Where's the Outrage: We need leadership on healthcare.

Reid Report: Duh, Obama-hate is mostly about race.

musings: A Texas county GOP group learns the Facebook, right after Murder She Wrote and their nap.

Amygdala: What our wars do to our soldiers

Mark Moford: Sigh, even God doesn't care about your sex life.

DOWNLOADS: (1541)

PLAYS: (3057)

Embed

Hold back the jello. Jay Rockefeller was on this morning with Andrea Mitchell and complained about the Kent Conrad "co-op" plan which he said was basically unworkable. He then went on The Ed show and hit it even harder. Jay is a supporter of the public option and was pissed that the co-op proposal was inserted in the Baucus bill since it was never even talked about during the general election. Isn't it nice that Baucus has killed the public option just to work with Republicans? Conservatives don't even have to win elections to get what they want. That's some deal they have.

Ed: It's not going to work. There's really no successful model out there to support the basis of signing on to a co-op. Would you sign on to a co-op or is that unacceptable?

Rockefeller: That's unacceptable and I can almost prove it. We've been in touch with all the folks that oversee, represent all the co-ops in the country on all subjects and they point out that there are probably less than twenty health co-ops in the country. There are only two that really work that well. One in Puget Sound, one in Minnesota, except for those two, they are all unlicensed. All present health co-ops are all unlicensed, they're unregulated. Nobody knows anything about them, nobody has any control over them and nobody has ever said, which is stunning to me, no government organization or private organization has ever done a study to what effect they might have in terms of bringing down the insurance prices.

They are untested, they are unlicensed, they are unregulated, they are unstudied. Why would we even think about putting them in as a control on this massive insurance industry instead of the public option?

There aren't any co-ops throughout much of the country, but to appease the conservative Dems we're supposed to throw six billion dollars around and hope that the states will try to make them workable. Is this insane? Watch the whole clip, but you get the idea from this one statement. Kent Conrad's big proposal is a complete sham, but President Baucus is trying to cram that down the throats of the country, which will render all health-care reform useless. All hail bipartisanship!

DOWNLOADS: (137)

PLAYS: (394)

Embed

Immediately following the press conference given by Sergeant James Crowley, Chris Matthews and his guests started raving about what a great job he did and how he might have a future in politics if he wanted one.

Matthews: We're back with Roger Simon and Mark Whitaker after that, I have to say remarkable press conference Roger because I have watched politicians for about forty years now. He's better than most of them.

Simon: Is this guy suave or what? We had a cordial and productive discussion. It's like a head of state. He was good.

Matthews: Well he answered a lot of questions. No apologies. He said they're going to look forward. They're going to have a meaningful discussion later, not over a beer, but a serious get together. Mark your thoughts.

Whitaker: No apologies and probably no law suit from the body language. He says they're going to meet again. My guess is that Skip Gates loves to do documentaries.

Matthews: And he will be a player?

Whitaker: I wouldn't be surprised that they're going to be players in a documentary. And I think we've seen that a star is born. I think this guy could have a future in politics, the media. We'll see.

Matthews: Look out Deval Patrick in the next election, the governor up there. We'll be right back. I have to tell you I, well I feel like we're watching a.. Britain's Got Talent here. Right back with Mark Whitaker and Roger Simon and more of the politics fix. We've got our Susan Boyle here.

Now, for anyone who's been watching him for as long as I have, this is another obvious man-crush remark by Matthews along the same lines as his "furrowing up his leg" statement about Obama, or the "Aqua Velva" remark about Grandpa Fred. Tweety just can't help himself. But it seems he's got the Freepers up in arms for comparing Crowley to Susan Boyle.

As creepy as it is to watch Matthews with no filter as usual and just letting the first thing to come into his brain pour out of his mouth, and expressing another of his man crushes on the air, I really don't think he was trying to insult Crowley.

DOWNLOADS: 511

PLAYS: 54

Embed

(The Smoke - Banned at the starting gate)

I doubt The Smoke are a band anyone on this side of the Atlantic has ever heard of, unless you are a die hard collector of psychedelia or knew someone who actually was familiar with this band at the time.

