I was surprised and pleased when my email today contained my Congressman's seemingly full throated endorsement of HR 3200. It starts: "Knowing of your interest in a single-payer health care system, I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on recent efforts to include a single-payer element in health care reform efforts." Well, this guy is no progressive, but here he seems to be staking a claim to progressive territory. What does it mean? He gives a nod to bipartisanship; he addresses the problem of Medicare rates in rural states like Maine. He praises Dennis Kucinich's amendment . However, he ends disappointingly, "In the end, we must fix what is currently broken to create a competitive public insurance option that providers can participate in and that Mainers can access.

Last week, I was moving picnic tables on one of our beaches and I came across a large snapping turtle laying her eggs under one. She was about the size of a bag of cement, and probably only a little lighter. While not unusual, perhaps more time or my mood got me to thinking about her. Here was a living fossil, essentially unchanged for 200 million years. There was no need for further evolution in her species; she had achieved what was objectively perfection. I know that I am far from perfect, but I had not been thinking that we humans have strayed that far from what seems to be the ideal.

The US Attorneys, including the replacements Bush/Rove installed to be good Bushies, are being asked to stay on (http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politi...). I'm ok with Fitzgerald for a lot of reasons. However, this includes such notables as Mary Beth Buchanan and Alice Martin. Not only are they not being investigated for possible prosecution (Martin's role in the the Siegelman case is one of the things Conyers wants to question Rove about, for example) but they are not even being fired. The opportunity to pick up the remains of Carol Lamm's prosecutions are being passed by; Jerry Lewis gets a pass. Politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of Democrats are ok, it seems.