All that, plus the sense God gave a billy goat: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty: anti-science and anti-gay, and therefore a viable GOP candidate for president in 2012.

Countdown: Scott Roeder, accused murderer of Dr. George Tiller, goes on trial Jan. 11, and he’s not going to be allowed to claim that it was legal to kill Tiller to protect innocent lives. Whoever shoots down an unarmed doctor in the middle of his church, without reason or provocation, should get the spike, period.

¡Brava, Ciudad de Mexico!: Mexico City legalizes gay marriage before New York City does. Of course, that’s because the New York State Senate is run by guys I would call bucketheads except that honest walruses everywhere would take exception.

Probably crap: That’s my assessment of Reuters’ claim that its article by Matthew Goldstein on hedge-fund trader Steven Cohen was killed on “journalistic grounds.” You don’t create an investigative team, put someone like Matthew Goldstein on it, assign it a story, nurse that story through the reporting and writing and editing, all the way through the lawyering, and THEN kill it on “journalistic grounds.” Yeah, sure, anything is possible, but by far the likeliest explanation is that something else is going on here that reflects quite poorly on Reuters.

When stupidity becomes a public-health issue: Anyone who would pay Michael Steele a dime to give a speech needs to be quarantined for the public’s good.

Revisionist history: Obama claims he never campaigned on the public option. Unfortunately for him, he did. I guess pointing this out makes me a hater. Oh, well, feel the hate, peeps.

Ten worst things about the 2000s, from Juan Cole. Hint: They all had to do with George Bush.

Three of the ten worst things about this week, captured by Digby in a single post.

The best argument I’ve seen for a public option: The retiring CEO of Cigna, Ed Hanway, is getting $73.2 million. And all he had to do for it was deny a little girl a liver transplant. Forget sick people; will no one think of the poor stockholders here? You can e-mail him your best wishes at H.Edward.Hanway@CIGNA.com. Seriously. I just tried it a few minutes ago, and it worked.*

Requiring people to buy private health insurance: constitutional or not?: Some bona-fide legal scholars have it out on that issue here.

This will be fun. This will be shooting fish in a barrel, with dynamite. But I repeat myself. Andrew Breitbart, who has a long history of not being able to find a fact with both hands and a flashlight, plans to start a media fact-checking Web site soon, thus providing conclusive evidence for my hypothesis that Andrew Breitbart is a liberal plot to make conservatives look stupid.

On the other hand, Digby hates America, or at least American pundits, although given the offense she identifies here, I have to say I hate them, too: “There seems to be an unfortunate requirement in American politics that when pundits and numbers crunchers read the tea leaves and determine to their satisfaction that the contest is over, those they’ve decided are going to lose are required to immediately capitulate, admit they were wrong and join in the celebration of the winner — even if the votes haven’t been cast or the cases haven’t been decided.”

Jiujitsu: Newt Gingrich has been urging Republicans to campaign next year on a pledge to repeal HCR in 2011 if it’s enacted. But Democrats are seeing that as a bad thing for Republicans and are urging their challengers for 2010 to get the GOP incumbents on the record about whether they intend to try to repeal HCR. Interesting.

I think it is time to conclude that the people who are running the SEC are not just incompetent but are actively hostile to the agency’s mission.

For the win: Balloon Juice is having a contest tonight: Name the ten worst Washington Post columnists of the past decade. As it happens, I stumbled my personal No. 1, Charles Krauthammer, on TV earlier tonight. Sick bastard was  complaining because we hadn’t gone to war against Iran already. That’s not just stupid, that’s Evil, the kind of Evil that deserves for its paralyzed ass to wake up in a foxhole surrounded by corpses with no weapon, no comrades in sight, no way to move and the enemy advancing with bayonets fixed. If Krauthammer wants blood that badly, let him drink his own.

Colbert, also for the win: “Folks, there are some things that everybody knows, but nobody says,” one being that the health-care industry is buying the legislation it wants. (Doubt me? Hey, you don’t have to believe me. Believe the stock market.)

Michele Bachmann hates Teh Soshulizm. Sort of: Unfortunately for Michele, evidence has been uncovered that actually she’s quite the welfare queen.

