Sadly, No!

Basically, they understand how political power works. Witnesseth Steve Bell writing over at Frum’s place:

First, even if Brown wins, leaving Senate Majority Leader Reid with only 59 aye votes for healthcare reform, we should remember that Sen. Reid has another parliamentary option — budget reconciliation.

I have been mystified for months now, watching the Senate stagger through “regular order,” making the kinds of political deals that enrage voters. Why doesn’t Reid use reconciliation?

If you believe that the duty of the Majority Leader of any party is to aggressively address the party legislative agenda and the interests of the President, if he is of the same party, then it seems almost mandatory that the Majority Leader use every parliamentary tool at his or her disposal.

Some in the mainstream media have pooh-poohed the idea of using reconciliation from Day One. The argument, generally goes like this: if Reid uses reconciliation, then it will forever ruin relationships with Senate Republicans.

I think that’s silly. Relationships cannot get much worse between Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans than they are now. And, who cares?

It has been remarkable to watch Harry Reid struggle to bribe Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman to the point where they’ll vote for the most significant piece of social insurance legislation in recent memory, and all because he wants to avoid the wrath of a sternly-worded David Broder column. And oops, Broder still wrote the scathing column anyway. It’s like David Broder is every Senate Democrat’s lovable old grandpa whom they’d simply hate to disappoint. Me no get.

Also: If Scott Brown wins, I love that Reid will “only” have 59 seats. Jesus Christ! That’s a bigger senate majority than the GOP had in the ’90s or all throughout last decade! And you’re telling me you can’t get any goddamn shit done with 59 goddamn seats?

Related: As much as it pains me to say it, Greg Sargent is right that Dems are still better off passing Liebercare in the House and working through reconciliation to fix the egregiously awful parts.

Liebercare violates a chief principle of sound Democratic legislative policy, which is that the policy does not piss off union members and the elderly. I cannot believe I even have to state this.

God, you guys — though mostly the White House and the Senate Dems — have really fouled this shit up. I’m a goddamn pessimistic person by nature but even I would never have predicted that you might lose health care reform because you couldn’t hold onto a Senate seat on Massachusetts. It’s like every werewolf, vampire and gremlin I’ve ever had nightmares about have all appeared at once to take a heaping dump in my bed. Politics is terrible for my mental health.

UPDATE: This is actually an interesting report from Reason:

All natives of the commonwealth and reflexively Democratic, they kvetch about spending, taxes, and health care. As one member of a pipefitters union told me, “none of the guys in my union trust that Obama won’t hit us with that 40 percent health care tax.”

I’ll have more to say about this at a later date, but I think Obama’s biggest miscalculation upon taking office was that the American people were looking for a return to Clintonism — that is, a Democrat who is buddy-buddy with business elites and who won’t rock the boat too much on the economic populism front. Basically, it’s the sort of mentality that if you let the corporate elites work their magic and grow the economy, you can use the added tax revenue for social good.

But the times clearly demand something else. Corporate-friendly Democrats do well when the livin’ is easy, but these times demand angry populism in one form or another. The good news is that Obama can do a really good job of calling the Republicans out on their bullshit by launching populist initiatives including the bank tax, new financial regulations and a strong jobs bill. The GOP will reflexively hate all of these initiatives and will give Obama and the Dems an opening to say, “See? Same Republicans who spent eight years in bed with Wall Street.”

Now, there is one major obstacle here, which is that the Democratic Party may not, in fact, be smart enough to do these things and they probably won’t be smart enough to have strong messaging. But they’re going to be under a tremendous amount of pressure this year. Voters are pissed that the Obama administration spent its first year creating a corporatist health care policy and that the Senate killed off just about every measure that could have best helped people directly, from the public plan to drug re-importation to the Medicare buy in. Oh, and the loan modification program has been a total bust, as Atrios has tirelessly pointed out. Also unemployment is still way, way too high.

But, look, dudes. You still have time to turn things around. Obama’s poll numbers, while not great by any stretch of the imagination, are still reasonable given the absurdly awful economic climate. But the administration and Congress are gong to have to take concrete measures that will provide people with relief immediately — no more of this “let’s delay all the good stuff in health reform until 2014” bullshit. People will support you if they see that you’re making their lives better. If you don’t do that, then they’ll get pissed and vote for whatever else is around. And guess what? “Whatever else is around” is sadly the goddamn GOP. So please, dudes, get your shit together.

ABOVE: Mike McGowan

Shorter Mike McGowan, When Falls the Coliseum, A Journal of American Culture [or Lack Thereof]
Why We Shouldn’t Be in Haiti

• Fuck Haiti. I don’t get t-bone steak for dinner so why should they? Let them eat copies of Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

[H/T Sparkletits. Thx!]

Oh my goodness, but this is pee-in-your-pants hilarious. Ben Shapiro, who used to be America’s Worst Law Student™, and then America’s Worst Law Firm Associate™, and then America’s Worst Unemployed Self-Employed Lawyer™, now has enough time on his hands that we wants to add another “Worst” to his collection of sobriquets: America’s Worst Movie Reviewer™ — a title that previously appeared to be the unassailable lifetime property of Debbie Scheißelkopf. I’m sure that the universal reaction to Ben’s effort to attract the attention of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd will be something on the order of “Don’t kwicher day job, Ben,” which would be good advice if Ben actually had a day job to quit.

