Check out Health Care for America NOW, a new $40 million campaign being launched today. Member organizations include the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Moveon and lots of other people. They seem to understand that electing “nicer” people to office doesn’t make much difference without a social movement pressuring them. If we ever get universal health care in this country, it will be because of something like this.

I would never deny the importance of the FISA stuff, etc. And it’s possible to do lots of things at once. But health care should get BY FAR the most effort and attention from progressives, online and elsewhere.

You can join HCAN here. And this is their first ad:

A somewhat revealing interview with the author of the Times Magazine’s recent love letter to Rush Limbaugh:

BOB GARFIELD: Your piece on Limbaugh was very generous, I would say even flattering. You seem to give him a pass for his excesses. And when I’m talking about excesses, I’m talking about ad hominum attacks, truly mean-spirited stuff that goes way beyond satire and into the politics of vilification, and also playing fast and loose with the truth, seizing on some news item and grossly misrepresenting it and creating a lot of hubbub, using as the kernel of his satire something that is just fundamentally untrue.

ZEV CHAFETS: Well, do you have an example of that? I’m not an apologist for Rush Limbaugh, but I’m a little bit defensive because I think that the liberal media takes such an unfair view of him.

I hear people being vilified on the radio, on all sorts of radio stations by all sorts of people all day long. And Limbaugh is not worse than many of the ones I hear, even on NPR. He just has a different point of view.

BOB GARFIELD: The NAACP should have a riot rehearsal, they should get a liquor store and practice robberies?

ZEV CHAFETS: Not my sense of humor, but it’s not a lie.

BOB GARFIELD: Did Limbaugh not say that Abu Ghraib was no worse than a Skull and Bones initiation?

ZEV CHAFETS: Yeah, he did. It’s his opinion.

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. Did he not deny that genocide was committed against the American Indian and state that the population is higher now than it was before Christopher Columbus — of Native Americans?

ZEV CHAFETS: Mm, I don’t know. I didn’t ask him that either. I don’t know what the population was before Christopher Columbus.

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, it was about 15 million and, you know, by the 19th century it was 250,000. I mean, that’s what – that’s the numbers.

As with so many things in this life, I can only say … really? “It’s not a lie” that the NAACP should “get a liquor store and practice robberies?” It’s “his opinion” that Abu Ghraib was no worse than a Skull and Bones initiation?

I mean, to steal a riff from Atrios, it’s my opinion that Zev Chafets has oral sex with farm animals. Hey — it’s my opinion.

Josh Marshall is right when he says that John McCain’s economic plan is hilarious. Apparently Maverick thinks he can balance the budget with all the savings we’ll reap from winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s a sneak peek at his economic advisors coming up with their budget plan :

Seriously though, there’s a few problems with McCain’s miraculous budget plan. First, it doesn’t contain any numbers, just wishful thinking. I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that you’re going to need to do some math at some point.

Second, we can’t afford the wars now. Paying for the occupation of two countries full of people who hate us is actually causing a lot of the budget problems that McCain is claiming to solve. If things get remarkably better under a McCain administration, we’d still going to be spiraling even deeper into debt to finance his grand plans for a North Korea-style permanent military presence. Besides, even if he were to end the war and pull all of our troops out of both countries, there’s a big difference between promising to stop digging a hole and actually having a plan to fill it back in.

Finally, if John McCain’s plan to win the wars is related to the Bush policy he’s spent the last year and a half cheerleading, then it’ll just make our budget problems worse. We’re in a “surge”, remember? All those extra troops cost a lot of money, so if John McCain’s bluster about the surge working can be taken at face value, then the only way to win the war is send more troops or, to convert this into the McCain budget plan, the only way for us to save money is to spend a lot more of it.

I highly recommend David Sirota’s new book The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. Many progressive political books, and just about all conservative political books, are crap and not worth the paper they’re printed on. That’s because politics is as simple as tic tac toe, and there’s never anything new to say about it. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adam in 1813,

To me then it appears that there have been differences of opinion, and party differences, from the establishment of governments to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our country, that these will continue through all future times…everyone takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few…nothing new can be added by you or me to what has been said by others, and will be said in every age.

But what can be done is serious, high quality reporting on what exactly is happening in the times we’re living in. Almost no one ever tries this because it’s hard work. But Sirota does in The Uprising—it’s full of useful and encouraging information about what regular people are doing all over the country to deal with the extremely serious problems we face.

This week Sirota is at TPM Cafe to talk about it. Check it out.

The wisdom of Glenn Beck, here.

