Recently in Health Care Category

"To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made...[H]owever, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts."

Also in the Brave New World dept. and by way of a friend, The Economist takes a gander at new "bioprinter" technology. "As for bigger body parts, Dr Forgacs thinks they may take many different forms, at least initially. A man-made biological substitute for a kidney, for instance, need not look like a real one or contain all its features in order to clean waste products from the bloodstream."

"The Chamber spent much of its money in 2009 on campaigns that worked -- it scared the Senate away from considering a version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation, and an argument can be made that its cutting ads on health care (with money taken from some insurance companies) helped to undercut support for the legislation." You think? In a shape-of-things-to-come moment even before Citizens United goes into effect, the Chamber of Commerce outspent both political parties in 2009.

"According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far more than the RNC and more than double the expenditures by the DNC." But corporate spending isn't a problem or anything.

"I know that we haven't agreed on every issue thus far, and there are surely times in the future when we will part ways. But I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground."

They do? I thought they expected change we can believe in. But worn-out nods to an elusive, ephemeral, and, given the current GOP, often undesirable bipartisanship does not constitute such. In any event, so concluded the President's State of the Union address last Thursday. This is old news at this point, so I'll keep it brief. Suffice to say, while it got better as it went along, I thought the speech was merely ok, and often troubling. Throughout the evening, the president's remarks had that excessively-poll-tested, small-bore feel that conjured up grim odors of 1995 and 1996. Throw on a flannel and fire up the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, y'all: One year into the Obama era, are we already back to V-chips and school uniforms?

Part of the president's problem is that the Senate is looking like the elephant's graveyard of progressive-minded legislation right now. The president called for an energy reform bill. The House went out on a limb to pass one last June. The president called for a financial reform bill. The House passed one in December. The president called for a new jobs bill. The House also passed one in December. All of these bills, and many, many others, are languishing in the Senate right now, as Sen. Reid and others try to figure out how to somehow get something -- anything! -- passed with a larger majority than Dubya ever enjoyed.

The Senate issue aside, there were other problems in the President's speech, including far too many nods and feints in the direction of ridiculous deficit peacocks like Judd Gregg and Evan Bayh. First off, at the risk of sounding like Dick Cheney, I tend to think that deficits are troubling, but, even in the best of times, they shouldn't really be the foremost driving concern of our government policy. If we run a deficit to invest in education now, we'll save money down the road and improve Americans' quality-of-life to boot. (Put in somewhat ugly fashion, it's invest in schools now or prisons later.)

And that being said, right now is emphatically not the best of times. We know exactly what happens when you cut spending too quickly after a virulent recession -- It was called the 1937 Roosevelt recession, and it would be flagrantly idiotic to repeat it. Just because the GOP doesn't seem to understand basic Keynesian economics doesn't mean we should follow them down the rabbit hole of flat-earth thinking, just so we can look bipartisan.

No, the problem with deficits isn't necessarily the running of a deficit. It's the running-up of massive deficits for patently stupid reasons -- like, say, prosecuting a war of choice in Iraq, or doling out excessive tax breaks to multi-millionaires. And that's why some of the President's nods in that direction were so irritating last Thursday. Calling for a spending freeze on discretionary spending, without touching the exorbitant "security-related" budget (cute euphemism, that), is kabuki theater at best. And at worst, you're balancing the books at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. (I tend to agree with Candidate Obama on this issue anyway.)

Similarly, this deficit commission which the president plans to foist on Congress by executive order after the Senate killed it, is, again, at best kabuki theater and at worst trouble. It's clear to everyone involved that the entire point of this commission is CYA: i.e, to create political cover for raids on entitlement spending, while once again ignoring the grotesquely swollen defense budget. (Altho', to be fair, Secretary Gates has at least tried to rein in growth in this sector.) In other words, this commission will basically just be a chance for deficit peacocks to pretend they're Serious People and "make tough decisions," while in fact the one really tough idea that actually needs to be tackled -- reining in defense spending -- will be completely avoided.

In any event, all this discussion of the deficit ignores the larger problem. Obviously, one of the president's biggest charges coming into office was to restore economic sanity after eight years of Dubyaite excess. That being said, people were not looking to President Obama for this sort of deficit tsk-tsking and small-bore, fiddling around the margins. You'd think we Dems would have learned this by now. But curling up into a fetal position and mouthing moderate GOP-lite bromides will not stop the Republicans from kicking us, ever.

We have a Democratic president, an 18-seat majority in the Senate, and a 79-seat majority in the House. In short, we Dems need to keep thinking big or we will pay dearly at the polls this November. Perhaps the dysfunction of the Senate is the central problem Obama faces right now, but his speech nonetheless suggests that we're getting dangerously close to Eisenhower Republican territory now, and not even in the good "the military-industrial complex is completely frakked" kinda way. Without vision, the people perish. So too will our party, if we keep up with this thin gruel, triangulation schtick. At the advice of the careerist DLC-types over the years, we have tried this path several times over -- Put simply, it does not work.

So, slow news evening, eh?

Well, first off, thanks, Massachusetts! To my many friends from the Bay State, I say this: Speaking as a son of South Carolina, I never, ever want to get the "you-hicks-are-keeping-us-back" routine from y'all again, thanks much.

So, yes, Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. And thus, in a truly bitter irony, a man who spent his life trying to achieve health care reform for all Americans has now been replaced by a guy sworn to kill the health care bill and armed with the 41st vote(?) that could potentially make it happen. (Yes, Virginia, it's true. In our system, 41 > 59.) Well, in Brown's defense, he has a nice truck.

Why did this happen? Well, everybody has a theory. Here's mine, which boils down to two reasons.

1. Martha Coakley. I didn't watch enough of the MA race to determine if she was a lousy candidate through-and-through, although I have my suspicions. Nonetheless, Ms. Coakley was undeniably a gaffe-prone standard-bearer. From calling Curt Schilling a Yankee to misspelling the name of the state in a political ad to, weirdly, insulting the very idea of glad-handing in public, Coakley was an out-and-out gaffe machine. Couple that with a lackadaisical campaign and the inexplicable decision to take an extended vacation in the heat of the race, and you have a recipe for disaster. There's a reason we've been telling the story of the Tortoise and the Hare for a couple thousand years now.

