Just carve out fifteen minutes and watch this. Trust me.

The missing public option. For the record, I don’t support killing the bill — any modest improvement will still affect real people’s lives. Maybe this Rube Goldberg contraption, sans public option, really is the best we could ever have hoped for, in this political climate. That doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating.

Here’s the full article referenced in the fourth panel.

As to the question of whether or not Obama campaigned on the public option, I defer to Ezra Klein:

For one thing, it was in his campaign plan, which is to say, he campaigned on it … The White House argues that they didn’t emphasize it in public speeches, and according to Salon’s Alex Koppelmann, that’s true. But speaking as someone who did a lot of reporting on their health-care plan, they emphasized it privately quite a bit. It was, in fact, their answer to a lot of the other flaws in their proposal. So whether Obama used it in his speeches, his campaign purposefully pushed it to, at the least, some reporters, which is to say they worked to ensure that people knew about the public option’s important role in their health-care thinking.

Obama’s latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That’s even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it’s a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama.

An update from our friends at Glox News.

Under the category of “I am not making this up”: Sarah Palin says she used to cross the border to Canada to get health care.

She now considers this “ironic.”

Okay, so life got a little complicated for me for awhile there, but things are starting to calm down … so hopefully I’ll be able to deal with the signed edition of the Philly posters before too long. (You can see the whole set here.) I have more names on the wait list than I have posters, so those are most likely all spoken for already, but if I do end up with any sets left over I’ll post a note here. In the meantime it looks like they’re starting to sell (unsigned) copies of the posters at pearljam.com (click on North American Tour Posters). The catch is, you have to join the fan club ($20, click on Memberships) to be eligible to purchase them, but if you end up buying the whole set, that’s just an extra five bucks a poster. (I have no financial stake in fan club sales, just posting this for those of you who might be interested.)

Friday edit: Second poster goes on sale at pearljam.com today, next two are up next week.

(Also adding, for TMW fans not familiar with the PJ poster world: these are 18 x 24 silk-screened posters — printing is much more beautiful than standard offset litho.)

Too much crazy.

Wed. edit: same cartoon on Credo’s site, which has a redesigned and very easy-to-navigate archive of my work.

(After Godwin): anyone skeptical of internet triumphalism will inevitably be compared to an old man ranting about the kids on his lawn.

I’m stepping on my own toes a little bit here since this is part of next week’s cartoon, but if you haven’t seen the exchange between the Times’ Public Editor and Brad Friedman, this bit is really quite extraordinary:

Hoyt… [stands] behind it because, as he wrote [emphasis his]: “The story says O’Keefe dressed up as a pimp and trained his hidden camera on Acorn counselors. It does not say he did those two things at the same time.”

I wouldn’t let my six year old kid get away with an excuse that flimsy.

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Still catching up on everything, and just noticed a recent spate of donations from readers. Not entirely sure why, given the frequency with which I’ve been blogging, but I thank you for the implicit support nonetheless.