The Dish

Looking through the current reporting, it's striking that Coakley's margins are huge in Boston – roughly two to one. There are a lot of votes in Boston and the final tally is not in yet. As I said, this is closer than I expected. But it is a Brown win.

A fascinating post by Jeff Davis:

[A]n interesting trial balloon floated by Ron Pollack of Families USA in a recent article in Politico points out that a reconciliation bill amending the health care bill could actually be voted on before the House votes to accept that health

care bill.

That’s right. When it comes to enacting laws and then later amending those laws, it doesn’t matter in what order Congress passes bills. All that matters is the order in which the president signs those bills into law. As long as the president signs the health care bill 30 seconds before he signs the reconciliation bill, the latter can amend or repeal any provisions in the former. So the House and Senate could, in theory, vote on a conference report amending the Senate health care bill before the House actually has to take the tougher vote to accept the Senate bill.

No matter whether the House votes on reconciliation or the Senate bill first, the Speaker can ensure that the health care bill is signed into law before reconciliation.

But reconciliation would remain a nightmare.

Hmmm.

David Leonhardt explains why the rage against a "leftist" Obama is baloney:

The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job.

More conservative than Nixon or Clinton – and yet it's a threat to the meaning of America. This is claptrap. Hooey. Hysteria. And wrong. If the Democrats give into this FNC/RNC campaign to smear Obama as something he is not, they will miss the only chance of real, imperfect but meaningful reform. They will have blinked after being psyched out.

Pass the Senate bill and then defend it loudly, strongly, proudly. And call the opponents' bluff.

The Boston Globe has a map.

James Joyner rebuts me:

There’s a modest populist surge out there, as evidenced by the Tea Party and various other phenomena.  But, as always, most Americans are only peripherally interested in politics.   Right now, Obama is rather unpopular. Not wildly unpopular, as his predecessor was, but nonetheless one with higher disapproval than approval numbers. That’s hardly unprecedented for new presidents trying to enact major social changes in a down economy. See Reagan, Ronald and Clinton, Bill.

Maybe Obama will read a Brown win as a signal to slow down and push through a more modest bill. Or maybe he’ll indeed “take a combative turn.” The people will get a chance to send him another signal in November and again two years hence. I haven’t the slightest clue as to what the mood will be then.

But Andrew should know better than to read so much into a single election, much less a single race. Too many read Bush’s re-election in 2004 as the beginning of some sort of permanent majority; that faded within months and he got a shellacking in 2006. Too many read some sort of sea change into Obama’s win fourteen months ago. The public is fickle and interested mostly in results.

The test of nihilism is the opposition party's alternative. What is the alternative to the current health insurance reform bill? Nada. What is their plan for cutting the deficit? Nada. Do they really think that fialing to bail ut the banks or provide any stimulus would have brought unemployment down? Mark Thompson piles on:

The only thing I’d add is that bemoaning the possible death of this health care reform bill as “nihilist” is deeply unfair to the many people who really, honestly do believe that the bills that have been passed in the House and, especially, the Senate actively make matters worse in this country for any number of reasons.  It is increasingly frustrating to me that, for many supporters of Obama, any belief that the existing health care reform bills will do more harm than good is automatically written off as being in bad faith or, as it were, “nihilistic.”

As I have written there are many good faith objections to this health reform bill. But Brown supports exactly the same kind of bill in his own state and has offered nothing by way of an alternative on a national scale. That's why it's nihilistic. When you wage a war on a president for being pro-government, and you are part of a party that has expanded government beyond measure, when you campaign on debt reduction and yet prose measures to increase the debt … what else can you call it?

The Courage Campaign, FDL, and San Jose Mercury News are stilll live-blogging. Live-tweets here and here. Margaret Talbot once again sums up the day's testimony. Jerry Sanders, Republican mayor of San Diego and convert to the marriage equality cause, took the stand:

Sanders is a genuine conservative who, like many people with gay and lesbian family or friends, changed his mind on gay marriage, much to his own surprise. His law-and-order credentials are impeccable: he spent most of his career before he became mayor in the San Diego police force, with stints as commander of the SWAT team and as chief of police. In 2007, when the city of San Diego was considering filing an amicus brief in favor of gay marriage with the California Supreme Court, Sanders initially planned to use his mayoral veto to quash it. He thought civil unions were good enough, and besides, San Diego is a fairly conservative city, not San Francisco at all, so he worried about the repercussions. In fact, voters apparently believed in his sincerity enough to elect him to a second term in 2008. He’s like Dick Cheney—who also has a lesbian daughter he’s close to and who has also made a decision to support marriage equality—without the whole war-in-Iraq thing.

DiA weighs in:

The Massachusetts election is to a large extent a referendum on health-care reform, and health care is a complicated issue. Some on the left, like Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake, have a health-care position voters can understand: it's all the fault of the insurance companies and Big Pharma. That's not true and leads to no workable solution, but it makes progressives happy to hear it. Scott Brown has a health position voters can understand, too: it's all the fault of big government. That's not true and leads to no workable solution, but it makes conservatives happy to hear it. Barack Obama has a different position: it's the result of a set of systemic problems that need to be changed with a combination of government subsidies, regulations and market incentives, and to have a realistic shot at enacting a reform like that you need to get all the political and industry stakeholders involved and craft a compromise that better serves the public but that everyone can sign off on. That message is political poison, and it now has a significant percentage of the American public calling for his head.

But if any adult proposal to actually achieve meaningful change is doomed because of this simplistic and amnesiac polarization, we're done for. Nothing will be achieved. Only those cynical enough to manipulate this kind of mass ignorance will win. I refuse to believe this has to be the future.

Greenwald's reaction to the MSM reaction to Scott Horton's ground-breaking article:

[O]ur media persists in sustaining the lie that the torture controversy is about three cases of waterboarding and a few "high-value" detainees who were treated a bit harshly.  That's why Horton's story received so little attention and was almost completely ignored by right-wing commentators:  because it shatters the central myth that torture was used only in the most extreme cases — virtual Ticking Time Bomb scenarios — when there was simply no other choice.  Leading American media outlets, as a matter of policy, won't even use the word "torture."  This, despite the fact that the abuse was so brutal and inhumane that it led to the deaths of helpless captives — including run-of-the-mill detainees, almost certainly ones guilty of absolutely nothing — in numerous cases.  These three detainee deaths — like so many other similar cases — illustrate how extreme is the myth that has taken root in order to obscure what was really done.

The denial is in exact proportion to the horror.

I fear Americans will never be able to own this, that the Noonan impulse to just "keep walking" is the only option most can bear. A minority of the GOP base is thrilled we tortured and murdered so many Muslims, including innocents. The Rovians see it only as a way to use fear as a means to power. Most Americans simply don't or won't believe it, or they simply push it out of their consciousness and resort to irrelevant discussions of ticking time-bombs, which have nothing to do with what Bush and Cheney authorized.

The Democrats are totally pathetic as they always, always are. Obama is a coward and Holder a tool. They too believe Americans cannot handle the truth. But the longer Obama and Holder kick this can down the road, or continue to cover it up, the sooner the responsibility for it will cling to them too.

President Obama: if you do not open up an investigation into the Gitmo "suicides", you are yourself guilty of reneging on the Geneva Conventions. Your wily pragmatism on this is not wily at all. It is, in fact, criminal.

Glenbrook, Nevada, 7.05 pm