So without further ado, here are a few selections from Ben’s list of the “Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.” Ben starts out with Ridley Scott. It would be irresponsible not to speculate why Ben believes that Gladiator is Scott’s best film, but we think it may have something to do with this or maybe this. It might also have something to do with the reason that the only part of Thelma and Louise that Ben liked was watching the two women drive off a cliff.

Here’s all we have on Number 9 on Ben’s list:

9. Michael Mann: All style, no substance.

That would be a fairly adequate description of Ben’s own assessment of Michael Mann, and the other nine directors on the list for that matter, at least if you take out the style part.

Number 8 on Ben’s list is David Lean. All his movies are “tooooo long,” Ben complains. This is likely because Ben saw Doctor Zhivago before Herb and Sylvia Shapiro finally got him a Ritalin prescription. And also because it’s about falling in love with a girl.

And then we get to Darren Aronofsky, number 7 on the list, who seems sort of out-of-place compared to the other heavyweights but was likely included on the list so Ben could talk about, eeeeewww, lesbians and how revolting their sexual practices are.

Of late, Aronofsky has been spicing up his chaotic, disordered crap with explicit lesbian sex scenes. … Requiem for a Dream is noteworthy only in that Aronofsky somehow convinced Jennifer Connolly to participate in a lesbian scene involving mutual anal sex and a dildo. … The fanboy press is already agog over rumors that his newest ode to depravity, Black Swan, will feature a sex scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. Clearly, his target audience is pathetic losers in college dorms looking for an excuse to watch girl-on-girl action in the name of art.

Which is way worse than pathetic losers looking for an excuse to watch some shirtless gladiator-on-gladiator action.

Mike Nichols takes the honor of being number 6, even though the only part of the Nichols’s oeuvre apparently known to Ben isThe Graduate. This is a bit surprising since you have to imagine that Shapiro intersperses his viewings of gladiator movies with private shout-along viewings of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. (“What a dump!” Who said that George?” “She’s a housewife. She buys things.”) And Shapiro has a little narrative advice for Nichols worthy of Kurosawa himself:

The ending of that movie alone makes it unworthy of human viewing. All future directors take note: having your main characters staring blankly into nothingness is not an ending. It is a cop out.

Watching two feminist lesbobitches drive a car over a cliff — now that is an ending!

Next on the list at number 5 is David Lynch, and we’re back to Ben’s visceral disgust at touching girly parts:

[Mulholland Drive] makes no sense, doesn’t try to make sense, and then fills the vacuum with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring feeling each other up.

Let’s skip to number 3, Woody Allen, for yet another unintentionally autobiographical remark by Ben:

He’s a whiny narcissist with sexual inferiority issues. And no one except for him cares about the status of his penis.

Martin Scorsese, number 2, prompts Ben to butch it up for a moment with a little valley-girl-speak: Scorsese is “gross.” Gnarly, too. Also.

And the most overrated director of all time is . . . . Alfred Hitchcock. Uh huh. That just speaks for itself. There’s no way I can possibly add any snark to that. Ever. Really.

Finally, it’s interesting that Ben’s list doesn’t include any Frenchislamasocialist or Germanohomomarxist directors in his list. Wouldn’t any furruhn director be overrated just by definition? Where’s that incestophile Louis Malle? Eric Rohmer just died, so doesn’t he deserve at least one short little witty aperçu from Ben about one of his trademarked yakitty-yak-fests (with the yakking in French no less.) And Herzog. I mean Werner Fucking Herzog, where the fuck is he on this list? Surely Ben doesn’t think he’s underrated.

That’s probably because Ben had never seen this newly discovered short by Herzog.

[Hat tips to Pinko Punko, J—, and Loneoak]

*Cf.

So I eagerly clicked on this essay on transhumanism today expecting a bunch of “BWAH-HA-HA”-worthy philosophical treatises about the ethical merits of boinking robo-babes. Instead, I got a fairly standard discussion of Enlightenment philosophy with occasional buzzwords such as “superlative technocentricity” thrown in for good measure.

Even so, something here really stood out to me:

Third, while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism.

Leave aside the fallacy that most transhumanists are “liberal democrats” — most of the ones I’ve read are glibertarian dorkmasters — I’m more interested in the assertion that liberal democrats supposedly believe in “human perfectibility.”

This is something I’ve heard a lot about lefty ideology, that we supposedly think people can be made “perfect” through reasoned governance. That’s not how I really see things. My general view is that we’re never going to be “perfect” in any way, that we’re all deeply flawed and fucked-up creatures and that our lives in and of themselves are fairly meaningless. I know, I’m a cheery person.

