December 9, 2009 archive

Midnight Cowboy: A Return to Naranjastan

Man, I can’t wait to get back to Naranjastan. I am sure it’s the same as before, because Peeder built the machine, ct just maintains it. Since I last played peeder’s game, which I much prefer to Ender’s, the meta tools for playing such adventures have advanced.

Basically I have cheat codes for assessing the meta structure of any online community. Lucky for everyone, raiding is so 2006. So here is what Daily Kos’s home page looks to me, through meta colored glasses:

This looks like a good relevancy sample because comments is near discuss.

Looks like they are really into the Public Option and the Senate, fixated if you will. Two major meta blocks missing are War and Economy. Jobs does get a cornerstone position but does not carry much weight.

Funny data strings:

If you look at the House Health Bill block, President Woman appears. Daily Kos is still secretly a Hilldog site! I kid, sorta.

Next to Public Option, the white First. First GOP Year. See! In meta terms, Dkos does know what’s up, they are just lying to themselves.

They do know they are progressives. It’s at the core of the structure. Progressives Things Diary to be exact, and they are diary for Insurance. The truth hurts, especially when its not covered by the Insurance trust they pretend to be fighting.

The purity is still strong in Naranjastan. Make note of that.

Also missing from the list:

Torture

LGBT Rights

Katrina

Liberal7’s Harry Reid says AP wrong, Public Option not dropped caught my eye. Someone does not like the pony they are being given.

Gonna filter that, be right back.

Update

Back! For a reality denial diary it was pretty mundane.

Wow, another football. Naranjstan kicks a lot this.

Well, this shows two simple things. The sounds of their own voices commenting is equally to the content of the meta ball. Besides the major theme of the diary Public Option, the next biggest asset is +0.

All in all, there doesn’t seem to be a flowing meta fetish as there use to be. Who knows, maybe they changed the Trusted User rule now its like level 120 immortals only.

The funny part about this diary is that it isn’t based in reality or what is being reported. At the right tip, not big at all is truth and lying, under plans of all things. They also Care Always, right next to the +0.

The funniest part of this structure is to the right of Public, the major meme of the diary: Buy-In Hope.

That’s what this diary is full of, people who had buy-in hope for Obama. They even took their time to write their names down on the meta wall.

Last stop, Recent Diary List!

Here it is, clean as a whistle:

This pretty much speaks for itself, they are trying to break some kind of public option.

A meltdown there is good to likely. They know the truth about Copenhagen, those parties are gonna be crazy. Sexual Edition Global, indeed.

At least we know they are Worried Americans.

I’m not sure they are even worth the effort.

This is like finding out people still play muds online.

Health Care Reform and the Moment We Are In

[An old friend of mine, Nick Unger, has been working on the AFL-CIO’s campaign to win National Health Care. He gave me permission to post this talk that…but let him tell it:

I was asked to confront the lack of energy and even negativity at the annual meeting of the Illinois Campaign For Better Health Care. Packed room — ~150+. Very diverse. Here is the result. They taped and transcribed it. I cleaned it up a bit.

This is a pep talk. Nick always gives great pep talk, and this one is brilliant. My own work in recent years has mainly been in the anti-war movement, so I can certainly relate to lack of energy and battle fatigue. But I am not posting it because of that. I am posting it because it makes the most passionate argument I’ve seen that “the Obama moment” was not a mirage or a con-job, nor was it a window that is now already closed. I’m not sure I buy it, but I think it’s an argument worth considering.]

Edited transcript of remarks at the November 19, 2009 Annual Meeting of the Illinois Campaign for Better Health Care by Nick Unger, AFL-CIO Health Care Campaign Training Director



Every once in a while, a country gets to have a conversation about what kind of people we are, who we are as a country. Sometimes it’s in an election, most of the time it isn’t. An election might start the conversation but Election Day usually ends it and you haven’t quite finished.

And most elections don’t even start the conversation, they just keep business as usual going. The 2008 election began a conversation as to what kind of country we are, but I don’t believe it finished it. I think it just opened it up, and that conversation continues.

There are those out there who act like they want a recount on the 2008 election, that Obama is not their president and you–we–can’t have “their country.” And they say it with vigor and with passion, and with earned and unearned media, in that they own TV stations and TV networks. Their view of earned media is that they get to say what they want, whatever they want, and echo it over and over, and control the national conversation from above.

But they don’t control the national conversation from below. The 2008 election showed that. People were wrestling with who we are. Actually it was mainly about who we’re not. That election seemed more of a rejection of what was wrong than a climbing onto what was right. That means we didn’t finish the conversation.

We did say that the country is going wrong. And there was a deep sense of it, of pain and suffering. The presence of my brother Rev. Sal Alvarez being here the faith community reminds me that the word compassion means shared suffering. It doesn’t mean feeling for somebody else, it means suffering with somebody else.

So last year people got a sense that the country ain’t doing it right, and we can’t go down that road anymore. But we haven’t picked the road that we’re going to be on yet. We haven’t turned the corner yet.

But I would offer to you that we are at the corner. And when you’re at a corner, you best turn, because we don’t know when the next one comes up. From a political analytical point of view, the last time America turned the corner was 1980, and we sure turned wrong.  And we are living with the price of it now.  We are at a corner now. If we miss this one, I don’t know if I will ever get a shot at another one.

The battle to turn that corner is on health care.  Health care doesn’t “deserve” to be the battle. It’s not that health care is more important than any other issue. It could have been fought over jobs. It could have been fought over education because education’s real important. I’m not going to say health care’s more important than education. It turned out that the two armies have met on the battlefield of health care. It could have happened some other way, but this is what it is.

My wife and I went to Gettysburg this past summer–anybody here been to Gettysburg? To a New Yorker, Gettysburg is a one stoplight town. In 1863, when they had the battle there it was a one-horse town.

They weren’t fighting for Gettysburg. The battle was not about Gettysburg. They were fighting for what kind of country America was going to be. Two armies met in one little town in Pennsylvania, and right there, in Gettysburg, America decided what kind of country it was going to be. At the end of the battle, one army was beaten and one army was marching ahead, and America found its soul, on Little Round Top in Gettysburg, PA.

If you go to Gettysburg the ghosts of that battle speak to you. The field is empty, but you can hear the battle. One monument stands out, the Pennsylvania Monument. t lists the names of all the Pennsylvanians who fought and died there.  A hundred years before the Vietnam Wall, they just listed the names, and every one of those names talks to you.

We are in a battle for the soul of America today, right now. It is being fought over health care. Six weeks, tops eight weeks from now, one army marches ahead and the other one is on the side of the road with their banner in the dust.

On one side you have Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the insurance companies, the Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs all saying, “If health care reform fails, that’s good for us and our team.” All of them lined up on that side saying to us, “You are not going to decide the future of America your way and we will take you down over health care.”

So where are we today? There are a thousand things wrong with that bill and the process of getting to it was a pain in the ass. Each day you say: “We lost this, we gave up this, we conceded this, what about this, this isn’t in it, they don’t have enough here.”..I mean, no part of it is quite right.

And yet today, November 19, we are closer to defining the soul of America properly than we have been in decades, in your lifetime for most of you. The metaphor I would use is we are falling uphill. We keep falling down. But turn around. You will see we are so much further ahead. Each time we fall and get up we are getting closer to where we’ve got to be.

We have pushed this process so far that America can say eight weeks from now, maybe six weeks from now, we are going to establish a new public good with government and the public in it, a public health care structure, and we’re going to say that everybody in America should have health care. This is the first time America will say it, and it comes after two generations of attacks on these kinds of ideas.

And we’re going to tax the rich to pay for a public good after two generations of saying taxes are bad and the rich can have all the money–all of my money and all of your money. Man, that is heavy!

And we are going to say to the insurance industry, you can’t write all the rules. You can write some of them, but not all the rules, and this is after thirty years of telling corporations, do whatever you want cause that’s the way the world should work.

We are six weeks from doing that as a people. We are six weeks from setting America in a direction where We the People act like we, instead of every man for himself. We are six weeks from turning the corner, making history, and somehow here today we don’t feel the energy of it.

And so when Reverend Sal Alvarez says it’s a moral issue and when Dr. Jonathan Arend says it’s a medical issue, and when the woman who said she can make $60,000 but can’t afford health care says it’s an economic issue, they are all right.

And each of you is the center of a universe of people to talk to  You are not just the Illinois Campaign For Better Health Care. You are much more than that. If the only people you talk to are in this room, I have some advice for you: You should get out more.

You come from churches and neighborhoods and groups and mosques and all sorts of things, and you have to talk to your friends about the history that is being made right now, and what kind of country we are going to be, so that 75 years from now, they read your names the way I read the names on the Pennsylvania memorial:  These are the people who made the country that I live in be the way I wanted it to be.

