You know what would really simplify and improve the American political system presently?  I'll tell you: We should all just give our money directly to corporations!  At least, that's what Glenn Beck is apparently advising his audience to do in the form of making political donations directly to the Chamber of Commerce.  Media Matters sums it up:

Ah, the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.  No, not the courtroom of Judge Judy - the United States Senate.  Once a bastion of the elite and much more a body that represented state legislatures than Da Peehpuhl (as we say here in California), then civilized by the 17th Amendment, it is now the Place Where Good Legislation Goes to Die on the Vine.

PROTIP: If you're going to take someone to task for their supposed bigotry, it's probably best that your whole argument not devolve into a weird tirade about how Jews run everything... including the company that employs you.

Anyway, peace out to Rick Sanchez, whose Twitterfied brand of infotainment was the final nail in the coffin containing my erstwhile relationship with cable news two years ago.  Cancelled my cable and haven't looked back.

Meg Whitman has a maid problem.  It's too early to know all the facts, but what Whitman knew and when she knew it isn't what really matters here.  Even if she didn't know, she would still be guilty of one of the great Republican pastimes - the simultaneous persecution and exploitation of immigrants.

Much has been written, both here at dagblog.com and elsewhere, about the rift between the so-called progressive left and their interlocutors in the halls of power.  So much so, that the arguments seem fairly ossified at this point.  I don't know that I can change of that, but I do have something for the offering nonetheless.

Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at Cal.  Megan McArdle is a hack in the employ of the Atlantic (for some reason).

Megan, meet Professor DeLong.

The real treat here is that McArdle comes by DeLong's blog to defend her stupidity in comments.  DeLong, again, tries to clue her in.  The fun comes when she finally realizes her simple (yet gargantuan) error and has to finally utter the resounding mea culpa of, "Oops."

Seen here:

So, apparently we've reached the point in our present national decline when our modern day Father Coughlin has decided it's time for full-blown anti-intellectualism:

Via Roger Ebert, I just learened tha Glenn Beck is set to hold an event in Anchorage, Alaska this September the 11th.  I was able to confirm that tickets are on sale for the event here.

Hey, remember this?

I'm offended.  So, naturally, that places me amongst the majority of people living in the world today.

First off, it feels good to have outed myself as one of you.  After all, the present condition of the "national dialogue" begins to make one feel rather left out when one is merely an observer of completely unrestrained outrage.  Now that I've made my position known, I feel a lot better.

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.

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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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

No, I'm not making this up:

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.

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: