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Robert Byrd, Respected Voice of the Senate, Dies at 92:

Robert C. Byrd, who used his record tenure as a United States senator to fight for the primacy of the legislative branch of government and to build a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money, died at about 3 a.m. Monday, his office said. He was 92.He had been in failing health for several years.

Mr. Byrd’s death comes as Senate Democrats are working to pass the final version of the financial overhaul bill and win other procedural battles in the week before the Independence Day recess. In the polarized atmosphere of Washington, President Obama’s agenda seemed to hinge on Mr. Byrd’s health. Earlier this year, in the final days of the health care debate, the ailing senator was pushed onto the Senate floor in his plaid wheelchair so he could cast his votes.

Governor Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, will appoint an interim successor to Mr. Byrd.

Nate Silver wrote this on Byrd's replacement before the Senator passed away but after the news of his illness did not sound good.

Senator Byrd is Ill; A Note on West Virginia's Vacancy Laws:

Byrd's current term expires on January 3, 2013. Under West Virginia state law on handling Senate vacancies, "if the vacancy occurs less than two years and six months before the end of the term, the Governor appoints someone to fill the unexpired term and there is no election". Otherwise, Manchin would appoint an interim replacement, and an special election would be held in November to determine who held the seat in 2011 and 2012.

In other words, we are within a week of the threshold established by West Virginia law. If a vacancy were to be declared on July 3rd or later, there would not be an election to replace Byrd until 2012. If it were to occur earlier, there could potentially be an election later this year, although there might be some ambiguities arising from precisely when and how the vacancy were declared.

Washington Journal's Peter Slen spoke to Politico's Martin Kady about his article on the Senator's passing and took calls from viewers in the video above.

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Oh boy. The man who brought us Sarah Paling-Around-with-Terrorists Palin and who has promised to take his ball and go home rather than work with the Democrats now thinks we should have some "civility in the health care debate":

Sen. John McCain called for a more civilized political discourse on Thursday after members of Congress who voted for health care reform reported incidents of harassment and threats of violence.

"There is a lot of anger and passion out there," McCain said on CNN's "John King USA." "Let's change that into a spirited and healthy respectful campaign season between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Let's really go at it, but let's do it with respect, that's the key to it."

McCain noted that he has held thousands of town hall meetings during his long political career. "The only thing I ask people to do is be respectful," he said.

CNN didn't bother to mention in their Political Ticker that McCain defended Sarah Palin for her "reload" and political crosshairs Facebook posting. McCain wrote it off as just typical political rhetoric.

Full transcript via CNN below the fold.

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When Bob Schieffer asks Sen. Lamar Alexander if the Republicans are at risk for being seen as purely obstructionists if the health care bill passes, Alexander responds by saying that it will be "a political kamikaze mission" for the Democrats if they pass the bill and vows they're going to run on repealing it. I think Lamar Alexander is the last person the Democrats should be taking any political advice from.

SCHIEFFER: Critics have said that the President has really put his whole presidency on the line. He’s put all the chips on the line. By putting everything he can muster against health care-- for health care and getting it passed. I guess, I would ask the other side of the question. Aren’t Republicans also putting everything up on the line by just being universally, totally against this? I mean, I’m thinking about November. Is it-- can a-- can a party get elected just by saying no? Is-- Is that a successful campaign tactic?

ALEXANDER: No-- no, it’s not. It is not what we’ve done. I mean, a hundred and seventy-three times, and I had my staff count them in the congressional record. Republicans went to the floor of the Senate and offered our step-by-step plan to reduce cost,including small-business health plans, buying insurance across state lines, stopping junk lawsuits against doctors, reducing waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s a different direction. What the President is trying to do is to expand a health care system that everybo-- body knows is unaffordable. What we want to do is reduce the cost of the health care system. And I’m willing to put it to a vote. I hope we don’t have to for the country. I mean, the most important words the President may have uttered in the summit were "that’s what elections are for." And he also said last year that the health care debate’s not just about health care, it’s a proxy for the larger issue of the role of government in American lives. And we think he’s right about that.

SCHIEFFER: Senator, you have said, I believe, that it would be catastrophic for the Democrats if this legislation passes. From just the standpoint of straight politics, why wouldn’t it be a good idea for Republicans to let it pass?

ALEXANDER: Well, if-- if-- if we were completely irresponsible that-- that’s what we would do. I think it’s a political kamikaze mission for the-- for-- for the Democrats to insist on this. I believe if they jam this through-- remember, no big piece of social legislation, Pat Monahan used to say this, the late Democratic Senator, no big piece of social legislation’s ever been jammed through just by a partisan vote. I mean, Lyndon Johnson had the Civil Rights bills written in the Republican leader Everett Dirksen’s office. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid--all had seventy votes. I think, from the day this passes, if it should, there will be an instant, spontaneous campaign to repeal it all across the country. It’ll define every Democratic congressional race in November. And it will be a political wipeout for the Democratic Party. That’ll be bad for the country but it will change the leadership of the country.

SCHIEFFER: Just quickly. Robert Gibbs said next Sunday we’ll all be sitting here talking about how health care reform passed. Do you agree with that?

ALEXANDER: I hope he’s wrong. And I hope that the first part of your show is wrong, too. I hope this is not-- this won’t be the end of health care. If it passes, it’ll define the rest of the year in terms of political contests.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

ALEXANDER: If it fails it’ll just begin a different debate.

