Below The Fold

To be succinct, I agree with everything Scott Lemieux says about the Op-Ed in The New York Times by Barry Friedman and Andrew Martin. I would add though that what seems to be the biggest problem with the column is that the writers really don’t seem to have any idea how a filibuster works. And the same can be said for anyone whose idea for breaking filibusters is to actually make the minority talk endlessly.

The confusion, I think, stems from the use of the word filibuster itself. Basically people think of the filibuster as one person talking endlessly to try to run out the clock on a motion. But that’s not what Senate minorities are doing now by voting against cloture motions and denying unanimous consent. Basically, the issue is that the Senate has only two ways to end debate and proceed with business; unanimous consent and cloture. If they fail to get either one, they can’t close debate on a question to proceed to a vote. What Republicans are doing is denying consent to move on with business, and since you need a supermajority to do that, the motion fails. It makes no difference whether anyone is talking or not. This is a distinction a lot of people miss, and even have a hard time grasping after you explain it to them, and I think it’s because they can’t get past the term “filibuster” itself. But what’s going on isn’t a filibuster, it’s an unprecedented willingness by the minority to prevent the Senate from conducting business. I think a new term to denote this new practice would help create better public understanding of what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: Filibuster

I’ve basically been at the point where very little that shows up in The Washington Post, especially on the Op-Ed page, surprises me anymore. I’m not really sure how Fred Hiatt views his job responsibilities, but it’s been clear for some time that the practical impact of whatever it is Hiatt thinks is that conservatives can expect to tell pretty much any lie they want and have it published by Hiatt. That extends to regular columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and to guest submissions from Repulican politicians like Sarah Palin and Sen. Lamar Alexander. I imagine that Hiatt views this as “presenting all sides,” but of course all that is doing is muddying the waters for the readers, especially when the writers are telling verifiable lies. Whatever it may be, the Post has not been a publication primarily concerned with informing its readers for quite some time.

But when Hiatt actually hired Marc Thiessen to write a weekly column, I suspected Thiessen would actually find a way to drag the paper lower. Thiessen is a former Defense Department speechwriter whose only real claim to fame is having written an entire book vociferously defending the use of torture. Indeed, Thiessen is the guy who argued that torturing Muslim detainees was absolutely necessary so that they could achieve compliance with their religious beliefs in talking to interrogators. Thiessen’s premise has been the subject of fierce push back from actual Army interrogators, but he’s a moral monster who likes the idea of being able to brutalize people, if only by proxy, so of course that doesn’t make much difference. Before being hired by Hiatt, Thiessen’s most prominent interaction with the Post was taking to its pages to claim that the waterboarding of Khalid Mohammed had thwarted the plot to bomb the Library Tower, even though that plot had been foiled before KSM was even captured, a fact that was noted by The Washington Post’s sister publication, Slate. This, of course, hasn’t stopped Thiessen from repeating the claim.

Today, however, Thiessen and Hiatt have outdone themselves with what may be the most despicable thing I’ve ever seen run in a major newspaper. Thiessen is defending Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol’s attack on Justice Department lawyers who had represented suspected terrorists detainees in the past, a position that basically no one in the conservative legal community has yet stood behind. Here’s Thiessen:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.

So right off the bat, we already have a mischaracterization. “Mob lawyers” are most often members of the criminal organization themselves, albeit somewhat at a distance. They aid and abet the operation’s illegal activity, and are actively sympathetic to the business. So right at the outset, Thiessen is constructing a comparison designed to make the reader think of the lawyers as actively sympathetic to terrorists, something, incidentally, that even Cheney and Kristol won’t openly claim they’re doing.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information.

Again, Thiessen chooses to call the attorneys “al Qaeda lawyers” instead of “lawyers who represented suspects,” in order to plant the impression of people actively working for al Qaeda, as opposed to lawyers fulfilling what they believe to be a civic duty to provide a defense for the accused.

