Hold Fast

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog raises a point that nails home something I’ve been thinking a lot lately – that the White House is failing to provide the leadership necessary to ensure a good piece of healthcare reform legislation passes both chambers of Congress. The president still doesn’t realize that he’s now the president. He apparently [...]

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Just in time for tomorrow’s presidential election in Afghanistan, Brian Conley and friends have launched Alive in Afghanistan, a site that allows distributed reporting of incidents in the political process such as problems voting, illegal campaigning, vote tampering, and threats of violence. They collect data via SMS, email, and the web. It’s a great project [...]

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So sayeth his Twitter feed. Of course, O’Reilly has tried to demonize Netroots Nation before. Back in 2007, when it was still called Yearly Kos and there was to be a Democratic presidential candidates forum at the event, BillO went on a weeklong campaign against Daily Kos and the convention. It was effectively put to [...]

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Digby: Charlie Cook just said something very profound (which is unusual.) Chris Matthews asked whether or not the Democrats would lose the House next year and he said he didn’t think so, but that they might lose 20 seats. And then he said this: But arguably the people they would lose would be the Blue [...]

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Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers lays out the system through which progressive Democrats in Congress are being squeezed by Democratic elites out of support for the public option in healthcare reform. Bowers’ understanding of the forces at play is about as comprehensive as any written analysis of legislative wrangling I’ve seen on this issue. [...]

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Latoya Peterson of Jezebel gives us some real, righteous anger at the direction teabaggers are taking the healthcare debate in this country. The question isn’t health care or freedom! Where the fuck are you getting this shit from? The question is health care or more dead people! … No one here is actually interested in [...]

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This hardly counts as news, at least not to anyone who paid attention to Sarah Palin’s antics as Governor of Alaska and even less so for those of us who watched her as John McCain’s running mate, but Sarah Palin has a remarkable tendency to just make shit up. Palin posted a much-touted statement on [...]

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Chinese rights attorney Xu Zhiyong is yet another activist who is being prosecuted by the Chinese government for trying to practice the law. The New York Times reports on his detention and arrest, on a bogus charge of tax evasion. The law in China is something that exists as a paper mache facade intended to [...]

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Steve Pearlstein is right, the teabagger healthcare townhall protests, Republican politicians, and conservative media figures like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are political terrorists. Plain and simple. The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, [...]

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Mike Lux at Open Left writes: Look, this should be obvious, but apparently it’s not: when some big piece of our economy is really messed up, but some major corporate interest is making lots and lots of money off the system, if that corporate interest doesn’t object to the “reform” being proposed, whatever legislation being [...]

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