Dear Diary....

November 2, 2009

Hard work today--successfully restrained myself from throwing my laptop through the window, and got the work done, too.

Plus, Squeak threw up blood!  He probably heard us talking about my niece, who rescued a stray dog from the street in Naples yesterday.  As she was driving around it, it raised its poor head and looked straight into her eyes.  Being a kind person, she stopped traffic, got out and wrapped the dog in her sweatshirt, and hauled him home.  There are no English-speaking vets in Naples, so she had to wait until this morning to take him into the vet on post.  Last night, though, she said he had a broken leg and was vomiting blood.  I imagine he is on the rainbow bridge, as my niece calls it, by now--if not on the other side already.  But maybe not. I remember Josh surviving a hit by a panel truck back in the 70s.  He managed to limp back to the shop and stand swaying in the back, where the overhead doors were wide open to the outside and fresh air. He had blood running from his nose and mouth. Mary, who was working in the back, said "There's something the matter with that dog!" Off to the vet with him, and the prognosis was grim.  But HE survived.

Meanwhile, Squeak is at the vet here now, and the vet is going to do some blood work. What? No xrays?  No MRIs? Probably a good case of parasites. Squeak loves to supplement his diet with whatever he can find on the sidewalk or in the tall grass. He's been vomiting regularly since last Friday, when they installed all new carpet!  I yelled at him today for barfing on the carpet again, and woddya know, he directed his next four throwups to the kitchen tile!

So it's dog vomit day in Naples and DC.

I am not a dog lover like some.  And it always amazes some dog lovers that their dogs come to sit by me or lie at my feet when I visit. I disapprove of the dogs lollygagging on the furniture and eating food off the kitchen counter. I disapprove of the dogs' lack of obedience and good doggy manners. But ha.  The dogs still like me--more, it seems, than they like others who are more tolerant.

It's the day George Bernard Shaw died, at the age of 94. I was in the 8th grade at St. Mary's in Fargo that day, and I had never heard of George Bernard Shaw. I always thought he was English, but ha!  he was IRISH.

Yup, that's what we need, all right...more WAR we can't pay for

One of my favorite columnists anywhere, Glenn Greenwald, wrote this yesterday in Salon.com. Here are some highlights:

Something very unusual happened on The Washington Post Editorial Page today: they deigned to address a response from one of their readers, who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in [their] editorial positions": namely, the Post demands that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money, yet the very same Post Editors vocally support escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for. "Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

Greenwald confirms what lots of us are thinking:

We have absolutely no ability to pay for our Afghan adventure other than by expanding our ignominious status as the largest and most insatiable debtor nation which history has ever known. That debt gravely bothers Beltway elites like the Post editors when it comes to providing ordinary Americans with basic services (which Post editors already enjoy), but it's totally irrelevant to them when it comes to re-fueling the vicarious joys of endless war.

Yeah.  Read Greenwald's whole article. 

Martha Argerich plays Chopin, Polonaise N. 6 l'heroique

And younger still...

Martha Argerich plays Scarlatti, sonata K. 141

Here she is at a younger age.  What a marvel!

Martha Argerich performs Bach Partita No. 2 at Verbier festival

Martha Argerich is an incomparable Argentine pianist. She shuns the press and the limelight, but to see and hear her play is to be in the presence of music itself.

DC people won't stop to listen to purty music

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Not let kidz listen, neither. (see previous post)

Perception....

Good old Darlene. She sent this today:

A true story.



Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately 2000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.


4 minutes later:


the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk..


6 minutes:


A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.


10 minutes:


A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.


45 minutes:


The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.


1 hour:


He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.


This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?


One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.... How many other things are we missing?

[XE here] Every Saturday morning, two guys play outside the Gallery Place metro--one on violin, the other on some kind of electric guitar/keyboard thing (dunno what it is--never seen one before). Last Saturday, they were playing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Their playing was so beautiful, it stopped lots of people in their tracks, but even so, only a few people contributed. still, what a fabulous gift....

Some of the pickle bucket players are great, too--it costs me an average of $3 just to walk down the street here....NEED to win that lottery!


Mary Ellen Carew

Angelic face in the crowd....

Henry sent this trailer for "This Is Not a Show" by R.E.M. at the Olympia Theater in Dublin. The angelic young face appearing about 49 seconds in, just before the on-screen words "is the sound track to your life," belongs to George, my grandson. The lad gets around!


