Last Call

Hats off to our northern neighbors for the Olympic show.  We're pretty grateful you guys let us come over and smack you around for 37 medals.  In all seriousness however, it was a great event:

The U.S. won a record 37 medals, with a silver from the men's hockey final. The U.S. total included golds by the four-man bobsled team led by driver Steven Holcomb, the first gold medal ever by a skier in Nordic Combined (Bill Demong), and the expected brilliance of Shaun White in the snowboard halfpipe.

To their credit, despite a slow start and some disappointments in events that were supposed to be almost sure things, the Canadians won a record number of gold medals, with that one big event, the men's hockey championship, remaining on Sunday.

But no gold medal was as stirring, as inspiring, as the bronze won by figure skater Joannie Rochette, who competed despite the death of her beloved mother two days before the women's short program.

She skated flawlessly in that first night of the competition, then dazzled the crowd in the free skate, winning the hearts of a nation and the respect of those watching around the world.

Years from now, they will talk of her strength and her bravery, but she just saw herself as the daughter who shared a dream with a mother who wouldn't let her fail.

She wasn't perfect in her performance, but in an imperfect Games, she was a beacon of all that is right about sports.

An imperfect Games in an imperfect world.  Still, nice to see the world put it aside every couple of years and play games.

We even forgive you for Nickelback.

Eliminationist Nation

I've talked about Dave Neiwert and his term for the most egregious of the Winger insanity:  eliminationism.  It's pretty gruesome stuff, by definition, and its most visible adherent these days is Glenn Beck.

What motivates this kind of talk and behavior is called eliminationism: a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination.

Rhetorically, eliminationism takes on certain distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as beyond the pale, the embodiment of evil itself, unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus worthy of elimination. It often further depicts its designated Enemy as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and disease-like cancers on the body politic. A close corollary—but not as nakedly eliminationist—are claims that opponents are traitors or criminals and that they pose a threat to our national security.

Eliminationism is often voiced as crude "jokes," a sense of humor inevitably predicated on venomous hatred. And such rhetoric—we know as surely as we know that night follows day—eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

If this sounds familiar to you, it should:  it's the primary theme of Beck's recent CPAC speech where he compared progressivism to a "cancer" that was destroying America.  He also called for it to be "eradicated".

And that's a deadly theme we see in nearly all the most dangerous Tea Party rhetoric.  Progressives exist to be destroyed, to be excised from America and the world.  How do you reason with people who want to destroy you, don't even see you as human?

Sunday Funnies: Johnny Volcano, San Fran Nan, And A Lizard

This week's Bobblespeak Translations are here, fresh from the bakery to you.

Gregory: what happened at the health care summit?

McCain: it was 7 hours - almost as much fun as
a Matlock marathon

Gregory: so it was good

McCain: yes but the President is planning to seize tyrannical power by passing laws with 51 votes

Gregory: so how will you react if the Democrats
do this terrible thing

McCain: reconciliation is evil

Gregory: you voted for reconciliation 9 times

McCain: yes but I objected strenuously to my votes

Gregory: Obama reminded you that the American people hate you

McCain: yes but the idea that you pass laws with
60 votes and a massive majority in the House is
just plain crazy

Gregory: how odd

McCain: it’s totally unsavory to make a deal to build a hospital in Connecticut behind closed doors

Gregory: you’re kidding

McCain: policy cannot be made by deals made
with lawmakers

Gregory: with all due respect you cannot possibly
be serious

McCain: I am serious and don’t offer me pudding
if you don’t have any

Gregory: John I didn’t offer you pudding

McCain: [ yells at cloud ]

Seriously, President McVolcano has been on the Sunday Funnies what, 3.7e43 times since he won in 2008 and Republicans swept into power with huge margins in the House and Senate?  Am I missing something here?

In Which Zandar Calls Equine Fecal Matter On Steve Benen

And having just got done chastising Frank Rich, we now have Nancy Pelosi making the political argument that the  Tea Party should be hating the Republicans and trying to drive a wedge between them and the Tea Party.  Even worse, somebody who really should know better, Steve Benen, agrees.

There are multiple factions within this so-called "movement," and it's often challenging to keep track of what it is, exactly, that these activists are so worked up about. Much of the time, the Teabaggers themselves don't really know why they're so angry.

