Posts Tagged ‘Blanche Lincoln’
Tuesday Night Links
* Amazing omnibus World Cup calendar. Related: Why aren’t the great powers dominating the soccer pitch? Both links via Steve.
* Bad news / good news: Blanche Lincoln wins in Arkansas after all. But it looks like Harry Reid will face a far-right candidate with ties to anti-government extremists the Oath Keepers.
* I’m shocked, shocked: Lindsey Graham will vote against his own climate and energy bill.
* More details on that Hurley/Ben Lost epilogue.
* Details coming out on Indiana Jones 5.
* The New Yorker on why teens love dystopias.
* Thinking Collapsistarianism. Could this be the fifty-first contemporary political ideology?
Tuesday Afternoon Links
* “Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen.”
* Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece on actually existing media bias.
* Good news / bad news: Democratic Party leaders in Arkansas think Blanche Lincoln will lose tonight. Richard Burr way ahead of the competition in NC.
Alaska
Whispering in someone’s ear while he’s moose hunting is prohibited.
Well lock me up. Via Boing Boing.
* Also via Boing Boing: Science proves children of lesbians are better at everything. Finally another use for my beloved “lesbocracy” tag.
* And David Foster Wallace has an undergraduate thesis that’s about to be published: “Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.” Look for it this December, or don’t, it’s your choice…
Crazy Busy Today
Seriously busy day today—hardly able to catch my breath. In lieu of that, some links.
* It was an unexpectedly good day for the Communofascist wing of the Democratic Party, with Joe Sestak beating Arlen Specter, Mark Critz winning in PA-12, and Bill Halter forcing Blanche Lincoln into a run-off in Arkansas. That Richard Blumenthal has managed to completely shit the bed in Connecticut can wait perhaps for another night.
* The video of our most recent Polygraph event—John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark discussing “the consumer trap—is now on iTunesU. The download should be free to everyone.
* A from-bad-to-worse update on the story of a seven-year-old Detroit girl killed by police officers during a no-knock raid: they may have been filming a reality show.
* Extreme weather videos in hailstorm and tornado flavors. Both links via MeFi.
* It’s pretty scary to think that a person without basic qualifications could fraudulently pilot jets for 13 years without being caught, but at the same time it’s actually fairly comforting that in all that time nothing bad happened.
* This Dark Knight / Toy Story 2 mashup is an instant classic of the genre.
* Raising academic dishonesty to the level of art.
* Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 8 will be set in New York. I am intrigued.
* Lenin’s Tomb on why neoliberalism persists.
* And preparing now for next year’s job market. And the next year’s. And the next year’s…
Liebermania
The big news yesterday was, of course, Joe Lieberman’s threat to join the Republican filibuster on the health care bill, proving right my suspicion of everything that guy does. Never a popular figure in the progressive blogosphere, Lieberman is especially loathed today; see Steve Benen, Open Left, Steve Benen, Nate Silver, Steve Benen, Kos, and Steve Benen, for starters. I confess that Jonathan Chait’s take is pretty close to my own:
He’s not a Democrat and won’t be running on the Democratic ticket in 2012. Moreover, my read on him is that he’s furious with the party, resentful of President Obama (who beat his friend in 2008) and would relish a Democratic catastrophe.
Lieberman strikes me as a creature of spite with a long list of enemies, and I think he’d happily be the lone vote to scuttle the sixty-year dream of health care reform if he thought it would hurt Ned Lamont voters. I’ve never trusted him as a reliable vote and I question the wisdom of continually bending over backwards to keep him “happy” when it makes no apparent difference in his actions. The man spoke at the Republican National Convention, for heaven’s sake. He’s not on our side.
For what it’s worth, Ezra Klein says it’s probably a bluff, and I hope he’s right.
Sadly, Lieberman’s threats are emboldening the other conservative Democrats to make similar threats.
I sure hope reconciliation is still in the tank if Reid’s miscalculated.
Health Care
It’s being reported today that Reid’s bill is ready and is being sent to the CBO for budget impact. Here’s the Wall Street Journal on its likely contours:
Details of the legislation could change, but its broad outlines are becoming clear. Employers with more than 50 workers wouldn’t be required to provide health insurance, but they would face fines of up to $750 per employee if even part of their work force received a government subsidy to buy health insurance, this person said. A bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee had a lower fine of up to $400 per employee.
The bill to be brought to the Senate floor would create a new public health-insurance plan, but would give states the choice of opting out of participating in it, a proposal that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada backed last week.
Of course, in the kabuki dance that is the American legislative process, neither this bill nor the House bill will actually become law, but rather the House/Senate conference bill, which will be some sort of amalgamation between the two.
For more on this subject, Steve Benen has another post this morning concerning cloture, suggesting Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln are the holdouts. As far as I know Evan Bayh is still uncommitted as well. Stay tuned.
Gerry Canavan 