brainrow

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling looks at how the government is cracking down on malefactors in the banking industry a year after the economy collapsed. (Click the image to see the entire cartoon.)

All Hat No Cattle has discovered the GOP Healthcare Plan. You know, I thought it was a joke until I came to point five in the plan; then it sounded just like the Republicans. (Click the image to see the whole plan, and when you get there, scroll down and look at some of the other cartoons there. I particularly like the press asking whether Obama’s overexposed, and the quote of Dom Hélder Câmara.)

GOP HEALTH CARE PLAN
The “Stay Well, America” Act

The Republican health care plan is very simple.

1. If you are sick, something is obviously wrong with you.
2. If you believe in personal responsibility, then you know that ‘something wrong with you’ is your fault.
3. Why should the government pay to fix something that is your fault?
4. The way to put things right again in life is to get right with God. And prayer is free.
5. Therefore, we demand a tax cut.

Stay well, America.

(I’ve put the text here because it’s only an image at All Hat No Cattle, and wouldn’t show up on a web search.)

Rachel Maddow uses a crash test to suggest that government regulation may not be entirely bad:

This is what 50 years of safety regulations forced on industry looks like. Which of these cars would you rather be in in this crash?

Funny or Die and MoveOn.org tell us who the real victims are in the healthcare debate: health insurance executives.

If we don’t stand up for the insurance companies, who will?

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow created this cartoon explaining the origins of our current health insurance system back in 2001. He recently re-ran it because nothing has changed. (Click the image to see the full cartoon.)

The webcomic xkcd suggests that the coarsening of our political discourse started a long time ago. (Click the image to see the cartoon.)

(If you like, you can read the actual Lincoln-Douglas Debates for perspective.)

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow asks what if Democrats behaved more like Republicans?

(Click the image to see the whole cartoon.)

Some polls show public support for healthcare reform dropping. I can’t help thinking it’s because Democrats — especially in Congress — are already acting too much like Republicans.

In November, voters elected Barack Obama and gave Democrats large majorities in the House and the Senate. Add one party-switcher named Arlen Specter, and Democrats now have 60 seats in the Senate, a so-called filibuster-proof majority. I don’t believe voters were hoping for the timid, corporate-interests-first policies that too many Congressional Democrats seem to be embracing right now.

Does the Democratic leadership think they’ll finally be strong enough to fix the healthcare mess only after the 2010 midterm elections? Do they imagine they’ll be in a stronger position then, if they can’t manage to get anything done now?

Bill Maher said of Obama, “He is Michael Jordan playing on a bad team. There’s nobody to pass the ball to.”

Congressional Democrats, you were elected to do a job. Stop running scared. Do the job. Do it right. Let the voters judge. The surest way to lose in 2010 is to fail to deliver the change voters demanded in 2008.

Greg Saunders says it’s time to unleash Joe Biden:

You know what the healthcare debate could use right now? Profanity.

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Seriously. He’s not kidding. (Warning: linked blog post contains profanity.)

Rachel Maddow and Kent Jones illustrate the Republicans’ commitment to health care reform:

Barney Frank tells the truth about the health care debate:

Barack Obama has been president now for exactly six months — January 20 to July 20 — and the country still has problems.

Golly, should I have voted for John McCain after all?

Rachel Maddow looks into The Family, a fundamentalist religious group that counts a number of important politicians among its members. She talks with reporter Jeff Sharlet, who spent time inside the organization, and wrote The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. (Video runs about 9 minutes.)

It’s the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington. It goes back 70 years, when the founder believed that God gave him a new revelation, saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years, and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek, and the down and out, he believes God came to him one night in April 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful, and that these powerful men who were chosen by God, can then, if they want to, dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.

Rachel asks whether this sense of being God’s chosen explains why members like Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford, caught in scandals, have refused to resign. Sharlet notes that Sanford cited King David to help explain that he wasn’t going to resign.

That just struck a bell with me, because the King David story is a core teaching of The Family … One of the leaders of The Family was explaining why King David was important, and he said, “It’s not because he was a good man; it’s because he was a bad man. You know, he seduced another man’s wife; he actually had the husband murdered.”

And he wanted to explain why this was a model, and he says to one of the men in the group, “Suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?”

And this guy, being a human being, says, “You would think I was a monster.”

Well, the leader of The Family says, “No, not at all, because you’re chosen. You’re chosen by God for leadership, and so the normal rules don’t apply.”

Sounds like the Manson family.

More from NPR, including an excerpt from Sharlet’s book.

Austan Goolsbee, of the Council of Economic Advisors, appeared Monday on The Colbert Report. Asked about critics like Rush Limbaugh who say they want Obama’s economic policies to fail, Goolsbee said:

Your house is on fire. Guy goes, “Ahhh! My child!” Guy runs in, takes your kid out, saves their life. Now is not the time to accuse them of kidnapping. This is the situation that we face.

The right-wingers have called Obama a Socialist, a Communist, a Fascist, a terrorist, and worse. I expect them to call him a kidnapper within 72 hours.

Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 92nd birthday.

His administration was too short for us to know what kind of president he might have become, but I think he had one quality that’s rare among American politicians: he could recognize when he was playing a game that couldn’t be won, and stop playing it.

We tend to reward politicians who mouth the expected national pieties, and penalize those who “think outside the box.” But when he saw that the old game wasn’t working — couldn’t work — Kennedy tried to change the game. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear exchange that might have meant the extinction of the human race. Having gazed into that particular abyss, Kennedy knew that we had to find a different way forward.

On June 10, 1963, at a commencement address at American University, Kennedy spoke about peace in the era of the atom bomb.

I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

…

Some say that it is useless to speak of peace … until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs…

First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again…

There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process — a way of solving problems.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors. So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable…

[Extreme Soviet statements about American intentions offer] a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.

…

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

It’s a Cold War speech. We face different challenges now. But it remains true that we must find a way to live together on this small planet, and we are all mortal.

Video, audio, and the published text of the speech (not an accurate transcript) are available here. A more accurate transcript is here.

From HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher:

Raw, unencumbered capitalism is a wonderful engine, but how we mistook it for a social framework — for how to build a just society — and interpreted it as that, is just incredible. —David Simon

So it’s not just in science fiction that we turn control of our society over to the machines?