TPM has a great interview with Chuck Schumer about the discussion between Harry Reid and the White House on the opt out public option versus the triggered public option. It certainly sounds like the White House doesn’t trust Reid to count votes. And I don’t either.

Throughout the HRC HCR process, whenever I’ve read anything Chuck Schumer said about it, it’s made me wish that the Lord of Flatbush was running the Senate instead of Harry Reid. The guy may be a whore for AIPAC, financial companies, and probably all kinds of other scumbags, but he’s tough, he knows how to win elections, and I bet he’d know how to get what he wanted through the Senate.

Getting ready for my trip tomorrow, so I dropped Tunch off at Tammy’s and took Lily to my brother’s. As I was driving away from my brother’s, he was walking her in the house, and she struggled so much that she got out of her collar and came chasing after the car. I had to stop in the middle of the road and grab her and he had to carry her, whining, into the house. She’s apparently been crying ever since.

I has a sad.

Obviously, there’s lots to make fun of Michael Ledeen’s hoax post and many have made fun of it. But not many have touched on this claim he makes:

I’ve done satirical pieces myself, and I know how they can take off. I once wrote one that said that Bill Casey did not die, and was hiding in a bunker under the St Andrews golf course from which he was running Mikhail Gorbachev. I thought it was obviously satirical, but it went like wildfire all over the world. And that was in the days before the Internet.

Is it possible that this really “went like wildfire all over the world”? Could people possibly have been that dumb 20 years ago?

Update. I can find no evidence that this happened.

Maybe that is what Obama needs- a tire-swinging event at the White House to ease the wrath of Jake Tapper and Mark Knoller?

I’m sorry, I just have a hard time computing the notion that a WH correspondent has nothing better to do than make multiple posts about the gender make-up of Obama’s athletic activities, to include one post with college pictures of Kathleen Sebelius on her basketball team. Seriously.

The problem I have with the WH approach to Fox News is not that they are openly contemptuous of that wing of the GOP, but that they are not showing enough contempt for the rest of these folks at the other networks and organizations like the politico. If I were Robert Gibbs, I would open EVERY SINGLE press briefing, from here on out, with a five minute daily athletic/gender report, detailing what activities Obama took part in and what the male-female make-up was. And then I would deliver, daily, right there in the press briefing, a stack of signed affidavits from Hillary, Janet Napolitano, Kathleen Sebelius, and every other major female in the White House, stating that they were asked if they wanted to work out with Obama and Reggie Love this morning but they declined.

And I would drop them right on Jake Tapper’s lap. And I would do it every day from here on out until these clowns pull their heads out of their collective asses. And if the briefing was nearing the end of the allotted time and they still wanted to ask more questions, I would stop exactly when you are supposed to stop and point out that there would have been more time to answer questions, but that we had to spend the first five minutes of the briefing answering the important questions for ABC News.

God damned joke.

*** Update ***

An even better solution:

I think a better idea for Gibbs’ response to this: Every time Tapper raises his hand, Gibbs says “In the interests of gender equality, we’re skipping you. Helen, your next question, please.”

Perfect.

For those of you who thought yesterday’s NY Times piece about the “boys club” playing basketball at the White House was ridiculous, that just shows why you don’t have the chops to be a WH reporter for a major network:

We asked Terry O’Neill, the new president of the National Organization for Women, what she thought of those Democratic women and others quietly complaining about a “boy’s club” atmosphere at the White House, as exemplified by the president playing basketball earlier this month with 11 members of Congress and four Cabinet Secretaries—all men.

As the New York Times and cable news chatter looked at whether the Obama White House is too fratty yesterday, President Obama brought along a woman golf partner for the first time in his 24 golf outings as president, domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes.

Is this much ado about nothing?

Jake Tapper, on the job. I’m beginning to understand why he thinks Fox news is his “sister news organization.” I wonder what Neil Cavuto thinks about this?

Just shoot me now.

*** Update ***

This is excellent news for John McCain. Also, too.

I’ll give you a question to discuss: does Obama’s waffling on the exact nature of the public option (which I agree is puzzling) make him look like Jimmy Carter, Richard, Nixon, Adolf Hitler, or all of the above?

Update. Mao, Stalin, Neville Chamberlain, Don Draper, and Felix the Cat are also acceptable choices here.

I can never decide if it’s a good thing that the Politico spends so much time profiling unelected people with power in Washington DC. But this piece is pure Chamber of Commerce propaganda:

If the combination of Obama policies and attacks on the Chamber turns business against Democrats, it could have a big effect on elections. Many businesses, spooked by the crackdown on soft money, have been reluctant to fund groups outside of the Chamber in recent elections. If they are motivated, Republicans will have a much better chance at reclaiming the money edge that they once enjoyed but have let slip away in recent years.

Several CEOs have told POLITICO in recent weeks they have gone from genuinely uncertain about Obama’s economic views to authentically concerned. And the outcome of climate change, health care and regulation could turn much of business against the president’s goals.

Having spent a lot of time (and possibly too many blog posts) on elite media’s defense of Fox News, I think I get it now: Fox, the Chamber, the think tanks, and all the assholes, elected and unelected, who have been running this country into the ground for however many years, are part of the status quo. And the status quo is good to media elites. They’ll defend it every step of the way.

In his latest NYT column, Paul Krugman (may he abide in shrillness forever) is so confident we’ll get some kind of health care reform that he’s willing to speculate on how it will be received:

[T]he experience in Massachusetts, which passed major health reform back in 2006, should dampen conservative hopes and soothe progressive fears.

Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage. It is, to be frank, a bit of a Rube Goldberg device — a complicated way of achieving something that could have been done much more simply with a Medicare-type program…

[R]eform remains popular. Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed.

Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state’s physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed.

As a proud Massachusetts resident by choice, I can attest it would be hard to get 79% of my fellow Massholes to come out in favor of sunshine and/or kittens. This is good news for Nancy Pelosi!

Kaplan goes double barrel anti-public option.

I wonder if Ezra will have the balls to call them on it.

Update. To summarize here’s shorter Hiatt/Samuelson: the public option may not fully address increases in health care costs, so we shouldn’t have one.

Not sure if any of you are following Californication, but I just spotted Stephen Root (aka Jimmy James), a guy who I think makes every scene he is in funnier, in a role as Kathleen Turner’s husband. And my goodness, Kathleen Turner…

Another bleg to our music nerd readers: please suggest the best, relaxing music that you can think of. Life and work is a little hectic at the moment. Left to my own devices I would listen to an infinite loop of Yo Yo Ma playing prelude to Cello Suite #1, but no doubt equally inspiring stuff exists that I haven’t heard yet.

Jazz, Funk, R&B, space and electronic are all welcome as long as it puts one in the right mood. I will hit up iTunes tonight for my favorite suggestions.

***Update***

And celtic, of course. 9 out of 10 Enyas agree that celtic might be the most inherently relaxing genre short of shakuhachi.

I just bought a shakuhachi album BTW, thanks very much to whoever recommended it.

Look, just because Obama won and Michelle is putting in a garden at the White House does not mean there is any excuse for the NY Times publishing this nonsense:

I BOUNDED off the Q train in Brooklyn one night last winter and headed to Union Street, past the yogurt shop and the firehouse, to do some grocery shopping. But my plans soon went awry.

“You’re suspended,” the entrance worker at the Park Slope Food Coop announced as I swiped my membership card. Some entrance workers speak softly, but not this one. Worse, there were a dozen other shoppers within earshot.

Flushed, defeated and taken aback — I knew I owed the co-op some work, but I didn’t know I had been blacklisted — I slunk around the corner for a takeout burrito. But no amount of mushrooms and spinach could diminish my shame and guilt.

Established in 1973, the co-op, with about 15,000 members who enjoy savings of up to 40 percent on environmentally friendly groceries, is one of the oldest, largest and most successful institutions of its kind in the country. Unlike many co-ops — including the Flatbush Food Coop in Brooklyn, where guests are allowed to shop without joining and members who don’t want to serve work hours can pay a slight markup for items — Park Slope has one of the stiffest work requirements: 2.75 hours every four weeks for each adult member of a household.

It also has some of the best bargains. The organic spinach that costs $2.97 at the co-op fetches $3.99 at the Whole Foods in Union Square; 17 ounces of Bionaturae Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil costs co-op members $7.80 and Whole Foods shoppers $13.99.

It goes on like that for three pages, and I want that five minutes of my life back. I seriously can not tell if that is a real person or a right-wing spoof/caricature of a NY lefty.

And by the way, they ask for less than three hours a month in volunteering. Is s/he really unable to find LESS THAN THREE HOURS A MONTH? Here is a hint- go volunteer instead of writing crap like this.

Atrios writes of the neocons:

When the American empire crumbles, future historians will point to the fact that anyone took any of these people seriously as the main reason…

The thing I always wonder is: how did the neocons amass so much influence? Everything they attempt fails and, when you consider how unpersuasive their arguments are, this failure isn’t surprising. How did it come to pass that a naive-sounding theory with no supporting body of empirical evidence became so influential? Yes, part of it is that our media elites are hacks and morons, part of it is that the so-called think tanks are staffed by hacks and morons, but give that there are an infinitude of dumb-sounding, empirically unsupportable theories, why did this particular one become so popular?

I don’t know the answer, but I think there is an answer and that this (from Ezra Klein) has something to do with it:

Speaking of bizarrely counterintuitive articles, and with the ostentatious contrarianism of Super Freakonomics still on everybody’s mind, it’s worth saying that there’s nothing contrarian about being contrarian in elite intellectual circles. Indeed, the really contrarian move would be to try to make your way as a thinker without taking aim at somebody’s sacred cows, or at least making it seem like you’re taking aim at somebody’s sacred cows. There’s a reason the book “Everything You Know Is Wrong” is not titled “Most of The Things You Know Are Right.”

There’s no doubt that some of the appeal of neoconservatism is the contrarian reasoning: you think that by negotiating with countries and bribing them with relatively small amounts of money you can make them do what you want, but if you look more closely….filler…HITLER! It’s powerful because it combines the contrarian impulse to arrive a conclusion no one else would arrive at with with the undeniable pleasure of talking about Nazis. It’s a rare chance to play at being Winston Churchill and Mickey Kaus at the same time.

But there’s got to be something more, because there’s all kinds of theories you could come up with that would be both contrarian and Hitler-related.

Maybe it’s just this: contrarianism is fun, talking about Nazis is fun, watching smart bombs drop is fun, various industries make a lot of money from wars, CNN’s ratings go up when there is a war. So it’s a simple marriage of a fun ideology and corporate interest. Do you think that’s right?

This should be a good game. I have a fresh batch of homemade salsa, some taco meat simmering, and a 12 pack of diet root beer. Hampton jersey is on, Lily is rocking her Steelers collar, Tunch is perched on the couch in his game day spot.

It’s business time. GO STEELERS!

For those of you at work, one f-bomb, so easy on the sound.