UPDATE: John Amato

I guess sushi is in style of GOP because Goober Graham is the latest one to use Japanese analogies:

Graham: Pelosi has House Dems 'liquored up on sake' ready for 'suicide run'

Ed Schultz talks to Rep. Peter DeFazio and The Nation's John Nichols about whether the Democrats are blowing it on the health care debate and with demonstrating some leadership. I think Nichols has it right:

Nichols: The Democrats have as one of their best members of Congress Pete DeFazio said, made a hash of this thing. The truth of the matter is the American people don't care what a filibuster is. They don't care what cloture is. There's a new Pew Center poll that says they don't even know what those things are. What they care about is whether their kids, whether their parents, whether they have health care.

And if the Democrats don't get this, and I'd start with Barack Obama, nobody gets off the hook here, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the whole Democratic Party, if they don't get that the issue is health care, not Senate rules, they are going to be beaten awfully badly this fall. They may not lose all their majorities, but they will lose their ability to function, and in so doing they will have sacrificed the ability to set this country right.

That isn't just bad politics. That's bad morality.

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January 01, 2010 CNN

Heather: Only the Villagers like those on CNN would think that Ed Schultz and Rep. Alan Grayson's fiery rhetoric during the health care debate is the same as the insanity of Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. Shame on John Avlon and CNN for this bit of false equivalency bullpucky.

JOHNS: Every week independent analyst John Avlon joins us to name the Wingnuts of the Week. Wingnuts, according to John, are professional partisans and unhinged activists.

KAYE: John even has a book coming out called "Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America." And he's put together a list of last year's 2009 worst offenders. He joined Kiran Chetry to countdown the top five, including the biggest wingnut of the year.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KIRAN CHETRY, CNN ANCHOR: Let's just get right to the list. We did this little countdown, and we're going to start with number five. So who made the cut for wingnut -- top five wingnut?

JOHN AVLON, INDEPENDENT POLITICAL ANALYST: Top five wingnut, big threshold, we have Ed Schultz, sort of aiming to be the liberal Rush Limbaugh this year. And here's one comment he made this fall regarding health care that really stood out.

Let's take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ED SCHULTZ, HOST, THE ED SHOW: The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They'd rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer, and they don't have anything for her. That's how the insurance companies make money -- by denying the coverage. My God, Democrats, what's wrong with you? You can't deal with these people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: Wow. That's wingnut stuff.

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December 24, 2009 Fox & Friends

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This is rich. C-Street Family member Tom Coburn who along with his fellow Family members have been doing their best to inject religion into the health care debate, uses a quote by Thomas Jefferson about separation of church and state, and takes it out of context.

h/t jenyum at Daily KOS who has more -- Dear Senator Coburn: Liberals Can Quote Jefferson, Too:

During today's Senate health care bill debate, Senator Tom Coburn held up a big graphic displaying a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical

This quote resided in the background while Coburn went on and an about earmarks, and abortion, and waste and fraud in the federal government. If Senator Coburn had actually read the original source of the quote, however, I don't think he'd be so quick to use it.

Jefferson's actual words originated in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical

The Statute goes on to say...

our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right, that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage.

Obviously among other things too long to list, Tom Coburn's irony alert button is broken. He'd better hope he doesn't wind up in trouble for his part in his buddy John Ensign's affair that the press has been giving him a pass on. As jenyum noted:

Jefferson's words when not taken out of context are hardly a rallying cry for a party that opposes health care reform on religious grounds.

Couldn't have said it any better myself.

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It was Bill O'Reilly and Jim DeMint's turn to pretend like no one has ever cut a Senator's time on the floor short tonight on the O'Reilly Factor. Bill-O and 'PrayerCast' member Jim DeMint do a little bit of history revision and pretend like Grandpa McCain hasn't done the exact same thing himself. So nice of them to show such concern for Joe Lie-berman while ignoring that McCain himself has acted a whole lot worse. Little wonder that O'Reilly would lash out at Franken since he's been mocking Bill-O since his days at Air America Radio.

Franken's spot where he panned O'Reilly for pretending like he served in battle on his radio show and his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them had to have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. If anyone out there has the recording of that segment on Air America, let the site know. I'd love to post it if I could find it.

As Think Progress noted, McCain was more than happy to cut off a Democratic Senator's time during the Iraq war debate. Now he's got memory lapse. Apparently it's too much to ask O'Reilly or DeMint to tell the truth about that in this segment. Fox News... unfair and unbalanced.

I'm still trying to figure out why the staff at Hardball could find footage of John McCain from back in 2002 cutting off another member of the Senate when the Rachel Maddow Show said they couldn't find it in the C-SPAN archives. Very strange.

UPDATE: My mistake on the Hardball/Rachel Maddow show segments. Matthews showed a different clip and not the one Rachel's staff could not find. At least both of those shows, unlike O'Reilly, bothered to point out that McCain is a huge hypocrite with his feigned outrage towards Franken "picking on" his buddy Lieberman when all Al was doing is following the directions given to him by Harry Reid.

h/t to David who sent on the O'Reilly in combat segment. I had thought this might have been Mike Stark but it wasn't. The one thing this is missing is the Franken show's mockery of it, not that it needs it to be funny as hell. Enjoy.

David also sent on what looks to be some of Franken's show footage and where to find it. I'll check that out as well and thank you for the tip.

From The Daily Show:

George Voinovich compares health care reform to the emperor's new clothes, and Judd Gregg employs a deliberate tactic of obstruction.

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Sen. Tom Coburn, after first claiming that the Republicans aren't just looking out for the insurance industry goes on to say this about why the Senate passed the Mikulski breast screening amendment.

Coburn: Because we know a larger percentage of the emotional attraction has to do with those things associated with women. So we pounded our chest and passed the Mikulski bill for preventative care for women and we ignored the preventative requirements of everybody else in this country.

Fail. They passed the Mikulski amendment because the media and the GOP decided to make an issue out of the findings from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that said women didn't need to get screened for breast cancer in their forties, not because anyone's "more emotional" about issues relating to women.