hwickline.com

RH in Dublin (well, Citywest, but who’s counting?) sends the following tale of life in the Irish suburbs, which I post shamelessly without permission:

The funniest thing just happened. I’m cooking dinner listening to music and went to the back door for a smoke. A bloke on the other side of the wall who I can’t see shouts, in the best Dublin accent, “Joy Division. F**kin’ super”!

Good to know that good taste does not end at the city’s edge. At any rate, I laughed out loud, but that might have something to do with being able to hear the accent so clearly in my head.

Another in a series of excellent infographics from the New York Times. The budget itself seems responsible, taking steps towards reducing the structural deficit, still focused on job creation.

The coverage of it seems asinine: taking Obama to task for not doing more on the deficit, taking Obama to task for not doing more on jobs. Then a shot of some Republican Senator complaining about fiscal irresponsibility. No mention of George W. Bush and his two wars, plus every other damn thing he did, on the national credit card. Evidently we should be finished looking backward, blame Obama, and put Bush’s enablers right back into power.

He couldn’t stand another night with that smug hookah.

Via CG in Dublin, Unhappy Hipsters will make you smile.

More good stuff from Charlie Brooker.

Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, and John Cole at Balloon Juice are three bloggers that I have a lot of respect for, and they’re united this week in their call for the House to end the whining, the cringing, and the fearful crouch, and just pass the damn Senate bill. It’s the best policy course available with the loss of the 60th Senate seat, and it makes good politics.

It’s the best policy course because it contains so much of what liberals have been fighting for in health care reform for decades now. It’s not a perfect bill, but the opposition coming from progressive House members makes very little sense. It’s the best they’ll be able to get without a supermajority in the Senate. For more conservative Democrats, it’s an even clearer case: the Senate bill is closer to what they wanted anyway. Finally, once they pass it, they’ll be able to make changes to the bill via reconciliation, which only requires 51 Senate votes, which they have.

On political grounds, Congresspeople really need to take a minute and think this through. They have already voted for health care reform, and the Congress has spent the better part of a year on this. The Republicans will hammer the hell out of them regardless of what happens now, but wouldn’t it be better to have something to show the American people for that year’s worth of work? Oh, and something that contains hugely popular provisions like an end to being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions?

The Senate bill is there for the passing in the House, at which point the President could sign it, and we could move to talking about the next thing. Or we can spend the next several months talking about why Democrats can’t get anything done, even with huge majorities. This is not a difficult political calculus. Honest it’s not.

Here’s the thing. You can help. Seriously. By calling your Representative. Details are here, but here’s the gist: call the House Switchboard Monday morning at (202) 224-3121. Ask to speak to your Representative. When someone in their office answers, tell them that you support them immediately passing the Senate health care reform bill. It has to be a phone call, because emails are cheap. And it has to be tomorrow because this is all moving quickly, and it could be decided in the next couple days. It will only take a minute, and it could really help.

There was a post at Talking Points Memo yesterday that explains the stakes pretty well, in very human terms. It’s after the jump. Where you can also leave a comment to let me know you called your Representative, or why you don’t think it’s worth it. But read the story first:

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That about sums up where I’m at folks, so rather than offer analysis or ranting, I figured I’d share a few links. First up, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com sez: Let’s play the Blame Game!

Clearly the national environment has gotten worse for the Democrats since Barack Obama’s inauguration one year ago…

Clearly also, the quality of the candidates and the campaign matters a lot, especially in open seat races. Although it might seem strange to have a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, it is not dramatically more strange than having a Democratic Senator from Alaska or Nebraska, or a Republican Representative from New Orleans, all of which our Congress already had before tonight. Martha Coakley, needless to say, was not a good candidate and did not run a good campaign.

Finally, there is a third category: contingencies specific to Massachusetts, but not specific to Coakley. This was a state in which Democrats had twice changed the rules governing Senate succession, first in 2004 to prevent then-governor Mitt Romney from appointing a Republican to take John Kerry’s seat (should he have been elected President), and then again last year to allow Deval Patrick to appoint an interim appointee. Moreover, because it was a special election, the time frame of the campaign was dramatically compressed, making it harder to define the Republican opponent or to recover from any initial missteps in the campaign. Lastly, Massachusetts is unusual in that it already has universal health care and the Democratic health care plan would not do it much good, which allowed the Republican to promise to oppose it without looking like a typical partisan hack.

He then proceeds to do the math for you. Turns out all three factors are needed for a loss this gobsmacking. Plenty of blame to go around!

