This runs just under 2 minutes and is from Senator Claire McCaskill’s town hall on health care earlier today. Most of it is Senator McCaskill trying to get Missourans to show a little respect.

OK, so I reserved for Congressman Adam Schiff’s Town Hall on Health Care tonight in Alhambra. Here’s what I’ve now found out:  I’m one of Seven Thousand Two Hundred people who have RSVP’d for this event. (At a library that accommodates at most 300.)

I wonder how many of those Seven Thousand Two Hundred will actually show up, and how many will show up to behave like the guy in the video below?

My pal April Winchell has created an iPhone app designed to further the gay agenda of “destroying marriage, recruiting children and doing lots of cardio.” Here’s where you can get it.

…a friend of mine would be dead. Here’s her story.

By the way, the White House has (finally) put out some videos to counter the health-care disinformation campaign being spread by the usual suspects. Here’s the Chair of Economic Advisors explaining how the administration’s health-care proposals would actually lower the cost of health-care for small business. As the owner of a small business myself, I would be happy to save some money, but I would dance naked jigs of joy if I could save time and frustration on paperwork.

Thirty-five years ago, Richard Nixon announced on national television that he was resigning as president. I lay on the living room floor to watch, my cherished black leatherette-encased black cassette tape record at my side and its mike placed as close to the television as possible because I wanted to record every word. I was 12 years old and I knew this was going to be important. My parents were quiet, although I knew my father’s feeling: that somehow Nixon was getting railroaded. Looking back, I wonder if they weren’t a little scared.

A year before, the Arab Oil Embargo had put my father out of business. He was 52. He went back into the union as a heavy-equipment operator, but I’m not sure that our family’s finances ever truly recovered. Now it looked like the presidency was going out of business, too, with a twice-elected president being replaced by one nobody had voted into executive office, someone who was plucked from obscurity to replace another scandal-plagued predecessor.

I just watched the resignation speech again. I remember keenly feeling that history was being made. It was. But I had no way of knowing that 35 years later I would feel that we were just coming out of an even darker time, one that would make the trespasses of Watergate seem quaint.

Yesterday I noted that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes Barack Obama’s health-care proposals. Here are some more specifics, although you’ll note that the specifics aren’t terribly specific:  They’re just opposed. I’m opposed to all sorts of things too — like uninsured sick people showing up at emergency rooms and bankrupting hospitals. And I’m opposed to the staggering (and rising) costs and inefficiencies of the current system. So what’s their counter-proposal? Unless somehow fixing this situation doesn’t seem important.

I got an email today that said that my Congressman, Brad Sherman, had canceled his Town Hall on health care because of a death threat. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the manipulated level of outrage attending to this issue is appalling. Even if I weren’t already generally disposed toward a national health-care plan, I think having a lynch mob show up against it would put me there.

Burbank’s other Congressman, Adam Schiff, is hosting his own town hall meeting on health care on Tuesday night. It’s at the Alhambra Civic Center Library Community Room from 7 to 8:30. The word is already out that an astroturf mob is going to show up to protest, so I’m going to go in support.

What’s an astroturf mob? It’s a group of fake grassroots activists — fake because they’re actually funded by corporate special interest groups. As Rachel Maddow explains below.

By the way, I think mind people who disagree with me showing up at events. The more the merrier. (It’s when nobody shows up for anything that I get concerned. When apathy rules, power is unchecked.) On Friday I was handed what I took as a thoughtful analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of current health-care proposals; whether or not I agree with their analysis (probably not), it wasn’t claiming that Obama’s health-care initiative puts out a contract on Grandpa so junior can collect his social security, or whatever the latest alarmist lie from Rushland is. If people want to show up for a town hall so they can debate the issues, I welcome that. If they show up to shout down the event, we should all throw them out.

Here in November in California the voters accidentally turned married gay couples in the state into an  elite group — by passing a proposition that outlawed gay marriage (thereby restricting marriage to those gay people who were already wed). As a (married) lesbian attorney friend of mine explained, voters, and the state Supreme Court whose previous ruling created the window of time in which same-sex couples were allowed to marry, have in essence created two classes of gay citizen:  those who are (or were) allowed to get married, and those who aren’t. This is not the sort of society that courts have endorsed since the end of segregation, and it’s not the sort that will stand. Or, as some of us put it, if same-sex couples can get married in Iowa, how long can this prohibition stand in California?

What got me thinking about this again today is a story about one of our zoos in California, where a formerly “homosexual” penguin named Harry has thrown over his male lover, the penguin Pepper, for a female. (The zoo where these sexually ambivalent penguins live is, of course, in San Francisco. None of the penguins appear to wear leather.)   This has kicked up an inevitable hoohah:  if in the animal kingdom a gay penguin can switch teams, then perhaps homosexuality is indeed a “lifestyle choice” and not genetically preordained. (Expect to see this argument on the ranting evangelical show of your choice this Sunday.) This is a notion that probably doesn’t sit well with homosexuals.  Click here to read the full story.

My perspective is different. It’s this:  Who cares? Who cares if the penguin is gay or straight or even bi? I can’t imagine a productive way to keep penguins from mating with whatever other penguins they want to. It’s up to them what circles they waddle in; we really have no say. I can’t find any evidence that we’re tampering with homosexual preference anywhere in the animal kingdom — nobody’s segregating the male seahorses that like to sidle up with each other — so why start with the penguins? I don’t care if it’s their genetic implication or if they learned gay behavior from Tennessee Tuxedo. If they want to be gay, by all means, go ahead. And if they want to be straight, more power to them for that, too. In fact, I’m willing to bet these penguins don’t even put gender preference into the mix that way. It’s just a matter of who looks better at the fishing hole that day.

Now, if we can’t patrol gay behavior in animals, and if we aren’t restricting their behavior, why are we doing it with people? If there’s going to be any disparity between people and animals, so long as they do no physical harm to others, shouldn’t people have more freedom than animals?

Where were all these “judicial restraint” Republican Senators when the last guy nominated Roberts and Alito? Because basically undoing the last 50 years doesn’t seem so restrained.