OMG Shatner is everywhere. Via Monkey Muck. Open thread below...

Pashmina fight! From the dear departed "Smack The Pony" Channel 4 British sketch comedy show.

h/t Monkey Muck

Open thread below...

First I want to say that I had an incredible time at Netroots Nation. What a treat to see so many in the liberal blogosphere gather to discuss health care and virtually every other issue we face. Kudos to all the politicians who showed up to represent their positions as well.

Anyway, a huge topic that was raging through the weekend was the state of the 'public option.' Since the Baucus Dogs haven't finished their bill we still don't have the goods to really make any sense of what the House of Lords is going to put forth. We do have the Senate HELP committee bill, but the Baucus Dogs are trying to muck up the works by stalling the process and trying to empower the teabaggers. Any member of Congress that is affected by the lunatic fringe appearing at these events should resign immediately.

I was talking to Digby at length about it over the weekend and she said she had a meeting with Mike Lux and he laid out a possible scenario to her that could come to pass even if Grassley, Bayh, Conrad, Baucus, Nelson and the rest of the paid off shills of the health insurance industry come out with a bill that doesn't have a 'public option.'

He later wrote about it in his piece: The News of Its Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

Here are a couple of possibilities for getting a bill passed:

A. The first is that conservative Senators are given a fig leaf compromise on the public option, so that they can say to people they forced a compromise, and then are brought over with all kinds of other incentives that make them more comfortable with the bigger bill.

B. The second is that the conference committee simply breaks the bill in half, one half being the less controversial part that everyone agrees upon, the other being the public option and the financing, both of which can go through the reconciliation process. Then Obama and Reid muscle the 50 votes they need for support.

Continue reading »

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Open Left: It's not 1994 anymore (or 1984 for that matter)

The Econocataclysm: Town Hall Meeting Defense -Video Game!

The Atlantic: The Final Days of Merrill Lynch

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: The Red Hot Jazz Archive, Workplace Bullying Institute, True/Slant, Monkey Muck

You stay classy, GOP: (h/t Oliver Willis)

This was not widely reported in the "MSM," but last month the delightful Michelle Malkin ran a very important "Obamacare poster contest" on her blog, which soars o'er the muck of the internet like a million eagles screeching into the sunset.

The submissions Michelle received were just as insightful, nuanced and discerning as you might imagine, and obviously this is an excellent way to advance the health care debate in the United States, some fun Photoshopping. It beats a lame sketch about Hitler, right? [..]

And then this morning someone forwarded me this email, which as far as I know is unrelated to the Malkin contest BUT follows a similar vein AND has been "making the rounds," as the kids say, under the subject line Obamacare Healthcare is coming soon!

Today's Conservatives: Just when you think they can't sink any lower, they dredge yet another layer of slime out of the swamp.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (2508)

PLAYS: (5414)

It's obvious that the marching orders have been given for Bushies to come forward and justify torture ever since we saw Dick Cheney do just that. This time it was Condi's turn, and she sounds just as wacky. Every time she opens her mouth she digs herself deeper in the muck. Here's her latest incoherent explanation over her remarks about the president's power to make waterboarding legal or not:

Rice: I said at one point that it was ahhh, given, right that if the president authorized it, it was legal. This was not a "Nixon/Frost" moment. What I ontended to say or what I meant to say about this is: The president said I won't authorize anything that is illegal. It's not that because he authorized it, it was legal...

And she has to even justify her position to a fourth-grader:

Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.

... Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama's administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."

Waterboarding is and always has been torture, so it was not legal. The above clip includes video of her talk at Stanford, which started this whole incident:

“[President Bush] was also very clear that we would do nothing – nothing – that was against the law or against our obligations internationally,” Rice said May 3rd at a Washington school.

And ended with her saying, again, that she didn't make a "Nixon/Frost" type gaffe.

Well, what should we call it then?

Andrea Mitchell said that she may have been bitten by an insect playing golf and was having a allergic reaction in her eye, so that's why her face looks swollen. But her words are just gibberish, and you can't help wondering if those words and their strangled reasoning are causing Condi's discomfort. Is their endgame to just try and move polling a few more points in their favor against torture investigations?