That said I think that human beings do have the ability, after much trial and error and over long periods of time, to make things somewhat less sucky for ourselves. For instance, we eventually figured out that enslaving people was a silly idea. Also, the fact that we now elect people to run our government rather than anointing them by virtue of their father’s sperm? That’s a pretty smart innovation. Ditto things like Social Security and Medicare — it’s good to not have old people dying in the streets.

None of these innovations make us more or less “perfect.” Rather they’re changes we’ve made that have made life marginally less sucky. We’ll never get to the point where people don’t drive drunk or where people don’t steal from one another or anything like that. But we can make gradual improvements over time. We learn things that we can pass on to future generations. I don’t think this makes me an idealist — at the very least, I hope that it makes me a realist.

Thoughts?

Above: \Will-i-a-m Ja-c-ob-s-on\ n. 1. Buttwipe.
2. cobag 3. dickhead.

Shorter William “MiniInstaHayseedWannabe” Jacobson, L-eg-a-l I-ns-u-r-erec-t-io-n
Coakley Supporters Fabricate Birther Accusation Against Brown

• Because I speculate that the part of the video where Scott Brown retracted what he said was probably edited out, it is irresponsible for liberals to suggest that Scott Brown actually said what he said.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

We are always late to the party, but apparently there’s something called the FrumForum on the internets these days. It features lots of good stuff, like FrumBytes and links to various news stories (there aren’t enough sites out there that link to news stories). It’s obvious though that sometimes, once has gone through the trouble of linking to something, actually taking the time to read said story is just too cumbersome. (Just ask Anne Applebaum). Which is why the story that is linked to here:

actually reads:

Tiger Woods is considering a $3 million donation that would send doctors and supplies to Haiti, rap icon Russell Simmons told the Daily News.

Yes, it is a slow blog day.

So, OK. Martha Coakley is a really, really bad candidate. Neither words, numbers nor hieroglyphs can describe how terrible she is. I cannot imagine any politician ever saying something like this

Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive.

“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’’ she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.

YEEEEEEEAAAAAAARRRRRGH.

So, OK. She doesn’t like shaking hands. Which is sort of what campaigning is all about. She’s really, really awful.

But, look. I’m already a deeply pessimistic person. But if health care reform in this country goes down AGAIN because the Democrats couldn’t hold onto a seat in Massachusetts I will literally go insane. So please, flip some emergency money to Martha, for the sake of both the country and my mental health. Balloon Juice has set up an Act Blue page here:

Tintin adds: What Brad said. Times three. Both for Brad’s sake and the country’s sake. The current health care reform bill may have its share of problems, but if it goes down now, we’ll never see health care reform at all. Whatever you may think of the rest of the bill, ending the pre-existing condition problem is worth it. And if greedy insurance companies make the plan cost the taxpayers too much, then we have a chance, down the road, of a public option or a single-payer system.

Sigh:

David Brooks: Gail, can I draw you into the America versus Europe debate? This is the old argument over which model of capitalism is better, the Anglo-American model or the continental one. It was recently rekindled by two bloggers extraordinaire — Jim Manzi and Jonathan Chait — and then joined by our colleague Paul Krugman.

My own background on this matter comes from having been a Wall Street Journal editorial writer in Brussels for more than four years early in the 1990s. I was sent there to flog American-style capitalism into the natives. I came away convinced that the American model is in fact better, but it was useless to try to persuade continental Europeans of this fact.

I became convinced that our system was better not for the wealth-generating reasons the current bloggers are arguing about, but because it leads to more exciting lives.

Dude, there’s nothing “exciting” about not having health insurance or about going through massive financial crises. This sort of chaotic economic activity may get you off, but for most folks it isn’t a lot of fun.

Also, Europe has some of the best places to ski in the world. That seems like a much healthier form of excitement than, say, losing your child because you can’t pay for his medical bills.

More:

The continental model encourages less work at the cost of boredom. I knew people in Brussels who went to work at an organization at 25 sitting in one desk, and they could tell you exactly what desk they will be sitting in and what job they will be doing when they retire at 60 or 65. Yawn.

Yawn. No kidding. Clearly they’d be better off in the thrill-a-minute American economy where you get laid off every three weeks and have crappy unemployment benefits.

ABOVE: Steve Mazzeo (No image manipulation
software was harmed in posting this photo.)

Shorter Steve Mazzeo, When the Coliseum Falls, a Journal of American Culture [or Lack Therof]
2009: I Saved the Best for Last¹

• I am woman fat man, hear smell me roar farting.^{2, 3}

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

ABOVE: Debbie Schlussel, Patriot

Shorter Frau Debbie Schlüssel von Flügelhorn
Good News: Prez Obama Comments on Most Important Issue of the Day

• We must fight feed the terrorists Haitians in Iraq Haiti or we’ll have to fight feed the terrorists Haitians here.*

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

*Seriously, however, if you have any money to spare for Haitian relief, please think about doing so for the right reason: to help alleviate the massive human suffering that has only just begun and which will get worse than we can possibly even imagine as starvation, thirst, disease and, possibly, political unrest spread on the unfortunate island. Here are some links where you can go to contribute without even having to get up from your chair:

Oxfam
American Red Cross
AmeriCares
Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders