Are you sick and tired of the silly talking point Republicans use when they say all we have to do is allow people to cross state lines and buy insurance anywhere in America? They say that'll lower costs and save us all. Really? OK, here's what I have to say to that.

I want every member of Congress who is against health care refom with a public option to go out into the real world and try to purchase their own private insurance in any state they choose as a test. They can't say they are Senators or Congressmen, though. Make believe they are real citizens and then be like everybody else. Let's see how many of them actually would qualify for a plan at all and if they somehow can get insured, I want to see how much it would cost them and their families.

Hmmm, I wonder what would happen to Orrin Hatch?

That's what I want to see.

BAGnewsNotes: I guess all those dittoheads - oops, I mean citizens - not delivering "high-decibel rants" must be "more reasoned voices."

The Rude Pundit: A few random observations regarding the newest torture report

Bats Left/Throws Right: Thank God our long national nightmare of a wildly successful government program that accomplishes something is over.

Jeff Hoard: A Canadian goes back through the archives and brings together 101 of Fox News's worst moments.

Amygdala: Calley: Wrong, but right

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Private Buffoon, Pulp Friction, UncommonSense, POUR

Sam Seder filling in for Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks takes a call from a conservative who resents paying for health care for his fellow citizens, but doesn't mind paying for the Iraq War. Why in the hell is this man not on the radio every day of the week?

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Does anyone remember when Town Hall forums were civil affairs that gave citizens a chance to speak freely to their elected representatives in a civil conversation?

Yeah, that would have been last week. In the days since, Republicans and their astroturf gangs of protesters have transformed town halls into outlets for their prearranged shoutfests ginned up by Fox talkers.

The old town-hall forum may never be the same. And the country is the worse for it.

Check out the ugliness yesterday in Tampa Bay. It certainly fits the blueprint for action laid out early on in this effort: Disrupt, distract, and destroy any chance for an actual civil and informed conversation. In other words, demolish the entire purpose of a town-hall forum.

As Paul Krugman puts it:

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

... [T]he driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

No one has a problem with right-wingers marching in protest of the health-care plans. That's certainly their right. And no one minds that they choose to participate in these forums. But town halls were never designed to be vehicles for protest. They have always been about enabling real democratic discourse in a civil setting.

When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.

And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.

Sensen no Sen: Dennis Prager, Mendacious Hack

Rumproast: The giant teeter-totter of racism.

What About Our Daughters: Action-oriented citizens put up billboards about missing Black women.

Facing South: The politics behind Lindsay Graham's vote for Sotomayor

Jonestown: But hey! If Obama wanted to wipe out seniors, he could find a more cost-effective way than this healthcare reform rigamarole!

Zappatero at DKos:

A simple word of advice from me to our United States Senators on health care reform and their "centrist" colleagues: just say "No" to Ben Nelson if he comes a-callin' with scary stories about getting all our citizens covered by health insurance this year:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said he planned to urge the president not to force an arbitrary August deadline on health care reform.

Arbitrary?

Because 15 years after the last attempt at meaningful health care reform is too soon?

Maybe the 44 years after Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare Act is rushing it for Senator Nelson.

Arbitrary could be the 64 years since Truman said this:

In my message to the Congress of September 6, 1945, there were enumerated in a proposed Economic Bill of Rights certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.

One of them was: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." Another was the "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of . .. sickness ...."

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.

The people of the United States received a shock when the medical examinations conducted by the Selective Service System revealed the widespread physical and mental incapacity among the young people of our nation. We had had prior warnings from eminent medical authorities and from investigating committees. The statistics of the last war had shown the same condition. But the Selective Service System has brought it forcibly to our attention recently--in terms which all of us can understand.

As of April 1, 1945, nearly 5,000,000 male registrants between the ages of 18 and 37 had been examined and classified as unfit for military service. The number of those rejected for military service was about 30 percent of all those examined. The percentage of rejection was lower in the younger age groups, and higher in the higher age groups, reaching as high as 49 percent for registrants between the ages of 34 and 37.

Wow, didn't realize the Republican "military lovers" could've killed that proposal -- even with Harry Truman's base militaristic pandering and the shadow of WWII looming over all of us.

Sadly, this self-interest of Nelson (to the detriment of America) only fuels the Republican obstructionism and makes statements like this one from Jim DeMint all that more frustratingly close to reality:

Last week, Sen. Jim DeMint (R) of South Carolina, arguably the chamber's most right-wing member, told an audience at the National Press Club that the United States is currently "about where Germany was before World War II." Everything about his remarks -- the sense of history, the understanding of current events, the philosophy -- was a special kind of stupid.

But DeMint seems quite pleased with himself, and keeps churning out new and creative insanity.

