Pass The Damn Bill, Part 5

Harry Reid is calling the Republican bluff.

Democrats will finish their health reform efforts within the next two months by using a majority-vote maneuver in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said.

Reid said that congressional Democrats would likely opt for a procedural tactic in the Senate allowing the upper chamber to make final changes to its healthcare bill with only a simple majority of senators, instead of the 60 it takes to normally end a filibuster.

"I've had many conversations this week with the president, his chief of staff, and Speaker Pelosi," Reid said during an appearance Friday evening on "Face to Face with Jon Ralston" in Nevada. "And we're really trying to move forward on this."

The majority leader said that while Democrats have a number of options, they would likely use the budget reconciliation process to pass a series of fixes to the first healthcare bill passed by the Senate in November. These changes are needed to secure votes for passage of that original Senate bill in the House.

"We'll do a relatively small bill to take care of what we've already done," Reid said, affirming that Democrats would use the reconciliation process. "We're going to have that done in the next 60 days."

The move would allow Democrats to essentially go it alone on health reform, especially after losing their filibuter-proof majority in the Senate after Sen. Scott Brown's (R) special election victory in Massachusetts.

Uh-oh.  The GOP plan has backfired.  They thought the Dems were done after Scott Brown.  They thought the Village was going to buy the 41 is more than 59 play and that Obama was going to throw in the towel.

And then Wellpoint's rate hike happened.  Suddenly, the Dems had their opening.  And now they are going for the brass ring.  Watch the Sunday shows be full of Republicans saying "Well, we're going to boycott the health care summit" and Obama can respond with "When the insurance companies want to raise rates by 20%, 30%, almost 40% on the American people in a recession, the GOP plan is to walk away from the table and leave you and your family at the mercy of the insurance companies."

This is starting to go even better than I could hope.

General Breitbart Declares War

Andrew Breitbart has seen THE FUTURE OF MEDIA, as Mike Madden of Salon discovers.

The patron of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles and their ACORN pimp-and-prostitute "scandal" video, Andrew Breitbart, spoke to CPAC Saturday morning. After his rambling talk about the evils of the media -- and how conservatives can fight back -- I tried to ask Breitbart a few questions. But as soon as I introduced myself, it was obvious he wasn't really in the mood to chat:

(For the record, the Max Blumenthal story he was asking about had already been corrected.)

Silly the Lamestream Media Reporter Person, THE FUTURE OF MEDIA needs not your "facts" and "logic."

But he didn't save all his rancor for Salon (talking to the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel, he sent a pleasant message to Center for American Progress boss John Podesta). For that matter, his speech had been pretty surly, too. "Look, mainstream media, the gig is up," he told the CPAC crowd to cheers. "We figured you out. You're not on our team -- you're not on the American team. You're on the progressive team. We tried to play nice with you, and nice is over." Evidently so.

You see, THE FUTURE OF MEDIA is where only crap on the internet is forcefed to everyone without fact checking.  Lamestream Media Reporter People like Rachel Maddow are delegated to janitorial duties!

Breitbart claims that Maddow drastically distorted the arrest of one of ACORN filmmakers last month, while he was attempting to produce an expose on Sen. Mary Landrieu (D.-La.).

According to Politico, "asked what he would say if he ran into Maddow, an unabashedly liberal MSNBC host who made a surprise appearance at CPAC on Thursday, Breitbart said, 'I hope to see you and give you a lovely hug because you validated my hopes and aspirations and my business model because you're so bad at what you do."

Breitbart accuses Maddow of being involved with "part of a propaganda campaign to attack the last president .. and make him out to be the worst human being that ever walked the face of the earth. And, at the same time, you promoted Barack Obama as the greatest thing that ever walked the earth."

"Plus," as reported by Politico, "he ripped Maddow and other liberal commentators for their treatment of the populist conservative tea party movement and one of its champions, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin."

And they will destroyed!  For in THE FUTURE OF MEDIA, all news is what Breitbart says it is!  People do not want "facts" or "truth" or "integrity", they want Breitbart!

Also, all restaurants are Taco Bell!   It's THE FUTURE!

