America, does not have faith that the republicans will be able to deliver key legislation any more. One example might be the failure of the various amnesty bills, corporate America wanted a new source of low paid legal workers and Bush and his pals were unable to deliver it for them, without losing a large part of the GOP base.

The other side of this is that a lot of the money seems to be flowing the way of the Democrats, the challenge for the Democrats is to keep all the corporate money from making them into a pantsuit wearing version of the GOP, where corprate interests are placed ahead of indaviduals at all times.

The entire article can be viewed here

Salon has a lengthy article about how a persons brain may still be functioning while they are in a persistant vegatative state, in some ways this seems to make the idea of keeping these people alive for years even less humane.  Although maybe guys like Senator Vittor might really like the idea of someone changing his diaper everyday some of us might prefer death with at least some dignity.

Let’s briefly look at the study. In mid-2005, a 23-year-old woman sustained massive head injuries in an auto accident. Following multiple brain surgeries and five months of rehabilitation attempts, she remained unresponsive. According to her treating physicians, she could open her eyes but could not respond to any commands; she could not voluntarily look in the direction of a voice; there was no evidence of orientation or emotional response. They determined that she was in a permanent vegetative state — a neurological categorization of patients who emerge from coma, appear to be awake, but show no signs of awareness of self or environment.

Before the recent advances in functional brain imaging, most neurologists, based upon their bedside observations and brain wave studies, would have agreed that the woman, though “awake,” was extremely unlikely to have a significant private mental life — either in terms of personal awareness or willful mental activity. (This failure to differentiate between awake and aware was a major feature of the Schiavo affair.) But new tools bring new opportunities; her doctors wondered if the fMRI could provide additional understanding of the clinically unresponsive brain. What if the fMRI could demonstrate residual consciousness and self-awareness, perhaps even the ability to respond to commands?

For me personally it would be worse to be aware of my situation and know that I was powerless to move or communicate, and I would probably want to be taken off life support.  It also helps make a case for active euthanasia as starving to death is probably pretty unpleasant.  It also shows the importance of a living will as some people are probably fine with the idea of sitting in a bed unable to move or communicate, and these people should probably make that known in a living will;  If I am ever in a vegatative state I hope Al will send this post to the hospital so they will know that I would like to be disconnected .  You might have to sit through an advertisement but you can read the entire article here.

Maybe O’Rielly is not that stupid, he knows his audience and knows how to tell them what they want to hear.

On the May 29 edition of his nationally syndicated radio program, host Bill O’Reilly asserted that the “segment of the population” who, like The New York Times, wants to see some restrictions on migration in the Senate immigration bill eased or modified “hate America, and they hate it because it’s run primarily by white, Christian men. Let me repeat that. America is run primarily by white, Christian men, and there is a segment of our population who hates that, despises that power structure.” In an editorial, the Times criticized restrictions in the bill “that narrow[] the channels through which family members can immigrate,” while also saying, “It is encouraging that the bill survived several attempts by that camp [‘the restrictionist right’] to blow it apart.”* O’Reilly continued: “So they, under the guise of being compassionate, want to flood the country with foreign nationals, unlimited, unlimited, to change the complexion — pardon the pun — of America. Now, that’s hatred, too.” O’Reilly later asserted that the Times “want[s] to change the white, Christian male power structure” and concluded: “So you’ve got racism on the anti-Latino front, and you have racism on the anti-Christian, white male front. Aha! Isn’t that interesting?”

There you you have it, if you don’t want white christian males in charge you must hate America, media matters has the whole discussion here.

Talkleft takes and in depth look at the Jena 6 case and offers a lawyers opinion in only the way a lawyer can:

Like other bloggers, I got a few emails about the case before the march. It wasn’t until the day of the march that I did my own research. I spent more than three hours reading news articles online and on Lexis and reading blogs. I also watched the CNN one hour special. Even afterwards, I was too unsure of key details to do anything but write a post linking to news sources.

The MSM coverage was not particularly helpful. This is not about a singular event but a course of events, including criminal acts, that culminated in yet another criminal act. But too many news articles glossed over critical components.

There’s also a lack of double-sourcing or other reliable means available for resolving the disputed facts with respect to several essential components of the story.

While I still can’t make judgments as to much of the story, I have no problem declaring the case one of prosecutorial over-charging and abuse of a system that allows prosecutors discretion in charging juveniles as adults. I think the only reason the kids were charged with such serious felonies was to get Mychal Bell, then a juvenile, into adult court.

Sounds like prosecuters abuse their discretion both with black and white defendants, the entire discussion is worth reading