Yet for raising questions, Cheney and the Republican senators have been vilified. Former Clinton Justice Department official Walter Dellinger decried the “shameful” personal attacks on “these fine lawyers,” while numerous commentators leveled charges of “McCarthyism.”

Of course, what Thiessen doesn’t note is that the condemnation of Cheney and Keep America Safe has been basically universal, with such noted liberal luminaries as Ted Olsen and Ken Starr leading the pitchforked mob. The response to Cheney has not been one of partisan rancor, but rather legal professionals of all political persuasions responding to an attack on fundamental principles of their profession and the American legal system.

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals “war criminals” and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed.

This is where the column really goes off the rails, because while Thiessen is very good at selecting his words and rhetorical framing (he isa speechwriter, after all), the fact that he’s looking for a ridiculous premise at the outset leaves him grasping for a comparison that is just so self-evidently absurd that any self-respecting, non-propaganda outfit would have squashed this column immediately. To wit, it should be clear that there’s absolutely nothing similar about the accusations Liz Cheney is directing at the attornies in question and what Yoo, Bybee, & co. did. Cheney is asserting that, because an attorney represented a detainee accused of a certain crime, that must mean that they’re sympathetic to those people and the cause of which they’re accused, and therefore we can’t trust them to hold jobs in the Justice Department. Yoo, Bybee, etc., on the other hand, are accused of actually breaking the law in facilitating and implementing the use of torture. Calling this an apples to oranges comparison would be giving it too much credit.

Some defenders say al-Qaeda lawyers are simply following a great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their day in court. Not so, says Andy McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney who put Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheik,” behind bars for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

And this is the giveaway. Whatever McCarthy may have to say, that Thiessen has chosen to quote him and describe him in this manner exposes the column as abject dishonesty, propagand in its most undiluted form. For one thing, there’s the fact that McCarthy is a raving lunatic, birther, and all around radical too extreme even for Rich Lowry and most of the other writers at The Corner to stand. But even more basic than that, McCarthy is the originator of the “al Qaeda seven” attack. For Thiessen not to disclose that, and especially to paint McCarthy as simply some sort of detached expert on the question, is an indescribale breach of ethics, a blatant attempt to mislead, not persuade, readers, and so unbelievably ham-fisted and obvious that I can’t believe for a second that no one at the Post noticed it.

The entire column is nothing but a string of lies, false equivalencies, and misrepresentations. Thiessen quite transparently wrote this with the intent of misleading the reader. There’s simply no other way anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes following the issues in question could interpret the article without straining credulity to the max. It also, I should hope, represents a low point, thus far, in the moral degeneration of the Post. And at this point, I think we can safely say that the Post is into the territory heretofor occupied by The New Republic; where the overall direction of the publication’s management begins to tain everyone involved in the publication. In the same way I feel that Jon Cohn, Jon Chait, Michelle Cottle, and the other wonderful writers at TNR nonetheless have to carry the stain of working for Marty Peretz, at this point Ezra Klein, Steve Pearlstein, Eugene Robinson, and any other decent employee of The Washington Post nevertheless has to live with the stain of association with Fred Hiatt, Marc Thiessen, Charles Krauthammer, etc, so long as they accept a paycheck from Kaplan.

Greenwald has more.

Technorati Tags: Fred Hiatt, Marc Thiessen, torture, Washington Post

Jamison Foser does some digging, and finds that not only did the media not think budget reconcilliation was some great evil when Republicans used them to pass Bush’s 2003 tax cuts on a 50-50 vote, they basically didn’t even realize the process existed, even though they’re pretty much obsessed with it now, and largely convinced that if Democrats use it, it will damage the legitimacy of their legislative agenda. Kevin Drum says this is a failing on the part of Democrats:

In fairness, though, part of the problem here is the Democrats didn’t complain about reconciliation back in 2003. There’s no reason for the media to make a fuss if the opposition party hasn’t bothered to bring it up, after all.This doesn’t excuse the fact that they keep getting basic facts wrong this time around, like the fact that Dems aren’t planning to pass the entire healthcare package through reconciliation, only a small package of amendments. And it doesn’t change the fact that the conservative noise machine is way more effective than anything liberals have. Even if congressional Democrats had tried to make an issue out of reconciliation in 2003, they probably wouldn’t have gotten much traction.

Still, you have to try. Republicans figure they can get some attention for this kind of nonsense if they yell loud enough, and they’re right. Democrats don’t even think of it.

I wouldn’t really say I think Kevin is wrong in this analysis, I just think he’s got it backwards. The reconcilliation process is part of the law governing the process of passing budget related legislation in the Congress, and it’s a perfectly legitimate tool for Congressional majorities to use when it’s allowable. There simply wasn’t any reason for Democrats to complain about Republicans using reconcilliation, because there was nothing wrong with that. One thing I think we really have learned beyond any shadow of a doubt from the past two weeks is that, as a whole, the Republican Party really is nothing but a collection of pure hacks at the moment. Republican Senators are well aware of how reconcilliation has been used in the past, what reconcilliation bills they’ve voted for, and that this is a rather mundane procedural move given the landscape. And yet they’re pretty much united in painting the process as controversial and illegitimate. It’s just shameless. Another problem, the one that Foser nails down, is that our elite media institutions and major “journalists” are just completely clueless. Not only do they not have the nerve to resist whatever meme it is the right-wing noise machine is peddling on any given day, they don’t even seem to have the inclination to try to do even a little legwork to learn about Congress, its rules, or even recent legislative history. I haven’t heard any Republicans who are complaining about reconcilliation be asked about the tactics House GOP leaders used to get Medicare Part D passed.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this story. Basically, Arizona is facing a huge budget shortfall, the largest in the country relative to overall size of the budget, and as part of an effort to cut costs, they’re closing a number of interstate rest stops. Predictably motorists and truckers aren’t very happy about this, and I certainly don’t blame them. On the other hand, the article really doesn’t seem to indicate that there’s any support for a tax increase to make up the deficit, or even a dedicated tax stream to support the rest stops. Indeed, apparently one woman thinks this is all some sort of organized plot to set up a massive tax increase. Basically I think this just illustrates that people, including nominal “small-government conservatives,” really aren’t interested in cutting much in the way of basic public services, they just really don’t like paying for them.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Broder actually had a good column yesterday, successfully bringing an insider’s knowledge and veteran’s perspective to put something of a dampening on the round of Rahmapalooza that’s broken out in the past week. The articles in the Post were mostly awful, not really giving you much insight into what’s going on, and with no real way to evaluate the veractiy of its claims. Noam Scheiber’s profile in TNR is much better, although that estimation is certainly clouded by the fact that it basically tracks with what I’ve assumed the intra-administration working dynamic looks like. I think Ezra gets it basically right; other than the day to day management of the White House staff, Rahm’s job is basically to be a politics guys, especially legislative politics. And when arguments arise over policy, Rahm is basically losing to the people who are there to shape policy. I think that’s basically a good thing, although it’s interesting to note that two arguments Rahm lost on, doing financial reform early in 2009 and telling Max Baucus to drop the Gang of Six stalling, are clearly places where you could make a very good case that he really should have been listened to and, assuming the claims are correct, really can give Obama some flak for not taking his advice. On the other hand, without knowing why Obama went the other direction, I guess that’s sort of a hard case to make. Maybe he believed that doing financial reform right really would take more time. In the case of Baucus, I find it very plausible that he, or the Vice-President, realized there was nothing they could really do to force a Senator to do something they didn’t want to do, and so simply not to antagonize the conservadem Finance chair. It’s really hard to say. But what we do get out of this, I think, is an understanding of a couple of points. First, that Rahm does have a pretty good feel for the politics of the administration’s agenda, even if his inclination is to trim the sails more than any of us would like. Secondly, that he is losing internal battles, and that he’s not the shadow President, secretly pulling Obama’s strings and selling the hippies out to corporate America.

