The Dish

Nate Silver isn't panicking yet:

Of the 86 elections that we made calls on the morning of November 4th, 2008, only 6 (the Senate election in Minnesota, and the Presidential elections in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina and North Dakota) featured contests in which the trailing candidate had a 25 percent or better chance of prevailing. The outcome of this election remains more uncertain than that of at least 90 percent of other elections, even if it's less uncertain than it was 24 hours ago.

Chait is running around like a chicken with its head cut off telling the Dems to stop panicking. And it's working!

He notes how a ten percent unemployment rate in a race for a seat that seemed owned by one party is not exactly a recipe for electoral continuity. He notes that Obama's popularity remains remarkably stable and high for this kind of recessionary backdrop (especially in Massachusetts). But his strongest point is against the delusion that somehow Obama did not try for bipartisanship and that the polarization is his fault and that a more moderate stance on the stimulus or healthcare would have helped.

Look at the fricking stimulus plan, a good faith effort to stop the economic bleeding, of which one third was composed of tax cuts. How many GOP votes did he get after just being inaugurated? Zero. Scott Brown argues that it did not create or save a single job. This insane position is rebutted by … AEI.

For Rovians, the entire game of politics is just that: a game. And it's a game we all have to resist being sucked into (excitable moi especially).

You create reality by spin and hysteria and a 24-hour propaganda channel. The actual reality – the anachronism of Reaganomics in our current moment, the need to cut spending and raise taxes, the enmeshment of the previous administration is war crimes, the crippling burden of a broken healthcare system, the role of carbon in unsettling our climate – is too complicated for them to grapple with. So they create a game and they play it, with no accountability for their own past, fear-mongering on terror, denial on torture, and recitation of the same bromides that were very relevant in 1980 but are part of the problem now.

Obama will stay cool, get his Senate health bill through the House, and move on to financial re-regulation and economic revival. If the Democrats in the House balk at this, they have to be nuts. They will be buying into the Rovian psych-out. And I don't believe that so many worked so hard for Obama so recently in order to restore the logic and priorities of Rovian cynicism. Sprung has more thoughts here.

Assuming a huge Brown victory tonight, as I do, I've been trying to sort through the many layers of what it might really mean. The FNC/RNC machine will describe it as a crushing referendum on health insurance reform and Obama, period. The trouble with this analysis is that Scott Brown has actually supported a near carbon copy of the Obama plan on a state level, and his opposition to the Senate bill is primarily that Massachusetts already has universal health insurance, so what's in it for his state? This is not the same as calling Obama a radical, transformational communist, which is the current GOP talking point (well, it's been their talking point since June 2008).

The second explanation is the Brooks/Noonan theory that somehow everything feels wrong to the Independent or conservative-leaning voters. They have an instinctual fear of more government and, even though the Senate bill couldn't be more minimalist within the confines of expanding access and controlling costs, this gnaws at them. I think this is a legitimate feeling (I have it too) – but an illegitimate argument.

Look: the markets conservatives have believed in have failed.

As the more honest conservatives (Greenspan, Posner, Bartlett) have noted, the financial crisis was a clear indicator that we need a more active and vigilant government in regulating the financial sector. And when you look at the results of America's hybrid and dysfunctional healthcare system, it is more than clear that the status quo is unsustainable. Yes, this system has pioneered amazing breakthroughs and a pharmaceutical revolution that has transformed lives. But the cost and inefficiency of this is simply staggering. Look at the graph above. If you think it's great, support the GOP. They don't want to change anything, but a few tweaks.

The current system insures fewer and fewer people and costs more and more. It is crippling other sectors of the economy and will bankrupt the entire Treasury if some painful adjustments are not made. If America cannot grapple with a crisis this big, and cannot accept an imperfect but reformable piece of legislation that makes a start on this, then America is incapable of grappling with its serious problems. And if Republicans are in the forefront of defending every cent going to Medicare and refusing to offer a single credible path to cutting spending and offering even more tax cuts as some kind of panacea, they are much worse than the feckless Democrats. Even the drug and insurance companies know that the current system is broken. At least Obama seems interested in government. The GOP seems interested only in politics and rhetoric that can sustain the bubble of deep denial they live in.

The third explanation is unemployment, a long recession, a sense that things have not turned around, and an economic environment which is a recipe for populist protest.

The fourth is Coakley herself, an awful candidate, who Mass voters know would be stuck in that seat for ever if she gets in today. In contrast, Brown could will almost certainly be ejected by 2012. He's hot, he's tapped into white ethnic class resentment of Democratic party hubris in Massachusetts, and he's run a terrific campaign. You can see why many would vote for him. If you have lived in that one-party state, you will know why there's a frisson in the air today.

What the current FNC/RNC machine wants you to have is total amnesia about the recent past, an iron grip on ideology and abstraction – government always bad, Democrats always socialists – and a tactical delight in playing the political game, even if it means no accountability for their own past, no engagement with reality, no openness to change or constructive reform.

This is the deeper war here. Which means it is essential that Obama find a way to rescue health insurance reform from the Rovian nihilists.

(Graph c/o that socialist/communist rag, National Geographic.)

As usual, the foreign press cover the new and powerful evidence that the Bush administration was using torture methods so severe they killed prisoners in Gitmo as late as 2006 – and then covered it up with claims of a triple-simultaneous-suicide. Here's the Guardian. And the Telegraph. And the Independent. Here's the Irish Times. And the Canadian Press. But the US papers?

