If you wish, you can dismiss it as mere Monday morning quarterbacking.  I prefer to call it taking advantage of hindsight.  What follows here is my take on the major mistakes of the Democratic party during the first year of the Obama administration.  It's my opinion, straight up.  Take it or leave it.

This is the first of three installments.

--- [Read more]

Listening to Marketplace this evening, I heard guest Tyler Cowen mention that the people of Haiti are literally eating mudcakes.  This struck me as astonishing, so I immediately employed the use of Google to verify whether this was true.  Well, it turns out that it is:

At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun. [Read more]

Here's how American politics can be swiftly summarized:

If I give you five dollars in exchange for consideration in your decision-making process in the voting booth, that's illegal.  If I give a member of Congress five-thousand dollars for the same purpose, that's politics.

Many Americans seem to be fond of a sort of ersatz independent politics, though for the most part these people are transparently partisan.  Glenn Beck claims he is independent.  Lou Dobbs calls himself Mr. Independent.  The list goes on. [Read more]

I don't subscribe to cable or satellite television.  The reason for this is that I basically see no value in it.  Pay television doesn't really seem to offer me much.  For one thing, it's rife with advertising content.  Why do I have to watch ads constantly when I'm paying for the service?  Furthermore, much of the content available to basic cable subscribers is now available for free on the Internet.

However, cable news content is not entirely available on the Internet at this point in the game.  I'm really okay with that.  When I've had cable in recent years, for example last year when I was living at a residence where cable was included, I end up watching cable news.  This is regrettable because I really dislike cable news. [Read more]

It's probably a fool's errand to make attempts at parsing the paranoid, hysterical rhetoric that's been flying around in the healthcare debate, but that's never stopped me before.  So, I'm watching the fun on C-SPAN this afternoon.  Listening to some of the "against" calls, I noticed something that I probably should have noticed before, which is this: The bizarre dichotomy of professing your undying love for the Constitution, while breathlessly spewing venom at the fundamental evil of the government. [Read more]

If you were listening to last week's Talk of the Nation on NPR, you heard Ken Rudin twice call the Obama administration's push-back against Fox News "Nixonian" and even compared to Nixon's infamous enemies list.  It went a little something like this: [Read more]

No, I'm not making this up:

How will this ingenius piece of Web 2.0 software be used?  My guess is however Fox wants.  If they want to attack Obama on change, they have two ways to go.  On the one hand, they can criticize him for not creating enough change, thus failing in his stated mission.  On the other hand, they can criticize him for creating too much change by dragging real Americans into the shadowy, bi-curious world of Islamic socialism.  Heads they win, tails they win!

So, perhaps you've heard the buzz about a shiny, new compromise compromise in the battle for healthcare reform reform.  First, there was the notion of single-payer.  Of course, this proved to be far too unpalatable for anyone to the right of Dennis Kucinich, so then we were given the notion of the public option.  This would create a Medicare-style system for anyone who wanted to buy in.  It was certainly a compromise, but the merits of the compromise, as well as the general notion, were clear - it's publicly run and anyone can opt in.  Public.  Option. [Read more]

Okay, so we're not really bombing the moon, as some of the more sensational headlines have indicated.  We're trying to find out more about the water that might be there.  However, this did remind me of one of my favorite sketches from Mr. Show.  Submitted for your approval:

 [Read more]

Yes, Virginia, spines exist.  And, yes, even some Democrats have them.  We know this to be true because Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) went to the House floor this week and said this:

House Republicans immediately demanded that he apologize.  So, he did: [Read more]

The whole discussion of executive compensation seems, like so many discussions these days, to have gone a bit off the rails.  The point is not whether an executive is being paid X number of dollars or whether the figure X is Y times the wage of the average worker within the firm, though the second question here is fodder for a discussion all its own.  The real crux of the issue is moral hazard. [Read more]

The AP just broke a story that Bill Sparkman, a 51 year-old U.S. Census worker, has been found hanged in Kentucky, apparently with the word "fed" written on his chest.  Door-to-door operations have been suspended in Clay County, where the body was found.  The FBI is investigating.

I can say unequivocally that I love Dr. Strangelove.  Kubrick is almost universally renowned as an auteur, but Dr. Strangelove stands out for many reasons, not the least of which were the fantastic contributions of George C. Scott and the multiple personalites of Peter Sellers.  Even the opening and closing credits are memorable. [Read more]

 [Read more]

What happens when 300 million people, selected by fate to live together in one nation, stop being polite and start being real?

Maybe it's something in the air.  Or the water.  Or my Harvey Wallbanger.  Whatever the case, there's no denying that Americans have been letting it all hang out lately.

There was, of course, the month of August, which was marked by the, shall we say, colorful townhall meetings on healthcare reform.  People were getting out there, saying what was on their mind.  Literally.  Anything that was on their mind.  And pehaps "saying" doesn't really get at it.  They were yelling it, screaming it even. [Read more]

You've probably heard by now of the videos being promoted by Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com and Fox News that purport to show Acorn employees engaging in some rather unethical behavior.  I don't know to what extent the videos have been edited, because they have clearly been edited, but there certainly seems to be some rotten behavior on display.  The SF chronicle has reported that that these employees have already been fired, although the same article also notes that there were other cities that booted the videographers, with the Acorn office in Philly even filing a police report,  [Read more]

There's been much made over the presence or absence of a public option in whatever healthcare bill finally ends up emerging from Washington.  Proponents regard it as the raison d'être in the battle to reform America's healthcare system, noting that it's a far cry from a true, single-payer system.  Opponents have responded by doing everything from branding it socialist to brandishing guns to drawing Hitler's moustache on Obama.  That's cool.  As a buddy of mine recently remarked, "I used to do that in my middle school textbooks."  Did Hitler ever make tepid overtures to being open to a public option, but not considering it a necessary component of reform?  Maybe I missed that history class.  Must have been busy putting a Hitler moustache on Reagan. [Read more]

He's the Senate majority leader.  He's up for re-election next year.  He also might as well be a ghost in the healthcare debate.

Where is this dude?

We've got a tiny cabal of Senators from states with a collective population smaller than Los Angeles gumming up the works in the Place Where Legislation Goes To Die.  Where is the majority leader in all of this?  Shouldn't we be seeing a united front here?  Pelosi, Reid and Obama all on the same page, all getting the message out?

UPDATE: Ah, apparently he's having his threats ignored.  Good times.

I'm loving Rep. Weiner on this issue.  Straight and to the point, he asks a subsequently stunned Joe Scarborough what value health insurance companies are adding to the equation.  Watch (awesomeness occurs at the 5:00 mark, culminating in a lovely pregnant pause at around 5:30): [Read more]

When I first heard reports of the armed man outside of Obama's townhall in Portsmouth, NH, I had a feeling that we would see an escalation of this behavior.  Today there were estimated to be a dozen armed outside of his appearance in Arizona.

It's a tricky situation.  Technically, these people are acting within their rights.  Realistically, they're bringing loaded weapons to incredibly tense gatherings.  As the tension and the number of weapons increases, so does the chance that something unwarranted occurs. [Read more]