Cenk does a great job of reflecting how I feel about the media's treatment of Evan Bayh and his retirement from the Senate. They never bring up all the money his wife has made working for WellPoint -- Evan Bayh's Wife Reaping The Benefits Of Health Care Reform. And they continually call these ConservaDems who are corporate Democrats "centrists" which drives me as crazy as it does Cenk.

Cenk also points out that unlike the main stream media the HuffPo was willing to ask Bayh if there's one job he won't rule out after leaving office and they got their answer here -- Evan Bayh Won't Rule Out Becoming A Lobbyist After His Term Ends.

And for more here's Cenk's post on the subject at hand -- The Media's Billion Dollar Ad for Evan Bayh:

The mainstream media has been giving Evan Bayh a big fat sloppy wet kiss for the last 24 hours. Every single story is about how moderate and centrist and independent he is. Golly gee willikers, Evan Bayh is such a pure and innocent person and he just couldn't take the corruption of Congress anymore. He was so fed up with the partisanship and like any great man decided he must strike out on his own and leave DC.

Come on, are these people this naïve or do they have a stake in this? Do you really think Evan Bayh only has pure motivations and was the last good man in Washington? This is absolutely absurd, and on many fronts it's the exact opposite of the truth. No one made a deal with corporate lobbyists faster than Evan Bayh. He wasn't sick of the problems of DC, he was the problem of DC. Read on...

As Cenk notes, like about half of the people who leave Congress, Bayh is just another name on a long list who might be looking for a big payday after their retirement from "public service". All of this might be just slightly easier to stomach if these assholes weren't lining their pockets while the rest of the country rots beneath them.

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Evan Bayh has decided to retire and another ConservaDem bites the dust. And the media blaming the dirty f#%king hippies for Bayh leaving will begin in 5, 4, 3, 2... Steve Benen has more on why he might be leaving and this lovely tidbit:

For what it's worth, a great deal of the early talk -- and by "early," I mean "the last hour" -- is about the DSCC recruiting Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D), a Blue Dog and former county police sheriff from Indiana's Southwest corner.

It appears that the signatures for a prospective candidate are due tomorrow, and it's extremely unlikely any Dem could pull this off in time. What's more likely, then, is that the Indiana Democratic Party will be responsible for selecting a candidate -- there would be no primary.

So Bayh made it next to impossible to have a strong candidate or anyone decent to replace him. Thanks Bayh. He's going to have a press conference a little later today.

From The Daily Show:

The announcement that Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan are stepping down takes the Senate by surprise.

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NevadaAppeal: Support builds in congress over mining reform

Swing State Project: Daily Digest

Open Left: Dodd's retirement is unspinnably bad news for Republicans

PERRspectives: 10 Moments in GOP Terrorism Accountability

ACSblog: Obama returning eight nominations, including Dawn Johnsen's

C&Lers know my father passed away in June this year, which really hit me pretty hard, but he lived to eighty-two and thankfully didn't suffer when he passed. But today is his birthday. I wanted to wish him a Happy Birthday online and celebrate his passing.

Every so often he complained that he got cheated out of a real birthday celebration because of the Christmas holiday, but he did enjoy having his birthday on Christmas, because our whole family was there to give him his cake.

Growing up, my family celebrated Christmas with all our relatives, and it was the one time each year that all my cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents got together on the same day.

After he turned about 50, one of his favorite things to do in life was to dress up as Santa and entertain the kids. He did it almost every Christmas after that, and when he retired from Local 94 in New York, he really looked forward to the holiday season -- because frankly, he was the best Santa I ever saw.

Miracle on 34th Street was one of my favorite Christmas movies growing up as a kid, and my father loved it just as much. The star of the movie was Kris Kringle. And so Dad, here's to you on your birthday -- the world's best Santa Claus.

I hope everybody has a great holiday season.

Campaign analyst Charlie Cook says so far, it's still unlikely that we'll see a Republican sweep in 2010:

To put it another way, as things stand now, Republicans could win every competitive House race and still come up one seat short. That won't be the case, however, if there is further erosion in the ranks of the solid and likely Democratic seats. Although Democrats can take some solace from the fact that no party has ever lost every single competitive House race, none of the four lawmakers who have recently added their names to the retirement list -- Brian Baird of Washington, Bart Gordon of Tennessee, Dennis Moore of Kansas, and John Tanner of Tennessee -- was considered particularly vulnerable a year ago.

For Republicans to take control of the House, more Democrats in swing districts would have to retire. There will be more, but how many?

