Mike was a friend to the staff and a bro to Kenny. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

On his radio show Monday, Limbaugh said, “I’ll just tell you this, if [health care] passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.” I can think of no better way of spurring on Democrats to get their act together than for Rush Limbaugh to threaten to leave the country. In fact, given the way he bullies Republicans, I bet health care reform might even start enjoying some bipartisan support!

Save the Democrats tripping at the final hurdle, health care reform will pass. To help him on his way, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee set up a site for you to send Limbaugh a bon voyage card that it will deliver once health care passes. You have the option of including a personal “farewell wish” on your card (and I, for one, did not hold back).

Liz Cheney released an ad describing Justice Department lawyers who defended detainees as “The al-Qaeda 7,” and has since received criticism for it left and right on the political spectrum. The New York Times ran a story today about how Liz Cheney’s “Attacks on Detainee Lawyers Split Conservatives.” Greg Sargent over at the Plum Line thinks all the negative press plays right into Cheney’s hands by maximizing her publicity.

Speaking of detainees, turns out the CIA tortured some of them far worse than previously thought. To extend the time someone could be waterboarded, a memo in 2005 stated, “the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia.” The CIA also thoroughly documented waterboarding sessions “in order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations.” As Mark Benjamin at Salon points out, “The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place.”

Chief Justice Roberts sounds pretty pissed off with President Obama for calling out the Supreme Court during the State of the Union Address. Obama criticized the Court’s decision to overturn the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which now basically allows corporate money to tether politicians to corporate interests instead of, you know, public service.

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The full Tracy Morgan photo taken this morning and photos of the chaos on Waverly after the jump.

Midterms are awful. Listen to live music and try to feel less awful.

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Photo from Flickr user Lauren Monaco

This clip would be depressing if it weren’t so damn hilarious. President Obama receives a late night visit from a posse of former Presidents who give him some serious advice on how to handle America’s woes — all of which accumulated under their leadership. Fred Armisen plays a less-than-enthused Obama, Will Farrell reprises his SNL role as Dubya, and Jim Carey channels a particularly creepy Ronald Reagen.

Then again, I didn’t work for the Republican National Congress. If I did, I think I’d be a little more careful about what I left behind in a hotel room like, say, an inflammatory presentation about the party’s fundraising tactics. Ben Smith over at Politico obtained a printout of a slideshow presented by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart in mid-February to top donors during a Florida retreat. The presentation is controversial not least for comparing Nancy Pelosi to Cruella DeVille and promoting the disturbing image of Obama painted as The Joker that first cropped up at Tea Party rallies last year.

The RNC doesn’t seem to think much of its donors either. One slide shows a flow diagram the categorizes “the motivation to give” into “visceral giving” and “calculated giving.” According to the slide, direct marketing can exploit “fear” and “extreme negative towards existing administration” in the former, while the latter are major donors who are “ego-driven” and motivated by “peer to peer pressure” and “networking opportunities.”

RNC Communications Director Doug Heye scrambled to do damage control on RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s image. “The document was used for a fundraising presentation Chairman Steele did not attend, nor had he seen the document… Obviously, the Chairman disagrees with the language and finds the use of such imagery to be unacceptable. It will not be used by the Republican National Committee – in any capacity – in the future.”

Really? I’d be impressed. The RNC renouncing that kind of propaganda “in any capacity in the future” would be a significant shift from Republican practices in the past, which include calling Obama’s policies socialist and endorsing the Tea Party rallies at which he is vilified. In reality, exposing the deliberate use of these tactics to raise money is more of an embarrassment for the GOP than a revelation. Plus that presentation totally looks like it was created using Microsoft Office 98.

Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist, Bret Stephens, rightly notes that it is somewhat of a miracle that the death toll in Chile is under 1,000, despite the earthquake being about 500 times stronger than the one that hit Haiti and claimed well over 200,000 lives. Unlike the Haitians, the Chilean government enforces a set of strict building codes – a practice that Stephens tenuously links to the economic growth Chile experienced under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973-1990.

“Chile’s “Chicago Boys” [Friedman's Economic School of thought] had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on…

…Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line…

…The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance… “

Not quite that simple. Pinochet overthrew Chile’s socialist government in a bloody coup in 1973 while the country suffered from hyperinflation. His regime was characterized by politically motivated kidnappings and torture; more than 3,000 people died and many lived in fear.

As for the economy, per capita GDP grew during the later 1970s but dropped again during the Latin debt crisis in the early 1980s. As Paul Krugman over at the New York Times points out, “It wasn’t until the late 1980s, by which time the hard-line free-market policies had been considerably softened, that Chile finally moved definitively ahead of where it had been in the early 70s.”

As for the building codes themselves, that is hardly a staple of libertarianism and Friedman wasn’t a fan of them. Chileans becoming “South America’s richest people” doesn’t account for the terrible income inequality. As Andrew Leonard at Salon mentions, income inequality is an issue the Chilean government began to cope with after Pinochet ceded power, and it did so through social spending and taxes: how much does Chile really owe that to Friedman Free Market fundamentalism?

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