Especially when thrown by Drew Bees. The science explained:

From Catholic Worker:

By now most of you have noticed that I get much of my national political news from Talking Points Memo, a blog started by Josh Marshal which has evolved into essentially an online political magazine.  They focus on liberal Democratic politics of course, but they have a large staff as well as a large volunteer submission base and they break stories pretty quickly – often faster than CNN or any of the national new services.  The politics may be a little “mainstream” for many of you, but I find the source invaluable.  They are also very good at fact checking quickly, and they don’t often have to retract stories the way other blogs do.

They’ve compiled a list of their top 10 stories of 2009 based upon hits, which generally means stories they either break or cover because the rest of the media isn’t.  I’m providing only the headline for each story.  You can find the details through the link.

1.  (Gov. Bobby) Jindal Admits Katrina Story Was False

2. GOP Lawmaker’s Graphic Sex-Bragging Caught On Tape

3. Mysterious Private Security Firm Gets Control Of Empty Jail In Small Montana Town

4. Palin: Obama’s “Death Panel” Could Kill My Down Syndrome Baby

5. Conservative Activist Forwards Racist Pic Showing Obama As Witch Doctor

6. Fourth-Grader To Obama: Why Do People Hate You?

7. A Loyal Bushie Burrows Into Obama’s System

8. Franken Cuts Lieberman Off, Won’t Let Him Finish Floor Speech

9. Even Fox News Fact-Checks Palin’s Claims About Dollar Coin

10. Kyl: ‘I Don’t Need Maternity Care.’ Stabenow: ‘Your Mom Probably Did’

Honorable Mention: Sex Scandal Flow Chart

60 to 39.  And by all accounts the House is expected to cave in to President Lieberman.  The Republicans essentially win, but they’re whining anyway and gearing up for lawsuits.

Meanwhile, teabaggers are planning to strike on January 20 to “financially cripple” the corporations who are “funding socialism.”  In particular, they intend to target companies advertising on MSNBC.

Jonathan Chait makes some interesting comments about the process while arguing that the bill is “the greatest social achievement of our time.”

The sum total effect of this legislation is fairly simple. It would redirect a large chunk of the money sloshing around the health care system away from ineffective treatments and toward providing care for the uninsured. On top of that, it would prod the system, in dozens of ways large and small, to adopt cutting edge methods. It is not the kind of plan liberals would create if they could design it from scratch. Rather, it is a centrist compromise of the best variety, combining the ideas of the now nearly-extinct moderate wing of the Republican Party with the smartest bipartisan technocratic reforms.

What, then, is not to like? Conservatives have attacked reform with a potent combination of populist attacks against cost controls, aimed particularly at terrified elderly voters, along with more intellectually-respectable attacks protesting the lack of cost control, aimed at winning elite opinion. The first set of attacks whips up fears of Medicare cuts, death panels, or any provision that might cause anybody to lose his employer-sponsored health-insurance. Anything Democrats do to protect themselves against those attacks opens them up to the opposite charge of failing to sufficiently cut the health care budget, and vice versa.

This was found on a wall in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.  It obviously took some effort and time.  It’s, well, what it is.

On the road again today, but I have time for a few notes from this morning’s national political news.

A poll shows that the majority of Americans opposes the Afghan war, but supports sending more troops.

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The first rule about merger negotiaions?  Don’t talk about merger negoations!

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President Carter apologizes to Jews.

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A teabagger who prayed for Sen. Robert Byrd’s death thinks his prayer might have misfired, causing collateral damage.

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A right wing attorney claims he was “worked over” by the Secret Service outside the White House.

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This Kos poster outlines nine sins of ommission on the part of Obama re health care reform.

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Mall Santas are reporting an unusual number of requests from kids for socks this year.

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Senatory Lindsay Graham is complaining that blacks and low income people are costing his state money.

It’s hard to know when the Humboldt Mirror is even minimally serious, but in this post they discuss Robert Faust’s non-appearance at the GPU Commissioners’ meeting in Redway last week.

Funny thing about the politics of the life of a well-known political activist: none of it stops with your death.  Not even for a moment. 

We celebrated my grandmother’s life yesterday, at the Redwood Gardents Community Room in Berkeley.  Redwood Gardens is senious housing – of the sort which is the last before you go to a special care home.  My grandmother, who would have been 94 yesterday, never made it to a special care home.  As independent as she was, she wouldn’t have lasted long in one. 

The room was packed with about 150 people from various walks of her politics.  Some of us in the family were there; though the conservatives of the family were absent.  You might think that would make for a unified celebration, but life nor death are so simple. 

As I mentioned in the earlier posts, she was once a member of the Communist Party.  She left during the 1950s, after having endured McCarthy, when the Kruschev revelations revealed to her that a big portion of what she had believed about the Soviet Union had been deadly fraud.    Unlike some others who left who either became what would eventually be termed “neoconservative” or abandoned politics altogether, sometimes in favor of less grandiose vices, she remained active for the rest of her life as a non-sectarian leftist.  When I came of age and became involved with Democratic Socialists of America, she told me that she was “finished with political parties.”  When I argued that DSA wasn’t really a political party, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “it’s too close for my comfort.” 

