Via TNC, Sebastian at ObWi talks about what it is like to learn that someone you have known only through online gaming has died, and wonders if it is odd.

All I can think about is the WoW Guild that crashed an online funeral for one of their guild mates who had died:

For those of you who have no idea what you are watching, you are watching one guild slaughter another guild on a pvp server as they had gathered to hold a remembrance for a lost friend.

Ed Schultz has Katrina can den Heuvel on right now.

Drink every time you hear “the base.”

Drink every time you hear “public option.”

Drink every time you hear the phrase “sold out.”

Or just start chugging and shoot your tv.

When Ed Schultz is berating Tom Harkin for not being liberal enough, does anyone else think of the teabaggers attacking Cornyn for not being conservative enough?

Remember when Harry Reid told the WH he had the votes and to step back, and they said “You better.” Good times. So glad Rahm and the WH are to blame for this current debacle.

So glad Howard Dean thinks it is a good idea to scrap the current bill and trust Reid with reconciliation. Nothing could go wrong there.

You can almost guarantee this person gave money to the anti-Rahm tv commercials:

In the past few weeks, the two most famous and arguably most successful black men in America have taken a huge fall. It has become clear that both pro golfer Tiger Woods, just named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, and the American president, Barack Obama, the first black person to lead the country, suffer from a surfeit of hubris which has finally caught up with them. If both men somehow thought they were untouchable, they have been put to right. Both have crashed to earth and it may well be true that they can never recover their earlier status again.

Obligatory link.

No one could have predicted that Murdoch would move the WSJ newsroom to the right:

Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)

The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.

On Aug. 27, a fairly straightforward obituary about Ted Kennedy for the Web site was subjected to a little political re-education on the way to the front page. A new paragraph was added quoting Rush Limbaugh deriding what he called all of the “slobbering media coverage,” and he also accused the recently deceased senator of being the kind of politician who “uses the government to take money from people who work and gives it to people who don’t work.”

On Oct. 31, an article on the front of the B section about estate taxes at the state level used the phrase “death tax” six times, but there were no quotation marks around it…

Bing users beware, I guess.

No matter what anyone says, I believe that future generations will be puzzled that an Australian tabloidist and a Korean cult leader had so much influence on American media in the early 21st century.

Here is some change you can believe in- just a few months ago this would have been considered treason:

Way back on December 2nd, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) filed a single-payer amendment to the Senate health care bill, which was supposed to come up for a vote this afternoon. But at the last moment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), at the behest Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), demanded that the entire 700-plus page amendment be read aloud on the floor. That’s happening now.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a 10 or 12 hour dilatory tactic. But not today. Today, Democrats were planning to file for cloture on the Defense Appropriations bill, in order to get it passed by Friday before midnight when department funding runs out. If the entire amendment is read aloud, it’s likely that the Senate won’t be able to pass the defense bill until Saturday at the earliest, and would have to pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep money flowing.

“The only thing that Sen. Coburn’s stunt achieves is to stop us from moving to the DoD appropriations bill that funds our troops – not exactly the kind of Christmas gift that our troops were expecting from Dr. No,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Does this mean Coburn and the Republicans are “objectively pro-terrorist?”

We need an open thread:

It is good to be a Republican these days:

Senate Republicans fulfilled a threat on Wednesday to require chamber staffers to read Democrats’ healthcare amendments aloud on the floor of the Senate.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took the floor to begin debate on his proposal to establish a single-payer healthcare system, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) interjected on behalf of his party, requesting Sanders’s 767-page amendment be read in full.

Their strategery is real simple- keep slowing things down and keep reading amendments while the Democrats in-fight until they finally kill the bill. And have you noticed that the Republicans have finally started to take my advice and are being quiet and just let the Democrats damage themselves? Stop being jerks, and let the Democratic circular firing squad do the dirty work. Nelson and Lieberman will come through, and if that fails, you’ve always got C-Streeter Bart Stupak in the House to fall back on.

