The Crossed Pond

So, I’ve mentioned before that I’m not altogether on board with Rand Paul. However, his opponent, Trey Greyson, has decided to make the distinction more clear and the contrast more favorable to me…for Paul.

Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state, is trailing in polls behind physician Rand Paul (Ron Paul’s son) in the Bluegrass State’s GOP Senate primary. To try and generate some momentum, Grayson is putting his chips on national security, noting that such a strategy was “effective” for Sen. Scott Brown (R., Ma.) earlier this year. “This is the issue in Republican primaries,” he says.

This week, Grayson released a new web video calling Paul’s foreign policy ideas “strange.” He then followed up with this website: RandPaulStrangeIdeas.com. “Rand is a lot slicker than his dad,” Grayson says. “He tries to avoid talking about national security, but it’s a weak issue for him. He lies about his views.” Grayson points to Paul’s stances on Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan as examples.

While ready to hammer Paul the younger on national security, Grayson says he’s not entirely against the Paul-family brand of libertarian politics. Paul’s father, a Texas congressman and former presidential candidate, “is pretty accurate on economic stuff,” he says. Nonetheless, he still calls Rand “a radical.”

Rand decided to go on the air claiming he was in fact in favor of leaving Gitmo open and for trying terrorists in military tribunals off U.S. soil (also funny: “Rand Paul, the son of a veteran…”), although he definitely seems to prefer using the “strong national defense” construction when explaining his foreign policy views, which strikes me as a bit wiggly, but that might be my own preconceptions (in that I’m for “strong national defense”, my definition of that is just very different than, say, some people’s.

So, contra Joe Wilson, there is specific language in the health care bill which would explicitly prohibit any coverage for illegal immigrants. Still not sure why a segment of Congress are so specifically concerned about that, but whatever—Obama made sure it was in there, and yesterday highlighted it to Congressional Republicans, who have decided to deem the language acceptable.

The downside, however, is President Obama suddenly has the headache of trying to placate Hispanic Democrats in Congress, who are today vowing to vote against the health care reform package if it contains that exclusionary language.

The Senate language would prohibit illegal immigrants’ buying healthcare coverage from the proposed health exchanges. The House-passed bill isn’t as restrictive, but it does — like the Senate bill — bar illegal immigrants from receiving federal subsidies to buy health insurance.

Hispanic Democrats say they haven’t moved from their stance that they will not vote for a healthcare bill containing the Senate’s prohibitions.

They claim that while it may be politically popular in some parts of the country to ban illegal immigrants from using their own money to buy coverage, it is not good policy. Illegal immigrants will, one way or another, need medical attention in the United States, and it would be cheaper and more humane to provide them coverage if they pay for it. Otherwise, they will seek treatments in the nation’s emergency rooms, effectively increasing medical costs.

Considering how fragile passage of the health care legislation looks to be, this is one sidebar political battle the White House and congressional Democrats do not need. If I were a Democrat, I’d be mighty pissed at the Hispanic caucus for risking the biggest expansion of health care in the last 50 years, which would suddenly insure another 40 million Americans and make a giant leap towards universal health care, to make a point about illegal aliens.

However, it might be that they’re just looking to secure some sort of promise for an immigration reform package down the road in exchange for their votes on health care (although some are standing firm on their threat to vote no). Which President Obama is doing. However, can the Hispanics abide having illegal immigrants explicitly written out of our nation’s health care system? And can liberals abide congressional Hispanic no votes over the matter? Stay tuned.

Marc Ambinder shares a weird anecdote.

Former Rep. Eric Massa’s description of tickle fights in his office reminded me of my own brush with powerful men and their wandering hands. When I was a cub reporter for the Harvard Crimson, I attended a 1999 Democratic primary debate between Al Gore and Bill Bradley. The then-Vice President had asked several cabinet secretaries to attend the event as his surrogates. After the debate ended, I approached the Secretary of Education, a genial man named Richard Riley, and asked for his impressions.

After I had identified myself, Riley reached out his right arm and proceeded to tickle me in the Pillsbury dough boy-style. Then, he answered my question. A few moments later, I walked up to the Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson. Same scenario. I identified myself as a reporter with the Crimson. Richardson proceeded to put me in a headlock. Then he answered my question.

Sens. Dick Durbin and Jeff Sessions have reached a compromise that will allow Durbin’s bill addressing the mandatory sentencing disparity between cocaine powder and crack rock to pass through the Judiciary Committee and head to the full Senate for a vote. The legally mandated disparity is currently 100 to 1. With this bill, it will be reduced to 20 to 1. To get the Republicans on board, Durbin had to water down a number of provisions—for instance, currently there is a five year mandatory minimum for simple possession of crack. Durbin wanted to eliminate that entirely (as damn well the Senate should). Instead, he traded eliminating that for a provision which would cap the maximum at 10 year. But, in so doing, he also got Sessions to back of amendments which would have only allowed new sentencing discretion in certain cases.

