Pennsylvania is the 26th most religious state according to the following Pew Poll:

Which of the 50 states has the most religious population? Since there are many ways to define “religious,” there is no single answer to this question. But to give a sense of how the states stack up, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life used polling data to rank them on four measures: the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God. Mississippi stands out on all four, and several other Southern states also rank very high on the measures.

via Pew Forum: How Religious Is Your State?

Where’s yours?

People are killing rich granny with Estate Tax Death Panels Or just simply allowing your loved ones to have the easiest time with a life lived.

“I have two clients on life support, and the families are struggling with whether to continue heroic measures for a few more days,” says Joshua Rubenstein, a lawyer with Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in New York. “Do they want to live for the rest of their lives having made serious medical decisions based on estate-tax law?”

Currently, the tax applies to about 5,500 taxpayers a year. So, on average, at least 15 people die every day whose estates would benefit from the the taxs lapse.

The macabre situation stems from 2001, when Congress raised estate-tax exemptions, culminating with the taxs disappearance next year. However, due to budget constraints, lawmakers didnt make the change permanent. So the estate tax is due to come back to life in 2011 — at a higher rate and lower exemption.

To make it easier on their heirs, some clients are putting provisions into their health-care proxies allowing whoever makes end-of-life medical decisions to consider changes in estate-tax law. “We have done this at least a dozen times, and have gotten more calls recently,” says Andrew Katzenstein, a lawyer with Proskauer Rose LLP in Los Angeles.

Of course, plenty of taxpayers themselves are eager to live to see the new year. One wealthy, terminally ill real-estate entrepreneur has told his doctors he is determined to live until the law changes.

[…]

The situation is causing at least one person to add the prospect of euthanasia to his estate-planning mix, according to Mr. Katzenstein of Proskauer Rose. An elderly, infirm client of his recently asked whether undergoing euthanasia next year in Holland, where it’s legal, might allow his estate to dodge the tax.

His answer: Yes.

via Rich Cling to Life to Beat Tax Man – WSJ.com.

I guess its ok when your family “death panels up” for money.

Maureen Dowd says the Maverick is gone and wonder’s why. (emphasis mine):

The Maverick’s buck stops here.

John McCain is no longer the media’s delight and his party’s burr, bucking convention with infectious relish.

The man used to be such a constructive independent that some of his Republican Senate colleagues called him a traitor. Now he’s such a predictable obstructionist that he’s in the just-say-no vanguard with the same conservatives who used to despise him.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Is There a Real McCain? – NYTimes.com.

John McCain was never a Maverick.

Maverick was a campaign image wrapped around a far right senator from Arizona in the 2000 Presidential Republican Primary by high priced consultants Mike Murphy and Mark McKinnon who apparently either loved Top Gun (or possibly Mel Gibson’s movie Maverick). He was always a conservative and why conservatives disliked McCain was because he embraced this “Mavericky” image even though in practice, he was a far right Senator in a pretty far right delegation who skewed left on two issues (immigration and spending) that fit his state demographic. Nothing wrong with him being that, it was just wrong to tag him as someone who bucked his party as much or more than he voted with his party.

After the 2000 South Carolina primary, I doubt a “maverick” would have heartily jumped in to support George W. Bush. A “maverick” also wouldn’t have let his “friend” John Kerry be swift boated without saying it was unfair. He was pretty MAvericky when he repeatedly opposed an MLK holiday and he was maverick with maverick sauce on top when he opposed US divestment from apartheid South Africa.

Either way its fitting that they built McCain’s brand after a movie character played by one of two guys that used to be golden and have since been exposed as people prone to ridiculous public outbursts.

Tim Donaghy went to jail for this, no?

Goldman’s own clients who bought them, however, were less fortunate.

Pension funds and insurance companies lost billions of dollars on securities that they believed were solid investments, according to former Goldman employees with direct knowledge of the deals who asked not to be identified because they have confidentiality agreements with the firm.

Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc., an investment company whose parent firm was overseen by Lewis A. Sachs, who this year became a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

via Banks That Bundled Bad Debt Also Bet Against It – NYTimes.com.

Then how do we know what “Public Option” health insurance is? The President needs to step out of the cocoon if he really feels this is something he can pass off on lefties expecting too much. The Public Option was the compromise away from what many lefties initially wanted: single payer health care.

Glenn Greenwald catches Reason consistently referencing CBO reports as authoritative information when it benefits a “libertarian” position and deriding the use of CBO reports when it validates a liberal position.

When it suits them — meaning when the CBO issues negative findings about Obama’s domestic policies — Reason holds up the CBO as an authoritative oracle not to be questioned. Three weeks ago, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie warned of “massive premium hikes” based on “the CBO’s latest assay of the Senate’s health-care reform plan.”

