Awesome.

"This has the bacony stink of Canada all over it." - Mike Nelson, MST3K

I gotta say, I have a real love/hate relationship with the way liberals refuse to unify.

Psychologic is right. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson deserve the credit for what became the final demise of the public option. They're the ones who committed to joining a Republican filibuster of the Senate bill until it was stripped.

It's true that if there had been even one Republican who came out in favor of it, it would've been passed (probably only 61-39, but it'd pass), but that's a fantasy universe where good policy ideas on the left attract votes from the Republican side of the aisle.

I'm not sure that Obama being more engaged about the public option would've gotten it through. Maybe if we had some way of making Obama angry, and getting him to turn into The Rock Obama, he could have played hardball with Democrats, and threatened them with primary challengers, stripping them of chairmanships, etc. Ultimately though, I'm not convinced he really had any stick to wield against either Nelson or Lieberman. There's no other Democrat who could hold onto a Senate seat in Nebraska other than Nelson, and Lieberman seems to have simply been looking for an excuse to join the Republican party ever since the netroots successfully helped Ned Lamont beat him in the Democratic primary in 2006.

I'm honestly not sure there are 51 votes for it in the Senate. That campaign to get signatories to a letter for passing the public option under reconciliation petered out around 40 or so Democrats, and that was counting a lot of people who didn't actually sign the letter, just people who made approving noises about the idea. That makes me think that whether or not there are 51 Democrats who wanted the public option, there weren't 51 willing to try to use reconciliation to pass it.

It's my opinion, as a really, really avid follower of all this, that we just didn't have the votes for the public option.

I'm shocked and pissed about that, and I definitely think the nearly 20 Dems who were only for the public option when it was subject to the filibuster need to be ran through the wringer, but we go into these things with the Democrats we have, not the ones we wish we had. I'm all for a Congress entirely composed of Graysons, Weiners, Sherrod Browns, with a couple Sanders and Kuciniches, but we're a long way from that now.

I think this bill was the best deal we could have gotten in the 111th Congress.

It does not implement any level of government price setting (i.e. its 0% socialist). However, it does collect taxes from the rich, and uses the money to buy insurance for the poor.

It puts lots of new restrictions on insurance companies to make sure their profits come from serving their customers well, not from denying them care. Same for doctors and hospitals, it will make an attempt to change their incentives towards being based on patient outcomes, and not number & size of procedures done.

It does not, and will not solve every health care problem in the country, but it's going to vastly improve the state of our health care system, and provide care to a huge number of people who didn't have access to it, or who couldn't afford it until now.

It's not perfect, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

I think the main effect this bill will have is that we'll keep reforming our health care system as we go. The public option isn't dead, it just didn't get baked in from the start. We can keep pushing for it, and working to elect people who will fight for it, and working to defeat people who helped kill it...like Joe Lieberman.

From what I know—and hopefully somebody will correct me if I'm wrong—is that there is no straight forward prophecy about the rapture. It was in fact contrived by the theologian named John Nelson Darby. Granted, it would have no more merit if it were in the bible, but it's just funny how so many take this idea as actual scripture, when really it's just a far fetched interpretation, at best.

Watch for the Black Hole "Remake"

Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski takes on 1979 sci-fi film
"Disney are going back to the eighties with a reinvention of the sci-fi classic The Black Hole. The remake has a top team behind it with direction from Tron Legacy's Joseph Kosinski and screenplay courtesy of Travis Beacham who penned Clash of the Titans. They have also have producer Sean Bailey involved on the potentially 3D project.

The original, directed by Gary Nelson, at the time was the most costly Disney film ever made, and saw the longest computer graphics shot at that point in history leaving it with nominations for cinematography and visual effects at the Academy Awards that year.

The remake will recount in much more detail, the story of spaceship Palamino discovering the presumed dead Dr. Hans Reinhardt in a lost, robot controlled ship hovering over a black hole. Reinhardt, even after twenty years, remains to determind to find what lies beyond the hole - be that immortality or oblivion...
- http://www.screenrush.co.uk/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18491246.html

True,
"Gary Nelson", the director was not a true visionary but he has brought us things like "Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold"

At the time was the most costly Disney film ever made, and saw the longest computer graphics shot at that point in history leaving it with nominations for cinematography and visual effects at the Academy Awards that year.

And if you're really fat you can even use it to play Ping Pong!

I had a friend once who was taking Ninjitsu classes, he bought all kinds of toys like this with wild claims about their effectiveness. He once told me he could escape from a full nelson, he had me place him in the hold and then tried to slip out, nearly broke his neck and he was still trapped.

Comments from LiveLeak:


Raw Video: TV crew spots Daschle pushing car down DC street in snow storm


While FOX 5 was busy covering the start of the Blizzard of 2010 in D.C. on Friday night, our reporters came across a number of stranded vehicles—but one stood out from the rest.