If 10 or 12 more seats rated as solid or likely Democratic shift to the "lean Democratic" or "toss-up" columns, the fight for control will become much more serious. Washington is awash in rumors of other veteran Democrats contemplating voluntary exits. Some serve in safely Democratic districts, but others represent places not unlike the districts of Baird, Gordon, Moore, and Tanner. Also helping the GOP is its best House recruiting in a long time. A crop of strong candidates will help Republicans win more than their share of contests if the political environment remains what it is today.

Winds that began shifting against Democrats around the end of June, during the House cap-and-trade vote and the beginning of the health care debate, are now transforming their party's potential problems into real ones. That change is causing predictable talk of a 1994-style Republican landslide strong enough to flip the Senate. That talk, though, is just so much hot air.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Senate's 2010 lineup of contests couldn't take such talk seriously. For Republicans to seize the Senate, they would have to hold all six of their open seats, which is quite plausible. All 12 of the GOP incumbents up for re-election would also have to win, which is quite likely. The Republicans would then have to pick up the Delaware and Illinois open seats that Democrats now hold -- a feat that is not difficult to imagine.

However -- and this is where the going would get rough for the Republicans -- they would need to defeat Michael Bennet in Colorado, Barbara Boxer in California, Christopher Dodd in Connecticut, Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, Harry Reid in Nevada, and Arlen Specter (or Joe Sestak if he wins the primary) in Pennsylvania, plus Republican Gov. John Hoeven of North Dakota would have to run and beat Byron Dorgan.

No party in history has ever run the table that completely. And even then, the GOP would come up one seat short.

The fragility of the Democrats' Senate majority is visible, though, if you look toward 2012, when 23 Democratic seats will be on the line compared with just nine Republican ones, and ahead to 2014, when 20 Democratic seats but only 13 Republican ones will be up for grabs.

Just as much has changed in the past year, much could change in the next. What the past tells us is that it takes a truly major event -- such as the 9/11 attacks of 2001 or the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton -- to improve the fortunes of the president's party going into a midterm election. Only one thing seems certain: 2010 won't be dull.

As always, Thom Hartmann makes a lot of sense:

One of the most powerful forms of stimulus we could apply to our economy right now would be to lower the current Social Security retirement age from the current 65-67 to 55, and increase the benefits back to where they were in inflation-adjusted 1960s dollars by raising them between 10 to 20 percent (so people could actually live, albeit modestly, on Social Security).

The right-wing reaction to this, of course, will be to say that with fewer people working and more people drawing benefits, it would bankrupt Social Security and destroy the economy. But history shows the exact reverse.

Instead, it would eliminate the problem of unemployment in the United States. All those Boomers retiring would make room in the labor market for all the recent high-school and college graduates who are now finding it so hard to find a job.

Hartmann goes on in the article to discuss in detail about how lowering the retirement age would open up thousands of jobs nationwide, and how wages for working class Americans have been devastated since the days of Ronald Reagan and our old pal Alan Greenspan started gutting unions and trying to lower our standard of living:

In September of 2007, in an interview on C-SPAN for Book TV, Greenspan said: “We pay the highest skilled labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would attract a very substantial quantity of skilled labor which would suppress the wage levels of the skilled, because the skilled are essentially being subsidized by the government, meaning our competition is being kept outside the country.”

It’s shocking that ideologues like Greenspan, Reagan, and Clinton believe this, but they do. And the only way to reverse the past 29 years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics is to tighten up the labor market again. While a great start would be to pull out of our insane trade treaties and begin again protecting American manufacturers, that will take a decade for the impact to be truly felt even if we were to go back to our 1980 tariff levels today. Read on...

Thom finishes by stating that his plan would ultimately "take us to nearly zero unemployment and dramatically stimulate the economy." I happen to think it's a good idea. What say you?

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(Claude Debussy lunching with his daughter and musical dedicatee Jouxjoux)

A little something orchestral this Sunday. A 1932 recording of Debussy's Childrens Corner Suite, as performed by the Paris Conservatory, conducted by Piero Coppola.

Coppola (no relation to Francis or Carmine, by the way), was House Conductor for His Masters Voice offices in Paris from 1923-1934. He was responsible for much of the French repertoire to be recorded and heard all over the world, in many cases for the first time. Debussy was reported to have admired his work, although there's no record of him actually hearing Coppola perform. Still, what Coppola recorded, for the most part, had the distinction of being the first conductor of international stature to bring attention to what was considered a lot of "modern" compositions before the record buying public. One of the most famous recordings he was associated with was Prokofiev's 3rd Piano concerto with the composer at the piano.

Coppola pretty much went into retirement during the war, and only surfaced briefly to conduct some session for the newly developed Full Frequency Range Recordings that Decca was producing in the late 1940's. Coppola died in 1971 and left a rich legacy of milestone recordings from the 78 era.