Let’s face it – there’s tons of problems with the current health care reform package, but it beats the alternative, which would be the status quo. Liberals are realizing that:

Dennis Kucinich's flip on the health care vote this morning is symbolic of a broader shift among liberals. Last month 73% said they supported the plan with 19% opposed. Now 89% say they support the plan with only 3% opposed. Whether it's because of the President's increasing visibility on the issue or because liberals finally decided the current bill is as good as they're going to get and better than nothing, there's been a big rise in support since early February.

I’m waiting to hear from certain “progressive bloggers” how we are all wrong in wanting this bill instead of nothing.

Now this is funny:

Birthers beware: Hawaii may start ignoring your repeated requests for proof that President Barack Obama was born here.

As the state continues to receive e-mails seeking Obama's birth certificate, the state House Judiciary Committee heard a bill Tuesday permitting government officials to ignore people who won't give up.

"Sometimes we may be dealing with a cohort of people who believe lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy," said Lorrin Kim, chief of the Hawaii Department of Health's Office of Planning, Policy and Program Development.

You know, they could have a video of Obama being born and Ronald Reagan delivering him with Pearl Harbor in the background and these morons still won’t buy it. They are so removed from reality that it is really scary. Welcome to Dale Gribble’s America.

Jane Hamsher has been busted working with the teabaggers to kill health care reform. She can call herself a progressive, but I sure as hell never will.

Kucinich is holding his press conference right now and said he will vote for health care reform, but pledges to continue to fight on towards true reform. You go boy!

I’ve been saying it all along and now Mitch McConnell is validating it:

Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.

Republicans embraced it. Democrats denounced it as rank obstructionism. Either way, it has led the two parties, as much as any other factor, to where they are right now. Republicans are monolithically against the health care legislation, leaving the president and his party executing parliamentary back flips to get it passed, conservatives revived, liberals wondering what happened.

In the process, Mr. McConnell, 68, a Kentuckian more at home plotting tactics in the cloakroom than writing legislation in a committee room or exhorting crowds on the campaign trail, has come to embody a kind of oppositional politics that critics say has left voters cynical about Washington, the Senate all but dysfunctional and the Republican Party without a positive agenda or message.

See that? They hadn’t even seen the Democratic plans yet and decided to vote against them. They don’t give a crap how good a plan might be. The Democrats could put forth a plan that eliminates taxes, employees every American, gets rid of our national debt and gives every American full coverage health insurance and the Republicans would vote no.

They are not in office to serve the country – they are in to only serve their party. It seems like communist Russia all over again, where party trumps everything. The GOP – the party that hates Democracy.

OK – This just has me laughing:

Gov. Rick Perry moved Tuesday to step up Texas' law enforcement presence along the Mexico border to handle the threat of spillover violence from escalating drug cartel warfare in cities like Juarez and Matamoros.

The governor also continued his call for additional federal assistance, saying he was activating the state violence contingency plan in the meantime because “with the safety of Texans on the line, we can't afford to wait.”

(emphasis added)

And this is why I couldn’t be President. If I were I would be on the phone with Perry right now saying “you want your sovereignty – well you fucking got it asshole”.

Really – this guy talks about how Texas should just leave the union. Well time to act like you are on your own and show us you can handle it. Game on Governor Secession.

Dennis Kucinich is holding a press conference tomorrow morning to announce his vote on the health care reform bill. Just now on MSNBC, Howard Fineman just reported that his sources are telling him that Kucinich will announce he is supporting the bill now. If this is the case, then this is very big news and a key hurdle to final passage.

Michele Bachmann is telling people to break the law and calling for civil disobedience:

At a rally at the Minnesota State Capitol on Saturday, Bachmann declared illegitimate the potential route that House Democrats could take to pass the health care bill. She was specifically railing against a parliamentary tactic by which the House could skip voting on the Senate bill by declaring it passed as part of the reconciliation bill. Bachmann pronounced this to be taxation without representation. "They have just started a revolution -- and they did it," said Bachmann.

