Teabagger in tears, fears prayers for Byrd's death ricocheted and hit Inhofe. Really.

This shit is priceless. You cannot make this up. Courtesy of our friends at ThinkProgress.

Just before the Senate vote on the first of three procedural motions to move its health care reform bill toward final passage, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) appeared to urge Americans to pray that a member of the majority caucus would not show up to vote, thus leaving the Democrats one vote shy of breaking the GOP filibuster:

COBURN: What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray.

As it turned out however, all 100 U.S. senators voted on the measure, which passed on a party-line 60-40 vote. This morning, the Senate health care reform bill jumped the second procedural hurdle, with all 60 senators in the Democratic caucus voting to pass the measure. However, only 39 Republicans voted against passage. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) was the Republican who missed the vote.

On C-Span this morning, a caller wondered if perhaps Coburn’s prayer request had “backfire[ed]” against his own party:

CALLER: Yeah doctor. Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night.

How hard did you pray because I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? One of our members died? How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough?

While Barrasso didn’t answer the question directly, he said he didn’t know why Inhofe missed the vote.

For the record, Inhofe is still alive. As is Byrd. The caller's intellect sadly died in utero.

Watch the video, because the guy's voice... well, just watch.

Glenn Beck: Misinformer of the Year

Obama calls into radio show as "Barry from D.C." with a "traffic question"

This is just so cool. WTOP was doing it's monthly "Ask the Governor" show with VA Gov. Tim Kaine when the President called in posing as "Barry from D.C."

Arguments for the health care bill (in pictures, for those who don't like all those - you know - words)

Jon Cohn lays out the insurance cost savings for working and middle class families. You should definitely read the whole write-up here, but meanwhile here's the chart:

Kill the bill = swatting a fly on your arm with a chainsaw

Jane Hamsher at firedoglake is advocating killing the senate health care bill because it will bring about the end of the western world and force you to remove your uterus and send it to Nebraska. Or some such.

Jon Walker, also at FDL, comes to their defense:

What I have heard from people like Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, Keith Olbermann, Jane Hamsher, etc… is that they simply want to kill the current version of the Senate bill. None of them, to my knowledge, have advocated ending all efforts to pass a health care reform bill. I believe each and every one of them have advocated for simply passing a different bill through different means.

He goes on to argue that there are at least 4 scenarios whereby progressives can get a better bill out of the Senate using reconciliation.

Here's the problem: it might not work. In fact, it probably won't. Most progressives discovered the term "reconciliation" over the summer and now use it as a mantra. Kind of like "Beetlejuice". Say "reconciliation" 3 times and single payer appears.

Let me make two points:
1) The current Senate HCR bill is not bad. It's not perfect, in fact it's not even great. But it's good and makes a great framework to hang other legislation on in years to come. Without it though, health care is dead in my lifetime. The nation won't go through the last 6 months again as a progressive do-over. Not happening. Period.

2) There is a long way to go. anyone who thinks the Senate bill won't be changed during the conference with the House to merge the bills is short-sighted or nuts. The House bill is a more progressive bill and the Senate bill is going to go in that direction. And there's going to be a fight over it. save your bullets for that one.

As the much-smarter-than-me Nate Silver lays out, in exhaustive fashion, there are huge problems with the thought process of those who think reconciliation is a magic bullet.

The failure to use reconciliation does not reveal any lack of courage on behalf of Harry Reid or the White House. It is, rather, a reflection of reality. The more unadorned, straightforward versions of reconciliation might not work and would probably result in objectively worse policy than the bill that the Senate is considering now. The more exotic versions might or might not result in better policy, but almost certainly wouldn't work.

None of this is to say that the reconciliation strategies are impossible. They might work. But the hurdles are much more significant than what Jon has implied, and reconciliation might also "work" but produce a worse, perhaps much worse, policy outcome. Even if one were willing to ignore the political fallout, it would be a fairly poor strategy. And when the consequences for the Democrats' electoral fortunes are taken into account -- as well as their compromised ability to pass policies like a jobs bill and financial reform next year -- it seems like a very poor risk.

