All good things must come to an end, alas (Part One is here, Part Two is here, Part Three is here, Part Four is here, Part Five is here, Part Six is here, Part Seven is here, and Part Eight is here)...RIP
Griffin Bell (What a shame he didn’t live to see FISA restored to the law he originally authored in 1978), Ricardo Montalban, Patrick McGoohan, Beverly Eckert, Andrew Wyeth, Donald True Van Deusen, John Updike, Ray Dennis Steckler, Lukas Foss, Hank Crawford, Dewey Martin, James Whitmore, Harrison Ridley, Jr., Paul Harvey, Horton Foote, Natasha Richardson, John Hope Franklin, Maurice Jarre, Uriel Jones, Bud Shank, Randy Cain, Harry Kalas, Les Keiter, Lee Madden, Bea Arthur, Danny Gans, Robert B. Choate, Hugh Van Es, Newt Heisley, Peter Zezel, Koko Taylor, David Carradine, Kenny Rankin, Barry Beckett, Bob Bogle, Ed McMahon, Irv Homer, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt, Gordon Waller, Corazon Aquino, Budd Schulberg, John Hughes, Willy DeVille, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Les Paul, Kim Dae-Jung, Don Hewitt, Edward M. Kennedy, Dominick Dunne, Larry Knechtel, Sheila Lukins, Larry Gelbart, Jim Carroll, Mary Travers, Jody Powell, Crystal Lee Sutton, Art Ferrante, Irving Penn, Philip Brown, Nan Robertson, Dickie Peterson, Captain Lou Albano, Soupy Sales, Claude Levi-Strauss, David Lloyd, Al Alberts, Lester Shubin, Gene Barry, Bob Keane, Val Avery, "Editor and Publisher" (maybe), Jennifer Jones, Arnold Stang, Vic Chesnutt, George Michael (reporter/sportscaster), James Sullivan, Dax Ryan Locke, Michelle Lang, David Levine
Videos Of The Year
Here are the comedy stylings of a certain 43rd President of the United States before he happily departed from office (I don’t know about you, but we still have our “1/20/09, Bush’s Last Day” refrigerator magnet)…
…and soon afterwards, this dance craze swept the nation (well, not really…and yes, I supported it because I thought it would be accompanied by some relief for “main street” also; just a silly lib to buy that con, I guess)…
…also, anyone taught to report via a print or electronic medium is first taught to communicate their life experience as much as is permitted; given that, I think Dagen McDowell of Fix Noise has a bit more interesting of a background based on this clip than she might want to admit (comparing her personal life perhaps to the Obama Administration trying to tax AIG’s bonuses, as noted here)…
…and April brought us this gem from Stephen Colbert, who had another great year…
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad | ||||
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…and yes, the guys in the red pinstripes came up short against the Yankees this year, but for a magical time, the Phillies ruled baseball; in May, they were honored in a White House ceremony (delayed by the death of announcer Harry Kalas the month before)…
…oh, and a certain Democratic senator from Minnesota was FINALLY seated in June (would that the following clip were actual footage, but we’ll take what we can get)…
…July brought us this truly disgusting moment, in which the utterly compromised Senate Dem Kent Conrad of North Dakota laughed at a DNC ad in support of a public option (which is dead, people – more on that in a bit)…
…and in August, Barney Frank of Massachusetts gave those “teabaggin” town-hall wingnuts exactly what this lady and her pals deserved…
…also, file this September clip away with Dr. Dean describing an “enormous backlash” as a result of dropping the public option from health care reform, and let’s see what transpires at the polls next year (I’m afraid Dean will be right; I don’t have the numbers, but I’m sure I posted more about health care reform than anything else this year)…
…earlier I mentioned Stephen Colbert, but his Comedy Central cohort Jon Stewart struck gold, as they say, with this CNN sendup in October…
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| CNN Leaves It There | ||||
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…and just so no one can accuse me of utterly ignoring wingnuttia this year, this is the November trailer for the “documentary” film “Tea Party” (and here is more comedy involving “Nate”; I wish Rob Reiner or Christopher Guest would make a parody film, but the teabaggers are a parody all by themselves)…
…and earlier this month, Rachel Maddow conducted some first-rate reporting on Richard Cohen (again, not the “liberal” WaPo columnist, but the “gay-to-straight” therapist) and the anti-homosexual movement in Uganda (which has sprung with the “blessing” of The Family in D.C., the organization of moral charlatans including Joe Pitts and Tom Coburn).
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Dregs Of The YearI don’t know about you, but I never found a reason as to why exactly Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chose not to use budget reconciliation in trying to pass health care legislation recently. The closest I came to an explanation was the quote found in this linked Politico story in which he says flatly that, “I’m not using reconciliation,” which really isn’t an explanation at all.
