For once, Mr. Cheney is absolutely and indisputably correct. He is obviously inviting prosecution. MC

Political:
Synonyms: governmental, administrative, civil, diplomatic, constitutional, electoral, doctrinal, ethical, civic

NY Times
August 31, 2009
Cheney Calls Interrogation Inquiry ‘Political’
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Sunday that the Justice Department’s decision to review detainee interrogation practices by Central Intelligence Agency workers and contractors was “a political move” and that President Obama was trying to “duck the responsibility” by saying the choice was the attorney general’s.

But the comments from Mr. Cheney, a constant, sharp critic of the Obama administration, drew an impassioned if partial dissent from a prominent fellow Republican, Senator John McCain, their party’s presidential candidate in 2008.

Speaking on the television program “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Cheney called Attorney General Eric H. Holder’s decision to name a federal prosecutor to examine abuse of prisoners held by the C.I.A. “clearly a political move — I mean, there’s no other rationale for why they’re doing this.”

Continued NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/us/politics/31cheney.html?hp

From the movie, "Devil's Advocate"

John Milton is the Devil, Kevin Lomax is a hot shot lawyer employed by Milton's firm. He has just found out he is Milton's son. If you haven't seen the movie, by all means, do so. MC

Kevin Lomax: "Why the law? Cut the shit, Dad! Why the lawyers? Why the law?"

John Milton: "Because the law, my boy, puts us into everything. It's the ultimate backstage pass. It's the new priesthood, baby. Did you know there are more students in law school than lawyers walking the Earth?"

Another quote from the movie, Milton telling Lomax about God:

"Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He's a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do, I swear for His own amusement, his own private, cosmic gag reel, He sets the rules in opposition. It's the goof of all time. Look but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow. Ahaha. And while you're jumpin' from one foot to the next, what is He doing? He's laughin' His sick, fuckin' ass off. He's a tight-ass. He's a sadist. He's an absentee landlord. Worship that? Never."

August 30, 2009
Supreme Court to Revisit ‘Hillary’ Documentary
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will cut short its summer break in early September to hear a new argument in a momentous case that could transform the way political campaigns are conducted.

The case, which arises from a minor political documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” seemed an oddity when it was first argued in March. Just six months later, it has turned into a juggernaut with the potential to shatter a century-long understanding about the government’s ability to bar corporations from spending money to support political candidates.

Continued at the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30scotus.html?hp

NY Times
August 30, 2009
Editorial
Majority Rule on Health Care Reform
The talk in Washington is that Senate Democrats are preparing to push through health care reforms using parliamentary procedures that will allow a simple majority to prevail in their chamber, as it does in the House, instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster that Senate Republicans are sure to mount.

With the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, the Democrats do not have the votes just among their 57 members (and the two independents) to break a filibuster, and not all of these can be counted on to vote in lock step. If the Democrats want to enact health care reform this year, they appear to have little choice but to adopt a high-risk, go-it-alone, majority-rules strategy.

We say this with considerable regret because a bipartisan compromise would be the surest way to achieve comprehensive reforms with broad public support. But the ideological split between the parties is too wide — and the animosities too deep — for that to be possible.   Read More »

Might be the nudge you need to make a contribution to the ACLU. MC

NY Times
August 30, 2009
A.C.L.U. Lawyers Mine Secret Documents for Truth
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.

The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.

Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more.

The case has produced revelation after revelation: battles between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods; and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons.

Continued NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/30intel.html?hp

Bush was in the audience when Obama said these words, "Through his own suffering, Ted Kennedy became more alive to the plight and suffering of others — the sick child who could not see a doctor; the young soldier sent to battle without armor;...." Would have loved being a fly on the wall watching that wannabe squirm, it's not every day that you get to see a sitting president bitch slap the man responsible for so much misery and pain. Makes you wonder if Bush will invite Obama to his library dedication. MC

Text of President Barack Obama's eulogy at Sen. Edward Kennedy's funeral Mass on Saturday in Boston, as prepared for delivery and provided by the White House:

Mrs. Kennedy, Kara, Edward, Patrick, Curran, Caroline, members of the Kennedy family, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens: Today we say goodbye to the youngest child of Rose and Joseph Kennedy. The world will long remember their son Edward as the heir to a weighty legacy; a champion for those who had none; the soul of the Democratic Party; and the lion of the U.S. Senate — a man whose name graces nearly one thousand laws, and who penned more than three hundred himself.

But those of us who loved him, and ache with his passing, know Ted Kennedy by the other titles he held: Father. Brother. Husband.

