It is probably worth pointing out that wishful thinking aside, if Coakley loses tomorrow, thirty million or more Americans will remain one slip on the ice and broken shoulder away from bankruptcy, with the alternatives being seeking more expensive and less thorough emergency room care with no follow-up rehab and costs passed on to all of us, or no treatment and debilitating injuries and pain in perpetuity.

You and I might think that is a big deal, but if you read enough left-wing blogs, it really is no big deal. If the bill fails, we can take Taibbi’s advice and just try again in 6-8 years. I mean really, the republicans aren’t much different from the Democrats, I’ve been told. Besides, won’t you feel better knowing that you didn’t sell out to immoral insurance agencies like Feingold and Sanders and the rest of the corporate whores?

No one said having firm principles was without pain, you know.

I know Andrew Sullivan is a controversial subject here, but I love it when he dials the gloom up to 11:

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow. They crafted a strategy of total oppositionism to anything Obama proposed a year ago. Remember they gave him zero votes on even the stimulus in his first weeks. They saw health insurance reform as Obama’s Waterloo, and, thanks in part to the dithering Democrats, they beat him on that hill. They have successfully channeled all the rage at the massive debt and recession the president inherited on Obama after just one year. If they can do that already, against the massive evidence against them, they have the power to wield populism to destroy any attempt by government to address any actual problems.

This is a nihilist moment, built from a nihilist strategy in order to regain power … to do nothing but wage war against enemies at home and abroad.

What comes next will be a real test for Obama. I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

[....]

And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country. And one of the major parties is ecstatic about it.

I guess I can’t be so pessimistic, given the demographic trends that favor Democrats. I do think, though, that without non-white voters, we’d probably be a military dictatorship by now.

Regardless of what happens tomorrow in Massachusetts, Chilean voters have clearly rejected Obama’s agenda. Am I right?

(via)

The thousand injuries of the Red Sox I had borne as I best could, but when Curt Schilling ventured upon politics, I vowed revenge. If Scott Brown wins tomorrow, I am no longer a Red Sox fan.

Consider this an open thread.

A lot of my peeps are in 508 and 617. This just came in from one of them:

I just got a polling call about Martha Coakley. I also had to answer questions about gay marriage, Israel, and malaria, including this one: “In World War II, 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Now 6 million Israelis live under constant threat of attack from Islamic extremists. Meanwhile, 1 million women and children in sub-Saharan Africa die each year from malaria. The United Nations could use its billions of dollars to protect the people of Israel or to prevent the spread of malaria. In your opinion, is the threat to security in Israel a more pressing concern that should immediately be addressed by the United Nations than the epidemic of malaria in Africa?”

I forgot the best part: “A study by Syracuse University found that although liberals make more money than conservatives, conservatives give more. Does this sound reasonable to you?”

Update. The number it came from is 202-461-3411 202-461-3441.

Spent the whole morning at various medical appointments, and I will be having arthroscopic surgery and then a procedure to pin/screw my glenoid back together next Tuesday. Until then- pain pills and limited movement. Rehab starts three days after surgery.

And according to my Doctor, I really messed my shoulder up- I basically used the ball joint on my humerus as a battering ram and shredded the glenoid.

In other news, Lily and Tunch still love me, although Tunch might be faking it for food.

A funny thing happened to me while I was in San Francisco. A friend of mine and I were having lunch and the waiter said to my friend “you look exactly like that political guy on tv, what’s his name?” My friend looked quizzically at him and I said “Tucker Carlson”. The waiter said “Yes!” and proceeded to call my friend Tucker for the rest of the meal. In fact, my friend looks exactly like Tucker Carlson (even wears a bow-tie), so I was shocked that no one has ever told him that before; another person pointed out to me that people might not say that to him since the resemblance is so uncanny, people probably think he is Tucker Carlson and just say “Great job with Paul Begala yesterday!”, which of course makes no sense to him.

So this got me thinking that I should check in on the Carlsonington Post. It’s awful, much worse than I thought. James Wolcott has a great summary of it here and here. “Papa Don’t Treach” must surely be the greatest Jim Treacher-related post title of all time.

Update. While Conor Friedersdorf’s review of the CP goes too easy on it, I give him credit for this:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this SE Cupp piece is the most inane, poseurish, wrongheaded bullshit published by a movement conservative writer so far in 2010 — scare quotes around environment? — but it’s well edited

I have to be honest, I find SE Cupp and Jim Treacher so annoying, I couldn’t read the rest of the site. It could be brilliant for all I know.

Steve Benen is completely right about this:

Be on the lookout for this one—as the economy improves and the Bush Recession ends, Republicans will try to convince people that Bush, not Obama, deserves credit for rescuing the economy. While the evidence is overwhelming that it was the stimulus that created economic growth and pulled the economy bank from the brink, Karen Hughes—and soon, her cohorts—would us believe that the economy had already been rescued before Obama took office.

Of course, reality is complicated here: Bush probably does deserve credit for TARP and Obama should have, in my opinion, pushed a bigger stimulus and done a better job with cramdown-lite. But, given that Bush preceded Obama, it takes a lot of chutzpah to blame Obama for the recession and give Bush credit for any subsequent recovery.

Once again, the rumors are getting louder about the New York Times going (back) behind a paywall. It probably says a lot about my personal biases that I found Foster Kamer’s Gawker article the most interesting—not least because of the comments engendered by it. You don’t get nearly such a range of… creativity… in the “Letters to Ye Editors”.