2. Change. In fending off Rahm Emanuel's charge that she's at fault for this fiasco, pollster Celinda Lake aptly summed up the main problem here: ""If Scott Brown wins tonight he'll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it." Put another way: All across the country, the current occupants of the White House tapped into a deep and strongly-felt yearning for a transformative presidency in 2008...and then spent pretty much the entirety of their first-year in office playing the same old tired in-the-Beltway reindeer games that made people ill in the first place. This is not change voters believed in, and it has made voters angry, or depressed, or both.

Equally demoralizing is the neverending spectacle of a stalled-out health care bill. If I'd hazard a guess, most voters aren't really delving into the ins and outs of this all-consuming debate, particularly by Month Eight or whatever it is. But they can see just from casually following along that the Democrats are really struggling to get this done, that the White House has been letting the bill get bogged down and eviscerated in the Senate -- first in August, and again in November/December -- and that, from the Big Pharma deal to the disappearing public option to all of the Lieberman/Stupak/Nelson/Snowe shenanigans on display, the usual Washington rules are in full effect right now. Once again, this is not change people can believe in. With each passing month that the bill has languished, we Dems have looked weaker and weaker. And if you continually force voters to choose between venal and incompetent, they'll tend to gravitate toward the former.

Now, the good news:

1. First, and this cannot be stressed enough, we have an 18-seat majority in the Senate. It's 59-41 people...most presidents can only dream of having that kind of majority, Dubya included. So there's really no good reason -- none, zip, zero -- that we shouldn't see more progressive accomplishments from this administration in the year to come. It just takes an act of will. I don't remember the Republicans getting all kerfuffled about operating with 51 votes. Nor did Hubert Humphrey and the Johnson Senate have any problem with blithely ignoring the Senate parliamentarian when it got in the way of legislation.

2. It's January of 2010, i.e. almost a full year before the "real" election day. In other words, this Brown victory is really just a shot across the bow. And if the administration course-corrects now, we may even end up gaining a year in time -- and several seats we might well have lost -- had this lazy centrist drift continued on until next November.

Of course, that's only good news if the administration and the Democratic Party draw the right lessons from yesterday's defeat. Suffice to say, this afternoon, it does not look good: Enabled, as usual, by the Serious People™ who comprise the broken-down wreck we once called beltway journalism, all the usual suspects are currently blaming Coakley's loss on "the Left," or more specifically the hippie-liberal cast of Obama's administration thus far. Uh, say what now?

It's hard to answer this ridiculous charge any better than did the estimable Glenn Greenwald this afternoon: "'In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by 'the Left,' let alone 'the furthest left elements" of the Party? As Ezra Klein says, the Left 'ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months'....The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials -- and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems -- has been captive 'to the Left' is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it."

Truer words and all that. If we want to stop seeing these sorts of Brownian upsets in the future, the answer is emphatically not to curl up within the usual GOP-lite protective camouflage and hope the flak dies down. People see through that malarkey immediately. (As Harry Truman is rumored to have said, "In an election between a Republican and a Republican, the Republican wins every time.") No, the answer is to move forward from this point with the courage of our convictions, and to start delivering to American families the real and fundamental change they were promised a year ago. It's just that simple, folks.

"When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware...Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it's unchangeable.

Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the 'saucer' George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might 'cool,' into a deep freeze and a dead weight."

In a worthwhile cover story for The Atlantic on the long history of American declension and jeremiads, James Fallows -- recently returned from China -- make his case for the biggest problem facing our nation right now."That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world's talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I've never heard in my time overseas is 'I wish we had a Senate like yours.'"

"It's one thing to recognize capitalism for the powerful economic tool it is and to acknowledge that, for better or for worse, we're stuck with it and, hey, thank God we have it. There's not a lot else that can produce mass wealth with the dexterity that capitalism can. But to mistake it for a social framework is an incredible intellectual corruption and it's one that the West has accepted as a given since 1980--since Reagan...People paid a much higher tax rate when Eisenhower was president, a much higher tax rate for the benefit of society, and all of us had more of a sense that we were included."

By way of DYFL, Vice Magazine publishes an extended interview with David Simon on The Wire Treme, writing, political economy, health care reform, and other important matters. "Of course it's socialism. These ignorant motherf**kers. What do they think group insurance is, other than socialism? Just the idea of buying group insurance! If socialism is a taint that you cannot abide by, then, goddamn it, you shouldn't be in any group insurance policy."

"I don't honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn't figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he's not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he's going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is 'liberalism,' and they don't like what they see. I don't, either. What's they're seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That's a recipe for going nowhere fast -- but getting there by November."

I already said my piece about this last week, and was going to let it drop for now. But this long essay by Drew Westen on the problems with Obama's leadership so far is right on the nose and well worth-reading. "[W]hat Democrats just can't seem to understand is that the politics of the lowest common denominator is always a losing politics. It sends a meta-message that you're weak -- nothing more, nothing less -- and that's the cross the Democrats have had to bear since they 'lost China' 60 years ago. And in fact, it is weak."

"Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional 'centrists.' Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry."

A day after Senate Democrats kill Byron Dorgan's non-importation amendment in order to preserve the administration's back-door deal with Big Pharma, the indispensable Glenn Greenwald takes the Obama administration to task for the final Senate product on health care, which, suffice to say, is looking pretty far afield from the House bill. (And all the while, the bought and paid for Joe Lieberman grins like the Cheshire Cat.)

I was going to wait until year-in-review post week to put this up, but now's as good a time as any: From civil liberties to this Senate health care fiasco, it's hard to think of any arena where this administration's first year hasn't been a tremendous disappointment. (Regarding the former: I didn't mention this here earlier, but the brazen audacity of this passage from the president's war-is-peace Nobel Prize speech made me blanch: "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor -- we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard." Uh, your Justice Department is not upholding them, remember? Is the president even aware of his own civil liberties record?)