Uncle Teddy, or as he was often known to his younger nieces and nephews, "The Grand Fromage," or "The Big Cheese." I, like so many others in the city where he worked for nearly half a century, knew him as a colleague, a mentor, and above all, a friend.

Ted Kennedy was the baby of the family who became its patriarch; the restless dreamer who became its rock. He was the sunny, joyful child, who bore the brunt of his brothers' teasing, but learned quickly how to brush it off. When they tossed him off a boat because he didn't know what a jib was, six-year-old Teddy got back in and learned to sail. When a photographer asked the newly elected Bobby to step back at a press conference because he was casting a shadow on his younger brother, Teddy quipped, "It'll be the same in Washington." This spirit of resilience and good humor would see Ted Kennedy through more pain and tragedy than most of us will ever know. He lost two siblings by the age of sixteen. He saw two more taken violently from the country that loved them. He said goodbye to his beloved sister, Eunice, in the final days of his own life. He narrowly survived a plane crash, watched two children struggle with cancer, buried three nephews, and experienced personal failings and setbacks in the most public way possible.   Read More »

Praise the Lord and pass the bumper stickers! MC

denver and the west
Romanoff has eye on Senate
Democrat to run against Bennet, sources say
By Michael Riley and Christopher Osher
Former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff is poised to mount a Democratic primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

Urged to challenge Gov. Bill Ritter as he seeks re-election in 2010, Romanoff has instead turned his attention to next year's Senate race, sources close to Romanoff told The Denver Post. One source reported that Romanoff offered a campaign position to a veteran Democratic strategist.

Continued at the Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13227508

Dodd Remarks at Memorial Service for Senator Kennedy

Tonight, we gather to celebrate the incredible American story of a man who made so many other American stories possible, my friend Teddy Kennedy.

Unlike his beloved brothers, his sister Kathleen, and his nephews, Teddy was granted the gift of time – he lived, as the Irish poet suggested, not just to comb gray hair, but white hair.

And if you look at what he achieved in his 77 years, it seems, at times, as if he lived for centuries.

Generations of historians will chronicle his prolific efforts on behalf of others. I will leave that to them.

Tonight, I just want to share some thoughts about my friend.

And what a friend he has been – a friend of unbridled empathy, optimism, and full-throated joy.

Examples of his friendship are legion.

Many years ago, a close friend of mine passed away. Teddy didn’t know him.

I was asked to say a few words at the funeral.

As long as I live, I will never forget that, as I stood at the pulpit and looked out over the gathering, there was Teddy, sitting in the back of the church.

He wasn’t there for my friend. He was there for me, at my time of loss.

That was what it was like to have Teddy in your corner.

When our daughters Grace and Christina were born, first call I received was from Teddy.

When I lost the Iowa caucuses last year, not that anyone thought I was going to win, first call I received was from Teddy and Vicki.

When my sister passed away last month, first call I received was from Teddy, even though he was well into the final summer of his own life.

And two weeks ago, as I was coming out of surgery, I got a call from Teddy, his unique voice as loud and booming as ever.

“Well,” he roared, “Between going through prostate cancer surgery and doing town hall meetings, you made the right choice!”

And though he was dying, and I was hurting, he had me howling with laughter in the recovery room as he made a few choice comments, I cannot repeat, about catheters.

As we all know, Teddy had a ferocious sense of humor.

In 1994, he was in the political fight of his life against Mitt Romney.

Before the first debate, held in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, I was with Teddy and his team and, along with everyone else, offering him advice.

“Teddy,” I cautioned, “We Irish always talk too fast. Even if you know the answer to a question, you have to pause, slow down, and appear thoughtful.”

Out he went, and, of course, the first question was something like this: “Senator, you’ve served the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for nearly 35 years in the United States Senate. Explain, then, why this race is so close.”

Teddy paused. And paused. And paused. Five seconds. Ten seconds.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he answered.

After the debate, I said, “Good Lord, Teddy, I didn’t mean pause that long after the first question! What were you thinking about?”

He looked at me and replied, “I was thinking – that’s a damn good question! Why IS this race so close?”

In these last months of his life, I have so treasured our conversations.

At 6:30 in the morning of July 16th, the morning after his Senate health care committee finished five weeks of exhausting work on the bill he had written, and that I believe will be the greatest of his many legacies, my phone rang.

There was Teddy, beyond ecstatic that we had finished our work, and that his committee had been the first to report a bill.

Always the competitor.

Teddy was never maudlin or self-pitying about his illness, but he was always fully aware of what was happening.

