The Dish

This video shot by an emotional mourner is haunting:

(Hat tip: Tehran Bureau)

CNN's new poll suggests that the likely passage of health insurance reform has resulted in a big jump in support for Obama among the young and the Democrats. Once it sinks in, I suspect the effect will be more potent. And once the full panoply of the first year sinks in, even more so. The liberal base is not always best represented by HuffPo and Howard Dean.

Well, almost. Ezra notes how the final bill is remarkably similar to the plan Obama outlined in his campaign. If you recall the mandate debate in the primaries, it's moved a little to the left, although the death of the public option moved it back again a little to the right. I certainly regard the passage of the health insurance reform bill to be another victory of strategy over tactics. In his first year, Obama will have achieved something that no previous Democrat had managed: universal health insurance. This will be spun away by some. And maybe the infuriated left-liberals and the angry right-oppositionists will get some temporary respite from that. But guess what? He did it. It was as grueling a victory as the one in the primaries, and took even longer. But it was a victory, a substantive, enduring legislative victory the like of which no president has achieved since Reagan.

It will have to be tweaked, as Reagan's tax cuts were. But like that first year triumph, it will last. For good or ill. And unlike tax cuts announced as pain-free, this was a clearly budgeted, deeply difficult, legislatively complex operation. The only Pyrrhic part of it is the GOP's celebration of its opposition. Their glee is premature.

This dramatic clip is labeled, "Booing the Supreme Leader’s Message”:

A prominent Iranian twitterer tweets:

Mousavi’s car attacked by plainclothes on the way to Tehran

Attackers damaged the car but no one were injured and Mousavi is safe

Mackey elaborates:

My colleague Nazila Fathi writes to say that the opposition Web site Rahesabz reported that Mir Hussein Moussavi’s convoy was attacked and one of his bodyguards was injured. According to the Web site, a group of Basiji militia members followed Mr. Moussavi’s convoy in Qum on motorcycles and blocked it several times. At one point, they attacked Mr. Moussavi’s car and smashed the rear window which injured one of his bodyguards. Mr. Moussavi was not hurt. The leader of the group was also injured after one the bodyguards confronted them.

Take it away, Confederate Yankee:

Robert Byrd has been around a very long time, and his many decades of service have made West Virginia a wonderful state in which to manufacture methamphetamine or frame the locals for murder. But it's time for Senator to do the right thing, and expire. It isn't too much to ask for Byrd to step off for that great klavern in the sky before the Senate vote that may force this nation to accept government-rationed health care. Even a nice coma would do. Without his frail, Gollum-like body being wheeled into the Senate's chambers to cast the deciding vote, the Senate cannot curse our children and grandchildren with crushing debt and rationed, substandard healthcare.

Jon Cohn gets down to specifics:

A family making $50,000 will have to make serious sacrifices to find $10,000 [the amount you're likely to spend for an insurance policy under the new law]. But it’s better–light years better–than finding $25,000 or more [the amont you'd have to find without the new law]. It’s potentially the difference between having to give up your home, get an extra job or declare bankruptcy. Just knowing the bills that could come will be the difference between getting care you need–and skipping it, at grave risk to your health.

I keep waiting for this obvious fact to sink in. What Obama has done is force the existing system to insure 30 million more people at a modest cost, and to include a swathe of (still-insufficient) varieties and strategies of cost-control. This is huge – the biggest first year achievement of any president since Reagan. If you consider that he did this while also managing the steepest down-turn in decades, revamping America's image in the world, preventing a banking implosion, and prosecuting two unresolved wars in the face of almost deranged opposition, it's pretty damn impressive.

This seems clearer to me after a break from the Intertubes. Maybe others will feel the same way after the hols.

Bill Kristol, whose view of politics is pretty much as Trotskyite as the far left used to be, does not see healthcare reform as a means of addressing a serious political, economic and moral challenge. It is, of course, just one more battle in the eternal ideological and partisan warfare he believes in. His current advice to the GOP is the same as the advice he has given for a couple of decades now:

Keep fighting on health care. Fight for the next few days in the Senate. Fight the conference report in January in the Senate and the House. Start trying to repeal the worst parts of the bill the moment it passes, if it does… The criticism of the Obama administration needs to be broad-based, because you never know just what issue is going to take off, and because the opposition needs to knit together all those who object to the Europeanization of America… So: Fight on with respect to health care. Fight on other fronts. And recruit new fighters. In a word: Fight.

Note that the issues as such are largely opportunistic – "you never know just what issue is going to take off".

Just keep punching out the outrages, constantly wage scorched earth resistance to any reform of any major problem, find any issue, any appointee, any opening to wage a campaign of brutal oppositionism … and for what? To win against liberals. That's the goal. Yes, that's all they have. And that will make them happy enough. It's a game after all, isn't it?

Healthcare reform? The GOP has no way to insure the uninsured and is now pledging to keep Medicare untouched to foil any cost controls. Climate change? Again, there's no valid alternative, no brave championing of a carbon tax as a better alternative to cap and trade, just an incessant attempt to throw mud and scandal at any of those concerned with global warming. The deficit? If it grows, attack Obama. If it shrinks a little and joblessness rises, attack Obama. There's no real coherence here, just bellicosity, limitless partisanship, profound cynicism and fanaticism.

Fareed proffers a salutary warning not to look away. He's more optimistic than I am and more comfortable with direct US intervention in the months ahead. But his core point is surely valid: this year will be as critical in Iraq as in Afghanistan. If the US is to extricate itself successfully from this misjudgment, it will need much more care in leaving than it took in invading. The Sunnis remain unreconciled and the Kurds are restive.