I Can Hardly Contain Myself November 21, 2012 Let’s start with this: We have hot water! As much as we want! Any time we want it! The list of blessings most of us have to be thankful for dazzles me nonstop. I’ll spare you that rant this year, as I’ve made this case so many times before. We live better than any czar or pharaoh — we have aspirin. We have antibiotics. We have entire symphony orchestras ready to play any piece we want — perfectly — at the tap of an iPhone. We have iPhones. We fly through the air. We have zippers. We have air conditioning. I can hardly contain myself. Yet instead of further enumerating things of which Caesar himself could have barely dreamt (light bulbs! Words With Friends! GPS!), the more relevant list may be of things some of our fellow citizens lack. Stewart Dean: “Brutal. Have your right-wing friends play the game at this website.” Indeed. “There but for the grace of God go I,” say I, the atheist, with feeling. # THIS WOMAN IS AN IDIOT – II A Reader: “I’m as frustrated as you by the deliberately misleading information presented (and consumed, I gather) as fact on Fox News. But I take some solace in the fact that their audience is indeed large as cable networks go, but at the same time its terribly narrow and not expanding. 95% of the viewing of Fox News is done by just 20% of their audience. So their messages truly do reside and resound in an echo chamber. I believe that, as with the current GOP, demographics will overtake and marginalize further Fox News at some, hopefully not too distant point in the future. (You’re welcome to use this info, but if you do, please keep my name out. I’m a media researcher and have the Nielsen ratings at my fingertips, but like to keep my hat on that on the interwebs.) FILIBUSTER REFORM – II Rachel Lawrence: “I’m surprised you would ask us to blindly sign a petition to ‘reform the filibuster’ without explaining how the so-called “reform” would operate.” The most obvious and popular reform is simply to require that a senator who wants to filibuster actually FILIBUSTER. Stand there for hours on end making his or her case, or reading the phone book, or whatever he or she wants to do, as it used to be. That would likely cut out a high proportion of them, as his or her colleagues – and the voting public – quickly lost patience over shutting down the entire government to keep from voting on (say) an appointment that had the unanimous or nearly unanimous recommendation of the subcommittee that had vetted it. I think one thing we need not worry about is that reform will go too far. PLEDGE NOT TO VOTE FOR TAX-PLEDGERS Paul deLespinasse: “I wrote an article a few weeks before the election urging that people NEVER vote for anybody who has signed the Grover Norquist tax pledge. As a result of the article, I was contacted by a guy running a petition campaign against Norquist-types. You might want to give it a plug, as you did the anti-filibuster campaign Monday.” # We have the Grand Canyon! We have the Bill of Rights! We have a $12 billion company signed on to make WheelTug’s wheels! We have corrective lenses! Have I left anything out? Have a great Thanksgiving weekend.