Anyway, I keep being reminded of this line from my Obama endorsement of January 2008: "There's a possibility -- maybe even a strong possibility -- that he'll end up a Tommy Carcetti-like president: a well-meaning reformer outmatched and buffeted to and fro by the entrenched forces arrayed against him." Well, welcome to the Carcetti presidency, y'all. The only surprise so far for many of us is in how little he's actually even tried to enact meaningful reforms. But I guess once the president surrounded himself with the exact same GOP-lite people we'd spent months trying to defeat in the Democratic primary, the writing should have been on the wall. This will not be change we can believe in. A New Day is not dawning. And the president is not really with us -- We're going to have to do the heavy lifting for reform next year without him.

"The 'death panel' episode shows how the news media, after aiding and abetting falsehood, were unable to perform their traditional role of reporting the facts. By lavishing uncritical attention on the most exaggerated claims and extreme behavior, they unleashed something that the truth could not dispel." In the NYT, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) reviews the sad, sordid tale of Death Panel fear-mongering by the GOP this past summer.

In very related news, it seems the Republican National Committee's health insurance plan, contra all their rhetoric on Stupak, has not only covered abortion services for the past eighteen years -- it includes end-of-life counseling, a.k.a. the "Death Panels" of Sarah Palin's nightmares. These folks really have no shame.

"In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world's largest biotechnology companies."

As a speechwriter in the House, I'm sort of a rare bird...but perhaps I shouldn't be: An estimated 42 Members -- 20 Dems and 22 GOP -- get caught lifting industry talking points for the health care debate. Suggested TP's make the rounds all the time, of course, but they're usually meant to be guidelines, not taken word-for-word. Oops.

"[L]ives are what's at stake in this debate, and moments like this are why they sent us here -- to finally meet the challenges that Washington has put off for decades; to make their lives better and this nation stronger; to move America forward. That's what the House did last night when it brought us closer than we have ever been to comprehensive health insurance reform in America."

After many months of work and a long Saturday of debate (not to mention quite a few flagrant and ridiculous GOP lies along the way), the Houses passes the Affordable Health Care for America Act 220-215. (Joining 219 Dems was one solitary Republican, Anh Joseph Cao of William Jefferson's old seat, and he voted after the bill had already crossed the 218 threshold.) And, much thanks to the people who have fought for it all this time, H.R. 3962 passed the House with the public option bloodied but still intact.

Alas, the skeleton at the feast was a successful gambit by the heretofore unknown pro-lifer Rep. Bart Stupak to use the necessity of health care reform to fundamentally alter the status quo on abortion. (Best tweet of the day, btw: "'Stupak' sounds like a political action committee for morons.")

Stupak forces like to say they're just upholding existing law with this amendment, which already states that federal funds will not be used to pay for abortions. But, in fact, this amendment goes further -- it prohibits not only the public option but private insurance companies who operate in the exchange from offering abortion services to people who receive subsidies. Or, in other words, low-income women are going to be S.O.L. for starters, with mission creep ultimately denying more and more women reproductive choice and/or necessary medical procedures. (Stupak to women -- don't miscarry.)

On one hand, the good news is that Stupak's gambit is pretty much dead in the water in the Senate -- even the GOP isn't warming to it. (And, while maintaining the usual "above-the-fray approach"for now -- big surprise, I know -- Obama has telegraphed he's not a supporter of the idea.)

On the other, the Stupak situation shows one of the problems we now have as the majority party. Here we have a scion of the "Family" on C-Street playing shenanigans with critical Democratic legislation at the eleventh hour...and he was joined by 63 other Dems in getting the amendment passed. In fact, many of these look to be CYA votes by ostensible pro-choicers to shore up their moderate bona fides.

Even more troubling, 21 of the final 39 Democratic votes against health care reform voted for Stupak -- i.e., they voted to screw up a bill they had absolutely no intention of supporting in the end. (Conversely, twenty Dems in GOP-leaning districts did the right thing -- they voted against Stupak and for passage. They are listed here.) Simply put, these 21 are why primary challenges were invented.

Until congressional Democrats learn that bucking their left is just as -- if not more -- dangerous than prostrating themselves before the right, they're going to continue to play these reindeer games. (To be clear, in almost all cases, it's not like these holdouts' issues with the bill came from the left.) And until these often craven middle-of-the-roaders feel the wrath of the stick as well as the carrot, we are going to remain locked in this dismal feedback loop where important bills are in danger of being endlessly watered down into "moderate" mush. (See also: no Single Payer, no Medicare +5.) And that's just not change we can believe in.

Aside from the Recovery Act, the House hasn't held as important a vote all year. And, if certain Dems can't find a way to support critical Democratic legislation -- legislation tempered to meet their approval, in fact -- when the time comes, then don't expect the progressive base to have their back just because they have a D by their name. The time to suffer such fools has passed.

In any event, Round 1 completed. Round 2, the Senate...

"In short, it's no time to be despondent about the fate of the public insurance option. For sure, pegging rates to Medicare and obligating Medicare providers to accept these rates would be far preferable, and a public plan with negotiated rates may do less to keep the insurers honest and drive down costs. But it's still immensely valuable to give Americans an out -- another choice -- to let the insurers feel the heat of not being the only game in town. The fierce and continuing opposition of the insurance industry suggests that they think that a public option will prove a serious counterweight in an increasingly consolidated private market."

In TNR, Jacob Hacker and Diane Archer make the case anew for a public option, specifically the one that made it into H.R. 3962. If all goes well, the House bill -- recently endorsed by the AARP and the AMA -- will get a vote tomorrow. (Yep, it's a work day.) Update: Or later. Here's the hold-up.