New This Is Not A Show Trailer by Bill Berg-Hillinger

R.E.M. | MySpace Music Videos

WHAT "huge COLA increase in January 2009"??

OK...I may be old and funny, but I'm not quite as gaga as to have missed any huge cost-of-living jump in my Social Security payment in January, 2009. As I remember, we got the news last winter--rather shortly after the Inaugural, in fact--that there would be NO COLA increases for TWO YEARS: 2009 and 2010. This is not what I would call a COLA increase. COLA increases show up in your SS payment. Mine has held rock steady in 2009. The last increase of any kind in Social Security I got was in 2008. Quibble all you want, but we got zip in January of 2009, contrary to what I've read twice now in different news outlets. These articles are straight from the word processors of people who are either very young and don't know anything much or liars.

I read this morning that the President wants to give each and every one of us old crocks a one-time bonus of $250. Isn't that nice? I don't know how they're timing this, but it seems the bonus will appear in 2010. And the teabaggers have gone ballistic wondering just how "we" can afford this "socialistic" nonsense. The cause of their total astonishment is the apparent fact that to cut a $250 check for each of our country's aged, sick, and permanently incapacitated will cost $13 billion dollars! Mercy! It cost "us" several hundreds of billion dollars to ease the pain of bankers, white-collar employees on Wall Street, and Big US carmakers, not that Jessica or Joe the Line Worker in Detroit/Hamtramck will see a dime of it. Even there, the big payouts go to the executive suite.

But what's my problem? $250 is, as my dear, witty father-in-law used to say, "better than a poke in the eye." Of course, that will be $250 MINUS TAXES, don't forget. That's one thing us poor old folks are good at--paying taxes on every freaking penny so that the rich folks can avoid paying any taxes at all.

So, hmmm...what will $250 do RIGHT NOW, before they raise the prices of everything? (And aren't you just flabbergasted to learn that there was NO INFLATION this past year? Where are they talking about, do you know?) But I digress.

Go ahead, seniors! Take that 250 smackers (minus taxes) and FILL THOSE PRESCRIPTIONS! Get your teeth cleaned! Buy a used bicycle and use it for a walker! Take a trip to Florida on the Greyhound bus. There's talk of another payment for next year (2011 or 2012), when you can buy a return ticket!!

Like, Ha Ha....

One afternoon last week, I was heading toward the escalator at my local metro stop, and a cluster of teens fresh out of junior high school classes for the day burst ahead of me onto the moving steps and began their descent to the trains. One of the kids, a skinny boy about my height (medium), was trying to sit on the moving hand rail for a free ride, when the escalator stopped. The kid hopped on the railing, slid down the black rubber "bannister," and ran fast toward the gates. Was he feeling guilty? Afraid he'd get caught stopping the escalator? One of the sights in my neighborhood is young men running like crazy out of a store with merchandise in hand. Petty crime is great exercise, apparently.

You don't need much proof that lots of early teens act like jackasses until they either grow out of it or get passed on to juvenile court. As an adult, it's quite annoying to watch them throw their empty soda cans and cigarette boxes on the sidewalks, stuff their faces on the metro ("no eating or drinking"), and mess up public transporation with graffiti and stupid teen tricks. Since this is DC, there are bullets or knives involved all too often.

One of my sisters-in-law is from a tiny town in the western half of North Dakota. Her cousin lived in L.A., and his early teen-aged son was in such constant trouble for vandalism and other offenses there that the authorities suggested they send or take him "back home." My sister-in-law's parents offered to take him in, so back to ND he came. I asked her a few months after his return how he was doing.

"Oh, fine," she said.

"Is he settling down? No more vandalism?"

"No, he's still at it, but you know, folks in [hometown] just expect kids will do that, so nobody pays much attention."

And sure enough, the kid stopped after a while. Maybe petty crime wasn't as much fun if it didn't cause a ruckus. Or maybe he just found other interests like sports (you can almost always play on a team in a very small town--they need all the bodies they can get) or girls.

Watching that kid dash away from the escalator reminded me of all that. But there's lots more involved in big cities now than just low tolerance for youthful hijinks. Bob Herbert has an excellent column in today's NYTimes: "Behind the Laughter."

Herbert talks about Conan O'Brien's needling of Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

O’Brien joked that the mayor was establishing a program to improve the health of the city’s residents, then deadpanned: “The health care program would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark.”

He did a video bit in which he praised the city’s “thriving arts scene” (while showing a graffiti-scarred wall); its “four-star lodging” (shots of abandoned, gutted, rusting vehicles); and its “world-class live theater” (a peep show).

