The Dish

Friedersdorf takes a shovel to the bullshit:

It is particularly amusing to see folks call the outcome stunning in one breath and aver in the next that they can explain why it happened mere hours after the fact, without any new data save the result. This is especially grating when it’s so obvious that the election turned on all the issues that were most important to me, that the outcome so clearly vindicates my world view, and that the wisest course in light of the results is for both parties to do exactly what I’ve been advocating for all along.

Well, yes. But that's only human, isn't it? And without solid exit polls, there is no objective source.

He's not just surrendering; he's reveling in it.

St. Petersburg, Russia, 10.15 pm

Reihan sees an opening:

One question for Brown is whether he wants to focus on building his national profile — campaigning with Marco Rubio and other star conservative candidates — or building a base in Massachusetts. Very frankly, I think that Brown has demonstrated a real gift for national politics: his biography is compelling, he is an effective speaker, he had the discipline to take the high-road in the campaign. There were no macaca moments this time, and I have to assume that there were many, many strategists and activists very eager to manufacture one. Under this level of scrutiny, Brown thrived. And this after being a purely local politician for years. That's not normal. It is an Obama level of talent and discipline and work ethic. We know how that turned out.

For more tax cuts and more debt! For torture and Medicare for ever! Because the Bush years were so awesome.

Because Obama has been so “partisan” in framing healthcare reform – even as he junked single payer, included cost controls, made it budget neutral, and won over the drug and insurance companies – his proposal is apparently in tatters. Scott Brown has said he supports universal healthcare with an individual mandate, as in Romneycare, but wants to “start over” on the federal level. The GOP pretends that there was always a better way. So what do they now propose? Here’s Eric Cantor’s offer:

He noted the goals of getting rid of discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, producing more competition, and getting rid of “frivolous lawsuits,” adding: “We can do those things together.”

I asked Cantor if that was the full extent of the foundation for possible compromise. “Listen, we have to start somewhere,” he answered. “They now have found themselves in a cul de sac. They’re trying to find their way out. Republican have put a plan on the table that is the result of bipartisan agreement on some issues.”

The Republican concept of compromise is adoption of the McCain plan. Which does nothing significant to control costs and nothing to extend insurance to the working poor. Because McCain, remember, won the election. But the alternative? Nothing. So in my view, Obama should agree. Why not salvage something? And in a stroke, you embrace a bill that clearly does nothing to solve the real problems, but you can simply say it’s all that can be achieved in the current system and climate, given total Republican resistance to everything the president is trying to do, and the usual Democratic disarray, incompetence and mismanagement.

Then pivot immediately and strongly to the fiscal question and lay out a real plan to balance the budget with big long-term entitlement cuts, a hike in the retirement age, and a serious tax increase. And make the Republicans and Democrats vote it down as they surely will. If the system is going to destroy Obama and reform, then he should simply fight, fight, fight for real reform against the agendas of both parties. If he fails, so be it. But we know now that he cannot win by the usual methods. He cannot win in an alliance with a dysfunctional Democratic party. That system is broken. It can neither please its own base nor win over the middle nor do anything to counteract the total obstructionism of the far right, which is the only right we have left.

This stinging defeat should therefore be marshalled into a new reformist ferocity. In his SOTU next week, Obama needs to reiterate the need for real reform, which requires real bipartisanship. He should remind voters that he was elected to get things done, to avoid the old red-blue argument so desperately needed by the FNC/RNC. He should say he will adopt a minimalist health bill because doing nothing is worse. And then he should commit to restoring fiscal sanity. Tackling the long-term debt head-on is what Independents want, and what the economy needs for true confidence to return. By demanding entitlement cuts the Democrats don’t want and tax increases the GOP hates, Obama can frame the future of his presidency. 

And he may surely lose. But what we have seen is that by trying to make the current system work to solve deep problems, he loses anyway. The Democrats cannot unite; the Republicans simply want to destroy. Obama won the election with a new coalition; but he has had to govern through the existing system, which is essentially broken beyond repair. Hence he is as stranded as the country.

But he is also all we have left. And how he responds to this crisis will tell us a huge amount about him.

