This morning, I was getting ready to write a thank you note to Senator Kennedy for his inspiring entrance onto the Senate floor yesterday and for voting in favor of the Medicare bill.  I was then planning on CC'ing Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, pretty sure that they voted against it.

Imagine my surprise when I saw this headline in today's Dallas Morning News: Texas senators aid Medicare doctors' pay

AARP, military families, and Texas doctors have been burning up the Senators' phone lines all week, demanding to be heard on the Medicare bill.  Yesterday, Cornyn and Hutchison actually changed their position and voted with constituents instead of Bush.  That's what I call "the power of positive whining."

Excerpts and commentary over the jump...

I've read some funny things this morning, namely Bill Prendergast's diary I had gay sex with John McCain" web page--let's do it!, and billysunday's diary saying that Obama wants to spend four kajillion dollars raising Texas.  This is great stuff--and I think the best way to stop actual smear campaigns is to fight them with satire.  If we can counter every smear with material that's funny, totally outrageous, and more popular than the real smear campaigns, Karl Rove & Company will be forced to call it quits.

Here's another idea to get the--ahem--ball rolling.  McCain needs to be outed as a member of some strange religious group.  How 'bout Pastafarian?

Post your ideas after the jump.

According to nyceve, the phrase I'm going naked refers dumping your health insurance when it's no longer affordable.  If you're "going naked," even though you make more than $35,000, tell your story to Dallas Morning News.  Below is the ad from Friday's paper:

Uninsured? Share your story

04:17 PM CST on Friday, February 15, 2008

The country’s next president could make sweeping decisions affecting health care coverage.

If you make more than $35,000 a year and have no health insurance, we would like to contact you for an upcoming story.

Please contact Dallas Morning News reporter Jason Roberson at 214-977-8737 or e-mail jroberson@dallasnews.com.

The California Nurses Association is always thinking up creative ways to demand universal health care for all Americans.  Their latest effort is a follow up to the brilliant full-page newspaper ad, saying that Dick Cheney, with his history of heart problems, would probably be dead by now if he were an average American.

Now, they've launched the National "Cheney Care" Campaign.  Please take a moment today to visit their website and sign the petition, which will be delivered to the 2008 Presidential Candidates, telling them that we want the same access to health care that they--and Dick Cheney--have.

Last week, nyceve wrote an excellent diary about the health insurance industry, called Lest you doubt what John Edwards means by "corporate greed", in which she provided links to articles about the compensation packages of health insurance and drug company CEOs.

I sent the diary link to John Edwards with this note:

I've heard you talk about making health insurance "affordable," which would mean my tax dollars going to prop up the health insurance industry, which I oppose.  The health insurance industry has had it's shot at the "free market," and they blew it.  We need universal health care, supported by "we, the people," instead of relying on the insurance industry...

Today, I got an email from the campaign.  Sadly, he still doesn't get it.  The Edwards Campaign email and my comments over the jump...

Without federally funded health care--paid for by us, the taxpayer--Cheney would be dead by now, according to the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee.  The organizations placed ads yesterday in Iowa newspapers, which said "If he were anybody else, he'd probably be dead by now."

Cheney spokesperson Megan Mitchell said of the ad, "Something this outrageous does not warrant a response."

It's outrageous, all right, because it's true.  Forty-seven million U.S. citizens have no health insurance at all, and those of us who do have insurance would either have been dropped before we could receive all the care Cheney has received, or the premium would have been raised so much that we could no longer afford to pay it.  Even with insurance, I'd be dead by now, if I had Cheney's problems.  Yes, it is outrageous, and we need universal healthcare now.

O'Reilly got me.  I'm a devil-worshipper--if, by "devil" you mean the process by which ordinary hard boiled eggs are made more interesting by scooping out the yolks, mixing them with mayo, a little bit of spicy mustard, some pepper, and putting them back into the whites with a little paprika sprinkled on top.

In a nation overrun by Puritans and Baptists, have you ever wondeed how the Lord of Darkness became associated with such culinary treats as spicy ham, dressed up eggs, and deep dark chocolate cake?

Follow me over the jump for a brief history of all things deviled...

Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi issued a statement calling Pete Stark's remarks against Bush "inappropriate."  After watching the tape several times, I'm still not quite sure what he said that was controversial, but it did prompt me to bring up some actual inappropriate comments that have been made on Daily Kos by otherwise intelligent people.

One poster, for instance, referred to Bush as "a rat's ass."

Come on, people, that's insulting--to rat's asses.  Rats have cute asses!  Don't believe me?  Follow me over the jump, take a look at some pics, and tell me which one's cuter--Bush, or a rat's ass...

Michael Moore was on Oprah today, and he did a great job of explaining universal health care to the nation.  I was impressed with how polite he was to the "other side," a representative from AHIP.  With grace, eloquence, and compassion he kicked her ass!