"'We've spent countless hours over the last few days in consultation with senators who've shown a genuine desire to reform the health-care system,' Reid said. 'And I believe there's a strong consensus to move forward in this direction.'" Yer damn skippy. The Senate health care reform bill will include an opt-out public option, mainly because Senate progressives demanded it. "Reid and the leadership faced this basic math: There is only one Snowe and there are 60 members of the Democratic caucus. If just a few Democrats abandoned the bill, it would fall short even with Snowe's support."

Also worth reading, Nate Silver's concise ten-point summation of why a public option made the Senate bill. Note #1: "The tireless, and occasionally tiresome, advocacy on behalf of liberal bloggers and interest groups for the public option. Whatever you think of their tactics -- I haven't always agreed with them -- the sheer amount of focus and energy expended on their behalf has been very important, keeping the issue alive in the public debate." Keep up the good fight, y'all. This ain't over yet.

Update: To wit, Senator Lieberman is up to his old antics: "I told Senator Reid that...if the bill remains what it is now, I will not be able to support a cloture motion before final passage. Therefore I will try to stop the passage of the bill." Let's remember. Lieberman -- who played this same game back in 1994 -- was allowed to keep his chair last November mainly on the pretense that he wouldn't hold up important Democratic legislation. One would think this counts.

"The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration's expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush's cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama's cover-up." In an editorial applauded by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, the NYT calls out the Obama administration for their appalling and Dubyaesque record on civil liberties.

As Greenwald well notes: "All of this vividly underscores a vital point. There is simply no way that a person with even the most minimal levels of intellectual integrity could have objected to these actions during the Bush years yet defend them now that Obama is doing them, or even refrain from objecting just as loudly."

See also Sen. Feingold's recent and angry post on dKos this month (coupled with this statement on the Senate Judiciary committee) on the hamstringing of his attempts to revise the Patriot Act. Far too many ostensible civil libertarians in the Democratic Party have been rolling over for this administration since January -- The time for giving the benefit of the doubt has passed. On this -- and other crucial issues before us -- it's time to put this admin's feet to the fire and hold the president to his word.

"From the California Nurses Assoc., the largest nurses union in the country: 'Our legislators should respond to this bullying and stop coddling a useless industry whose sole function is to make enormous profits from the pain and suffering of patients while providing little in return.' From the AARP: The AHIP report is not 'worth the paper it's written on.'"

Wow, who saw this coming? The insurance industry turns against health care reform -- even the middling Senate Finance Committee version put forth by Max Baucus -- by publishing an obviously bogus report that prophesies of impending rate-increase doomsday should reform pass. Hmm, well. I'm just gonna throw this out here, but I think it can be reasonably assumed from the start that any industry making money hand-over-fist from a broken system would eventually turn against meaningful reform of that system. So, maybe next time we shouldn't give away the store to keep these swine at the negotiating table? Just a thought.

Anyway, the insurance industry isnt the only strange bedfellow (inadvertently) making the case for the public option of late. Both Bill O'Reilly and FOX's Shepard Smith have made impassioned pleas for the public option recently. And -- though they've been backpedaling like mad ever since -- both Bill Frist and Bob Dole have called out their party for desperate and heedless obstructionism in recent days. So, even though we've taken the long way to get here for no particularly good reason, I feel confident right now that the public option is very much back in play.

"The two primary groups -- Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks -- actually grew out of the 2003 breakup of an outfit called Citizens for a Sound Economy that had been integral in the fight against Hillarycare. Indeed, the same 'Tobacco Strategy' memo in which Philip Morris boasts of shaping McCaughey's writings also reveals that the tobacco giant paid Citizens for a Sound Economy to engineer a "grassroots" revolt against health care reform by staging demonstrations in the home districts of key congressmen."

In Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson follows the money to expose the Republicans' recent astro-turfing campaign against health care reform. In short, it's the "Brooks Brothers Riot" all over again. In fact, "Americans for Prosperity, which has taken the lead in the current fight against reform, is a front group for oil billionaires David and Charles Koch, co-owners of the world's largest private oil and gas conglomerate...Matt Schlapp, one of the original 'Brooks Brothers rioters'...now serves as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries, orchestrating the firm's political efforts in Washington."

"'Our health-care system is simply unsustainable,' the Montana Democrat said during a news conference today at which he appeared without any other lawmaker. 'It's time to act.'" Well, at least we agree on that much. After frittering away a month trying to appease obvious GOP irreconcilables, Sen. Max Baucus finally releases the Senate Finance health reform bill. [Here it is.] Key components include co-ops, a tax on "cadillac" insurance plans (which still doesn't make much sense to me), cheapo catastrophic insurance for people under 25, and, of course, no public option.

Suffice to say, it's not up to snuff, and many important folks aren't particularly happy. "On the House side, the Baucus proposal falls very, very short...Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) was disappointed by the Baucus bill, calling it 'health care reform in name only.'" Said Rep. Anthony Weiner of the failed attempts at bipartisanship: "The Senate and the president to some extent have been like a child looking for a unicorn. I don't see it." Nor is HCAN amused.

Update: Whatever you think of the Baucus bill, one thing is clear: Despite what they're saying now, the Republicans got what they wanted...just ask Kent Conrad.

"With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for many years, to kill reform this year, or even better, to shape it so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street investors far more than average Americans." Former head of corporate communications at CIGNA, Wendell Potter, the health insurance industry equivalent of Russell Crowe in The Insider, explains in Salon what his former employers are up to, and why our republic appears to be in a spot of trouble:

"During my 20 years in corporate communications and public affairs, I participated in the steady growth and influence of largely invisible persuasion -- and at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and investigative journalism seems to be vanishing. The number of PR people long ago surpassed the number of working journalists in this country...The clear winners as this shift occurs are big, rich corporations and other special interests. The losers are average Americans, most of whom are completely unaware how their thoughts and actions are being manipulated to achieve corporate goals on Capitol Hill."

"That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise."

As I'm sure you know, President Obama delivered his health care reform address to Congress last night. [Transcript.] My thoughts on it are mixed.

