Weekend Open Thread

Here’s an open thread for you while we all recover from our post-Thanksgiving family, food and/or alcohol hangovers. What’s on your mind?

Do you remember when we talked about the hypothesis that the Higgs Boson was sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider. The sub-atomic saboteurs have decided to rest for a while because last week the first experiments were performed there.

Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions.

I look forward to learning about the great science that will come out of these experiments, including the confirmation of the Higgs Boson.

Let’s file this next story into the “actions have consequences” file:

A North Carolina health insurer is facing a major backlash in the wake of its campaign to enlist customers in the fight against health-care reform.

The state’s Insurance Commissioner has begun an inquiry into a mailer sent recently by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina — and first revealed last month by TPMmuckraker — that urged customers to lobby Senator Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) to vote against the public option. As we reported Tuesday, the state’s Attorney General has opened his own probe of a barrage of follow-up robo-calls generated by the insurer. And state lawmakers continue to express their own and their constituents’ outrage at the effort, with one legislator telling TPMmuckraker that some recipients of the mailer sent it back to BCBS attached to a brick.

Apparently Blue Cross/Blue Shield sent these postcards and robocalls right after they sent notices of rate increases. Can the foes of the public option make it any more obvious why they oppose it?