Cheap Blogging Crutch 09.14

It’s Showdown Week for the Baucus Six, With a Medicaid Fight Looming
Max Baucus is finally ready to put his chairman's seal of approval on some health care legislation this week. The only question is if he'll be able to forge some sort of compromise with the bill they've written and get Republican lawmakers to sign on (HA!), or if he'll just rubber stamp the bill without their support. Because after all, after the bill that you've crafted with the expressed purpose of gaining Republican votes fails to get the Republican votes of the people who directly negotiated with, the only solution is to move forward with that bill and all the provisions in it that failed to capture Republican votes.

Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America'
I don't know whether to sing a verse from the "Star Spangled Banner" or "America, Fuck Yeah!" here. A dramatic film about Darwin that is only marginally about evolution has gotten distribution in every other country, but can't get distribution here...for some reason. Now sure, some might say that it's just because the movie is "Flat, dull, and painful to sit through", but that didn't stop Transformers 2, or half-to-three quarters of all movies that get released. Oh well, maybe we can get a documentary about the facts behind the Creation Museum instead.

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy
Who would have ever thought that a census could ever provide a furious smackdown of the Bush legacy? But when you look at the trend lines from previous Presidents comparing median income, adults living in poverty, children living in poverty, access to health care, Americans uninsured, Americans receiving employer health insurance, Amer.....look it's rather a lot of things, we'll just say "everything either declined in a bad way or rose in a bad way" and be done with it.

Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman
What is it with these Nobel Prize winning economists and their need to let everyone know that not only were they right about the economic collapse, but that they have some new soul crushing revelations? Things are worse and problems are larger? Who would have ever thought that would be the result after a Congress completely in the pocket of the banking and financial industries committed themselves to doing nothing other than handing out large sums of cash? For those of you that are interested, this is Part 124,868 in the series America: Not Learning From It's Mistakes.

Santorum Admits to Pondering Run for Republican Presidential Nomination - Asks for Prayers
Can he tell if the prayers are coming from heathen sources only wishing for him to engage in electoral failure that matches this moment of greatness? Surely he's going to be able to tell that my prayers, Sean's prayers, and Dan Savage's prayers aren't filled with anything other than malicious intent, right?