Nary a mention. Fox News? You have to be kidding. NYT? A buried AP feed. The right-wing blogosphere that is fanning the flames for a torture state? Crickets … In fact, National Review is in full swing with articles by the torture-celebrating Marc Thiessen and a video interview with the war criminal, John Yoo, citing George Washington, perhaps one of the most ferocious opponents of torture in American history, to defend his crimes. The premise of both Thiessen and Yoo is that what was authorized was not torture, and that Gitmo is the best of the best facilities for the worst of the worst prisoners. But the possible deaths-by-torture in Gitmo – which explode their lies and spin – do not rate even a mention.

If you want to know how America became a torturing country, look up Dick Cheney in Wikipedia. Then go look at a great deal (but not all) of the MSM.

More unsettling shots at the Big Picture.

Richard Cohen gets it about right:

It's true that I opposed gay marriage. But I did so only in the context of Tennessee and not New York. In the first place, like Iran, Tennessee has no homosexuals. New York has lots of them, including the speaker of the City Council and Isaac Mizrahi, whoever he is. Still, I always favored civil unions because I did not think that a civil union between gays threatened the sanctity of contract law, which is the bedrock of our Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Buddhist-Santeria faith. I used to think the American people were with me on this, and now I know I am with them.

This is what democracy is all about.

Marc Lynch has some advice:

If the U.S. really wants to launch a new peace process which won't be just another Annapolis, it should seriously consider announcing serious moves  to alleviate the humanitarian conditions in Gaza as part of the launch.  

This would surprise and please Arab public opinion, and might even please Israelis who have grown uncomfortable with the indefinite suffering there.  It would also put Hamas in a bind — they could hardly complain about a process which  improved the quality of life in Gaza, and it would give them even greater incentives to refrain from spoiler violence. In that regard, it's very interesting that Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has been making a very public tour of the Gulf including meetings with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. Even if real Palestinian reconciliation isn't in the cards, combining relief for Gaza with the launch of new negotiations may give the new effort more support across the Arab public and strengthen the Palestinian Authority going into the talks. 

Megan, a foe of the health insurance reform, reacts to the report on the three alleged homicides-by-torture at Gitmo:

I usually do not swear on this blog.  But all I can think of is a quote from PJ O'Rourke on seeing young kids shot by the IDF:  "This is bullshit.  This is barbarism." This is not how a decent country acts, which is presumably why we lied about it.

I expect tomorrow, if Brown wins, we'll hear a lot of talk about a Republican resurgence.  But unless the Republicans can come up with a more convincing program to keep stuff like this from happening–and a more convincing economic program than cutting taxes in the face of record deficits–I don't think they're ready to lead. 

My conservative readers are no doubt winding up to tell me I'm a liberal sellout. But I don't think it's particularly bleeding heart to think that we shouldn't have to fake suicides to cover up for abusing prisoners.  In fact, I think that's the stance of a hard core believer in law and order.

More accurately, the obvious inference from the Harper's piece is that the Bush administration faked suicides to cover up for torturing prisoners to death.

Remember that for John Yoo, the only thing you couldn't do to a captive prisoner was to murder him. But we have scores of corpses from the interrogation program to show that even this most extreme position was violated. And this time, we have it in Gitmo, a place where Bush and Cheney cannot possibly scapegoat the grunts for the policy they enforced. It was under their direct control. And we still don't know who was over-seeing this particular torture session in "Camp No."

If this is investigated by the Obama administration (and if they don't, we will discover that their opposition to torture is a lie), and it turns out that Horton is right, we will not need to prosecute Cheney and Bush for war crimes. We can simply prosecute them for being accessories to murder.

If the president authorizes someone's murder, that is still against the law, isn't it? Or would John Yoo believe that was part of George Washington's legacy as well?

Felix Salmon argues that logistics are a bigger problem than cash flow at this point. He recommends donating to responsible charities but not mandating where the money goes:

The last time there was a disaster on this scale was the Asian tsunami, five years ago. And for all its best efforts, the Red Cross has still only spent 83% of its $3.21 billion tsunami budget — which means that it has over half a billion dollars left to spend. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s money which could be spent in Haiti, if it weren’t for the fact that it was earmarked.

It’s human nature to want to believe that in the wake of a major disaster, we can all do our bit to help just by giving generously. And if there’s a silver lining to these tragedies at all, it’s that they significantly increase the total amount of money donated to important charities by individuals around the world. But if a charity is worth supporting, then it’s worth supporting with unrestricted funds. Because the last thing anybody wants to see in a couple of years’ time is an unseemly tussle over what happened to today’s Haiti donations, even as other international tragedies receive much less public attention.

Charli Carpenter has further thoughts.

(Hat tip: Yglesias)

A reader writes:

If Brown wins, the House has to pass the Senate version. We all know how colossally stupid congressmen can be but they cannot be that colossally stupid that they would just dump a year’s worth of work on this and hand Republicans their biggest victory since Bush beat Kerry. There are enough smart people around that this can get passed.

Now if some of these Democrats don’t like the Senate version as much then hopefully that will give them the motivation to keep working on additions to the bill to fix it and make it better AFTER they pass it.

Here are another few possible advantages might come from a Brown win:

In 2012 the Democratic nominee from Massachusetts should be a LOT better and then the state will have itself a good Senator for a generation.

The Republicans will have a political orgasm like never before if they take Ted Kennedy’s seat. which will certainly feed their hubris like nothing else could. This hubris means little if it isn’t backed up by alternative proposals. Currently, they have none.

The Democrats will realize they need to stop screwing around and get their shit together. Losing Kennedy’s seat to a right winger will probably freak everyone out and make them think the world is ending but it should also get them to stop, look, listen and really figure out what they need to do to stay successful.

Long term a loss should help Democrats/Progressives. Like the campaign this could be a short term win for Republicans that could help Democrats concentrate on the long term.