Thank you Nancy, with a nod to Scott Brown

Think back to January 20, when we thought healthcare reform was dead because Scott Brown got elected.

In retrospect, I think it galvanized the Democrats, especially Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

The President deserved Joe Biden’s encomium, though it was embarrassingly long, but it’s unconscionable that Biden didn’t even mention Pelosi. Looking at her face here though, she didn’t seem to mind. She’ll be 70 on Friday, but the neck Norah Ephron must be drooling over shows no signs of all her heavy lifting.

Lady Gaga, Scott Brown, and Time Magazine

There’s a limit to how au courant I’m willing to be. I refuse to read People Magazine, and maybe that’s why I have no idea who Lady Gaga is, or how she got such a ridiculous name, or why everyone’s talking about her – though I guess the name helps with that.

I know she’s a singer, and maybe wears gold dresses? but that’s as far as I’m going to go. I guess I’m going to have to go back to politics.

But that has its drawbacks too. There’s a new story online from Time Magazine announcing the next 10 Scott Browns, including the guy running for Congress in my district.

“We create our own reality.” That was a line we used a lot in the Personal Mastery workshop we’d run for corporations (even though everybody knows people in corporations – the little guys, anyway – can’t possibly create their own realities).

Lady Gaga seems to have done that, and now I’m afraid Time has too. Except that they seem to be telling us the news before it’s even happened.

Sarah Palin ♥ Massachusetts

Here I was, only last Sunday, worrying about why Ted Kennedy seemed so restless in his grave, not realizing his problem wasn’t with those three hacks above him on the best seller list but with some guy named Brown I’d never heard of.

Nate Silver, where are you? I need your soothing statistical reassurance! When I go to your site all I see is a bewildering piece by Andrew Gelman called “Scott Brown is a liberal Republican,” which doesn’t make much sense when you read about Brown’s positions on abortion, or global warming, or healthcare reform, or evolution; and then when you go to the source of this conclusion you find that someone named Boris Schor, PhD., actually did the analysis, but his title is “Scott Brown is a more liberal Republican than Dede Scozzafava,” which isn’t exactly reassuring.

Nate left us on Friday after telling us not to worry about the Pajamas Media poll (who would ever worry about a poll somebody did in their pajamas anyway?), but to pay attention to three polls over the weekend: Suffolk, Public Policy Polling, and Rasmussen. Well, Nate, the results are out: Brown up by 4, up by 1, and down by 2, respectively; but where are you? I want you to tell us about how that’s a good thing, because as you told us once before, Rasmussen tends to be Republican-biased, for various arcane statistical reasons, and so that poll seems like a good thing, right Nate? Where are you?

And could it really be, that if Scott Brown beats Martha Coakley, healthcare is doomed, both houses of Congress will fall, we’ll be buried under tea bags, and Sarah Palin will be our next president?

Nate?

The roadrunner

My grandparents had these little books where you flipped the pages and it looked like the characters were running, or being chased, or falling off cliffs like the roadrunner. My son just told me about a guy who creates these books now from video, but it’s the same idea – you flip the pages really fast and you have a little book video.

It’s unclear to me why you’d need such a thing, when you already have portable smart phones with video right there, but maybe these difficult times make people want to regress to the “good old days,” when all we had to worry about was crouching next to our lockers waiting for Russia to blow us up.

Which brings me to what a little page-flipping book would look like for the beginning of this brand new decade. First page: there’s the Senate, finally passing the healthcare reform bill, even though a lot of the reform part fizzled out; and there’s Obama happily at the microphone, and then he’s running to his plane, and then he’s playing golf in Hawaii, but then there’s some guy naked from the waist down at the front of a different plane and first Obama’s not at any microphone and then he’s at one microphone after another, talking about the underpants bomber and Yemen, a place everyone forgot about until now; and somewhere along in there he makes it back from Hawaii but then this titillating book comes along quoting Harry Reid saying something everybody knows is true but everybody also knows he has to apologize for, and Obama has to take one of these busy little pages to accept the apology; but that page flips by pretty fast and Haiti takes up a whole lot of pages we can hardly bear to look at; and in the midst of all that there are still all these people without jobs and getting our crazy system of government together on healthcare reform starts looking pretty dicey, so there’s Obama staying up till 1 am one night (but at least there’s a sweet little page of him at Malia’s band concert). The page hasn’t even come yet about some guy named Brown who, even though we’ve never heard of him, can maybe single-handedly deep six the whole healthcare thing; but tomorrow we’ll see Obama, on his plane again, going off to Massachusetts to try to save the day.

I guess you need the video to handle all of this in a little page-flipping book. I just hope our roadrunner president can avoid the cliffs, and that he gets to go to more concerts.