The Smoke was a short-lived outfit famous (or infamous) for their very first hit single "My Friend Jack" - an innocent sounding title, but the rest of the line goes " . . eats sugar lumps". Sugar lumps being something of a code word for the thing LSD was laced with. Right off the bat, it was banned from any airplay in England. So naturally, when anything is banned it races up the charts just on sheer rumor alone. There have been several bands with the name The Smoke, including one that did get released in the States on Tower, but they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Sadly though, The Smoke were a one hit wonder. And after several tries, of which this particular single "Have Some More Tea" was one, they gave up and went their separate ways. But not before recording an albums worth of material and making an indelible impression on any record collector who came their way. In later years, "My Friend Jack" has become something of an underground classic, being covered by Boney M (which has a connection to The Smoke) and Wondermints. I actually never heard this band the first time around, but discovered them on the recommendation of a guy named Yves who ran Vinyl Solution in London in 1979.

It's all his fault - thank God.

Tengrain calls it "Have a Beer with Someone Who Arrested You Day."

Also on topic: Frank Chow, Beer and Buy American.

And Alien Truth is funny on the Sudsy Convo.

Open Thread below...

DOWNLOADS: (168)

PLAYS: (780)

Embed

From The Tonight Show July 29, 2009.

(h/t Logan)

A YouTube user recently uploaded this complete Kiss show from 1975 in San Francisco from the Kissology set. You can watch the whole thing here.

I've always had a mixed relationship with Kiss, as have a lot of music fans who can't divorce them from the blatant commercialism and megalomania that they've embodied for most of their career. This set is a million miles away from that -- merely four guys from New York with something to prove. Peter Criss gets his first line a half-step sharp, and from there delivers a charged vocal performance somewhere in the big space between James Brown and Iggy Pop. "I Was Made for Lovin' You" it ain't. The 1950s style black and white footage just adds to the mystique.

"Black Diamond" is the night's closer. There's something about hearing one of the most polished, manicured acts in rock history start a song with an out of tune guitar and an uncertain melody that makes you wish they fell victim to such accidents more often. Watch the whole show if you have some time.

Even as Republicans wage their new war against the latest efforts at health care reform, they are still fighting the last one. 44 years after the passage of Medicare, Republicans leaders like Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) are attacking Democratic proposals by blasting the popular health system for America's elderly. Sadly for the GOP, Medicare's proven success in reducing poverty among the elderly and its strong support from beneficiaries belies Price's claim that "nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare."

As ThinkProgress noted, Republican demagoguery on Medicare has a long and sordid past. While George H.W. Bush in 1964 used the now-eternal sound bite to describe it simply as "socialized medicine," Ronald Reagan warned three years earlier that failure to stop Medicare meant " you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

On Thursday, orthopedic surgeon turned Georgia Congressman Tom Price picked up the baton of GOP fear-mongering on Medicare. In a Politico op-ed which unsurprisingly omitted any estimates of the cost and coverage of the Republicans' latest supposed health care reform plan, Price slammed Medicare as the poster child for everything that's wrong about proposals backed by the Obama White House:

Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare. Because of Washington's one-size-fits-all approach, its flawed coverage rules and broken financing mechanisms, seniors are increasingly having care rationed while federal health spending spirals out of control.

And though newly eligible Medicare patients struggle even to find a doctor who can accept them, the president appears immovable in his belief that what is needed to fix health care is more government involvement. His proposal can only be described as a government takeover of health care.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (1063)

PLAYS: (1663)

Embed

There's been a lot of talk on the teevee -- particularly Fox -- the past couple of days about domestic terrorism, sparked by the arrests of 7 men in North Carolina for supposedly planning acts of terrorism on the behest of Al Qaeda.

What strikes so many of them -- including the Fox "All Star" panel yesterday -- was that the suspects were so successful at blending in as regular American neighbors. But not once does it ever seem to cross their minds that this, indeed, has long been a feature of right-wing domestic terrorism in this country.

There's no doubt that the addition of Al Qaeda as a player on the domestic terrorism scene is cause for special concern. America has been fortunate in that, for the most part, its many would-be domestic terrorists have not typically been very competent. Adding a highly competent organization like Al Qaeda to the mix ratchets up the potential danger on this front significantly.

Attorney General Eric Holder was fairly thoughtful in his interview with ABC in addressing this:

"I mean, that's one of the things that's particularly troubling: This whole notion of radicalization of Americans," Holder told ABC News during an interview in his SUV as his motorcade brought him from home to work. "Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people, is a great concern."

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (156)

PLAYS: (354)

Embed

July 29, 2009 C-SPAN