The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

in convenient cartoon form.

by Tom Toles

I got this via Ezra Klein’s fantastic blog, but apparently it’s by Tom Toles.

I haven’t really gotten involved in haranguing my elected representatives before, but the possibility of health care reform is so tantalizingly close — and the apparent drift of the Democratic so-called “leadership” is so grindingly predictable and frustrating — that I’ve felt compelled to contact my representative several times.  Below the fold is the email I’ve sent.

UPDATE: I claim no particular credit, but according to Talking Points Memo, Rep. Holt has in fact come out in support of (what I feel to be) the correct option, passing the Senate bill.  (I am in different as to whether it needs to be done straight up or with amendments via reconciliation.)

read more…

Pass health care reform.

Pass the frakking Senate bill as is and have the President sign it before the State of the Union. Heck, have him sign it at the State of the Union. Yes, it will enrage the Republicans but in case you haven’t noticed, the Republicans are already the party of incohate rage. Nothing is going to mollify them. read more…

Apparently, Rudy Guliani is even more of a hack than I had suspected.  Despite being the mayor of New York City during attacks that killed 3000 people, Guliani apparently doesn’t think they count.  After all, how else can he explain going on Good Morning America and saying, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush”?

By the way, since Guliani also apparently can’t read a calendar, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he thinks the deaths of 3000 Americans is not an “attack”.  We’ll leave aside the shoe bomber or the anthrax mails, too.

Can you believe this guy was once considered a serious contender for the nomination for President?

With the health care bill finally moving forward in both houses of Congress, it’s a good time to take stock, take a breath, and take a look at what’s inside.  Below are some links to useful summaries and commentaries.

• Ezra Klein’s excellent list-of-articles called “Health Reform For Beginners“
• Alec McGillis’ “Your Handy Health Care Cheat Sheet“

More as I come across them.

Headline at ABC News: “Democrats are Dropping Like Flies”

Reality:

So the retiring Republicans outnumber the retiring Democrats in every chamber– and in what we are told is destined to be a “Republican year” — yet it’s the Democrats who are dropping like flies?

How exactly did the myth of a liberal bias in major media ever get started??

See Political Animal for more details.

OK, that’s melodramatic.  All that’s occurred so far is that their mediocre site has choked several times since I’ve tried to post a comment in response to a blog post there.  The post blames President Obama for the jobs lost in the past 11 months and worries what it would mean if he does a “hard pivot” towards jobs creation in January.

Now, it might just be that the GOP site is poorly designed (other evidence suggests this) or that they’re just slow.  And it might be that they don’t like hearing feedback from people who haven’t drunk their Kool-Aid.  In any event, after my third attempt to post, I decided to cut-and-paste my comment and post it here.  Ah, the joys of the vanity electronic press!

I totally agree.  After all, it’s simply irrelevant that the economy inherited by the President was bleeding jobs at a rate unseen in 70 years, after his predecessor managed to follow a decade of strong growth with a decade of retrenchment, turning surpluses into deficits while squeezing the middle class and giving away trillions to the uber-rich.  And it doesn’t really matter that many private forecasters believe that the economy would be in far more dire straits absent the stimulus (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/charts_and_graphs_that_will_fi_2.html), including shedding perhaps an additional 2% of jobs if the money -hadn’t- beeen spent.

What really counts is ideological purity, not pesky things like facts or reality.  After all, if you stay pegged to reality, you might -never- get the chance to turn a national tragedy into carte blanche to launch your own war of choice against a nation completely unaffiliated with the attackers, while ignoring the fact that 15 out of 19 of them came from the Middle Eastern country that you and your daddy were so close to.  And what would even -be- the point of being in power if you can’t shred two hundred years of judicial philosophy to pursue your own mean ends?

One of the unsung heros of the health care debate is the Congressional Budget Office, an agency that few really understand and fewer appreciate.  Ezra Klein has a tidbit on them, including a description so pithy I can’t help but steal it:

If the role of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punchbowl just as the party is getting started, the role of the Congressional Budget Office is to walk around the party telling everyone exactly how drunk they’re getting and reminding them that there will be consequences for their actions tomorrow.

I join with Mr. Klein in wishing all the hardworking government types a happy holiday.

Well, I’m closing in on one year in the HMR program and, looking back, I feel pretty satisfied.  I hit my nominal target (weight loss of 150 lbs) a couple of weeks back and have managed to keep going a bit, so it wasn’t a fluke.  My blood pressure today was 110 over 80, which is much better than when I started (when it was something like 180 over 130).

The next step is the transition into maintenance but I’m holding off on that until after the holidays.  It’s going to be hard enough without adding in all the irregularity of the next six weeks.

Since August I’ve been tracking my weight twice a day, when I get up and just before I got to sleep.  The first thing that struck me is how irregular this is.  Although the morning weight has been mostly consistent, the nightly weight has bounced around.  The second thing is, it’s been a good review of linear regression.  I can use the daily tracking to predict the weight I get at HMR, to a pretty good extent.  This means I can keep track and, after a day when I might tick upward, be sure to even out.

Not surprisingly, Bruce Schneier has an excellent piece talking about the psychological dimensions of terrorism and what a strong, stable industrial democracy can do in the face of amorphous threats… without sacrificing its principles, its freedoms, or its citizens.

If you live in an advanced country, you should probably read this — before the next attack and the urge for primal reactions.