Every Irishman’s dream, of course, is to attend our own eulogies. That’s why we call the obituary page the Irish sports page.

And I know he enjoyed a uniquely Celtic kick out of hearing people who abhorred his politics say incredibly nice things about him.

Volumes, of course, will be published by those attempting to unlock the mystery of why Teddy was such an effective legislator.

Was it his knowledge of parliamentary procedure? His political instincts? His passionate oratory? His staff?

Please let me save the pundits and political scientists some time – and all of you some money – and tell you what Teddy’s secret was: People liked him.

Now, he always had a great staff, and great ideas, but that only counts for so much in the United States Senate, if you lack the respect and admiration of your colleagues.

And Teddy earned that respect.

He arrived in Washington as the 30-year-old brother of a sitting president and the attorney general of the United States.

Too many people drew their conclusions about him before he spoke his first words in the Senate.

And over the years, he became a target of partisans who caricatured him as a dangerous liberal.

Now, liberal he was, and very proud of it!

But once you got to know him, as his Senate colleagues did, you quickly learned he was no caricature.

He was a warm, passionate, thoughtful, tremendously funny man who loved his country, and loved the United States Senate.

If you ever needed to find Teddy in the Senate chamber, all you had to do was to listen for that distinctive thunderclap of a laugh, echoing across that hallowed hall as he charmed his colleagues – and, more often than not, got them to vote for whatever it was he was pushing that day.

He served in the Senate for almost a half-century alongside liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and he befriended them with equal gusto.

It’s great to see his friends Senators Orrin Hatch and John McCain here.

It is to their great credit that they so often supported Teddy’s efforts.

And, I say in some jest, it is to Teddy’s great credit that he so rarely supported theirs.

But Teddy’s personal friendships with Orrin and John, and so many other conservatives, weren’t simply the polite working relationships that make politics possible.

They are the real and lasting bonds that make the United States Senate work.

That’s what made Teddy one of our greatest Senators ever.

Some people born with a famous name live off of it. Others enrich theirs. Teddy enriched his.

And, as we begin the task of summing up all that he has done for his country, perhaps we can begin by acknowledging this:

John Fitzgerald Kennedy inspired our America; Robert Kennedy challenged our America; and Teddy changed our America.

Teddy was involved in every major debate in the last half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.

Nearly every important law passed in the last half century bears his mark, and a great many of them bear his name.

Teddy was defined by his love of our country, his passion for public service, his abiding faith, and his family.

His much-adored Vicki, his children Kara, Teddy, and Patrick, his step-children Caroline and Curran, his grandchildren, nieces and nephews – all of you need to know, you brought him unbounded joy and pleasure.

Teddy was a man who lived for others.

He was a champion for countless people who otherwise might not have had one, and he never quit on them, never gave up on the belief that we could make tomorrow a better day. Never.

Last August in Denver, one year to the day before his passing, Teddy spoke at our national convention.

His gait was shaky, but his blue eyes were clear, and his unmistakable voice rang with strength.

As he passed the torch to another young president, Teddy said: “The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”

He spoke of the great fight of his life – ensuring that every American, regardless of their economic status, is guaranteed the right to decent health care.

We are all so saddened that he did not live to see that won.

But in a few short days, we will return to our work in Teddy’s Senate.

The blistering days of August will be replaced, I pray, by the cooler days of September.

And we will prevail in the way Teddy won so many victories for our country: by listening to each other; by respecting each other and the seriousness of the institution to which we belong, and where Teddy earned an immortal place in American history.

As he so eloquently eulogized his brother Bobby 40 years ago, Teddy doesn’t need to be enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.

We will remember him for the largeness of his spirit, the depth of his compassion, his persistence in the face of adversity, and the breadth of his achievement.

We will remember him as a man who understood better than most that America is a place of incredible opportunity, hope, and redemption.

He labored tirelessly to make those dreams a reality for everyone.

Those dreams, the ones he spoke of throughout his life, live on like the eternal flame that marks President Kennedy’s grave, the flame that Teddy and Bobby lit 46 years ago.

And in all the years I knew and loved him, that eternal flame has never failed to burn brightly in Teddy’s eyes.

Now, as he re-joins his brothers on the hillside in Arlington, may the light from that flame continue to illuminate our path forward.

And with the work of our own hands, and the help of God, inspired by Teddy’s example, may we lift up this great country that my friend Teddy loved so much.