And the lord of that future is Andrew Breitbart!

The Mind Of An American Terrorist

Over at Slate, author Dave Cullen takes a look at the mind of Joe Stack through his manifesto and comes up with a number of warning signs that identified stack for what he was:  a mass murderer in an all-too-familiar style of using domestic terrorism to make a political point.

Joseph Stack spent months on his manifesto. He was adamant about convincing us—or himself—why flying his plane into an IRS building was an act of charity.

The five-page rant the software engineer wrote before his performance murder is illogical, hysterical, hyperbolic, and deeply dishonest. Stack's convoluted arguments explain nothing, and the thumbnail sketch of his impoverished life is absurd. And that's exactly why it's so revealing. The software engineer tried to con us with a deceptive self-portrait, but the real Joseph Stack reveals himself in the way he concocts it.

I've spent 11 years studying routes to mass murder, in particular for a book on the Columbine school shootings, and it's startling how similar all the manifestos sound. Many of Stack's passages were practically lifted right out of the diatribes of Eric Harris, the Columbine mastermind. Yet while the notes are the same, the tune is not. Harris was a textbook psychopath, and Stack doesn't read that way at all. Stack has more empathy, less callousness, and none of the vicious desire to torment others for enjoyment. There are echoes of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui here, but Stack forms coherent thoughts and speaks rationally. He gives no indication of insanity. Instead, Stack shares Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh's disgust with intrusive government and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's angry frustration at "the system." 

Matt Osborne disagrees with me that you can try to separate the political motivations from the murder here.  Indeed, the political motivation is what makes a terrorist a terrorist, in fact it was the political motivation that was at the core of his deadly spree to burn down his home, kill his family, and then smash a plane into an IRS building.

He was an Ayn Randie who tried to get away with a tax dodge and got caught. Then he tried dropping off the radar (this patriot was not registered to vote) with a move to Texas, consulted attorneys, and then -- upon getting the final bill from the IRS -- decided that rather than sell his $30,000 PRIVATE PLANE and (quit paying hangar fees) he would set his house on fire WITH HIS FAMILY IN IT and NOT TELL ANYONE before driving to the airport to BUY GAS for his PRIVATE PLANE and fly it into a GOVERNMENT BUILDING to kill TOTAL STRANGERS.

Matt is right on that account.  This man was a domestic terrorist.  He killed for political motives.  My point is not that it excuses his horrible actions, but that the argument over whether he's a left-wing or right-wing terrorist misses the very valid point that he was a terrorist and that America continues to have a domestic terrorist problem.

But Matt's larger point is that the right-wing is quick to justify that this wasn't terrorism but murder, or else they are even quicker to dismiss this as proof that Stack was a liberal and all terrorists are liberals, equating Stack's action to that of Dr. Amy Bishop's alleged shooting murders last week.

And that's a problem still.

Defending Rahmbo's Honor

Dana Milbank of the WaPo makes the argument that Obama needs Rahmbo because he's the only smart person Obama has working for him, and that apparently includes Obama himself.

No really.  That's the argument.

Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.

Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

Obama's problem is that his other confidants -- particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod -- are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn't dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel's counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

Obama's greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.

The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.

Had it gone Emanuel's way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel's strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess. 

If I'm reading this correctly, Milbank is saying "So if Obama had followed Rahm's advice and basically thrown the Dirty F'ckin Hippies under the bus immediately and then had gone straight to the Republicans and asked them how they wanted him to govern, we'd be having a great time right now."

First, what Milbank is really saying is "If Obama had only followed my advice..."  Let's get that out of the way right now.

Second, Milbank believes that Rahmbo should be in charge.  He doesn't have a high opinion of any of Obama's other inner circle members, and he has an even lower opinion of the President for listening to them, and not Rahm (and by extension, Dana Milbank.)

Third, even after the Clinton years, we still have Villagers who believe that Democratic Presidents will be rewarded by doing what the GOP tells them they should be doing.  Clinton wasn't impeached or anything despite tacking to the right after 1994 enough to win re-election in 1996.  The GOP isn't going to make that mistake again.  And by "mistake" I mean "allow a Democratic President to be re-elected".

