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I do love this Jimi Hendrix song…

I think that guy has taken lessons.

Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly has been creating a monthly chart of job statistics. The red bars are from the final year of the Bush Administration; the blue bars are from the Obama Administration.

It seems something changed at just about the same time Obama took office — what a coincidence, huh?

Every bar below the “0” line represents jobs lost, so this certainly doesn’t mean the whole mess has been cleaned up. But it does seem to indicate that elections have consequences.

(On the Rachel Maddow Show, they call this the Bikini Graph, because someone there thinks it resembles the bottom half of a bikini swimsuit.)

Revealed at last, the secret origin of our modern political discourse:

Okay, Kurrgo, your ray worked. You can check the results yourself by monitoring Fox News or C-SPAN. Now, please turn it off!

Cartoonist Don Asmussen explores issues with the new “papers, please” law in Arizona. (Click the image to see the full cartoon.)

Next step: change the state’s name to Aryzona.

Author Dennis Meadows, from a recent PBS American Experience program called Earth Days:

We’ve been on this planet for several hundred thousands of years, and during most of that time, anybody who looked far into the future didn’t have much survival value. I mean, if you’re in the midst of a battle with a mammoth or something, you don’t sit there and say, “Well, let’s think about three years from now;” you run.

And so, for a long period of time, the advantage went to those who focused on the immediate situation. And, I think, as a consequence of that, now that we are faced with issues which will really unfold over centuries, we’re genetically and institutionally ill-adapted for it.

Web cartoonist Francesco Marciuliano shows us where short-term thinking will lead. (Click the image to see the whole cartoon, which is funnier and scarier than this little excerpt.)

Little known fact: Nikita Khrushchev was, in fact, a Republican.

On second thought, maybe not. More likely he was just a role model for Republican Senators:

Senate Republicans, united in opposition to the Democrats’ legislation to tighten regulation of the financial system, voted on Monday to block the bill from reaching the floor for debate.

They weren’t voting against the bill. No, they were voting against even starting debate on a financial reform bill. The argument seems to be that, since government is imperfect, it should not be allowed to set rules for the folks who nearly wrecked the economy.

I wonder what voters will think of that, come November?

Friday night on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the panel was discussing how John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court’s retiring “liberal lion,” had been considered a moderate Republican in 1975 when he was appointed by Gerald Ford. Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, said:

I think Republicans can still be moderate today. It’s their choice. I think the demographics have changed hugely, but what I think is absolutely stunning about what’s going on right now — where are the elder statesmen of the party, and why aren’t they standing up and insisting that this party take a more constructive view?

You know, anger is not a public policy prescription.

Maybe not, but it seems to be the only thing the GOP has got these days.

The intro is from the 1986 Hollywood Movie Top Gun. The real flyers who follow are a lot more daring (warning: strong language):

Yeah, it’s all fun until somebody loses an eye.

Barack Obama, here in Ohio Monday:

Last month, I got a letter from Connie’s sister, Natoma [Canfield]. She’s self-employed, she’s trying to make ends meet, and for years she’s done the responsible thing, just like most of you have. She bought insurance — she didn’t have a big employer who provided her insurance, so she bought her health insurance through the individual market.

And it was important for her to have insurance because 16 years ago, she was diagnosed with a treatable form of cancer. And even though she had been cancer-free for more than a decade, the insurance companies kept on jacking up her rates, year after year. So she increased her out-of-pocket expenses. She raised her deductible. She did everything she could to maintain her health insurance that would be there just in case she got sick, because she figured, I didn’t want to be — she didn’t want to be in a position where, if she did get sick, somebody else would have to pick up the tab; that she’d have to go to the emergency room; that the cost would be shifted onto folks through their higher insurance premiums or hospitals charging higher rates. So she tried to do the right thing.

And she upped her deductible last year to the minimum [sic], the highest possible deductible. But despite that, Natoma’s insurance company raised her premiums by more than 25 percent. And over the past year, she paid more than $6,000 in monthly premiums. [More than $6,000 total for the year.]

She paid more than $4,000 in out-of-pocket medical costs, for co-pays and medical care and prescriptions. So all together, this woman paid $10,000 — one year. But because she never hit her deductible, her insurance company only spent $900 on her care. So the insurance company is making — getting $10,000; paying out $900. Now, what comes in the mail at the end of last year?

It’s a letter telling Natoma that her premiums would go up again by more than 40 percent.

So here’s what happens. She just couldn’t afford it. She didn’t have the money. She realized that if she paid those health insurance premiums that had been jacked up by 40 percent, she couldn’t make her mortgage. And despite her desire to keep her coverage, despite her fears that she would get sick and lose the home that her parents built — she finally surrendered, she finally gave up her health insurance. She stopped paying it — she couldn’t make ends meet.

So January was her last month of being insured. Like so many responsible Americans — folks who work hard every day, who try to do the right thing — she was forced to hang her fortunes on chance. To take a chance, that’s all she could do. She hoped against hope that she would stay healthy. She feared terribly that she might not stay healthy.

