Call me overly optimistic, but lowering the medicare age, opening up the same options as federal workers have, stricter regulations, and a trigger should these fail seems to be a pretty good deal. I’m sure you all will take the opportunity to explain to me why I am full of it, but I’m actually kind of pleasantly surprised. Hell, the medicare thing alone I thought would never happen.

I don’t what effect the votes of Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe etc. will have on their political careers. But whenever Senators cast votes on a bill like this, I think of New York State Assemblyman George Michaels:

Mr. Michaels personally favored a woman’s right to choose but had voted against the proposed law twice at the behest of the Cayuga County Democratic Committee. He did so at the beginning of April 1970 when the bill went down to a narrow defeat.

But on April 9, he realized that the measure was doomed without his support. He rose to take the microphone, his hands trembling. “I realize, Mr. Speaker, that I am terminating my political career, but I cannot in good conscience sit here and allow my vote to be the one that defeats this bill,” he declared. “I ask that my vote be changed from ‘no’ to ‘yes.’ “

His tearful reversal provided the 76th vote needed for passage. The State Senate quickly added its approval and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the bill into law. “I found myself caught up in something bigger than I am,” Mr. Michaels said about his agonizing decision. “I’m just a small country lawyer.”

Mr. Michaels sought a sixth term that year, but piqued county leaders denied him renomination and he lost the June primary in a four-way race.

Assemblyman George Michaels was never eulogized by David Broder. He never appeared on “Meet the Press” or earned millions of dollars as a lobbyist.

I feel bad that in this age no thinking person can use the phrase “principled decision” without a healthy dollop of irony.

How about instead of War Bonds, we finance the war with lemonade stands?

Consider this your nightly open thread.

Another day, another pronouncement from the Senate’s leading drama queen:

After his abortion amendment did not win the day on the Senate floor, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) did not come out swinging. Though he insisted that the failure of his abortion amendment “makes it harder to be supportive” of Senate health care bill, he did not reiterate his pledge to filibuster the bill.

“We’ll just have to see what develops,” Nelson told reporters. “I have no plan B.”

And no one else would have Plan B or any other control over their own reproductive system if you got your way, you showboating cretin. Does he even know what party he is in? Has he ever even looked at his party’s platform? Do he and Stupak honestly think that a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House and a Democratic President are going to reel in abortion rights? How stupid are these people?

Sing it loud and sing it often:

Congress should cut the top marginal tax rate for individuals as its newest stimulus, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said Tuesday.

The conservative senator said that not only should the Congress keep in place the tax cuts enacted earlier this decade by President George W. Bush, but also cut the top rate even further.

“What we need to do is what I’ve proposed and many Republicans is, first of all, we stop this tax explosion that’s scheduled for next year,” DeMint said during an appearance on Fox News. “The Bush tax cuts expire. Every tax that you can think of goes up—capital gains, alternative minimum, marriage penalty. It all comes back into play.”

I find it terrifying that he is serious, and I wonder what noted climatologist Sarah Palin thinks about this idea.

With all due respect to Stanley Kaplan, I can’t believe they published a Sarah Palin Op-Ed on global warming:

“Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle—the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

[....]

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.

My brain is broken. I hope I have enough gin in my house to get to sleep tonight.

I’m going out for a bit. I may not return. I am just going outside and may be some time.

Update.

Update update. I guess we all forgot to say “green balloon”.

If you were a Republican, and the Democratic White House just opened unprecedented numbers of government records to the public, what would you do?

***Update***

Not that I disagree with the idea of opening up the government to scrutiny by the rest of us. Just the reverse! I am thrilled to see Obama live up to a promise involving government records. Too bad the media won’t take sides every time rightwing activists lose their shit over some ordinary thing (it might compromise their evenhandedness) and Obama will most likely end up regretting it.

***Update 2***

Don’t get too excited about any Plamegate docs showing up. Obama has blocked every chance to shine daylight on the last administration. You might as well remember it now or else you’ll keep getting disappointed again and again – he does. not. want. that. fight. Congress will have to force him to move forward on accountability for Gonzo, Plame, Iraq, torture or anything else. Otherwise we might as well get used to the eight year memory hole.

Today’s directive will almost certainly cover government operations going forward.

I know you’ve all been wondering Rod Jetton’s “safe words” were. They don’t disappoint:

[W]hen he left the woman’s home the next morning he told her: “You should have said ‘green balloons’.”

I like these safe words for a lot of reasons: (1) the similarity to the name of this blog and (2) the fact that it sounds like an expression the At Pack would use (“black swans”, “green shoots”), for example.

But, still, I can’t help but wax nostalgic about the carefree innocence of double wetsuits and dildos.

