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Dr. Nancy Snyderman talked to Sen. Judd Gregg about his stalling tactics in the Senate to hold up the debate on the health care bill, and after a great deal of filibustering and feigned indignation from Gregg Snyderman followed up by asking Gregg this:

Snyderman: But Senator let me just ask you a question. We just listened to the President talk about jobs. We know people continue to lose their jobs, which means they’re losing their health care. So what do you say to the average American who’s played by all the rules who can’t have the same health care that you have and you’re one of our elected officials?

Gregg: Well, you know if he works for the government he’ll get the same I have. I mean I have the same health care as a person who works for The Secret Service, works for the FBI or works down at the local Federal Building. I mean I don’t have anything different than what an average federal employee has.

I actually proposed a bill which I wish had been incorporated into this which said that people would be able to have the option of the FEHB program which is the Federal Health and Benefit Program and I’m cosponsor of a bill which does the same thing. That’s not really the issue here. The issue here is how you do it affordably. How do you do a health reform process which is step-by-step takes on issues that can improve health care, expand its coverage rather than proposing this massive bill which as I said grows the government in the largest way we’ve ever grown. It’s $2.5 trillion and at the same time in my opinion will put the government basically in charge of health care because that’s the ultimate goal here—move the government into health care, give us a single payer system.

Think Progress posted the first part of Gregg's reply here--Gregg’s Health Care Solution: ‘If You Work For The Government, You’ll Have The Same Health Care I Have’ and had this response to the interview:

It’s puzzling that Gregg — who regularly slams “spending beyond our means for big government programs” — would say that anyone who wants health care coverage like his should simply work for the federal government. Certainly, Gregg wouldn’t advocate that we grow the size of government by employing the tens of millions of Americans who are uninsured in order to provide them health care. Or would he?

They did not include the latter part of Gregg's response where he touts a bill he co-sponsored as a means for everyone to receive the same health care benefits as federal employees. There's just one problem with that. From Ezra Klein:

The plan has a lot more fake support than it has real support. If every Republicans who has co-sponsored W-B would commit to voting for it, the plan might pass. But they haven't.

So Gregg cites a bill he co-sponsored but never committed to voting for instead of admitting what the Republican Party’s actual solution is for health care reform—do nothing and sabotage anything the Democrats try to do for political gain. It sure can't be because the Democrats haven't shown the insurance industry enough love in the bill they're trying to get through the Senate.

Looks like our own Nicole isn't the only one slamming the Swiss for this. Jon Stewart takes a whack at them as well.

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Michelle Malkin's latest column wants to turn the deaths of police officers around the country -- spurred by the recent horror in Lakewood, WA -- into a chance to blame liberals for the deaths.

The Left has a popular mantra: “Stop the hate.” Why don’t they start applying it to the men and women who protect and serve?

She listed some officers killed in a couple of different incidents involving career criminals and a bizarre recent case here in Seattle.

Well, I've got a few other officers here she seemed to have forgotten about:

Pittsburgh officers Eric Kelly, Paul Sciullo III and Stephen Mayhle, gunned down by budding neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski, because he believed the officers were part of a nefarious plan to take citizens' guns away.

Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, shot down by extremist nutcase James von Brunn at the Holocaust Museum.

Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies Burt Lopez and Warren "Skip" York, gunned down by right-wing nutcase Joshua Cartwright, who believed right-wing propaganda that President Obama was going to take his guns away.

Later in her column, Malkin asks:

From where does the deadened and deadly callousness toward the thin blue line come?

Oh, I dunno. Maybe it comes from conservatives like Michelle Malkin, who shriek and holler when mean "liberals" at the Department of Homeland Security issue an important bulletin to law-enforcement officers warning them of the threat posed by right-wing extremists to their health and well-being, crying that in doing so they're just "smearing conservatives."

Even though, as we pointed out, the report was an important heads up about the Richard Poplawskis out there:

The Department of Homeland Security more than likely couldn't give a rat's patoot about today's right-wing Tea Tantrums, because they're mostly exercises in futility and stupidity anyway.

But I'll tell you who they do care about: the people in uniform who go out every day and put their lives on the line to keep you and I and our families and neighborhoods safe -- that is, the men and women in law enforcement. People like those three officers in Pittsburgh, who had no reason to suspect a killer was about to ambush them.

