Insomniactive

From my friend Dave Sikora. Maybe it’s not nine minutes funny, but it’s still pretty damned good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc

This is just marvelous, stunning news:

San Francisco financier Warren Hellman will invest $5 million to develop a nonprofit journalism venture that will provide regional news coverage online and feed stories to media partners including KQED and possibly the New York Times.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/24/BUA719SBDH.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0S7HKIjUw

This from Judy Sims, formerly VP Digital at the Toronto Star Media Group: “4 Easy Steps to Becoming a New News Organization.” This is not bad, as these things go. But it leaves out the central fact: this “news organization” is tiny. What it cannibalizes is big.

Her Sunday essay sent me scrambling to find the General Social Survey, which has been published since 1972. Lord, what a way to kill a morning. From it, she extracted some tidbits about the trends in women’s happiness. The big one, and the big surprise for me, is kids:

One area of extreme distraction is kids. “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”

As I’m neither a parent nor a woman, I’m utterly unqualified to comment, other than to say, “huh?”

This really is a marvelous piece by a terrific guy. Glad he’s the captain of our new ship.

Paul’s post is about as crisp and cogent analysis of the current state of play as I’ve seen. In part:

The health care debate is rather simple, really. The fundamental problem is this: There are three elements to any health care reform: cost of care, quality of care, and breadth (coverage) of care. It is easy to design a system that takes care of any two of these, but extremely difficult to design a system that takes care of all three. The other fundamental fact is that most people who have health insurance are pretty happy with what they have. They get quality care at an affordable price, which is paid for by somebody else, usually their employer. Yes, that price keeps going up, and eventually it will become unsustainable, but for now, they don’t see a reason to change. Nor do they believe that the cost will come down if the government is in charge. To sum it up, the Democrats made the worst mistake they could make. They started acting like a bunch of liberals.

So now CNN reports that South Carolina Republican and self-appointed Hyena in Chief Joe Wilson has raised $200k in the wake of his calculated, embarrassing stunt . Unfortunately, the rest of the country seems to be a lot more embarrassed than Rep. Wilson:

“On these issues, I will not be muzzled, I will speak up and speak loudly against this risky plan,” Wilson said in a YouTube video released Thursday evening. “The supporters of the government takeover of health care and the liberals who want to give health care to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan.”

The congressman disbursed the video via Twitter and asked his followers to “please watch and pass on.”

“[Democrats] want to silence anyone who speaks out against it,” Wilson also says in the video. “They made it clear they want to defeat me and pass the plan. I need your help now. … Contribute to my effort to defeat the proponents of government-run health care.”

As Politico reports this morning, South Carolina has a long history of rough-and-tumble politics, some of it (or most of it, depending on whom you believe) racially tinged. But honestly, surely any clear-eyed American can see that this behavior is not only cynical, but unpatriotic. Where are calls of formal censure from the Republican leadership? We haven’t heard a peep.

I don’t begrudge Rep. Wilson his convictions that the Obama health care plan is a sure road to hell, with shockingly healthy illegal aliens serving as shameful mile markers along the way. Whatever. But I’d like to ask him one question, which my grandmother would ask me when I really disappointed her:

“What if everybody behaved that way?”