Senator Dodd's Website

Who doesn't have flaws? Eugene Robinson sums up the triumph and tragedy of THE champion of the less fortunate. MC

A Prince's Fate
Ted Kennedy Played a Role to Near-Perfection
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, August 28, 2009

That the nation is so moved by the passing of Edward Moore Kennedy testifies to his skill, grace and determination at playing a role that must have been infinitely more difficult than it sounds: a prince fated never to be king.

Ted Kennedy was the youngest of nine children in a family whose ruthless patriarch was intent on building an American dynasty. The old man, business titan Joseph Kennedy, was a king. Ted's older brother Jack, the handsome young president, was a king. The other two brothers, Joe and Robert, were slated for the throne but died too soon. Ted made a run for president, but with the air of someone who didn't really believe he was meant to win. He was the baby brother, the eternal prince.

Princes often have lives that are difficult, even within a context of wealth and privilege. They have to find ways to keep from being eaten alive by ambition that can never be requited. Some become sage counselors in the affairs of state; some become wastrels who lose themselves in women and booze; some fade away and become hobbyists who go off and pilot sailboats or collect butterflies or something. It's fair to say that at various points in his life, Ted Kennedy tried all of these identities.

The hardest task for an eternal prince is to construct an original identity of which he can be proud -- an identity that allows him to live a life of purpose, meaning and impact. Ted Kennedy accomplished this feat by becoming the greatest senator of our age and serving as the liberal conscience of the nation.

Every once in a while, the conventional wisdom is basically right. The generally agreed-upon story line is that Kennedy found himself through the experience of defeat. The consensus view is that he ran for president in 1980 largely out of a sense of obligation, that he ran such a disorganized and almost desultory campaign that it almost looked like self-sabotage, and that when he lost the Democratic nomination to incumbent Jimmy Carter he became a free man, able for the first time to find his own voice and chart his own path.   Read More »

IMO, I don't find wind turbines as unsightly as telephone poles, power transmission towers and cables, roof top TV antennas, TV broadcast antennas, etc.. As a matter of fact it would look something like energy independence ought to look. There was a time, back 100 years or so, chimneys sprouted from every roof and spewed black coal smoke, some went out back to get water from the well, take a dump in an out house, dump edible garbage in a hog pen, dump the rest somewhere out of sight and lit houses with oil lamps and candles. Question is are we ready to evolve? MC

NY Times
August 28, 2009, 8:17 am
Standards for Small-Scale Wind Power
By Colin Miner

The Associated Press Standards are afoot for small turbines aimed at individual homeowners and small businesses.
The American Wind Energy Association is developing a series of standards that will measure the safety, reliability and performance of small wind turbines.

The standards, which the organization hopes to have in place by the end of the year, come amid increased interest in small-scale and rooftop wind power — typically designed for individual homes, farms and small businesses, and producing 100 kilowatts of electricity or less.

“We are charged with hearing from all materially affected persons as part of the process,” said John Dunlop, a senior project engineer at the association, which was tapped by the American National Standards Institute, which oversees the creation of thousands of standards for things as varied as bottled water and swimming pools, to steer the process for small wind standards.

The new codes, which are still being completed, would compel manufacturers to put their turbines through a variety of tests that might, for example, demonstrate their reliability by having them operate continuously for 2,500 hours (including 25 hours when the wind speed is in excess of 33 miles an hour). Other tests might be used to ensure that turbines don’t exceed a certain decibel level while operating, or are capable of shutting down in extremely high winds, which can be dangerous.

Mr. Dunlop cautions that while a standard, which would be administered by the newly formed Small Wind Certification Corporation, would help the industry gain credibility, there are several things it won’t do.

“It’s not going to make turbines more efficient,” he said. “If someone puts a highly efficient turbine in a low-wind location, it’s still not going to produce any energy. We want to create standards that will allow consumers to know what they’re getting.”

John Breshears of Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, which is responsible for an experimental rooftop turbine project in Portland, Ore., said that standards would be a boon for consumers by forcing manufacturers to be honest.

“Right now manufacturers can make any claim they want,” Mr. Breshears said, “and they do.”

NY Times
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/standards-for-small-scale-wind-power/?hp

The Secret Government
By Christopher Hayes
August 26, 2009

"It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. "

Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working "the dark side" in order to triumph in the "war on terror," they were not, in fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report, which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the national security state's understanding of each as an existential threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy. Victory--indeed, survival--requires us to become more like them.


And so: the CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against democratically elected governments, while the National Security Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a mistress and a note that said, "There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

Continued at The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/hayes

"I say again, as I have before, if health insurance is good enough for the President, the Vice President and the Congress of the United States, then it is good enough for you and every family in America."

