For many people, holidays involve lots of sparkling wine and lots of less-than-discerning relatives. But you’ve got to drink the same stuff they do, so you want something cheap and decent. I bought a case of Segura Viudas Brut Reserva (it’s a big family gathering on Friday) and just opened the first one. It’s really pretty good, not yeasty and complex like real champagne, but with nice fruit and acid and nothing offensive.

Only seven bucks and the best under ten dollar sparkler I’ve ever had.

This may be the most awesomest moment in C-SPAN history. What you are about to watch is a tearful teabagger, noting that James Inhofe missed a health care reform vote sick, calling in to C-SPAN worried that his prayer group from Waycross, Georgia may have killed Inhofe by mistake after answering Cornyn’s Coburn’s call to pray for someone to miss a vote the other day:

I’m in tears.

And it is obvious to me that what really motivates these teabaggers is anti-corporate resentment. We should totally join with these guys to kill the bill. There is no doubt they will help us get a better bill.

*** Update ***

It could be, as noted below, a hoax. This does have a performance art sort of feel. But then again, so does standing in a town hall screaming “KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!”

I have no idea what the hell Obama is talking about here.

It has been a long time since I worked in radio, and I used to have some great Sennheiser headphones, but while these Bose Quietcomfort are a little pricey, they are hands down the best earphones I have ever had. I’m going to buy these babies for next summer.

Michelle Bachmann, welfare queen:

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

I’d be worried this would make Glenn Beck cry, but everything makes him cry.

(via one of you commenters but I can not remember where)

The NY Times:

Members of both parties say the dispute over health care has created bad blood, left both Democrats and Republicans suspicious of the opposition’s motives, and shattered some of the institution’s traditional collegiality.

At the same time, Democrats say the apparently unbridgeable health care divide has convinced them that Republicans are dedicated solely to blocking legislative proposals for political purposes. Several said they now realized that they would have to rely strictly on their own caucus to advance such defining issues as climate change in 2010.

“We have crossed the mark of over 100 filibusters and acts of procedural obstruction in less than one year,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the floor Sunday. “Never since the founding of the Republic, not even in the bitter sentiments preceding Civil War, was such a thing ever seen in this body.”

And with rats like Stupak, you can’t even rely on your entire caucus, although he has not been stirring up any shit the last two days, so I am wondering if he got the horse head in the bed and took the message.

(Via the GOS)

I’m planning on curtailing my fixation with the Kaplan editorial page. It’s one of my New Year’s resolutions. But in the meantime I cant resist discussingMatt Yglesias’s list of top ten worst Washington Post columnists of the decade:

10. Michael Kelly

9. David Broder

8. Jim Hoagland

7. Robert Novak

6. Michael Gerson

5. Fred Hiatt

4. Robert Samuelson

3. George Will

2. Robert Kagan

1. Charles Krauthammer

Atrios rightly suggests replacing Michael Kelly with Richard Cohen. But I’d take this one step further: Cohen deserves to be number 1. His algebra and “better with the lights off” were probably the two worst columns I have ever read in my life.

Moreover, it’s too stacked against right-wingers. I’ll grant Gerson and Kagan, but Krauthammer is only marginally worse than David Brooks and not as bad as Bill Kristol (both of whom have had Times gigs). Likewise, George WIll is not as bad as John Tierney. And Hoagland is better than Tom Friedman. The list should focus on what is makes the WaPo editorial page bad compared with other papers so I propose a severe reshuffle with some new names

10. Charles Krauthammer
9. George Will
8. Anne Applebaum
7. David Broder
6. Michael Gerson
5. Jackson Diehl
4. Fred Hiatt
3. Robert Kagan
2. Robert Samuelson
1. Richard Cohen

Update. The idea is that Kristol and Palin haven’t written enough in WaPo yet to make the list. If we were to make a list of the worst irregular/one-off columnists, it would start

1. Palin
2. Kristol
3. Amity Shlaes
4. Steve Landsburg
5. Kevin Hassett

I’m feeling a little odd this morning. A mixture of perkiness, optimism, contentedness and maybe a little holiday cheer.

Is this what you people sometimes refer to as a “good mood?”

Ezra Klein and Nate Silver have posts responding to various FDL complaints about the health care bill. Ezra’s point-by-point rebuttal is very well-done. Silver writes:

I’m sorry, but debating the kill-billers on the policy merits of their position has become a bit like debating the global warming denialists. The denalists operate by picking and choosing which evidence they cite and what arguments they respond to. Sometimes, they raise fairly good points or expose legitimately sloppy work on behalf of “consensus” scientists. Sometimes, they are being contrarian for contrarianism’s sake. And sometimes, they’re just throwing a bunch of sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, hoping that the underlying truth or lack thereof is lost in the fog of debate.

