Journamalism

McCain on MTP.
Marshall: Getting Sad

McCain doubles down on his big fib: claims no one told him TARP was for the financial sector or the banks.

It's been pretty much shark hopscotch for McCain going back to late 2007. But I wonder whether this could push him over the edge, even get him in trouble in what should be a pretty easy reelection.

How can J.D. Hayworth not take advantage of this opening?

and Gregory didn't question his premise.

Benen: QUOTE OF THE DAY

ABC's "This Week" held its usual roundtable discussion this morning, with Elizabeth Vargas hosting a panel of Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, George Will, and Paul Krugman.

The last topic of conversation was introduced by Vargas this way:

"[O]f course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She -- she was highly criticized after the Obamas' first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary's office didn't have people manning the security sites."

This led to a surprisingly long chat about Desiree Rogers.

Krugman sat silently while the discussion went on (and on), before eventually interjecting:

"Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we're worrying about the status of the White House social secretary....

Donaldson responded, "Paul, welcome to Washington."

Look, I realize that not every discussion on a show like this is going to be substantive, sophisticated, and policy focused. Not every post I write for this site is going to highlight critically important issues, either. There's nothing wrong with including heavier and lighter subjects in the same public affairs forum.

But this panel discussion covered exactly four subjects this morning: health care reform, Charlie Rangel's ethics problem, David Paterson's latest troubles, and the fate of the former White House social secretary (and where she's from, what her clothes looked like, what her next job is likely to be, etc.), which hardly seems relevant to anyone who doesn't actually attend social events at the White House.

In this same discussion, there was nothing about the jobs bill that passed the Senate this week, nothing about the incredibly important Zazi guilty plea this week (and the fact that it makes Republican talking points look ridiculous), nothing about Jim Bunning single-handedly delaying unemployment insurance for those who need it.

I wonder, who was the target audience for the discussion of Desiree Rogers, who most Americans have never heard of, and whose White House position has nothing to do with public policy? The general public or the D.C. cocktail circuit crowd?

Krugman no doubt annoyed the show's producers by mentioning the inanity of the subject matter, but he's right to remind his colleagues of what matters. For Donaldson to "welcome" him "to Washington" was insulting -- to Krugman and the rest of us.

Benen: LAMAR AND 'THE END OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE'

Sen. Lamar Alexander's (R-Tenn.) appearance on ABC's "This Week" yesterday was quite a dishonest display. One argument, in particular, was hard to overlook. (TP has video.)

"The reconciliation procedure is a little-used legislative procedure -- 19 times it's been used. It's for the purpose of taxing and spending and reducing deficits.

"But the difference here is that there's never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate -- it would really be the end of the United States Senate as a protector of minority rights, as a place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority, and it would be a political kamikaze mission for the Democratic Party if they jam this through...."

The very next thing host Elizabeth Vargas asked was, "Why political kamikaze, though?"

In other words, there was no effort at all to push back against the dishonest claims or set the record straight for viewers. What was interesting, apparently, was Lamar Alexander reflecting on the electoral consequences of the legislation, rather than the substantive. The senator's policy lies were overlooked, while the senator's campaign predictions drew scrutiny.

With that in mind, let's do what the show didn't. First, for Alexander to dismiss reconciliation as a "little-used legislative procedure" is pretty disingenuous. Reconciliation has been used, legitimately, to pass everything from welfare reform to COBRA, Bush's tax-cut packages to student-aid reform, nursing home standards to the earned income tax credit. Not too long ago, Senate Republicans even considered using reconciliation to approve drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's a little too late to characterize the same procedural measure as some kind of outrage, after Republicans relied on it extensively.

Second, to insist that reconciliation's purpose is to "reduce deficits" is simply wrong. As Paul Krugman noted, "[R]econciliation was used to pass the two major Bush tax cuts, which increased the deficit -- by $1.8 trillion."

Third, even if we concede that health care reform is bigger in "size and magnitude" than the other bills approved through reconciliation, the plan isn't to pass health care reform through reconciliation.

Fourth, to suggest passing a budget fix by majority rule "would really be the end of the United States Senate as a protector of minority rights" is comically ridiculous.

It was a rather depressing display all around. But here's the kicker: there will be no consequences. Lamar Alexander, who may actually know better, made a variety of demonstrably false claims on national television. Not only was he not called on it, Alexander will almost certainly be invited back, rewarded for his dishonesty with more opportunities to mislead the public.

The estimable Jay Rosen recently explained that "the Sunday morning talk shows are broken." His modest proposal for more fact-checking looks better and better all the time.

Yglesias: “Minority Rights” and the US Senate

Lamar Alexander on reconciliation:

The reconciliation procedure is a little-used legislative procedure — 19 times, it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing, spending, and reducing deficits. But the difference here is, that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate, it would really be the end of the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority.

As to the historical use of the budget reconciliation process this is hypocritical nonsense. But it’s also worth taking this “minority rights” business on.

As everyone knows, in a democracy you normally do things with a majority-rules or plurality-rules decision procedure. But as everyone also knows, part of building a sustainable liberal democratic polity is that you don’t just have “the tyranny of the majority.” A strong framework of individual rights is necessary. The idea is that you shouldn’t have the few subjected to oppression by the many. And all that’s fine as far as it goes. But it has to be seen clearly that the US Senate’s countermajoritarian aspects are rarely if ever used to protect “minority rights” in any relevant sense of the word. The Senate fought a lonely battle on behalf of Jim Crow segregation, not against it. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an example of a vulnerable minority being subjected to majoritarian persecution by the House, the White House, and the Supreme Court being saved by the heroics of the filibuster.

Yglesias: Luce & Machiavelli on Leadership

Edward Luce in the FT: “American presidents with the greatest record of bipartisan legislative achievement, notably Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, got their way by intimidating opponents, not by splitting the difference. As Machiavelli famously observed, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. For all his intelligence, nobody fears Mr Obama.”

Exactly. Arguably this trend started with the decision to appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I have no complaints with her job performance, but it didn’t exactly send an “I will crush my enemies” message.

Krugman: Revisionist History

So, on the This Week panel today I didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the biggest whopper from Sen. Lamar Alexander, who told Elizabeth Vargas that reconciliation — I don’t have the exact transcript — had in the past been used for small things and “to reduce the deficit”.

In fact, reconciliation was used to pass the two major Bush tax cuts, which increased the deficit — by $1.8 trillion.