Technorati Tags: Rahm Emanuel

I really try not to focus too much on the Washington Post Op-Ed page, because if I did I could basically have a dedicated blog, and that’s not what I want. Still, when they do things like run this blatantly dishonest guest Op-Ed from Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, you really can’t ignore it. Plenty of people have already addressed most of the dishonesties, so I’ll just add a few points. First of all, there’s no way to really excuse most of this as “just opinion.” Almost all of it is objectively false. The founders didn’t establish the filibuster, nor did they personally design the Senate as a super-majoritarian body. Reconcilliation has been used numerous times, and for proposals much larger in scope than the “sidecar” amendment Democrats are talking about at the moment. Off the top of my head, the $1.8 trillion of Bush tax cuts comes most easily to mind, but so do COBRA and the Reagan tax cuts of 1981. Finally, the notion that reconcilliation can only be used to “balance the budget” is particularly ridiculous, not just because reconcilliation has often been used to increase the deficit, as with the tax cuts Hatch voted for in 2001 and 2003, but because the healthcare reform bill scores as deficit reduction. Is Hatch literally arguing that reconcilliation can only be used for proposals that literally balance the budget in its entirety, and so even bills that reduce the deficit in part, but not in whole, are out of bounds for the process?

On a larger note, I really would like to know what the Post thinks it’s doing by publishing pieces like this. Presumably, the purpose of a newspaper like the Post is to inform its readers about what’s going on, as well as to help them understand it. That’s certainly what journalists, publishers, etc. see their work as. But I think you’d be hard pressed to really defend the notion that Post readers are being better informed by Fred Hiatt’s habit of regularly publishing blatantly dishonest Op-Eds from conservative writers and Republican politicians. And while I can at least sort of understand how newsmedia has gotten to the point where regular columnists for a major paper are allowed to lie on a regular basis, I really don’t see how an self-respecting journalist could imagine there’s any journalistic value whatsoever to printing objective lies from a politician.

Technorati Tags: Washington Post

The Washington Post ran two columns this morning coming down somewhere between disdainful and skeptical about costs associated with healthcare reform. Chait already did a good job dealing with Fred Hiatt’s column, but I’d prefer to engage the much worse column from (surprise!) Robert Samuelson. This seems to be the key graf from the column:

On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.

Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t.

First of all, it seems to me that if Samuelson is going to claim that the financing mechanisms for reform aren’t “believeable,” he really ought to go to greater lengths to say why that’s the case. The CBO has scored both bills as deficit reducing, and if Samuelson has some sort of reason to believe those reports aren’t accurate, then it seems to me that his station at a major newspaper obligates him to let us know about it. If nothing else, you’d think the vaunted editors that make newspaper so wicked awesome we keep hearing about might ask their main economics columnist to explain this to their readers. It’s not like it’s trivial, after all. Secondly, there’s the rather obvious point that that last sentence rather blatantly ignores the fact that the CBO says the healthcare reform bill would lower the long-term budget deficit. Passing legislation that reduces the long-term deficit definitely strikes me as “dealing with budget deficits,” and I’d be interested to hear why Samuelson thinks it isn’t. Of course, Samuelson is a big proponent of cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits, as is the Washington Post editorial board, so I suspect it’s mostly a matter of cutting the deficit in general not being as important to Samuelson as cutting social safety net benefits in particular, but that really doesn’t give him a license to lie about the effect reform would have on the deficit. Being a Washington Post columnist, on the other hand…

