Here is something that has nothing to do with politics. After clicking on the article below start reading at the bottom of the third column.

	See My Contribution to Class of 65 Notes
January/February 2010

Follow this link to the article in The New Republic.

This is the best defense I have seen of health care reform as embodied in the recently passed Senate bill.

If you are a disheartened liberal, read this article to get yourself straightened out.

If you are a rabid right winger, forget it, there is no hope for you.

Everybody else seems to get it without any help. Even for you, reading this article might impress you about the benefits of the legislation even more than you knew.

Follow this link to the story in the Los Angeles Times about how Harry Reid shepherded the health care reform bill through the Senate.

It is scary to realize what must happen to get a bill passed through the Senate. I am thinking that the liberal ploy of insisting on a public option worked really well.  The people trying to stop this bill probably thought that keeping out the public option was enough to kill the bill.  They probably rested when that option was removed and the early Medicare sign-up was removed.  Luckily the liberals had pretended this was enough to be a show stopper, so the killers stopped there.  Then the liberals fooled them by voting for the resulting bill.

This reminds me of a principle or parenting that I have always pondered.  Children need to rebel against their parents.  So you need to insist on something that is not too consequential so that they will be able to rebel and yet survive their teen years.

The only humor in the Senate process was the part that Charlie Brown and Nelson Rockefeller played.

Follow this link to the story at the Information Week website.

Is it just a coincidence that Microsoft is being slapped silly by the courts now that George Bush and his regime are out of office?

At first, I could not imagine a patent that could be granted in this area because patents must be non-obvious to practitioners in the domain.  I figured that if you wanted to process an XML document, the methodology would be pretty obvious.  The obvious method is described in the patent as prior art.

Follow this link to read patent No. 5,787,449. When someone tries to claim that the patent is obvious, I always ask the question, “So why wasn’t it invented before?”

As a software engineer, but no expert in the technology of document processing, this invention seems to me that it may be a significant break with all previous word processing methods. I say “seems to me” because I know that I am not aware of all previous word processing methods.  Apparently Microsoft was not successful in attacking the validity of the patent.  I have no idea of the details of Microsoft’s defense of the lawsuit. Perhaps they were trying to defend themselves on some other grounds than the validity of the patent.

I thought about finding and posting links to the debates among the candidates for Massachusetts Senator.

After hearing just a few words from the Republican candidate during the primaries, I decided that it was pointless to put any effort into the current round of debates.  There is no way that I would vote for anybody but Martha Coakley.

Follow this link to the story at the McClatchy News web site.

Follow this link to see the original rating as it appeared on the PolitiFact web site.

Apparently Palin never lets a good lie go to waste.  She is still using it.

As for Joe Biden’s supposed lie, when one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft., I think you would have to interpret it in a specific way that might not have been intended to think of it as a lie. It is a far stretch to even consider that remark in the same league as Palin’s remark.

Follow this link to the story about Biden’s remarks on PolitiFact.

going through the aircraft also could mean going through the aircraft filtration system.  This was also discussed in the PolitiFact article.  The explanation does explain why it is highly unlikely that the germs would pass through the filtration system.

PolitiFact consulted Dr. Tony Overfelt of Auburn University. Overfelt is the executive director of the National Air Transportation Center of Excellence for Research in the Intermodal Transport Environment. After debunking the idea of germs going through the filtration system, he did add the following:

That’s not to say that people shouldn’t worry about germs on aircraft at all, Overfelt said. But the concern should be more focused on not touching something that a sick person touched. Overfelt said that when he flies, he washes his hands frequently and tries not to touch his face, especially his nose or eyes.

Since you have no control over who sits near you, does it matter if the germs travel through the whole aircraft to get to you or travel only a few rows to get to you?

Moreover,  Biden’s press people retracted Biden’s overstatement of the hazard while Palin is still pushing her overstatement.

Note to self: Follow this link to remind yourself why you should go to the gym.

As Paul Harvey used to say, And now for the rest of the story…

Follow this link to the story about Senator Bernie Sanders’ amendment to institute a single-payer health care system.

This is the 767 page amendment that Senator Coburn insisted be read aloud by the clerks.

If you just listened to the mainstream media, you may not even have known what amendment Coburn was insisting be read. You certainly didn’t know that the amendment was withdrawn. Even more certainly you did not know that Bernie Sanders made a 30 minute speech about the amendment.

Well, maybe you knew these things, but I didn’t.

The other thing you might learn from the story is the power that individual voters now have to influence the course of events in the Congress. That power did not succeed this time in achieving the end goal, but it did cause a small ripple of action. Small ripples do sometimes grow into big waves if they keep getting reinforced by other ripples.

Perhaps this video will help you decide on whether the current bill is worth passing.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s editorial explaining why we should pass this deeply flawed bill.

To his reasons, I can add a few thoughts of my own.

Remember the adage, “it isn’t over until the fat lady sings.”  In this case, the vote on the reconciled bill is when it is over.  There is some hope that something can be salvaged during the reconciliation stage.  If the Senate bill does not pass, there is no chance to get to the next stage.  Who knows what clever strategies Obama and Reid can come up with.  If we cut them off at this point, they won’t have a chance to show us.  If they have nothing to show, they can always be cut off at the reconciled bill.  If the reconciled bill is good enough, the whole thing can be improved in later years.

Remember the other adage revenge is a dish best served cold.  What future will Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman have in the senate after this performance?  Good luck if they need anything from any other Senator.  A good Democratic election strategy would be to remind voters how harmful the Republicans and not quite right wing bat sh*t crazy^† Democrats were.  Convincing voters to get rid of some of these bozos is a lot easier than getting 60 votes in the Senate.  You only need a majority of voters in each Senate race to vote against the bozos.

^† not quite right wing bat sh*t crazy is the actual description of the group of Democrats that the media is calling “moderate”.  To describe all of the Republicans and some Democrats, just remove the “not quite” qualification.