And there’s no penalty for this kind of deception.

Update: Brad DeLong has the transcript, including my final lament.

digby: Why Oh Why 2010 Edition

Brad DeLong:

Read through the 'This Week' Transcript. It's truly terrifying. You try to figure out why anybody thinks it's a good idea for these people to have the jobs that they do--and you can't:

.. WILL: Two things. First of all, Sam, you want the president to be Ulysses Grant, who won the war by his wonderful indifference to his own casualties, and I think some members in the Senate and in the House would not approve of that.

DONALDSON: Did I not just say that they may lose some seats? Were you listening?

WILL: By the millions. Now -- second, now, Paul says that, in fact, the Republicans have no ideas. They do, cross-selling across state lines, tort reforms, all those. Just a second, Paul. Then you say they're telling whoppers. That was your view about Lamar Alexander when he said, for millions of Americans, premiums will go up. You said in the next sentence in your column, I guess you could say he wasn't technically lying, because the Congressional Budget Office says that's true.

KRUGMAN: No, it's not what it says.... Can I explain? This is...

WILL: Wait. Let me -- let me set the predicate here, because you then go on and say the Senate does say the average premiums would go up, but people would be getting better premiums.

KRUGMAN: Look, let me explain what happens, because you actually have to read the CBO report.... [T]he CBO report tells you... that... what the bill will do is bring a lot of people who are uninsured, who are currently young and therefore relatively low cost, into the risk pool, which will actually bring premiums down a little bit. It will also... lead a lot of people to get better insurance... people who are currently underinsured, who have insurance policies that are paper thin and don't actually protect you in a crisis, will... get... full coverage. That makes the average payments go up, but it does not mean that people who currently have good coverage under their policies will pay more.... [T]hey'll end up paying a little bit less.

WILL: One question. If the government came to you and said, "Professor Krugman, you have a car. We're going to compel you to buy a more expensive car," but it's not really more expensive, because it's a better car, wouldn't you tell them to get off your land?

Will was really on this week-end. This one was particularly interesting in its total unresponsiveness:

VARGAS: I do want to get to one other issue related to this health care bill, which is the language on abortion, because it almost died in the House, the health care bill, because of abortion. There was the Stupak amendment, which attached highly restrictive language to when abortions could be covered, and there -- Bart Stupak says this is unacceptable, this current bill, as Obama has proposed it, and he says 20 other members of the House will have problems with it, too. Will abortion kill this thing in the end?

WILL: Well, Alan Frumin's 15 minutes of fame have arrived. He is the hitherto obscure, but soon to be quite famous parliamentarian of the Senate, and it will be his job to rule on what can and cannot be passed under reconciliation. That is, is it a budgetary-related thing? You can argue about a great many things in the health care bill. Can you say that's budget-related? No one thinks you can change the abortion language under reconciliation.

Obviously Will was riffing because he didn't have any clue about this issue and it was gibberish.

The thing went downhill from there with poor Krugman trying to inject sanity, but being thwarted by Roberts' fatuous non sequitors:

WILL: Twenty years from now, the country is going to be spending a larger portion of its GDP on health care than it is now for three reasons. We're getting older, and as we age, we get more chronic diseases that interact with one another. Second, we're getting richer; we can afford to buy more medicine. And, third, medicine is becoming more competent. Therefore, we're going to spend more on health care.

KRUGMAN: But there's a...

(DeLong: What Paul wanted to say here was: "There is a big difference between, twenty years from now, spending 20% of GDP on health care with universal coverage and spending 25% of GDP on health care with one-quarter of the non-elderly population uninsured and getting substandard coverage.)

ROBERTS: The other thing is, you know, the health care industry is the biggest employer in most of our cities now. So when -- when the speaker talks about a job creation bill...

VARGAS: A jobs bill, exactly.

It wound up with this sad, pathetic, predictable conclusion:

VARGAS: And then, of course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She -- she was highly criticized after the Obamas' first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary's office didn't have people manning the security sites.

ROBERTS: Well, I talked to -- I did talk to her, Desiree, yesterday at length. She is from my home city of New Orleans and fellow Sacred Heart girl.

DONALDSON: What's the name of the city?

ROBERTS: New Orleans.

DONALDSON: I love to hear her say it.

ROBERTS: But -- and she has lots of good explanations about that dinner. And basically, the bottom line is, it's the Secret Service. But she -- but her -- her major point is -- and I -- and I completely take this -- is that she -- she put on 330 events at the White House last year and did open the building to all kinds of people who had not been there before. And they had wonderful music days of all kinds of music, where you had during the day, the musicians would work with kids in Washington and teach them things before coming on at night.

DONALDSON: Cokie, that's irrelevant.

ROBERTS: Well, I don't think it's irrelevant.

DONALDSON: I mean, it's irrelevant. People who work for the president understand or should understand their place, which is to be spear-carriers. There are two stars in anyone's White House, the president and the president's spouse. After that, this passion for anonymity that once was a hallmark of people who worked for a president, has been lost. She wanted to be a star herself...

ROBERTS: And it's been lost. Look at all the people who work for presidents and then go out and write books about them.

DONALDSON: I think you're right.

VARGAS: Do you think she was -- did she quit, or was she asked to leave?

DONALDSON: She was asked to.

ROBERTS: She says she quit.

DONALDSON: Oh, well...

ROBERTS: And she certainly has lots...

DONALDSON: And to spend more time with your family.

ROBERTS: No, no, to go into the corporate sector and make some money, where she'll make a lot of -- she'll do fine.

DONALDSON: Good luck to her. I don't wish her ill.

DONALDSON: It's just that she didn't understand...

ROBERTS: She'll do very well.

DONALDSON: ... she was not a star in the sense that she should make herself prominent.

VARGAS: George?

WILL: It is axiomatic that when there's no penalty for failure, failure proliferates. She failed conspicuously in her one great challenge, which was the first state dinner, and she's gone. If she's gone because she failed, that's a healthy sign.

VARGAS: The big question, of course, because she was one of that close contingent of Chicago friends is whether or not she's just the first to leave or if we'll see other...

ROBERTS: But you'll see people leave.

ROBERTS: I mean, that's what happens. It's a perfectly normal thing that happens in administration, is that people come, and they come in at the beginning, and then it's time to -- to go back to life.

KRUGMAN: Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we're worrying about the status of the White House social secretary...

VARGAS: It's our light way to end, Paul.

DONALDSON: Paul, welcome to Washington.

