Late Late Night FDL: Every Time I Roll The Dice
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on March 5th, 2010 5:50 am by HL
Late Late Night FDL: Every Time I Roll The Dice
Delbert McClinton — Every Time I Roll The Dice.
Delbert McClinton — Every Time I Roll The Dice.
What’s on your mind?
Tags: Delbert McClinton, Every Time I Roll The Dice, late late nite firedoglake, live music, YouTube
Liz Cheney, “mockingbirds are tasty”
I thought we were out of low-points in American journalism, but as always there’s more rungs on the ladder to descend.
Before the United States was ever born, one principle was clear to John Adams, when as a lawyer, he defended British soldiers in the wake of the Boston Massacre (and I’m reminded in comments — ironically, it’s the 240th Anniversary of that event):
“The part I took in defense of captain Preston and the soldiers, procured me anxiety, and obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
And from Adams, to Clarence Darrow, to the Scottsboro Boys to Stephen Jones defense of Timothy McVeigh right through to the latter’s execution this has been a time-honored principle of an idyllic America, whether conservative like Adams and Jones, or liberal like Darrow.
But admiration for an Atticus Finch is no match for the visceral stupidity of Wolf Blitzer and the thuggish politics of a Liz Cheney. No, for them, lawyers following the highest principals of the calling are just another bunch of terrorist enablers.
The daily right-wing slant of FoxNews and it’s hourly diatribes are, of course, bad enough, and the determination of every news medium to allow right-wing bullshit to be taken seriously rather than laughed at is depressing. But CNN’s Situation Room had all the intellectual acumen of ‘The Situation’ himself yesterday. It’s one thing for Blitzer to be bland and dumb — because he is — it’s another thing to add kerosene to the fires of undermining the best things about our system of government.
Early Morning Swim: Rachel Maddow on Bart Stupak’s Hijacking of Health Care Bill
Heckuva job, Bart.
Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak (D) threatened Thursday to block health care reform (again) because it might allow federal money to subsidize abortion. Which has Democratic leaders cooking up Rube Goldberg-like schemes to supposedly assure that any abortions would be funded only out of the premium dollars people paid themselves for coverage in new insurance exchanges, not via any federal subsidy. But this entire debate is ridiculous, because the feds already subsidize abortions massively, via the giant tax subsidy for employer-provided care. Today the feds devote at least $250 billion a year to subsidizing employer-based coverage, a subsidy that skews incentives horribly (but which big business and big labor wouldn’t let the politicians touch this year). A Guttmacher Institute study says that 87 percent of typical employer plans cover abortion, and a Kaiser study found that 46 percent of covered workers had abortion coverage.
Heckuva job, Bart.