And 75 years from now, people will look at the fall of 2009 the way I look at the summer of 1863. They’ll say, “America had a chance to become who we should be, and we took it. And these individuals fought to make that happen.” That’s where we are today.

For many of us, this is the first time in our lifetime that we have had this chance. Some of us were around in the Civil Rights Movement. This moment feels like that was for those of us who were around then. This is the moment that you get to turn around the entire future, and it’s over health care. And if you didn’t stand up strong over it…you will always regret it.

There are better organizers than me who throughout their whole life were getting kicked in the face, fighting a defensive battle, getting smacked around, and they were better–they worked harder, they were more straightforward, they cursed less…and they never once had a chance to be on the offensive to make the world the way it should be because it was their dumb luck to start their work when the world was going wrong and retire before it got right.

And you should think about the people whose shoulders you stand on today, because we’ve got six or eight weeks to decide what kind of country we are, to decide which army wins.  This is our opportunity, and if you get lost in the weeds of that bill, then some friend of yours better stand you up and say, “We are making history and I am writing my name down on the memorial that people are going to visit 75 years from now and if you miss it, shame on you!”

There should be anger and energy and elation and glee…because we get a chance to make this country right.

In 1964, in Alabama, an old civil rights worker said to a young reverend–the old civil rights worker was my age, and the young reverend was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr–and he said to him, “How long, how long do we have to wait for justice?”  And Dr. King replied, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

But he knew it doesn’t bend by itself–you bend it. You reach up, you grab it and you bend it. And when enough of us grab the moral arc of the universe, it bends towards justice, and in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed.

So the person who just asked “How long do we have to wait for health care justice?” is repeating the history of our movement. That’s the same question they asked Dr King in 1963. And the answer: when enough of us put our hands on the arc, it bends towards justice.

Right in front of our eyes, the moral arc of the universe is about to decide which way it bends, in six weeks. You can’t ask for anything better than that. You are blessed with this opportunity. How long? You decide.

Thank you.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

What Will You Tell Them?

If there’s still enough time, if it’s not too late, if you haven’t given up, if you can find the words, if you haven’t run out of words, if you haven’t been silenced, banned, exiled because too many Obamabots profusely supportive admirers of Barack at GOS and other bizarre locations don’t want to hear the truth, don’t want to deal with it, can’t bear to look at it, won’t acknowledge it because he is their last refuge, their final sanctuary, the only source of hope they have left in this betrayed wreck of a country.            

How many times do they have to see Obama stumble down the side of that Misty Moderate Mountain before these people realize he’s not the Moses of the Democratic Party, before they finally understand he’s not leading us to the Promised Land, he’s just plunging us deeper into the Valley of Centrism Death, where lies and self-delusion reign and the truth is never heard.  It shouldn’t be so hard for them to figure out how this is all going to end if progressives back down again, if we take one for the team again, if we let K Street’s bought and paid for hacks pass this healthcare “reform” atrocity.  

You don’t have to walk and crawl on six crooked highways for the rest of your life to know where we’ve been and where we’re going next, an IQ of 50 and two functioning eyes are all that’s necessary to confirm that those crooked highways are just an endless corporate tollway to nowhere and that it’s our job to keep paying for the trip.  

Snow Night

Its snowing. A lot. I always think of it as the Mean Season… even though eventually I come to see the beauty, and like the slowing of the pace. How people all in the same boat wander out to be awed, stuck home by the storm. I end up liking too, that as an early riser, I get to see it before it has been marred by footprints and tire tracks, so pristine, so clean.

It washes away the things I both long for, others I despise from my memories of growing up.

Its kind of a season of loss, both of all the bustle of a huge family Jake will never know, mixed with a happiness he will never have to go through much of it. At least I belonged to something, however flawed; he is alone but for his Father and I. Mixed blessings. But there are reasons why I think of it as the Mean Season. Still, I can’t hate the snow.

Snowstorms shrink your world. Forced solitude. You and the elements. You alone in the World.

The seasons have changed more ways than one. I guess I’m officially old. Just missed a 2nd period after months of weirdness. Menopause, too. The Winter of my life as well. And a few zits to boot from the hormone change, too. Old and hideous. Bonus!

Not that I mind practically. Jake was my miracle, and I couldn’t have another anyway, so fuck that hassle. No, don’t feel like less of a woman either.

Its just, geeez, two minutes ago I was 19, and now, its officially the end-part of my life. And I’m still the little kid hiding from the next hit.

What have I done with my life?

It’s really snowing out.

“With winter closing in…”

Sigh.

What the loss of the Public Option really Means …

from the ConsumerWatchdog.org



(Click for Larger Image)

What the loss of the Public Option really Means …

Good bye competitive choice …

HELLOOOO … More of the Same!

Overnight Caption Contest

View From Under The Bus

In case others here haven’t been watching the train wrecks at GOS today, at the top of the wreck list (above MoT’s 120% missive) is the news that Senate Dems caved, dropped the PO and went for a 55 and older (but only if you’re uninsurable and uninsured) Medicare buy-in. No surprise to those of us who are getting quite used to the view from between the wheels of this bus, but there is encouraging stuff in the comments. Primarily the number of people planning to re-register as Independents a.s.a.p.

True, that’s mostly angst and anger right now, but it gives me hope that perhaps there’s impetus for a real ‘movement’ here. As more and more Dems are becoming fed up with the Kabuki and now giving up entirely, there’s a wealth of rootless energy out there for the tapping. How do we tap it?

Public Option Out

Breaking News… I missed the teevee versions, but its all the buzz… mcjoan has it on teh GOS front page

Over 700 comments, very interesting commentary, at the orange rec list: Breaking News: Senate Dems Drop Public Option .

And a brief report at FDL.

Is it true? we dont know yet. go read mcjoan, she has most info.

NYT: Senate Leaders in Tentative Deal to Alter Public Option

But Democratic aides said that the group had tentatively agreed on a proposal that would replace a government-run health care plan with a menu of new national, privately-run insurance plans modeled after the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which covers more than eight million federal workers, including members of Congress, and their dependents. (See this earlier Prescriptions article about how the group of 10 has been thinking about this approach.)

A government-run plan would be retained as a fall-back option, the aides said, and would be triggered only if the new proposal failed to meet targets for providing affordable insurance coverage to a specified number of people.

The agreement would also allow Americans between age 55 and 64 to buy coverage through Medicare, beginning in 2011.

EDIT: Check out the essay by Jamess on what this loss means.

UPDATE 10:45PM: TPM has ‘White House health care team sends over a brief statement:’.

“Senators are making great progress and we’re pleased that they’re working together to find common ground toward options that increase choice and competition.”

Reading between the lines here in a statement from a team who knows President Obama has been accused of not standing firm enough for a public option, they think what happened in the meeting may strike the right political balance.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Does the Netroots need a platform?

So I’m ask of all of you, would it benefit the liberal blogosphere to have some kind of a platform to unite around?  I’ll keep it brief, since this should be more of a discussion than a lecture.

Let the navel staring begin!

Third Grandson

It is supposed to be a happy time.  The anticipation of his arrival in February.  It is not an event calling for “Should I ask an attorney”.  I was left in disbelief at the news and I had to drive over to my daughter’s house.

Yes, it was true.

120% of public think climate scientists lie about global warming says Fox FAIL and Balanced News

 Crossposted at Daily Kos

    I thought mistakes at Fox would have consequences?

    Guess not.

    Last week, Fox and Friends showed a Rasmussen poll graphic revealing that a whopping 120 percent of the American public believes scientists may be falsifying research to support their own theories on global warming:

ThinkProgress.org

    Fox News’ graphics department added together the “very likely” and “somewhat likely” numbers to reach 59 percent, and called that new group “somewhat likely.” Then, for some reason, they threw in the 35 percent “very likely” as their own group, even though they already added that number to the “somewhat likely” percentage. Then they mashed together the “not very likely” and “not likely at all” groups, and threw the 15 percent who were unsure into the waste bin. Voila – 120 percent.

Hat tip to MediaMatters.org

Some Bold text added by the diarist.

    More fun with inventing numbers below the fold . . .  

Bonddad versus Bonddad

  Last week Bonddad posted a diatribe against the entire economic blogosphere.

 Reading blogs that in any way write about economics has generally become an exercise in utter futility. According to most good news is either propagated by corporate whores who are blind to the realities around them or presented without considering “all” the facts. All government statistics and all economists are wrong — unless they support or present a bearish viewpoint.

 Normally I wouldn’t notice, but someone pointed it out to me and it got me thinking. How did we arrive at this point, where the bullish and bearish are drawn up against one another in much the same way that Democrats and Republicans in Congress are?

  It occurred to me that perspective has everything to do with it.

Load more