A Blue Eyed Buddhist

Here’s a Congressman, Anthony Weiner from New York, absolutely destroying the three Fox News hosts that are trying to grill him on healthcare reform.

Definitely worth watching and thinking about no matter WHAT side of the debate you’re on:

Rachel Maddow does a tremendous job of taking down several Republican Senators, who were totally for reconciliation before they were totally against it.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbPpcwtWvzY&feature=player_embedded if you can’t see the video embedded above.)

Here again we see the right wing being dishonest, and having it lead to hype and fear and uncertainty. The reality is that today’s health care reform plan is more conservative than plans touted by Republicans in the past- and they’re lying about how “unfair” the use of the reconciliation process is.

You know what reconciliation really is? It’s majority rules. You take a vote and if more than 50% of the Senators vote for something, it passes. These guys keep claiming that they represent “the will of the people” but if there’s 59 Senators that vote FOR something, and 41 Senators that vote AGAINST something, how is that not the “will of the people”?

The reality is that the people, when polled, favor things like guaranteed issue and the public option. The public favors those things by wide margins. It’s not even close. So why does the right wing pretend that the public doesn’t want these things?

Two reasons. First, they don’t want the Democrats and President Obama to get a political “win”. They don’t care about doing what’s right, or what the public wants; they just want to hurt Democrats, and if it hurts the nation at the same time, oh well. Second, they are indebted to the insurance companies that want to kill health care reform.

Thus you get guys like Grassley now going against something HE suggested earlier, and Hatch saying that reconciliation is a terrible thing even though he voted on the side of using it several times in the past.

Hypocrites. These people don’t deserve to be Senators.

One of the biggest problems with the debate in today’s political world is that there are a significant number of people who pay far, far too much attention to Fox News.

The reason this is bad is that Fox News is deliberately partisan, and worse still, they are liars. They intentionally coordinate their message with whatever the Republicans are pushing, and they do not hesitate to lie.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

(here’s the link if you can’t see the embedded video: http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/002577/ )

This video shows Sean Hannity claiming that then-Senator Barack Obama, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator Harry Reid were against the use of the process called “reconciliation”.

Today the Democratic Party is in the majority in the Senate and is possibly going to use reconciliation to get some health care reform through.

The thing is… Hannity is a liar. In the segment, there’s a little insight into the truth- these Senators were NOT speaking about reconciliation. They were discussing the Senate potentially using the “nuclear option”… but what they referred to as the “nuclear option” is NOT the reconciliation process.

The nuclear option, in the context of the Senate, is a process that would basically use a parliamentary procedure to end a filibuster. This is different than reconciliation, which prevents a filibuster from starting in the first place. Slate ran a pretty good explanation of it.

The nuclear option was being discussed by Reid, Clinton, and Obama in 2005 when the Democrats were trying to stop some of the Bush Administration’s judicial appointments.

The point here is that reconciliation to pass changes to spending and the law is a different deal than the nuclear option- and Hannity KNOWS that. He knows that very well, and yet in today’s context he aired that video of Reid, Clinton, and Obama, trying to make it look like they were against reconciliation just a few years ago and now are for it.

In other words, he’s lying. Worse still, he’s using his lie to smear his political opponents. (It’s one thing to merely lie about what your side wants; it’s another thing to lie about the other guys’ morality.)

And do you know why Hannity had to use video of Obama, Reid, and Clinton talking about the nuclear option and NOT video of them talking about reconciliation? It’s because they didn’t oppose the use of the procedure back then. Oh, they opposed the bills that the Republican majority in the Senate were trying to pass, but they didn’t speak out against reconciliation.

In other words, Hannity couldn’t find video that actually makes them hypocrites, so he used video of them talking about something else. It was a deliberate choice to try and make his opponents look bad.

Oh, by the way, reconciliation? That process has been used 22 times to pass bills in a method that avoids filibusters since 1980. (See this and this.)

Out of those 22 times, 16 of them were accomplished by Republican-majorities in the Senate. That’s right- over 70% of the times that a party used reconciliation, it was the Republicans.

So remember, the next time you see some Republican Senator like Alexander, Hatch, McConnell, Gregg, Grassley, or Snowe talking about how bad the Democrats using reconciliation would be, remember that THEY were the ones who used it just a few years ago to pass some of President Bush’s tax cuts.

Wow.

I mean, WOW. WOW!

Here’s a quickie review of the James Cameron movie “Avatar”…

Plot: You’ve seen this story before, maybe a half-dozen times, really.

Writing: Sometimes painfully cliche.

3D: Awesome.

Computer graphics: Incredible.

Overall Spectacle: Totally awesome. Must-see.

Seriously. If you’re a movie snob who says “film” and looks at popular movies and thinks they suck simply because the low-brow masses enjoy them, then you’re probably going to hate “Avatar”.

BUT… if you’re a more normal person who just wants to be entertained, you have GOT to see this movie, in 3D, while it’s in the theaters. Simply amazing. And in IMAX, on a true IMAX screen, it’s even more amazing.

Must-see. Go see it NOW.