Conan is just trying to be funny, I guess. And his audience (or at least his laugh track) finds it all amusing. Herbert, however, points out this [emphasis mine]:

In Newark, where some of the streets do look as bad as the scenes that were part of Conan’s comedy bit, the unemployment rate is 14.7 percent. Keeping kids in high school long enough to graduate is difficult. Drug dealing is a fallback employment option for men and boys who can’t find legitimate work.

Other cities have the same problems, some to a greater degree. So what are we doing? While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, we’ve stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year.

That should tell you all you need to know about twisted national priorities.

Even as teachers by the tens of thousands are walking the plank to unemployment, we’re learning, as The Times reported last week, that one in every 10 young male dropouts is locked up in jail or juvenile detention. As if that weren’t gruesome enough, we find that the figure for blacks is one in four. What would it take to get the perpetual crisis facing these young people onto the radar screens of the rest of America?

And in case you haven't heard about all the teachers being laid off, Paul Krugman had an enlightening column in the NYTimes last week: "The Uneducated American."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States economy lost 273,000 jobs last month. Of those lost jobs, 29,000 were in state and local education, bringing the total losses in that category over the past five months to 143,000. That may not sound like much, but education is one of those areas that should, and normally does, keep growing even during a recession. Markets may be troubled, but that’s no reason to stop teaching our children. Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing.

There’s no mystery about what’s going on: education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. Adequate federal aid could have made a big difference. But while some aid has been provided, it has made up only a fraction of the shortfall. In part, that’s because back in February centrist senators insisted on stripping much of that aid from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the stimulus bill.

As a result, education is on the chopping block. And laid-off teachers are only part of the story. Even more important is the way that we’re shutting off opportunities.

For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the plight of California’s community college students. For generations, talented students from less affluent families have used those colleges as a stepping stone to the state’s public universities. But in the face of the state’s budget crisis those universities have been forced to slam the door on this year’s potential transfer students. One result, almost surely, will be lifetime damage to many students’ prospects — and a large, gratuitous waste of human potential.

Teabaggers, pay attention! Your beloved 'Murica-loving', tax-hating representatives are doing their best to bring the country down.

My favorite banana story

I put this in a comment on Major Reader's recent post on opening a banana "the monkey way" (see above video). However, I love this story. Those who know me may find I have repeated it 1000 times, but so what? Why get old if you can't repeat your old stories??? Here it is:

One of the women in my reception at 1890 Randolph tells us that she and her numerous siblings had never eaten bananas in all their young lives until after WW2 ended, and their mother came home one day bearing a bag of groceries containing a bunch of bananas. Mom was highly excited about being able to find bananas on sale in Minnesota at long last, and she pulled the bunch out and left it on the kitchen table for her children to admire while she went to the hallway to hang up her coat. While she was in the hall, the phone rang, and she answered it and chatted at some length.

When she came back to the kitchen, there were no bananas on the table.

"Where are the bananas?" she said.

"We ate them," the children said.

"But where are the peelings?"

"Peelings?"

"Well, yes, you have to peel them. You can't eat the peelings!"

"We don't like bananas," they said.

Happy Almost Friday.....P.S. My favorite is #10

This came today from M'reen. Thanks, kiddo....

This may be a little old but it's short and still may give you a smile!


1. A day without sunshine is like night.

2. On the other hand, you have different fingers.

3. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

4. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

5. Remember, half the people you know are below average.

6. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

7. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

8. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap.

9. Support bacteria. They're the only culture most people have.

10. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

11. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

12. If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

13. How many of you believe in psycho-kinesis? Raise my hand.

14. OK, so what's the speed of dark?

15. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

16. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

17. How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

18. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

19. What happens if you get scared half to death, twice?

20. Why do psychics have to ask you your name?

21. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, "What the heck happened?"

22. Just remember--if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.

23. Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

O Canada!! Fall, 2009, version

To Ronnie, Fenella, and Sherwood (well....almost canadian), et al.

Smartest Thing I Heard All Week--And It's Only Monday

In my class in positive psychology this week, we're thinking about "ultimate currency"--which the teacher tells us is HAPPINESS.

One of the students pointed out this link to an article in an Australian newspaper.

Leave it to the French to have something smart to say about how to live your life. As the article's author, Henry Samuel, says, "FRANCE has long been famed for its love of the good life - the land of wine, cheese and generous holidays."