Fourth, a "smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support" is a laughable concept that does not exist.  No popular health care reform bill that a Democratic President and Congress could have taken credit for would ever be embraced by a Republican.  Period.

Is Milbank really this dense?  Has he been paying any attention at all to the CPAC conference?  Do you think the Tea Party movement would have gone away with a GOP health care bill?  Do you think they wouldn't be screaming "Socialist" and demanding the long-form birth certificate and posting pictures of Obama as a witch doctor on the internet?

Denial is an interesting mechanism.  But in the end, it always comes down to the Villagers complaining that Democrats aren't Republican enough.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

After noting that Steven Pearlstein of the WaPo went after the Kroog yesterday with this:

I’m not a something for nothing free lunch Keynesian—you must be thinking of Prof. Krugman… 

Doug at Balloon Juice asks,

Pearlstein goes on to slam the reader who asked the question, comparing him to Joe McCarthy, but why the strange gratuitous slam on Krugman.

That one's easy.  "Something-for-nothing free-lunch Keynesian" is econ nerdspeak for "You're a Dity F'ckin' Hippie Socialist."

The Kroog has basically become the king of "Socialist" economists (along with Joseph Stiglitz.)  Even the Village economics reporters are now spewing Tea Party idiocy as talking points.

Coming Out Swinging

Obama has let other folks do the talking on health care reform over the last couple of weeks, mainly the Dems in the Senate and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  Today however he used his weekly address to go straight after the health insurance companies to make the case for health care reform.

“The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping,” Obama said in his weekly radio address. “Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent.”

Since news of Anthem Blue Cross’ planed premium increases first broke, Democrats in both the House and the Senate have cited little else in arguing their case for refusing to let healthcare reform slip through their fingers.

But with the economy and debate over a jobs bill dominating the majority of their attention so far this year, Democrats had shown very little progress in merging two competing bills, or even formulating a cohesive strategy for sending a single bill to the president’s desk.

That seemed to change Friday, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office left the door open to using a parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation to pass a bill out of the Senate with only 51 votes.

And just days ahead of Obama’s much-anticipated bipartisan, televised healthcare forum, the president himself on Friday – speaking at a town-hall style meeting in Las Vegas – began to reemphasize the importance of finishing the task of signing a healthcare reform bill into law.

He reiterated that argument during his Saturday address.

“The bottom line is that the status quo is good for the insurance industry and bad for America,” Obama said. “And as bad as things are today, they’ll only get worse if we fail to act. We’ll see more and more Americans go without the coverage they need. We’ll see exploding premiums and out-of-pocket costs burn through more and more family budgets.”

The GOP is scared right now.  They thought they had cornered the market on populist anger and directed it all at the Dems in preparation for a massive electoral landslide in November.  They thought they had sealed the deal with the death of health care reform after Scott Brown's election.

But something funny happened on the way to measuring the drapes in Pelosi's office.  Wellpoint singlehandedly saved health care reform and revived the public option with one of the most boneheaded moves in corporate history.  The GOP argument against health care reform was "the government is so horrific that doing nothing is better than any health care reform bill."

That GOP "doing nothing" plan now involves people waiting for their own insurer to hike rates by 39%.  If insurance companies can arbitrarily do that...and they basically can...then there's a serious problem here.  Wellpoint clearly thought the battle was over and proceeded to propose to jack up rates in a number of states, not just California along with their fellow insurance companies.

Wellpoint's disastrous fumble did what the Democrats had been largely unable to do since the days of the Town Hall Blitz scaring the crap out of voters in the summer:  they are now able to take the high road on the populist argument for health care reform.

"If we don't get a health care bill passed and signed into law, the insurance companies will continue to raise your rates until you can't afford insurance anymore."

That's a simple and powerful argument.  It's the argument Obama should have been making from day one but instead he went for the complex and confusing angle on how much the plan would cost.  That allowed the GOP to all but bury it.