Cohn writes a letter to nervous and frustrated House Democrats. I want to look away. Those of us who want Obama to succeed in tackling this country’s deepest problems are bummed enough. But healthcare reform was never my reason for supporting him. I was much more invested in getting past the cynicism and laziness of the red-blue divide, restoring the rule of law and the constitutional balance, ending the unwinnable wars in  Iraq and Afghanistan, stopping torture, and so on. But for those progressives who have fought for wider access to health insurance for their entire lives, this must be an excruciating, devastating moment. It is, of course, heightened by the almost unimaginable irony of Ted Kennedy’s seat being the death-knell for insurance reform, the end of the hopes of many that they might have a chance to buy some affordable insurance, that they could get insured despite a pre-existing condition, that the rest of their lives would not be filled with economic stagnation and profound personal insecurity. Well, the GOP has a clear message to them: “Tough shit. We needed a way to break a reform presidency and your lives were the mechanism.”

The glee with which the GOP is greeting the end of any access too health insurance for millions of the working poor, even as they propose nothing in its stead to help them or to restrain soaring costs for everyone else, is instructive. This really is a game to them. But to the sincere progressives who backed this moderate bill as the best they could get, this is, simply, tragic. And to those of us who wanted politics to become something more than a game, given the accelerating decline of this country on all fronts, it’s a body blow.

Here’s why it’s hard to see anything positive coming out of this debacle. Stephen Bainbridge, an intelligent man and one of the few conservatives who also found Bush and Cheney appalling, can write this:

Obama and the Congressional Democrats (especially in the House) governed for the last year as though the median voter is a Daily Kos fan.

This must come as some surprise to most Daily Kos fans. But if one had traveled to Mars and back this past year and read this statement, what would you assume had happened? I would assume that the banks had been nationalized, the stimulus was twice as large, that single-payer healthcare had been pushed through on narrow majority votes, that card-check had passed, that an immigration amnesty had been legislated, that prosecutions of Bush and Cheney for war crimes would be underway, that withdrawal from Afghanistan would be commencing, that no troops would be left in Iraq, that Larry Tribe was on the Supreme Court, that DADT and DOMA would be repealed, and so on. But when even a sane and honest person like Bainbridge has lapsed into believing the FNC mantra, you realize that ideology has simply altered our understanding of reality. I note that Peter Berkowitz, another sane conservative, notes “extreme partisanship” on health insurance reform – but sees it as entirely a Democratic failure!

Bainbridge is admirably candid about GOP failures, which makes him far more credible than the FNC crowd. But here is his wish list of things not to do in the last few months of Democratic majorities:

Just say no to:

• Financial regulation that restricts growth and investment (did the pro-regulation types learn nothing from The Sarbanes-Oxley Debacle?
• Additional stimulus (a.k.a. pork) spending
• Obamacare-lite
• Corporate welfare (for once)
• Bigger entitlement programs
• New wars of choice

No financial regulation; no health insurance reform (or rather the tinkering that McCain prposed, which would do almost nothing to contain costs and nothing to insure more people); no more stimulus; maintenance of the entitlement crisis; and no more wars of choice (as if Obama were even proposing one). The premise must be that the US need not address its fundamental problems. It can just ignore them for a while longer, while Stephen dreams of a libertarian nirvana and asks the GOP to propose specific spending cuts.

Dream on.

Mort Zuckerman pronounces:

He didn’t address the main issue.

He means the economy. How anyone who has been sentient this past year can say such a thing merely reveals how effective the propaganda has been. Let’s review: a stimulus package that has clearly helped turn the economy around and was skilfully structured to ensure that it didn’t entirely fade away when the second year came around, a third of which was tax cuts; a bank bailout that is now being paid back; a lifeline to the car industry; major investment in infrastructure; extension of unemployment benefits; avoidance of a second great depression and a return to fragile but real growth after the financial and economic abyss of a year ago … I mean he didn’t address the main issue?? What the fuck is he talking about?

But this will be the reality because this is the easy reality and our politics now lives off of created reality, not the data. For Zuckerman, the idea of extending health insurance to the working poor in a period of immense economic insecurity is not addressing the main issue. He is, of course, a billionaire diner at Michael’s whose own access to the best healthcare in the world is automatic. And he wants a Democratic president to share those priorities.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch joins the Dish in calling for a full investigation of the Gitmo “suicides”:

Prisoner abuse and botched investigations undermine national security, handing America’s enemies a devastating recruiting tool. Mr. Obama should appoint an unrelenting career prosecutor to the case, someone of the caliber of Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to dig deeper. He must follow where the evidence leads.

All the way to the Bush White House.

Planetizen assesses the impact:

[Google]'s Lat Long Blog says it "received numerous requests from relief organizations and our users to share recent satellite imagery of the country." That imagery, it turns out, can provide much more than context. With suddenly outdated maps showing roadways that are now inaccessible and bridges that are uncrossable, this satellite imagery is actually being used in rescue and recovery efforts.