On Tuesday night, almost on the eve of a historic Senate vote on expanding health care coverage for Americans, hundreds of people congregated outside of Joe Lieberman’s Connecticut house in a candlelight vigil to advocate for healthcare reform. The vigil, organized by the Interfaith Fellowship for Universal Healthcare, included rabbis who appealed to Lieberman’s conscience to make him to the right thing and support reform. From the Danbury News Times,
STAMFORD — Quietly holding candles, hundreds of clergymen, congregants and reform advocates lined the sidewalks outside Independent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Stamford home Sunday night in a show of support for universal health care.
“When we heard not only would he vote against it, but he’d use his power, his position as a swing vote … to block it from coming to a vote, we had to send a message so he knows people who vote overwhelmingly favor the public option,” said Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, of Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford.
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The vigil began at Stamford High School, Lieberman’s alma mater, and ended at the senator’s home, the Hayes House, across the street.
“In some sense, it’s poetic,” said Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy, who attended the vigil. “The place where Sen. Joseph Lieberman received his high school education, the place he visited upon his announcement to seek the vice presidency, a place where his run for the presidency began — and it just so happens, a place across the street from where he lives.”
Lieberman is going so far as to say that he’ll filibuster health care because he doesn’t believe that a public option will work. He is, in essence, saying that his knowledge and “understanding” is much deeper than health care experts, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the evidence of every other industrialized nation’s government health care systems and, quite frankly, a majority of the American people.
Putting aside the question whether Lieberman is sincerely critical of the idea of a public option or just continuing the disingenuous douchebaggery he’s been known for ever since losing his Democratic primary, I thought this was a good time to remind folks of another man who had doubts about a big piece of legislation. He was a big enough man, however, to realize that he was not the wisest person on earth. (This realization, however, ironically meant that he probably was.)
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In a recent issue of Physical Review Letters was an article with the intriguing (to me) title of “Experimental verification of reversed Cherenkov radiation in left-handed metamaterial,” by a collaboration from Zhejiang University in China and MIT. The paper is an experimental verification of an effect predicted for metamaterials way back in 1968 by the originator of metamaterials research, Victor Vesalago, in his original paper, “The electrodynamics of substances with simultaneously negative values of ε and μ.”
Skulls in the Stars 