Don't bother trying

These guys can't be satisfied or mollified or putrefied (any further).

Click image for full Chan Lowe/ Sun-Sentinel cartoon.

Mud in your eye

There goes the shut-out.

Click image for full John Cole/ Scranton Times-Tribune cartoon.

Rally 'round the wingnuts

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The amazing thing is that the teabagger movement keeps emailing me, as if they could possibly win me over. Today, I received two emails, one from Arkansas, the other threatening a lawsuit based on the Tenth Amendment if health reform passes. Guess they'll hire Orly Taitz...

Up is down

Conservatives backed Doug Hoffman in NY-23 because the hand-picked Republican wasn't extreme. They and Hoffman lost a seat that no Democrat had held in a hundred years. But it's a glorious victory for the revolution!

"(T)he GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives," wrote RedState's Erick Erickson.

Only if by "win with conservatives," Erickson means, well, lose. Looks to those of us with dictionary-based vocabularies as though the GOP will lose with or without the wingnuts, which is some of the best news of yesterday.

There's even hope for tomorrow:

"For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida."

Lying for a living

In the aftermath of the White House calling Fox out for arrant propaganda, the so-called Fox ratings spike turns out to be bullshit.

What happened when you included October 24 and October 25 in the tabulation to make a true two-week-vs.-two-week comparison? Suddenly, that 9 percent gain in overall viewers evaporated into a barely-there 2 percent blip...

Is anyone surprised? This is known as down in the noise, which is somehow appropriate.

Think about this too: Fox's viewership is paltry - 1.2 million viewers a day. If only one of every 200 Americans watched Fox, that would be a true spike, a 25% gain.

But even that many viewers would be the wingnut fringe.

(h/t Atrios)

Swimmingly

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Commit to your puns

Get Fuzzy, by Darby Conley, embedded from here.

Sweat equity

Click image for full G.B. Trudeau "Doonesbury".

Trickle down

Click image for full Nate Beeler/Washington Examiner cartoon.

Band-Aid on open heart surgery

Tort "reform" is one of the Republican's favorite health reform. But of course it's not really a health reform. Its purpose is to allow large corporations to escape financial responsibility for their actions.

You thought it was about doctors and nurses!? Don't be naive.

You thought it was about saving you money? Step away from the Kool-Aid!

Malpractice litigation costs about $20 per person per year. The cost problem that America faces relative to our economic competitors among the western democracies is more like $4000 per person per year. If we're serious about cost containment, malpractice costs - 0.5% - are waaay too low to matter. At all.

None of this $20 per year would return to consumers in the form of lower prices. Pricing of a $12,000 annual premium is just not sensitive to a $20 difference. For a buck and a half a month, you're going to shop on coverage features, right? The whole $5.4 billion per year would go right where the Republicans intend it to go: to the corporate bottom lines of medical and insurance corporations.

Furthermore, given how many preventable deaths and injuries are caused by medical errors, more litigation, not less, looks like a goad to more efficient allocation of medical resources. If we had a more effective means of preventing these errors, I'd be all for it, and sure enough computerization of records is in the current bills both for bureaucratic and medical efficiency, but meanwhile it would be bad policy to remove all punitive accountability for medical errors.

Republicans disagree. This is because they really believe in government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.

The real question

... is not whether Joe Biden cares what Darth Cheney thinks. Why does the media care about what Cheney thinks after his utter and abject failure as Regent, Vice President, and human being?

Against forgetting

The day that Russia's President, Dmitri Medvedev, cautions against amnesia of Joseph Stalin's huge crimes is a day I can agree with him.

My own caution would go further. It was the economic failures of capitalism in the first 30 years of the 20th century that gave rise to Hitler and Stalin, helped on by the social and political failures of royalism. Those failures put us in America, along with our friends in Europe and around the world, in the terrible position of having to choose to ally ourselves with Stalin.

That's why the stakes have been so high in prevention of another depression. That's why the costs in debt were bearable.

We have spent the past 30 years tearing down the bulwarks we had built to keep capitalism's dynamic energy safe. Now is time to build those guide-rails back again.

Giggle test

Only a raving narcissist could ever speak this way through her hero:

“We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

Does the world Ayn Rand implies here resemble any world that has ever existed?

This review has some good bits.

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.

And...

[I]f there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem.

Choosing your opponent

So the DNC is attacking Sarah Palin for the bullshit she has posted on Facebook:

A few months back, Palin took to Facebook to declare that health reform would create "death panels," and drive private insurers out of business -- and nonpartisan fact-check sites and the independent Congressional Budget Office debunked those lies.

But that hasn't stopped Sarah Palin. She's back with a new Facebook note claiming that reform will raise costs on families and drive up deficits. Unfortunately for her, even the conservative "Tax Foundation" says those claims are false.

So we're calling out Sarah Palin, and taking to Facebook to debunk her lies on the very same pages she's using to spread them.

Doesn't attacking Palin make her stronger with her base? Couldn't that help her win the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination?

Yes, Grasshopper.

Perfect Romney

Faced with a choice, Mitt Romney refuses to make any choice before he's sure it will help him. Don't ever look for him to have your back without self-serving calculation.

Schwarzenegger f-bomb

On CNN, the pro-Ahnuld commenters seem to be evenly divided between those who cling to the transparent lie that Schwarzenegger's "fuck you" to the legislature was a mere coincidence and those who applaud the sentiment. Republicans, a coalition of prudes and assholes! It's no wonder the party's falling apart.

OK, you're fat

Jon Corzine should go ahead and say, "You call yourself fat, Chris. Stop playing the victim. I would have said obese if that's what I was talking about. The important thing about you is not the size of your appetites. It's the size of your ego. You think that you deserve special treatment, and your choices show it."

Then Corzine should laugh and ask whether that's enough manning up for Christie.