What can you say to this? The system is broken and corrupt and this is one of the major reasons why.

It's mind-boggling that George Will can say this without being struck by lightning right there at the table, but he said it without even the slightest shred of irony or self awareness:

It is axiomatic that when there's no penalty for failure, failure proliferates. She failed conspicuously in her one great challenge, which was the first state dinner, and she's gone. If she's gone because she failed, that's a healthy sign.

Yes, he's right about one thing. Failure certainly does proliferate when there's no penalty.

And Rush's Head Exploded

Booman: That's Right, The Liberals Are Smarter

Liberals are smarter according to a recent study:

The study found that young adults who said they were "very conservative" had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were "very liberal" averaged 106.

The scientists attempt to explain this in evolutionary terms, essentially saying that caring about total strangers is counter-evotutionary and only contemplated by people smart enough to think outside the box.

Krugman: You’re So Vain

Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about.

It goes like this: Person A says “Black is white” — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, “No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.”

And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending.

I had, I have to admit, hoped that the nation’s experience with George W. Bush — who got within hanging-chad distance of the White House precisely because Al Gore was punished for actually knowing stuff — would have cured our discourse of this malady. But no. Why not?

Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)

Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.

The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”

But NOOOO! [/Belushi]

• from the comments:

  Jenn

  Montchauvet

  February 28th, 2010

  7:35 am

  It starts in grade school - the smart kid afraid to raise his hand and answer for fear of being taunted by the slower kids. The US despises intellectuals. I live in Europe now - and here you are expected to raise your hand and answer questions. Here, it's the slow students who are taunted. Americans have to first learn to respect education, and that will have to start in gradeschool. Then maybe the one with the facts will win the debate.

Ezra Klein (2007): The Class of 1994

Along with Gingrich, Dick Armey is often lauded as one of those honest, thoughtful, crackling-with-ideas type conservatives who bumrushed Washington in the early-90s and whose intellectual energy we should all sort of miss. Well, Armey is doing some guest-blogging over at Time, and it turns out he's as disappointingly hackish as ever. It's also a bit funny, full of gems like, "In all of these endeavors I have been guided by my highest political value: freedom. This is a good place for me to start. While tyrannies work only for those at the top, the American tradition demonstrates that all people are better off when their political and economic freedoms are protected. Government can only expand its scope of power and authority at the expense of the citizen [blah blah blah]." Reading this, you get a better sense for where the cult of Armey comes from: He's like a stupid person's idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.

Think Progress: Sen. Alexander: Using Reconciliation To Pass Health Care Reform Would ‘End The Senate’

Today, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) appeared on ABC’s This Week to discuss last week’s bipartisan health care reform summit. During the summit, Alexander urged the President and Congressional Democrats to “renounce” the idea of using budget reconciliation to pass health care reform. Alexender went even further today, saying that the use of reconciliation would be “the end of the Senate“:

The reconciliation procedure is a little-used legislative procedure — 19 times, it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing, spending, and reducing deficits. But the difference here is, that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate, it would really be the end of the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority.

Watch it:

If using reconciliation were really “the end of the Senate,” the Senate would have died a long time ago, and Lamar Alexander would have been complicit in its death.

Reconciliation has been used to pass at least 19 bills, including major pieces of health care reform legislation like the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Medicare Advantage Program. Fourteen of the times reconciliation was employed it was used to advance Republican interests.

Furthermore, Alexander himself has personally voted for reconciliation at least four times, as Igor Volsky pointed out:

– 2003 Bush Tax Cuts: The Congressional Budget office, Bush’s tax cuts for the rich increased budget deficits by $60 billion in 2003 and by $340 billion by 2008. The bill had a cost of about a trillion dollars. [Alexander voted yes.]

– 2005 Deficit Reduction Act of 2005: The bill cut approximately $4.8 billion over five years and $26.1 billion over the next ten years from Medicaid spending. [Alexander voted yes.]

– 2005 Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005: The bill extended tax cuts on capital gains and dividends and the alternative minimum tax. [Alexander voted yes.]

– 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act: The bill forgave all remaining student loan debt after 10 years of public service. [Alexander voted yes]

In the end, Alexander’s mere presence on television this morning seems to indicate that using reconciliation does not, in fact, end the Senate.

Pure B.S.

If anyone on the national scene is a bigger bullshitter than Newtie, I can't imagine who it could be.
Think Progress: Despite Running A Health Industry ‘Trade Association,’ Gingrich Says He Will Not Register As A Lobbyist

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has founded several businesses, including a for-profit health care firm called the “Center for Health Transformation” (CHT) and a communications firm called the “Gingrich Group.” CHT serves approximately 94 health industry corporations and lobby groups, including health insurance (BlueCross BlueShield Association, WellPoint, AHIP, UnitedHealth), health IT (L-3 Enterprise, Microsoft, IBM), and pharmaceutical companies — with each paying up to $200,000 annually. And although CHT has no registered lobbyists or lobbyists on retainer, Gingrich has used his CHT business to promote his clients’ interests in Congress:

– Gingrich Meets With Lawmakers To Help Craft Specific Policy, Legislation: In March 2009, Gingrich met with Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) and other members of the GOP Doctors Caucus to help write conservative health reform alternative legislation. “Gingrich provided us with great insight as we work to craft health care solutions for the 21st Century,” proclaimed Gingrey after the meeting. As FireDogLake has reported, through his CHT firm, Gingrich wrote healthcare legislation introduced by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA). Gingrich’s CHT also “consulted” with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on health reform legislation that would deregulate the insurance industry. As the American Spectator reported, the Coburn-Ryan bill also contained the exact health IT proposals backed by Gingrich.

– Gingrich Helps Clients Obtain Specific Financial Opportunities From Legislation: As Business Week reported, Gingrich and his CHT firm worked with health IT firms like IBM and Microsoft “on how to grab some of the $19.6 billion in federal stimulus money.” The article notes that Gingrich helps “open doors” on Capitol Hill for his business clients.

– Gingrich Advises Lawmakers On Legislative Strategy: According to the New York Times, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) discusses strategy on a “regular basis” with Gingrich. Throughout 2009, Gingrich attended whip meetings with the GOP caucus to “educate” rank and file Republican lawmakers on the health reform debate. Gingrich provides “Newtgrams” — constant e-mails and messages with tactical advice — to a vast array of Republican legislators in both the House and Senate. By helping the GOP kill health reform, Gingrich is also assisting his health insurance clients, which all oppose reform.