A recent study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism lays out in painful detail the very real threat that right-wing extremists pose to people in law enforcement:

Research led by Dr. Joshua D. Freilich (John Jay College, CUNY) and Dr. Steven Chermak (Michigan State University) and funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has revealed a violent history of fatal attacks against law enforcement officers in the United States by individuals who adhere to far-right ideology.

* In the United States, 42 law enforcement officers have been killed in 32 incidents in which at least one of the suspects was a far-rightist since 1990.

* 94% of these incidents involved local or state law enforcement. Only two events—high-profile attacks at Ruby Ridge and at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City—involved federal agents. Much more common are events like the tragic Pittsburgh triple slayings.

* Attacks on police by far-rightists tend to occur during routine law enforcement activities. 34% of the officers killed by far-rightists were slain during a traffic stop, and a number of law enforcement officers have been killed while responding to calls for service similar to the domestic violence call that precipitated the Pittsburgh murders.

* Firearms were the most common type of weapon used during these fatal anti-police attacks. 88% of the incidents involved guns, while only 6% involved explosives and 6% involved knives. 81% of the victims were killed by guns.

* Only 12% of the suspects in these attacks were members of formal groups with far-right ideologies. The vast majority—like Poplawski—acted alone. This greatly complicates law-enforcement efforts to anticipate which individuals might pose a threat to police officers.

* Beyond these law enforcement murders, far-right violence presents a broader threat to national security and American citizens. Since 1990, far-rightists have been linked to more than 275 homicide incidents in 36 states. These crimes have resulted in the more than 530 fatalities, including the 168 victims murdered by Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The vast majority of these suspects are white and male, with almost 70% being 30 years old or younger.

Back then, Michelle couldn't be bothered to express even a scintilla of concern about the safety of law-enforcement officers:

This is where I wonder about the grotesquely skewed priorities of the conservative movement and its leading pundits. Because all the yammering has been fearmongering about the DHS potentially targeting ordinary conservatives -- especially VETERANS!!!! -- when in fact there is not a scintilla of evidence they have done so or are considering it.

Yet in the meantime, as we just pointed out, these right-wing extremists who are the subject and the raison d'etre of this bulletin are also known lethal threats for the men and women who work in law enforcement ...

So while the folks at Faux News fearmonger for the sake of yet-unharmed veterans and conservatives, they're completely turning their backs on the interests of the men and women who risk their lives each day serving as law-enforcement officers.

Yeah, well, that was then. This opportunity is now. Even if it means connecting Obama to the Oakland cop killings through Van Jones, just because he was a black nationalist from Oakland ... it's all about Michelle's agenda. Dead cops just make handy props for it.

We know this because on her next post, she argues that funding for public safety and health functions -- like, you know, police -- is the same thing as funding toxic assets:

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David Gergen and Anderson Cooper actually had the nerve to compare the White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers not appearing before Congress to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignoring Congressional subpoenas. It's bad enough that the press has spent as much time as they have on this overblown story, but to compare the White House not wanting to give Republicans another scalp in the form of Desiree Rogers--who Gergen admits was not the one responsible for the President's safety--to Karl Rove and Harriet Miers refusing to testify in the U.S. Attorney scandal is utterly ridiculous.

If the press had spent half the time they did on the party crashers story asking why Rove and Miers didn't show up to testify, or on the U.S. Attorney scandal at all, maybe the public would be more aware of how Republicans have been stealing elections, how they used the Department of Justice as a political arm of the Republican Party, and how they filled the D.O.J. with partisan hacks like Monica Goodling.

Transcript via CNN.

COOPER: Let's dig deeper with senior political analyst and former presidential adviser David Gergen. David testified before Congress during the Whitewater investigation, when he was a member of President Clinton's staff.

So, the White House is saying, all right, separation of powers, that's why she can't testify. Do you buy that?

DAVID GERGEN: Not really.

COOPER: That is usually used for extremely serious things, not a social secretary.

GERGEN: Yes, not really, Anderson. But let me say a couple of things, preliminarily. I think people ought to get off her back, personally, on a couple of counts. First of all, the one thing this White House has done well is, they have had a ton of people come through that White House, children and various people from poor neighborhoods. And she's been right at the center of that.

