No, not the STATE of Virginia, the commentor known as "Virginia."
This was a comment recently posted by someone with the nom-de-blog of "Virginia" on the morning  thread about the teabaggers admitting defeat on the HC issue.
"Virginia" you should start up a blog here so we can follow you!  
Here's the comment."Americans are enslaved to a cruel health insurance system that keeps millions chained to jobs they hate. They can't leave their jobs if  anyone in their family has any kind of pre-existing condition. They can't take the risk to take a sabbatical, start their own business, work freelance, try to make it as an artist, writer, or musician.
Europeans can do all these things because they know that their health needs will be covered. Europeans are MORE free than we are, not less.
In England, national health is there for everyone. If you are well-off, you can buy supplemental coverage and use private clinics and hospitals.
Are England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada all unfree countries? Of course not - they are freer than the United States because people have more options of how to live their lives. That's what freedom means. And they love their systems and wouldn't dream of trading them for ours. Even conservatives like Thatcher Cameron Sarkozy and Merkel woudn't dream of running against universal health care.
That's because, like Social Security, it's a GOOD thing that people like and want. American conservatives seem determined to ensure that Americans remain miserable.
I've been hearing from conservatives for 50 years that Europe is on the verge of collapse becuase of its social welfare systems. Funny how those darn Europeans seem to keep sailing right along, now leading the recovery and with a currency that leaves ours in the dust.
The reason the Right hates Europe is very simply because these countries provide living proof that that the right is dead wrong."
That opening paragraph in particular, is so loaded with abject truthiness, it hurts.

I heard a sad story yesterday, about an elderly lady in the early stages of dementia who is totally terrified about going to her doctor now because she thinks some sort of death panel will euthanize her and she will never walk out of the clinic.
It is obvious diminished mental capacity makes people ripe for Palin's fearmongering.  And the ignorant conservatives don't help at all, because they protect their prejudices before they try to understand the truth, promoting Paln's lie rather than having compassion for their suffering loved-ones.
Do these wingnut politicians realize how awful that type of fear is to elderly and frail and sick people?  Especially those who are surrounded by wingnuts? 
Palin's callous remarks represent pernicious political cruelty.  Does she even care how many elderly patients she has scared to death, literally?  As usual, instead of trying to pose a serious dialog about healthcare, Palin takes the lazy way out, spitting deceptive statements out to foment fear.

"The news media was a particular culprit in this drama. This was not just Fox News; seemingly all the national news organizations monitored any meetings they could find between lawmakers and constituents, looking for flare-ups, for YouTube moments. The meetings that involved thoughtful exchanges or even support for the proposals would never find their way on air; coverage was given only to the most outrageous behavior, furthering distorting the true picture."
This paragraph from today's op-ed piece in the NYTimes written by Earl Blumenauer(D), Oregon's 3rd District Congressman, who first drafted the death-counseling words that were twisted so perniciously by the opposition,  offers some solid evidence that the media as a whole is in the tank for the insurance industry on this issue.  It really covers the timeline of the "death panel" fabrication that Republicans (particularly Palin) promulgated as the process unfolded.
I have blogged before that most media operations, no matter how big, are low-profit or even non-profit (Washington Times) members of investment portfolios, retained only for their public influence, not for their profitability.
That being said, consider that most PROFITABLE (egregiously so) parts of those portfolios are the myriad investments in the healthcare industry and it's insurance providers.
Is it any surprise the media is so absent in this debate, or pushing the corporate agenda?  
Once again, the task of 4th Estate-ism will fall to the blogs. 

but, then again,  maybe it's the fluoride... 

Many folks have but one image come to mind when they hear the words "wind turbine."  That is a propeller-looking device that faces into the wind.  In some places, mile after mile of these futuristic wind turbines stretch out past the horizon.
But there is an alternative, one that has been around in a practical form since at least the 1930's, called a Vertical Wind Turbine. They require considerably less space and apparently much lower maintenance costs.
Here's one called a Helix Wind Turbine, if you take a peek you will see how little space it requires, compared to the propeller types. 
Greensburg, Kansas will be using a ground-level version to light their city building.
With the billions of $ now going into smart-grid transmission lines, no doubt there will be tens of thousands more transmission poles stretching as far as the eye can see in remote places across the nation.
While it would be impractical to put a prop-type turbine atop every power pole, these vertical versions might be a very practical application.
The idea is, as long as we are putting those poles up, why not top them with a small vertical generator? 
While these would not be the giant versions we see in vast fields these days, the sum of so many smaller units could equal or surpass the capacity of the traditional models. Those thousands upon thousands of transmisson pole generators would constitute a HUGE amount of energy, along with a new class of jobs.   Putting the generators atop the transmission poles also eliminates the need to build transmission lines to get that energy to the public, they are, inherently, already attached.
Just food for thought.

This post started as a series of comments on Dickday's recent post, 

Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Liar and so is Joe Scarborough

I thought it was worth putting out as a blog entry. 

Someone here at the Cafe recently posited, quite accurately, that Fox and The Lump have such high ratings because EVERY ignorant knuckledragger watches or listens to them, while the other 79% of the population spreads their attention around to the other networks and wouldn't listen to Rush or watch Fox if they got paid to do it.

That "class" of people hooked on trash talkers like The Lump is very similar to a cult.

Robert J. Lifton's standard 8-point outline for identifying a cult can be quite accurately attributed to them.

1. Milieu Control; "they (cult members) can be warned under threat of punishment to stay away from the world's educational media,"

2. Mystical Manipulation; If a person leaves for any reason, accidents or ill-will that may befall them are always attributed to God's punishment on them... The organization is therefore given a certain "mystique" that is quite alluring to the new recruit.

3. Demand for purity; "The world is depicted as black and white, with little room for making personal decisions based on a trained conscience.

4.The Cult of Confession; Serious sins (as defined by the organization) are to be confessed immediately. (How many times have we seen conservatives criticize Rush, only to turn around and apologize fearfully the next day?)

5.The "Sacred Science" The cult's ideology becomes the ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. The ideology is too "sacred" to call into question, and a reverence is demanded for the leadership. The cult's ideology makes an exaggerated claim for possessing airtight logic, making it appear as absolute truth with no contradictions. 

6. Loading the language; The prolific use of "thought-terminating cliches," expressions or words that are designed to end the conversation or controversy. Such cliches are easily memorized and readily expressed. They are called the "language of non-thought," since the discussion is terminated, not allowing further consideration.

7. Doctrine Over Person; Human experience is subordinated to doctrine, no matter how profound or contradictory such experiences seem.... The person is only valuable insomuch as they conform to the role models of the cult.

8. Dispensing of Existence; The cult decides who has the "right" to exist and who does not. They decide who will perish in the final battle of good over evil. The leaders decide which history books are accurate and which are biased.

Check it out at http://www.freeminds.org/psychology/mind-control/eight-marks-of-a-mind-control-cult.html

You can see the similarities between say, the teabaggers, the birthers, the Palinites, and these identifiers of what constitutes cult members, it really explains the profane relationship between the Fox/Rush listeners and their cult idols.

Rush is a cult idol, and his listeners are brainwashed lemmings. I've said it before, but it probably sounded like your everyday barebones complaint.

Here I am attempting to put more meat on the bare bones. I meant it seriously, not just as a lament, but as a warning to those lemmings.

If you don't learn to think for yourselves, you can never be free from the likes of The Lump, and you will waste your lives parroting other peoples' pernicious words.

When Lifton wrote his seminal piece "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, A Study of 'Brainwashing" in China, on which the movie "The Manchurian Candidate" (hey, Rachel, me too...) was based, the Democrats wouldn't touch it because they were afraid of association with the word "Communist."  

It was published in 1961.

But both the Republican Party and Madison Avenue (Mad Men, literally) found it very valuable. Anyone who doubts it is blind and deaf to the brainwashing we see and hear every day from the wingnuts.

Here's the Google online version of his book; if you think my little paraphrase of Lifton's whole work was scary, Flowerchild, wait until you read this, or some of it.

Long URL, but it leads to one of the most pertinent but obscure works of research in the past 100 years. If you want a glimpse into the dark places of the mind, and the pernicious people who tap them for power and profit, take the time to check it out.

My short take on it is that Totalitarianism, by any other name, would still stink just as bad.

Read the forward, Lifton recognizes that his work transcended it's original intent, to prove what I just paraphrased. 

Here's the URL for browser pasters.

http://books.google.com/books?id=FU_ifHrIIg0C&dq=lifton+Chinese+thought+reform&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=zp7aSuPrCMfL8Qa2jpG3BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=lifton%20Chinese%20thought%20reform&f=false

Here's a sincere invitation to all my fellow NFL Fans who are also men and women of conscience, to join me in a pledge to boycott the televised games of any team Rush Limbaugh (AKA "The Lump") buys into.
I respect the players who have already shown the courage to step forward and voice their own intentions to refuse their talents to any team The Lump might own or partly own, and I think that those of us who do not want to see the game tarnished by wannabe's like Limbaugh should join their protest and pledge to boycott a Lump-leveraged team.
SO lets start right now, serving notice that we will refuse to watch any televised game, and will boycott and protest to the advertisers of those games, if Limbaugh spends some of his vile, nation-splitting, wingnut provoking blood money to intrude upon our leisure time.
And by serving this notice NOW, before it ever comes to reality,  we may help convince the other team owners, who are the final arbiters of their own membership,  that bringing such a divisive, bigoted and emotionally unstable character into their ranks will only assure them a political backlash, the likes of which they would surely regret.
Just his history of drug abuse represents a terrible hypocrisy, considering how many players have been banned or suspended due to drug tests.  Would Rush be required to take the same drug tests his players are required to?  I thought not.
I don't suggest for a moment that we should boycott the NFL (please, one bad apple STILL doesn't spoil the whole bushel) but in solidarity with the black and hispanic and polynesian players who now make up such a big part of the league, we should not allow a bona fide, proud-of-it white-racist a chance to demean a game we love just because he throws some easy money at them.  
When I ponder how he made that money, it only makes me all the more disgusted, and all the more determined to make some sort of attempt to blog some sense into the other owners, before they hamstring their sport with such a sorry loser.
No matter what kind of cash The Lump can throw at them, it is nothing compared to the advertising and licensing revenues the Rams would lose if they decide to let The Lump grow malignantly onto their fold.  Not to mention the talent they will have to forego, because no man of color and/or conscience should be able to justify working for such a creep.
All comments appreciated,  I won't engage in debate on this one though, but I would appreciate some support and input from some of our TPM football fans,  as to how to most effectively get the message across to the other owners who vote on who gets into that august body, that they include Rush at their own risk, the risk of politicizing a game we all hope remains untouched by this type of political hack.

The Boston Globe has a story this morning worth reading, by Steve Rosenberg, outlining how Massachusetts has utilized about $4 billion of the $17+ billion in stimulus funds to retain and create street-level jobs.
Lets hope this is the trickle before the flow, and more MSM outlets will start covering the stimulus effect on state and local economies.
If you read the story, take note that it says this money helped not only create jobs, but RETAIN public service jobs.  Here's a paragraph that goes there;
"The group's report, to be released this week, is one of the first attempts by an independent organization to document the effects of the stimulus on Massachusetts. It said the stimulus helped preserve the jobs of municipal police officers, teachers, and firefighters, while generating jobs at new building and infrastructure projects across the state. By extending unemployment benefits and providing tax credits, it also fueled new consumer spending."
It is safe to say that the rest of the nation is expriencing similar stories from state to state and city to city. The stimulus money is, at least in most part, flowing, not trickling, down to the working class consumers, where it will actually enter the general economy, and not some billionaire's personal portfolio.
Which seems to me to be the difference between the bank bailout money and the stimulus money.  The easy credit that the bailout was supposed to produce, to put more money into consumer circulation, never reached the consumer level to maintain and create jobs (anybody know where it is now?),  the way stimulus money appears to be working.
Correct me if I'm wrong, (please, I'm an economic layman, so any expertise would be humbly appreciated) but it seems as if those who need it the least, who hold it in big pools of personal wealth as some sort of bloated form of security,  got the bulk of the bailout money, while everyday American consumers got the benefit of the stimulus money.
And thus the stimulus money actually gets into the economic cycle, rather than augmenting already over-bloated bank accounts.

(crossposted and edited from a comment I made on MJ Rosenberg's excellent post "Nobel Prize Honors America, Not Just Our President")
"the White House immediately keep its many verbal, written and campaign promises.."

Too many people in the middle and on the left have projected their own very personal, particular brand of "hope" into some kind of "promise" Obama made either on the campaign trail or in the White House since his inauguration.

It is a sad sort of group delusion that converted hopeful speeches into concrete promises, because we are all so desperate to see change.

But when that change hasn't matched the expectations curve, then suddenly Obama hasn't kept his "promises."

Too many people believe Obama promised them something he never really promised, he just spoke hopefully about change.

But now that the corporate-lackey Republican obstructionists have had their way with our antiquated system of government, and our hopes have been held back from flowing instantly into law, too many blame Obama for their own delusions, no matter how noble, being unrealized.

Obama promised change, and obviously the rest of the world recognizes that at least SOME of that change happened immediately, as awards like THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE prove.

But to the single-issue American zealots whose cause has yet to be vindicated, Obama's just another promise breaker.

