All of a sudden it has become fashionable for worried liberals to start pandering to the Tea Party fringies, saying how their anger and frustration is understandable and rational.  Please count me OUT of that absurd trend.

The Washington Post wrote a "news story" that is little but a thinly-veiled press release for the National Tea [...]

Without further comment:

An Open Letter to Our Fellow Americans

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February 3, 2010
We live in a world that increasingly demands more dialogue than monologue. President Obama’s January 29th question-and-answer session with Republican leaders gave the public a remarkable window into the state of our union and governing process. It was riveting and [...]

No poofters among this sweaty bunch of fierce, manly soldiers. That much you can bank on.  At least none that were public. You know than men never had sex with men in the year 1356.
A comforting thought we've made zero progress on that front in, say, the last 7-800 years. And if such Real Men [...]

Last week, uber-numbers-cracker Nate Silver laid out in cold, cool stats the "something" in the health care bill that is way better than nothing.  His projection:

In short, a family of  four making about $55,000 a year will not be living in Socialist Paradise because of the Senate version of the health care bill. But their [...]

The health care bill remains alive if rather unstable and probably permanently deformed.
I think the best lesson to derive from all this is summed up rather well by E.J. Dionne and  Paul Krugman,
Here are a few other random lessons dished out over the past year.

Jay Rosen interviews Clay Shirky on "newspapers and thinking the unthinkable."

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I love the name of my friend Tim's blog -- Biped Twilight.  I felt reaffirmed in this pleasure this evening during a chat with my shrink.
We heartily agreed that, in the end, it's up to people. And people don't always come through. Better said, they rarely come through.
It's not that humans are born bad. They [...]

The corpse in the middle, in the blue shirt, was a friend of mine. Spanish-born Jesuit priest Ignacio Martin-Baro.
It was twenty years ago today that he and five other Jesuit clergy were dragged from their beds at the Central American University in San Salvador by national army troops and, in cold blood, were shot to [...]

A few years back, as a heat wave swept the California central valley taking the lives of three farm workers, I wrote a long feature piece lamenting how very little the plight of the Golden State's campesinos had improved. The piece inevitably included some reporting on what is unquestionably the historic failure of Cesar Chavez' [...]

The Senate is about to take up debate on the historic issue of health care but in case you haven't noticed, next week will be  Sarah's Week.

Neighboring San Bernardino County has just declared a state of emergency over the spread of Swine Flu and here in L.A. County several dozen people have already succumbed to the same. I'd like to give you the exact figure, but the Director of the L.A. County Health Department has decided to play hard to get [...]

Now that was helpful, wasn't it?  Rep. Dennis Kucinich took a knife-edged vote to pass historic health care reform and turned it into a razor-edge win by joining with knuckle-dragging Repubicans and shivering Blue Dogs to vote NO.    Dennis has a long and articulate justification for what was, in reality, an asinine vote.

Here's the latest development from the First Free Territory in the Americas: Cuban security agents picked up prominent and dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez off the street and beat her when she resisted getting into the car.  She was later released but is still barred from traveling outside of Cuba.

Sanchez is guilty, of course, of what [...]

Spin Tuesday's election results any way you wish, tell yourself any fair tale you please, but the hard, cold truth is that the Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey MUST be taken as a serious warning signal to Democrats.And more importantly, as a warning to the rest of us who are subject to the [...]

Gavin Newsom is out.  That was fast. And merciful.
Cancel the election.

Well, after all the town hall hystrionoics of this past summer, after a tea-marinated series of accusations of creeping socialism, the rise of Birthers and Beck and the suggestion that the Presisdent of the United States is an illegal alien, the results are now in.

Om Monday, the Obama administration Justice Department is announcing a clearer policy on handling medical marijuana sellers and users. It will no longer arrest or prosecute those who are in compliance with state laws. There are currently more than a dozen states where "medical marijuana" sales are legal.
The Bush administration, for the most part, ignored [...]

I watched Michael Moore's latest, "Capitalism: A Love Story," and found pretty much what I expected.  My short review is that if Michael Moore could only take himself out of his own films, and maybe even stop directing them, they'd be pretty good.

It all began woth GOP Party Leader Limbaugh wishing failure on the American presidency.  Yay!
Then increasingly fringe conservatives applauded when Obama's plea for Chicago as home to the Olympics was rebuffed. Huzzah!
Now the Republican National Committee and its goofball leader calls the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Obama "unfortunate. Booooo!