I’m always a little confused by this stuff. Are we supposed to believe that Barack, Michelle, and Anita Dunn are secretly Maoists, but they keep forgetting to actually seize power in a violent coup and instead got confused and put internationally famous neoliberal economist Larry Summers in charge of economic policy?
Category: Politics
I was saying around the office that I think what was missing from the Lieberman public option sellout deal was a healthy dose of liberal catharsis. Like if Lieberman got the leadership to agree to drop the public option, but in exchange Bernie Sanders gets to slap Lieberman five times in the face as hard as he can.
It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.
Stay on Target!
Terence Nowicki, Jr., is a freelance editorial cartoonist. Very often I find his take on the news to be more interesting than those of in‐house cartoonists at major newspapers.
October 18, 2009
The Senate Finance Committee’s version of the health care bill is out, but only as a 223‐page PDF. OpenCongress has translated it to HTML, but David Moore rightly complains that the whole damn process is too convoluted. Because it hasn’t yet been introduced, it’s not available in THOMAS, and even if it were, we’d need the kind souls at OpenCongress and GovTrack to convert it into a usable format. (Even worse: the way we write legislation is stupid. Why do we need three different versions of the bill if they’re all going to be reconciled in conference committee anyway?)
How did LaRouche’s ideas make his way to that town hall? Well, his followers are the most interesting part. They are young, usually college aged. They are articulate, and they will present LaRouche’s ideas in what seems to be an intellectually viable light. If you question them, they will become extremely angry. They will not defend their ideas with logic. Instead, they will call you ignorant. They will tell you that their ideas are the only thing in between America and certain doom. They will tell you the only way to learn their ideas is to buy a DVD. The DVD is $25.
GovTrack, the site whose excellent machine‐readable data powers Filibusted, now links back to Filibusted on any page that describes a cloture vote. The circle is complete. Thanks, Josh!
I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.” Later, as night fell over the tumultuous capital, gunfire could be heard in the distance. And from rooftops across the city, the defiant sound of “Allah‐u-Akbar” — “God is Great” — went up yet again, as it has every night since the fraudulent election. But on Saturday it seemed stronger. The same cry was heard in 1979, only for one form of absolutism to yield to another. Iran has waited long enough to be free.
I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.
One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as “that ever‐gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.” If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.