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I'm planning on being around in ten years, Lawd willin'. And I'm really looking forward to holding up all these global-warming deniers, like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and all their absurd guests running around their shows screaming that "CRU e-mails prove global warming is a hoax!" for some serious, serious ridicule.

Like Hannity last night on his Fox show, hosting the best author Exxon/Mobil money could buy, Chris Horner, to natter at length about the fake CRU e-mails scandal. At the very end, Hannity comes up with an epithet for global warming:

Hannity: Biggest scientific fraud, I think, in our lifetime.

Yes, that's what we'd call it too -- not global warming, but this fake scandal, as Media Matters explains in thorough detail.

Particularly when it comes to Hannity's and Horner's doubts that the e-mails were "stolen" (Hannity says: "I don't think that's an accurate story," and Horner says, "There is no evidence this was a hacking.") As MM explains:

CRU officials have stated that emails were obtained through "a criminal breach of our security systems." In its initial response to the reported theft, officials at the University of East Anglia stated: "Recently thousands of files and emails illegally obtained from a research server at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have been posted on various sites on the web." In a statement about the controversy, CRU vice chancellor of research Trevor Davies stated: "We are committed to furthering this debate despite being faced with difficult circumstances related to a criminal breach of our security systems and our concern to protect colleagues from the more extreme behaviour of some who have responded in irrational and unpleasant ways to the publication of personal information."

But beyond the fact that this is just another right-wing water-muddying exercise to advance their own propaganda, you really have to wonder how the rest of the media can so eagerly lap up such a non-story. Especially when confronted with the actual evidence of what in fact is occurring in the Real World, i.e., the natural world, to wit:

Climate change speeds up since 1997 Kyoto accord

Since the 1997 Kyoto international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the Arctic's once-frozen summer sea ice. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:

• The world's oceans have risen about an inch and a half.

• Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

• Species now in trouble because of changing climate include not just the polar bear, which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

• Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 degree warmer than in the dozen years leading up to 1997.

"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

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Elizabeth Warren is one of the few public figures who understands and acknowledges the enormous economic stress placed on the middle class, and actually cares what happens to them:

While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.

Families are ready for change. According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration's proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers -- not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricks-and-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares -- so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming.

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

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Oy. Sarah Palin legitimizes the Birthers:

Transcript via Alex Koppelman at Salon:

HUMPHRIES: Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?

PALIN: Um, I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think enough members of the electorate still want answers.

HUMPHRIES: Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?

PALIN: I think it's a fair question, just like I think past associations, past voting records, all of that is fair game. You know, I gotta tell you, too, I think our campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign, didn't do a good enough job in that area. We didn't call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were, and perhaps what their future plans were, and I don't think that was fair to voters, to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of things that now we're seeing made manifest in the administration.

HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama's past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

PALIN: Hey, you know, that's a great point. That weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn't my real son, a lot of people say, "Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid," which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we should reverse that and use the same type of thinking on the other one.

Steve Benen is spot on:

That last point about the bizarre notion that Palin's son is not her son was especially odd. The former half-term governor seems to think questions about Trig's birth certificate are a "weird conspiracy theory freaky thing" -- she does have a way with words -- but instead of arguing that all of the nonsense be taken off the table for everyone, Palin wants to see "the same type of thinking" applied to the president.

Palin tried to walk this back on her Facebook page:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask... which they have repeatedly. But at no point – not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews – have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

No, you just suggest that the people who are asking and suggesting this have good reasons to do so. In other words, you just legitimized a bunch of far-right fringe cases.

As Brian Levin put it at HuffPo:

While many are pondering what exactly Sarah Palin’s approving radio comments on the birther issue and her subsequent “clarification” mean to her possible 2012 run, there is a more fundamental question: what does this bode for our democracy? The answer is this is yet another indicator that extreme is the new mainstream.

Steve Benen with the story about the Republican plan to obstruct health-care reform:

We learned yesterday that Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has distributed a three-page memo to his Republican colleagues, reminding them of various procedural tactics they can utilize to obstruct, delay, and undermine the debate on health care. Sam Stein called it "the equivalent of an obstruction manual -- a how-to for holding up health care reform."

This morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) seized on the document: "The good news is that Senate Republicans finally, at long last, have put a detailed plan down on paper. The bad news is that it's not, as we'd hoped, a plan to make health care insurance more affordable; it's not one to make health insurance companies more accountable; and it's certainly not a plan to reverse rapidly rising health care costs and draw down our deficit.

