The Dish

He had health insurance reform in his grasp and yet it may now be swiped away because they simply took too long to get it done. Josh vents:

[If Scott Brown wins], Health Care Reform will be dead unless the House agrees to pass the Senate bill verbatim — which I really wonder about, given how dug in the progressives in the House are. Barney Frank doesn't seem to think it'll happen. At that point, how incredibly stupid is the dawdling over the last few weeks going to look? The work of a year, arguably the work of a few generations, let go needlessly over a single special election?

It's really almost beyond comprehension.

It is until you realize the Democratic party organized this Congressional mess and the Coakley candidacy. And then, of course, there is the total, rigid opposition to any reform and any cooperation at all from the nihilist Republicans. Obama is president for three more years. He will survive. He may even prosper. But this really would be a massive blow. To get this close and lose health insurance would embolden every enemy Obama has, from Netanyahu to Ailes.

That's the only reason to vote for Coakley on Tuesday.

She's a dreadful candidate, but this race is now a critical battle in the war to rescue the possibility of effective governance. If health reform dies, it will show just how broken the system is, just how impossible it is to effect even centrist reform in a Senate this paralyzed, how polarization has made compromise impossible, how the country's profound problems are simply beyond the system's reach. If this fails, what chance for any action on climate change? Or the debt? Or some movement toward a settlement in the Middle East?

And if Obama fails, there are no Democrats able to match him. The nihilist Republicans would be resurgent, pledging more tax cuts, more debt, and no entitlement cuts, entrenching torture as the American way, and pouring even more resources into the indefinite occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The lesson will be: permanent political war is the only way. The only way to govern the country is to divide and weaken it. 

Just like Rove did. You want that back? Vote Brown. You don't? Hold your nose and vote for Coakley.

(Photo: Darren McCollester/Getty.)

Steve Coll reflects on his days covering earthquakes around the world. It's a hard to excerpt post that deserves reading in full. The beginning:

Journalism is not a particularly esteemed profession, but its capacity to bear witness remains one of its more redeeming attributes. At moments like this in Haiti, a journalist’s function as a witness can be relatively uncomplicated, in comparison to, say, the processes of political or investigative reporting. In the field during a natural disaster of this scale, you do feel at times ghoulish and intrusive upon both the grief of survivors and in relation to the more directly useful efforts of rescuers and humanitarian relief workers. And yet all of those classes of participants in the crisis will recognize, most of the time, that journalism helpfully amplifies their own condition or potential.

DiA's view of the current healthcare system:

Health spending is rising at 8% per year. PriceWaterhouseCooper says medical costs will grow 9% in 2010; health insurance premiums generally rise even faster than costs. Premiums now amount to 18% of the average household's income, up from 11% in 1999. As insurance costs rise far faster than wages, unsurprisingly, the number of uninsured keeps rising too, to 46.3m in 2008. And those who aren't uninsured are increasingly insured by the government.

Medicaid added 3m people to its rolls in 2008. The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) picked up another 1.5m. As this process continues, federal spending on health insurance keeps climbing; it grew 10.4% in 2008. Sick people, poor people, and older people are increasingly unable to afford insurance, and many are winding up on the government's dime. As premiums rise, people at higher and higher income strata find they cannot afford them, drop out of private insurance, and end up being covered by the government or not covered at all.

(Hat tip: Ezra)

Jim Burroway says to not be fooled.

FDL, the Courage Campaign, and the San Jose Mercury News have live-blogged all day. Up to the minute aggregated tweets can be read here. Tapped has highlights from the week. From FDL's live-blogging of Helen Zia's testimony on whether she experienced discrimination during the Prop 8 campaign:

When we would be out on streets, handing out fliers. People would come up and say, “you fucking dyke, you’re going to die and burn in hell. You’re an abomination…” [They would say that my] marriage is going to cause people to have sex with animals. That my marriage is going to cause them to marry other people so there will be more polygamy, [that it] is going to cause great harm to their children, [and] cause molestation of children. That my marriage to Leah [would] cause [the] end of human race…It was a highly painful and discriminatory and hurtful message.

Nate Silver joins a few other poll watchers in declaring the Massachusetts race a toss up:

You can still argue that Coakley is favored — and I might even believe you. Hell, I might even wind up making that argument myself. But at this point, you can't really cite the public polling as a data point in favor of your argument.

