Great 538 Blog about the impact of the Senate bill on low-med income families

Oh, if I only had the time and talent to do this research and do the writing. I dream of posting this type of thing myself instead of just linking you to Nate, but alas.

It seems I am falling into the camp that dislikes the health care legislation but believe it's a heck of a lot better than nothing. In this great post, Nate Silver unpacks some analysis by Marcy Wheeler at FDL and shows why the Senate bill is in fact a pretty good deal for the working class.

Thanks, Nate.

The Senate

Thank you, CBO!

Link back to Aaron Carroll's blog, where he re-posts a post by Megan McArdle. Hear, hear!

Thank you, CBO!

Dr. Carroll on HuffPo

See Dr. Carroll's latest on HuffPo and my comment (I'm ecarolina over there)

A really great blog

Wow, embarrassing that my last post was at the beginning of October.  Some blogger I am turning out to be. 

Truth be told, I am a little down about health care reform and the state of our nation in general.  I am trying to maintain a more healthy balance, for instance, if I find myself getting too upset during drive time when listening to POTUS or some other news program, I force myself to switch to pop music.  When I'm really upset, I go classical.  I have a strict no-Sunday-morning talk show rule in place for now as well.

But I am down and not out.  And so I thought it would be useful to pass along the information about one of my new health care heroes, Dr. Pete Carroll.  He does a blog and also appears regularly on news media, most prominently for me on Stand Up with Pete Dominick (3-6 ET M-F on POTUS).

His latest post is trying to make some sense out of the politics around the Senate Health Care Bill (to pass or not to pass - that is the question.)

Thanks, Dr. Carroll - very helpful.

Commence Bombardment Now

Politico's Glenn Thrush says:  "House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has just more or less dared proponents of a public option to bombard his office with their expressions of support of the plan."  By stating that he hasn't met a "real American" who supports the public option in a health care reform plan.  Umm, yeah.  Commence bombardment now:

(202) 225-6205


Thrush's full post here.

Easing the sting

So while I don't like making fun of people to make myself feel better (or at least I don't like that I LIKE making fun of people to make myself feel better) I thought this picture was a riot.  The think I like best is that it doesn't even make any effort to be clever, and the man clearly knows he's being photographed.  He's holding it up for the camera...and he doesn't realize we're all giggling at him....

Czars and Witches

OMG, I was furious this morning while I was driving in listening to squeaky little Marsha Blackburn, representative from Tennessee on this whole Czars thing.  If you haven't heard, they have introduced a bill with 100 co-sponsors to - oh I don't know - oversee the presidential appointments to a wide variety of staff positions.  They want to be able to "fully vet" people he wants to hire in his administration.  NOW you think of it?  After we let Brownie ruin a major US city?  WhatEVER.  The irony is unbelievable - Bush was fine to appoint his frat brother's illiterate junkie kid but now when every indication is that Obama wants to appoint QUALIFIED people to important federal positions, now we somehow need oversight. Talk about Congressional overreach.  This post about Obama's appointment to the Justice Department head of the Civil Rights Division made me hopping mad.

So I was wondering, how in the heck do these people - the "unhinged zealots" in the immortal words of Jason Linkins, manage to be so destructive when they are such a minority?  They are following up on the firing of Van Jones by saying that there should be congressional oversight of something like all of the president's staffing decisions.  It's so absurd!  And it chips away, chips away, chips away at Obama's ability to move forward with the country's agenda.  Which is just their goal.  Hmmph.  But how do they do it?  I think it's Fox News!  They have this enormous pulpit from which they can fling this nonsense and the Fox News viewers just eat it up.  And then, by the laws of the "Crank Cycle" it somehow gets picked up as reality and covered as news.

Anyway, so really I just wanted to say that Fox News is really bad for America.

And also, I wanted to point out that little Marsha totally reminded me of Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter!  What do you think?

Here's Marsha

Here's Dolores