Quote of the day, from Attackerman: “After all, systemic dysfunction doesn’t come from nowhere, and it usually has a constituency.” I don’t know that I’d call that a rule of investigative reporting, but it’s definitely worth remembering.

*I bet you’re wondering what I wrote. Well, I’ll tell you what I wrote. It was this: “Dear Ed: Best wishes on your retirement. I hope it’s a long one. You’re going to need a long one to think up an argument that St. Peter will buy. Love, Lex.” Really.

She is one of blogosphere’s best.

@rnstrong asks

Clinton ended up with nothing. Obama may actually make things worse. How did this happen again?

Pretty much everyone who wanted health care reform is now admitting defeat.  Well, everyone but Obama, who just tweeted

We are on the precipice of big changes—the most significant reform of our health care since the passage of Medicare.

Uh, sorry Barack, but Digby has it right:

Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good. — and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.

But you know, as disappointing as it is, I don’t put too much blame on Obama.  As Megan McArdle put it

But the guy got elected to be president of the United States, not Prime Minister of Sweden.  Anyone who seriously entertained the notion that the procedural obstacles to enacting legislation in the United States would suddenly fall away–along with the essentially center-right politics of the American voter–is probably not mature enough to be driving.

She went into more detail on this topic in this post:

Federalist and non-parliamentary democracy:  in most other systems, the head of the government tells the government what to do.  In our system, you need 220 congressmen and 50-60 senators.  There’s no way to implement the sort of technocratic change that reformers envision; the politicians will keep sticking their fingers in the pie.

…

It’s no good saying that well, we should try to be more like the Netherlands–you can’t build a system on the assumption that you will, suddenly and for no apparent reason, be able to import someone else’s political culture.  Progressives are watching the whole health care legislative process with utter dismay as it produces a monster of a bill that not even its mother could love–and trying to love it anyway, on the grounds that it’s a start. … This is the kind of thing the American political system produces.  …

So one problem is our political system leads to bloated legislation, because we need to keep senators (and their lobbyists) happy.

The other problem is that public support for reform just isn’t there.  In order to get a good health care reform bill passed, you first need to win the battle of ideas.  This battle has to be fought over a long period of time.  If progressive news shows continue to focus on the antics of Sarah Palin, Tiger Woods’ affairs and on insulting the very people that would benefit from reform, this isn’t going to happen.  As Bob Somerby put it

For decades, Republicans have peddled a string of familiar claims (described by The Economist as “falsehoods”) about the shape of world health care. We all know what these talking-points are; they come from the side of American politics which actually tries to win. American health care is the best in the world! And: “Socialized medicine” has failed everywhere it’s been tried! And: In England, [insert scare story here!] Republican pols, and conservative talkers, have peddled these claims for decades now. The boys and girls at our liberal journals seem to know that they daren’t push back.In England, commentators are “amazed” by all the distortions. In America, the distortions roll off our liberal backs! And American citizens aren’t amazed; instead, they’re happy with their insurance! They simply don’t know the things they don’t know. More specifically, they don’t know how much of what they hear is bogus. Our side never quite tells them.

The voters don’t know they’re being looted! Who would dare say such a shrill thing? For such reasons, health reform fails.

This is the situation that Obama walked into.  A lot of people recognized that a universal health care bill with real cost savings was not going to pass.  So, you know, this will go in the defeat column for Obama, but I don’t think he had much of a chance to begin with. The same can’t be said for how he has handled other issues (gitmo, afghanistan, etc), but that’s a topic for another day.

I don’t know ten percent of what I would need to know to even begin to comprehend whether the clusterfuck Taibbi describes here is accurate. As much as I know about finance it could just be an inbred profession where people run across each other all the time and everyone being connected to Bob Rubin is no more nefarious than the Bill Walsh head coaching tree.

But I don’t know that for a fact, and Taibbi makes a pretty convincing case. And it’s pretty interesting to me that various corners of the liberal blogosphere like OW are so quick to dismiss him. Some of us are too quick to give the president the benefit of the doubt, or to simply say ‘well he’s eons better than McCain would have been,’ and leave it at that.

We are in one weird place in world history.

Jesus Christ.

Digby and Glenn have more.

Update: Major confession: These things wouldn’t be a bad idea, just in case the right-left thing gets too out of hand. I would just point it like I golf:

If you’re worried about hitting the tree, aim at it.