Steele the First, engaging in what therapists call projection:

"See, the thing is, Liberals just don't respect people who disagree with them, and they don't respect ideas that differ from theirs. Liberals demonize and smear and hate. "

This is, of course, a description of the hard Right mindset, not the plurality of opinions and perspectives that voted Obama into office. Oh, no, not a bit of demonizing going on in Limbaugh Country...

I thank Steele for adding the modifier "from a certain Christian perspective" to his arguments, once he gets down to them, against stem cell research. From a certain other Christian perspective, one that doesn't rely on selectively literal reading of the Bible and certain familiar forms of special pleading, this is another appropriation of Christ by political evangelism to stampede people into endorsing their electoral agenda. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, abortion, or stem cell research; what one infers from his silence on those matters is open for debate, but I'm pretty sure that the demonization, smear, and hatred of America's religious Right is not what he was looking for in his followers.

...the "Judeo-" is silent.

One of my favorite implicit critiques of utopian languages like Esperanto is in the first volume of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series, where he mentions in passing that universal linguistic transparency (via the Babelfish) is a path to more, not less, warfare. The more sentient beings can make themselves truly understood by one another, the less they are bound to get along.

I recall the after-dinner speaker at an Esperanto conference I attended in the 1970s warming up the crowd with a few jokes about Ido- and Interlingua-speakers. ("Idist walks into a bar...") This makes Adams's point for me, sorta kinda. Esperanto remains a noble experiment...we just need a better species to come along and speak it.

Isn't he the clown with the Carrot Top hair, the big shoes and fast food chain? Ah. Now I see why the Right loves Reagan--they're confusing him with the Happy Meal guy.

anyone watching Graham's fumbling attempts to stumble on a coherent question to ask and not come to the realization that he's dumber than a bucket of dead squid. This ignoramus is passing judgment on a highly qualified judge like Sotomayor? What a great electoral system we have allowed ourselves to end up with.

The civics class boilerplate about the states being "laboratories of democracy" was intermittently true at one time--FDR's New York in 1929-32 was out front of the Hoover administration on dealing with the Depression, and California at one time led the Feds in environmental regulation. But federalism also gave us slavery, and now it has given us a system where strong lobbies like Health Insurance and Pharma can divide and conquer, destroying access to health care one cheaply purchased legislature at a time. Dr. Vox has drawn attention to this forcefully and well.

And federally, helpful lobbyists are on call on Capitol Hill with "expertise" at interpreting and even drafting legislation. This leaves congressmen and senators free to do their real work, which is on behalf of the same lobbyists and their PACs. The first article of the Constitution ("All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States") has been a dead letter for several decades; all legislative powers are vested in anyone with a nice suit and enough money to seize it.

Elections have consequences, except when the people writing your laws aren't elected--and the same lobbyists are writing the laws; they're also there whispering into this President's ear as they did the last two. My best wishes to Dr. Vox and his patients until this changes.

We'll find out which lobbying firm the good (ex-)senator will be representing in due course. Probably just a matter of moving from the dugout to the front office, as it were.

I say this just because another GOP sex scandal would be too mind-numbingly predictable to contemplate.

of attempting to craft a health care reform bill entirely in-house, without Congressional collaboration. Obama seems to be making the opposite mistake. It's a great idea, in principle; restore the balance of powers that has been in abeyance since '01 by working with Congress to write the health care plan, letting a thousand flowers (or half a dozen competing health care bills) bloom in the meantime.

But now it's time for Truman's The Buck Stops Here doctrine. Obama needs to pick and choose the features of the various competing bills he wants, and apply some good old fashioned executive arm twisting and log rolling to make sure that THE bill, when it is voted on, includes those features. He needs to use the bully pulpit, old fashioned patronage, whatever--but he cannot continue to pretend that Congress is an equal partner in this process. Congress is piranha bait at this point; what do YOU believe we need, Mr. President?

Ironically, many of Truman's first-term difficulties came from the fact that he truly wanted to collaborate with Congress in drafting legislation; he'd provide the principles he wanted to see embodied in a bill and expect Congress to write the actual bills. After 20 years of FDR's more ex cathedra style, this led to chaos until Truman learned to exert the right sort of leadership in his dealings with Congress. The results (the Marshall Plan, etc.) were nothing to sneeze at. The difference is that Obama has less than a year to learn the lessons that Truman had nearly four years to learn.