– Gingrich Coordinates Meetings Between Corporate Clients, Public Officials: In December 2009, Gingrich met with Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and industry partners to discuss potential Wall Street investments in health IT. A health IT trade magazine has noted that since 2007, Gingrich has worked to pair business leaders with influential lawmakers and government officials to promote health IT programs. In March 2009, Gingrich organized a conference to create an “innovative business matchmaking framework” between Israeli telehealth firms, American health insurance and health technology companies, and Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine.

At a CHT press conference on Monday promoting tort reform (CHT clients include medical malpractice consulting firms for doctors), Gingrich attacked President Obama’s health proposals for lacking a supposed “rhythm of transparency.” In the spirit of this transparency, ThinkProgress asked Gingrich why he has not registered as a lobbyist to provide greater clarity on who exactly is paying him to lobby on legislative issues, especially given the influence of his ideas. Gingrich dodged and explained that he is not a lobbyist because when he lobbies Congress, he does so at the request of lawmakers every time. According to lobbying guidelines, lobbying members of Congress counts as lobbying regardless if it necessarily benefits each client. Nevertheless, Gingrich defended his actions by stating that his lobbying is not technically lobbying because it “benefits the country at large.” Watch it:

At the event, CHT Vice President David Merritt told ThinkProgress that Gingrich has “flipped the trade association model really on its head” by pushing an agenda, then inviting clients who support that agenda to “sign on.” Merritt said that it is “very true” that corporate clients pay Gingrich because his agenda benefits them. However, like Gingrich, Merritt explained that Gingrich’s lobbying never benefits individual clients, thus disqualifying Gingrich as a lobbyist.

However, trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce or AHIP also do not necessarily lobby for individual members. Instead, they lobby for policies that benefit groups of members or the industry as a whole. AHIP, the Chamber, the National Association of Manufacturers and other trade associations largely follow the law and register their own lobbyists, as well as lobbyists they contract out. Since Gingrich’s CHT is essentially a health industry trade association, the same rules should apply to Gingrich.

As ThinkProgress reported, Gingrich has been working closely with the oil industry through another project he leads. In his ubiquitous punditry, Gingrich touts himself as an author, a “futurist,” a conservative thinker — anything but a lobbyist. But as the evidence shows, he has positioned himself as a nexus between corporate clients and mostly Republican lawmakers. For the sake of transparency, Gingrich should register as a lobbyist pursuant to the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

Aravosis: Please back away from the Teabagger, ma'am

Politico reports that conservatives are now trying to purge the Teabaggers of their most extreme elements, such as birthers and the militia movement:

After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment - with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon - is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements.

The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded in the 1960s and 1970s by William F. Buckley Jr.

“A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in the Washington Post . “It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.”

In front of conservatives, that would be next to impossible. You see, facts have a liberal bias. It's the reason a recent study showed that kids who go to college end up more liberal. Intelligence and knowledge tend to make you more accepting of reality, and other human beings. That doesn't go over so well in Republican circles, where far too many believe that great grandma used to hang out with pterodactyls.

digby: Teabaggers Aren't The Only Kooks

Right up there with them are the neocon "intellectuals." Check out the latest lunacy from middle east expert Frank Gaffney (now writing for Breitbart, natch. What a hustle...)

Among other reprehensible actions, Team Obama terminated the nation’s only program capable of providing a near-term ability to intercept ballistic missiles early in their flight (i.e., the boost-phase). This Airborne Laser Program nonetheless was successfully tested earlier this month — destroying not one but two missiles similar to those arrayed against us and our friends today and making the case that such systems should be operationalized and deployed as a matter of the utmost urgency.

Then, there are the persistent reports that President Obama is going to accede to Russian demands to reinstitute bilateral restrictions on missile defenses as part of the new START follow-on treaty now being finalized with the Kremlin. Moscow lost its effective veto over such U.S. systems when George W. Bush withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 and the Russians have been as anxious as its American fellow-travelers to be able to exercise it again.

Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.

People keep talking about the reasonable Republicans reasserting themselves. Who are they?

Media Matters: Gaffney issues correction on post linking Missile Defense Agency logo to Obama campaign logo, Islamic star and crescent

From a February 27 post by Frank Gaffney on BigGovernment.com:

In a post here Wednesday, under the headline "Can This Possibly Be True?," I called attention to a "new" logo being used by the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on the grounds that it bore a disconcerting resemblance to an amalgamation of the Obama campaign's logo and the symbols of Islam, the crescent and a single star. It turns out the answer is "no," it isn't true that the MDA's logo is exactly new or, apparently, that it reflects an Obama-directed redesign.

We have since learned that the logo has been used at the MDA website since at least October 2009. Matters are made more confusing by the fact that the agency continues to use its older shield-like logo for online and other purposes. The contract for a complete rebranding for MDA was let in 2007, during the Bush administration, although much of the work appears to have been done in 2008 in follow-on contracts during the presidential campaign in which the Obama logo was much in evidence.

It has also been observed that - rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA's latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.

For these reasons, I am content to have the question posed in the last post be answered in the negative, and I regret any confusion caused by my suggesting otherwise.

SmoothLikeRemy: The REAL Pre 9-11 Mentality

Imagine for a second that we were in bizarro world and John McCain had won the presidency. And in this bizarro world it was say Senator Dick Durbin instead of Richard Shelby who had placed holds on President McCain's nominees many of them for positions high up in the military. What do you think the GOP response would be to an exchange like this one on CNN?

BASH: I spoke with Geoff Morrell over at the Pentagon and just asked him what the impact is of not having these three people in place — one of whom, as you know, is the number two at the Air Force. He said, “Without these people, we’re not firing on all cylinders.” And he also said, “It does adversely affect the organization.”

Are you worried about that? This is a time of war –

SHELBY: The Pentagon is a big place. I don’t think one or two will affect anything except on the margins.

BASH: Do you think that the nominees you have holds on are qualified?

SHELBY: Oh, I don’t have any idea. I looked at them closely and we’ll see. Sometimes that’s not the issue.

Senator Shelby admits that he is holding up nominees for Pentagon posts whose qualifications he can't even say are lacking. He further states that missing one or two people won't affect anything when we are in the midst of two wars and trying to keep our homeland safe from terrorist attacks.

Democrats, please find a fucking spine and bury this asshole. If the situation was reversed he would have not only been shamed into releasing these holds, he would have had to go to the floor of the Senate and apologize by now.