BTW- I’m going to go on record and state I have never seen anything dumber than an ad focused on trashing the President’s Chief of Staff. Really. That is some sad shit that anyone think this will have any impact on the debate whatsoever. We’re talking teabagger grade stupidity. How much money did they burn on that foolishness? What did they think they were accomplishing? Negative ads sure are going to hurt Rahm in his 2010 race for another term as Chief of Staff. Wait. What? The guy works at the will and pleasure of the President.

Some weird reactions in the last post about not being able to go back to the drawing board with Health Care reform. I really don’t think that is a really controversial observation- where we are right now, clearly our options are some version of the bill in the Senate, or no bill at all.

Anyone who thinks the House and the Senate are going to just say “to hell with it” and start over from scratch is just smoking rock. How many months did it take for a bill to get out of Baucus’s committee alone. On top of that, we would be treated to another six-eight months of teabaggers throwing things at congressmen, wildly inflated claims on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and the op-ed pages of the Washington Post (although, in reality, those two things are pretty much one and the same these days), and so on. And then, you have to filter in that all of this would be happening in an election year, and with the notoriously timid Democrats, you have to be sniffing glue to think that the bill is going to be easier pass and more progressive. And then, assuming the House does manage to get it passed, does anyone think Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are going to suddenly decide the public option is a good idea? If so, why? Does anyone think that the blue dogs and “moderates” are going to become less of a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries?

And then we add the other things in to account. You think the progressive base is pissed now? Well, let’s remember, that HCR has effectively sucked the air out of EVERY other piece of legislation. You want another year dealing with HCR every night, while financial reform, jobs bills, gay rights, and numerous other things simply languish? Are you smoking rock? The administration is already getting flamed because they haven’t ended DOMA by fiat, you think another year of ignoring it trying to re-do HCR reform is going to make things better with the base?

And look, I’m fully aware that many of you say this bill sucks. I have no idea why there are not even any attempts to control the costs, which was one of the two main points of health care reform in the first place, wasn’t it? Control costs, expand coverage. We sorta do the second, but seem to have completely ignored the first. Premiums are still going to go up, only now the insurance companies get to increase premiums and you are required by law to pay them. Way to make generations of young Republicans.

I look at this bill and see very little to cheer about, and I read the blogs that are very in favor of this reform. If I were in the House or Senate, I have no idea how I would vote. I’d probably try to flee the country, but not before kneecapping Nelson, Conrad, Baucus, Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, and whoever decided that 60 votes was required.

So what I am saying is not controversial. It is this bill, or nothing. Take your choice.

*** Update ***

Apparently Kevin Drum already made this point the other day, as others have, I am sure.

As a side note, the question I have these days is “Why on earth would anyone want to be a member of the House of Representatives?”

A two year seat means you are constantly running, constantly having to raise money and be on the road and eating chicken and rigatoni and green beans at pot luck dinners with people who are invariably pissed at you, you don’t make that much money and have to maintain two residences, and what we have learned the last few months is no one gives a shit what you think.

You could be a member of the House for 30 years, work your ass off to get a bill passed, and then all your work gets stripped out by some jackass in the Senate. Remember in nursery school when you would finally get a neat tower built out of lincoln logs, and some jackass would walk along and knock it over the moment you turned around. It would be like that. Every single day.

Why would anyone want to do that as a career?

I’ve heard several bobbleheads state that “liberals and progressives want to go back to the drawing board” with health care, and this is just ridiculous. There is no drawing board to go back to. Period.

The notion that they could just go back, rewrite the bill, and somehoe this time sneak in a medicare buy-in or public option is laughable, and there is no chance that, in an election year, Pelosi would be able to get the votes to get the bill we have now through the house again, let alone a more progressive one.

So it should be clear. If you are thinking that you can kill this bill and come back with a better one, you are fooling yourself. It is this, or it is nothing for decades, and that is why folks like Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown and Ron Wyden and other folks are sucking it up and still supporting the bill. Likewise, it is why that retrograde asshole Ben Nelson is still playing games with it- he doesn’t want the bill passed in any way, shape, or form, so he is back to his abortion BS.