Yglesias notes that a Republican winning in Massachusetts is hardly unheard of:

At the end of the day, it’s hardly impossible for a Republican to win statewide in Massachusetts. Mitt Romney won in 2002. Paul Cellucci won in 1998. And William Weld won in 1990 and 1994. What’s more, Weld almost beat John Kerry in 1996. There hasn’t been an open Senate seat in Massachusetts in forever, and it’s hard to beat incumbents who aren’t hit by scandal or something, but in the more open fields of gubernatorial politics the Bay State Republicans have done quite well. But the formula for winning as a Republican in Massachusetts is pretty clear—you want to be independent from the machine, and generally for lower taxes and less regulation than your Democratic opponent, but also decidedly not as right-wing as the kind of guys the GOP runs for Senate in Alabama.

But Matt still thinks Brown will lose because he's only "putting a slightly moderate spin on orthodox conservative views." Weigel is less sure:

All Republican guns are blazing, but that doesn’t translate to a ground game that can compete with the union and machine ground game that Democrats are mustering. It’s Republican activists in states like Texas manning the phones for GOTV calls. Nonetheless, there’s a growing sense that Coakley, by failing to campaign hard and define the race (and Brown) in December, might have created a GOP opening that’s impossible to close.

Blumenthal's latest thoughts are here.

 
He Pingping of China holds the hand of Sultan Kosen of Turkey as they attend the Guinness World Records Roadshow, on January 14, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey. He, standing at 73 cm (2 feet 5 inch), and Kosen, at 246.5 cm (8 feet 1 inch), are both in the Guinness World Records for their statures. By Burak Kara/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

Back in 2006, I was a staff counsel to the House subcommittee with chief oversight responsibility for federal anti-drug efforts.  I have since decided that the War on Drugs is a comprehensive failure and a disaster for the rule of law.  Nevertheless, your reader is wrong to say that "the GOP and 'tough on drugs' moralists still demonize all drug use as a black or gay inner-city problem that occasionally seeps into suburbia."

Pretty much all of the federal efforts against meth were initiated by the Republican Congress through earmarks, because Bush's drug czar, John Walters, was obsessed with marijuana as the "gateway drug," and he showed little enthusiasm for fighting meth.  Democrats AND Republicans in Congress rightly had a very low opinion of Walters and his office, and my experience there–which included organizing field hearings on meth in white, rural locations–indicated that the congressional GOP largely understood the meth problem pretty well.

And by the way, a distinction should be made between meth and crystal meth.  The latter is a much more potent and poisonous form manufactured in Mexico.  Crystal meth has become a much worse problem here since the federal government made it much more difficult for "mom-n-pop" labs in the U.S. to operate, thanks to tight restrictions on the sale of pseudoephedrines.  The Mexicans just picked up the slack.

A reader writes:

I grew up in rural, small-town (pop 300) Iowa and me and my entire circle of friends used meth for several years from the late 80’s to the mid-90’s or so. Most of the analysis so far as to why it’s so popular in rural areas is too complicated and misses the point, I think. 

There’s really no need to analyze religiosity or socio-economic factors.  It boils down to two things: it’s available, and it’s cheap.  When one first starts using meth, before they build up a tolerance, one can get high all night for as little as five dollars.  That’s cheaper than any other drug, including alcohol, and is even cheaper than a pack of cigarettes these days.

It’s also the only drug besides marijuana that’s easily available in those areas. Cocaine might be found from time to time, but it’s several times the price of meth, and heroin is never even heard of. 

I’m sure some of those other factors contribute somewhat to the problem, but really it’s all beside the point.  Basically, people like to get high.  If something is readily available for cheap, that’s going to be their drug of choice.

Radley Balko makes the case that Coakley is "far to the right" of Kennedy on criminal justice:

The Melendez-Diaz case wasn’t an anomaly. Coakley has made her reputation as a law-and-order prosecutor. More troubling, she’s shown a tendency to aggressively push the limits of the law in high-profile cases and an unwillingness to cop to mistakes — be they her own or those of other prosecutors. Coakley’s most recent high-profile case was the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” hoax, in which she defended Boston authorities’ massive overreaction to harmless light-emitting-diode devices left around the city as a promotional gimmick.

More on the 2007 "bomb scare" from Wiki:

The LEDs were arranged to show a cartoon character displaying the middle finger. Two variants were manufactured with the LEDs arranged in pixelated likenesses of Ignignokt and Err, Mooninite characters from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said the device "had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires." Others compared the displays to the Lite-Brite electric toy in appearance.