"But mark my words, the American people aren't gonna take this lying down," Bachmann later said. "We aren't gonna play their game, we're not gonna pay their taxes. They want us to pay for this? Because we don't have to. We don't have to. We don't have to follow a bill that isn't law. That's not the American way, and that's not what we're going to do."

Not the American way? Where were her complaints when the Republicans did the exact same thing?

– The 2001 Bush Tax Cuts [HR 1836, 3/26/01]
– The 2003 Bush Tax Cuts [HR 2, 3/23/03]
– Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 [HR 4297,5/11/06]
– The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 [H. Con Res. 95, 12/21/05]

(By tlw3 via Alan.com)

Bachmann never once called those pieces of legislation illegal or un-American, despite the very same rule being used to pass them. As matter of fact those are the very issues that Republicans, like Bachmann, love campaigning on. They consider it huge victories for their party.

But the fact that Bachmann is out there trying to provoke people to break the laws of this land is a violation of her oath of office. She is supposed to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not define it. Given that, she should be either censured or suspended from the Congress, and that should actually come from the Republican leadership. Instead they stay silent on her crazy ramblings, so from now on when she calls for illegal activities we will say it’s the GOP calling for them. By their silence, it makes it obvious that the GOP is sanctioning what she says, so they must agree with it – right? That’s exactly what we would have heard if this was 2006 and a Democrat was doing this.

If you thought the internet was getting nastier then you were right. A report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance shows an increase of nastiness online of 20% in 2009:

The report, based on some 11,500 problematic Web sites, social networks , chat forums, twitter posts, other Internet postings, found that hate-filled language is increasingly filling social networks. In compiling it, researchers for the Wiesenthal center found such disturbing online content as video footage showing bomb-making instructions and hate games — including one about bombing Haitian earthquake victims.

The report found a 20% increase to 11,500 in hate-filled social networks, Web sites, forums, blogs, Twitter feeds, and so on (up from 10,000 last year). It notes that beyond its role in our social lives, the Internet often acts as the incubator and validator of dangerous conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 and organ theft.

(h/t Alan Colmes)

They forgot to add birthers to that list of conspiracy theorists.

The great thing about the internet is that it is a global forum based upon free thought. The bad thing about the internet – it is a global forum based upon free thought. That’s one reason a lot of sites have zero tolerance policies against hate speech and violence. Of course it appears that the left wing blogs are far more vigilant on these commenters than the blogs on the right.

This morning on MSNBC Erin Burnett was talking about the FCC releasing their plan this week to increase the nation’s broadband speeds and penetration. During the segment she pointed to a new report stating that we are #18 when it comes to internet speed. Romania even beats us out.

Is it any wonder that we are struggling in the 21st century economy when we are still stuck with 20th century technology? To exemplify this, take a look at the U.K.:

The Tory party has once again pledged super-fast broadband, and has gone a step further by stating that if the party wins the general election it will provide Britain with the fastest broadband in Europe.

Broadband speeds have become a big part of the promises that the various political parties have been making in a bid to win votes in the up and coming general election. The Labour government has already put its own plans in place to improve broadband access and speeds, and recently the Conservative party also promised to ensure that Britain would get faster broadband speeds and better access.

When do we hear our politicians campaign on increasing internet speeds? Even during the 2008 campaign it was never really that big of an issue. True a lot of that had to do with a Republican candidate who didn’t even know how to open an email, but still.

If the U.S. wants to really compete we have to bring the backbone of the 21st century economy up to par in our nation. The U.S. was instrumental in bringing the world into the technological age. Now we seem to be ignoring it.

So here we are, the final week for the health care reform push. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens today. I got a feeling the signals will be mixed all the way up to the final vote this weekend. From one minute to the next we will hear “they have the votes”, “they don’t have the votes”.

A lot of Democrats in the House have a problem with trusting the Senate to do the right thing later on, and I can’t blame them one bit. On the other hand, a lot of the pro-life Democrats who were going to vote against the bill seem to be switching now. That really adds to the complication of the whip count.