On one hand, speaking in terms of rhetoric, style, and delivery, this was an amazing speech, his best since the campaign days. While it's an open question how long its effects will linger, the address clearly and decisively helped move the reform ball forward. And the emotional closer, featuring Ted Kennedy's heartfelt final words to the President, was incredibly moving. In sum, it's the exemplary address we knew Obama had in him on this issue, and he brought it home perfectly.

But, all that being said, I can't shake the nagging feeling that [a] the policy being outlined last night didn't quite jibe with the wonderful speech, and, as all too common of late, [b] the president far too readily threw his left flank -- the very people who sweat blood and tears to get him elected -- under the bus.

To take the second part first, Obama early on indulged in an irritating and textbook case of Beltway false equivalence by setting himself up as the sensible middle between those cuh-rrrrazy single-payer types on the left and the free market fundies on the right. ("There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada's...") Uh, yes, and not so long ago, Mr. President, you were among them. I feel like I've said this several times recently, but painting the left as dingbats to shore up one's centrist bona fides is a pretty tired parlor trick at this point, and it never gets any less insulting.

As an aside, on the way into work yesterday, I -- and everyone else around the Metro -- was accosted by guys in Grim Reaper costumes and bullhorns, telling us all, basically, that violence will erupt and we will all die if this health care bill passes. Y'know, there's a term for telling people they'll be killed if a political event happens -- We call it terrorism. (As it turns out, there's a term for wearing a hood while telling people they'll be killed too.) Well, imagine my surprise to hear -- from the president I've vocally supported for two years now -- that me and my fellow clowns on the left are just as part of the health care problem as these jokers are on the right. I have to admit, it kinda tempers the enthusiasm.

And then there was the discussion of the public option. Yes, the President did make a case for the public option in last night's remarks: "[A]n additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange...It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better." In addition, the President correctly pointed out, "It's worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I've proposed tonight."

But what the President giveth, the President also taketh away. The public option was clearly brought up in the speech after the non-negotiable section. ("While there remain some significant details to be ironed out, I believe a broad consensus exists for the aspects of the plan I just outlined.")

Indeed, in case we missed the point, President Obama later made it clear: "To my progressive friends, I would remind you that...[t]he public option is only a means to [an] end - and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal."

He then went on to float two "compromise" ideas that, for all intent and purposes, are public option killers: (1) a trigger and (2) co-ops. ("For example, some have suggested that that the public option go into effect only in those markets where insurance companies are not providing affordable policies. Others propose a co-op or another non-profit entity to administer the plan.")

The trigger notion -- the idea that if the insurance companies don't fix the problem themselves, a public option would then be "triggered" into existence -- is in effect, as one progressive well put it, a threat made with an unloaded gun. It's kabuki theater, pure and simple, because everyone knows that Congress never pulls the trigger in question. (See also the cost of prescription drugs in Medicare Part D.) As Slate's Tim Noah recently ably pointed out, triggers are used all the time as "compromise" fodder, and what they really mean is we're going to pretend to have addressed the problem and let things go on as they have. And, really, how much worse would insurance companies have to fail before this trigger kicked in? We're talking about health care reform right now because the system is already broken.

As for co-ops, there's a good reason they are the compromise that the insurance industry tends to favor. Most likely, they'll be too small, weak, and scattered to bring real competition to the market.

So, granted, we don't have a final bill yet, and there are many strong advocates of a public option in the House who will continue to fight for it. But, if the public option is as expendable to the administration as it seemed last night, then we may have some problems.

To wit, if a health care reform bill passes that has an individual mandate (i.e. everyone has to buy insurance), limited subsidies (to keep costs down), and no public option, than what's basically happening is this: People are being forced to buy insurance they likely still can't afford from the very private companies that are making vast amounts of coin from the current, broken system. If this sounds like a huge boon for private insurance companies, it is. (One might even start to think they had a hand in writing the legislation.) Yes, a larger risk pool should make health insurance cheaper -- but without a public option keeping rates honest, what guarantee do we have that these savings would be passed on to the consumer?

Along those lines, President Obama also made the case last night for a tax on premium plans to help pay for reform. ("This reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their most expensive policies, which will encourage them to provide greater value for the money - an idea which has the support of Democratic and Republican experts.") But, again, without a robust public option holding the private industry's feet to the fire, what will stop said insurance companies from just passing these costs down the line, in the form of higher premiums across the board?

(I'll confess to being confused about this element of the plan anyway. The article I just linked on this premium plan tax says: "The hope is that employers would buy cheaper, less generous coverage for employees, thereby reducing the overuse of medical services." Uh...cheaper, less generous coverage for employees? That's a good thing? And I'm by no means an expert on these matters -- far from it -- but is "the overuse of medical services" really the main problem afflicting our health care system? It sounds a bit to me like "too many notes.")

All of which is to say that I really hope the substance of the final plan matches the beauty of last night's rhetoric. Now, I understand the counter-arguments: As Paul Begala recently reminded us, the Social Security Act of 1935 had serious problems too, and look how that turned out. The great is the enemy of the good. Politics is the art of the possible, etc. etc.

I don't disagree with any of that. But I also believe that leadership is the art of expanding the horizons of the possible. (Cue RFK: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.") We always knew that the President is a master of oratory, and that he would move us all with his eloquence when the time came. But, in setting their sights so low on this bill, the administration, in my view, have come close to squandering both the historical moment and the president's once-in-a-generation gift.

A historical puzzle lingers over the entire health care reform enterprise at the moment: How is it, with a Democratic House, a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, and a Democratic president, that the proposal for health care reform on the table basically remains to the right of Richard Nixon? (See also: The Family Assistance Plan.)

Well, the short answer, imho, is lack of meaningful campaign finance and lobbying restrictions. (A key problem that's about to get a whole lot worse.) But I would also argue in favor of another cause. For decades now, Democrats have tried to find that safe happy moderate middle, while Republicans -- flaks, representatives and presidents alike -- have willfully and consistently pushed that center to the right. The president's address, however magnificent and even moving at times, felt like another step in the same old vicious cycle. And at this crucial historical moment, I strongly believe it would be a better demonstration of "our American character" if we Dems -- and this administration -- showed the courage of our convictions in words and deed.

