the healthcare post is a socialist liberal hippie. with no morals.

Reasons Not to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill

On the whole, Hamsher is right to argue that the Senate bill is a deeply flawed piece of legislation which, as Paul Krugman observes, “we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it.” In fact, “with few exceptions, sweeping initiatives in the U.S. system start small, are often flawed, and then are expanded, sometimes improved, sometimes not.” Medicare began as smaller program that was expanded to cover “hospice benefits, mammograms and pap smears to detect cancer, and most recently, under the Republicans, prescription drugs.”

Obama, at the end of the day.

There have definitely been compromises, and there have been letdowns. There have been mistakes, and there have been broken promises. I’m not thrilled with the slow pace of Gitmo, I’m not thrilled about any number of things, but I see slow progress. But there have also been unrealistic expectations- Obama was always a risk averse, cautious, careful person- I remember the many discussions we had here regarding Obama as poker player versus John McCain and his reckless love of roulette, and we used to agree that a cautious poker player who studies the opposition and thinks long ball and treats us like adults was desirable.

There are no poor white people.

The charitable interpretation rests on the invisibility of white suffering. It rests on the erasure of Clay County. It rests on the notion that the white poor are not merely the white poor, but white trash. It's a formula makes an anchor of black America, straps it to a larger population of poor white Americans and then drops them in the Mississippi. It's a con that asks large swaths of white folks to suffer poverty in shame and silence.

And now for something entirely different: Seven Reasons for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays.

But some of us love the holidays. We love the parties, the decorations, the smell of pine trees in people's houses, the excuse to eat ourselves sick, the reminder that we do in fact love our family and friends. We're cognizant of the shameless twisting and mawkish piety and whatnot -- but we can deal with it. It's worth it for an excuse to drink eggnog with our loved ones and bellow out "Angels We Have Heard On High" in half-assed four-part harmony. (In fact, when it comes to the holidays, atheists are in something of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position. If we scorn them, we get called Scroogy killjoys... but if we embrace them, we get called hypocrites. Oh, well. Whaddya gonna do.)