Technorati Tags: Robert Samuelson, Washington Post

One thing that’s often hard to get across in writing, and even to speaking to people, is just how far out of the mainstream the conservative movement is, even on taxes. After all, no one likes paying taxes, or fees, or fines, to the government, but when you can actually strip away the emotion and the cognitive dissonance a lot of people have about these things, you generally can come away with an understanding that they’re necessary for things people like. No one likes paying the fees to register a motor vehicle, for example, but if you really try, you can get them to acknowledge that maintaining roads costs money, and that that money has to come from somewhere. Ditto for traffic fines; no one likes getting caught or having to pay the fine, but no one wants people driving down highways at 90 MPH or speeding through neighborhoods, so some sort of punishment that actually stings has to be put in place to ensure compliance with the rules (although that’s not counting for people who simply think it’s different when they do it, obviously). Now though, Eric Felten actually makes the case for making dealing with government fees as difficult and inconvenient as possible. He starts out by excoriating red-light cameras, a topic that’s probably best left for another post (for the life of me I can’t understand how the notion that people have a right to go through intersections after the light turns red without getting caught for it became so widespread), but goes on to complain about…parking meters:

Take Montgomery County, Md. Last month it started a new program that lets motorists pay at parking meters with their cellphones. How easy! How convenient! How civilized! No more digging around the ashtray for dimes and quarters. No more pestering passersby to change a dollar. Of course, when you have to scrounge for coins to feed the meter, you’re painfully aware of just how much the parking regime is costing you. Not so with the mobile-phone parking app. According to a demonstration on the Web site of the company powering the service, you just key in how long you’d like to leave your car, and you’re on your way. The pesky question of how much you’ve just paid doesn’t come up.No doubt you can find out later from your online statement, and surely there are some savvy and well-organized folks who do. Yet for most of us the cost fades toward invisibility, and that’s when fees go to town. Policymakers have long understood that the less visible—or “salient,” to use the economist’s term of art—a tax is, the easier it is to raise. Which is why Milton Friedman, looking for ways the federal government could collect more money during World War II, recommended the creation of income tax withholding (an innovation he was not proud of). It’s also why “value-added taxes” act like steroids when it comes to bulking up government.

What I find interesting about this isn’t so much the comical level to which Felton takes his anti-government beliefs (the parking regime? Seriously man?), bu rather, how the examples he cites and the effect thereof mostly take apart his arguments themselves. What Felten has basically discovered is that people don’t so much hate cost as they hate hassle. It’s true that people hate dealing with parking meters, or waiting in line at toll booths, but it’s not so much the cost of a parking space they mind so much as it’s the inconvenience factor. Whether it’s the inconvenience of having to find spare change to pay parking meters or the burden of looking at/paying a bill as a whole, as opposed to splitting it into increments, the basic takeaway is that people are perfectly willing to pay more for parking spaces, or tolls, or whatever, so long as it’s more convenient. Indeed, it’s odd to see someone who I imagine probably fancies himself a free-market champion complaining that people are willing to pay more in exchange for something, in this case, convenience.

What this really is is an example of how exactly conservatives are very much out of the mainstream. Conservatives like Felten hate government, don’t much care for public services, but to the extent they do, really don’t like paying for them. I very much doubt that Felten objects to having public roads, or places to park, for example, he just doesn’t think he should have to pay the cost of providing those roads or parking spaces, or pick up any of the opportunity cost that goes along with him occupying a parking space. To that end, he imagines that a lot of people are like him, but it turns out they’re not. They’re more or less ok with paying for parking spaces, they just don’t like how inconvenient it is to pay a parking meter. Make it more convenient, and they’re perfectly fine with it. So fine, in fact, they’re willing to pay higher fees. And people who can pay a bill in increments find it more manageable than paying in one larger lump sum. But conservatives like Felten hate government, have built an entire political movement around hating government, and think other people should hate government too. But it turns out that most people don’t really hate government, so long as their routine interactions with it are convenient and at least somewhat pleasent. To that end, Felten thinks we ought to deliberately make routine interaction with government as inconvenient as possible, simply so that more people will hate government. It’s like that old joke that Republicans spend their time complaining that government doesn’t work, and when they elected they get straight to proving themselves right. Only this is an actual conservative really writing that government should be deliberately inconvenient so that more people will agree with him.