"'We have been saying all along that the most important part of this debate is not the public option, but rather ensuring choice and competition,' an aide said. 'There are lots of different ways to get there.'" Granted it's in Politico, which always needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but Team Obama is apparently floating another no-public-option trial balloon. "On health care, Obama's willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party's liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done."

Hmmm. "Getting tough" with the Left (while having Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress) to impress people on the Right who can't stand you and want you to fail.That doesn't sound like change we can believe in either, and it's going to turn off the people who got this president elected in droves. I fear the Third Way/DLC careerist cadre in and around the administration are blowing a historic opportunity here.

Update: "'It's so important to get a deal,' a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about strategy. 'He will do almost anything it takes to get one.'" Sigh...I know I'm not a master tactician or anything, but, as with dropping single-payer right away, I would think telegraphing "we're really really desperate" before coming to the table is not a very good negotiating strategy.

"The narrative is simple: Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people."

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff discusses how the administration should best promote health reform (and the American Plan, nee "public option"), and offers a choice critique of "policy speak" -- the old progressive standby of "enlightening public opinion" -- that would make Walter Lippmann very happy: "To many liberals, Policy Speak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest. But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind Policy Speak is just false. "

Lakoff aside, the good folks at Media Matters have compiled a useful list of "Myths and Falsehoods about Health Care Reform," and how best to refute them. And, next time somebody starts ranting at you about how Big Guv'mint never does anything right, send 'em here with a smile.

"'I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,' said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 'We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.'" In one of the dumbest unsourced administration quotes since "the reality-based community," an unnamed White House official indulges his/her pique with progressives by marginalizing the public option.

Uh, what? First off, this is your plan, White House folks, and not really the type of thing you want to characterize as "left of the left." Second, the "left of the left", as most people know, would actually prefer a single-payer system, and in fact find the public option to be pretty weak tea -- the type of compromise between comprehensive reform and the status quo that we should have ended up with at the close of negotiations, not used as the opening salvo of our health care strategy. Third, the quote demonstrates a troubling arrogance toward, and an idiotic contempt for, both the administration's natural allies in this fight and the very people who put them in office. Spitting in the eye of progressives in order to seem moderate to folks who will never, ever agree with you is not only counter-productive, but pointless and insulting.

Bad messaging, bad politics...This is an amateur move, and no mistake. One hopes Mr./Mrs. Anon. at the very least caught an earful about it this morning. And that there are some people in and around the inner circle who think a little more highly of this same public option that the administration has pushing for months. And that the archetypal DLC/Third Way contempt for progressives evinced in the quote is nipped in the bud, like, yesterday. These type of "let's scoff at the lefty fringe" insults, like the self-aggrandizing "centrist" careerists who make them, are not part of change we can believe in. In fact, they sound entirely too much like more of the same.

TLDR version: Trying to marginalize the lefties who are behind you in order to appease the righties who hate you is not a winning strategy, in health care or anything else. Nor is it at all what we voted for. Get it together.

"So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are 'either' the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube?...They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests."

In the WP, historian Rick Perlstein puts the latest incarnation of the stark raving right-wing in historical perspective. The difference this time? The media is completely failing at its job. "The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the 'death panel' canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of 'complaints over the provision.' Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites."

The woeful state of American political journalism, in a nutshell (and in two parts):

1. CNN and WP media poobah Howard Kurtz, on Twitter today: "Booking hell: All pundits are in the Hamptons or Vineyard. Intelligent discourse apparently ceasing."

2. CNBC to Teabaggers today: Can you guys please stage us a really violent rally? "We have a media request for an event this week that will have lots of energy and lots of anger. This is for CNBC."

So. Broken.

"The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems."

You know the GOP has gone too far when they start ticking off the business columnists: The WP's Steve Pearlstein reads Republicans the riot act for their shameless lying on health care reform. (See also USA Today's attempt to set the record straight this morning, and Politifact's evisceration of Sarah Palin's bizarre "death panel" claim.)

I'm not going to get into all the current Democratic in-fighting over health insurance reform here (although I will say that I'm none too happy about this Billy Tauzin deal.) But, notwithstanding the Republicans' recent penchant for astroturf (see also the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot and last April's teabaggery), we already watched them road-test this reprehensible strategy -- riling up scared, angry, and occasionally nutty people to alarm with hatred and patent untruths -- last October. This is just more of the same, and I have every expectation it will backfire massively as it did then -- hopefully before any serious violence breaks out.

"As a society, we trust doctors to be more concerned with the pulse of their patients than the pulse of commerce. Yet the American Medical Association is using that trust to try to block a robust public insurance option as part of health reform. In fact the A.M.A. now represents only 19 percent of practicing physicians...Its membership has declined in part because of its embarrassing historical record: the A.M.A. supported segregation, opposed President Harry Truman's plans for national health insurance, backed tobacco, denounced Medicare and opposed President Bill Clinton's health reform plan."

And don't forget Sheppard-Towner: In his column this week, Nicholas Kristof take aim at the powerful American Medical Association. "'They've always been on the wrong side of things,' Dr. Scheiner told me, speaking of the A.M.A. 'They may be protecting their interests, but they're not protecting the interests of the American public.'"

"When 22 senators started working over the first health care overhaul bill on June 17, the news cameras were pointed at them -- except for NPR's photographer, who turned his lens on the lobbyists. Whatever bill emerges from Congress will affect one-sixth of the economy, and stakeholders have mobilized. We've begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going." Clever, clever: Also on the health care front, an NPR photographer initiates a game of find-the-health-care-lobbyist. "Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is."

Here's one to grow on: If you're looking to represent the little people by taking on a cabinet position in our nation's government, please deign to pay the taxes you owe on your chauffeurs, nannies, sinecures, and assorted other luxuries. Thanks much.

