Mario Piperni dot Com

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Is there a bigger dick in Congress than Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim ‘What-Global-Warming?‘ Inhofe?

On the health care reform bill…

“I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways.”

And…

“People are not buying these concepts that are completely foreign to America. We’re almost reaching a revolution in this country.”

This is the same Inhofe who has said…

“I just hope the president keeps talking about it, keeps trying to rush it through. We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.”

As long as braindead, self-serving Congressmen like Inhofe are a part of the process, there will never be bipartisanship of any kind. Period.  Will Dems stop the charade and get moving come September?

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This is good.  I wasn’t sure of a couple of actors toward the beginning of the video but I think I figured everyone else out.
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Hey, Mel Gibson didn’t make the list. Wonder if it has anything to do with his drunken, bigoted rant of a while back…

UPDATE:  Oops!  Mel is in the video. My mistake. I was looking for the blue face paint.
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Matt Bai breaks down the demographics of age in an Obama era.

For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself.

The typical anti-Obama activist tends to be white, male and — perhaps most significant — advanced in age. A poll conducted earlier this month by CNN and Opinion Research showed a rather stark age divide when it came to health care: 57 percent of voters under 50 said they favored the outlines of a Democratic plan, but that number was a full 20 points lower among voters over 65. In three Pew Research Center polls going back to April, senior citizens consistently gave Obama’s job performance lower approval ratings than did than any other age group.

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The good news for Obama and his party, of course, is that they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force and among those now drifting into middle age. And that means that if reigning Democrats can manage to get health care policy right this time, and maybe even add some fundamental energy reforms, they might still be able to cement more hopeful attitudes about government for generations to come, much as Roosevelt did in his day. Today’s younger voters might never be as party-affiliated as their grandparents were, but neither may they turn out to be as cynical about their leaders as their parents often seem to be. If the president has his way (which is to say, if the worst nightmares of Republicans come to pass), those voters may someday live out their retirements in Arizona or Nevada, spinning stories for their grandchildren of the days when Barack Obama was twice elected president, when government managed once again to make things better instead of worse and when politicians still bothered with these things called town halls.

It is exactly the over 60 crowd, the most vulnerable demographic, which conservatives have been targeting with their lies over health care.   Talk of death panels, as ridiculous a notion as it may be, has been affective in taking the debate away from facts and into the realm of the absurd.  Fear works.

If the president can sustain the short term pain associated with getting both a health care reform bill off the ground as well as seeing a measurable turnaround in the economy, Republicans will be bitching from a minority position for a long time to come.

(Hat tip: Balloon-Juice)

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As fair and balanced a look at Ted Kennedy as I’ve yet seen.

Andrew Sullivan…

He was a senator able to be fiercely ideological and also fiercely pragmatic, able to develop friendships beyond politics – friendships that are the grease that makes the Senate work. He was a master of parliamentary procedures and the helm of a ship of highly skilled staffers.

He was also, of course, a politician. Despite being a proponent of green energy, he single-handedly prevented the construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod because it might obstruct his sea view. In 2004 he fought hard to remove Romney’s right to appoint a temporary senator if John Kerry were to win the presidency. And yet in the week before his death he urged a return to the appointment of a temporary senator – in order to keep a Democratic vote for healthcare reform intact. He could be partisan and hypocritical, as well as bipartisan and principled.

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As The New York Times elegantly put it, Kennedy “was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy”.

He was in the end more than a Kennedy. He was a senator. He worked the hard way, in often unglamorous circumstances, mostly in the minority, but he worked.

Some in dynasties rise high and fall far. Others provide the drop-shadow of their siblings’ drama: the prosaic work of legislating that endures even after the dream has died.

This is a mixed legacy, if a thoroughly human one.

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Alrighty. Time to do a check on what’s new and exciting in Wingnuttia – the fringe far-right land of loons where no claim is too outlandish or too stupid to be swallowed up by Obama haters.

Secret Camps

Retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson says the government has prepared 1,000 camps for its own citizens. He also says the government has stored 30,000 guillotines to murder its critics, and has stashed 500,000 caskets in Georgia and Montana for the remains.

Why guillotines? “Because,” he wrote in a report obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, “beheading is the most efficient means of harvesting body parts.”

Ok. Interesting.  Three points.

1.  I’d think President Obama could do better than make use of guillotines.  Sort of messy, aren’t they?

2.  Body parts?  What’s Obama planning do with harvested body parts?  I need to know.

3.  Are FBI applicants not screened for psychotic disorders?

Nazi-style Concentration Camps

In a second warning, the Web site Worldnetdaily.com says that the government is considering Nazi-like concentration camps for dissidents.

Jerome Corsi, the author of “The Obama Nation,” an anti-Obama book, says that a proposal in Congress “appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.”

Ahh. So those townhall idiots with the Obama-as-Hitler posters, might not be idiots after all.  I wonder if Sean Hannity has had Corsi on his show yet discussing this new revelation as he had him on countless times before promoting his pile of shit fascinating book on Obama.

Oathkeepers

In another ominous warning, a group called the Oathkeepers boasts that it wouldn’t cooperate if the government orders dissidents locked up.

“We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext,” the group says in its list of top principles.

Oathkeepers is built around the idea that its members — active and retired military, police and firefighters — all have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, not the federal government.

These guys have a web site where they state the orders they’d refuse to follow.  Real Americans.

Michele Bachmann and Mandatory Camps

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., also is worried about the federal government and children, saying a bill expanding the AmeriCorps volunteer service could lead to mandatory camps for young people.

“There is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service,” Bachmann told a Minnesota radio station.

“And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.”

What can I say about Bachmann which has not been said a thousand times before.  She, along with Glenn Beck, are Wingnuttia countries of their own.  What’s interesting here is that the common theme appears to be camps of one form or another being forced upon the people by Obama -secret, concentration, detention and mandatory camps where people will be rounded up and god knows what else.  All very scary stuff.

Along with birthers, tea partiers, most of the conservative media, the RNC, Republican members of Congress and Sarah Palin,  life is pretty good in Wingnuttia although it is getting a bit crowded.

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Money can’t buy you happiness, right?  Well, perhaps it can.  Modern research is giving the adage a new twist.

…starting to emerge now is a different answer to that age-old question. A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can – it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.

[Researchers] are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

…while we quickly grow accustomed to a new suit or a bigger house, no matter how much we originally loved it, experiences instead tend to get burnished in our memory – a year after a vacation, we look back not on the stress of dealing with lost luggage or the fights over which way the hotel was, but the beauty of the scenery or the exotic flavors of the food.

I encourage you to read the entire article.  Good stuff.

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The dolt was right. Obama’s death panels do exist (or soon will be). How embarrassing for every liberal who has ever claimed otherwise.
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Via DailyDish

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Everywhere you look these days, you have someone else claiming they’re a Libertarian.  I’ve suspected for a while that most of these newbies are anything but traditional Libertarians and are more likely Republicans and conservatives who are having a difficult time defending the current state of the Republican party.   Eight years of ineptness under George W. Bush will have that effect on some I’d think.  Anyway, nice to see that others have had similar thoughts.

From the Daily Kos comes the Top 10 Signs You Might Not Be A Libertarian.

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Here’s another statistic from the health care debate which is not heard enough.

Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance.

Why are these numbers not being shouted out from every rooftop each and every day until reform is a reality?

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