The Dish

Scott Lucas reports:

A reliable EA source confirms that Hasan Lahouti, the grandson of Hashemi Rafsanjani and son of Faezeh Hashemi, was arrested by Iranian authorities at Imam Khomeini airport this morning. While the story broke in Fars, which has been known to post disinformation, it is also being carried in Tabnak and Alef.  Lahouti, who is studying at a British university, was returning to Iran for the Nowruz holidays when he was detained. There has been no comment from Rafsanjani or Faezeh Hashemi. A few weeks ago, Lahouti was interviewed by BBC Persian, and he criticised the Government’s harassment of his mother and grandfather.

Such harassment was recently caught on tape.

A reader writes:

Virtually all the reactions today have focused on President Obama’s grit, determination, skill and patience — and I have no quarrel with any of that. But I don’t think Nancy Pelosi is getting her due today. I’m a progressive Democrat in California, and have butted heads with Pelosi on several issues over the past three decades. For most of that time, I was not impressed. In the past two months, I have been very impressed.

Recall that in December, the House became the first chamber of Congress in history to pass a universal healthcare bill. This was no small feat. Then, as the Senate dithered, the Speaker was a strong voice for the public option and for acting. After the Massachusetts special election, when the Senate was ready to wash its hands of the whole thing, and Emanuel and who knows who else in the administration were arguing for scaling back or even dropping the effort, Pelosi dug in her heels, insisted on the whole enchilada, and showed the way.

This past week, she delivered the House yet again, in support of a Senate bill that was given zero chance in January. It was as deft a performance by a Speaker as we are likely to see in our lifetimes. One misstep could have blown the whole thing up, but she handled all the brushfires, and the press, with remarkable assurance. She just stepped up and took charge.

A very telling moment was when the Senate Majority Leader attended the House Democratic caucus meeting on Saturday to promise to pass the reconciliation bill. It was little remarked on at the time, overshadowed by the President’s speech to the caucus, but I believe that was unprecedented in the history of relations between the two chambers. President Obama may have secured his place in history alongside FDR and Lyndon Johnson, but also I think Nancy Pelosi may be in Sam Rayburn territory.

For Jewish liberals under 40, the entire mindset of previous generations seems to be cracking open. Jake Weisberg:

If the stupidity of the settlements is obvious to most American Jews, it is not to the majority of Israelis, who have chosen a prime minister who represents the rejection of a two-state solution. At the same time, American liberals have recoiled from the pattern of miscalculation and inhumanity—there is no other word for it—in Israel's attempts to protect itself from Hezbollah and Hamas.

Last week, I saw the journalist Lawrence Wright perform a moving and disturbing monologue entitled "The Human Scale," based on his time reporting in Gaza. Whether or not one accepts the judgment of the Goldstone Report that Israel's bombing and reinvasion of the strip involved war crimes, Wright's piece (at New York's Public Theater this weekend) is a persuasive case that it constituted a wildly disproportionate response. Like the second invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the reoccupation was immensely destructive and counterproductive, sowing new seeds of hatred that will bloom for generations.

Douthat cautions:

Barring an extraordinary economic boom, the American situation will soon require the slow and painful restructuring of the welfare state that liberals have spent decades building. This environment may or may not lead to a revival of D.L.C.-style centrism among the Democrats, but at the very least it’s hard to see it proving congenial to further adventures in sweeping social legislation. I’ve talked to liberals who seem to understand this: The reckoning is coming, they allow, and the theory of health care reform has always been to get everybody inside the barrel before it goes over the falls. (I’d lay good money that this is Peter Orszag’s view of the matter.) But seen in this light, the health care victory looks less like the dawn of a bold new era, and more like the final lurch forward before a slow retreat.

Or rather, surely, to embark on long-term, dead serious fiscal reform, while making sure the poorest and those most struggling in the barrel are kept on as equals, not cast aside as burdens. In the big fiscal task ahead, we'll need a sense of fairness as well as strictness if we are to persuade a majority – rich an poor – of necessary but painful change.

Or did I just lapse into total Disraeliism?

Clive Crook is upset:

Thanks to the unrewarded exertions of conservative Democrats, this health care plan has moderate, centrist ambitions. It is not socialism in disguise. Shame on liberal Republicans (if there are any) for failing to support it. Even so, the Democrats' claims for the reform have been dishonest in one crucial respect, and most voters understood this. It is right to provide guaranteed health insurance, but wrong to claim this great prize could be had, in effect, for nothing. Broadly based tax increases and fundamental reform to health care delivery will be needed to balance the books. Denying this was a mistake. What was worse–an insult to one's intelligence, really–was to argue as Obama has in the past few days that this reform was, first and foremost, a cost-reducing initiative, and a way to drive down premiums.

The Economist makes some related points:

The truth is that ObamaCare does much to expand coverage, but does too little to rein in health inflation. The reform effort did start over a year ago with aspirations of “bending the cost curve”, but Mark McClellan of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, explains that the most meaningful proposals have since been “watered down or delayed.” For example, an independent commission on reforming Medicare got defanged, and a promising tax on gilded (or “Cadillac”) insurance plans will now be diluted and delayed for years.

Indeed, it is likely that the laudable extension of insurance coverage now makes it more important to tackle the question of costs. On that, at least, left and right seem to agree. Paul Krugman, an economics professor at Princeton and a liberal booster of reform, said on the eve of the votes, “there is, as always, a tunnel at the end of the tunnel: we’ll spend years if not decades fixing this thing.” Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank opposed to the effort, agrees, albeit in darker terms: “This marks the beginning of the next phase of this 100 years’ war.”

A reader writes:

When on I saw the NYT headline, "House will not use ‘deem and pass’ to pass health care”, I had a thought: What if it was all a ruse?  What if Pelosi and Slaughter know the right wing so well that they knew if they dropped a hint that they might use it to pass the health care bill, the right blogosphere and all their friends would jump on it like it was a piece of red meat thrown to the lions. 

So while Peggy Noonan was busy writing a column for the WSJ entitled “Demon Pass” and excoriating the Dems for even thinking about it …

and Mitch McConnell’s op-ed piece about its constitutionality and the AG of Virginia vowing to sue if deem and pass was used…while in the background, where no one noticed, they were working to get a deal with Stupak, the president was working the phones, etc.  So when they essentially said "oh, never mind, we’re not going to do that," there are a whole bunch of Republicans on record that deem and pass is not only the wrong thing to do, it’s unconstitutional.  Wait til the Republicans are in charge in the House again (which will happen, I’m sure) and they try deem and pass. Won’t THAT be fun to watch?

Maybe they are all smarter and tougher than I thought.

The NYT has an interactive guide. The LAT has a chart. The WaPo has a time-line.

Yglesias hoses the Kristol-NRO-WSJ brigade:

it’s worth observing that it’s literally not possible for Republicans to win enough Senate seats in 2010 to pass anything over Barack Obama’s veto.

Toobin posits that the Supreme Court isn't going to overturn the law on constitutional grounds.

But what does a movement do when it has to face a fact on the ground that refutes its fantasies of public opinion and purist ideology?

Denial and more acting out. They cannot yet understand that their visceral hatred of a moderate and long overdue bill just isn't credible to reasonable people, has been made to sound half-nuts by the fringe and that the benefits of the bill – the lifting of anxiety so many feel with respect to illness – may well make it a popular bill by the fall. If the GOP runs on repeal, they will seem bitter, angry sour losers obsessed with the past.

Because they still haven't understood why Obama was elected, the GOP will get worse before it gets better.