"The Republican plan we've waited weeks and months to see ... [is] not even about health care at all. The first and only plan Senate Republicans could be bothered to write up is an instructional manual on how to bring the Senate to a screeching halt. We knew that was happening anyway, but they had the audacity to put it in writing."

The Democrats are finally starting to take a look at changing procedural rules.

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Rachel follows up on her reporting on the 'kill the gays' bill being considered in Uganda. Her show attempted to get some responses from the American legislators who have decided to inject themselves so deeply into African politics - with predictable results. Most of them either tried to wash their hands of their part in this absolutely horrid piece of proposed legislation or didn’t bother to respond at all. The scandal ridden John Ensign’s office said he was too busy screwing up the health care bill to give a response.

James Inhofe and Sam Brownback didn’t bother to respond, either. Don’t hold your breath waiting on those two knuckle-draggers, Rachel. I’m sure it will be a cold day in hell before either of them bother to tell the evil “librul” lesbian woman why they could care less if you were killed if you were unfortunate enough to live in Uganda, assuming this law gets passed.

Props to Rachel for keeping after this story. It has to be one of the most disgusting news items I’ve watched in a very long time and these C-Street wingers need to be held to account for their actions. It’s a shame the rest of the media is not giving this story the attention it deserves. They’re too busy chasing around the White House party crashers or Tiger Woods’ mistresses.

Transcript via Nexis Lexis below the fold.

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Master economist Bill O'Reilly last night proposed that, to shrink the federal deficit, President Obama adopt the Bill O'Reilly Bold Fresh Economic Recovery Plan: halt "runaway" federal spending, keep the Bush tax cuts, and best of all, institute a federal sales tax.

O'Reilly wants just a 2 percent tax to last only two years. He thinks that'll close the deficit and get the dollar back on solid footing.

He brought on Neil Cavuto afterward. And say what you will about Cavuto, he's not an economic dunce. Like some people. And he tried to explain to O'Reilly that sales taxes don't work that way; they actually would suppress economic demand at exactly the time it needs to be rising.

This went whistling right over O'Reilly's head (duh). What Cavuto left unmentioned, of course, is that a sales tax is one of the most regressive taxes known to man; the tax burden resulting from consumption taxes disparately falls on the lower and middle classes. Guys with big mansions like Bill O'Reilly, however, are perfectly fine coming up with more taxes for working stiffs to pay.

A "federal sales tax" is what's otherwise known as a "consumption tax." It's worth remembering that, back in 2003, George W. Bush floated a similar idea (the suggestion then was to replace the entire income-tax system with a consumption tax), it was shot down pretty quickly.

As Angry Bear explained back then:

There are a number of reasons, including social justice, why a regressive tax is not a good idea, but that's a topic for a later post. Instead, the question is why a consumption tax is worse than an income tax. First, it will surely cost more than it is expected to. Why? Because naively setting the target consumption tax in a revenue-neutral fashion will actually lead to a decline in revenue. A consumption tax increases the cost of the final good to the consumer, meaning that for any price that stores charge, consumers buy less after the tax is imposed than before. Most states have sales taxes around 8%. To replace all income taxes with consumption taxes would require a federal consumption tax of at least 15% on top of the states' 8%. So things will change from the scenario in which, when a store sells a DVD player for $100, the consumer pays $108 to a situation in which the consumer pays $123. Consumers care about price after tax, not before (question: can you buy a $100 DVD player with only a $100 bill?)! So what happens when the effective price to consumers goes up? They buy less DVD players! But the government can not collect sales (consumption) taxes on unsold DVD players. As an economic aside, some, but not all, of the impact of the tax would be borne by sellers. In the current example, the retail price might fall to $95 ($5 less for stores) and the after tax price to consumers would be $95*1.23=$116.85 (an $8.85 increase). Stores get less and consumers pay more, as a result the total volume of goods traded will fall. More generally, any move to a consumption tax that proposes a neutral tax rate, one such that

"(the value of all goods sold * proposed rate) = Income Tax Revenue"

will not generate the same revenue as under the income tax because it fails to account for the fact that the volume of commerce will fall (economists call this "dead weight loss").

Put simply: Consumption taxes drive down economic activity because people will spend less, necessarily. O'Reilly's 2 percent tax won't even cover the decrease in economic demand that would result.

Incidentally, O'Reilly still owes Paul Krugman an apology.

One Senator mentioned how funny it was that the same Republicans who fought so hard to stop Medicare now paint themselves as the program's champion:

The Senate voted Thursday to keep nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts in its overhaul of the health care system, protecting the bill's major source of financing against a Republican attack.

On a vote of 58 to 42, the Senate rejected a proposal by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to send the bill back to committee with orders to strip out the cuts, a move that would effectively have killed the measure. Two Democrats -- Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jim Webb of Virginia -- voted with all 40 Republicans on the amendment.

The vote was among the first cast on proposed changes to the package, which would spend $848 billion over the next decade to extend coverage to more than 30 million additional people and implement the most dramatic revisions to the nation's health-care system in more than 40 years. Though debate officially opened on Monday, legislative progress has been hampered by disagreements between the two parties over the terms of debate and the timing of votes. But Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) still hopes to hold a vote on final passage before the Senate adjourns for the Christmas holidays, and on Thursday he told senators to plan on working throughout the coming weekend.

The vote on Medicare cuts was the most significant of four votes held Thursday. Republicans argued that the cuts, which would slow the projected increase in Medicare by about 5 percent over the next decade, would decimate the popular program for people over 65 in order to finance an expansion of insurance coverage for younger people. Any cuts to Medicare, they argued, should instead be dedicated to preserving the program, which is scheduled to start running out of money in 2017.

"If we're going to take money from Grandma's Medicare, let's spend it on Medicare," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

Democrats, backed by an array of major senior organizations, including the AARP, argued that the cuts would extend the financial life of Medicare by several years. The cuts would not reduce guaranteed benefits or increase co-payments, they said. And because hospitals and other providers have agreed to absorb the cuts by working more efficiently, Democrats said they would not affect access to medical services.

"I think it's pretty clear that the main organizations that care about seniors support this bill," said Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which drafted the bill that formed the foundation for a compromise package assembled by Reid.

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From the AFL-CIO Blog--Trumka on MSNBC: Jobs Summit a Good Step:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said tonight on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” he was encouraged by the White House Jobs Summit earlier today and that he’s looking forward to working on the urgent goal of job creation.

Trumka told host Ed Schultz that in the discussions among President Obama, administration officials, economists and business leaders, there was a broad consensus that we need to fix an economy that has shed millions of jobs. Trumka said of the jobs summit:

I think it worked really well. The president really does understand the urgency of job creation. He said it on numerous occasions: jobs, jobs, jobs. I think his staff and Cabinet understand the importance of job creation. A lot of good ideas came out today that are usable. If we turn them around real quick, we can start putting Americans back to work in weeks.

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Calculated Risk: Fed Chairmen never learn. Meanwhile, in the UK the gubmint is trying to rein in the bankers...

Little Green Footballs: Has seen the light!

Pulp Friction: America has become one big, crappy reality show

Pressing Issues: No terrorist angle, not news

Legal Schnauzer: A "Deep Throat" emerges in the Mike Connell plane crash

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Journalism 2009...Dana Milbank is an ass...Politico reports wingnut talking points as news...Cato rips Fox...Politico deep in the tank..."Bold Strategy"...Moonie Times to lay off 40% of 'staff'...WH Mainstream hacks object to bloggers...Watching America...Steyn/Beck's Fakes of Wrath...Celebrity Nonsense...Don't think, kill!...Ask This

"Pay no attention to that Murdoch behind the curtain!"

Open Thread below...

Tonight is a more sobering Late Nite Music Club, for it has been 30 years today since tragedy struck a Who concert in Cincinnati that claimed the lives of eleven young fans. The concert was utilitizing “stadium seating”, seating based upon first come/first serve. That coupled with a lack of crowd management lead to 11 of the 18,500 fans attending to be trampled to death once the doors open, and sparked a ban in Cincinnati on stadium seating that would span the next quarter of a century.

To remember this tragic event, The Cincinnati Enquirer has opened up a special blog section where readers can share their memories of that cold winter night. There will also be a candle light vigil in downtown Cincinnati tonight to remember those who died that night.

Here is what those of us in Cincinnati remember from that horrible night in 1979 when the news broke and told us what happened.

Hopefully it will never happen again.