I would actually be willing to pay some kind of subscription to keep a high-quality “paper of record” online, because I’ve reduced a 30-year daily newspaper addiction down to a Sunday-only over-the-counter purchase for the ad inserts and leisurely browsing when screenreading isn’t convenient. And as a comparatively old person with an established pressed-pulpwood addiction, I should be a prime target. But I bitterly resent the idea of giving so much as a thin dime to the godsdamned New York Times, because they’re the Gordon-Gekko-besotted bandits who eviscerated my dependable Boston Globe and sabotaged its various delivery services in a (vain) attempt to “convince” Bostonians of a better-than-fourth-grade reading ability to switch to the NYTimes. As it turns out, Sulzberger’s People could wean me off buying the Globe, but they couldn’t force me to buy the Times, and I can only assume I’ve got plenty of company out here in the wilds beyond the Hudson. Suggestions as to alternative options gratefully accepted.

But it gladdened my shriveled heart to read that The Moustache of Understanding is no longer sanguine about the free exchange of ideas in the global marketplace…

Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

Friedman is now “pro some kind of pay model,” he says. “My own feeling is, we have to do anything we can to raise money,” he told me. “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”

I asked Friedman whether any of the technologists he meets during his globe-trotting had presented any groundbreaking ideas for how to save the Times and journalism. While he’s optimistic about the coming crop of tablets and e-readers, the answer is no. “We’re in a megatransition. It hasn’t ever felt like anyone has the answer,” he said. “My macro feeling is that I’m glad I had this job at this time. It was great working at the paper when it was on dead trees and could pay for itself.”

Such are the harsh judgements that must be made when a Very Serious Person’s family fortunes are cruelly reduced from a decently prosperous $3-billion-plus to a mere handful of millions. Perhaps the NYT’s last paywall-free front page can headline a five-page article chronicling the sad plight of its most illustrious pundits, reduced to scrabbling for speaking fees and book contracts with the unwashed hoi polloi from Fox News and the wingnuttier outposts of Heartland America™.

If you really like stuff like following stuff like Tuesday’s MA special election, I really recommend checking Ben Smith’s blog over the next couple days. I know it’s Politico and I know he consults Bill Cosby whenever race comes up, but for this stuff, his blog can’t be beat. I can’t take all the showy, overwrought stuff that Josh Marshall prints from readers before elections or Sully’s “who would Burke vote for in a special election” stuff, and I don’t even want to know what OBG Bob Somerby is writing about this race (I’d like it if someone would tell me briefly, though, provided it’s not too horrifying).

Any other recommendations for good places to read about Tuesday’s race? Boston being Boston, I’m sure there’s no shortage of bloviation. Anything that won’t make me want to punch myself in the neck?

Update: Speak of the devil, here’s footage of Brown smiling at the “shove a curling iron up her butt” comment:

I’d rather not go into the details, but this seems to be the origin of the bizarre “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” comments made by a Scott Brown supporter at a rally this weekend.

Unsavory sex abuse cases play a big role in Massachusetts politics. In 1998, the Democratic nominee for governor, Scott Harshbarger, lost in part because of his infamous prosecution of the Amirault family (which I agree was a terrible miscarriage of justice). Coakley has been criticized for her role in this case, but to me it seems fairly tangential. Weirdly and personally, I have heard about this case for my entire adult life: for reasons I can’t explain, when my uncle is drunk around the holidays, he starts joking about Tookie Amirault and the “magic room”. I can also remember my grandmother telling me she wouldn’t vote Harshbarger because he wouldn’t let priests wear their collars in their courtroom when they were being tried for sex crimes.

Massachusetts politics is strange. It’s very liberal by any measure and it’s completely dominated by Democrats (I would argue that the recent success of Republican gubernatorial candidates was caused by the fact that the Democrats ran a lunatic in 1990 while the Republicans ran a moderate candidate who went on to be a moderate and well-liked governor). But, Cambridge and a few other places notwithstanding, the liberalism is not always of the high-brow, nuanced variety. It’s more the liberalism of places like Italy or Spain, where there’s genuine concern for the poor and respect for the working class, but also a lot of superstitious, essentially conservative Catholicism and a lot of retelling of decades (if not centuries) old stories. If Coakley loses on Tuesday—and I think she’ll win by 6-10 points—it will be more because of the state’s idiosyncrasies than because voters reject health care reform.

I guess that is all that is on my agenda.

Are other people confused by the blue and yellow strip on the 20 yard line in San Diego? How can it be both the first-down marker AND the line of scrimmage? If the league is going to require that players pull their socks up and not take off their helmets, shouldn’t it also require that San Diego use different colors for their 20 yard line?

Update. The play-by-play guy just said “Hay-sha” for Haiti. Never heard that one before.

This will go over well with women voters:

The crowd responded enthusiastically as Brown made his case against AG Martha Coakley (D)—even interrupting frequently to make Brown’s case for him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Brown said, using a megaphone to address the crowd. “There’s negative campaigning, and then there’s malicious campaigning.”

“She’s malicious!” a man in the crowd cried out. “She’s a phony!” shouted another. “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” a third man interjected a few moments later.

Why is it always about putting things up people’s butts with Republicans these days? Seriously.

Update. Eddie Murphy said it best.

Your host will be pulling for the Chargers because my mother hates the Jetrs because she was a Colts fan and has never forgiven Joe Namath.