Now there's some slim hope to get the plan moving.  The GOP doesn't have a counterattack to this.  A 39% rate hike in this economy?  Suddenly the Republicans don't have an answer at all.  And wisely, Obama is going on the attack.  Given a second chance, it's time for the Dems to make the most of it.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• The ruling Dutch coalition government has collapsed over the future of the country's 2,000 troops in Afghanistan.
• A new book suggests that as VP in 2008, Dick Cheney wanted an armed conflict with Russian troops in Georgia.
• Kansas Republicans are pushing a new covenant marriage law where couples could only file for divorce for specific reasons and after a trial separation.
• Tiger Woods' televised apology ended up temporarily freezing Wall Street trading as brokers all tuned in.
• An internet security firm is working on technology to identify users behind the keyboard by how they type.

Last Call

Dave Weigel's CPAC report on the John Birch Society is pretty chilling stuff if you know your history.

If any more proof was needed that CPAC organizers aren’t sweating the stories and photos about fringe conservatives making their way around the conference, behold: the John Birch Society. The notorious right-wing group signed on as a co-sponsor late last year, drawing some controversy at the time and… showing up anyway. If anything, the JBS — which has benefited immeasurably from the amazing political comeback of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a longtime supporter — is being greeted with some smiles, some eye-rolls, and some conspiratorial winks.

Long before the Paulites, the Tea Party movement, and even the Moral Majority, the Birchers were the original Right Wing Nutjobs, formed in direct response to the rise of the civil rights movement of the sixties. Much like the Tea Party was a backlash against Obama, the Birchers were very much the virulently racist, hard-core ideologically pure zealots that rose in opposition to Dr. King.  They called Eisenhower a Communist.  Bill Buckley kicked them out because they were too nuts even for his guys.

Even as recently as last year, the Birchers were persona non grata.  That was before the Town Hall Blitzes and the Tea Party idiocy.

To understand just how much of a shift this represents for the mainstream right, consider — two years ago, RedState.com blasted Ron Paul for endorsing the “conspiracy nuts” of the JBS. One year ago, National Review’s John Derbyshire implied that it was a vile smear to connect Ron Paul to the Birchers.

And now the Birchers are sponsoring CPAC.  These guys ARE the Reactionary Right, folks.  Now, these guys are the mainstream Republican Party at the biggest GOP political event of the year.  And they expect to get into power come November.

Eric Holder Needs To Go

Really, Obama?  This is pretty amateur, even for your DoJ and its complete refusal to prosecute war crimes in the previous administration.

Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos blessing the waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics "exercised poor judgment" but will not face discipline for their actions, according to Justice Department correspondence sent to lawmakers late Friday.

The long-awaited conclusion marks a turnaround from recommendations against two of the lawyers by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility. OPR, which conducts ethics investigations of Justice Department attorneys, twice urged that allegations against John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee be sent to state legal disciplinary authorities for further action, the correspondence said.

But the decision was overruled by David Margolis, a career lawyer in the Deputy Attorney General's office, on Jan. 5, the letter said. Margolis "declined to adopt OPR's findings of professional misconduct and concluded instead that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee exercised poor judgment in connection with the drafting of the pertinent memoranda," said the letter from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich. 

Oh, and it gets worse as the FBI also officially closed the case today on the anthrax attacks.

The FBI sought to close the book on its long, frustrating hunt for the killer behind the 2001 anthrax letters Friday, formally ending its investigation and concluding a mentally unhinged scientist was responsible for killing five people and unnerving Americans nationwide.

After years of false leads, no arrests and public criticism, the FBI and Justice Department said Dr. Bruce Ivins, a government researcher, acted alone.

Ivins killed himself in 2008 as prosecutors prepared to indict him for the attacks. He had denied involvement, and his family and some friends have continued to insist he was innocent. 

I'll tell you what, Obama.  You make it pretty goddamn hard to support you when your FBI and your Department of Justice is even more corrupt than Bush's.   Not that Hillary Clinton or John McCain would have done any better, mind you.  But on this, you are an utter failure.  And I'm calling you and Eric Holder out on it.