Reaction is mixed among long-time proponents of eliminating the sentencing disparity. Since pretty much all the Senators, including Sessions, agreed that the disparity is, well, terribly racist—essentially just a way to screw black men—it then seems weird to go ahead and explicitly continue it at all. The ACLU is worried that this might be the one chance to just strike the whole mess down, and if we blow it on a watered-down compromise measure, who knows when we can next address the matter? And, as the American Prospect puts it:

The Judiciary Committee passed the bill, which will go to the full Senate for a floor vote. Instead of eliminating the crack/powder disparity, which practically everyone in the committee acknowledged disproportionately affects black Americans, the senators opted to make the law one-fifth as racist as it used to be.

The senators on the committee spent the rest of the markup complimenting each other on all they had achieved with their bipartisanship.

So, a good news / bad news kind of day.

Is back with new jews, jokes.

The Ten Best from the first year here.

Item 1:

JERUSALEM — US Vice President Joe Biden said after talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security is “absolute, total, unvarnished.”

“The cornerstone of the relationship is our absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security,” said Biden, who was in the region to encourage indirect Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and discuss international efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear drive.

“Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel.”

Item 2:

JERUSALEM — Hours after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed unyielding American support for Israel’s security here on Tuesday, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem. Mr. Biden condemned the move as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”[...]

He began the day on a note of support, asserting the Obama administration’s “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.”

But by the end of the day, Mr. Biden’s tone had a very different quality. He issued a statement condemning “the substance and timing of the announcement” of the housing, and added, “Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues.”

He said the announcement “runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.”

That’s the name of a bill being introduced by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, who surveyed the civil liberties landscape and determined that the problem with it is that we provide suspected terrorists with too many, i.e. any.

The bill explicitly codifies into law a procedure which, based on any justification “the President deems appropriate”, allows the Attorney General and Secretary of Defense, within 48 hours of a person’s apprehension, to declare anybody an “unprivileged enemy belligerent”, a designation that means, once a person is so labeled, they become sent down a legal black hole and will be held indefinitely “without criminal charge and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners”, i.e. forever. Even if the President deigns to give a high value detainee a military tribunal, in other words, he can’t.

The burden of proof? It is if a person “is suspected” or “may be” an “unprivileged enemy belligerent.”

At that point, it’s not just that the President might not or probably won’t grant them appeal or a civilian trial, which is the present situation—it is that he will be legally barred from doing so. He cannot grant that person any rights even if he wanted to. Once it is so declared that a person is suspected of being an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” (itself a bone-chillingly Orwellian term—remember when they used to have to be “combatants”?), every scintilla of rights, of any kind, are forfeit.

xpostfactoid concludes:

It is unimaginable that Obama would sign such a law. At present this is an act of pure legislative aggression, an attempt to score political points, put forward by two politicians who have not a scrap of integrity left between them. But it’s also a shot across the bow for all of us. A President Palin, or Giuliani, or “Double Guantanamo” Romney, or doubtless a pandering Pawlenty, would sign it in a heartbeat. Give one of that crew a Supreme Court appointment or two, and the High Court would concur.

I have no doubt on the latter points. And I totally take Rojas’ point, which I think is aging very well, that Obama might be a net loss to civil liberties in that he’s proving as bad as Bush (he didn’;t start nothin’, but he ain’t endin’ nothing’), but with the negative side effect of turning liberals off to the issue and making everybody to the left of Bush disinclined to bring it up. Although that this is the bipartisan legislation coming from McCain and Lieberman (ugh) is a powerful counterpoint, and of course, xpost is not wrong at all that not only would a Palin, Romney, or Pawlenty sign such a bill, they would surely champion it.

As to the first point, “It is unimaginable that Obama would sign such a law”…you sure about that?

…be glad you don’t live in Russia, where the oligarchy is immune even to the enforcement of rules against vehicular manslaughter.

So you might have heard that Eric Massa, Democratic congressman from New York, announced on March 3rd that he isn’t going to run for reelection. This is unusual, as Massa is only in his first term and fought long and hard for that seat. But Massa is also a cancer survivor, and the reports all stated he wasn’t going to run again due to health reasons. We wish him the best.

It took about an hour before all sorts of insider sources hit all sorts of news sources saying “are you sure it wasn’t because of a weird sex thing?” Like Mark Foley and countless others, apparently there was some open secret about Massa, but c’mon. Give dude the benefit of the doubt. Cancer! Plus, nobody has made any public claims …

Politico then reported that Massa is resigning because of sexual harassment claims made by a male staffer (Massa is married with two kids). At which point, it dawned on some that, wait, wasn’t there some weird crap with Massa earlier…?