Frank Rich:

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee "unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states" (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

Sigh ...

For the GOP, if the tinfoil hat fits...

Feb. 26: Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, talks with Rachel Maddow about the strange development on the right of embracing the conspiracy-minded fringe instead of purging them to preserve credibility.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

DougJ: Wallace not Goldwater

Jonathan Rauch has a truly superlative piece on how George Wallace is the true god-father of contemporary Republicanism. The side-by-side comparison of Palin quotes with Wallace quotes is striking, but you need to read them all to see just how striking it is, so instead I’ll excerpt Rauch’s thesis and summarization:

Wallace’s national appeal came neither from the racial backlash he exploited nor from his program, such as it was. “It was a deep sense of grievance,” Carter says—a feeling that elites “are not only screwing you over but at the same time they’re laughing at you, they’re looking down their noses at you.”

[.....]

First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace’s central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem out of place at any major Republican gathering today.

Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national leader.

Third, by becoming George Wallace’s party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.

I disagree about the importance of race, I believe, to paraphrase Lee Atwater, that the rhetoric on the issue has simply become more abstract. But other than that, this is right on target.

John Cole: Hand Me Down World

These really are just hideous people, any way you look at it:

At yesterday’s health care summit, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY-28) related this story from one of her constituents:

I even have one constituent—you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, it’s true. Her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit. Do you believe that in America that that’s where we would be?

What was the reaction from leading members of the conservative media?

* On Twitter, Michelle Malkin wrote: “We need trillion-$ Demcare cuz someone had to wear their sister’s dentures! O: “Terrific conversation”

* On his radio program, Glenn Beck stated, “I’ve read the Constitution … I didn’t see that you had a right to teeth.”

* Author and radio host Laura Ingraham told Bill O’Reilly that Slaughter’s tale was “ridiculous” and a “sob story.”

* Fox Nation, the website maintained by the Fox News Channel, labeled Slaughter’s comments “Summit Insanity.”

I don’t know whether to interpret this response as to them just not believing anything that a Democrat says, their being complete assholes, or the fact that all of these folks are so well off that the concept of hand-me-down clothes, let alone dentures, sounds bizarre and foreign to them. After all, there is no poverty in America- all those welfare queens got their big screens somehow.

It really is amazing, though. I didn’t flinch when I heard this story, but then again, I live in an area where people make the calculation to not do anything about a sore tooth until they can justify getting it pulled- because that is cheaper than a root canal or anything else. I know people who don’t check their blood sugar, or who don’t take their meds, because they simply can not afford the equipment or the treatment. And they all work. They all have jobs.

It is easy to chalk this all up to them being assholes, but I really do think a lot of them are just oblivious. That is why we can have septuagenarian assholes like Andrew Malcolm bleating about people in line for food at a shelter having the nerve to own a cell phone. But then again, they just don’t care to know, so I guess that does, indeed, make them assholes.

On the other hand, thank goodness Rep. Slaughter didn’t mention that woman’s name, or you know who would be on her doorstep giving us a play-by-play about her kitchen counters.

Reconciliation Follies

Beutler (TPM): Gregg: Reconciliation Is The Rule Of The Senate

Republicans are doing everything they can to convince the media and the public that using the budget reconciliation process to finish health care would be a grave crime against democracy.

But reconciliation is part of the Senate rules. And there's perhaps no better person to make that point than Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH)--the Senate Republicans' top budget guy--who vociferously defended the use of reconciliation when his party tried to use it in 2005 to allow drilling in Alaska.

"The representation by the Senator from Massachusetts that somehow that this is outside the rules--to proceed within the rules--is a very unique view of the rules," Gregg said on the Senate floor back when he was part of the majority. "We are using the rules of the Senate here, that's what they are senator. Reconciliation is a rule of the Senate set up under the Budget Act. It has been used before for purposes exactly like this on numerous occasions."

Gregg went on, "Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don't think so."

Unsurprisingly, Gregg feels differently about things these days. Last year he compared the majority-rules vote to "running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River."

Republicans have also advanced the meme that reconciliation amounts to the "nuclear option"--a term that came to fame when Republicans tried to change the Senate rules regarding the minority's right to obstruct judicial nominations. But the "nuclear option" was a threat to change the rules. As Gregg pointed out very publicly, reconciliation is already part of the rules.

Benen: THE INEXORABLY FLAWED PREMISE

A rather conventional report in the New York Times, which ignores the most relevant detail:

White House officials and their allies in liberal advocacy groups are making an all-out push to persuade Congress and the public that budget reconciliation is a legitimate procedure used often in the last 30 years to pass major legislation, including President Ronald Reagan's domestic agenda in 1981, an overhaul of welfare programs in 1996 and President George W. Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said he knew those precedents. But, he said, they amount to "peanuts compared with this total restructuring of one-sixth of the economy."

The whole discussion seems badly off-track. Democrats and other proponents of health care reform have invested so much energy in questioning the merit of the GOP argument -- pointing to all the other times reconciliation has been used, for example -- that they forget to question the premise.

Whether Grassley and his cohorts realize it or not, let's emphasize what the NYT did not mention: reconciliation would not be used to pass health care reform in the Senate. The Senate has already approved health care reform, with 60 votes, through an entirely conventional process. The next time the Senate votes on a reform-related measure, it's very likely to a small budget fix -- not the huge legislative package -- after reform is already finished.

The Democratic arguments in response to Republican complaints are plentiful and accurate, but ultimately irrelevant. The GOP is arguing that it would be outrageous to pass health care reform through reconciliation, but no one is recommending passing health care reform through reconciliation. The other talking points don't much matter when the premise of the Republican argument is proven to be inexorably flawed.

Reader Ron Byers noted that MSNBC's Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews, to their credit, emphasized this point on "Hardball" on Thursday, and I tracked down the video. It's a clip the DNC, the White House, and congressional Dems would be wise to keep in mind.

E.J. Dionne called Todd's observation "superb," adding, "I do not expect what I will call the Todd Clarification to stop Republicans from condemning the Democrats if they get a bill through with the reconciliation amendments. But shouldn't all of us be referring to them just that way -- as 'amendments' rather than as 'a bill'? ... Kudos to Todd for stating a truth that just about all of us have missed."

The next time you hear a Republican (or a reporter) argue that it would be wrong to pass health care reform through reconciliation, remember one critically important detail that's gone overlooked for weeks: the argument doesn't make sense.

Democrats court Godot vote on health reform
Feb. 26: Ezra Klein, staff writer for The Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about why the Democrats, having by now figured out that opponents of health reform are unwilling to compromise, aren't acting immediately to pass a bill.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Benen: EXPERTS AGREE: PASS THE DAMN BILL

If policymakers are still open to advice from experts not on Capitol Hill, this should be taken seriously.

Obviously, not all economists are in favor of the current proposals in Congress. But a pretty impressive list of health economists and other policy experts has released a letter making the following argument:

"We commend the President's pursuit of bipartisan solutions. Yet the summit made plain that it is now time to move decisively and quickly to enact comprehensive reform. We believe that the only workable process at this point is to use the President's proposal to finish the job. After long debate, the House and Senate have passed two similar bills that do crucial things to improve U.S. health care."

Harold Pollack and Timothy Jost pulled together responses from 80 nationally prominent experts, which included some pretty heavy hitters: "Jacob Hacker, Paul Starr, Theda Skocpol, Ted Marmor, Len Nichols, Jon Gruber, David Cutler, Henry Aaron, and many other luminaries from the social sciences, medicine, and public health. People on this list disagree about many things ranging from single-payer to the public option and the taxation of health insurance. We agree about one thing: It is time to finally pass this bill by majority vote in both houses."

The letter and list of scholars who signed on is available in full here.

Summit Follies

QOTD, Pearlstein:

What we didn't hear from Kyl, or Camp, or Coburn or McCain, however, was an offer to vote for a health reform plan if these problems were fixed and their ideas were incorporated. Without even the hint of such offers, there was little reason for a willing president and his unwilling allies to even consider serious compromise. Now the losers will be the American people, who could have surely benefited from such productive dealmaking.

CSPAN Rocks!

DougJ: A tale of two pundits

K-Thug:

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

[....]

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.

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.

Bobo:

The Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, were smart enough to stand back and let Senator Lamar Alexander lead the way, which he did genially and intelligently. While Alexander was speaking, Reid and Pelosi wouldn’t even deign to look at him.

Once you got to the other members, about two-thirds of the statements were smart and well-informed. This was not a repeat of the Baltimore summit, in which Obama dominated the room. This time, Obama was very good, but so were many others, like Mike Enzi, Jim Cooper, George Miller and Tom Coburn. If you thought Republicans were a bunch of naysayers who don’t know or care about health care, then this was not the event for you. They more than held their own.

I have yet to meet an academic over 50 who doesn’t think that Bobo Brooks is a thoughtful, reasonable conservative with lots of sensible ideas. My parents both feel this way, though they will no longer admit it to me.

History will not judge this era kindly.

DougJ: Every Rose has its thorn

Apparently, Bill Frist and Mark Halperin are on Charlie Rose discussing today’s summit right now. (The good news is that Ezra Klein is on too.) I’d watch but I have no desire to take my own life this evening.

There are a lot of people out there who believe that our sorry state of affairs is caused by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and, if they’re really deluded, they’ll add “and on the left, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann”. I know plenty of people who say things like this.

The truth is, it’s more the fault of Charlie Rose and Tom Friedman and David Brooks. Glenn Beck didn’t get us into Iraq.

• from the comments:

Wile E. Quixote


But the good news is that John McCain is going to get an exclusive interview on Press the Meat with David Gregory this Sunday, and I for one say that it’s about time that the liberal media gave John McCain a chance to speak his mind.

February 26th, 2010 at 12:17 am

Gregory


Apparently, Bill Frist and Mark Halperin are on Charlie Rose discussing today’s summit right now. (The good news is that Ezra Klein is on too.)

On the other hand, the even-the-liberal NPR had only a Republican Congressman on to give his response to the summit.

Not another dime from me.

DougJ: The children’s table

This (from Drudgico) belongs in a time capsule too:

But in this case, the tie goes to Republicans, according to operatives on both sides of the aisle — because the stakes were so much higher for Democrats trying to build their case for ramming reform through using a 51-vote reconciliation tactic.

“I think it was a draw, which was a Republican win,” said Democratic political consultant Dan Gerstein. “The Republican tone was just right: a respectful, substantive disagreement, very disciplined and consistent in their message.”

[....]

Republicans drove a hard bargain with the White House over the seating arrangement — securing a massive square table that put them on a visual par with the president — to underscore their parity and seriousness.

Republicans won because they got to sit at their own table.

But that measure, my sister and I won Thanksgiving for the first 20 years of our lives.

Benen: AN ILLUSTRATIVE SUCCESS

The New York Times mentioned in passing this morning that the White House health care summit "was a kind of Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to keep [President Obama's] top legislative priority from slipping out of his grasp."

That's probably not the best analogy. When a game is nearly over, a Hail Mary pass is tried in desperation. And if it fails to connect, the team that attempted it loses. But in this case, there's no reason to think health care reform is in any worse shape than it was 24 hours ago. Indeed, by some measures, it might be slightly better off.

It's probably only natural to consider a high-profile event like this by weighing whether it was a "victory" for one side or the other, looking for "winners and losers." I suppose a reasonable case could be made for just about anyone to consider this a "win" -- the president won by making a powerful case for reform, and proving he knows infinitely more about the issue than his GOP rivals. Republicans won by maintaining message discipline and refusing to back down. Congressional Democrats won by having their predictions about GOP intransigence proven right.

But if we put aside that analysis, a more important truth emerges: it became painfully, overwhelmingly clear yesterday exactly what has to happen next.

E.J. Dionne's summary struck the right note.

The Republicans simply don't want to pass comprehensive health-care reform. That is the main lesson of today's health-care summit. It started, as Steve Stromberg pointed out earlier, with the Republicans wanting to talk more about process than about the content of the various health-care bills. It approached an end with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) delivering the core Republican message: "Scrap this bill."

As I argued in a post I put up before the summit began, this discussion would be successful if it simply revealed the stark philosophical differences between the parties. That's exactly what it's done.

No reasonable observer, regardless of ideology, could disagree. We learned, over the course of an entire day, that Democrats and Republicans have wildly different visions on every possible aspect of the debate. As if it weren't enough that the two sides disagree about how to solve various problems, the parties also fundamentally disagree about whether the problems exist and whether there's even any point in trying to solve them.

Jonathan Cohn noted that GOP proposals are clearly, woefully inadequate for addressing key public needs, but Republicans "seem to believe these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, at least in any manner they would find acceptable."