It's time to seriously consider dismissing Holder from the position.  He's as bad as Gonzo.  He's letting Yoo and Bybee walk for torturing people in our name, and letting a dead man take the fall for a crime he may have not committed.

You tell me, why does he deserve not to be made to resign again?

A Block Buster Of A Rate

I almost wish Dianne Feinstein hadn't proposed this legislation.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Friday that she plans to introduce legislation that would bar insurance companies from enacting health insurance premium rate increases that the Secretary of the Health and Human Services deems to be unjustified.

The bill would create a national Medical Insurance Rate Authority, which would be able to prevent such increases. Feinstein's announcement follows reports that Anthem Blue Cross had intended to jack up premiums for certain policyholders in California by as much as 39 percent.

A report published Thursday by HHS found that health insurance companies have requested dramatic premium hike increases over the past year in states beyond California -- 56 percent in Michigan, 24 percent in Connecticut and 23 percent in Maine.

"This is unconscionable. It places a huge burden on people who are already struggling in these tough economic times, including the estimated 700,000 Anthem Blue Cross policyholders in California," said Feinstein in a statement. "The insurance industry reaps soaring profits by piling massive financial burdens onto consumers. According to a recent study by Health Care for America Now, America's five largest insurance companies reported record profits of $12.2 billion in 2009, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, from 2008. And WellPoint, the parent company of Anthem Blue Cross, reported earning $2.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009."

Cost controls are one thing, but what I'm afraid of is that the Dems will kill this bill before the Republicans get a chance to.  I don't even see this one getting out of committee.

Better to pass a real health care bill instead and remove anti-trust exemptions from the insurers.

On the other hand, this legislation would effectively smoke out the Dems who are in the pockets of the insurance companies other than Joe Lieberman.  You know all 41 Republicans are already, so there's no need to ask.

Tugging On Superman's Cape

Karl Rove has finally played fast and loose with the wrong guy's facts:  Nate Silver's.

It's not as though one should expect honesty and integrity from Karl Rove, but it's disappointing when his duplicity involves you personally. In a memo at his website, Rove.com, he carelessly misrepresents my arguments about the Democrats' 2010 electoral picture, while going on to demonstrate a superficial understanding about the underlying dynamics of the race.

Here's what Rove said that I said:

On the blog fivethirtyeight.com, Democratic booster Nate Silver recently suggested the 2010 midterms won’t produce an anti-Democratic swing of the same magnitude of 1994 because “unlike in 1994, the GOP remains quite unpopular.”

And here's what I actually said:

It's not that I'm at all optimistic about the Democrats' electoral fortunes in 2010. The general consensus that they'll lose between 25 and 35 House seats strikes me as generous, for instance. I'd put the modal number at somewhere in the low 40s instead, although with a very wide range from as few as 20 Republican pickups to as many as 60. [...]

Clearly, 2010 will be to some greater or lesser extent an anti-Democratic year. The question is to what extent it might also be an anti-incumbent year [...] Unlike in 1994, the GOP remains quite strongly unpopular. Also as compared with 1994, the Republicans are less cohesive, and that could result in their nominating a sub-optimal candidate in Kentucky, New Hampshire, Florida or Arizona.

It's pretty rich to be characterized as a "Democratic booster" for having written an article in which I argued that (i) the general consensus on the number of seats that the Democrats will lose in the House is too optimistic (ii) my best guess would be for a loss in the low 40s instead, and possibly as high as 60, which would eclipse the Democrats' 54-seat loss in 1994.

What I do think, however, is that while the results might wind up being pretty similar to 1994, the parameters driving those results are rather different, in much the same way that losing a football game by two touchdowns can be very different between a 14-0 shutout and a 45-31 shootout.

Nate may be splitting hairs...but that's what Nate does.  He's the master of political stat crunching and once again Karl Rove finds himself getting his ass kicked by good ol' logic.  Nate completely admits that 2010 could be worse than 1994...in fact Nate's mode number has the GOP eking out control of the House by a handful of seats right now.