As reporter Matt Ackland and his photographer Nelson Jones were driving down Wisconsin Avenue in Upper Northwest D.C. while they were live on the air, they spotted a man trying to push his car out of the snow. When they stopped to help—live on the air—they found that it was none other than former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle.

Daschle's car was stuck along the roadway, but Jones hopped out to help him push.

Of course, D.C. officials have been urging residents not to venture out onto the road in the treacherous conditions, but apparently Daschle had somewhere to be. There's no word on where he was headed.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'country, willie nelson, johnny cash, waylon jennings, bob seger' to 'country, willie nelson, johnny cash, waylon jennings, bob seger, audiosift' - edited by gwiz665

Kinda reminds me of the old "Nelson Mandala freedom fighter or terrorist" chestnut.

Except replacing substituting white men for Japanese(works) and black Africans for whales(fail)...

The Japanese are skirting international law to harvest animals, which is bad. The Sea Shepherd, through antics like this and others, is actively endangering human lives. The endanger not only their own lives and anyone sent to rescue them, but those of the other ships around them that they choose to attack. That is much, much worse and the only way to cut it any different is to value human and other animal life equally. This shows in who does and does not support these loons.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'White, Stripes, Charles, Nelson, Reilly, Internet, Leaks, Gene Rayburn, weird al' to 'White, Stripes, Charles, Nelson, Reilly, Internet, Leaks, Gene Rayburn, weird al, jibjab' - edited by NicoleBee

>> ^ShakyJake:
Vote buying? That sounds suspiciously like what all these big corporate lobbyists are doing...
So both sides are corrupt. Anyone who is surprised by this fact hasn't been paying attention.


Still, the deals extended to Senator Nelson simply cannot be interpreted any other way - they're bribes, to be paid for with American tax dollars.

Apparently a deal was reached. Here's a DKos diary running down the changes.

For people allergic to the great orange devil, it includes:

• Annual and lifetime benefit caps are banned
  
• Insurance companies will be required to spend at least 80% of their revenue on medical costs (85% for large group/corporate plans)
  
• States may opt to ban abortion coverage from their state's exchange
  
• Public option is now a framework for privately run non-profit plans which can operate across state lines (but has to comply with the regulations in all client states simultaneously)
  
• People meeting certain income/cost requirements may be able to use exchanges, even if they have an employer plan available (big improvement, IMHO)
  
• A bribe to Ben Nelson, in the form of federal money to Nebraska's Medicaid program.
  
• Penalties for not carrying insurance are increased slightly for those making more than $37,500/yr.
  
• Lots of tax breaks/extra funding for adoption and teenage pregnancy programs
  
• Dropped provisions which would have revoked health insurance companies' anti-trust exemption (not sure if that was for Nelson or Lieberman, maybe some Republicans could offer that as an amendment *guffaw*)
  
• Most everything else like subsidy levels, bans on denials for preexisting conditions and recissions are still in place.
  

>> ^Doc_M:
"Ever unpopular" to the American citizen chief. Sorry to disturb your dreamland, but there are people that disagree with you to the extent that freedom means.


Go google the public option polling again, you are grossly misinformed.

The public option always polled in the 55-70% support range, and has been more popular than the reform package generally in every poll I've seen.

As for your lament about the two party system being broken, do you really think more parties would help? The likliest "new" parties would start on the extreme right (libertarian/tea party) or to the left of Democrats (green/progressive). Neither would be more likely to compromise, given that their entire existence would have come from their otherwise uncompromising ideological stances.

Without changing the overall adversarial nature of politics these days, there is no such thing as bipartisan agreement.

As for the argument that the Republicans offered amendments that would've let them vote for it, that's horseshit, and I hope you already knew that. Republicans were never going to vote for this bill unless Democrats accepted their first amendment, which would've stricken the entire bill and replaced it with one penned by the insurance industry Republicans. They were never willing to truly compromise; they would never agree to let us make the bill more liberal in one area in exchange for it getting more conservative in another.

For example, what could we offer Republicans to get them to vote for a bill that allowed every American the choice of buying into Medicare? Anything?

It's simply naive to think that there were any Republicans who would've ever voted yes for the final bill. At best, we might have gotten Snowe or Collins to vote for cloture, but given the pressure they got from the right, I doubt there was a compromise that could have been made that would've won us either of their votes.

For that matter all Snowe said she wanted was the public option to be triggered, but now it's gone entirely. Why didn't she announce she'll vote for cloture and prevent Ben Nelson from making the bill more anti-choice? It's not been a big focus in press coverage, but it's not like they haven't asked her.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'john wayne, ricky nelson, western, 50s' to 'john wayne, ricky nelson, western, 50s, dean martin, rio bravo, sheriffs' - edited by EndAll

Hm - I'd never even heard of the thing before. I saw that Simpsons episode where Bart, Nelson, Milhouse & Ralph were a boy band and there was some sort of computer thing that made them sound good, but I thought it was just a McGuffin. Interesting. Props for Professor Al.