[…]

As soon as the CBO began issuing reports that undermined rather than bolstered Reason’s desire to sink all health care reform, the CBO was instantaneously transformed from (a) “a straight-laced bureau whose job is to ground congressional fantasy in budgetary reality” and which “is biased toward the certain and the real and the measurable” into (b) an agency whose “authority is belied by the highly speculative nature of its work,” which is “keeper of the nation’s budgetary myths” and plagued by a “woeful record.”

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Either CBO data models built to project budgets for a piece of legislation holds value or it doesn’t. They can’t have it both ways. It seems Reason is plagued by a woeful record of hypocrisy.

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire and now D.C.

In a raucous signing ceremony at a northwest Washington church, Mayor Fenty officially legalized same-sex marriage in the District, distributing ceremonial pens among the Council members standing behind him.

via D.C. Wire – Fenty signs gay marriage bill.

Looking at the list of places where marriage equality passed it wasn’t the blacks. or the latinos. or the old people. or the religious people. or the poor uneducated people. It was a poorly organized, out funded, pro marriage equality movement in California that lost the “Prop 8” battle. This needs to remain clear to the people that want to treat ethnic cross tabs of votes around marriage equality as an indictment of a group of minorities.

Hamsher circled the wagons around the Netroots and then filled them with teabags:

At no time do the synapses firing in their brains make the connection that both the “lazy progressive bloggers” and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill.

via Jane Hamsher: Left/Right Populist Outrage Will Defeat Senate Health Care Bill.

This comparison is ridiculous. The tea baggers say no bills should be passed that interfere with the “free market” aka “gov’t hands of my medicare” nonsense. Progressives want health care reform, the ones against the current compromise who jumped in to say “kill the bill” want to make sure that private insurance companies receive no windfall from health care/insurance or any other legislation. If this is not possible, they either advocate starting over with the senate bill and creating a senate public option as the minimum step toward single payer health care OR stripping any health care reforms out and enacting health care rights for citizens and regulations to guarantee that, essentially allowing access to coverage but through much lower cost regulations.

The “kill the bill” mantra was already a poor articulation of progressive goals regarding repairing the Senate Health Care Bill and it was a mantra that fueled the “everyone is against reform, now” theme to be kicked around the news media before the historic Christmas Eve senate vote to pass health care reform. It never represented the even “almost the same thing” that teabaggers wanted.

Now Hamsher has teamed up with Grover Norquist to demand accountability from Freddie Mac’s board of Directors in 2000 and 2001 when earnings were misstated. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was a member of that board and is directly named in a letter addressed to US Attorney General Holder from Norquist and Hamsher. Hamsher’s goals are to stop the siphon of tax payer money to corporate bailouts through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being able to buy crap mortgages from banks who were largely responsible for offering garbage mortgages to use as filler for specialized securities. Norquist’s goal is to stop taxes and starve government to a military industrial complex. The ACLU and other groups have done excellent work filing FOIA requests and pursuing them to achieve open government. Why wouldn’t Hamsher team up with one of these groups and leverage her FDL community to fund an effort?

Remember those environmental issues commercials where a lefty and a righty got together and said: we know something needs to be done about climate change so we are gonna chum it up on a bench in a eye pleasing black and white commercial?

Liberals thought they were demonstrating how settled science had settled the issue for everyone. These far right Republicans did these spots to launder their histories of being climate change deniers and promoters of garbage science used to debunk studies of climate change. Newt Gingrich chummed it up with Pelosi in that ad, and then he helped Pelosi by testifying before congress against progressive climate change legislative agenda. Now he denies he is against climate change legislation, he just wants climate change legislation that allows the free market to fix the climate change issues on its own. Do you think Al Gore and Pelosi may regret promoting Gingrich as someone who is serious about climate change?

I doubt Norquist disagrees with corporations engaging in creative accounting to obscure losses, he just disagrees with them having to account for anything to anyone except to their board of directors. He also disagrees with any government or psuedo-government entity created to promote empirically fair markets or support a middle class. Hamsher will probably end up regretting validating Norquist as someone who is serious about ending government corruption, when in reality he just wants to end government regulations and or public vs private competition. If Norquist can use this as a “Death Panel” cry to cripple the financial reform agenda of the Obama White House by formally accusing a high ranking member with (at the least) creative accounting and at the worst some sort of fraud, he will.

Even if you take Norquist at his word, that he really is upset by what Emmanuel’s role may have been with Freddie Mac, agreement on one issue is not foundation enough to make a coherent alliance. I hope Hamsher has a grip on where this whole thing will lead.

Krugman discusses the differences between candidates Obama and Clinton.

But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that

(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders

(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive

Now it’s true that many progressives were ardent Obama supporters, with their ardency mixed in with a fair bit of demonization of Hillary Clinton.

via The WYSIWYG president – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

I agree with Krugman on the point that many folks simply ignored some of Obama’s key policy points in the 2008 campaign and got swept up with hope-y change-y t-shirts and crying and hugging strangers.