Next up, paleoconservative Daniel Larison reminds us that candidates matter:

It is a simple observation, and so obvious that it might be considered unnecessary: candidates and campaigns matter. Hoffman showed no interest in the concerns of the district he wanted to represent, his allies belittled local interests as “parochial” and he served as little more than a mouthpiece of national party and movement activist slogans. NY-23 was lost in much the same way that Coakley lost in Massachusetts: a candidate who seemed indifferent to the people he wanted to represent proved to be a horrible fit with the electorate. Similarly, Jim Tedisco in NY-20 ran an atrocious campaign that was marred by poor messaging, confusion over his positions and the interference of the national party. Tedisco, Hoffman and Coakley have something important in common: all of them had every advantage in terms of party registration, funding and and voting patterns, and they squandered all of these. As a result, two solidly Republican districts are now represented by Democrats (Owens and Murphy) and one of the most politically liberal states in the country will have a Republican Senator. There is a pattern, but it is not one that fits self-congratulatory narratives from either party. Parties and candidates that exhibit feelings of entitlement and/or disdain for the voters, the places they live and the issues that actually matter to them will be voted down regardless of how those electorates voted in the past.

Man, Coakley was a terrible candidate, huh?

And finally, what does this mean for health care reform? Jonathan Chait, who is smart, is hopeful:

Here is what I think will happen. The shock and panic will play itself out over a few days. Then the Democrats will assess the situation and realize that letting health care die represents their worst possible option. And then they will make a deal to pass the Senate bill through the House. I am not positive this will happen, but it’s my bet, because elected officials at the national level, dim though they can be, are usually shrewd enough to recognize their political self-interest.

Good Lord I hope he’s right.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

So Google has decided to stop censoring its search results in China. It seems they recently experienced a large-scale attack target on their GMail servers, specifically targeting Chinese human rights activists. They don’t come out and say it, but it’s clear they think the attack came from the Chinese government. Now they’ve decided that they can no longer censor search results on Google.cn. Definitely strikes me as “not evil,” whatever their justifications for allowing censorship up until now. And probably the end of Google.cn, if we’re being honest, but it’s still the right thing to do.

It also points to something larger, I think. As China’s relative economic power has increased during the financial crisis, it’s becoming clear that we’ll have to address the conflict between our economic interests and our values that has been finessed by the last few American administrations, and 2010 might be the year for it. To be clear, I’m not arguing for a new cold war, just a recognition that our relationship has changed, needs to change.

At the risk of making a liar out of myself: I’ll have more to say about this later.

I was vaguely aware that Roger Ebert had been ill for some time, but it’s worse than I thought. After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, he had a series of operations that ultimately left him unable to eat or drink. He’s written a beautiful blog post about what this means for him. It’s not nearly as sad as you would think, and you should read the whole thing.

Aside from being a meditation on cheap candy and the nature of memory, it has a surprising amount to say about blogging (honest, but you’ll have to read to the very end, and I don’t want to spoil it for you). I had no idea Ebert was such a fantastic writer. (via Daring Fireball)

Ta-Nehisi Coates reacts to the recent gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts regarding the ginormous, unstoppable, run-for-your-lives-the-Teapartiers-are-coming Republican wave that will swamp the poor Democrats this November:

If you work for the DNC or RNC, or if you cover politics for the media, elections are the end. The conversation of policy isn’t even really about policy, so much as it’s about how policy will effect the next election. But for others of us, policy is the end. Winning elections is nice, but you don’t elect candidates so that they can stand in front the capitol and look pretty, anymore than you send soldiers to the field for a photo-op. They’re there to do a job. And sometimes the job costs.

This is of a piece with what I was trying to say a few posts ago. It would be good if our media would do more to cover politics as a contest to see who gets to shape policy, instead of the Sophomore Class President/ Superbowl of Style Points way they do now. It would be even better if our politicians did some hard thinking about what public service really means. But it’s not all on them. We need more grown ups who care– not in a “Please Mr. Obama, give us rainbows we were promised!” sort of way, but pushing for good policies that make people’s lives betters, even when that involves compromise.

Maira Kalman closes out her And the Pursuit of Happiness blog at the New York Times with George Washington. Slightly different take than this (from whence the title of this post), but just as informative.

And once again the Times is doing good work on the web: different, interesting, plays well within the medium. (via Kottke, but also Mr. Goodman’s blog some time ago)