That's not good if you're the Dems.  On the other hand, there are a lot of opportunities that could damage supposedly safe Republican seats merely because they are incumbents.  The Republicans clearly understand this, which is why they are more than happy to throw their own incumbents under the bus in red district/state primaries if it means putting in a Tea Party candidate on the ticket and saying "Behold!  We no longer have the millstone of incumbency!"  (Ask Charlie Crist or Trey Greyson.)

And, as Nate points out, Republicans are far less popular than they were in 1994.  An incumbent seat vacated by a Republican in a Red district is not a 100% guarantee that the people will put a Republican back in the seat.

In other words, there's still time to go.  I personally think the GOP has peaked, and if the Dems are smart enough to get a public option bill through reconciliation, they will suddenly find that the GOP is the team in trouble.

Public Flogging: The Return

The public option meat.  It is back on the menu for Harry Reid and the Senate Dems. Greg Sargent:

With more and more Senators signing on to the letter urging Reid to hold an up or down vote on the public option under reconciliation rules, Reid spokesman Rodell Mollineau sends over a statement signaling Reid’s qualified support for the move:

Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition. That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal.

If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.

That’s a fairly big step forward: Up until now, Reid, while supporting the public option throughout the process, had been silent on whether he’d support a reconciliation vote on it.

This thing is getting bigger now.  Much bigger.  But we need to continue to push this.  Still, there is now growing reason for hope.

Reconciling Reconciliation

One of the arguments I've seen against reconciliation is that it's only used for getting partisan measures through the Senate past the filibuster.  The Bush tax cuts, for example, went through on reconciliation.  That's true, but there's a difference between the Bush tax cuts and health care reform.  Bush also jammed them through with no effort to even worry about getting the Dems on board.  You can't say that with the health care reform process, now going on ten months.

The argument the Republicans are now using to try to block health care reform is that they are demanding that the Democrats immediately put a halt to efforts in the Senate to use reconciliation and permanently take reconciliation off the table in order for the GOP to even come to the summit now.

President Barack Obama must take a procedural maneuver to pass healthcare reform with a simple majority off the table, the second-ranking House Republican said Friday.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) urged Obama to reject using the budget reconciliation process to pass health reform, a tactic that would allow Democrats to finish health reform without any GOP support.

“If the president is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan fashion, he must take the reconciliation process — which will be used to jam through legislation that a majority of Americans do not want — off the table," Cantor said in a statement.

Let's pause and review.  The key phrase here in the article is "a procedural maneuver to pass healthcare reform with a simple majority".  This is the default mode that the Senate should be.  The only reason that this is not the case is because the Republicans are using a procedural maneuver to prevent legislation being passed with a simple majority, called the filibuster.

The correct Democratic party response to this is really exceedingly simple:

"We're only using reconciliation, which is a perfectly legitimate way to pass legislation with a simple 51-vote majority, because the Republicans are threatening to filibuster and will not allow this legislation to pass with a simple 51-vote majority vote.  We will take reconciliation off the table if the Republicans in turn take the filibuster off the table.  Your move, Representative Cantor."

That's all the Dems have to say.

How about it, guys?

Oh, and the Senate Bill already got 60 votes.

Still Missing The Point On Joe Stack

As I said yesterday, the argument over if Joe Stack was a "left-wing or right-wing" terrorist is pointless, petty, and small-minded.  It misses the point that Stack was a domestic terrorists, and homegrown at that.

Naturally, Malkinvania and company are too busy spewing righteous indignation to notice.  There's no such thing as a right-wing terrorist period, ever, to them, and all politically motivated acts are leftist plots only.  They spend so much time justifying why only leftists are terrorists that they forget what terrorism is and why it's effective: it spreads a message of hatred and division that they repeat daily.  Group X is not human, not worthy or seeing as anything other than the Enemy.

The irony is lost.

Your Taxonomy Is Broken

Daily Beast's Tunku Varadarajan names the Left's 25 top journos.  Everything wrong with the article can basically be summed up with Jon Stewart is #1, Fred Hiatt is #5, and the obvious omissions of Spencer Ackerman, David Weigel, Dave Neiwert and David Corn are glaring.

Oh well.  Josh Marshall and Yggy are there at least.  But really?  The Left's best journalist is Jon Stewart?