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponuru, in a tribute to American exceptionalism/identity, explain how mass transit is evil:

The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America grew more desperate. Why couldn’t we be more like them — like the French, like the Swedes, like the Danes? Like any people with a larger and busier government overawing the private sector and civil society? You can see it in Sicko, wherein Michael Moore extols the British national health-care system, the French way of life, and even the munificence of Cuba; you can hear it in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.

Matthew Schmitz points out that calling mass transit “socialistic” is stupid, given that highways and roads are also provided and maintained through government spending and taxation, but I think Yglesias’s critique of this as simply another instance of conservatives demarcating what does and does not count as “American,” as dismissing anything outside of that narrow conception subversively pro-European, is more accurate.

For my part I’ll just note that this yet again proves that the critiques you hear from conservatives from time to time about how liberals want to use public policy to force changes in peoples’ lifestyle is complete bullshit. It’s not so much that liberals don’t want to do this (basically any change to public policy, or lack of change for that matter, is going to effect lifestyle decisions at the margins), but rather that conservatives want to do this to. Yglesias points out that you never really hear conservatives or libertarians complain about local regulations designed to maintain the low-density, car-centric nature of suburbs. I would add that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movement conservative complain that things like the federal tax preference for homeowners over renters induces people to live in suburban or exurban areas over urban areas, or that the lack of quality mass transit systems in most American cities basically forces the people who live their into car-centric lifestyles, whether they like it or not. Which again, isn’t to say that using public policy to drive lifestyle patterns is bad, per se, it’s just to point out that conservatives who talk about ”small government,” individual choice, etc. are usually full of crap, and that they’re just as comfortable, or even moreso, with using government policy to influence the decisions people make.

Technorati Tags: mass transit, Ramesh Ponurru, Rich Lowry

I know Chait has been talking this up for awhile, and while I’ve seen some people giving this article a bit of attention today, I’m not sure how seriously any should take it. I know nothing about Jack Funari, but the tone and rhetoric of the article certainly makes him sound like a Rubio supporter. The closing in particular summarizes what I think is the obvious problem with taking the article seriously:

Here, in a minimalist nutshell, is why Crist will lose to Rubio in a Republican primary:
If someone told you that Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County, was going to leave the Republican Party to become an independent, would you believe them? Would you believe it about Marco Rubio? No. If you knew anything at all about politics, or anything about Rubio and Dinerstein, you would dismiss out of hand such a ridiculous report as not being credible and just another silly political rumor.

So tell me, do you believe it is possible that Crist will leave the Republican Party to run as an independent?

You do, don’t you?

And that is why Crist will lose to Rubio.

So what we basically have is someone who supports Rubio, or at least clearly doesn’t like Crist, and who also thinks that the GOP primary electorate’s ability to imagine Crist leaving the party will be a huge liability for Crist, spreading anonymously sourced tips that Crist is getting ready to leave the GOP. The self-serving nature of the claim is transparent, and leaves me skeptical, unless Fumari wants to disclose his sources and they confirm.

This isn’t to say that Crist won’t run as an independent, and certainly not that he shouldn’t. I basically agree that it’s impossible to see Crist beating Rubio in a Republican primary at this point, so if Crist really wants to be a Senator, his only chance to do so is by running as an independent and crafting an electoral coalition of Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans. I’m just saying that this particular “report” is a little too transparently biased and self-serving for my tastes, and I’m not sure I can believe it.