Senator Edward Kennedy-Democrat National Convention August 12, 1980

Well, things worked out a little different from the way I thought, but let me tell you, I still love New York.

My fellow Democrats and my fellow Americans, I have come here tonight not to argue as a candidate but to affirm a cause. I'm asking you--I am asking you to renew the commitment of the Democratic Party to economic justice.

I am asking you to renew our commitment to a fair and lasting prosperity that can put America back to work.

This is the cause that brought me into the campaign and that sustained me for nine months across 100,000 miles in 40 different states. We had our losses, but the pain of our defeats is far, far less than the pain of the people that I have met.

We have learned that it is important to take issues seriously, but never to take ourselves too seriously.

The serious issue before us tonight is the cause for which the Democratic Party has stood in its finest hours, the cause that keeps our Party young and makes it, in the second century of its age, the largest political party in this republic and the longest lasting political party on this planet.   Read More »

"Liberals are not so quick to invoke morality..........On cable television and in town halls, conservatives rail against health care reform as an unconscionable infringement on liberty--an effort, literally, to snuff out the sick, the elderly, and the veterans of foreign wars

Liberals have countered with numbers, legislative histories--in short, we've made appeals to logic. But appeals to morality? They've been few and far between. We've approached health care reform as a problem to solve--which, surely, it is. We've not approached it as an obligation to fulfill--which, surely, it is as well.
Kennedy rarely made that mistake. When he looked at America, he saw a country full of people made vulnerable--by circumstance of birth, economic misfortune, illness, or injury. Some were middle-class; some were poor.............Like FDR, Kennedy was not afraid to talk about values, to talk about right and wrong."

Liberalism’s Torch Bearer
--Jonathan Cohn

The New Republic


The elder statesman. The dynastic icon. The man of personal excess. The man of a thousand legislative accomplishments. As the tributes and obituaries attest, Ted Kennedy was all of these things, at one time or another--for better and, yes, sometimes for worse. Like he famously said of his slain brother, Robert, Ted Kennedy "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life."

But Ted Kennedy was something else, too. He was a crusader. He was--again, to quote his fraternal eulogy--somebody "who saw wrong and tried to right it." He possessed not just a clarity of purpose, but a certainty that his purpose had moral grounding. And that made Kennedy somewhat unusual, or at least quaint, in the part of the ideological universe he inhabited.   Read More »

Quote of the Day, what does this mean? Change a term in government speak and it makes it all better. Besides I thought "Human Resource Exploitation" was something to do with American labor. Don't bother reading the WP Editorial, it's an apology for the behavior of the Bush Administration. The Post has gone all the way to the dark side. MC

"For another, the report underscores what little appetite the CIA had for getting back into the business of ugly interrogation (it had been so burned that it changed the term, at one point, to "human resource exploitation"); the agency was clamoring constantly for guidance about what it should and should not do."

Source The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/24/AR2009082402629.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Other than his intelligence, Obama has the patience of Job, the tenacity of an ant and the guts of a burglar. It's rather odd that the right has encouraged the riff raff to be spokesmen against healthcare, but considering the lack of coherent leadership in the Republican party perhaps this is the best they could do. I need to produce a new sign for these rallies, "You Say Socialism Like It's a Bad Thing" I have to keep explaining to the knuckle draggers what a "Levee" is. "Make Levees Not War" is not so effective for the politically impaired. MC

Obama Faces 'Scare Tactics' Head-On
He Hits the Road To Quell Public Fears About Reform Efforts

By Anne E. Kornblut and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., Aug. 11 -- President Obama began a personal effort Tuesday to reclaim momentum for his health-care initiative with a direct rebuttal of what he called "scare tactics," rumors and misrepresentations.

At a town hall meeting that had the feel of a campaign rally, administration officials sought to tap the skill in confronting public doubts and fears that helped Obama win the White House. Aides who worked on his campaign are now sharpening his health-care message, they said.

Continued:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081002447.html?nav=hcmodule

Behind the Rage, a Cold Reality

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Could it be the heat that's making people so angry and unreasonable at those town hall meetings on health care? Might it just be the effect that Raymond Chandler described so brilliantly in the opening lines of his 1938 short story "Red Wind":

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Red-faced retirees are railing against "government-run" health care and "socialized medicine" -- with Medicare cards tucked in their wallets. They could have just stayed home and harangued themselves. The August heat is punishing, but not enough to induce mass delirium.

Continued:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081002455.html?hpid=opinionsbox1