Weekend Open Thread

Welcome to the first day of Spring! It certainly feels like spring out there. I’ve been puttering around in my yard this afternoon. This is a big weekend – tomorrow the House votes on the health care reform bill. It’s still down to the wire but the House Democrats are seeming increasingly confident. So, let’s get started with the open thread.

A French documentary has reconfirmed the Milgram experiment:

The fictitious game show had all the trappings of a real TV quiz show, including a beautiful and well-known hostess, and a raucous audience. A group of contestants posed questions to a man sitting inside a box in front of them in an electric chair.

The hostess and a chanting audience urged the players — who had levers in front of them — to send jolts of electricity into the man in the box when he gave an incorrect answer.

Even when the player screamed out in pain for them to stop, 80 percent of the contestants kept zapping him. In reality, the man in the electric chair was an actor who wasn’t really being shocked — but the players and the audience did not know that.

…

Television talk shows ruminated over the documentary Thursday. Comparisons are being drawn to the manipulation of the masses in Nazi Germany. One of the game show participants, Jerome Pasanau, said in an interview that he was still haunted by the experience.

“I wanted to stop the whole time, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the will to do it. And that goes against my nature,” he said. “I haven’t really figured out why I did it.”

Pasanau told the TV host that he felt intimidated and isolated on the fictitious game show set, and that the crowd was overbearing. The host countered by pulling up footage of Pasanau pumping 460 volts of electricity until the actor pretending to be electrocuted seems to keel over dead.

Rush Limbaugh fail. Rush Limbaugh accidentally gave the phone number for a pro-reform group to his flying monkey brigade:

Unfortunately for Rush, he gave out the toll-free FamiliesUSA number on his show on Tuesday, which meant his anti-reform listeners got a pro-reform message when they tried to call Congress. So many Rush fans called the FamiliesUSA number on Tuesday that it caused a massive spike in call volume, which was immediately noticed by the group’s telephone re-routing vendor. Not wanting to pick up the tab for anti-reform calls, of course, FamiliesUSA immediately shut down the number and got a new one, which is posted above and now functioning as intended. (FamiliesUSA executive director Ron Pollack says the cost of that brief spike is in the thousands of dollars. “It’s an ironic form of flattery,” he quipped when I reached him earlier today.)

But Rush’s callers didn’t understand this whole re-routing thing and many were absolutely and astoundingly enraged. Many of them assumed the pro-reform message they got was a left-wing conspiracy to take over government. Think this is a stretch?

Here’s a Youtube video [Ed note: the video has been removed] posted by one such caller, who believed he had discovered a blatant case of “Obama propoganda…Alert the patriots: Tyrants are ruining our country !”

He’s not alone. After FamiliesUSA turned off their original toll free number, it was bought by someone else who must have known about the mixup. That new person put a pro-reform bulletin on an answering machine and recorded messages left by angry – and I mean very angry – Rush listeners. WARNING: Many of the message contain obscenities – they can be accessed by calling 206-666-6666.

You can follow the developments on the health care reform vote at TPM’s Live Countdown to Reform Wire. The latest developments – Stupak is still causing trouble, deem & pass is probably history and President Obama may sign an Executive Order reaffirming the abortion restrictions.