Private insurers are the scorpion in the story of turtle and the scorpion. They have proven for decades they will do anything to avoid regulation, and will always put profits over the health care needs of regular Americans. Heck, by law, as for-profit corporations, they are required to put profits over everything else. Democrats let insurance companies hop on their back, and now they are smack-dab in the middle of the river with them. Don’t scream when they sting you–it is just their nature.

• Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Larry.
• Tone is the least of their problems.
• The witchcraft dabbler runs The Quitter’s playbook.
• Isn’t he the Commander-in-Chief?
• Maybe we could pay somebody to fix them?
• Jane is shrill.

Summing up how ‘Murica works, in vulgar form.

Indigenous — The Faults All My Own, at the House of Blues.

Just like there are Baptists that drink, Catholics who support liberation theology and a variety of other shades and hues in the Christian coloring book–as well as some who go outside the lines–there are all variety of witches. Not all witches are Satanists. Or Druids, Wiccans, Re-Weavers, Dianic, shamans, or members of the Ancient, Secret and Unacceptable Order of the Almond Bear Claw Danish Qabalistic Coffee Coven ™, any more than not all Christians are narrow-minded theocratic, anti-sex, anti-gay, fundamentalists. Heck, some witches aren’t even religious, they just have mad skillz.

Enter Project Vote’s new poll (PDF), which focuses on the black, youth and low-income voters who are the opposite of the white, old, affluent teabaggers in almost every way. Not only that, but there’s actually more of them: 32% of the electorate to the tea partiers’ 29. And most amazing of all, when you compare their responses to the country as a whole, it turns out that they’re a lot more mainstream and representative of America than the tea partiers are.

There’s an interesting detail in the IG Report on FBI’s investigations of peace groups that suggests FBI was asking OLC for an interpretation of the approval required before conducting a riot-related investigation.

The proud shameful tradition of the filibuster in our august broken Senate being used by a small group of privileged elites to deny rights to segments of this country now continues unbroken for over a century. Today, the legislative action that should have begun the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” failed to get cloture by a vote of 56 to 43 (note: for procedural reason Harry Reid had to switch his vote for yes to no). Those 43 senators used the filibuster to deny homosexuals their right to serve openly in our armed forces without government-imposed legal discrimination based on a minority status. In a sane democracy, winning 56 percent of the vote would be a victory, but sanity is at best an unwelcomed guest in the modern United States Senate.

Obama is at it again, complaining about “griping and groaning Democrats” and frankly just not looking very presidential.

The White House just released a statement that the President’s Chief Economic Adviser, Larry Summers, will leave the Administration and return to Harvard University by the end of the year.