Ted Kennedy Funeral Mass

My wife an I watched the funeral mass for Senator Ted Kennedy on Saturday. I thought it was very nicely done. If you missed it, C-SPAN has it in full.

31 August 2009

Ted Kennedy Dead at 77

As you might imagine, a great deal has already been written about his passing, not to mention about the man himself. I'll link a few here.

Love him or not, he was a giant in the Senate. In his later career, health care reform was his baby and I'm actually hopeful that by the true end of his life, he was unable to see what was going on regarding this issue. It would have broken his heart.

TPM Obituary

Overview of reaction from The Huffington Post

Huffington Post blogging on Kennedy

President Obama on Kennedy's Passing

And, since I'm now a citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I'll note that the New York Times has a piece on issues regarding succession to his Senate seat.

26 August 2009

Addition: Vice President Joe Biden speaks about Kennedy.

Jonathan Alter on Kennedy, from Newsweek.

Bernanke: Wrong for the Fed

President Obama has nominated Benjamin Bernanke to another term as Fed Chairman. Here is a detailed look at why he is the wrong man for this job.

25 August 2009

"Obama's Trust Problem"

Paul Krugman has written an op-ed in the New York Times detailing how the president has lost the trust -- and in many cases the good will -- of progressives. Krugman starts this way:

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.

Krugman concludes with:

So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.

Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

It is worth the read.

21 August 2009

Obama: The Public Option

From Matt Lockshin, campaign manager for CREDO Mobile:

President Obama needs to hear from us about the public option.

If we don't make a stand now for a public option, the Obama administration may hedge on its plan for health care reform.

This weekend, the Obama administration indicated that it might be open to passing health care reform without any provision for a public insurance option similar to Medicare that could compete with private insurance companies.

President Obama said that a public option was just a "sliver" of his plan and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius went so far as to say that the public option was not an "essential" part of reform.

The comments this weekend by the president and Secretary Sebelius rhetorically pave the way for the Obama administration to cave on a meaningful public option and instead accept toothless regional health care co-ops that would be unable to compete with insurance companies and keep them honest.

Help us remind President Obama that part of the reason he won the presidency was his plan to enact major health care reform that included a public option, a provision that 76% of Americans support.

Click here to automatically add your name to the above petition asking President Obama to tell Congress and the voters that he will only sign a bill with a robust public option similar to Medicare.

Thank you for working to secure real health care reform.

18 August 2009

Movie: Kinky Boots

My sister recommended the film Kinky Boots to my parents and my parents in turn recommended it to me. I watched it this morning and heartily recommend it now to you. It is an English movie released in 2005.

In spite of the fact that I've linked its IMDB information above, I would recommend that you watch it without foreknowledge of its plot or indeed, even of its premise. With many movies, knowing a great deal about the film in question prior to seeing it does not lessen the experience of watching it. With other films, this is not the case, and knowing as little as possible really can add to the experience. I think that this is one such movie. I watched the film without even having read the Netflix disk sleeve synopsis and I'm glad of that.

The movie is funny and ultimately uplifting. And, of course, I cried, too, for the best of reasons.

18 August 2009

Rat-Eating Plants

What a title! Really, can you beat that?

From the Times of London:

He may be best known for his mellifluous tones and gentle manner, but for one group of botanists Sir David Attenborough clearly conjures up different associations. Explorers who discovered a new species of giant rodent-eating carnivorous plant have named it after the TV naturalist.

Nepenthes attenboroughii, a previously unknown variety of pitcher plant discovered on a remote mountain in the Philippines, is so big that small rodents could be trapped inside and slowly dissolved by flesh-eating enzymes.

We will most likely drive them to extinction now in short order, but damn am I glad that they exist!

17 August 2009 (New Mexico)

Paul Krugman on Health Care Reform

The title says it all.

17 August 2009

Crazy People, Gutless Pols, Lax Media

Rick Perlstein has a piece in The Washington Post that describes our country to a "T." Sad, but true.

16 August 2009

RIP: John Hughes

The man, John Hoghes, who "wrote the biography" of the 80's generation has died.

Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062.

Dear Mr. Vernon, We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did *was* wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.

....

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...Brian Johnson

...and an athlete...Andrew Clark

...and a basket case...Allison Reynolds

...a princess...Claire Standish

...and a criminal...John Bender

Does that answer your question?... Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

7 August 2009

Addition: Here is his wiki, with a listing of his movies.

Financial Reform: Outraged Yet?

Arianna Huffington has summed it up nicely yet again, this time on the topic of financial reform -- or rather the lack thereof -- in Washington. If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention. And everything you have is at risk.

"Everybody understands," Geithner said on This Week, "that we cannot have our financial system go back to the practices that brought this economy to the brink of collapse." The problem is, it already has. If we're really going to protect taxpayers and create a more stable system, the most important reform is to ensure that there are no financial institutions any more that are too big to fail. That we can never again be held hostage by institutions that have the power to tell us: "If you don't give us the money, we're going to blow up the whole system." Actually, what we have now is worse than a hostage system because in a classic hostage setup, after you pay the ransom you get the hostage back. We've paid more than a king's ransom, but have not taken the hostage -- our financial system -- back from the banks.

Read the whole op-ed here.

7 August 2009

A Penny for your Thoughts

The Lincoln penny turns 100 this year. Here are some facts.

3 August 2009

Net Neutrality Legislation

From FreePress.net, quoted in full:

A new Net Neutrality bill was just introduced in Congress.

President Obama has repeatedly called for Net Neutrality. A pro-Net Neutrality chairman is now heading the FCC. Public support has never been greater.

The time has come to make Net Neutrality the law once and for all. Congress introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458) to give you control over the future of the Internet.

Now, it's your turn to get involved.

Tell Congress: Pass Net Neutrality Legislation Now

Congress needs to know right now that Americans want them to pass Net Neutrality legislation. It's easy to do. Just click on the link above and sign the Net Neutrality petition. It will be delivered to your elected officials immediately.

Since we began our campaign, more than 1.6 million people have told Washington that we must make Net Neutrality the law. More than 850 organizations have signed on to the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, including every major consumer group, progressive and conservative leaders, small businesses and unions, bloggers and librarians.

Giant phone and cable companies still think they can squash our movement -- and over the past six months alone, they have hired 500 lobbyists in Washington to try to stop this bill. Companies like AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon are still trying to control the Internet.

Congress can't afford to wait any longer: As all media move online, the phone and cable companies see your high-speed Internet connection as their new source of revenue, and they're now scrambling to kill Net Neutrality so they can inspect and filter content and overcharge you for using the Web in ways they don't like.

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 will stop them. And it's up to you to tell your members of Congress to side with the public -- not with the corporate lobbyists -- and take a final stand for an open Internet:

Help Us Send 2 million Messages to Congrass for Net Neutrality

Now is the time to show our elected officials that millions of people believe that it's our Internet, and we're willing to fight for it. Thank you for taking action!

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net
www.SavetheInternet.com

P.S. Stay tuned to SavetheInternet.com for updates as we push the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act" through Congress. Today, you can sign the petition, and then use Facebook and Twitter to tell your friends to join the fight.

3 August 2009

Big Bad Wolf

This is why science rocks. As noted on The Huffington Post.

The BBC series "Bang Goes the Theory," whose tag line is "Get ready to put science to the test," has a fascinating video on the web in which presenter Jem Stansfield "builds a vortex cannon to pick up where the big bad wolf failed to blow over a house of brick." Watch the amazing results below.

You can see the video at this link.

Addition: Speaking of Big Bad Wolves. The song isn't very good -- although several of her others have been -- but damn Shakira can move!

3 August 2009