It's the Bermuda Dodecahedron

I've been hunting wabbits accumulating links for a week.  Those things are indigestible.

• wendelah at dreamwidth has some links for the disastrous Senate version of a "healthcare" bill.
• Feministing supports saving the ACA before it gets destroyed.
• Echidne of the Snakes comments on the "free market religion" of conservatives and how that really doesn't help with healthcare.
• How "conservatives" are robbing you of health care and how "corporate media" have been "aiding and abetting."  (Adam Johnson, AlterNet)
• An actual shortfall problem which the Senate bill does not address.
• "Civic illiteracy" and how we got there. (Henry A. Giroux, Salon)

  I am not referring here to only the kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such as Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky and Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of manufactured illiteracy that has become a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges captures this demagogic attack on thoughtfulness in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idioms of mass culture.” Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.
  
  This updated form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. At the same time, illiteracy bonds people: It offers the pretense of a community bound by a willful denial of facts and its celebration of ignorance.

• Senator Franken talks about the Senate "health care" bill (the header is a little misleading).  (Alexandra Rosenmann, AlterNet) on Morning Joe.
• Speaking of Morning Joe, he noticed the President has called the "health care" bill "mean."  (Travis Gettys, Raw Story at AlterNet)  "Jedi Mind Trick," indeed.
• Paul Ryan may be vulnerable (politically). (Capper, Crooks and Liars)
• Authoritarianism creeps in on little cat feet.  Time for the squirt bottle.  (MJ Stephan and T Snyder, The Guardian)
• In Memoriam:
• Glenne Headly, actress
• Bill Dana, comic
• Gabe Pressman, TV journalist
• Pete Flynn, Mets groundskeeper