However, that didn’t stop the politicians and the punditocracy from trying to malign those who wanted the public option in health care reform as the wish of "a bunch of people that watched 'Schoolhouse Rock' growing up (and) think that they understand how the Senate works, and they don’t," according to a Senate aide in this Salon.com story, as well as claiming that advocating universal coverage was a position for people who should “lay off the hallucinogenic drugs,” as John Harwood of the New York Times recently claimed here.
Well, the Salon.com story, in part, tells us the following…
The problem is that budget reconciliation isn't really supposed to be used to make policy. Instead, as the Congressional Research Service's Robert Keith said in a 2008 report, reconciliation "is a procedure ... by which Congress implements budget resolution policies affecting mainly permanent spending and revenue programs." In the procedure's early years, however, it was used to circumvent the filibuster on provisions unrelated to that purpose. So in the 1980s, then-Minority Leader Robert Byrd led the Senate in a crackdown. What resulted was the Byrd Rule, which prohibits the Senate "from considering extraneous matter as part of a reconciliation bill."Also, this Think Progress post tells us that both former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (who, since he is no longer in public life, should not have an "axe to grind" here) and former President Clinton have said that reconciliation could have been used to achieve the goal of passing the legislation. And I readily acknowledge that there would have been tradeoffs in terms of what would have emerged in the final bill, but adding a public option would have fundamentally changed the business model of how health care is provided by our for-profit private sector in this country, forcing insurers to spend more on patient care than they would otherwise spend on lobbying, advertising, and other charges unrelated to the function they have been charged to perform on our behalf.
The definition of "extraneous matter" is fairly broad, and subject to interpretation -- during the Bush administration, Republicans passed tax cuts using reconciliation -- but it generally includes any provision that fails one of these six criteria, as listed in Keith's CRS report:
• it does not produce a change in outlays or revenues;
• it produces an outlay increase or revenue decrease when the instructed committee is not in compliance with its instructions;
• it is outside of the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure;
• it produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision;
• it would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond the "budget window" covered by the reconciliation measure; and
• it recommends changes in Social Security
Even if a provision violates one of these rules, it won't automatically be stricken from a bill. In order for that to happen, a senator has to take action, generally by raising a point of order. Then, the chair (the majority leader or a designee) rules on whether to sustain that point of order and remove the offending part of the bill. That may seem like an easy victory in the making -- Reid rules that the public option passes the Byrd Rule's tests, and that's that -- but that's not necessarily the case.
Liberals argue that the public option could survive the Byrd Rule, pointing to tax cuts that Republicans passed using reconciliation during the Bush administration as precedent, and arguing that the public option would pass the tests anyway because it would theoretically decrease the federal deficit.
They may have a point, but it doesn't much matter -- the only thing that does is the opinion of Alan Frumin, the Senate parliamentarian. Technically, Reid isn't required to abide by Frumin's judgment, but according to Robert Dove, who served twice as Senate parliamentarian, he will anyway. "It's not that they have to [listen to the parliamentarian]," Dove told Salon, "but absolutely they do ... The past history is that the view of the parliamentarian becomes the ruling of the chair."
And it’s not as if the Senate considered reconciliation (which can only be used for passing a bill once a year) completely off limits; this tells us that Sen. Tom Harkin was looking at using this tactic for education-related legislation.
I also have read that supporting this “three-quarters-of-a-loaf-at-best” health care reform bill yet to emerge from the Senate and House conference (which may include mandates for coverage, and to read about how popular that is without the public option or Medicare expansion, click here) is something we should settle for at the moment and attempt to revisit a greater government role in health care later on. That is utterly laughable. Imagine all the “teabaggin” nonsense all over again, and in an even-numbered election year to boot (either Congressional or Presidential, or both.) If anyone thought voters were generally disgusted with the carnival shows we were treated to on this issue already, then the overload if we replayed this fiasco all over would be enough to make prospective supporters flee in droves.
So what were we treated to as a result of Reid apparently choosing to abide by the Senate parliamentarian and bypass reconciliation to secure either the public option or Medicare expansion? Scenes such as this where Reid had to suck up to miscreants such as “Holy Joe” Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Lord knows who else to obtain the magical 60 votes needed for passage to prevent the inevitable Repug filibuster (and by the way, many have blamed Obama for not supporting the public option as strongly as he should have or trying to back away from it; I think that’s a valid point, but Obama is in charge of the White House, not the Senate).
For all of these reasons (and despite the good that will actually be achieved in the health care bill, which could have been so much better), Harry Reid is my choice for Dregs Of The Year (and my runner-up is anyone who supported funding the Afghan war but not health care reform, as noted here).
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take some more hallucinogenic drugs.
Update 1/19/10: What Jed sez here...