Unfortunately about 25 years later she had fallen into moderate dementia with age and was coaxed into joining the Workers World Party; fomerly a Trotskyist splinter group from the Socialist Workers Party, but eventually adopting North Korea as its object of worship (and supporting the Tiananmin crackdown in China just over three decades following its indignant opposition to the Soviet invasion of Hungary).  Ironically she not only joined what was in tradition a Trotskyist sect, but a group which had evolved into the worst of the Stalinism she had rejected earlier in life.  On the positive side, like any religious cult, they took very good care of her.  They made sure she got home from meetings safely, and otherwise did quite well by her on a personal level.  It’s hard for me to be angry about that, even if her fellow VALB members didn’t understand what was happening.

And then you had her non-sectarian activist friends who didn’t understand much of the history nor the politics.

And what you had was recipe for arguments about what would be emphasized in her memorial; which songs would be sung and by whom; what causes would be championed; etc.  The details are boring, but somehow with all the potential for “family” arguments, the memorial turned out quite nice if imperfect in the eyes of any particular agenda. 

We had the Berkeley Labor Chorus sing some songs, and Bruce Barthol, formerly bassist for Country Joe and the Fish, and presently a musical composer for the San Francisco Mime Troup, sang some others.  There was some overlap due to lack of coordination, but nobody minds hearing/singing Venga Jaleo twice in two different interpretations.  And as the “Trotskyists” rolled their eyes, excerpts from the documentary Forever Activists played, mostly from her interview of 1986.

Most of the veterans gone, only Nate Thornton was able to attend (he was the last of the veterans with the presence of mind for me to interview on radio a couple of years back).  For all of the shortcomings of their brand of politics, we’re losing a generation of selfless activists who set up an inspirational model that might not be matched by any group of people for decades to come.  And as the average age of attendees yesterday was about 60, with my 16 year old nephew being the youngest among us, a vital history may be lost in another decade.  And we have a left lacking any real depth and in desperate need of knowledge of its own history.  

In my eyes we were memorializing not just my grandmother’s death, but  the death of a world view.  I have very mixed feelings about it.

In the 1970s, Berkeley was the city of the Volkswagon.  In the 80s and 90s it was the city of the Volvo.  Now it’s the city of the Prius.

I was at my Grandmother’s memorial in the great city on this day.  Her memories packed in well over a hundred people in the Community Room of the housing complex at which she died.  I’ll have more to say about that later.  This post is about a cosmic experience.

My mother recently bought a white Prius, which she used to get us to the memorial.  We’d brought some food and paper plates.  We forgot to grab the plates so I took my mother’s “key” and went back to the car.  The key is an electronic device which automatically opens the car and if it’s in the vicinity it lets you hit a button to start the car.  Well, it didn’t automatically open the car, so I hit the button.  No go.  The device contains a small compartment with a key, for backup if the electronics all fail.  But it wasn’t working either.

So I walked back to the service cussing about the failures of modern technology, warranties, and lamenting the days of simple locks, rolling window levers, etc.  My mother looked confused saying that she hadn’t had any problems of the kind, and followed me back to the car listening to my ranting the whole way, punctuating it with a dramatic display of the device’s failure.  It took a moment, but then my mother looked down the street and several cars away noted another white Prius.  ”Honey,” she said, “there’s my car.”

What’s more is that further down and across the street was yet another white Prius.  Malvina Reynolds would have written a song about this.

He puts the blame squarely on Obama.

I’ve been fighting all year for a strong public option to compete with the insurance industry and bring health care spending down. I continued that fight during recent negotiations, and I refused to sign onto a deal to drop the public option from the Senate bill. Unfortunately, the lack of support from the administration made keeping the public option in the bill an uphill struggle. Removing the public option from the Senate bill is the wrong move, and eliminates $25 billion in savings. I will be urging members of the House and Senate who draft the final bill to make sure this essential provision is included.  

But while the loss of the public option is a bitter pill to swallow, on balance, the bill still delivers meaningful reform, and the cost of inaction is simply too high. This bill significantly expands coverage and helps protect Wisconsinites from high costs and insurance company abuses, such as denying or restricting coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The bill also improves a flawed Medicare formula that denies Wisconsin fair reimbursement rates, encourages the kind of low-cost, high-value care practiced in our state, increases access to home and community-based long-term care, and reduces federal budget deficits by $132 billion over the next decade.

 I hope the public option is reintroduced next year.  By itself.  Straight up and down vote susceptible to the reconciliation procedure.

Addendum:  Senator Webb also blames Obama.

“Over the past year, the process of debating this issue often overwhelmed the substance of fixing the problem. The Obama Administration declared health care reform to be a major domestic objective, but they did not offer the Congress a bill. Nor did they propose a specific set of objectives from which legislation could be derived. Consequently, legislation was developed independently through five different Congressional committees, three in the House and two in the Senate. This resulted in a large amount of contradictory information and a great deal of confusion among our public.”

And Snowe ultimately falls in line with her party.

And Al Franken falls in line with his.

Second addendum:  The Bill passed its first procedural hurdle.  The Democrats will pass their bill before the end of the year.

Meanwhile Nate Silver explains why Reconciliation might not be viable.