That is essentially the question Josh Marshall asks about health care reform. And the answer is, when it comes to health care reform, half a loaf may well be worse than none:

See, it’s stuff like this that helps explain why Afghans — and many others — are convinced that the United States doesn’t believe Afghan lives matter all that much:

If you’re looking for holes in our national security, try San Antonio, Texas. Or Asheville, North Carolina:

Matttbastard tweeted the link to an article in Le Monde, by John Feffer, that is sure to raise conservative hackles, but there is a lot of truth to it, in my view. The gist of the piece (it’s long) is that there is a fine line between “their” suicide bombers and “our” military heroes — and that line can get very blurry. Here is the opening:

Anne Bayefsky of the National Review Online is having trouble breathing, and I think she might be about to pass out. And who can blame her, considering that she is writing about Pres. Obama, who once again is putting us all in mortal danger with his disgracefully irresponsible behavior (emphasis is mine):

Some of you may have seen references to a speech Bush 41 gave to schoolchildren in 1991. Jim Lindgren was curious enough to look into the matter further (emphasis in original):

That’s what Tim Rutten, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, says American children will be learning from the public hysteria about Obama’s planned speech to schoolchildren on Tuesday:

Where’dja get those guts, guys? They look good on you:

Politico’s Michael Calderone reports that MSNBC has taken down Pat Buchanan’s article claiming that World War II was Britain’s fault, and that Hitler really never wanted to murder six million Jews. Of course, abruptly yanking the piece in response to a storm of outrage on the Internet (including a tweet to Rachel Maddow from yours truly) does not explain why MSNBC promoted it on their site to begin with.

David Broder asks, in the context of possible criminal trials for high-ranking Bush officials who ordered and sanctioned torture (a word he does not use, of course):

Pat Buchanan’s anti-Semitic, ahistorical screed about Hitler and World War II (linked through Matthew Yglesias) has caught some attention today, although not nearly enough considering that this is the same man who accused Sonia Sotomayor of being a racist:

If Dick Cheney (channeled through Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus) didn’t want the CIA to be hung out to dry, perhaps he shouldn’t have thrown the CIA in the washer and left them by the clothesline with a bag of clothes pins:

Via tweet from Kyle Moore, comes this op-ed from Geoff Garin about which political party most needs another Ted Kennedy:

If the Pulitzer Prize Committee had a category for stenographic journalism, this WaPo piece by Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate surely would win it. The article is three full screens of tripe like this:

Ronald Bailey at Reason objects to Ezra Klein’s objection to Charles Krauthammer’s repetition of the rightist canard that government-funded health care will lead to rationing.

Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent reports that ABC’s Brian Ross and Matthew Cole were told by a former CIA intelligence official that the blacked-out sections contain information about three detainees who died while under CIA interrogation, and an unspecified number whose whereabouts are unknown:

The Leopard Hat: A Daughter’s Story, by Valerie Steiker, Random House, 2002 Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, famously opens with the sentence, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Andrew Breitbart seems not to have gotten the memo about treating the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy with sympathy and respect:

What ran me off the rails was Dr. Melissa Clouthier. She has a post that links to another post by Rachel Lucas about a trip she made to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Lucas’s post is very well-written and very powerful.

I am planning to do a round-up of Ted Kennedy coverage, remembrances, commentary, and so on — but for right now I want to point to the Twitter page of Matthew Elliot, aka matttbastard, who is among other things a contributing writer at Comments from Left Field. Matt has been twittering pretty much non-stop about Sen. Kennedy’s death since the news broke around midnight. Literally, he was up all night tweeting one link after another. I know, because I was reading his tweets until almost...