Broaden your political perspective, folks, and learn to appreciate the baby steps we now actually have the power to take. Don't let your personal disappointment over your pet cause blind you to the hopeful reality that people like those on the Nobel committee see clearly, as outsiders looking in. 

And never forget, our adversaries in this instance aren't soldiers with weapons, it is the richest collection of greedy billionaires and wannabe billionaires to ever inhabit the earth, which they believe is theirs to abuse.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/dow-unveils-solar-shingles/?em
Too bad it's Dow. But regardless of the manufacturer, this is one of those "duh" answers that has been waiting for the fossil-fools to leave the White House before it could be released.  
During W's tenure, it was literally impossible compete with the coal-fired industry's billion dollar state-by-state lobby.  Alternatives were marginalized and defunded, while that old oxymoron "clean coal" was promoted with a lot more fossil-fuel industry money than EVER went towards developing those alternatives.  All those billions spent protecting pollution-generating generators should have been spent getting products like these solar shingles to the market sooner.

Every now and then, I get all snarked-up.

The happy happy joy joy response of the wingnut media over Chicago's failed bid for the 2016 Olympics is pretty good proof the right wing has not a patriotic bone in it's aging body.
Clearly, their highly touted and constantly chorused love of America is far outweighed by their hatred for everything Obama.  Their thinly veiled personal prejudices and burgeoning political disappointments grow more transparent every day, as the news of their glee at Chicago's lost Olympics bid so clearly proves.
Bigoted, sore losers would be the best new label for the wingnut media manipulators, especially the radioheads.  But, by the very standard they tried to set during Bush's disastrous tenure,  they should drop any pretense of patriotism, and admit they are loyal to a fading, failed ideology, not to any real American ideals.

Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Tom Carper (D-DE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) joined with all the committee's Republicans in defeating the amendment.
Am I just being paranoid again, or does it seem unlikely that so many 'dogs were on the Senate Finance Committee?
How is it that such a preponderance of right-wing (please, don't give me that "centrist" crap) Democrats are installed in these key obstructionist positions?
Call me naive, but it seems as if there's definitely some behind-the-scenes manipulation underway here, when so many members representative  of a fairly small minority of Dems seem to be in positions of influence that abrogate, in many ways, the process that should express the PUBLIC will.
Congressional committees, like Congress as a whole, should represent the whole body, not just conservative parts of it.  And to me, this list seems "stacked" against the public will, because these are lawmakers who are all extremely beholden to conservative corporate contributors, in this case, big insurance.  Is that the very reason they were tapped for this committee?At least Ben Nelson outright admits he's protecting insurance company profits.  So why is he on that committee in the first place?  How did that very non-representative group become entrenched (installed) in the first place? 
They are like a legislative blood clot obstructing the flow of public will.

Beware wingnuts and Republican ideologues, there's a fresh breeze drifting across our tired, huddled nation, yearning to be free..
All along the interstates, and in towns, villages and cities across the nation, roads and bridges are being repaired, potholes are being filled and work on public infrastructure is simply humming.
All due to that "Change" we hoped and voted for.
In less than a year, the evidence of Obama's improved form of government is popping up.  The next time you pass a crew at work on roads, highways or city streets, just remember the word  "Hope."
But don't expect the mainstream media to tout this obvious "change."  The media still belongs to the worst neocons,  and they don't want the public in general to be upbeat about the future, or they might not get their cheap guv'mint back again, if things improve on the economic front.
The blogs may not be reliable, either, due to the proliferation of intentional disinformation and outright deception the 'nuts are promoting on their end of this free medium, but still the truth is there, residing among the posts, comments and cross-talk

It's an angle on the census issue that has been evolving for a couple days here at the TPM blogs, based on a theory that some of the vehement dialog emanating from Republican lawmakers against the census, might well be explained by those lawmakers' vulnerability to the results of that census.
So, not knowing where to start for this kind of information, I thought it might be worth challening some of our lurking experts to pitch in with some stats, and links there-to, if they are even available.
There may already be a website somewhere that addresses this very issue, but thus far my google-search word-combinations aren't providing me with anything but obscure references.
I think this evolving "theory" that the loudest census naysayers are identifying themselves as inevitable census victims could be fleshed-out better if we had an idea of just where and how many red districts could see the census axe fall, due to population changes and movement.
Considering that states like Iowa and Minnesota, both facing potential district amalgamation and redistricting due to population loss, are now under Democratic majorities, it is no surprise some red and purple districts are afraid they might be turning blue.
So, what other states or districts may see similar changes, and are those Reps(R) crying the blues already, in the form of criticism of the census itself, like Bachman and King?