French President Sarkozy is pushing the idea of happiness and well-being as a better indicator of a society's progress than the GNP.

Mr Sarkozy said he would ''fight to make all international organisations change their statistical system''.

He said: ''A great revolution is waiting for us. For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos.

''The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so.''

"Let Us Begin Again"

William Rivers Pitt, in today's Truthout says this, with which I heartily agree (emphasis is mine):

Putting aside any and all grievances you and I may hold regarding the acts and activities of the Obama administration, you have to admit, it is a brighter day. I actually voted for President Obama twice - calm down, once in the primary and once in the general - for a variety of reasons, but none more than this: I don't think Obama can change everything that needs changing.

I don't think any one election or any one president can repair the damage done over the last eight years, not to mention the damage done over the last half-century. I believe Obama has done much good work, and will do much good work in the years to come, but the challenges we face as a nation and planet are so daunting, it is fantasy to believe this president, or any one president, can address everything before us.

"Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards," said German sociologist Max Weber. "It requires passion as well as perspective." My perspective, and the final reason I voted for Obama, is as Mr. Weber said. The process of change takes lifetimes, it is slow, it is grueling, it is excruciating, and it is filled with defeats and setbacks. Especially now, in this degraded age, when only half the country votes, when the vast majority of young adults know all the contestants on "American Idol" but can't name three Supreme Court justices, don't know the name of their representative, don't know the names of their senators, don't know about Vietnam, or the Cold War, or Nixon, or Johnson, or Reagan, don't know history and how it has long, long teeth, don't know those teeth have been sunk into their flesh, and don't have any idea how to do anything about any of it.

People are unbelievably cynical now, as voter turnout statistics can attest to. A lot of people don't believe things can change, so they don't bother trying to try to even dare to imagine it ever could. That's why Obama got my vote: he has that once-in-a-lifetime gift that lets him elevate people, inspire them, fire them up, and make them believe change is possible. Before anything can change, people have to be convinced there is actually hope, that they can make a difference, that a difference can be made.

Obama, to me, is the first step on a very long road. He's not going to fix everything, but he is a good start, the best start I've seen win that office in my life, and even with all the darkness and everything that has gone so horribly wrong, that is a light to absolutely celebrate. He has the power to inspire, to make people believe change is possible, and I am telling you now, no change is possible if people don't believe it can happen ... but all things are possible if people do, and that is what President Obama has the potential to do and to be: the motivating factor that changes doubt to hope. Nothing is possible without that, and everything is possible with it.

Shame on SNL for mocking the president's achievements in his first months in office. The Truthout article has a long list of his achievements. I hope you'll read the while thing.

Things to think about....

DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU



THAT INCLUDES THE OCEAN



TOP TIPS

Hilarious

Skywatching with Goats - from Esther Garvi aka Ishtar's Ark

One of my favorite blogs originates in Niger. It's written by a young woman who manages the Eden Foundation. Not only is her writing simple and wonderful, her photography blows me away. Photos of what? Solar cooking, indigenous plants and foods, puppies, horses, goats, children, life in Niger, visits to Sweden. Today's post, Skywatching with Goats is a perfect example. The photos of Nigerien sunsets with goats silhouetted against the bright twilight are bittersweet. All of EGAIA's fans have had goats on our minds these days, and one goat, Allis, in particular. Today's pictures show Allis on her feet and moving around. Happy news! Earlier this week, Allis gave birth prematurely to two twins, one of whom was stillborn. The survivor, Alfonso, was a beautiful blue-eyed heartbreaker of a kid, but with Allis totally exhausted and unable to nurse him, he died, too. And the most recent other photo of Allis showed her looking like a goner. But she's better. And Niger's sunsets are without parallel. Thank you, Esther, Anette, Tabita, Arne, Allis, Esmeralda, Sahara and Kalahari, Sheba and the seven, for sharing your rich life.

Zombie Reaganism

Truthout has a wonderful post today, and I hope you'll click the link and read it all. If you are as baffled as I am over the dumbing down of the American public and the nastiness of American discourse recently, and if you want to know just HOW and WHEN liberal became the hated "librul" seen on demonstrators' signs, Henry A. Giroux's thoughts are enlightening. He says,

Part of the answer to the enduring quality of such a destructive politics can be found in the lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970's and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated. This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage.

He writes,

...one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."

Giroux continues,

For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission) an "excess of democracy."[5]

...

Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible.

Vast right-wing conspiracy, anyone?

MoneyMoneyMoneyMoney....Goop!

Goop has a

wonderful newsletter today. It's on money. As Gwyneth says,
Here, a collection of thoughts on the topic of investing from two bankers, a money coach and an accountant. Some illuminating concepts, histories and practical advice for the layman in these uncertain times.

I always enjoy this website: it has something different each time on one of its major themes: Make, Go, Get, Do, Be, See. The last time XtremeEnglish featured anything from Goop was last month when we showed Goop's YouTube video on making bibimbop.

There are no videos for this money newsletter, alas. (Do you think I could throw a handful of bills out the window and video them as they sail away?) But it's full of advice from Goop's wise people--many, if not all, of whom are friends or acquaintances of Goop's originator, Gwyneth Paltrow. You can subscribe to the FREE newsletter yourself. Just go to the Goop website and sign up.

UPDATE: Michael Moore's movie on capitolism is about to come out this weekend in DC, and I can't wait to see it. I'm sure the movie will say a lot about much of what is said in this newsletter, which appears to be written by capitalists. I personally don't agree exactly with what one of the contributors says about commodities. A woman I know makes a ton of $$ by trading commodities. But she's an expert and has been doing this for years in a serious way. Anyway....
what do I know about money? Not much. That's why I like things like Goop's newsletter. It provides food for thought on many areas of life.

UPDATE: and yes, she's an OLD woman!!

Baucus, Conrad, et al.: Daily Kos comments

I am having a hard time digesting the fact that Kent Conrad, D-ND, was one of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY senators who brought the p.o. down. I grew up in ND. What the hey is that effing turkey thinking? I turned to Daily Kos for comments on the public option fiasco engineered by Baucus, Conrad, et al. Here's what it says:

Public Option Outlook after Today

by mcjoan

Tue Sep 29, 2009 at 05:30:04 PM PDT

One thing that that's clear from today's Finance Committee votes on the public option: Kent Conrad is the problem for the Dems. He provided the cover today for Lincoln, who was virtually invisible, to vote against the Schumer "level playing field" public option that would have done away with Conrad's supposed problem with Rockefeller's amendment--that it was tied to Medicare rates. If that was truly Conrad's big problem with the bill, he should have had no problem with Schumer's bill.

Obviously, he's the anti-public option problem in the Democratic caucus, if you take Baucus at his illogical word that he supports the public option, but had to vote against it because it didn't have enough votes. But, on the other side, the most conservative of the committees to take up healthcare reform had 10 Dems supporting some form of public option--that's more than I think anyone thought they'd get. Rockefeller told Ed Schultz today that he was suprised to have gotten eight votes for his.

Bottom line, the Finance Committee is going to pass out a bill without a public option, unless Rockefeller and Cantwell do indeed decide to oppose it and can find a third Dem (assuming Snowe will vote with the majority). But it's also coming out of SFC with a strong majority of Democrats who will vote for the public option on the floor.

Which leaves us with a couple of questions, as posed by Ezra:

There are two questions here. The first is "60 votes for what?" Do they not have 60 votes in favor of a health-care plan that includes a public option? Or do they not have 60 votes against a filibuster of a health-care plan that includes a public option? If it's the former, that's okay: You only need 51. If it's the latter, that's a bigger problem. But I'd be interested to hear which Democrats will publicly commit to filibustering Barack Obama's health-care reform bill. If that's such a popular position back home, why aren't more Democrats voicing it loudly?

Second, why give up the public option now? If these moderates want to kill the measure, let them get full credit for doing so on the floor. They can sponsor an amendment to strip it out of the final legislation and go home to their districts having played a clear and undeniable role in the elimination of the public option.

What Democrat is going to stand up and say out loud that he (or she) will join a filibuster with the Republicans against a public option? But they're getting the easy way out on that question, with Kent Conrad (and Max Baucus) to hide behind.

So what can progressives do? Progressives in the Senate need to take a page from their House colleagues. Tell Harry Reid and Max Baucus that there aren't 60 votes for public option-less bill. There are certainly more Democrats who support the public option than who do not. With that strong majority, Reid has no excuse not to be an enforcer over breaking a filibuster.

The other thing today demonstrated is that the Dems have 50 Dem votes for reconciliation. There's really not much of an excuse at this point for a public option NOT to be included in the bill Reid brings to the Senate floor. Particularly considering that it's going to be in the House version of the bill.