Technorati Tags: Charlie Crist, Marco Rubio

I think this really should have been the focal point of Krugman’s column today, and so the fact that it’s buried at the bottom is a bit disappointing, but I do think that this is the key takeaway from yesterday’s summit:

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

This is basically the fundamental obstacle to getting the public to understand what’s going on with any number of issues at the moment; the Congressional minority is spinning a bunch of outright lies about the proposals, and the media isn’t interested in pointing that out. Consider this Glenn Thrush report, explaining that the summit was “a tie,” and that that means Republicans won because they spoke in complete sentences and didn’t cite Sarah Palin’s Facebook page or something. Thrush was apparently particularly impressed with the Republican decision to let Sen. Alexander take the lead:

The GOP’s smartest move, Democrats say, was picking Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a folksy, even-keeled conservative with a moderate disposition, to lead off.

Alexander eschewed the usual GOP talking points, instead offering a barbed olive branch, disavowing South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint’s prediction that health care would be Obama’s “Waterloo” — while pressing the moral argument for passing the bill through reconciliation.

 “We want you to succeed,” said Alexander, who urged Obama to heed the lessons the senator learned back in 1979 when he was elected as a 39-year-old governor of the Volunteer State.

 “Some of the media went up to the Democratic leaders of the Legislature and asked, ‘What are you going to do with the new Republican governor?’ They said, ‘I’m going to help him because if he succeeds, our state succeeds,’” said Alexander. “But often they had to persuade me to change my direction to get our state to where it needed to go. I’d like to say the same thing to you: We want you to succeed, because if you succeed, our country succeeds. But we would like, respectfully, to change [your] direction.”

How touching. Thrush thinks (or his sources think, anyway) that it was a smart move to let Alexander lead, and that Alexander took a rhetorically wise track in his remarks. What Thrush never says, not even once, is that Alexander’s “barbed olive branch” included an awful lot of lying of the bill and the process. To the former, Alexander claimed matter of factly that the CBO report on the bill says it will cause premiums to rise. As Krugman notes in his column though, and as many people pointed out in real-time yesterday, this simply isn’t true. The CBO estimates that the bill will lower premiums, and that the lower cost and availability of subsidies will lead to some people buying more coverage. But the same unit of coverage would cost less if the bill was passed. (This, incidentally, is in line with my criticism of another POLITICO article yesterday). Relating to the latter, Alexander claimed that reconcilliation has never been used for something like this, which is an even more egregious falsehood. Reconcilliation has been used to pass TEFRA in 1982, the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 (and 1997), among other Republica priorities. As Krugman notes, both Bush tax cuts were passed using reconcilliation, at a price tag twice that of the current healthcare bill. In the realm of healthcare specifically, COBRA was passed using reconcilliation in 1985. There simply is no way to make Alexander’s statements anything other than egregious falsehoods, but not only do political journalists not point out when polticians are telling egregious lies, they actively praise them based on theater criticism.

It might sound like nit-picking or whining about the refs, but this is a serious problem. If American political journalists are going to make a habit of ignoring when politicians lie about issues, then there’s nothing keeping everyone from wildly making shit up about public debates, which means there’s basically no hope of maintaining an objectively informed populace. And if that happens, democracy itself is threatened.

Technorati Tags: Lamar Alexander, Politico

Yglesias and Greenwald both write on the idea the public option died a curious death, killed off by some unseen Congressional entity, but the more I think about the politics of passing a public option now, the more I think the obvious answer for why there’s little enthusiasm for bringing the public option back is that the House probably can’t pass a bill that includes it. As plenty of people have pointed out, while Pelosi got 220 votes for the bill in the House, 4 of those votes (Murtha, Abercrombie, Cao, and Wexler) are gone. Additionally, they’ll probably lose 5 votes, give or take, over the differences in abortion language in the Senate bill. That means that Pelosi and House leadership are going to have to do some serious lifting getting Blue Dogs who voted against the House bill to vote for the Senate/reconcilliation bill, and that’s probably much easier to do without a public option, leaving the Congresspersons room to say they can support the more moderate Senate bill, even if they couldn’t support the House bill. It’d be a line of bullshit, to be sure, but that seems the only truly plausible answer as to why Democrats are running away from a chance to pass it in the Senate.

