Audio remix from Glenn Beck’s radio show, video slideshow from a fan.

Evidently, the transition of Senator Kennedy from near-death brain cancer patient to fully-dead champion of the downtrodden is reason enough to soften the hard hearts of the few ideological holdouts still opposed to socialized healthcare.

From ABC news website:

“You’ve heard of ‘win one for the Gipper’? There is going to be an atmosphere of ‘win one for Teddy,’” Ralph G. Neas, the CEO of the liberal National Coalition on Health Care, told ABC News.

Really?  So which of the “astroturf” protestor groups is Kennedy’s martyrdom supposed to convince?  The racist Nazi hate-peddlers, or the uncaring wealthy class who scoffs at the plight of the poor between martini lunches at the country club?  In one breath, liberals accuse everyone opposed to socialized healthcare of being a Nazi white supremacist reactionary, and in the next breath they try to appeal to them by saying “Do it for Ted Kennedy!”  Yes, I have heard of “win one for the Gipper”…was the awkwardly unsubtle Reagan reference intended to rhetorically sweep me off my feet, convincing me that selling out my freedom for vague promises of universal coverage is a good idea?

There’s quite a bit of America in between San Francisco and Boston…people for whom Ted Kennedy’s death was not a life changing event.  But by all means, name the awful bill after him.

From the Onion.

From Patrick Courrielche via Big Hollywood:.

I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Now admittedly, I’m a skeptic of BIG government. In my view, power tends to overreach whenever given the opportunity. It’s a law of human nature that has very few exceptions. That said, it felt to me that by providing issues as a cynosure for inspiration to a handpicked arts group – a group that played a key role in the President’s election as mentioned throughout the conference call – the National Endowment for the Arts was steering the art community toward creating art on the very issues that are currently under contentious national debate; those being health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?

I am not even mad at Keith Olbermann anymore. I only feel sorry for him.

You see, Keith cannot tell the difference between neighbors and friends voluntarily helping each other and the government undertaking to help everybody.

Thus, an elected official who exhorts his constituents to help each other out but who opposes additional federal efforts to intervene in people’s lives and jobs is a massive hypocrite.

The debate doesn’t need to go any further. If his mind truly cannot process the profound moral and philosophical gulf that exists between those two acts, then it is senseless to argue with him. (Not that anybody has ever argued with him– I have never seen Keith Olbermann interact with anybody who disagrees with him.)

So leave the Sultan of Smug to belch self-satisfied snark to an ever-diminishing audience. Same goes for snickering 14-year old, Chris Hayes. (Although that is not to say I am done posting video mash-ups of the show.)

No small part of the current confusion between “health care” and medical care comes from failing to recognize that Americans can have the best medical care in the world without having the best health or longevity because so many people choose to live in ways that shorten their lives.