Do-Gooder Of The YearI happened to come across this image over the summer, and I must tell you that it has stuck with me for the whole year. I think the life form responsible for it is named Mark Gietzen; I think he’s the owner of the truck.
I’m not sure what repulses me more about it – the matter-of-fact manner in which it treats the murder of Dr. George Tiller, or the notion that Dr. Tiller’s death is somehow nothing more than a battle in some holy war the anti-choice zealots are fighting in the same of some utterly self-deceived notion of what constitutes right and wrong.
And as we know, the death of Dr. Tiller led to another media feeding frenzy, with Tucker Carlson of that “liberal” network MSNBC saying here that comparisons between Dr. Tiller and Nazis/al-Qaida were "objectively true," and some radio hater named Hal Turner basically condoning the murder here and saying that anyone on “the lunatic left” should be put in an asylum (no standard of decency for some of these people whatsoever).
OK, now that we’ve heard from the full mooners, let’s hear from the reality-based community on Dr. Tiller, shall we? This tells us the following…
Dr. Tiller was one of three abortion providers in the U.S. who performed abortions after 24 weeks of gestation. Late term abortions are almost always done when a woman's health is at risk or if the fetus has no chance of surviving outside of the womb or if the fetus has a condition that will lead to a slow, painful death post-partum. In a sense, Dr. Tiller was performing abortions that were deemed medically necessary (for testimonials of some of Dr. Tiller's patients, please go here).And the Orange County Girl post contains links to testimonials from women in dire need of Dr. Tiller’s services, including “KB” from Maryland, whose in-utero child suffered from a condition known as pulmonary artresia, which would have ensured nothing but a short, painful life filled with endless surgeries (all of this was determined at the 21-week ultrasound, which is normally routine). And this post from the blogger hilzoy tells us, among other things, of a mother suffering from a condition of preeclampsia so severe that the baby had to be aborted to save her life (preeclampsia, by the way, is a condition under which the pregnancy starts to cause all kinds of severe harm to the mother, including blood pressure so high that it could induce a stroke).
But that's not what the anti-choicers want you to believe. He was a killer, running an abortion mill in Wichita, the abortion capital of the US. He had to be stopped. Domestic terror cell, Operation Rescue (let's just call a spade a spade, shall we?), had longed targeted Dr. Tiller, going so far as to move their terrorist organization to Wichita and posting all information about the people who worked in Dr. Tiller's clinic, including photos. Isn't that convenient? Why would they do that if not to incite violence against those employees and Dr. Tiller?
It is of no surprise whatsoever that Dr. Tiller's murderer was affiliated with Operation Rescue.
What should be of no surprise to the anti-choice movement is that the man who murdered Dr. Tiller (at his church, with his wife watching from the choir loft), has now created a martyr. Everyone in the women's rights movement was already familiar with Dr. Tiller and his passion for reproductive rights. This was a man who wore a bullet proof vest to work. Who had legal charges brought against him constantly by anti-choice politicians (he was never convicted, of course). Whose clinic had been bombed and, most recently, had been vandalized. Who was shot in both arms by another domestic terrorist (now serving time in prison). Who went to work every day despite these obstacles because he believed that women were capable and had the right to make their own health decisions.
These women turned to Dr. George Tiller for help. And despite the risk involved, he never refused them (and as hilzoy states at the end of the post)…
George Tiller endured decades of terrorism to help women like these, women in unspeakably awful situations whom very few people were willing to help, given the price domestic terrorists had decided that anyone who helped them would have to pay. Now he has given his life.For all of these reasons, I can think of no one more deserving of Do Gooder (and martyr) of the Year than the late Dr. George Tiller (and the runner-up would be Iranian Neda Soltan, another victim of terrorist violence, as noted here).
Update 1 1/9/10: Yep, unbelievable fits here - so does putrid, disgusting, etc...
Update 2 1/24/10: Nail. Hammer. Head.
Update 3 7/8/11: More thoughtful words on Dr. Tiller here (and there really isn't anything "pro life" about the characters who invoked violence against Tiller, of course)...
And in keeping with my custom for these posts, I should go “meta” again and thank anyone and everyone who has bothered to read this blog over the past year; I hope it has been instructive somehow. Also, every year I say that I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep it going in the following year, and that is true for 2010 also. Though it’s something I want to do, it does absolutely nothing when it comes to paying the bills, and I may have to concentrate more on that in the coming year at the expense of posting every day. I should also point out that I know I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time refuting the right-wing nonsense that will never stop, but I’ve tried to do that in a way that helps to educate and inform. Personally, I’d like to concentrate more on “theme” posts about a particular topic that provide greater depth, but again, I do what I can within the usual constraints. I really do “wing it” pretty much with this thing, so I’m really not able to make any promises other than to say that I’ll do my best.
Best wishes to one and all for a happy, successful and safe (as much as possible) 2010!
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