That's not even intended as criticism; it's simply a rephrasing of what GOP leaders said repeatedly. For Republicans, there's a dangerous intersection of practical and ideological concerns -- policymakers could fix dysfunctional aspects of the status quo, but that would mean spending money and imposing new government regulations. And since spending money and imposing new government regulations are bad, the dysfunctional aspects of the status quo must remain broken. QED.

If the goal of the summit was to reach a bipartisan compromise, the event obviously wasn't successful. If the goal was to change policymakers' minds, we can characterize yesterday as something of a letdown.

But if the goal was to air out the various approaches to health care reform, in a candid and transparent way, and realize once and for all that bipartisan compromise is quite literally impossible with an intractable minority that will settle for nothing but failure, I'd call the summit an illustrative success.

Sargent: Obama To GOP: It’s Over

Obama listened politely for six hours, with occasional flashes of temper, but in the end, the message was clear: It’s over. We’re moving forward without Republicans.

Whether Obama and Dems will succeed in passing reform on their own is anything but assured, to put it mildly. But there’s virtually no doubt anymore that they are going to try — starting as early as tomorrow.

That was the subtle but unmistakable message of Obama’s closing argument. After hours of hearing Republicans repeat again and again that only an incremental approach to reform is acceptable to them, Obama rejected that out of hand.

Here’s the key bit from Obama:

I’d like Republicans to do a little soul searching to find out if there are some things that you’d be willling to embrace that get to this core problem of 30 million people without health insurance, and dealing seriously with the pre-existing conditions issue. I don’t know frankly whether we can close that gap.

And if we can’t close that gap, then I suspect Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to have a lot of arguments about procedures in Congress about moving forward.

Unless I’m misreading that, Obama is saying that unless Republicans support comprehensive reform as Obama and Dems have defined it — dealing with the problem of 30 million uninsured and, by extension, seriously tackling the preexisting condition problem — they will almost certainly move forward with reconciliation.

What’s more, Obama also essentially accused Republicans of approaching today’s summit in bad faith — after they had sat there with him for six hours. He said that even after the public option was taken off the table, Republicans continued to use the same “government takeover” slur.

“Even after the public option wasn’t available, we still hear the same rhetoric,” Obama said. “We have a concept of an exchange which previously has been an idea that was embraced by Republicans before I embraced it. Somehow, suddenly it became less of a good idea.”

This accusation, combined with his assertion that Repubicans need to do some “soul-searching” on whether they wanted to join Dems in tackling reform as they have defined it, amount to an unmistakable vow to move foward without them.

Democratic aides are already interpreting Obama’s remarks along these lines. As one senior aide emailed: “We may make one last effort to try to get a Senate Republican.”

In terms of who “won” today’s debate, I tend to think Republicans actually accomplished much of what they needed to do today. It seems likely that some Congressional Dems will be just as skittish tomorrow as they were yesterday about moving forward alone via reconciliation. That means Dems still have an enormously difficult task ahead.

But Obama’s message to Dems and Republicans alike today was that barring some kind of major change on the GOP side, this is exactly what he and Dem leaders are about to attempt.

***********************************

Update: To clarify, this was a call to Dems, perhaps more than anyone else, that the time has come for them to stiffen their spines and move forward with reconciliation, which Republicans, and even some nonpartisan observers, have repeatedly characterized as akin to marching off a cliff.

Also: This summit was always about laying the groundwork for Dems to go forward alone, barring a major capitulation from Republicans. As noted here repeatedly, Dems will find themselves in exactly the same position tomorrow as they did yesterday: Confronting the enormously difficult task of passing ambitious reform on their own.

Update II: A GOP aide emails the Republican take: “They badly needed a win today and they didn’t get it. Not even close. Republicans were prepared. The President was pedantic and peeved.”

Ezra Klein: Obama doubles down on health-care reform

George W. Bush was known for his tendency to think in terms of black and white, good and evil, us and them. This was in opposition, supposedly, to the nuance favored by Democrats. But Barack Obama has his absolutist side, too: Some arguments are right, and some are wrong. Some are legitimate, and some are not.

And on health-care reform, Obama believes that his arguments are right. The basic structure of his plan is sound. The Republicans’ alternatives are inadequate. The problem is too serious to entertain thoughts of inaction. Comprehensive works better than incremental. Compromise only makes sense if the other side is willing to give something up in turn. Good policy will be electorally defensible even if it's not obviously popular.

The big story out of the summit is not that Republicans and Democrats extended their hands in friendship, but that the White House has dug its heels into the dirt. The Democrats are not taking reconciliation off the table, they are not paring back the bill, and they are not extricating themselves from the issue. They think they're right on this one, and they're going to try and pass this legislation.

Today was a boost for that effort. The Democrats got hours to make their case, at an event they planned, with one of their own controlling the discussion. For that reason, I imagine that this will be the last bipartisan summit we see for awhile. The format is simply too kind to the president, and he takes advantage of it ruthlessly. When the camera panned, you could almost see Republicans wondering why they'd accepted the invitation.

The people who came off best were those who knew the most about the issue. Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn on the Republican side. Dick Durbin and Chris Dodd for the Democrats. But above all of them, the president, who got to enter, adjudicate and conclude discussions at will -- not to mention say when others didn't know that much about the issue, or weren't offering comments in good faith. That willingness to put himself above Congress, combined with the structure of the event, allowed Obama to fully dominate the proceedings, and he used the opportunity to firmly assert ownership over the health-care bill. This is now his legislation.

But for all that he's made the bill his own, it still has to make a final pass through Congress. Importantly, Harry Reid and other Democrats were not only using the word reconciliation, but defending it from attack. Obama joined them in this effort. But the question is what the handful of ambivalent Democrats in the House and Senate thought. Obama spent the day trying to convince them that passing this bill was right: Not just politically, but intellectually and morally. That was his argument for why he's still here, lashing himself tighter to this legislation, and why they should stick by him.

Greg Sargent:

* Now that Dems are all but certain to move forward on health reform alone, the spin war shifts to a battle over the meaning and implications of using “reconciliation” to pass their bill. Republicans are already outworking Dems, pushing the message hard that it would constitute “ramming it through” the Senate against the wishes of the American people.

* The GOP is also casting reconciliation as an extension of the Senate backroom dealing that even Dems concede has badly tainted their reform proposals. Michael Steele, for instance, is calling it a “parliamentary trick.”

