SoBe is at it again, with another powerhouse common sense post. Be sure to check out the graph, although I suspect most of you have seen its like before. And this is not exactly unexpected, and I bet we'll see more of it:

Even more alarmingly, Putnam County, TN, is in such dire straights it has considered doing away with county primary elections:

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. -- Putnam County is looking at the prospect of eliminating primary elections in hopes of saving $60,000.

On Monday night, the county commission voted 14 to 9 to ask the county parties to forgo primary elections and select candidates through private caucuses.

Primary elections are historically low-turnout, but nonetheless canceling an election for fiscal reasons sends off alarm bells with me. You tea party folks yammering about your loss of freedoms might want to consider what it means to cancel an election because the county doesn’t have the funds to stage it.

Who needs safe school buses, elections, or health care for the elderly, right? Those things are not as important as making sure large corporations don't pay any taxes and the wealthy pay even fewer.

Steve Benen

'DELAY, DEFINE AND DERAIL'.... Roll Call reports today on what we can expect to see from the Senate GOP caucus as the debate over health care reform enters the final stretch.

Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail. [...]

The Republicans have been very candid that their strategy is to sabotage the Obama Presidency so that things get worse for American and Republicans can get back in power.

As of now it looks like the final bill will contain taxes on employer paid health benefits to pay for subsidies to low income Americans to buy private insurance and a mandate that everyone have insurance. In other words a bail out for health insurance companies.

There is no popular support for taxes on employer paid health benefits. It is one of many reasons that John McCain went down to a landslide defeat.

No Republican will vote for this. Democrats will take all the blame for a tax increase to pay for a bail out of insurance companies.

It will NOT expand access to health care. It will be very unpopular. If Obama or any other Democrat thinks that AHIP will have their backs they are out of their mind.

Liberals need to block this and save the party from the leadersheep.

Republican Health Care Politics and Right Wing Thuggery

With the support and encouragement of the Republican leadership, one of America's most despicable political thugs, Dick Armey, a corporate lobbyist funded by the "health" industry, is organizing mobs to disrupt, harass and intimidate every public event organized to discuss the health care reform effort.

Single payer advocates were very effective in coopting the Obama health care house parties, we should be able to coopt these town meetings and overwhelm Dick Armey's thugs. How about single payer activists?

The Republicans are pushing the idea that the fight for health care reform could be Obama's Waterloo. Everyone keeps refighting the previous war. The whole of Versailles thinks that it is still 1993.

I don't think so, I think the debate over health care reform is Versailles' Sarajevo, the debate that collapses a decrepit political order. Arguably that was the Iraq debate, which is still playing out.

Via ThinkProgress, G. Gordon Liddy on Sotomayor:

LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

Nice. I wonder what former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and current Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg think about that?

Chris Bowers:

If Democrats provide cheaper and more accessible health care to Americans, Republicans have promised to publicly turn themselves into the biggest partisan assholes of the last forty years.

Seriously. That is the actual political calculation Senate Democrats face on health care reform right now. It is the most obvious win-win political calculation Democrats have been presented with during my entire lifetime.

The Republicans plan the destabilize the country through a process of legislative sabotage. It would be easy for Harry Reid to expose this, but that depends upon whether he wants to.

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

WOW. Congratulations Alaska -- 35 of your legislators stood up to Governor Sarah Palin and voted down her nominee for state Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross.

Go check out Mudflats or DivasBlueOasis for more on this, but the big news here is a homophobe, misogynist "sure thing" GOP official got handed his walking papers.

Trawling through the Pravda web site reveals more juicy amusingness. Yes, I know, it is not news that it is a buffet of nuttiness. This time it is Sir Cabbagemallet, keeping the dream alive:

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the United Nations -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the "realism" Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

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Has Grover Norquist succeeded?

The nation is at an economic tipping point. Its weakened and getting weaker. So much so that a supposedly liberal President feels the need to speak repeatedly of "entitlement reform" which, to anyone paying attention, means services to the bottom 80% on the income ladder.

A follow up: Can a well intentioned "fool" (in the ignorant use of the word) lead to as much calamity given dire circumstances as an ill intentioned Grover Norquist type?

I don't think I've ever read more ridiculous justifications than I'm reading right now about why it was a "good idea" for Obama to appoint a Republican to Sec. of Commerce, and agree to have a Democratic Gov replace him, with another Republican.

Because the massive filibuster-proof uberliberal majority Dems have in the Senate is so Huge! Or something...

Less than all-encompassing, subject to revision, but some think it is a big deal.

This is one of the "it's happening right now" deals, so if it ends up I'm getting some of the fact wrong, my apologies in advance. The important part of this story is the blogs that are affected. There are not a few famous and important blogs affected by this. Soapblox gives up after hacker attack.

SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

This is a dire warning for the organizing part of the blogosphere. I expect more in the future. GOS thread on this topic.

Quite a list here of who he's meeting with and learning from, and those supposedly "sensible Republicans" are far outnumbered by the usual warmongering criminal ones -- but all is not lost: he's actually read 2 whole books by non-warmongers! (but not spoken to them or met with them or asked them for advice)

A World of Issues Waiting, Obama and His Foreign Policy Squad Brush Up --

... Besides reaching out to Mr. Scowcroft, Mr. Obama has also called former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a Reagan administration official who is known in some foreign policy circles as the father of the Bush doctrine because of his advocacy of preventive war. It is unclear what the two men talked about.

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Since posting on Fav-whatever-his-name-is is all the rage, I thought I'd throw my own two cents into it.

Favvy boy*, it seems, is not an Obama campaign or Obama supporter apparition. It's part of a perception, IMO, of Hillary Clinton among most of the rabid Obama supporters and campaign folks I've encountered. And it seems to permeate to the highest levels of Obama advisers and prominent supporters. It's not so much a rape fantasy I see in these pics, its a general disrespect and disregard to Hillary Clinton as a human being. Its a view of her as less than human, or just unworthy of humanity. Ya know, just like the GOP of yore.

Now I could make a long documented list detailing all the incidents, but I won't. Most of us have our own personal anecdotes about the overzealous Obama supporter getting a little too, um, "eager" to trash Hillary or her supporters. I have plenty of my own, for fuck's sake I was called a racist--ME!! We've all heard that Hillary is a "bitch" a "witch" or someone so consumed with ambition that she will "say or do anything to win" (even though we now know that is not the case!).

These are the low level, on the street supporters saying many of these things. What about the "big shots" you ask.

ArsT:

A key program in the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund overpaid telecommunications carriers by almost a billion dollars from July 2006 through June 2007. This disclosure, which is sure to provoke more cries for a massive overhaul of the USF, comes from a preliminary FCC audit of the USF's High Cost fund released just before Thanksgiving. The review says that 23.3% of the payments the USF made to telcos were "erroneous"—that's up from an earlier estimate of 16.6 percent. The latest total comes to $970.3 million in bad payouts.
FCC cracks down on Universal Service Fund cheats
Universal Service Fund should be "blown up" like Death Star

The Commission says that this money cannot be recovered, because it is based on a random sample audit of USF beneficiaries. "In order to recover erroneous payments that are approximately $970.3 million," the Office of Inspector Generals' (OIG) report observes, "an audit of the entire population of High Cost beneficiaries would be necessary." This also suggests that the actual total sum of incorrect grants could be much higher than what the audit found.

I mean, we wouldn't want to have to do an audit, heavens forfend, no! That could cost money.

The whole thing is very good.

This goes to the other side of how this nation is changing radically - with a series of programs conceived largely by executive fiat that weakens civil liberties protections and subverts the plain letter of the law. This includes illegal wiretapping of American citizens, indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, and the dehumanizing practice of torture, which is ineffective and deeply dangerous to the lives of our troops, as this senior interrogator in Iraq explains.
...

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Suzie asks some important questions concerning this report on young people's ethics. It doesn't surprise me at all that more boys than girls believe that lying and cheating are necessary for success in life. Now, I'm not one to bemoan Those Kids Today, as I've been doing some reading on 18thc politics and know we've got a long way to go before we hit rock bottom. But I do think that another point that should be raised re: this endemic of cheating and lying is that politics have far reaching consequences, and to me that is reflected in the survey. If the President and high elected officials lie like rugs and no one calls them on it, why shouldn't young people take that as a model and example?

Personally, I've come to understand that educators must take real care, and guard against cheating and lying, when it comes to teens today. There's a certain culture that crosses races and income levels, which lauds those teens who are able to 'get away with it,' whatever it may be. Again, I don't think this is too different than when I was a teen, or before that, but I think that teens who adopt this aesthetic will carry it on into adulthood, unless some authority in their lives teaches them that there are serious consequences.

It will be interesting, as the coming population wave assumes political and cultural power, in the many battles in which we find ourselves engaged today. People who don't believe that lying and cheating are great evils to be avoided will be more or less likely oppose gay marriage? More or less likely to believe that our nation should be engaged in wars of choice? More or less concerned with government spying? More or less tolerant of "the war on drugs?" I don't know the answer to any of that, but I suspect the political scene will be different, when this generation begins to exhibit its peak influence.

