Category: Health of the Republic
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A fantastic visual response to “Show us your papers” in AZ…
From the cartoonist Lee Judge ( http://media.kansascity.com/images/cartoons/judge/04-2010/judge_04272010_700.jpg)
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16,500 : a “mistake” so egregious as to be a lie
Where did the rabid right get the figure of 16,500 new “IRS agents” that (they claim) will be required to enforce the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act? They made it up. Really. It came from nowhere. In fact, the IRS will add few or no agents, and perhaps hardly any staff at all. …
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Quote of the Day
From a comment on Political Animal, in a thread about a brick-thrower who wants to “end socialism and the government takeover”, and has time to do so because he’s receiving disability checks from the government. In describing the futility of explaining this contradiction to the brick-thrower, a commenter pointed out, You can’t reason someone out…
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Health care reform passes
So, against all expectation, the Democratic Party managed to hang together and finally pass the comprehensive health care bill. As a lifelong Democrat, I am flabbergasted. I was certain they’d find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and fumble on the proverbial one-yard line. I’m glad to be disappointed, but this…
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David Brooks is disingenuous, delusional, or an idiot
Today, David Brooks had a column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. It’s pretty much a standard Brooks piece, bemoaning the lack of civility in Washington today. It is wrong on its facts and wrong on its interpretations and laughably wrong on its understanding of politics. Ezra Klein takes it down analytically.…
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Texas approves explicitly conservative curriculum
The writing was on the wall for a while, but Texas just approved a revision to its history curriculum. It has an explicit conservative bent — I mean, literally, students are to learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority…
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Our (Even More) Broken Senate
News comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the chance of cloture on these holds seems remote. So the Senate is even more broken. The danger is that this will…
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A well-deserved smack-down on trials of terrorists
Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists. I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life…
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We Are All Californians Now
This is the day. This is the moment that some clever historian — not the first to consider this sweep of time, but rather someone turning over the leaves looking for a more subtle causation — will draw a slash on the timeline of history and write: Here began the fall of the American republic.
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The Democratic playbook
in convenient cartoon form. I got this via Ezra Klein’s fantastic blog, but apparently it’s by Tom Toles.