The Dish

"We may be No. 1, but there is sort of an insurgent quality to Fox News. And that's kind of our attitude: 'Hoist a Jolly Roger, pull out our daggers and look for more throats to slit.' This is tremendous fodder for us. My lord, we've been living on it," – Brit Hume.

I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. But imagine for a moment that the opt-out public option passes and becomes law (I give it a 65 percent chance at this point). Then what happens? Well, there has to be a debate in every state in which Republicans, where they hold a majority or the governorship, will presumably decide to deny their own voters the option to get a cheaper health insurance plan. When others in other states can get such a plan, will there not be pressure on the GOP to help their own base? Won't Bill O'Reilly's gaffe – when he said what he believed rather than what Roger Ailes wants him to say – be salient? Won't many people – many Republican voters – actually ask: why can't I have what they're having?

This is why this is lethal. The argument against new entitlements requires a macro-level perspective. You have to argue that although a measure may help an individual get something she wouldn't otherwise have – like adequate and reliable, if barebones, health insurance – its consequences will come back to haunt us all. You have to remind people that money doesn't grow on trees, that in the long run, more government involvement might hurt healthcare excellence, that you just need to rely on the wonderful private sector to deliver the goods in a more market-friendly way. This is always a tough sell because it requires voters to put abstract concerns over practical short-term gains. It's why conservatism always has a tough time in welfare state democracies.

But with health insurance companies, the GOP may not only have to make this argument, they may be onto a defining alliance they really, really don't want or need.

Imagine Republicans in state legislatures having to argue and posture against an affordable health insurance plan for the folks, as O'Reilly calls them, while evil liberals provide it elsewhere. Now, of course, if the public option is a disaster in some states, this argument could work in the long run. But in the short run? It's political nightmare for the right as it is currently constituted. In fact, I can see a public option becoming the equivalent of Medicare in the public psyche if it works as it should. Try running against Medicare.

The genius of the opt-out is that it coopts the states' rights argument (just as ending the prohibition on marijuana does); it has the potential to make "liberalism' popular again; it has easily demonized opponents – the health insurance industry; and it forces Republicans not to rail against socialism in the abstract but to oppose actual benefits for the working poor in reality.

It's a brutal, Chicago-style political maneuver. And Obama appears not to be the person really pushing it.

Meep, meep.

And sometimes, only the keyboard cat can do it justice:

Baby Einstein Co. – maker of “educational” DVDs whose founder was officially recognized by George W. Bush during his 2007 State Of The Union address – issues a massive recall spurred by charges of false advertising. Nell Minow explains:

The academic studies show that what infants learn from watching a family member once takes them four times as long to absorb in a DVD. And the very act of watching a DVD with the pulsing refresh rate of the screen can be at the same time soporific and stimulating, making it more difficult for them to get restful sleep. The only thing they learn from these DVDs is how to watch television.

The public option is still alive for a variety of reasons, as Nate Silver has pointed out. The Dish always thought it was viable because the logic behind it makes sense to anyone with a brain, because it would save money, because it is actually popular and because the opt-out option squares the circle nicely.

But Nate is also correct about this:

None of this would have been possible without the yeoman effort of a relatively small number of bloggers and activists — they know who they are — who were tired of taking "no" for an answer. They wanted this fight because of the paradigm-shifting implications it could have for how business gets done in the Democratic Party. And, somewhat to my surprise, they're having it.

What part of "we" in "we are the ones we've been waiting for?" does the Beltway still not understand? And why has it taken this long for the Obamaphiles to tackle their leader. He's the follower, for Pete's sake, remember? The people who voted for him are the leaders.

So make him.

Orange City, Iowa, 11.30 am

A "90 percent" chance of Johnston. Money quote:

In other Levi news, Jones said that he's working on a book about the Palin family. "There's a whole lot of material he hasn't talked about because he wanted to protect the family," Jones says. But since the Palin's have been talking trash about him, Levi isn't keeping quiet anymore. "The gloves are off, everything is going to come out." While we don't want a body double for this shoot, we certainly hope there is going to be a ghostwriter for this book!

John Kerry – fresh from his trip to Afghanistan and flush from his success with Karzai – comes down between the counterinsurgency of McChrystal and the counterterrorism of Biden:

… although he leaned far closer to McChrystal than to Biden. Kerry dismissed a “narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban” as flirting with the risk of “civil war,” and doubted that such a counterterrorism mission could accomplish its objectives without a robust military presence to collect intelligence in support of counterterrorism operations. “For now, we need the boots on the ground to get the information and protect our interests,” he said.

Bolstered by his credibility in delivering the biggest tangible diplomatic success for the Obama administration on Afghanistan to date, Kerry endorsed a counterinsurgency strategy in the Pashtun areas of “the southern and eastern theaters of Afghanistan,” and limited to “major population centers,” saying “we cannot and should not undertake a manpower intensive counterinsurgency operation on a national scale.” He praised McChrystal as “understand[ing] the necessity of conducting a smart counterinsurgency in a limited geographic area,” but said McChrystal’s current plan “reaches too far, too fast.”

Mark Moyar, a scholar at the Marine Corps University who focuses on counterinsurgency, said narrowing U.S. focus on south and east Afghanistan “makes a certain amount of sense,” as the Taliban-centered insurgency is based in that region. But it runs the risk of allowing insurgents to disperse and set up shop unchallenged elsewhere in the country. “There is a danger, as there has been in a number of other counterinsurgencies, to focus on area, make it a high priority, but [insurgents] eventually figure it out and go somewhere else,” said Moyar, author of a new book about counterinsurgency, “A Question of Command.” “Already, [the insurgency is] starting to get stronger in the north and west” of Afghanistan.

One has to wonder if Oprah will indeed ask Sarah Palin about the bizarre stories she has told about her fifth pregnancy. I mean: why not ask her to recount that astonishing intercontinental, multiple day labor experience across several time zones and past nearby children's hospitals? Why not ask her if Levi was telling the truth when he claimed that Sarah kept nagging him to allow Tripp to be adopted by his nearly-mother-in-law?

My guess is that Oprah will punt, like everyone else. But we don't know what's in Lynn Vincent's "book" yet, do we?

David Sirota asks why it is socially acceptable for Lance Armstrong to hawk alcohol, which the International Journal of Cancer estimates causes "roughly one in 30 of the world's cancer cases":

[L]ess than a year after Phelps was crucified for merely smoking weed in private, few noticed or protested the planet's most famous cancer survivor becoming the public face of a possible carcinogen. "Apparently, it’s perfectly acceptable for a world-class athlete to endorse a substance like alcohol that contributes to thousands of deaths each year, as well as hundreds of thousands of violent crimes and injuries," says Mason Tvert, a co-author of the new book "Marijuana Is Safer." "Yet a world-class athlete like Michael Phelps is ridiculed, punished and forced to apologize for marijuana, the use of which contributes to zero deaths, and has never been linked to violent or reckless behavior. Why the double standard?"