I don’t think those people are the net roots for the most part. I think the problem with the net roots is that they forgot the limitations were never the 50+ senate caucus. It was always the swing votes in the opposition party to get to 60. George W. Bush had more Blue Dog Democrats willing to endorse all of his major first term initiatives without any compromise. People say his cunning got George W. Bush everything he wanted, I would say it was Nixon’s cunning that created the Southern Strategy and Reagan’s american chauvinism that compounded that and created the moderate as right of center Blue Dog Democrat. Post-9/11 political climate was a perfect environment to shame Blue Dog and Hawk Democrats into knee jerk votes. If we were unhappy with what Democrats did in the senate from 2000 to 08, it should be painfully obvious that the Senate Democrats didn’t demand adequate concessions in exchange for their cooperation with George W. Bush’s platform and agenda.

To be fair, Clinton could have been expected to be more progressive than Obama concerning health care and Women’s rights. It doesn’t mean a Clinton white house would be as close to getting a bill passed. On many other issues, I would doubt she would be more progressive from her slightly more conservative voting record and working affiliations as a Senator. Clinton was one of the Democrats that voted for a pre-authorized Iraq war. It was baffling at the time and Clinton’s explainations (I didn’t read the NIE and I trusted President Bush’s evidence) were both unacceptable. In addition Clinton’s deep relation with the”New Democrat” (read left of center, right of center left) DLC can not be ignored. Nor should her comments about creating a protective umbrella around all middle east nations vs Iran.

In addition, a candidate is policies and practice.

Also despite the “Obama the Arrogant” meme, Clinton’s campaign was the one built on brazen, reckless arrogance. Clinton pegged herself “inevitable” and proceeded to undervalue Iowa and the various state by state delegate rules. She had no long term branding strategy for her campaign and was struggling to find her footing well past Super Tuesday. In addition she burned through campaign cash at an alarming rate with wasteful spending. All of this would have been needed for a general campaign push. It was an awful way to start a bid for the presidency after Gore and Kerry campaigns and eight years of George W. Bush.

What we saw is what we got, but it wasn’t the “least progressive” candidate.

Right wing think tanks began to push the stupid idea of privatizing Social Security in the late 1990s which culminated in George W Bush’s failed attempt to privatize Social Security at the beginning of his second term.

Investors have just endured an absolutely terrible 10 years — a string of crashes, crises, financial scandals, recessions and collapsed bubbles.

According to Standard & Poor’s analyst Howard Silverblatt, it has actually been the worst decade for U.S. investors on record. When you look at total returns, including dividends, we’ve even done worse than the 1930s. Investors in the S&P 500 have lost about 10% this decade.

After you count inflation, investors have actually lost about 30%. That’s even behind the inflationary 1970s, when investors lost about 23% in real terms.

via ‘Hot Stocks For a New Decade?’ Wait a Minute! – WSJ.com.

Imagine if he had succeeded.

Stupak, is not a Democrat. He represents “The Family”. A C Street flunky, Plain and simple. (h/t John Cole at Balloon Juice)

“Guys – when will we see your letters of opposition to the managers amendment?? We need them ASAP!” wrote Erika Smith, the Stupak aide, at 9:23 this morning, less than an hour after the amendment had become available.

The email’s recipients included key staffers for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Right to Life, the Family Research Council, as well as Autumn Fredericks Christensen, aide to top pro-life Republican Chris Smith, and Lanier Swann, a McConnell aide.

A minute after Smith sent out her plea, Lanier reiterated it to the list.

“Nelson is telling people in the building he will vote yes. If there was any time to weigh in against this deal —- THIS IS IT,” Swann wrote at 9:24 a.m.

[…]

Stupak said that he was in Northern Michigan, without internet access, when the emails were sent from his office to McConnell’s. Smith “should have let me make up my own mind,” said Stupak.

A spokesman for McConnell declined to comment about the staffers’ exchange.

via Stupak aims to sink ‘unacceptable’ abortion compromise – – POLITICO.com.

Stupak is a sneaky coward. First, he goes the punk route by attaching anti-abortion amendments to health care bills as opposed to trying to pass legislation against reproductive rights on its own. When he gets caught e-mailing his C Street posse the signal to mount up, he throws his aide Erika Smith under the bus, as if she is calling the shots in the Stupak office. Pelosi and Clyburn need to find out how long this guy has been colluding with Republican leadership. Stupak’s I can’t even figure out this gosh darn e-mail thing-a-mabob excuse is ridiculous.

If you are a Democrat and against reproductive rights, fine. Stand on that principle. The caucus can find room in both houses of congress to maintain the pro choice status quo with anti-abortion Democrats under the big tent. Stupak is doing more than standing on his own, he is covertly whipping up interference against his party’s agenda and your colleagues re-election prospects by coordinating with the opposition is plain sabotage.

Friedman writes:

Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

Islam needs the same civil war.

via Op-Ed Columnist – www.jihad.com – NYTimes.com.

Except not every country needed a war to abolish slavery. In addition Mr. Suck on This may not ever consider what would happen if the extremists win this Islamic Civil War that he feels is necessary. Friedman’s opinions should be disregarded.