Whoa:

Hold on to your hats. At a town hall meeting in Oklahoma City last week, staunch conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) defended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, disparaged Fox News and told a constituent her fears about the health care law were unfounded.

When a woman in the audience asked Coburn if it was illegal for the government to jail citizens for not complying with the new health care law, Coburn responded by blaming TV news, and Fox News in particular, for that false rumor:

“The intention is not to put anybody in jail,” Coburn said. “That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn’t the intention.”

Later, when his audience started to boo at the mention of Pelosi, Coburn stopped them.

“Come on now… how many of you all have met her? She’s a nice person,” Coburn said. “Just because somebody disagrees with you, doesn’t mean they’re not a good person.”

“Don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody’s no good,” Coburn added.

Coburn urged audience members to widen their points of view by reading and watching different media outlets, not just the ones they agree with.

He will, of course, now be targeted by the Tea Partiers as a RINO, and sacked.

The Only Republican Plan Is To Destroy Democrats, Not Solve Problems.

He’s the principled conservative who, after watching the GOP decide to oppose HCR at all costs, posted a pretty accurate “I told you so” on his site a few days ago.

Frum was, at that time, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He’s since been dismissed. Cause and effect is left as an exercise to the reader.

“BREAKING: Blackwater wins a contract to guard Biden’s F-Bomb making facility” (@lizzwinstead via @robotmess)

Apparently, Ann Coulter has been basically threatened with arrest unless she tones down her act for an appearance in Canada.

Our Republic has a tendency towards noisey, content-free discourse nowadays, but (as Chomsky points out in the linked story) the US remains essentially unique in our nearly absolutist approach to free expression. This is a big deal, and it may be the most important freedom we have. I loathe Coulter and just about everything she stands for, but her views are protected speech, and she should be able to spew her vile invective without fear of arrest.

Of course, I’d prefer it if there were no market for her idiocy, but I’m not about to support censorship because I don’t like her politics.

Here’s a great letter that may help you stop looking like an organization led by douchebags.

His thoughts are pretty spot on, I think. A bit:

Basically, I find what passes for Democratic legislative strategy absolutely appalling. Decades from now, when they make the ponderous Oscar-bait movie about the struggle for health care (with Jaden Smith as Obama and two-time Academy Award winner Snooki as Speaker Pelosi), it will make for exciting twists and turns in the plot, but out here in the real world, you shouldn’t have to let your organization get the crap beat out of it in order to motivate those in it to do the thing everybody knows it wants to get done. What the Democrats have managed to do with health care isn’t a Pyrrhic victory — I’ll get to that in a moment — but it surely was taking the long way around: over the river, through the woods, down into the landfill, into the abattoir, across a field of rabid, angry badgers. Next time, guys, make it easier on yourselves.

That said, the Democrats were magnificently fortunate that, as incompetent as they are, they are ever-so-slightly less incompetent than the GOP, which by any realistic standard has been handed one of the largest legislative defeats in decades. The GOP was not simply opposed to health care, it was opposed to it in shrill, angry, apocalyptic terms, and saw it not as legislation, or in terms of whether or not health care reform was needed or desirable for Americans, but purely as political strategy, in terms of whether or not it could kneecap Obama and bring itself back into the majority. As such there was no real political or moral philosophy to the GOP’s action, it was all short-term tactics, i.e., take an idea a majority of people like (health care reform), lie about its particulars long enough and in a dramatic enough fashion to lower the popularity of the idea, and then bellow in angry tones about how the president and the Democrats are ignoring the will of the people. Then publicly align the party with the loudest and most ignorant segment of your supporters, who are in part loud because you’ve encouraged them to scream, and ignorant because you and your allies in the media have been feeding them bad information. Whip it all up until health care becomes the single most important issue for both political parties — an all-in, must win, absolutely cannot lose issue.

David Frum has many interesting things to say about today’s vote. Go read it.

Apparently unable to marshall any actual arguments, tea partiers instead resorted to levels of name-calling that would be hilarious if they weren’t so sad.

Or, at least, ignorant. The raving nutbird looney contingent on the Texas State Board of Education has managed to delete Thomas Jefferson and the entire Enlightenment from the state’s textbook standards. Oh, and the whole idea of separation of Church and State.

Click through for more. It’s really discouraging, but ultimately unsurprising.