I have nothing special against Bernanke. I think he probably deserves credit for averting financial catastrophe.

But this is a pretty strong signal that elite media still worships the architects of our awesome financial system. Some things never change.

Given the possible choices they mention, I would have gone with Usain Bolt or Nancy Pelosi.

I hate to keep linking to the Kaplan blogs but E. J. Dionne’s piece on the demise of any sort of public option is well worth reading:

Take yourself back to the endless wrangling in Sen. Max Baucus’ Finance Committee – or, more particularly, among his select “gang of six,” including three Republicans, two of whom clearly never had any intention of voting for health-care reform. They negotiated and negotiated and negotiated and negotiated—and got nowhere. Baucus failed to produce a draft bill before the August recess. The Democrats’ summer of discontent and the tea party madness followed.

This, it turns out, was a crucial moment. It set back the schedule for a health-care bill by at least a month, maybe two. There was no urgency in the Baucus process. Now there is urgency. And that gave Joe Lieberman his near dictatorial powers to kill a Medicare buy-in proposal that he had supported as recently as three months ago. If the bill had stayed on schedule—if this were, say, Nov. 15th, not Dec. 15th—there would still be time to wrangle. But time is running out.

[.....]

The Medicare buy-in compromise was not announced until it had been cleared with Lieberman. I was in close touch with the negotiations at the time, and everyone involved thought Lieberman was on board. I don’t think they misunderstood what Lieberman was telling them, since his own public statement at the time, while cautious, was positive. “I am encouraged by the progress toward a consensus on proposals to send to the Congressional Budget Office to review,” he said on Dec. 9. “It is my understanding that at this point there is no legislative language so I look forward to analyzing the details of the plan and reviewing analysis from the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.” But of course Lieberman did not so “look forward” to the Congressional Budget Office analysis that he actually waited to see it. He dropped the hammer on the buy-in before the analysis appeared. This is not about substance. It’s about political positioning. It may also be, as some bloggers have suggested, about Lieberman’s determination to torture liberals. And you have to worry about whether Lieberman will not turn around and find some new objection to the health-care bill after he gets this concession.

Obviously, this is one of those things where, structurally, it is insane that Joe Lieberman has so much power. And in the aftermath of any defeat, it’s easy to spin “for want of a nail, the war was lost” narratives. So I guess this should all be taken with a grain of salt. But it’s an interesting analysis.

I like this one, because my dog lies like this a lot, too:

Night all.

Interesting interview with Richard Cordray. A snippet:

Q: What made you go after the rating agencies?

In discussions with our pension system here in Ohio, we had a strong reaction that the rating agencies really were derelict in their duty in terms of how they handled mortgage-backed securities, some of the asset-backed assets, some of the complicated derivative packages where most investors around the country relied heavily on the ratings agencies to do the due-diligence, to really investigate carefully and make a strong and a solid assessment of the risks involved with those securities.

In fact, we believe, as we investigated the matter in bringing the lawsuit, that much of what was done was not up to snuff. In fact, the ratings agencies knew that there was a great deal more risk that their ratings were indicating—the ratings were fraudulent or badly mistaken and that was incentivized by their financial arrangements in the marketplace.

Q: But not much has changed with the rating agencies. What’s the solution?

A: Change has certainly been needed. We’re in the middle of a process where that change is occurring.

I do think that lawsuits that I and other states are bringing will result—we expect—in significant compensation for people who were harmed. That creates a deterrent effect; that helps change behavior. That’s part of the picture. If you’re trying to change behavior, the federal regulators—the SEC and others—and Congress’ ability to write the landscape is going to be critical to the success.

I wouldn’t rely on the Senate to do anything about this. At all.

And for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, apparently President Nelson hasn’t had enough attention yet and is still going to block the Health care bill.