You have to hand it to whoever runs Sarah Palin’s operation. They know that she is putty in the hands of spoof comedians. It’s like a feeding frenzy for Colbert wannabes; just ask an innocently worded question and let her mouth run. Just like the McCain campaign, her current handlers clearly recognize the wisdom of putting a NFL-style offensive line between her and cameras that might record any statement not written out in advance. Phonetically.

Comedian Mary Walsh of the comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a sort of Canadian Daily Show, stormed a recent Palin book-signing in Columbus, Ohio, and said to the former Alaska governor: “I just wanted to ask you if you have any words of encouragement for Canadian conservatives who have worked so hard to try to diminish the kind of socialized medicine we have up there.”

The question was tongue-in-cheek: Walsh’s character, Marg Delahunty, may be a conservative, but the CBC’s comedy show is decidedly not.

Walsh was pushed out of the Borders outlet as Palin tried to answer the question, but later, in the parking lot outside, Palin told Walsh that she should “keep the faith because common sense conservatism can be plugged in there in Canada too. In fact, Canada needs to reform its health care system and let the private sector take over some of what the government has absorbed.”

Poor guys.

elmo, Boats on Lake George. Mammoth Lakes, CA.

Rob Kleeman, Indiana Sunrise.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.

If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.

I hope that the rest of the health care bill is freaking awesome. I really do. Because without some major changes the public option is going to suck. What will stop insurers from dumping expensive undesirables into a public ghetto? A guilty conscience? An unprotected public option will do one of two things. Either it will make insurance unaffordable again for anyone who really needs it, or else public option managers will come back to Congress over and over to beg for more money. Either way Democrats will discredit public healthcare by implementing it in the worst way imaginable.

There really is no way around it. Either Democrats protect the public option from adverse selection or they will do themselves more harm than good. As it stands now we might as well let idiot moderates kill the public option and just require private plans to cover everyone who wants care.

Stories like this never turn up in Kaplan’s anti-health care reform screeds:

Wes and Katie Covington, from Smyrna, Tenn., were already in debt from a round of fertility treatments when complications with her pregnancy and surgery on his knee left them with unmanageable bills. For Christine L. Phillips of Nashville, it was a $10,000 trip to the emergency room after a car wreck, on the heels of costly operations to remove a cyst and repair a damaged nerve.

Jodie and Charlie Mullins of Dickson, Tenn., were making ends meet on his patrolman’s salary until she developed debilitating back pain that required spinal surgery and forced her to quit nursing school. As with many medical bankruptcies, they had health insurance but their policy had a $3,000 deductible and, to their surprise, covered only 80 percent of their costs.

“I always promised myself that if I ever got in trouble, I’d work two jobs to get out of it,” said Mr. Mullins, a 16-year veteran of the Dickson police force. “But it gets to the point where two or three or four jobs wouldn’t take care of it. The bills just were out of sight.”

Although statistics are elusive, there is a general sense among bankruptcy lawyers and court officials, in Nashville as elsewhere, that the share of personal bankruptcies caused by illness is growing.

This made me laugh:

Maybe you could post about the struggle to figure out how the smartest bunch of folks to ever grace the White House could manage to spend $300 billion dollars (the rest to be spent next year, and that’s just the stimulus) and have unemployment be 2% above your fearmongering projections with no end in sight to the lost jobs, you worthless arrogant piece of shit hack.

You gotta love the kind of fluid thinking that allows you to to flame the Obama administration for both underestimating and overestimating job losses in the same sentence.

Ahh, wingnuts.

Go eat some turkey.

I’m lying here with Lily on my chest, and while I love Tunch, I honestly don’t think I have ever loved any one or thing as fully and unconditionally as I love this dog. I know there are some of you who will not understand and think this is an attack on Tunch, but it just isn’t. I love him, too.

But this dog is just my once in a lifetime dog. I know how many whiskers she has, I love the feel of her wet nose, and when I look at her it just makes my chest ache I love her so much.

It’s strange and troubling that we now have a president who thinks rationally:

President George W. Bush once boasted, “I’m not a textbook player, I’m a gut player.” The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, “You’ve got to make decisions based on information and not emotions.”

I may brush up on my Mandarin over the holidays.

The story:

I live with my girlfriend here in Durham NC, and we had been together about two years when we started talking about getting a dog. We had just discussed the idea that morning when her mom calls (they live in Clayton) to tell us that there was a stray in their yard, and she was really pregnant with their boxer’s pups (I wish I had a picture of their boxer, but let me just say he is the largest boxer you’d ever meet. If you want to make a really big dog, feed it a steak every night.)

Well, lo and behold, 2 days after she told us that, the stray had the pups on their property, all 8 beautiful boxer mixes. We took one (Lola, the white and black one) and we helped to find homes for all of the rest.

Cue to 1 1/2 years later, where after months of Lola whining like there’s no tomorrow, we decide we need to get her a sibling. This time we actually got to shop around and look for the dog that would best suit us. We went for a couple of months finding dogs on craigslist and boxer rescues, but by the time we put in a bid to adopt, each dog was already taken (which is a damn good thing, so we weren’t complaining.)

We finally found a dog that was at a shelter and was a nice boxer mix, male, and the description said he was really friendly. However, when we had been looking for dogs, we also saw the ads for Sweetie, the brown and white American Staffordshire terrier mix in the other picture. All the ad said was that her name was Bebe, and she was really sweet, and that she was a boxer mix (which she’s not.) So we knew that Sweetie was at this same shelter, but we really wanted to get a male because Lola was a female.