Remember that excellent Matt Taibbi piece about the Republican way of doing things when in the majority that featured stories like this:

The GOP’s “take that, bitch” approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

“Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn’t in session, hoping that no one would show,” recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. “But we got a pretty good turnout anyway.”

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

“He was like a kid at the playground,” the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

Looks like Taibbi needs to do a new piece, this time about how these petulant over-grown kids act in the minority:

In September, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) had noticed Republicans House lawmakers intentionally forgetting or losing their voting cards in order to delay votes. Starting late in the summer, Grayson said he saw 60-70 GOP congressmen engaging in this tactic:

GRAYSON: They’d all walk to the front of the House and, laughingly and jokingly, put their arms around each other’s shoulder like it was some kind of clownish fun. And they did this over and over to make sure every vote took half an hour. That’s how low things have gotten. I could give you countless examples just like that. They’re simply obstructionists and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I really don’t know how this country is supposed to operate when one of the two political parties is composed almost entirely of crazy assholes. The entire party has gone wingnut.

Realistically, there’s no way any of the principled centrists from Maine are going to support anything even vaguely like a public option.

And, of course, the fact that only 58 out of 100 Senators do support one just proves that we’re a center-right nation.

Via Atrios, this:

The United States would begin financing its military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan with war bonds under new legislation introduced Tuesday.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) unveiled the “United States War Bonds Act of 2009” early this afternoon, which would authorize the Treasury Department to begin selling bonds to fund the wars.

The bonds, Nelson said, would be purposed with helping to pay for the military efforts, in particular the surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, without having to resort to the “war surtax” that has been discussed by some liberals in the House and Senate.

He really does not understand that all of our debt is structured through bond sales and the like, does he?

If I were a liberal in the Senate, here is what I would do. I would immediately write up a Stupak like amendment to make sure none of the funds raised in the war bonds co-mingles with any of the other funds raised by the sale of other treasury bonds, just to make damned sure no “WAR VICTORY YELLOW RIBBON ON MY CAR BEN NELSON IS A JACKASS BONDS” fund any abortions.

That ought to piss off the poor bastards at the Bureau of the Public Debt. The problem is, Ben Nelson is so goddamned stupid he will probably think it is a good idea.

For double fun, someone could go to the floor and suggestr we keep the proceeds from war bonds in Al Gore’s lockbox.

This is my personal hell:

We’re going to spend the next four years chronicling this know-nothing hustler, and after that four years is up, we’ll be right back where we started, staring down the same empty road wondering how in the hell she didn’t manage to learn a damned thing in all her travels.

James Fallows contrasts WaPo’s and NYT’s coverage of CLIMATEGATE!:

In this case one big-time paper, the Post, sticks with “critics contend,” while the other (the Times) presents a contrast between “decades of peer-reviewed science” and politically-motivated opposition. Moreover, the NYT presents the controversy as something that might get in the way of deliberations in Copenhagen; while the Post presents it as a scandal in which “wonky” emails may not constitute “proof” that climate change is a “lie or a swindle” but still justify introducing “lie” and “swindle” as possibilities.

Not to overdramatize, but: in a way the papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another “-Gate” style flap where it’s hard to get to the bottom of the story. While I don’t claim to be a climate expert, the overwhelming balance of what I’ve read convinces me that the Times’s approach is right. For now, I’m mainly noting the stark contrast.

Andrew Malcolm just pains me on so many levels:

Obama’s new Gallup Poll job approval number is 47%. Last month it was 53%.

Regular Ticket readers will recall how in this space in late November we pointed out that Obama’s closely watched job approval slide was coinciding with Palin’s little-noticed rise in favorability. And it appeared they might cross somewhere in the 40s.

Well, ex-Sen. Obama, meet ex-Gov. Palin.

The new CNN/Opinion Research Poll shows Palin now at 46% favorable, just one point below her fellow basketball fan.

The gallup poll is measuring Obama’s job approval. The CNN poll (.pdf) is measuring the favorablity ratings of people in the news.

Pretty impressive, even for a wingnut like Malcolm. He takes the results of two separate polls, measuring two different things, and finds two numbers that are comparable, and gets wood.

And let me remind you that these are the idiots that are attacking the statistical work of climate scientists.

But when I read things like this, I think to myself- “Gee, maybe a good use of some of that $200 billion for job creation could be well spent improving our drinking water and sewage systems. Or repairing bridges. Or, well, any of the thousands of things I see crumbling around us.” This just seems insane:

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

Of course, the Republican response would be to defund the EPA so we wouldn’t have to know about the violations, and then spend that money and the 200 billion on tax cuts for Jesus.