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What a week. We've already seen Blue Dogs take women to the back of the bus (or was it the alley?) with Stupak's impressively Stupid Amendment. Now we're hearing that those who supposedly worry about "too much spending" when it comes to health care--you know, the meatloaf-brains who rejected the public option, which would create competition and actually bring down costs--are now blathering on about embracing "tort reform."

Because you'd really want to take away the rights of victims in a democracy to lower the health care costs by...wait for it...wait for it... ".5%" (according to the CBO).

All you really need to know is that Blue Dogs/GOPers (is there any difference?) are those in favor of this counterproductive course of action, yet if you do indeed need more, watch the heart wrenching videos recounting the tragic results of medical malpractice. To learn more about the 98,000 lives lost due to medical error each year--or 268 every day--go to 98,000 reasons, a website set up by the American Association for Justice. Once there send a message to your Senator: Remind them you won't have your rights further stripped away so they can scarf down more caviar with their contributors at Big Insurance.

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I've been a little down lately, because it seems too many people are in a state of learned helplessness and don't want to participate in our democracy if it involves stepping away from the computer.

But then I saw this letter from Michael Moore and I felt a lot better. Because it's still our country, and we can still make a difference:

Friends,

It's the #1 question I'm constantly asked after people see my movie: "OK -- so NOW what can I DO?!"

You want something to do? Well, you've come to the right place! 'Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

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Michael Moore joined the set of the Larry King Live for the full hour. Here's part of the first segment where Michael talks about how much richer the upper one percent have gotten, how much Wall Street loves corporate welfare when they get into trouble and why Wall Street and large corporations are happy when they lay off workers in the United States.

KING: Are you saying capitalism is a failure?

MOORE: Yes. Capitalism. Yes. Well, I don't have to say it. Capitalism, in the last year, has proven that it's failed. All the basic tenets of what we've talked about the free market, about free enterprise and competition just completely fell apart. As soon as they lost, essentially, our money, they came running to the federal government for a bailout -- for welfare, for socialism. And it -- it -- I thought the basic principle of capitalism was that it's about a -- it's a sink or swim situation. And those who do well, the cream rises to the top and, you know, those who invest their money wrongly or, you know, don't run their business the right way, then they don't do well.

And if you run your business the wrong way, where does it say that you or I or anybody watching this has to bail them out?

I understand -- I understand why everybody seemed to get behind it, because a lot of people were afraid, because these people down on Wall Street had taken our money and made bets with it. I mean, they essentially created this invisible virtual casino with people's money -- people's pension funds, people's 401(k)s. They took this money and they made bets. And then they made bets on the bets. And then they took out insurance policies on the bets. And then they took out insurance against the insurance -- the credit default swaps.

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One of the more laughable right wing attack lines against President Obama has been the number of "Czars" he has appointed. Of course, we know that former President Bush had more czars than Obama, but why would Fox News report that? During his health care reform speech last week, the president said "If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out"

Release the hounds, the pushback has begun:

Last week, when the President addressed the Joint Session of Congress in a speech on health reform, he referred to some of the untruths – okay, lies – that have been spread about the plan and sent a clear message to those who seek to undermine his agenda and his presidency with these tactics: "We will call you out." So consider this one of those calls.

Over the past several weeks, we've seen with increasing frequency and volume issues raised around the use of "czars" by this Administration. Although some Members have asked serious questions around the makeup of the White House staff, the bulk of the noise you hear began first with partisan commentators, suggesting that this is somehow a new and sinister development that threatens our democracy. This is, of course, ridiculous. Just to be clear, the job title "czar" doesn’t exist in the Obama Administration. Many of the officials cited by conservative commentators have been confirmed by the Senate. Many hold policy jobs that have existed in previous Administrations. And some hold jobs that involved coordinating the work of agencies on President Obama’s key policy priorities: health insurance reform, energy and green jobs, and building a new foundation for long-lasting economic growth

But of course, it’s really the hypocrisy here that is noteworthy. Just earlier today, Darrell Issa, a Republican from California and one of the leaders in calling for an investigation into the Obama Administration’s use of "czars", had to admit to Fox News that he had never raised any objections to the Bush Administration’s use of "czars". Many of these members who now decry the practice have called on Presidents in the past to appoint "czars" to coordinate activities within the government to address immediate challenges. What is clear is that all of this energy going into these attacks could be used to have a constructive conversation about bringing this country together to address our challenges moving forward – and it doesn’t take a "czar" to bring that about! Just some folks willing to act in good faith. Read on...

This is a blogger with a spine. The blog post was written by Anita Dunn, and she goes on to nail numerous right wing politicians and pundits, calling them out on the nutbaggery. It's worth clicking through to the original to read it all.