* So: Will Dems step up and get serious about redefinining it as majority rule? All we heard from Dems yesterday was the constant use of the “reconciliation” phrase, which presumably has little to no meaning for many people.

* But: Nancy Pelosi did try to make the case yesterday for majority rule, albeit obliquely:

“We can’t say to [the American people], at the end of the day, well, we had an idea, we had a vision, we had a majority, but the process did not allow us to make a change for your lives. We need to have the courage to get the job done, and I think we will. And I think today took us a step closer to passing health care.”

*Senator Ben Cardin edges towards some slightly more felicitious language, telling ABC’s Top Line that majority rule in the Senate is “pretty Democratic.” Pretty hard hitting!

Steve Pearlstein: At summit, Republicans prove they aren't putting America's health first

I'm not sure what else was accomplished at Thursday's Blair House summit, but surely one result is that we learned what Republican "leaders" really think about health care and health insurance.

The most important thing Republicans think is that if there are Americans who can't afford the insurance policies that private insurers are willing to offer, then that's their problem -- there's nothing the government or the rest of us should do about it.

"We just can't afford this," said Eric Cantor, the fresh-faced House minority whip from Virginia, while John Boehner, the House Republican leader, called it "a new entitlement program that will bankrupt our country." What they were referring to, of course, was the $125 billion a year that Obama and his Democratic allies propose to spend in subsidies so tens of millions of low-income households can afford to buy health insurance and handle the co-payments. But if paying for those subsidies means raising taxes on high-income households with lots of investment profits, or capping a tax break for people with extravagant health insurance, or charging a modest fee on medical device makers that refuse to moderate future price increases, then Republicans are agin' it.

That was their clear message Thursday. It was their message during all those years when their party controlled Congress and the White House and they did nothing and said nothing about the plight of the uninsured. And it is clear that they would continue to do nothing if, by some miracle, Democrats were to drop their plan or embark on a more modest approach. For Republicans, the uninsured remain invisible Americans, out of sight and out of mind.

Judging from Thursday's discussion, Republicans have much more sympathy for those who can afford to buy health insurance but are denied because of a preexisting medical condition. They oppose Democratic efforts to end this industry practice directly through regulation, preferring instead to refer those customers to special high-risk insurance pools where they would be guaranteed to find coverage.

In some versions of the high-risk pool, the cost of a policy would be so high that households with average incomes would have to set aside a third or even half of their income to pay for it. It takes a Republican to view this as a solution -- the equivalent of giving a starving man a coupon for $2 off his next dinner at Le Bernardin.

Or perhaps Republicans imagine high-risk pools that are subsidized sufficiently enough that the insurance policies are actually affordable. Unfortunately, the only way to finance such subsidies is through some sort of tax or fee, mostly one imposed on every insurance policy sold outside the high-risk pool. It's a fine idea but one that turns out to be the actuarial equivalent of what Democrats proposed in requiring that insurers charge pretty much the same premiums for everyone, with only modest variations based on age and health condition.

Another of the Republican "big ideas" was to make it possible for small businesses to collectively negotiate with insurance companies for better deals on health plans. But that's what Democrats have in mind with insurance exchanges that will do exactly that, not only for small businesses but also for the self-employed and workers at companies that don't offer health coverage. Although they never quite came out and said it, what apparently bothers Republicans about these insurance exchanges is that they would be overseen by governments -- the same state and federal governments that for decades have negotiated a wide selection of competitively priced plans for tens of millions of satisfied government workers, including members of Congress.

Then there's the issue of what minimal level of benefits a basic health insurance package should offer. Republicans, of course, used Thursday's forum to denounce the idea that such decisions should be made by Washington bureaucrats and politicians. But as my Washington Post colleague Ezra Klein points out, Republicans apparently would have no problem if those standards were to be set by bureaucrats and politicians in Nebraska, or North Dakota or whatever Republican state decided to offer itself up as the regulatory haven from which insurers could sell their policies nationwide.

To give them their due, Republicans did manage to raise some serious issues and make a few constructive suggestions in between their carefully choreographed talking points.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, among others, complained that the minimum standards set in the House and Senate bill weren't very minimal at all, but in fact exceeded the actuarial value of the average policy now sold in the individual and small-group markets -- and are certainly more generous than the high-deductible policies that have shown some success in restraining the annual growth in premiums. Why not, he asked, start with a more modest benefits package?

Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan raised legitimate concerns about the way malpractice suits and excessive damage awards can cause physicians to practice defensive medicine, needlessly driving up the cost of health care.

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma suggested using undercover agents to weed out the waste and fraud that he claimed were responsible for the fact that one of every three dollars in the Medicare and Medicaid programs is misspent.

And Sen. John McCain demanded that his former presidential rival renounce the special Medicaid funding formulas for Florida and Louisiana that were used to buy the support of those states' wavering senators.

What we didn't hear from Kyl, or Camp, or Coburn or McCain, however, was an offer to vote for a health reform plan if these problems were fixed and their ideas were incorporated. Without even the hint of such offers, there was little reason for a willing president and his unwilling allies to even consider serious compromise. Now the losers will be the American people, who could have surely benefited from such productive dealmaking.

/Snap

American health is not a business goal

Feb. 24: Rachel Maddow points out that health insurance companies don't care about the well-being of Americans and shouldn't be expected to because they are businesses so their goal is making money. Because American health care is a profit-making system, not a health care system, the incentives are wrong to provide Americans with adequate care.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

C&L:

President Obama to Eric Cantor: We could make food and drugs cheaper but we don't want to kill people

By John Amato Thursday Feb 25, 2010 12:30pm

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/eric-cantor

Eric Cantor wanks away about the 2000 page bill and complains that some people might have to change coverage, the usual government interference with big business stuff and whatnot. Obama called him out on his "props" mentality while trying to discuss health care and the proper role of government oversight. Democrats have done a horrible job on explaining government's role in our lives can be a great thing instead of the republican line that government is the problem.

Obama: We could set up a system where food was cheaper than it is right now if we just eliminated meat inspectors, and we eliminated any regulations on how food is distributed and how it's stored. I'll bet in terms of drug prices we would definitely reduce prescription drug prices if we didn't have a drug administration that makes sure that we test the drugs so that they don't kill us, but we don't do that.

We make some decisions to protect consumers in every aspect of our lives.

Under Republicans, all safety measures and regulations of any kind only stifle the free market capitalism that they cherish. The people harmed along the way are just collateral damage.