Anger and frustration are always at the core of my (all too frequent) bouts with depression.  Nothing gets to me more than knowing in my head and in my heart that the public option is the only viable way to reform health care in this country and that we have the votes to win if Obama would just bully up and push for it.

Medicare for All would turn around my life and my family's.  We are cursed with bad genes that have led to health problems for all of us - high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, bipolar disorder and more. 

Lack of health insurance was the only reason I was forced to go on disability more than 20 years ago and fear of losing Medicare and Medicaid is what keeps me on disability now.  Pre-existing conditions keep my brothers in dead end jobs they hate - they can't look for something better because they can't risk losing their insurance.  Inability to keep up with insurance premiums and co-pays has made these last few years of my mother's life miserable and destroyed her once-perfect credit rating, and the financial stress has worsened her heart condition. 

Even my rich uncle (in my family "rich" means solidly middle class) is suffering.  He has a heart condition; his wife has asthma. Thanks to advances in medicine, their health conditions are easily manageable.  What causes their grief is struggling to pay more than $1200 a month in health insurance premiums and watching their life savings fly out the window with co-pays.

Knowing there is an answer out there and that it's within our reach and knowing that the president we supported and the Democrats elected to work with him don't have the guts to go after it ... all I can do is pound my fists and scream.

And every day when I come to TPM, there it is staring me in the face.  Right on the front page - where it should be - and there are my fellow TPMers who know the truth but none of us seem to be able to do anything that will change the outcome.

It's frustrating.  It pisses me off. Depression is setting in.

But keep up the good work, TPM.  Where there's light, there's a tiny sliver of hope.

Josh is such a tease:

"I have little doubt and some direct knowledge that we'll be hearing new shocking details of who [Sarah Palin] is for months, perhaps years, to come."

That's a quote from Josh Marshall.

Direct knowledge?  Spill!

If he isn't willing to share, we can only guess what Sarah's deepest, darkest secrets are.  I have my own theory.

  

I haven't been around much lately but I'm delighted to see the new look on the front page of TPM.  Very classy, easy to navigate, great content.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Picking up on Josh's post about the problems with Kindle and other electronic books.  He expressed his concern that Amazon could develop a stranglehold on books, or that many works that might have been preserved in book forms will fall by the wayside as technology changes if they're only published electronically.

My concern is more democratic.  If Amazon/Kindle has the corner on the technology, they also have the corner on what gets published.

But more than that, I know a lot of people who don't have computers and/or don't have internet access, either because they can't afford it or they live in areas where internet access is difficult to get or only dial up is available.

Right now, those people can walk into a public library and check out all the books they want for free.  Most libraries can even use interlibrary loan to get books they don't have in their collection.

If some or most books are only published in electronic form, economically disadvantaged people will no longer have access to them.  Even if libraries are able to provide some electronic devices for public use, the technology is too expensive to make it as widely available as books are now.

These same people already have limited access to a lot of information.  I can't tell you how many times my mother has called me all pissed off because of something she saw on TV that said, "For more info, go to www dot ..."  At least she knows me and I can look things up for her, but it's not the same as being able to see the info herself, and not everyone has a friend or family member who can help out.

And what do we do when the power goes out, the internet goes down, the batteries die?  Wouldn't it be nice to have a good book to curl up with?

Not to mention all the scholarship based on marginalia - biographers often go through a subject's personal library to read what the subject wrote in the margins of their books and which passages they highlighted. I've enjoyed looking through books that belonged to family members and others to see what they wrote.  There's the very human sentiment of knowing Grandma held this book in her hand, turned these pages, wrapped this daisy in waxed paper and tucked it in the middle of Chapter 9.

Remember the Star Trek movie where it was Captain Kirk's birthday and one of his friends (was it Bones?) gave him a copy of A Tale of Two Cities?  The only books available in the future were antiques. 
  

I don't get here every day - and the recommended posts seem to cycle out about every 24 hours so I know I miss a lot of good ones. I know someone tried to start a daily thread where everyone could list their favorite posts but I didn't have time to keep up with all of those, and I guess not enough people participated to keep it going. 

I wonder if it would be possible for TPM to add a sidebar that would list the most highly recommended posts of the week. Or maybe have a TPM editor's post every Saturday where they give links to the readers' posts with the most Rec's for the week. 

Or is there a tool already available that would help me find older posts with lots of Rec's? 

I believe the most important news story now and for the foreseeable future is the economy.  And I believe it's TPM's responsibility to report on that story.

But I can't bring myself to read about it anymore.  The ins and outs of financial dealings have always confused me and they're even more confusing now.  No matter how much I try to wrap my head around it, I can't.  I used to read everything I could find about the crisis but it didn't help me understand.  I have no idea what should be done to deal with the problem so there's nothing I can contribute to the conversation here and nothing I can say to my senators or congressman (Steve King, as if he'd listen to sense if I had any to offer).

I feel like the situation is hopeless - no amount of money they throw at the banking system is going to solve anything and no one in Washington has the will to do anything else. 

So I just don't read the articles anymore.  If I see a headline about an economic story, I skip the article.  Sometimes sticking your head in the sand is the only way to save your sanity.  My sanity is fragile enough already.

From AP:

Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program.