I think of this as one of those "what comes around, goes around" sort of things. Republicans have enshrined lying and cheating as legitimate forms of public behavior, and Democrats have failed to oppose that in a significant way. Soon, we'll get to find out just what it's like when a large portion of the population shares those beliefs. Short form: if the rubes don't follow the rules set up for them, it's a lot harder to suck up obscene profits from their enslavement.

The NT Times asks: Was the federal goverment out to get Eliot Spitzer?

No evidence has surfaced to support such an assertion, and the prosecutor in the case has said that politics played no role in the pursuit of Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat. But that has not put to rest suspicions, expressed on left wing blogs, that Mr. Spitzer, a zealous pursuer of Wall Street wrongdoing who some thought could one day be president, had been singled out.

Now, a congressional committee is pursuing what would be the first public examination of the events that prompted the initial inquiry into his bank transactions, which showed he was sending money to a front company for Emperor’s Club V.I.P.

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Medicaid program on skids, Jindal says
But wrangling persists as remedies planned
Saturday, November 15, 2008
By Jan Moller

BATON ROUGE -- Arguing that "doing nothing is not an option," Gov. Bobby Jindal on Friday proposed restructuring Louisiana's health-care program for the poor into a private insurance model that relies on managed-care principles to control costs and improve health outcomes.

[...]

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This is likely the wrong blog to ask this kweshun, but I'm still curious. For the sake of argument, let's say Obama wins, very clearly and obviously in your own mind. And let's say that somehow, insert your own 2000 redux here, "they" (try to) take it away from him, via Brooks Brothers riots and SCOTUS foolishness and other sundry undemocratic methods. What is your response, if any? And why? How would it be different than if HRC had had it stolen from her? Or the candidate of Your Choice?

I don't think McSpain has the ground game to steal it this time; I also don't think Wall St/Telco Ave money wants Obama to lose. So honestly I'm not so worried about it. I think we'll get a "democratic" prezint next Jan. But let's say the paranoid, insane racist members of the Franchise refuse to give up power, and pull out all the tricks, and declare at 3am Nov 5 that "McCain Wins!" What do you do?

Marching? Molotovs? Sit ins? Strikes? LTEs? Turning the channel? Knitting? Nothing? Just wondering...

[Ed: This post will make much more sense to you if you've ever worked for a large, inflexible corporation or hierarchal entity in which a bunch of incompetent, juvenile, clannish doods get to ruin everything, blame you for it, make you do all the work, and take all the credit when things do go right. But it's honestly not meant to be bitter retaliation about anything specifically personal or recent; I'm truly glad not to be part of that world anymore and I'm just waxing meta.]

Back during the dark days of the ex, he and I had a conversation about a frustrating moment he'd had at work that day. Blabbity blabbity, "...and why does he have to be such an asshole about it?" he bitched. He was speaking about his 'regional manager,' from the perspective of being the store manager most directly under Mr. Asshole. I said, "Because they always are. They have to be. The franchise requires it."

At the time, I was specifically speaking of the large corporation they both worked for, and the business model their company employed. Over the years, I've come to think of a lot of politicians and members of the media, and others, in similar ways. Waxing meta, blogger that I am, I think of the people we find ourselves talking about, the people who are making decisions for us "in our best interest" but so often against our will, as members of The Franchise. A sort of super-octopus of power and control that mimics/constructs a set of behaviors and relationships common to a smaller corporate specific.

Getting back to the asshole regional guy, it's not a coincidence that he was a rock ribbed Republican. White guy, exurban dweller, libertarian silliness clouding his occasional and normally laughable attempt a political philosophizing, cut right from the Contract on America cloth. Mammon was his god, if his wife did go to the family church now and again. Life was on the road, but only until he proved himself enough- normally by beating down local managers and exhorting them to follow the corporate manual of how best to beat the slaves into squeezing more blood from stones.

and walk away. After all, it's not your problem if the contractor's work is flawed, right?

Joe Biden:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Don't question Obama. Focus your energy on the demonization of John McCain and Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton or Somerby or Lambert--heck, even me if you feel so inclined, but throw in some condescension about my age, ego or intellect compared to yours, that works nicely--anyone who is warning of red flags.

At some point, if Obama wins, he's going to have to govern and he won't have the Hillary/McCain/Palin/Dominionist bogeyman to fend of criticisms. It seems like Biden is hinting at their possible governing strategy: Even if you think we're wrong, we need you to use your influence to convince people we are right. It's working so brilliantly now, why change?