In an interview with the evangelical World Magazine titled "The Taxpayers' Greatest Ally," Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) had some interesting things to say about his work with his colleagues in the Senate:

"I am not going to be able to persuade my colleagues to do the right things, so I am just going to have to create pain."

Okay, that is a bit intense. However, it may not even be the most intense statement from Sen. DeMint this week. On a conference call this morning, DeMint discussed health care reform: ""This health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America... If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

If you look back historically, you can draw a direct line from the defeat the Clinton suffered in '93 trying to push for Universal Health Care to his far less ambitious actions as President and the capitalization of the hobbled presidency by the GOP and their uprising with the Contract For America. It is critical that we not give the GOP an inch on that and we're certainly not going to be helped by Senators like Nelson who has a personal interest in helping the insurance industry.

I guess it's a speaker from the Citizens of Liberty or something...Another Global Warming denier. I couldn't write any dialogue for you from this clip. That's really asking way too much of me. Maybe she'll run for president too.

The Onion (edited for safe-for-work viewing, see original here) finally gets the 40-year-old headline right. The interactive website commemorating today's anniversary is worth the click.

40 years ago we were a nation that spent billions of dollars on the crap shoot of putting three men on top of 3,200 tons of hellfire wrapped in an aluminum skin and firing the whole thing at a dead rock 240,000 miles away because our destiny demanded it.

40 years later we are a nation that will not spend billions to keep its 300 million citizens alive, healthy and productive because the insurance industry lobbyists who own our politicians forbid it.

[Blue Gal's taking the night off to celebrate her birthday. Have a good one, BG.] Open Thread in comments...

Stunning. Millions of Iranaian citizens are staging protests of historical proportion and Republican Pete Hoekstra compares it to being taken to the woodshed by Democrats. Zero shame. The best part of Pete's Tweet? The comments.

Ice Station Tango nails it:

I remember that day. It was a god damned massacre. The Democrats surrounded the Republicans and deliberately fired into the peaceful crowd, killing seven...

Wait, that was Iran.

Hoekstra wasn't the only wingnut making the Iran protest/GOP comparison. These people obviously have no idea how ridiculous they look. (h/t HuffPo)

Well, I'm just going to say it: Obama gives a very nice speech, but his plans worry me. Ever see "Minority Report," the movie with Tom Cruise? Set in the future, he works for the Department of Pre-Crime. The police use technology to predict who will commit crimes, and they arrest them before the crimes happen.

Don't pretty this up, folks. This is exactly the position Obama expressed in his speech today, and if we keep silent simply because he's a Democrat, well, we're not doing our job as citizens of this democratic republic.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Digby said:

I know it's a mess, but the fact is that this isn't really that difficult, except in the usual beltway kabuki political sense. There are literally tens of thousands of potential terrorists all over the world who could theoretically harm America. We cannot protect ourselves from that possibility by keeping the handful we have in custody locked up forever, whether in Guantanamo or some Super Max prison in the US. It's patently absurd to obsess over these guys like it makes us even the slightest bit safer to have them under indefinite lock and key so they "can't kill Americans."

The mere fact that we are doing this makes us less safe because the complete lack of faith we show in our constitution and our justice systems is what fuels the idea that this country is weak and easily terrified. There is no such thing as a terrorist suspect who is too dangerous to be set free. They are a dime a dozen, they are all over the world and for every one we lock up there will be three to take his place. There is not some finite number of terrorists we can kill or capture and then the "war" will be over and the babies will always be safe. This whole concept is nonsensical.

The real terrorists, I'm afraid, are the self-serving hawks who promise to explode a political dirty bomb in the halls of the capitol every time someone tries to be sensible about American foreign policy and national security. They are still running things. They have always run things. And the sorry fact is that their dominance is a decades long model of bipartisan comity.

Glenn Greenwald:

So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.

In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing. That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."

And Will Bunch sums up:

No matter how much Obama tries to blame this on the Cheney torture policies (which created that inadmissible evidence), two wrongs don't make a right. What he's proposing is against one of this country's core principles, which is habeas corpus. No matter how many guidelines that Obama and his administration try to impose, there is nothing in the Constitution that would permit the indefinite jailing of people "who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes" but who "nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States" -- nor should their be. Not even if we ever do develop the mind-reading powers of a "thought police."

This is why people need to keep the pressure on Obama -- even those inclined to view his presidency favorably. Because while clearly his overall approach to torture and detention issues are "on the right track" as opposed to the very "wrong track" of Cheney and Bush, it is so easy inside the Beltway to start veering off the rails. Making people accountable for the torture and Guantanamo debacles of the Bush years requires the American people constantly holding our new president accountable, too.