So what do you think the final outcome will be? I really have no idea at this point.

Anita Dunn is on the round table on This Week. When asked about the health care bill she decided to use the Medicare-D drug supplemental as an example by saying “well people didn’t like that at first either”.

Guess what Anita? They still don’t like it! The Medicare-D program has left seniors with these new evils like doughnut holes, where they have to pay out hundreds and thousands out of pocket. They are also subject to predatory insurance salesmen now, pushing them to buy their program only to find that later on in the year they change the formulary, removing needed drugs from the list of what they will buy, and now that person is stuck with them until the end of the year.

And let’s not forget the implementation of the program. Thousands of seniors around the country were unable to get their medication. It was a cluster fuck to put it nicely.

No Anita – don’t use Medicare-D as an example to push for healthcare reform. You are going to do far more harm than good.

Or as I like to call him – Pope Been A Dick:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.

The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

And as Pam Spaulding points out, this isn’t the only trouble for the asshole:

The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict's handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977-1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes - a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.

And they may lead to further questions about what the pontiff knew about the scope of abuse in his native Germany, when he knew it and what he did about it during his tenure in Munich and quarter-century term at the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

the Munich archdiocese admitted that it had allowed a priest suspected of having abused a child to return to pastoral work in the 1980s, while Benedict was archbishop. It stressed that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger didn't know about the transfer and that it had been decided by a lower-ranking official.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement late Friday noting that the Munich vicar-general who approved the priest's transfer had taken "full responsibility" for the decision, seeking to remove any question about the pontiff's potential responsibility as archbishop at the time.

Victims' advocates weren't persuaded.

"We find it extraordinarily hard to believe that Ratzinger didn't reassign the predator, or know about the reassignment," said Barbara Blaine, president and founder of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

I would love to see history be made here – someone go from Pope to prison.

One of the bigger wingnut bloggers, Dan Riehl, is out using the horrible accident that Harry Reid’s family was in to push the lie of “death panels”:

Come on, Harry - do your civic duty. The nation's broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don't bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?

And I sit here thinking of how the wingnuts like Malkin go off on hissy fits everytime some anonymous commenter posts on a progressive blog saying they wish Cheney’s last heart attack would have done him in, or that Rush would have died in the hospital. These people aren’t just hypocrites, they are sick and twisted assholes.

No – it isn’t a bad thing. Quiet the contrary, this is excellent news. Part of the Recovery Act, passed last year, is slated to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure.

This is something desperately needed in our country so that we can compete in the 21st century economy. It should be considered a crime that we still have portions of our country that have no access to broadband internet, and those that do usually end up paying inflated prices by the monopoly that is the telecom industry. Just this week, one member of the FCC lashed out at the industry:

Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn on Wednesday indirectly hammered Comcast for recently raising its broadband prices.
As Cyburn and other FCC commissioners discussed broadband affordability at a digital literacy summit on Tuesday, Comcast instituted a $2 rate increase on its lowest-tier customers.

That prompted Clyburn to issue a statement rebuking Internet service providers, in general, for their recent rate hikes -- though the commissioner's comments seemed indirectly targeted at Comcast.

Sadly this is like that song that’s stuck in your head – you hear it over and over again. The telecom companies have become much like the health insurance companies. They get to operate as monopolies and can do whatever they want with the prices, leaving consumers stuck with them.

This might all be coming to an end though, and here’s how you can help. The FCC has set up a website where they are asking citizens to have their computer do a simple test to check your connection speeds. You do have to give your address, but that’s just so they know what areas the tests are coming from. You can do the test here.

But what if you don’t have broadband? Well the FCC isn’t forgetting about you either. If you live in one of these ‘dead zones’ then you can either fill out a report online or call the FCC at 1-888-CALL-FCC.

This is the product of having a 21st century President. We really need to catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to broadband penetration, speeds and prices. Hopefully we will have that very soon.