As a follow-up, Oprah wants you to tell her what you think: should health care be a right or a luxury, and what would you be willing to give up to give everbody in the nation universal health care?

I told her I'd be willing to give up bombs.  Tell her what you'd give up to give health care to all Americans at this link.  My full response is below the fold...

I'm a Precinct Chair for the Democratic Party in Texas and I'm just a bit put out with the Democrats who actually went along with John Cornyn's resolution condeming the Move On ad.  With all due respect, what the f**k were you thinking?

Well, well, well.  Look what we have here.  Another tough-talking chicken hawk, Ted Nugent, who likes to play with machine guns in the safety of a rock concert.  But when called upon to use the real thing in a real war, he got so scared he wet his pants.  Richard Roeper tells all about draft-dodging Nugent in today's Chicago Sun-Times...

In the late 1990s, back in the old days of message boards and email, I worked online with a group of people from around the world in support of the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland.  I later served in Northern Ireland as an international observer during marching season.  I was surprised when I started getting hate mail in the same vein as Kos posted, from Loyalists who wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and didn't want people from the U.S. supporting the power-sharing agreement. Most of it was incoherent profanity-filled rants, others were specific, saying that I deserved to be killed like Rosemary Nelson.

But I did strike up an ongoing correspondence with a non-violent Loyalist voter, and asked him what percentage of Loyalists are the real hard-core haters.  I asked the same thing of a local numbers-crunching junkie, a Democratic Party judicial candidate.  How many Republicans are the real Fox-viewing, Limbaugh-loving, O'Reilly-believing hard core haters?

Amazingly, they both came back to me with the exact same number...

Remember when the Mark Foley scandal broke, and Fox News tried to change his party affiliation to "Democrat"?  Well, the MSM is at it again.  From Raw Story:

The MSNBC website misidentified a Republican Senator from Louisiana on Friday as a Democrat. The erroneously captioned photo was posted with a news story about Senator David Vitter, who outed himself on Tuesday as a client of the so-called DC Madam, Deborah Palfrey.

"Sen. David Vitter, D-La., may not be Bill Clinton, but he may wish his wife was Hillary Clinton," reads the MSNBC caption.

Smacks of desperation, doesn't it? Check Raw Story for the screen capture.

Michael Moore says he's not an activist, he's just a filmmaker.  All he does is make the movies, he says, and the rest is up to us.

If you're like me, you've been writing your members of Congress and your Senators for decades now, asking why we don't have what other countries have--universal health care.  You've received nothing back but form letter platitudes, telling you how great health care is in the United States.  And health care is good in the U.S., for those fortunate enough to have access to it.

Your member of Coungress, your Senators, and Bush get great care, and you're paying for it.  They don't want the system to change.  They're using every scare tactic in the book right now, in op-eds attacking Michael Moore on everything from how much money he's making to the threat of terrorism from carbombers in the NHS.  If you want universal health care, you need to join the fight right now, starting with helping Michael Moore tackle the onslaught of critics.  Action items and suggested responses to right-wing scare tactics & anti-Moore op-eds below the fold...

On Monday, I wrote a diary outining some action items to help Michael Moore rebut critics of his film "SiCKO."  One of my action items was to sign up with Google News and get an alert by email every time someone writes about Michael Moore, SiCKO, or universal health care.

Tung Sol and Brix alerted us to this article Google vs. Michael Moore, which had a link to Google's marketing campaign aimed directly at Michael Moore: Does negative press make you Sicko?  I suggested sending an email to Lauren Turner, telling that Michael Moore is right about health care.  Apparently, lots of people did just that, 'cause now Google has apologized...

Michael Moore's doing his part.  He gave us the best film of his career, SiCKO and is now busy promoting it on the talk show circuit.  The rest is up to us.  If you want universal health care in this country, start working today, by taking on op-ed writers who are attacking "SiCKO."  Ideas below the fold...  

Last week, in an interview about his new movie Sicko, Michael Moore confronted Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo over the way journalists fail to ask hard questions these days, whether it's about health care or the Iraq war.

Apparently, Good Morning America has been shamed into practicing real journalism, 'cause this morning, they actually ran the story of a woman who was denied coverage retroactively by her insurance company.  Now, Good Morning America wants be the nation's health insurance complaint department...  

(Cross-posted at Sessions Watch):  Occasionally, Congress will vote on a resolution urging another country to take action on a particular matter--in this case, asking the U.K. for an independent inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane, a human rights lawyer who was killed in his home by pro-British loyalists in 1989.

Collusion between British security forces and loyalist terrorists during Northern Ireland's "troubles" has been proved in one investigation after another, most recently in a report by Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, the result of a three-year inquiry proving collusion between the Special Branch and the UVF. (For more information, see this article from The Guardian, Northern Ireland Police Shielded Loyalist Killers).

Yesterday, Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced a resolution supporting an inquiry into Pat Finucane's murder.  Who could say no to that?  Pete Sessions (TX-32), for one...