But Pelosi's suggestion that the activists have a fair amount in common with Democrats' progressive ideas is not as foolish as it might seem. The "movement" cares about fiscal responsibility? Then the activists certainly would have no use for Republicans, who added $5 trillion to the debt, left Dems with a $1.3 trillion deficit to clean up, and deliberately decided that they could expand government without paying for it. More recently, the GOP rejected PAYGO and a deficit commission that they proposed. If fiscal responsibility is a top concern, it's entirely reasonable to argue Democrats are the more fiscally responsible party.

The "movement" cares about wealthy interests dictating public policy over the needs of regular Americans? Then the activists certainly would have no use for Republicans, who not only run corporate lobbyists as candidates, but barely make a move without getting lobbyists' permission.

The "movement" cares about taxes? Then the activists certainly would have no use for Republicans, who voted against one of the largest tax-cut packages for the middle class in American history when they opposed the recovery effort a year ago.

The "movement" cares about the size and scope of government? Then the activists certainly would have no use for Republicans, who expanded Medicare and enthusiastically embraced government intercepting Americans' communications without a warrant.

To be sure, much of the Tea Party crowd is well beyond reason, and has embraced delusional and paranoid right-wing fantasies. For these folks, Speaker Pelosi's remarks will likely be laughable.

But for some of the well-intentioned factions, the notion of driving a wedge isn't entirely far-fetched.

Steve?  Horseshit.  Absolute, 100% Horseshit.  The "reasonable faction" of the Tea Party is using taxes, size and scope of government, lobbyists and fiscal responsibility as intellectual cover for their John Birch/Ayn Rand anti-government ravings, and you damn well know it.  Drive a wedge?  Really?  How?

These guys know what's up:  purge the Republican Party of the people they don't like (the RINOs) and replace them with John Birch/Ayn Rand types in the primaries.  That's the difference:  The Obama hating nutbars will vote for the Republican no matter what.  The "reasonable faction" of the Tea Party will make their move at the primaries instead.

You think these guys will ever vote for a Democrat?  No.  It just means they will differ at primary time.  Once that candidate is set, the target is the Democrat in the race.  No wedge issues there.

Any Tea Party member who says they're independent and would consider voting for "the right Democrat" is lying to you.

You should really know better, Steve.

Tea-tering On The Edge

I've argued that there's no difference between the GOP and the Tea Party, and that they are united in common by Obama Derangement Syndrome.  Frank Rich on the other hand makes the firebagger argument:  Tea Party faithful hate Bush Republicans just as much and want to see almost all incumbents tossed out.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club
Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

He's both correct and incorrect here.  He's absolutely correct about the Tea Party folks being potentially violent, dangerous, even deadly:

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.

But he's 100% incorrect when he says that's different from the GOP.  The country club Republicans may not be actively mentioning watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants, but to them Obama Derangement Syndrome and the Tea Party is still a means to an end, and that end is retaking Congress from the Democrats.  They may not actively admit overtly supporting these tinfoil-wrapped bits of lunacy that the Birthers, Tenthers, and 9/12ers bring to the Tea Party, but they are making no effort at all to renounce them, either.

Frank Rich is partially correct when he says the Tea Party is dangerous, but functionally they are no different than the GOP, and both sides know it.  They just want to the see the Democrats gone in flames, and one faction is simply more honest about the lengths they will go to in order to accomplish it.

That's the only difference.  Trying to pretend the mainstream GOP is somehow filled with rational actors who wish to work with the Democrats to save America from this recession is Village idiocy.  If Rich is really interested in warning us about the Tea Party, he needs to start by telling the GOP leadership to stop embracing these dangerous nutjobs, not looking for ways to get the Republicans off the hook ahead of time.  They created this monster and lost control of it.

Call them out on it, and ask them why they are not renouncing it daily.  A real journalist concerned with the safety of America as Rich really, honestly seems to be here would not be making the mistake of dismissing the GOP leadership as irrelevant to this fight in 2010.

On the contrary, they are entirely relevant, because you should be asking GOP leaders what they plan to do to stop the Tea Party.

Your article is a cop-out.  That's a shame too, because you're right about them being dangerous.

Georgia On My Mind

Yet another Republican is retiring from the House, this time Georgia's John Linder.

Republican Rep. John Linder of Georgia won't seek re-election in November's midterm election, a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman said.


Linder made the announcement Saturday during a speech at the Gwinnett County Republican headquarters in his home state, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

"It has been an honor to serve alongside John and his presence in the House will surely be missed," NRCC Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said in a statement.

The DRCC has a point when it responded with this:

Linder and his fellow House Republicans who are not seeking re-election this year, are "not buying the hype from [House Minority Leader] John Boehner and the NRCC that House Republicans will somehow take back the House," DCCC national press secretary Ryan Rudominer said in a statement.