The day comes where we get down to the shelter, and as we pull into the parking lot, my girlfriend turns to me and tells me she’s going to fall in love with the first dog she sees. Well, sure enough, we walk into the cage area and right there, first cage on the left, is Sweetie. She was stick skinny, hair matted, and the backs of her paws had blisters on them from where she constantly pawed on the cage at the people that came in there. It was a very sad sight, but we wanted to take a look at the boxer mix we had originally gone in to see. We get him into the acquaintance room, and he doesn’t pay attention to us whatsoever. He just sniffed around the room, and then peed on the wall. Needless to say, we were a bit disappointed. However, the entire time we were in the room, Sweetie could see us from her cage and she was DYING for us to pet her. She had her ears fully back and was doing the little “I gotta pee” dance to the full hilt. We had the male boxer taken back to his cage, and we said we wanted to see her as well. Well, the second we got her into the room, she was all over us, just loving being petted and licking our faces. At that moment, we knew we didn’t even have to make a decision, Sweetie was going home with us.

Little did we know that we would be adopting the world’s most hyper dog. From the moment she stepped foot in our house, she has had a ball in her mouth at least 18 hours a day, just wanting us to throw it for her. I’ve even spent 6 hours straight throwing the ball with a chuck-it, and the only reason we quit was because we had to go in and eat dinner. She was still bringing us a rope toy at the table.

We originally got Sweetie so Lola would maybe stop whining, but now Lola whines and Sweetie wants us to throw the ball, so they now both require constant attention, but I tell you, I couldn’t be happier.

They’re both about 3 years old now, and every day we spend an hour and a half at the local dog park (Pineywood dog park, it’s on facebook!) throwing the ball for Sweetie and the frisbee for Lola.

Having these two dogs in our lives is the best thing I have ever done, and I still tear up when I’m remembering how sad Sweetie looked when we first got her.

I really just want to thank you, John, for all these wonderful stories about Lily and all the other dogs. I look forward to reading your blog every day, and though I love the snarkiness, the posts about the dogs are definitely my favorite.

Cheers,
Daniel

Consider this your open thread.

By popular demand, a post about the David Broder/Harry Reid smackdown that was detailed in Politico last night. The short summary: David Broder has had his Depends in a twist for years about Reid and he recently wrote a column (dissected by Ezra here) telling Reid and other Congressional Democrats to get off his lawn. Reid then (accurately) described Broder as “a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while.”

Broder then took some more potshots at Daschle, comparing him unfavorably to a bunch of other Senate leaders from years ago (George Mitchell, Mike Mansfield). All of this prompted an impassioned defense of Broder from Moonie columnist Tony Blankley.

Broder, in Blankley’s opinion, has advocated for a “sense of decorum in town,” has a deep interest in process — how decisions are made in the halls of Congress — and has never been one for knee-jerk judgments, whether liberal or conservative. “My sense is that he finds lurching ideological expressions to be unappealing on either side,” Blankley said.

I actually agree with Broder that Reid is not a terrific Senate Majority leader. But it’s silly of Broder not to admit that American politics is not what it used to be, that things changed irrevocably in 1994 and that the Senate is not the genial old boys’ club it used to be. Harry Reid is not going to convince Jim DeMint to support health care reform over a mint julep.

In the end, this is what is so pathetic about Broder, Cokie, etc. It’s not just that what they’re repeating is warmed over conventional wisdom, it’s that it’s all been under the heat lamps for 25 years.

I’ve read all my newspapers and online magazines, and I have nothing to write about.

I guess I’m just pretty excited about eating turkey and stuffing until I get the meat sweats.

*** Update ***

Actually, now that I have thought about it, can you get meat sweats from turkey? I’m gonna try, but after some thought I guess those are normally reserved for red meats and italian meats.

nffcnnr, Window Washer.

Grumpy Code Monkey, Calling The Game.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.

If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.

You probably heard about this (via Steve Benen for example):

But Perino’s appearance last night with Sean Hannity was more noteworthy than most. The topic was the shootings at Fort Hood, and Perino, playing her usual role, criticized the White House for not having labeled the massacre as “terrorism.” She emphasized that the rhetorical description of the violence “matters,” though she didn’t say why.

More important, though, is what Perino went on to argue: “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think that we owe it to the American people to call it what it is.”

You may not have heard this (via NoMoreMisterNiceGuy):

Former press secretary to President George W. Bush Dana Perino was appointed as a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) Wednesday evening (November 19).

The board governs all government sponsored, non-military international broadcasting outlets, such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Alhurra. The BBG is a nine member, bipartisan panel.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) urged the Obama administration to appoint Perino.

Why the fuck would the Obama administration appoint this hack?

We have close to 2k. We have plenty. Send any more and I will spend it on booze, gambling and loose women and what is left after that I will piss away.

Oh, and thank you. I’ve also had several emails from programmers who are going to help fix this mess once and for all.

Ross Douthat dreams of a Republican who understands and can talk about policy. Just imagine. For a change Sunday newschat shows might cover actual issues instead of serving as group therapy sessions for stupid angry people like John McCain, Eric Cantor and Joe Lieberman. The dirty little secret of DC is that nobody presses these guys on policy because they can’t possibly handle it. They oppose Obama policy because pancake rainbow phlogiston wolverines.

As long as we’re dreaming I’ll take my magical flying pony with the feature that makes it poop dollar bills. Plus flame breath to fight the dragons.