Nitecap and the Marquise de Merteuil

You guys probably have a head start on me.  I just got home from work after spending hours on a frakin’ Excel spreadsheet.  I HATE Microsoft.  Every app is so damn kludgy.  I need a drink.  Rico!  Some tequila please?

In the meantime, let me direct your attention to this excellent smack down of Sally Quinn by Bob Somerby titled The Wages of Quinn.  Somerby dissects Quinn’s most recent column where the Queen Bee of DC threatens the Obama’s with her own personal brand of divine retribution for being lousy hosts.  “Pretty nice administration you got there.  Wouldn’t want anything to *happen* to it.”  As Somerby points out, Sally and her droogs don’t pick on Republicans for being celebrity struck social climbers like the Reagans or intellectual and sleepy boors like the second round of Bushes.  She saves her attacks, and at this point, they seem awfully close to domestic terrorism, for Democrats.  Clinton really frosted her crockies because right after his first election, he called her and the Villagers on their little cliquey games.  Quinn holds a grudge and her vengeance knows no boundaries of decorum.

I don’t know why Sally gets away with it except that she’s married to Ben Bradlee.  She sounds to me like a frustrated woman who should have been a CEO of something but was born 30 years too soon.  So, she is forced to channel her intelligence and thwarted ambition into middle school variety power plays that are approved by her class as being appropriate for her gender and station.  Oooo, the shackles of conformity must be rubbing her raw after sooo many years.  Nevertheless, she will not be ignored.  But someday, probably soon, she will be discarded.  Everyone gets old, eventually.  She will be replaced by a newer version of herself.

In the meantime, she’ll continue to scheme and stab people in the back and help the Villagers take down another Democrat.  Hey, Obama’s a pretty weak president.  It’s not going to be hard for Sally and her posse to take him down.  I’m just sick of people indulging in ruining other people for sport.  Besides, Obama’s doing a pretty good job of ruining himself without Sally’s help.

Someday, I hope Sally gets what’s coming to her.  In my fantasy, it goes a little bit like this:

Health care reform the dollars and sense of it

[ An extended update to Health care: Bipartisanship in itself is not a goal (period) ]

Health care for a country as large as ours is going to cost a lot of money — no matter who’s paying the bills.  Right now, the burden rests almost entirely on individuals to either pay extortion high insurance premiums & all the deductibles and copays required to actually benefit from those payments.  But, many of us are hoping that with true government reform, those payments could be restructured in such a way that everyone in the country gains access to health care . . .  and none of us go broke getting it.

Ezra’s  hair is on fire but, why can’t he point out that we’ll pay much more than these estimates in ten years without reform?

Health reform is, I think it fair to say, in danger right now. The news out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee was bad. The Congressional Budget Office had scored a partial bill and the result was a total fiasco. But the news out of the Finance Committee is much, much worse.

Put simply, the Finance Committee wanted its bill to cost $1 trillion over 10 years. The CBO returned an early estimate to the panel on Tuesday night: $1.6 trillion over 10 years. The specifics of the estimate have not been made public. But the final number changed everything. Max Baucus, the chairman of the committee, pushed markup back behind the July 4th recess. He has promised to get the bill below $1 trillion over 10 years.

That’s very dangerous.

“Very dangerous” — to say the least.

The Somerby Speaketh…

McCain Was Mean, La La La!

and let’s just say, he’s not too happy with the state of the Obamasphere.

If you’ve never read The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby’s blog, you are missing perhaps the sharpest and most thorough media critic in the blogosphere. He is a Democrat, and that perspective comes through quite clearly: but he is not afraid to critique so-called progressive bloggers when they play games with their readers. Case in point: The revisionism of the Obama Boyz regarding the debate between Obama and McCain last week.

On September 29th, Somerby wrote about Joe Klein, Josh Marshall and Duncan Black, aka Atrios, and how their opinions on the debate seemed to change as time went by. As these progressive luminaries watched (or listened to) the two combatants battle it out, not one of them mentioned the way McCain treated Obama – with condescension, rudeness and insults. That’s because this behavior Joe, Josh and Duncan are supposedly so upset about did not happen. If anything, Obama was rude to McCain, constantly interrupting him. But so what? Political opponents often behave badly towards each other. Certainly Obama has hardly been a model of courteousness towards any of his opponents. But hey, he’s “likeable enough.”

During the live-blogging of the debate, none of the three bloggers (hilariously dubbed the “Three Tenors” by Somerby) seemed to notice McCain’s horrible behavior. But by Saturday, they were all singing from the same hymnal. McCain was meeeeeeaaaaaan to Obama. He was condescending and small; glowering, even; certainly not presidential. Obama was, of course, saintly by comparison.