Indeed.  Clearly Linder doesn't think the GOP's getting back the House at all.  If things are looking so wonderful for the GOP, why retire now?  Linder's retirement takes the number up to 20 for the Republicans, with 7 coming in just the first two months of the year.  Republicans looking for Linder's seat?

Well, that may include former Braves hurler John Smoltz.  We'll see.

[UPDATE 10:50 AM] Jon Singer at MYDD points out that Linder is the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means subcommittee that handles food stamps, federal aid to families, and oh yeah, Social Security.  That means he would end up chairman of that subcommittee if the GOP took back the House.  That would make him a very powerful and key person in the GOP's efforts to "reform" entitlement programs.

But he's retiring instead from a relatively safe Georgia red district.  He's giving that up completely.   There's no reason for Linder to call it quits, if anything he's in line for a powerful chair...if he believes the GOP will take back the House anytime soon.

He's gone instead.

Some Much-Needed Perspective

Unemployment up to 10.8%.  Presidential approval rating down to 35%.

Obama in November 2010?  Maybe.  But that's what Ronald Reagan was facing in November, 1982 during his first mid-term election.  Reagan of course went on to totally lose in 1984 to that Dukakis guy, right?

And yet Obama is supposedly the worst President we've ever had. Would Reagan have survived the age of FOX News?

Hardly.

Just sayin.

CNN Goes All Anarchist On Us

The one thing that Bush's massive mismanagement of our country has done for the Republicans is convince America that government cannot ever be trusted.  The Village insistence that the Dems are just as bad as the Republicans contributes to that as well.  A new CNN poll shows just how widespread the damage is.

A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.


Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.

That's staggering.  56% of America believes the size of government itself is an immediate threat to Americans.  An immediate threat.  If that is true, if the majority of the American people honestly believe this is the case, then don't we have to rise up against the government itself?  Is that not the next step?

If you were looking for justification to do that, would this poll not validate that belief?  If you were looking to press violence against the government, would this not be the catalyst you would require in order to take action?

So why is CNN asking this particular question, equating the size of government itself with being an immediate threat to the "rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens?"  Is it not how a government is run, and not the size, that is the threat?

Not to socially responsible, "liberal" CNN.  Why not ask "Do you believe we should rebel against the notion of government itself?"  Yeah, anarchy!

Take power away from the government (who is accountable through elections) and give it to the corporations (who are not accountable through elections) because government is a threat to freedoms!

Gotta love corporate nihilism.

The True North, Strong And Free

Canada's women's hockey team celebrated an Olympic gold medal like any other team would celebrate:  they grab a few beers, smoke some stogies, and swipe the Zamboni.  Amanda Marcotte points out that some folks have a problem with this.

Oh, I’m sure people will swear up and down that men would get the same treatment.  And maybe they will....from here on out.  But let’s not fool ourselves here.  Some of the complaints are serious reaches, and not just when you express the idea that hockey players guzzling champagne (which is what the male winners of the Stanley Cup do as a tradition) is somehow an embarrassment to hockey’s image.  That they had to fend off complaints that this encouraged smoking is even sillier, but the mother of all concern troll complaints is that a player on the team was “underage” at 18, which is the drinking age in many parts of Canada.  That’s the sort of thing that screams “reach”, and the reaching is obviously due to the fact that a whole lot of people still have problems with female athletes, especially when they behave like athletes.

This tension seems pronounced when it comes to the Olympics, where a lot of properly feminine sports that involve costumes and the athletes starving themselves---like ice skating and gymnastics---are promoted heavily, and where women’s ski jump is still being kept out, with outdated arguments about ovary-jiggling being employed.  A lot of the Olympics organizers take the notion that the athletes are role models way too seriously, and when you start talking “role model” expectations and women, you’re going to start seeing a lot of sexist assumptions about ladylike behavior being employed.  Tracy Clark-Flory found at least one blogger using this incident to slam the very idea of women play “men’s” sports.  I wish hockey was that much of a threat to the patriarchy. 

Amanda absolutely has a point.  I seem to remember the USA men's hockey team trashed their hotel in 1998.  Nobody seemed to care then.  Frankly, having a celebration like this out on the ice, sharing the love in front of Vancouver's faithful, on home soil after winning a gold medal in the country's national sport?

Yeah, you get to swipe the Zamboni and chug a damn brew.  Lay off.  These athletes played hard, won big, and won it for the home country in the Olympics.  They've earned it.  Light it up, ladies.