From Democracy Now: UN Inquiry Finds Israel “Punished and Terrorized” Palestinian Civilians, Committed War Crimes During Gaza Assault

A United Nations fact-finding mission has found Israel “punished and terrorized” civilians in its three-week assault on Gaza earlier this year and cited strong evidence that Israeli forces committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions. More than 1,400 Palestinians—about a third of them women and children—were killed in the assault. We get analysis from author and Israel-Palestine scholar Norman Finkelstein.

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Project On Government Oversight: Retaliation: Whistleblower allegedly forced out after helping to expose the guard scandal at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul

TPMMuckraker: While lunatics debate whether a president should be permitted to address the nation's youth, there's an education story bubbling up in Texas that could have considerably more far-reaching consequences.

The Washington Independent: Glenn Beck's next target: Cass Sunstein

Whiskey Fire: A world-besotted wingnut attempts to imitate Swift, and ends up not so much lacerating his breast as serving human stupidity.

Let's Try Democracy: There Are So Many Days That Have Not Yet Broken

Newsifact: Right-wing mob attacks Roger Federer during doctor's visit

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Bill Moyers visited the set of Real Time, and had an honest discussion about why we're going to be lucky to see any real reform on health care with all of the money being thrown at both the Republican and Democratic parties from the insurance industries, big pharma, and Wall Street. Bill is exactly right here, and this needs to be looked at as a moral issue, and not what's in the interest of corporate profits or a good business model.

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(Sen. Claude Pepper - withstood many attempts at mud-slinging)

It's always interesting (and sometimes gratifying) to hear Sunday Morning talk shows from the past, just as a way of reminding yourself things were never as bad as they are now with mainstream media.

Case in point is certainly Meet The Press. Originally begun in 1946 as a feature on the Mutual Broadcast System Radio Network before switching to NBC in 1947, it was the brainchild of Martha Rountree and Lawrence Spivak and produced in association with American Mercury Magazine (of which Spivak was Publisher), Meet The Press pulled no punches and offered some serious grilling to whatever guest happened to be invited on. It prided itself in not asking canned questions and sometimes the results were newsworthy in themselves.

This episode, from November 27, 1947 features Senator Claude Pepper (D-Florida), himself an outspoken FDR Democrat, talking about our Post-war foreign aid policy and what needed to be done about it in view of the increasing presence of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Sen. Claude Pepper: “I’m in favor of spreading democracy in every part of the world. But there are many ways to spread democracy. You can’t cram democracy down the throats of people. And you can’t buy them off from Communism. We haven’t got enough money to buy the people of the world off from Communism. The best way, in my opinion, to spread democracy is to establish democracy so firmly here, that we’ll be able to propagate it to all nations and peoples of the world, we’ll be able to help them, we’ll set them a good example and the like . . not to buy them or cram it down their throats. . .

Lawrence Spivak: “ . . but certainly Senator we oughtn’t help those who are spreading totalitarianism . . or should we?

Pepper: Mister Spivak, we and the Communists have been living in this world a good many years together. Karl Marx started talking about Communism as you know in the last century. And it seems to me that unless we are willing to be blown to some other world to get away from a world where communism exists, we’ve got to live in a world with Communism. And they’ve got to live in a world with Capitalism. And the sensible thing to do is to learn to live together. We’ve got to live together whether we like it or not.”

Needless to say, Pepper didn't endear himself to the right wing fear mongers in the Senate, who nicknamed him "Red Pepper" and repeatedly attempted to smear him during the 1950's.

Times have changed - so have the people and so have the politicians.

After reading this, I have to conclude that Conservatives really can't tell reality from fantasy and are easily manipulated by movies and TV. I'm starting to understand why the Brent Bozells are always trying to sue some TV show or other. They think it's real; I mean, why would anyone sue a Buffy TVS episode, right?
Anyway, Digby's post covers the Jack Bauer influence on the right wing party.

It's very creepy and disturbing.

The Wapo also reports that the thing was just about to be operational before the plug was pulled last month. The plot thickens.

The LA Times says that the "CIA Was A Long Way From Jason Bourne" but when I read that description of a secret hit squad with no limits, I was reminded of something else, which I wrote a year ago:
Fanboy Interrogations

Dahlia Lithwick has a great column in this week's Newsweek about the biggest influence on the thinking of members of the Bush administration in regards to its "interrogation" policies: Jack Bauer.

I've written a ton about this shocking phenomenon over the years, but even I didn't know that John Yoo actually cited the show in his book:

"What if, as the Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?"...read on

Read her full article because she ends with this.

Rush was actually asking the right question. I laughed at him at the time,thinking he was an embarrassing torture fanboy. But it turns out that the military really was getting ideas from the show:

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas."

This probably worries me as much as anything I've heard about the antics of the Bush administration. These people are so fundamentally unserious that they found inspiration in a television show when the stakes were about as high as they could possibly be. It's horrifying to think these powerful people were this daft. But they were.
It seems it was actually worse than I thought.

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David Shuster and Tamryn Hall bring in J.P. Freire and Matthew Slutsky to "debate" whether the stimulus package is working or not. While I like David Shuster and think he does as good of a job as he's allowed to on MSNBC, this entire exercise struck me as just another example of why more people need to watch programs like Democracy Now and Bill Moyers Journal.

How the hell do you have an honest debate on this topic in five minutes? And cut the guests off at the end for some B.S. not important "breaking news" at the end of the segment to boot?

If MSNBC really cared about this topic, one, they'd be bringing in actual, respected economists to debate it from all sides of the aisle. Two, they'd not be limiting the debate to a few minutes. And three, they'd not be using the latest Republican talking point du jour as their guiding light for their "news" stories. Just because the Republicans decided to throw their latest hissy fit for the day doesn't mean they need to be taken seriously.

It's really tiresome to watch our "news" cycle being driven off the RNC fax machines talking points memo day after day.

One of the problems with trying to track the flood of wingnuttery emitted daily by Rush Limbaugh is that there's so much of it, and it's so ceaseless, that one becomes overwhelmed trying to keep up with it. But there's been a thread in his commentary this past week that's particularly dangerous, and it needs calling out.

It began on Monday, after the military coup in Honduras. Limbaugh went on the air and said this:

Limbaugh: So we've got hell breaking loose in Honduras. You know what we learned about Honduras? We learned the Obama administration tried to stop the coup. Now what was -- the coup was what many of you wish would happen here, without the military.

The next day, describing Obama talking to troops about the withdrawal from Iraq, he described the president thus:

"This is a guy who sought their defeat."

And then yesterday, he expanded on these thoughts even further:

This is Barack Obama, who led from the United States Senate his party into doing everything he could to ensure the defeat of the U.S. military. ... This party was doing everything it could to impugn and dishonor the military.

This thread of commentary clearly is pushing toward a single thought -- to push people in the armed forces into seeing Obama as a usurper and traitor, just like the Honduran president, and toward the idea that a similar military-based removal of him from office might be justified.

Keep in mind that Limbaugh is only of only four pundits still broadcast daily on Armed Services Radio, so our men and women in uniform are getting fed this garbage on a daily basis. (And Wes Clark was right: It is well past time to take him off.)

Limbaugh in fact is picking up on sentiments already circulating on the right. Larisa Alexandrovna at AtLargely picked up on the chatter going on at various right-wing blogs after Honduras coup, pointing in particular to the Gateway Pundit's commenters, who posted such items as the following:

We've seen a steady drumbeat of fearmongering from the right since Obama's election. But now we're treading into truly dangerous, insurrectionary territory.

UPDATE: Today Limbaugh added to the litany in a much more explicit fashion:

Limbaugh: And if we had any good luck, Honduras would send some people here and help us get our government back.

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Dana Milbank wasn't the only Beltway Villager all wanked out about President Obama prearranging a question with HuffPo's Nico Pitney yesterday. On Meet the Press, David Gregory pressed David Axelrod about it, suggesting that somehow this sort of thing is anti-democratic:

MR. GREGORY: I just want to be clear. Did the White House coordinate with a reporter about a question to be asked at a press conference?

MR. AXELROD: The White House didn't coordinate with the reporter about a question, we were looking for a way to get questions from within Iran. We could--we did not have access to Iranian journalists.

MR. GREGORY: So you talked to a reporter beforehand and said, "Could you ask a question about--from--directly from Iran at a press conference?"

MR. AXELROD: We said if you--we, we, we, we, we knew that he had been and he was very publicly involved in getting--in trafficking and communications in and out of Iran, and we felt it was important...

MR. GREGORY: Well, why is it appropriate to coordinate with a reporter about what's asked at a time when we're championing democracy around the world?

MR. AXELROD: No, no, David, you miss...

MR. GREGORY: Is that, is that what you should do at a press conference?

MR. AXELROD: You're not, you're not listening to what I said. We didn't coordinate with, with him about what was asked.

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. AXELROD: In fact, he asked probably one of the most--the toughest and most probing questions at that press conference. We had no idea what he was going to ask.

MR. GREGORY: But you coordinated with him about, about that subject of a question beforehand.

MR. AXELROD: He was a, he was a, he was a, he was a vehicle to get questions from Iran asked at this press conference, and that we thought was not only appropriate but, but necessary.

MR. GREGORY: If President Bush had done that, don't you think Democrats would have said that's outrageous?

Gregory is a Beltway Villager, and like all such folk, he wants to cling to the well-honed myths that preserve their favorite fictions about themselves. One of these is that White House press conferences are actually exercises in democratic, even egalitarian questioning of government officials by the people's representatives in the press corps.