Do you think that’s going too far? Or do you think that after Jane Hamsher’s “we are all teabaggers now” column, these comparisons are fair game?

I love TPM but posts like this are embarrassing:

Big Sigh of Relief for NY-Dems

The NYDN says Rudy will announce tomorrow that he won’t run for senate next year. Which is pretty good news for the NY Dems and Sen. Gillibrand since he was running way ahead of her in the early polls.

I talk to a lot of New York State Democrats and (1) no one thought there was any chance that Rudy would run and (2) no one thought that, if Rudy ran, he’d have a chance of winning. This reaction from Philip Anderson is pretty typical. Rudy is a terrible campaigner who tends to poll well early on in races because of warm memories of the days when he was America’s mayor.

I thought everyone knew this after the 2008 Republican primary.

Let’s just stop pretending that Rudy has a future in politics at the state or national level.

Here.

Let’s just forget your host is an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, acrimonious, conflict-seeking jerk who takes every opportunity to needle people but who (barely) is redeemed by a love for animals, and spend this thread talking about positive things.

And I was talking about Anne Laurie.

*** Update ***

An action shot for the lovers:

Be back after I shake out the blanket, vacuum, and shower.

*** Update ***

Top this for good news:

Happy thoughts? I can do that. My cousin, who was in a coma for 7 weeks with H1N1, walked 36 feet today, is beginning to be able to speak again (even with a trach) and is set to kick rehab butt. You go girl!

1.) Ezra Klein-

Thanks to the magic of Google, it’s easy enough to revisit the plan (pdf) Obama campaigned on in light of the plan that seems likely to pass. And there are, to be sure, some differences. The public option did not survive the Senate. The individual mandate, which Obama campaigned against, was added after key members of Congress and the administration realized that the plan wouldn’t function in its absence. Drug reimportation was defeated, and a vague effort to have government pick up some catastrophic costs was never really mentioned.

***

But whether you love the Senate bill or loathe it, whether you’re impressed by Obama’s effort or disappointed, it is very hard to argue that the bill Congress looks likely to pass is fundamentally different from the approach Obama initially advocated. “The Obama-Biden plan both builds on and improves our current insurance system,” the campaign promised, and on that, for better or for worse, they’ve delivered. You can debate whether Obama should have lashed himself to such an incremental and status-quo oriented approach, but you cannot argue that he kept it a secret.

Paul Krugman:

There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for.

But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that

(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders

(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive

Now it’s true that many progressives were ardent Obama supporters, with their ardency mixed in with a fair bit of demonization of Hillary Clinton. And maybe they were right — but not on policy grounds. (I still remember people angrily telling me that if Hillary got in, she’d fill her economics team with Rubinites).

So what you’re getting is what you should have seen.

There have definitely been compromises, and there have been letdowns. There have been mistakes, and there have been broken promises. I’m not thrilled with the slow pace of Gitmo, I’m not thrilled about any number of things, but I see slow progress. But there have also been unrealistic expectations- Obama was always a risk averse, cautious, careful person- I remember the many discussions we had here regarding Obama as poker player versus John McCain and his reckless love of roulette, and we used to agree that a cautious poker player who studies the opposition and thinks long ball and treats us like adults was desirable.

I’ve said repeatedly that the only people who really believed that Obama was a left-wing radical were the people on the left who wanted him to be but refused to pay attention and those on the right who wanted to destroy him. I think I’m still pretty right, and it is why I’m not disillusioned. I think my take on the guy was pretty accurate, and still is.

I like this look:

Saw this on twitter and it made me laugh.

Yet another positive development:

Policy wonks and deficit hawks weren’t the only ones paying attention when President Obama signed the Fiscal Year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act last week. HIV activists, public health experts and communities of drug users celebrated—not for what’s in the appropriations bill, but for what’s not in it: a ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs, which has appeared in the federal budget every year since 1988.

After two decades, this change is a historic achievement. Obama had already missed one opportunity to lift the ban, neglecting to pull it out of his budget in May. Still, that same month former Seattle chief of police Gil Kerlikowske was sworn in as the director of national drug control policy, calling for a new common-sense approach to drug addiction. When the drug czar calls for an end to the war on drugs, it’s clearly the start of a new era.

Unlike during the Clinton administration, when there was only mixed support for needle exchange—in 1998, drug czar Barry McCaffrey convinced Bill Clinton to renege on his stated intention to lift the ban—all of the top brass in the Obama administration are on record in favor.

It really is a sign of how dysfunctional our national dialogue is that something as common sense as needle exchanges is politically off limits. And that isn’t even getting into the rest of our insane drug laws.

BTW- I was mocking them earlier, but is it just me, or is the Nation pretty good reading lately?