I’m sure Sullivan enjoys excercising complete control over every word that appears on his blog. Some of us enjoy a variety of opinion and the back-and-forth of allowing different voices to express theirs too. It’s a mistake to extrapolate too much from one setup to another — and an even bigger mistake to trust someone else to make those distinctions for you without at least checking their links.

Welcome to 2010.

Harold Ford clearly has read George Orwell’s 1984, but I’m not sure he understood that “Newspeak” is not something to which a reality-based politician should aspire. But when Harold Ford uses the day set aside to commemorate a man dedicated to non-violence to speak glowingly of taking electrical cords to our national backside, there’s something very, very wrong going on.

Today, House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer indicated possible support for the rush strategy to pass health care reform, requiring would require Democrats to rush to finish all negotiations on health care and pass the new merged bill through both chambers in the small window of time before the Secretary of State of Massachusetts could officially certify Scott Brown.

[Ed. Note: FDL has complete team coverage of Perry v. Schwarzenegger--including more legal analysis, court documents, videos, and liveblogging direct from the federal court in San Francisco. You can find it all on our dedicated Prop 8 page.]

Liveblog – Day Six, Part 1 here

Fantastic concern trolling from McBobo today.

Theoretically, this “sidecar reconciliation” could happen quickly in the Senate, since the underlying bill has already passed. The Finance and HELP committees would probably have to approve, and then it could go to the floor for a vote.

None of this, by the way, is a function of what happens to day in Massachusetts. It can — and should — happen regardless of what happens with the Coakley/Brown election in Massachusetts today. The Democrats have a huge perception problem that the health care bill is just the bank bailout extended to the insurance companies, and they need to fix it if they want to turn the ship around before the 2010 elections.

These witnesses will testify for the Plaintiffs’ side Tuesday January 19th. They are San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, Dr. M.V. Lee Badgett, and Ryan Kendall. For more information on these witnesses, please see the Witness section of the FDL Prop 8 Trial Hub.

Tuesday, I will be live-blogging here at The Seminal; David Dayen will be live-blogging at the FDL News Desk. We’ll try to link up one another’s posts as we move between them; check both places as needed for up-to-the-minute liveblogging.

The WaPo has a story out describing how the FBI, from 2002 until 2006, used exigent letters to collect phone records without the proper underlying terrorist justification.

This would’ve been great in, say, January of 2009. President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say. [...] The health care backdrop has given the White House a strong incentive to strike a defiant posture, at least rhetorically, in [...]

Just what kind of message ads are now acceptable for the networks? Why conservative religious ones of course.