The Dish

And whacks me for my excitability. Fair enough. I'm a moody bugger at times.

The readers rally a battered blogger:

Get up. Take a walk. If it’s too cold or dark outside, go do something else: talk to someone, read a book. Anything. You’re right when you say “Yes, I’m gloomy.” But you’re too gloomy. Not that I don’t think, unfortunately, that Brown will win tomorrow (although I still have some hope for the progressive GOTV movement in as blue a state as Massachusetts), but because when you’re writing sentences like this (Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead) you’re letting the gloominess get to you too much. If Coakley wins, the bill is not dead.

Another:

Disappointment, yes.  Despair, no.  The earth will still rotate around the sun, the stars and the moon will still come out, and the birds will still sing as they perch on nearby trees.

This past year, the Democrats have wasted precious time arguing amongst themselves, while the Republicans simply got out of their way.  People wondered why they couldn’t compromise with Republicans, and yet they couldn’t even compromise amongst themselves!  And when the holdouts would take to the airwaves all they wanted was more money!  In a recession for God’s sake! Shame on them.  They did it to themselves.

As for me, I still believe in President Obama.  He’s done, or is trying to do, everything he said he would.  And let me remind you, he told us change would not be easy, nor would it be pretty to watch. 

Another:

If I could interrupt your gloom for a moment to interject some reality…

You say

“The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it.”

There is nothing minimalist about such a mandate, if it stands alone.  It would eliminate the individual market for health insurance.  If insurance companies could not reject people without preexisting conditions, then healthy people would have no incentive to buy insurance: they would wait until they were sick.  This would drive up premiums, drive even modestly healthy people out of the market, etc. until there is no individual market for insurance anymore.  If you want to regulate insurance companies in this way, you need a mandate to force healthy people into the pool; and if you have a mandate, you need to subsidize poor people; and if you want to subsidize poor people, you need to find money through taxes or cuts to other programs.  In short, you get something like the current bill – as minimalist as possible. 

The next step down, I’m afraid, is the status quo.

All good points. I was venting. The news has been awful lately, and when you absorb it all all the time, it can get to you. Thanks for smacking me around a bit. I need it sometimes.

Balko is stunned by M. LeBlanc at Bitch, Ph.D. defending Coakley's role in the Amirault case:

A leftist could make a respectable argument that even though Coakley was grievously out of bounds in the Amirault case the need for her vote on health care reform, filibuster prevention, and other issues is more important than the troubling decisions she made as a prosecutor. A leftist could also plausibly argue that when it comes to actually making criminal justice policy as a senator, Coakley isn't likely to be any worse than her opponent, and therefore she deserves support because she's more progressive on everything else.

But LeBlanc isn't arguing either of those positions. She's arguing something far more repugnant: She's conceding that the Amirault case was a travesty of justice, and that Coakley was wrong for her extraordinary efforts to keep Gerald Amiralut in prison. But she's then arguing that Coakley deserves a pass specifically for her actions in the Amirault case, anyway, because all prosecutors do it, and because it's what Coakley had to do to accumulate political power and move on to higher office.

Timothy Kincaid reads through Friday's Prop 8 trial testimony:

Quite a bit of time was taken establishing that children do better in homes with both parents rather than with a single parent. Much emphasis that step-fathers are more likely to sexually abuse than genetic fathers. Lamb continues to point out that they are comparing heterosexuals to heterosexuals.

I get the impression that [Prop 8 defense attorney David] Thompson is out of his element. At one point he objects that the US Census is not a random sample. Lamb points out that if a sample includes the entire population, it’s better than a random sample. Thompson tries to argue that studies of gay people are faulty because they only study those who identify as gay; he seems not to notice that if we are talking about marriage, there aren’t going to be many non-LGBT-identifying folk who marry a person of the same sex.

Margaret Talbot also summarizes Friday's proceedings.

On the day that an extremely credible report suggests that three prisoners, at least one innocent, may have been tortured to death under direct supervision at the most controlled torture-site in the Cheney gulag … there is literally no mention of it on any Republican or right-leaning blogs. I know this is a big political day, the eve of the crippling of Obama's presidency. But still …

If one couldn't get more depressed … hang on in.

You make the call.

From the BBC’s report on Haiti:

“Especially prized is toothpaste, which people smear under their noses to fend off the stench of decaying corpses.”

Democrats can stop hoping at this point.

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow. They crafted a strategy of total oppositionism to anything Obama proposed a year ago. Remember they gave him zero votes on even the stimulus in his first weeks. They saw health insurance reform as Obama's Waterloo, and, thanks in part to the dithering Democrats, they beat him on that hill. They have successfully channeled all the rage at the massive debt and recession the president inherited on Obama after just one year. If they can do that already, against the massive evidence against them, they have the power to wield populism to destroy any attempt by government to address any actual problems.

This is a nihilist moment, built from a nihilist strategy in order to regain power … to do nothing but wage war against enemies at home and abroad.

What comes next will be a real test for Obama. I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she'll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That's all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama's failure! That's how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair. 

Yes, I'm gloomy. Not because I was so wedded to this bill, although I think it's a decent enough start. But because if America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America's problems are too great for Americans to tackle. 

And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country. And one of the major parties is ecstatic about it.

Reihan wants to let the Haitians emigrate:

There are literally dozens of countries across the world that are what Pritchett, in his provocative book Let Their People Come, calls “zombies.” In the Old West, cities abandoned when the local gold mine dried up were called “ghost towns.” Zombies are essentially ghost towns that you can never leave. The economic opportunities are all gone, but barriers to migration are just high enough that people are forced to stay put, almost as though they were walled in a penitentiary. Though we all want to believe that Haiti and countries like it can eventually become as rich as successful as the U.S. or South Korea or Botswana, the sad fact is that some countries have been handed a raw deal by virtue of climate, resources, and the scarring effects of a cruel colonial history. It is possible that Haiti can’t be saved. But that doesn’t mean that Haitians can’t save themselves, provided we start breaking down the walls that have kept them hemmed in.