Getting Biblical Out There

The 8.8 magnitude quake off the coast of Chile is bad enough with 122 confirmed dead so far, but the temblor has created tsunami warnings as far away from the epicenter as Hawaii.

It planned to sound civil defense sirens across the island state at 6 a.m. local time (11 a.m. EST) after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said a tsunami was generated that could cause damage along the coasts of all the Hawaiian islands,

"Get off the shore line. We are closing all the beaches and telling people to drive out of the area," said John Cummings, Oahu Civil Defense spokesman.

Buses will patrol beaches and take people to parks in a voluntary process expected to last five hours.
More than an hour before sirens were due to sound lines of cars snaked for blocks from gas stations in Honolulu.

"Urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property," the Warning Center said in a bulletin. "All shores are at risk no matter which direction they face."

The center has issued a Pacific-wide tsunami warning that included Hawaii and stretched across the ocean from South America to the Pacific Rim.

Geophysicist Victor Sardina said the Hawaii-based center was urging all countries included in the warning to take the threat very seriously.

"Everybody is under a warning because the wave, we know, is on its way. Everybody is at risk now," he said in a telephone interview.

The warning follows a huge earthquake in Chile that killed at least 82 people and triggered tsunamis up and down the coast of the earthquake-prone country.

The center estimates the first tsunami, which is a series of several waves in succession, will hit Hawaii at 11:19 a.m. Hawaii time (4:19 p.m. EST) in the town of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii, with waves in Honolulu at 11:52 a.m.

Sardina said the Hawaiian islands could expect waves of six feet (two meters) in some places. Other estimates have been higher but he could not confirm those were likely.

Not cool.  Already there's reports of massive tsunami damage among some Pacific islands.  More on this as it develops.

Pass The Damn Bill, Part 6

Obama's looking to move forward on Pass The Damn Bill in the next few days.

The White House will announce next week -- "probably closer to Wednesday" -- the president's preferred path forward for getting health care legislation passed, spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Friday.

"The President will take into account what he heard yesterday, work through with the team some ideas and make an announcement next week about the way forward," Gibbs said.

Gibbs declined to get into specifics. But the widespread assumption on Capitol Hill is that Obama will address specific changes that he wants made to the Senate's version of the legislation (beyond the proposals he set forth in his own outline this week) and that he will encourage Congress to pass those changes using reconciliation, a procedure that precludes a filibuster.

One of the issues that could be addressed is the exemption of Floridians from cuts that the health care bill makes to Medicare Advantage. The president acknowledged during Thursday's summit that the carve-out didn't make much political or policy sense. And on Friday, Gibbs suggested Obama would want it gone.

"I think again, the president outlined a series of proposals based on good ideas from Democrats and Republicans in the past and I think you will likely see him take issues they agreed on yesterday and add them into a proposal going forward," Gibbs said.

Beyond that, Gibbs refused to budge. "I'm going to let the president make a decision and announce that decision as the best path forward," he said.

So if I read this correctly, the President favors incorporating even more Republican demands into the health care bill in exchange for...what?  What are the Democrats getting out of this, exactly?  What are the American people getting out of this, exactly?

Amazing.  This has been going on for a year now and we're still at the point where the Republicans are making the demands and the Democrats like Obama are saying "OK, will this work?  This is your idea on how to make this better."   The Republicans then say "No, we hate it, start completely over."

Just incredible.

Pass the damn bill already.  The Republicans are rendered irrelevant by their own actions.

Kyl And Bunning Do A Job On Thousands

Not only is my GOP Sen. Jim Bunning blocking federal unemployment benefit extensions because he believes they're too expensive, his buddy Sen. Jon Kyl is blocking them for a different reason:  he's holding the unemployed hostage to get a massive estate tax cut for the rich.

Well, it seems like at least one Republican is not, in fact, going to ensure that unemployed workers keep their benefits without first trying to cut taxes for the heirs of multi-millionaires:

On Wednesday, a top Republican leader said a deal on the bill would depend on working out the fate of the expired estate tax…Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said that Republicans will block consideration of the new bill unless they get “a path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

“I will insist on an agreement on how to proceed [on the estate tax], if we’re going to have unanimous consent on how to proceed with any of these subsequent bills,” said Kyl.