Also, for what it's worth, I guess it's possible that Tom Daschle was really God's Gift to Health Care Reform, as he was recently made out to be when his nomination tanked. (His ideas seem solid, but, his book aside, we didn't see that much of that side of him when he was Harry Reid 1.0 for years and years.) But I think it's just as likely that his strong lobbyist ties would've made him ineffectual in the post, and the Daschle-friendly administration -- a lot of candidate Obama's core people were Daschle hand-me-downs -- wouldn't ever have been able to cut him loose. So, all the recent teeth-gnashing aside, this might very well have been a blessing in disguise.

"Numbers posted by the National Center for Health Statistics show that more than 34 percent of Americans are obese, compared to 32.7 percent who are overweight...In the 1988-1994 surveys, 33 percent of Americans were overweight, 22.9 percent were obese and 2.9 percent were morbidly obese. The numbers have edged up steadily since." In dire news on the national health front, we Americans are fatter than ever. Perhaps it's time to dole out Wii Fits as part of the stimulus package? The health care savings might actually make it worthwhile.

"'Some may ask how at this moment of economic challenge we can afford to invest in reforming our healthcare system...I ask, how can we afford not to?" At the announcement of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle as HHS Secretary yesterday, President-elect Obama makes clear health care reform is still very much on the table despite the economic downturn, and is working with Congress to bolster health care provisions in the current stimulus package. "'It's hard to overstate the urgency of this work...It's not something that we can sort of put off because we're in an emergency,' he said. 'This is part of the emergency.'"

Among others, Senate health czar of sorts Ted Kennedy has applauded the Daschle pick. (Apparently, some of Daschle's positions on health care reform are causing consternation in some corners. They sound alright by me.) "Exceptional challenges call for exceptional leaders, and Tom is an ideal choice to meet the urgent challenge of health reform. His integrity, intelligence, experience and commitment to the American people have won him friends and admirers on both sides of the aisle."

"Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out." This was buried in a story over a month ago, but now it gets its own lede: While endlessly touting her insurance mandate as the be-all, end-all of health care reform, Sen. Clinton's campaign hasn't been paying the insurance bills. (This is in addition to screwing over local businesses and charities whenever possible, because apparently struggling mom-and-pop operations don't need to be paid as quickly as corporate behemoths.)

The Senate bans waterboarding by a vote of 51-45 and, surprisingly enough, straight-talker John McCain votes against the bill. "McCain sided with the Bush administration yesterday on the waterboarding ban passed by the Senate, saying in a statement that the measure goes too far by applying military standards to intelligence agencies. He also said current laws already forbid waterboarding, and he urged the administration to declare it illegal." God forbid we take too strong a stance against torture, eh, Senator? For shame.

"'There’s a growing sense, a growing probability, that the next administration could be Democratic,' said Craig L. Fuller, executive vice president of Apco Worldwide, a lobbying and public relations firm, who was a White House official in the Reagan administration. 'Corporate executives, trade associations and lobbying firms have begun to recalibrate their strategies.'" As a Democratic presidency in 2008 looks increasingly likely, business lobbyists scramble for deals under Dubya. "Few industries have more cause for concern than drug companies, which have been a favorite target of Democrats. Republicans run the Washington offices of most major drug companies, and a former Republican House member, Billy Tauzin, is president of their trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America." Well, for them to be really concerned, we Dems have to show more backbone in the face of lobbyists than we have thus far in this Congress. And, as Simon Lazarus recently pointed out anew in The Prospect, no matter who wins in 2008, corporate lobbyists will still have the Roberts Court to back their play for some time to come.

"As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government's failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests -- corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so on -- that moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone's situation had become virtually impossible." Slate and Rutger University's David Greenberg summarizes the history of health care reform, and of the epithet "socialized medicine." "[T]he idea of government-run health care dates to the Progressive Era. Originally called 'compulsory health insurance,' it enjoyed favor in the 1910s among many quarters, including the American Medical Association...But as the debate heated up, doctors began to worry that it would hurt their incomes, and they banded with business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose reform. American entry into World War I tabled consideration of the issue, and the postwar Red Scare, Starr notes, 'buried it in an avalanche of anticommunist rhetoric.'"

Some good news on the domestic policy front: Pushed forward by a veto-proof majority in Congress, Bush signs a Democratic Pell Grant increase into law. "The increase in financial aid is designed to come from cuts in subsidies that the government makes to banks, totaling roughly $20 billion...Bush at one point threatened to veto the bill on grounds that it included hidden costs and was an expensive expansion of federal programs." In addition, an expansion of the State Child Health Insurance Program is now on Dubya's desk after passing the Senate 69-30 and House 265-159, and also looks to become law despite the White House's original opposition. "Bush and GOP leaders said the measure would push children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed health care, while creating an 'entitlement' whose costs ultimately would outstrip the money raised by the bill's 61-cent increase in the federal tobacco tax. But Republican opposition is increasingly isolated."

And if passage of affordable college education and child health care bills by Dubya -- however reluctantly -- isn't through the looking glass enough for ya, check this out: "The world must cut emissions or sacrifice the planet, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State, told a meeting of governments on Thursday, in the most strongly worded statement on global warming yet made by the US administration....Her words reflected how far US rhetoric on climate change has moved in the past six months."

Update: Ah, there's the Dubya we know and...know. Despite its bipartisan backing, Bush vetoes the child health insurance bill, arguing that it was an attempt to "federalize" medicine. "'I think that this is probably the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country. It is incomprehensible. It is intolerable. It's unacceptable,' said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who pleaded with Republicans to help overturn the veto."

"'Instead of having all of us pay our fair share, we've got over $1 trillion worth of loopholes in the corporate tax code,' he said. 'This isn't the invisible hand of the market at work. It's the successful work of special interests." In a speech at Washington's Tax Policy Center, Barack Obama unveils his tax plan. "The plan means billions in breaks by: nixing income taxes for the 7 million senior citizens making less than $50,000 a year, establishing a universal credit for the 10 million homeowners who make less than $50,000 annually and do not itemize their deductions, and providing 150 million Americans with tax cuts of up to $1,000...Obama proposes funding the tax cuts by closing corporate loopholes, cracking down on international tax havens and increasing the dividend-and-capital-gains tax for the wealthy, he said."