Observations from a football weekend

So with the view house looking like this...


It seemed like a good day to watch football. However, as an Eagles fan, ESPN greeted me with the following graphic. On one hand, that's an awesome achievement. On the other hand, the only team on that list without a Super Bowl win in that run is... you guessed it.



Watching the J - E - T - S loseloselose, I snapped this picture of Mark Sanchez. Apparently he has control of the Department of Homeland Security terror watch list on his wristband. "Cover 2, threat level 4. I'll just toss a pick here."



Here's the disturbing part of the day. Chevy is running a series of commercials with Howie Long, one of him is a spot featuring him and the obligatory precocious little girl with curls.

That's not the disturbing part. The disturbing part is in this still. Her pointing, not at the Chevy, but at Howie's junk. Like, right at it.

You be the judge.



"Mr. Long, why do have the keys down your pants?" If you have a better caption, post it here.

Christopher Hitchens on Sarah Palin

BRILLIANT (and wouldn't Christopher Hitchens literally on Sarah Palin be a sight to see)

[Sarah Palin is] anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be "deniable") to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist.
...

At least Richard Nixon had the ill fortune to look like what he was: a haunted scoundrel and repressed psychopath. Whereas the usefulness of Sarah Palin to the right-wing party managers is that she combines a certain knowingness with a feigned innocence and a still-palpable blush of sex. But she should take care to read her Alexander Pope: That bloom will soon enough fade, and it will fade really quickly if she uses it to prostitute herself to the Nixonites on one day and then to cock-tease the rabble on the next.

Wow.

(via West Wing Report)

Lieberman is just as big of an asshole when he's a puppet

Why this bill is important

1: Improvability (and yeah, I think I just invented a new word)

(via Bob Cesca)

This is really great stuff. Bernie Sanders has successfully added $10 billion for primary care. Some details:

-Forgives medical school debt for doctors who choose primary care, increasing the number of primary care doctors by 20,000.

-More than doubles the number of primary care clinics.

-Eases the burden on Medicaid.

-Creates primary care access for 25 million Americans.

Senator Sanders is also working with Ron Wyden to establish the groundwork for state-based single-payer plans. These are the kinds of improvements that can be added to this work in progress over time -- another reason why passing this bill is so important to the long-term effort.

Bernie Sanders is doing great unheralded work on HCR. Let's thank him later. Noting it now would just attract the ire of Lieberman.

2. A new paradigm

(Paul Krugman)

...it represents a rejection of the view that the solution for all problems is to cut some taxes and remove some regulations. In that sense, what’s happening now, for all the disappointment it represents for progressives, is a historic moment.

And let’s also not fail to take note of those who had a chance to join in this historic moment, and punted.
...

I’m talking instead about the self-described centrists, pundits and politicians, who have spent years lecturing us on the need to make hard choices and actually come to grip with America’s problems; you know who I mean. So what did they do when faced with a chance to help confront those problems? They made excuses.
...

And the lesson I take from that is that these people are insincere. They like posing as defenders of fiscal rectitude; they like declaring a pox on both houses; but when push comes to shove, their dislike of social insurance, their refusal to consider any government economy measures that don’t involve punishing people with lower incomes, trumps their supposed concern about acting responsibly.

Gentlemen — everyone I can think of here does happen to be male — this was your moment of truth, your test of character. You failed.

The bigger picture

No, it's not what we wanted. Yes, there is still work to do - a public option can be added to HCR later via reconciliation. But read Ezra, he's right. We need to look at this in a macro sense.

Imagine telling a Democrat in the days after the 2004 election that the 2006 election would end Republican control of Congress, the 2008 election would return a Democrat to the White House, and by the 2010 election, Democrats would have passed a bill extending health-care coverage to 94 percent of Americans, securing trillions of dollars in subsidies for low-income Americans (the bill's $900 billion cost is calculated over 10 years, but the subsidies continue indefinitely into the future), and imposing a raft of new regulations on private insurers. It is, without doubt or competition, the single largest social policy advance since the Great Society.