That was the letter that I read to the insurance companies, including the person responsible for raising her rates. Now, I understand Natoma was pretty surprised when she found out that I had read it to these CEOs. But I thought it was important for them to understand the human dimensions of this problem. Her rates have been hiked more than 40 percent.

And this was less than two weeks ago. Unfortunately, Natoma’s worst fears were realized. And just last week, she was working on a nearby farm, walking outside — apparently, chasing after a cow — when she collapsed. And she was rushed to the hospital. She was very sick. She needed two blood transfusions. Doctors performed a battery of tests. And on Saturday, Natoma was diagnosed with leukemia.

Now, the reason Natoma is not here today is that she’s lying on a hospital bed, suddenly faced with this emergency — suddenly faced with the fight of her life. She expects to face more than a month of aggressive chemotherapy. She is racked with worry not only about her illness but about the costs of the tests and the treatment that she’s surely going to need to beat it.

So you want to know why I’m here, Ohio? I’m here because of Natoma. I’m here because of the countless others who have been forced to face the most terrifying challenges in their lives with the added burden of medical bills they can’t pay. I don’t think that’s right. Neither do you. That’s why we need health insurance right now. Health insurance reform right now.

I’m here because of my own mother’s story. She died of cancer, and in the last six months of her life, she was on the phone in her hospital room arguing with insurance companies instead of focusing on getting well and spending time with her family.

I’m here because of the millions who are denied coverage because of preexisting conditions or dropped from coverage when they get sick.

I’m here because of the small businesses who are forced to choose between health care and hiring.

I’m here because of the seniors unable to afford the prescriptions that they need.

I’m here because of the folks seeing their premiums go up 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 percent in a year.

Ohio, I am here because that is not the America I believe in and that’s not the America that you believe in.

So when you hear people say “start over” — I want you to think about Natoma. When you hear people saying that this isn’t the “right time,” you think about what she’s going through. When you hear people talk about, well, what does this mean for the Democrats? What does this mean for the Republicans? I don’t know how the polls are doing. When you hear people more worried about the politics of it than what’s right and what’s wrong, I want you to think about Natoma and the millions of people all across this country who are looking for some help, and looking for some relief. That’s why we need health insurance reform right now.

The Republican response (with Portuguese subtitles for some reason):

Via email: a friend found this advertisement for bread from England.

That kid sure took the long way home.

Loreena McKennitt sings “Bonny Portmore” at a Borders book store. (The song is about the destruction of Irish forests by English ship builders.)

Must be nice to have talent.

I was born four score and seven years after Abraham Lincoln died.

That’s a cute little coincidence, but it’s more than that: it tells me that on the day I was born, there were people living in this country who had been born as slaves.

Not many of them, certainly. But there were lots and lots of people who had learned about American slavery directly from parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles who had actually been slaves.

Imagine that.

Abraham Lincoln has always seemed almost mythical to me, like a figure from Mount Olympus. His life, his presidency and his death seem frozen in amber, immutable and inevitable. Yet, on the day I was born, there were probably a handful of people still living who had once, as children, heard him speak.

When Lincoln himself was born, Thomas Jefferson was president. By the time Lincoln was president, Jefferson and his peers had become creatures of myth.

Time turns life into history and history into mythology. We wait for a mythical leader to appear and solve our problems, but life has never worked that way. As Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign: “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” If our problems are to be solved, we have to do it ourselves.

From Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress (the State of the Union Message of his time):

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.

What we do, or fail to do, matters. That’s no myth.

This is real: the Republican National Committee gets into the spirit with a selection of e-cards for Valentine’s Day.

Oh, the spirit of love is in the air!

We’re approaching the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, so you can expect plenty of year-in-review stories. Rachel Maddow prepares us for the “Obama’s a failure” storyline we’re sure to hear from Republicans:

The news story:

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson says Haiti has been “cursed” because of what he called a “pact with the devil” in its history.

The prayer:

Dear Lord, you know I don’t like to ask you for anything. You know I’ve never asked you to do harm to anyone.

Well, I’m asking now. Please, Lord, strike down Pat Robertson with a bolt of lightning. Preferably in broad daylight with lots of witnesses.

I don’t believe Robertson was speaking for You about Haiti, any more than I believed he was speaking for You when he said Ariel Sharon’s stroke was Your vengeance for peace overtures to the Palestinians, or when he said Hurricane Katrina was Your wrath over abortion, or that 9/11 was Your response to secularism in America.

The problem is, he claims to be speaking for You, and some people believe it. It’s not good for us, and it’s not good for You. Some people think, “If that’s what God’s all about, I’m gonna be an atheist.”

One well-aimed bolt of lightning would do a lot to clear up this confusion.

Amen.

The answer:

Do you know who you sound like just now? Pat Robertson.

God, I’m so ashamed.