Take that, you freaking fundies! I've always believed that Planned Parenthood prevents more abortions than any other organization. Now can we put the family planning funding in the Health and Human Services budget?

Xe?  Give me a break!

I worked late last night and just woke up about an hour ago.  Came online, glanced at Yahooo news, then came straight to TPM.  After reading halfway down the front page and scrolling through the rest of the headlines, I want to go back to bed and hide under the covers.

Tom Daschle's reputation muddied and a good man who would've pushed through health reform lost.  Republicans determined to destroy us all.  The quote from BD sums it up well. 

Where is Obama?  Why isn't he all over the TV calling them out for what they are?  You tried working with them, O.  Now it's time to run right over them and back up a couple of times to grind in the tire marks.  Make them pay.  Make them think twice before they screw with you again.

And give us the stimulus package we NEED, not the one they're trying to jam down our throats.  Politics is dirty.  You can't get anything done if you try to stay above the fray.  All the great presidents understood that.  Even Lincoln.

Mitch McConnell and John McCain and Mr. Boner are not your father who abandoned you.  You're not going to win their approval. Give it up and get the job done.

... every time you see "Boehner" and "stimulus package" in the same sentence?

I can't help myself sometimes.  No one else can help me either.

He pulled it out of his ass.

(Josh asked:  Rep. Boehner (R) just said that the GOP alternative stimulus bill will create over 6 million jobs over two years with half the amount of money of the Democratic bill. Anybody have any idea where he got that number?)

David Kurtz noted that Madoff made off with the ACLU's money.  Another of his victims:  Kevin Bacon and wife Kyra Sedgwick.  They lost everything but their houses and what was in their checking account.  Now, he's desperate to work as much as he can.  I'm going to guess no more pet projects and indie films for them.

Yes, I read celebrity gossip columns.  And I am not ashamed!  I knew John Edwards was boinking someone not his wife before a lot of you yahoos did.  ;-)

Today's whine from Iowa Congressman Steve King (that Obama using his middle name is "bizarre") is only the most recent display of his willful ignorance.  A few other choice tidbits:

• "A soldier, man or woman, could get drunk in Bangkok, wake up in the morning and be married, as will happen sometimes in places like Las Vegas or Bangkok, be killed the next day, and the spouse who was a product of the evening's celebration would have then a right to claim access to come to the United States on a green card."

• When a bipartisan group of Iowa lawmakers wrote a letter asking for the National Guard chief to be a full member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, King said, "Representative Braley and all Democrats in the Iowa delegation do not support the troops and their mission. We will not be led to victory by those who have declared defeat."

• On Obama:  "I don't want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name, whatever the religion of their father might have been .. I'll just say this, that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected president of the United States, I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does this look like to the world of Islam?... And I will tell you that if he IS elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al Qaida and the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11th."

• He called Sen. Joe McCarthy a "Hero for America."

• On al-Zarqawi:  "There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he's at. And if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas."

• On Iraq:  "My wife lives here with me, and I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, she's at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq."

• On Terry Schiavo:  "She lives on her own, unassisted by machines. She was not dying, not in a coma and would not be near the end of her life now if it weren't for the barbaric torture of taking away her food and water that her husband, the man who said vows to protect her in sickness and health, has sentenced her to."

• He said what happened at Abu Ghraib was "What amounts to a hazing."

• He compared illegal immigrants to stray cats.  At first they help by chasing mice, so people feed them. Then they have kittens, which are liked for their cuteness, but eventually the strays, fed by the people, end up getting lazy, just like illegal immigrants.

Last spring, I participated in one of his telephone town hall meetings.  The only 2 subjects open for discussion:  gay marriage and the wall along the Mexican border.  We're in the middle of a war with Iraq that's killed thousands of Americans and Iraqis, we were creeping toward a major recession.  He voted against SCHIP but supported wasting millions on our own version of the Berlin wall.

The state of Iowa went to Obama.  My district re-elected Steve King.  I live in hell.

  

A big news story in my area:  A company that owns and manages residential rentals in Sioux City, IA, is going bankrupt.  Hundreds of people have been given less than a month's notice to move out of more than a dozen buildings scattered around the midtown area of the city. 

These are people who were already living on the edge financially.  The apartments were below standard because the landlord wasn't maintaining them properly but the tenants couldn't afford to move anywhere else.  Now, there are not enough apartments available elsewhere to house them all.  It's also creating headaches for the police who will have to keep an eye on all these vacant buildings in what's already a high crime area (by Iowa standards).

Added to that, the only grocery store within miles of that same neighborhood, inhabited largely by elderly, disabled and low income people, is going out of business. 

Whatever the "burdens" might be for Madoff's investors and others, none of them have to worry about having food to eat and a roof over their heads.  The same can't be said for my friends and neighbors. 

Stock market crash?  Pshaw.  None of these folks had money to invest in the stock market - they were lucky to be able to scrape together enough to rent the roach infested and inadequately heated hovels they were living in.  And now, even that has been taken away.

cross-posted at Debbie Does Nothing

If Obama thinks he can give Rick Warren a platform at the inauguration and still keep hope alive, he's wrong.  Between the Hillary bashing I've seen here around the cafe and now this, all the positive feelings I had right after the election are gone.  It's back to the same old same old. 


http://debbiedoesnothing.blogspot.com/2008/12/good-little-christian-elect.html