This is a fairly shocking admission of priorities. 1.1 million workers are scheduled to have their unemployment benefits expire in the next month, with 2.7 million on track to lose them by April, while unemployment is still at 9.7 percent and there are six unemployed workers for every job opening. 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, which is the most since the government began keeping track in 1948 and “more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.” Yet Kyl is willing to hold unemployment benefits hostage in order to fashion a tax cut for heirs of the very wealthiest estates.

Due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick, the estate tax is currently expired, but it is set to come back in 2011 at the Clinton-era level, which Kyl has an intense interest in preventing. His proposal to slash the estate tax rate and increase its exemption would cost $250 billion over ten years, with 99 percent of the benefit going to the heirs of multi-millionaires. Under 2009 law, only 0.2 percent of estates are subject to the estate tax at all.

And it’s partially Kyl’s fault that the expiration happened at all. Back in December, Democrats tried to put in place a temporary extension that would have prevented the tax’s expiration. But Kyl, along with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), blocked it in order to advocate for repealing the tax entirely.

Let's review.  Jim Bunning is throwing the unemployed under the bus in the name of fiscal responsibility.  Jon Kyl is throwing the unemployed under the bus for a tax cut for the kids of the wealthiest Americans, one that would cost the government far more than the unemployment benefits.

Kyl and Bunning are actually blaming each other at this point.  Bunning is mad that Kyl is adding another quarter of a trillion bucks to the national debt, and Kyl is mad at Bunning that he's not pushing for tax cuts for the super-rich (not a whole lot of them in Kentucky.)

Yes, that's right:  two Republican Senators are arguing with each other about what constitutes a proper reason to hold a million plus unemployed Americans hostage for political reasons.

These are the people you're going to throw the Dems out for because they're not progressive enough.  Really?

[UPDATE 8:57 AM]  Bob Cesca reminds me that Jim Bunning's maneuver shut down the Highway Trust Fund as well (that's where the money was coming from.)   The Department of Transportation is now shut down until for 30 days minimum.  4,000 people just lost their jobs.

Bunning's willing to bet every one of those 4,000 people are Democrats, so they don't matter.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• A major 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chile, creating a tsunami that threatens Hawaii and the pacific.
• The U.S. military has reversed its three year ban on social networking sites as the U.S. government is increasingly using these services to provide information.
• A shootout in California left several dead, including the gunman and sheriff's deputies.
• Fannie Mae is looking for another $15.3 billion from the Treasury after an even larger $16.3 billion quarterly loss.
• Critics testified yesterday to Congress that the proposed Comcast-NBC merger would cost jobs, and could turn into another AOL-Time Warner level disaster.

Last Call

The alternative to the Dems are Republicans like Arizona nutjob Trent Franks.

In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say “How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.” And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

He's lying about this, of course.

But there was little evidence that abortions had made black children unusually endangered. The fertility rate, or births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, among black women remains higher than the national average and has inched up in recent years, according to C.D.C. data.

The advertising campaign has drawn fire from supporters of abortion rights. Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, said the billboards painted black women as either monsters intent on destroying their own race or victims of whites who control abortion clinics.

“The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the ’20s and ’30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them,” Ms. Ross said. “Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works.”

But if you're trying to portray African-Americans as either unfit mothers that barely qualify as human or dupes of the dirty f'ckin hippie pro-choice movement so that they turn to God-fearing Republicans and away from the Democratic Party, why, this is a lie you want to tell over and over and over again.

And you know?  Check that.  It's enough to just make us not vote Democratic.  Hell, why let us vote at all?

Either way, you're bringing Jesus to the ignorant savages who just don't know any better.

In Which Zandar Plays The Devil's Advocate

Let's be honest here:  despite all the happy talk that this is moving forward, the Dems don't have the votes.

The Dems don't have the 51 votes for Senate reconciliation, or the 218 for passing the Senate bill in the House.  As it stands now, this bill's dead.  There is no health care reform.

Unless.

Unless.  Something has to change here in the next couple of weeks.  I was hoping it was going to be the summit, to finally convince everyone that there was no chance at the Republicans coming on board.  But the Dems knew that back in August.

If the votes were there, we'd have a bill by now.  We don't.  There's empirical evidence to support this, because there's no law yet.

So what has to change?  Obama has to twist some arms here.  The Dems have to commit to this now, 100%.  If they do not, they are doomed.  The Republicans warn that passing this bill and using reconciliation on it would be "catastrophic".  If that's so, then the Republicans should be daring them to pass the bill.  They're not.

Think about that.  To clarify what I mean, we need health care reform.  This is bigger than November.

Dems had better get those votes.  And soon.