So they are loathe to admit a simple reality: White House press conferences are in cold reality carefully stage-managed affairs, and the main beneficiaries of this arrangement have been the handful of "elite" reporters from big-name media outlets who traditionally have dominated them.

We're perfectly aware that presidents have for some long time gone into these conferences with a prearranged list of reporters upon whom they are going to call. The result has been an immense trivialization of press conferences, because those "elite" reporters have demonstrated over the years their eagerness to indulge trivial, celebrity-media-driven questions at the expense of serious policy matters. In the process, they've become increasingly manipulable.

This trend reached its apotheosis back when Jeff Gannon was lobbing softball questions to President Bush and White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Not only was Gannon a phony journalist, he was being regularly selected to be among the main questioners at the daily briefings.

Considering that this same White House never came clean on exactly why it issued credentials to this fraud -- and especially considering that David Gregory never once objected to it -- his outrage over the Obama White House's calling on Pitney for the toughest question any reporter at that conference asked seems strangely misplaced.

On the other hand, considering that this White House's admission of people like Pitney into the circle of people who get to ask questions at these conferences represents a direct erosion of the "elite" status of people like David Gregory -- and in fact an opening of these questions to many more "representatives of the people" -- it's really not too surprising.

Why?

Just a simple one-word sentence, yet it conveys probably the most anarchic, the most radical, the most provocative and the most democratizing thought in the world. The ability to question....no, the right and responsibility to question is the very cornerstone of our democracy. The Founding Fathers set forth programs and laid the groundwork to check the workings of our govenment by requiring it to answer to the people from which it was composed.

And yet, somewhere in the last forty years ago or so, we've lost our way. We, collectively as a nation, have decided that we needed to focus on the answers rather than ask the questions. We opt to live among others who share our values, rather than stand to have them questioned by other points of views. We select our media sources from those with which we share an ideological point of view, so our preconceived biases never are challenged. We pour money into the self-help industry, looking for someone to give us the answers that we seek, rather than do the hard work of finding our own path or questioning if we need measure our success in the same way. We gravitate towards politicians who appear to us to have the answers, even though the issues that face us cannot be "solved" by simple answers.

Our lack of appreciation of the power and value of questions leave us mostly disengaged from the democracy of which we're a part. Fewer and fewer people have any notion of how government works and that lack of engagement enables life-changing legislation to get passed with little public discussion.

Where did we lose our way? When did questioning stop being an act of democracy and become unpatriotic? How does this bode for our collective future as another generation is raised with fewer skills to look deeper at issues and analyze and synthesize information to consider solutions? Drum Major Institute's Executive Director Andrea Batista Schlessinger looks at this issue in her new book The Death of Why and she joins us here today to discuss it.

It is Andrea's position that so much of the policy debate is won in the framing. How are issues discussed? Through what lens do we approach debates about government and its role in our lives? Are we creating the capacity/will/desire in our young people to question? Are the tools that we give children to learn actually limiting their ability to really think?

These are questions that go right to the heart of where we find ourselves today and some fairly frightening prospects for our future if we don't reintroduce the value of questioning to the next generation.

Please welcome Andrea Batista Schlessinger to C&L and let's discuss The Death of Why:

[Ed. note: Please welcome to the C&L team our old friend Ian Welsh, whose work from the Agonist and FDL many of you many know. Ian will be writing whatever he chooses, but that usually means economics and international politics.]

It's Memorial Day. I gather for many it's just another long weekend, but I know that for many it's what Remembrance Day is for Canadians like myself: a day to remember those who have died in war. I won't say "died to protect our freedom" or any such trite BS, because with few exceptions, most wars had nothing to do with protecting anyone's freedom, but they did die, nonetheless, for us.

Their blood is on our hands, sticky and wet, and it will never dry. Why?

Because we live in democracies. Because we elected the leaders who sent them to war. Whether you think those wars are justified, or not, at the end of the day, we bear the collective guilt of their deaths. They died due to the decisions we made, the society we live in.

Oh, we can say "I did everything I could to oppose the war", whether that's Iraq or Vietnam, or some other war. But even if that's true, well, you failed, didn't you? (Didn't I?) And so off went the young men and women, and they died, or they were maimed, or their brain case got knocked around and they came back shaking, and they wake up screaming at night, and they can't control their emotions and they'll never be the same again.

It's one of the ironies of democracy that we're all responsible, collectively, and yet each of us, individually, can say "but not me, I voted against him" or "I protested against that policy". And because it's true, each of us can feel, in the end, that the deaths and suffering caused by our society, whether in war, or through a horrific medical system, or through abuses in the penal system, aren't our fault.

But is it true? Or is it true instead, that we failed, that we support the system with both our consent and our tax dollars, and that we are therefor complicit in what it does?

I don't know. But I do know this, on this Memorial day, even if it's not a Canadian holiday, I'm thinking of those who died, both soldiers and civilian.

And at the very least, I know I failed.