This was a surprise?

Bryan Carisone, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Raritan, N.J., “absolutely loves” his new GMC Denali XL, an extra-large sport utility vehicle with televisions built into the leather seats. But in June, one week after he bought it, he pulled into a station on a near-empty tank and watched the total climb higher and higher — to $109.

“It just about killed me,” Mr. Carisone said.

At the beginning of June, oil was selling for $138 a barrel. Yet at some point during that month, Mr. Carisone bought an “extra large” SUV, and was then shocked to discover how much it cost to fill the tank.

Wow. Just, wow.

… my wife points out that the name of the SUV is an anagram for “denial”…

On the field before the All-Star Game, Major League Baseball plans to assemble the largest gathering of Hall of Fame players in baseball history. And as fans salute their heroes, the former players will join the crowd in saluting the American flag — one that is roughly 75 feet by 150 feet, as long as a 15-story building is tall, spread horizontally over the Yankee Stadium turf.

Hundreds of volunteers are needed to unfurl and hold an enormous flag. Handlers often shake their arms, creating a ripple effect.

That is a relatively small flag by big-event standards in American sports these days. But it will signal the latest can’t-miss blend of sports and patriotism, a combination increasingly presenting itself through gigantic American flags, unfurled by dozens or hundreds of people in an attempt to elicit a sense of awe and nationalism in the surrounding crowd.

* * *

“People go ape when they see it,” said Jim Alexander, a retired Coast Guard commander who runs Superflag, the company that basically invented the industry and once held the world record for the largest flag, which temporarily hung on the Hoover Dam. It was 255 by 505 feet and has been surpassed by a flag in Israel that measures 2,165 by 330 feet. “It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling that takes over a whole stadium. If anyone in the stands opened their mouth and objected, there would be hell to pay.”

Story.

Just in case the revelation that American torturers took their cues from that model of moral clarity that was the Chinese Communist regime hasn’t fully convinced you that the practice is unquestionably, incontrovertibly evil, Christopher Hitchens’ column in the August 2008 Vanity Fair, “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” ought to drive the point home. That is, if the accompanying video, available online at Vanity Fair’s website, doesn’t do it first.

In the video, Christopher Hitchens is brought, hooded and bound, into an austere looking storage room, and placed on a board, slightly elevated at its foot. He is instructed by the similarly masked interrogators on how to call a halt to the procedure, either through a safe word - “red” - or by releasing the “dead man’s handle” - a metal object placed in each hand. A towel is placed over his face and one of the interrogators begins pouring water on Hitchens’ face from an ordinary-looking milk carton. The interrogators demonstrate no more aggression that one might when watering a houseplant. In fact, the process looks so unremarkable that you begin to wonder if they aren’t simply “warming Hitchens up” for something worse.

Seventeen seconds pass, and then Hitchens drops the dead man’s handle. When the hood is removed, it is jarring to see how panic-stricken Hitchens looks.

The rest.

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of children is unconstitutional. Barack Obama immediately said he disagreed with the decision.

Barry Crimmins explains his perspective here:

Does it really matter? The decision has been made and won’t soon be reversed and so Obama’s views don’t particularly matter. Even if the Supremes had ruled the other way, the worst case scenario would only involve the execution of some vicious rapists of children, right? No one else would be affected. No one, that is, except for the raped children and they’d be all for the state-sponsored elimination of these human jackals, wouldn’t they?

I can’t speak on this issue as a raped child. I can only speak as an adult who was raped as a child and I oppose capital punishment for those who rape children. I was much younger than 12 when I was assaulted so in theory, my rapist could have been sent to the death chamber by Sen. Obama’s rules…

Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn’t have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn’t grown into a cruel and heartless man.

The rest.

Thank you, Barry Crimmins. (And thank you, internet, for allowing people to communicate with each other about things that matter.)

A complete puff piece, maybe because the refs have been so thoroughly worked by the likes of Limbaugh that to do anything else would be to betray that famous “liberal bias” that you read so much about, but rarely actually see.

Still, gotta love this:

At dinner the night before, Bill O’Reilly’s name came up, and Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

This may be the one thing on which Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann are in complete agreement.

… adding, how can you write a feature piece about Limbaugh without even mentioning the possible connection between his drug abuse and his loss of hearing? I mean, the radio host goes deaf, plausibly due to his own weaknesses — the sort of weaknesses he has built an empire out of excoriating in others — and it’s politely overlooked…?

That’s what I mean by puff piece. Whole article is full of omissions like that.