Filibustering democrats bad, Filibustering republicans good!

NPR's Daniel Schoor on why the filibuster is good:

With 55 Senate seats held by the GOP, that should be no problem. But apparently there is a problem. As demonstrated in the spirited fight in the Foreign Relations Committee over Mr. Bolton, the Democrats seem united; the Republicans do not. Senator Frist must be aware that opinion polls reflect a general lack of enthusiasm for abolishing the filibuster.

Daniel Schoor now:

On occasion the frustrated majority has threatened to invoke what is called the nuclear option: a change in Senate rules that would require only a simple majority to overcome a filibuster. And so why don't the Democrats do it? Why do they leave themselves at the mercy of a minority? Until now the majority has been reluctant to end a venerable practice that it may want when it becomes a minority. But now the stakes for the nation are too high. A single senator has too much power to obstruct. A handful of senators can bog down the whole legislative process. It is time to restore majority rule as intended by our Constitution

I wonder what accounted for his change in heart?

Brought to you by the NEA

Nothing says take me seriously more than a gaggle of liberal Hollywood millionaires telling me I am not doing my part to pay for the uninsured:



Truly fine comedy is the ability to subtly poke fun at a larger truth, not take a ham handed swipe at an easy target. But considering that Obama has bought off the pharmaceutical industry and all those greedy executives, perhaps Ferrell has struck comedic gold.

Who would have figured that this group would be capable of such nuanced political satire.

Pelosi to America's Lumpen: UNCLE!

Botox Nancy has sown the wind, and she shall now reap the whirlwind:

A usually steely House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday began to tear up when, in responding to a question about the tone of the national debate, she recalled the politically charged violence that tore through her hometown of San Francisco in the late 1970s.

At her weekly news conference, Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked if she was concerned about whether the debate over healthcare and the role of the federal government — much of it wrapped in escalating anti-government rhetoric — could lead to acts of violence.

“I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance,” Pelosi began.

Before anyone starts pissing and moaning along with Pelosi about this, lets all keep in mind that just a few weeks ago Pelosi was saying that my fellow town hall protesters were "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare".

I guess all that botox has finally given her brain damage.

NPR's On the Media

NPR's on the Media is one of those cosmopolitan "smarter than thou" media watchdog shows on NPR. Its host, Bob Garfield, is a fairly reliable lefty .... sort of a walking stereotype of media bias and East Coast intelligencia.

This week Garfield was putting in work on another one of the administration’s obaminations (cute pun huh) debunking not only the birthers (more on that another day) but taking on some of those dastardly right wing radio hosts on the latest right wing lie concerning the health care debate.

BOB GARFIELD: Chief among those 10,000 issues is health care reform. But if Gibbs somehow believed the gravity of that matter guaranteed honest debate, he was sadly mistaken. It too was mired this week in a trumped up controversy over a nonexistent provision in the White House plan. Here on Fred Thompson’s radio show is supposed health care expert, Betsy McCaughey.

BETSY McCAUGHEY: One of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.

BOB GARFIELD: Whoa! The Feds culling the population of those burdensome elderly? That is shocking — also, utterly untrue. The bill would simply allow seniors who do wish for professional advice on end of life issues, from will writing to hospice care, to get the government to pick up the tab.Yet, the euthanasia canard was parroted by House Republican Leader John Boehner and at least referenced by FOX News, CNN, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Unfortunately for "Bob" he should have waited a week to run with this story ... it seems that those dastardly right wingers may have been onto something:

We knew it would come to this when Oregon insisted on passing its assisted-suicide laws. It doesn’t take much for assisted suicide to go from a humane option to a cost-saving device, especially when the state pays for the medical care. One patient in Oregon got a letter that made this all too clear, when in the same letter rejecting her request for life-extending chemotherapy, Oregon offered her “physician-aid-in-dying”. In other words, Oregon offered their customer a heapin’ helping of death:

Health Care “Reform”: What’s at stake

A few anecdotes about what happens when a “free” health care system needs to be bailed out by its friends across the border.

Shona Holmes

Shona Holmes was in trouble: The list of her symptoms included headaches, sleeplessness, dizziness, low libido and, worst of all, rapidly deteriorating vision. Her family doctor in Canada ordered an MRI, and a brain tumor was detected. But it would take months for her to get on the appointment calendar of a neurologist or endocrinologist in Canada.

Ava Isabella Stinson

A critically ill Hamilton preemie turned away from McMaster Children's Hospital is all alone in a Buffalo intensive care unit because her parents don't have passports to get across the border.

Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

So much for free health care. Its sounds lovely unless you are really sick.

This reminds me about a show my wife and I watched on TLC a few years back. It was about a little girl named Kenadie Jourdin-Bromley who suffers from primordial dwarfism. When playing the flashback to her birth, there were scenes where the doctors were speaking about how they thought Kenadie wasn’t going to make it more than a few days and how everyone, parents included were shocked by what was going on. They commented that she seemed very small on the ultrasound and how it was the first ultrasound that the mother had at 36 weeks into the pregnancy.

My wife and I wondered to ourselves, 36 weeks and no ultrasounds? Wasn’t the OBGYN concerned that the mother was as small as she was? Weren’t there some kind of markers in all the blood tests that expectant mothers get? I remember my wife having several ultrasounds and blood/urine tests with both of my girls and thought that something wasn’t quite right.

And then I realized that the parents were in Canada.

Sure, the “private” American health care system is expensive, but you get results. And yes the Canadian system and all government run health care systems are “free”, but you better pray to God you don’t need to use them.