Technorati Tags: public option

This blurb from Carrie Burdoff Brown is striking for a number of reasons.

If President Barack Obama at Thursday’s summit, like caps on malpractice awards or allowing insurers to sell across state lines. really wanted to show he’s serious about winning over Republicans on health care reform, he could offer up some key concessions

And if Republicans wanted to reciprocate, they could at least acknowledge the congressional scorekeepers are right – the Democratic plans cut the deficit in the long term and rein in health care costs.

Yglesias does a pretty thorough job pointing out the substantive ridiculousness of this; noting that Republicans agreeing not to lie, or lie less anyway, about Democratic bills isn’t a sufficient trade off for actual, substantive, concessions on policy. If Democrats are going to include Republican priorities everyone can agree to more or less in the bill, then Republicans are going to have to vote for the bill. If Republicans aren’t willing to do that, then there’s no reason Democrats should offer them anything.

For my part, I’d just like to note what this says about POLITICO. For one thing, the second paragraph just makes no sense. For one thing, Republicans aren’t claiming that “Congressional scorekeepers” are “wrong;” Lamar Alexander is not saying, “the CBO estimates that this proposal will lower premium costs, but my Republican colleagues and I don’t believe that, and have evidence to the contrary,” he’s just claiming the the CBO said premiums would go up. In other words, he’s lying. And Brown either won’t say as much, or she really just isn’t listening to what various officials are actually saying. Either way, it’s illustrative of a major problem with American political journalism that’s going to have to be fixed before we stand any real chance of ever addressing a major social problem.

Technorati Tags: Politico

Sen. Jay Rockerfeller (D-WV) is reiterating that he’s opposed to passing the public option through reconcilliation at this time. This remains odd, because to this point Rockefeller has been arguably the biggest champion of the public option in the Senate. This reinforces, I think, the idea that the major players just don’t think they have the votes for the public option, and while much of the attention on that question has been focused on the Senate, the more I think about it, the more I think the House may be the real impediment. Basically, you need to get 217 votes at the moment to pass anything, and while the healthcare bill passed with 220 votes the first time, Robert Wexler has retired, Jack Murtha died, and Jospeh Cao has joined the rest of the GOP in opposition. That leaves you with 217 before you account for Bart Stupak or anyone else who isn’t happy with the Senate’s abortion related language. So basically, any bill that passes the House right now is going to have to get a vote from a handful of Democrats who voted “no” the first time, and they might not be willing to support a public option. That seems like the most likely roadblock at the moment to me.

Technorati Tags: Jay Rockefeller, public option

I haven’t said anything about Steve King’s remarks alluding to some sympathy for the guy who flew an airplane into an IRS office, killing an employee, because I figured that they were disgusting enough that there wasn’t any need for someone with as small a platform as me to weigh in to state the obvious. Someone who doesn’t have a small platform, on the other hand, is The Washington Post, and according to Steve Benen, they haven’t mentioned King’s comments once either. I don’t really pay much attention to the Post’s newspages anymore, and I’d like to pay less attention to the paper as a whole, so I don’t necessarily want to say they absolutely should have run it, but I will say that the lack of a mention highlights a major problem for Democratic politicians and progressive activists; you just can’t get the corporate media to build an accurate narrative about the degree to which actual Republican members of Congress are dangerous, crazy, extremists. King’s comments are downright shocking, and there’s really no way to defend them. Nor are they the first offensively crazy/hateful things King has said. He’s long been a major basher of gays and immigrants in particular. But you’ll never see King referred to regularly as “the Republican Congressman from Iowa who regularly engages in gay bashing and sympathized with the IRS attacker.” And that reluctance to accurately portray the Republican fringe in Congress significantly impacts the public’s understanding of just how out there the GOP is.

Technorati Tags: Steve King, Washington Post