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton unveils her new health care plan. "A Clinton adviser compares the plan's 'individual mandate' -- which requires everyone to have health insurance -- to current rules in most states that require all drivers to purchase auto insurance...Clinton is the third of the front-running Democratic White House hopefuls to formally unveil her plan, following Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and former Sen. John Edwards." Said Edwards of the Clinton plan: "I'm glad that, today, the architect of the 1993 plan has another care proposal -- and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I'm flattered...The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.' I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests -- you can never join 'em, you just have to beat 'em."

"Snow has also been a chief spokesman for the Bush administration's domestic agenda, forced to argue continually that the typical American is doing just fine, and bravely pushing the unpopular elements of Bush's vaunted 'ownership society'...And yet Snow's own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society -- and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary." Slate's Daniel Gross explains how the unfortunate plight of Tony Snow exemplifies the problems with Dubyanomics.

"'We're sitting on the doorstep of a definitional moment,' said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus." Faced with their own low poll numbers, the Democratic Congress readies a flurry of late-term legislation involving homeland security (implementing most of the 9/11 commission recommendations), ethics (gift bans and increased disclosure requirements), and child health care (expanding insurance coverage for children of the working poor.) "Republican leaders plan to stand in the way...But against such philosophical stands, there is a stark political problem: How many Republicans are really going to oppose legislation expanding insurance coverage for children, tightening ethics rules and bolstering homeland security?" More than one might think, I'd wager.

As y'all probably know by now, Dubya -- so eager to exploit and enlargen executive power in other arenas -- vetoed his first bill in five years yesterday, when he decided to capitulate to the sad remnants of his base, set back medical science a few more years, and nip stem cell research in the bud once again. While Dubya said the bill would have forced "American taxpayers...for the first time in our history...to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos," he made no argument for criminalizing fertility clinics, where similar embryos get tossed away unused every day. "'If that's murder, how come the president allows that to continue?' asked Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). 'Where is his outrage?' Harkin called the veto 'a shameful display of cruelty, hypocrisy and ignorance.'"

"If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well." Perhaps overplaying the Hartzian "America is liberal and liberal only" card just a bit, Boston College professor Alan Wolfe argues convincingly why conservatives can't govern, and explains how, despite the emerging right-wing consensus to the contrary, Dubya's many failures and Boss DeLay's corruption aren't a betrayal of conservative thinking, but a culmination of it. (By way of Blivet.)

"This is certainly not the first time that politics has trumped science at the FDA. Another recent example: the agency's decision to block over-the-counter availability for emergency contraceptives in the face of overwhelming evidence that the treatment is safe and effective...From my standpoint as a doctor, the question is this: What do you do when federal agencies become so politicized that their recommendations can't necessarily be trusted?" In Slate, pediatrician Sydney Spiesel begins to doubt the FDA's credibility these days, particularly after their recent and apparently blatantly political decision against medicinal marijuana. "Marijuana as a medicine -- whatever its risk and benefits are eventually determined to be -- may turn out to be much less important than the question of whether we can count on agencies like the FDA to be honest in their dealings."

"'We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance,' Romney said in an interview. 'And cars are a lot less expensive than people.'" In a new tack on ameliorating the problem of the uninsured, Massachusetts passes a law mandating that all citizens buy health insurance. "As simple as the idea sounds -- buy insurance or else -- the proposal is complex and, in some cases, still unfinished. For instance, it leaves the task of determining exactly how much some low-income residents will pay for their new, more affordable policies to a new agency that would serve as a liaison between the government, policyholders and private insurance companies."

"Shoplifters of the World, unite and take over"...After resigning under strange circumstances last month, former Dubya administration domestic advisor Claude Allen is arrested and charged with felony theft -- i.e., shoplifting, with approximately 25 counts involving $5000 worth of merchandise.(His particular con -- Refund Fraud.) When I first heard the story, I felt kinda bad for Allen -- I mean, couldn't he get on board with Safavian, Federici, and the other Dubya administration crooks and at least make some Casino Jack-levels of swag?

Then I read a little more about him: A former aide to notorious race-baiter and national embarrassment Jesse Helms (No, not yet), Allen accused Helms rival Jim Hunt in 1984 of connections to "'queers,' 'radical feminists,' socialists, and unions." (In Senate testimony in 2003, he claimed -- under oath -- that by "queers" he meant "odd" people.) Moreover, fiercely pro-life and anti-contraceptive, Allen has been one of the administraton's foremost advocates of promoting abstinence programs as the sole way to combat the spread of AIDS and other STDS. ("In February [of 2003] a hundred CDC researchers on sexually transmitted diseases were summoned to Washington by HHS deputy secretary Claude Allen for a daylong affair consisting entirely of speakers extolling abstinence until marriage. There were no panels or workshops, just endless testimonials, including one by a young woman calling herself 'a born-again virgin.'") Well, while we're preaching, Mr. Allen, can I get a witness for the Eighth Commandment? Update: Dubya reacts.

"Spawned by a White House under the influence of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, rubber-stamped in a Congress bought by lobbyists for those interests, and imposed on the nation with prevarication, duplicity and outright bribery, the drug bill represents everything Americans hate about the federal government today." Iraq, Abramoff, Plamegate, and the NSA wiretaps aside, Joe Conason sees the seeds of GOP doom in their Medicare fiasco, particularly since it's become clear that they've been lowballing the price tag to the tune of $600 billion.

Has Operation Offset been enacted? "Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs." There's today's GOP in a nutshell for you. When the going gets tough, their first instinct is to keep the Dubya tax breaks for millionaires and crack down instead on food stamps and Medicaid. Really, who put these assholes in charge of the public purse? You couldn't find a more detestable gang of bandits and thugs if you tried.