Massa was the congressional candidate who after losing his 2006 bid was sued for libel by his campaign manager, a case which was settled with a rather unusual statement issued jointly by the two men. Massa went on to win election in 2008.

Massa fired his campaign manager, Sanford Dickert, and later accused him, among other things, of “providing alcohol to underage boys and inviting a teenage boy to spend the night with him,” according to a November 2, 2006 report in the Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette (via Nexis). After being fired Dickert filed suit to force arbitration of the employment dispute.

Huh. Alright, but none of that is Massa’s fault. So reporters straight up asked him, on his resignation conference call, “…wait. You sure this isn’t about some weird sex thing?” To which he replied “No, I have cancer you ingracious bastards!” Whew. See, here you MSM guys go again, always trying to destroy politicians, always assuming the wors—”However,” Massa interrupts,

“Do I or have I ever used salty language especially when I’m angry, in the privacy of my inner office or at home? Yes I have and I’ve apologized where it’s appropriate.”

… Huh.

“The allegations are totally false. I’m a salty old sailor. That’s that.”

Huh.

Wait a minute. What allegations are totally false?

And who the hell refers to themselves as “a salty old sailor”? Besides somebody clearly guilty of sexual harassment I mean. If your best excuse regarding inappropriate behavior is that you are “a salty old sailor”, you have probably lost the complaint.

Well, whatever. Nobody’s even made any public allegations against Congressman Massa at this point. Just a bunch of Politico innuendo…

Pursuant to Committee Rule 7(g), the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct agreed to issue the following statement:

The Committee, pursuant to rule 18(a), is investigating and gathering additional information concerning matters related to allegations involving Representative Eric Massa.

End of statement.

Now wait just a darn minute. I thought dude had cancer? He was elected in 2008 as a darling of the netroots and one of the big success stories of that cycle. A fighter! And now he’s retiring, so it must be health. Besides, nobody—besides all these f*&king anonymous sources coming out of the woodwork today—has ever heard anything remotely relating to…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that her staff kept her out of the loop about a “rumor” that Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) made unwanted advances on a male staffer.

“I asked my staff. I said, ‘Have there been any rumors about any of this before?’” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference. “There had been a rumor, but just that. There was no formal notification to our office that anything happened. It was a one-, two-, three-person rumor that had been reported to Mr. Hoyer’s office, that they reported to my staff, which they did not report to me because, you know what, this is Rumor City. There are rumors. I have a job to do, and I’ve been doing that.”

Oh. Well I guess, since today was the big health care reconciliation thing, that you haven’t had time on such short notice to be…

Hoyer learned about an allegation of misconduct on Feb. 8, his office said Wednesday night.

Oh.

He purportedly gave Massa or his staff 48 hours to take the issue to the ethics committee, threatening to take it to the panel himself if they wouldn’t. Hoyer’s office told Pelosi’s staff about the Massa situation within days of these allegations, but Pelosi says she didn’t know this was going on.

The first-term upstate New York congressman didn’t tell the speaker anything was up until Wednesday, Pelosi asserts.

“Mr. Massa called me yesterday and told me he had been diagnosed with cancer and that he may not be seeking reelection,” she said. “That was the first I heard of that.”

Well, see, cancer. You heartless fucks.

So, he’s just going to fill out the rest of his term and retire in dign…

Rep. Eric Massa, the embattled New York freshman who just this week announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection, will announce his retirement this coming Monday at 5pm. Massa said in announcing his retirement that it was due to the return of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which has been in remission.

The House Ethics Committee has also been investigating Massa for allegedly sexually harassing a young male staffer. Massa has acknowledged using “salty language” but denied the harassment claims. Dems have been anxious for this story line to go away, though Massa’s office gave no immediate reason for his decision to leave now versus next January.

Wait, what?

Alright, Cong…Mr. Massa. Bring it on home. Set the record straight with an offizial shizatement.

Follow me and I’ll flip you some knowledge (and cursewords)…

(more…)

By now, I’m sure that most people have seen at least parts of the presentation that Rob Bickhart, the RNC Finance Director, delivered to fundraisers in Florida; the one that (strangely) compares Harry Reid to Scooby Doo and talks about Fear and Ego being large motivators for donors.

I do love the opening of this Politico story:

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.”

Ya think? Is this somehow a surprise that political parties raise money by inducing fear and promising to save the country from the Other Side? The fun part’s been watching the RNC back-peddle fast and the DNC pounce, probably while wiping their brows in secret relief that their powerpoint about Wall Street loving Republicans dancing on the corpses of the uninsured while comparing John Boehner to Scrooge McDuck never saw the light of day.

It isn’t remotely surprising, but to have this almost contemptuous strategy laid out is a pretty brutal visual. Of course both sides engage in this kind of thing, but the RNC was the one that was caught, and I almost feel an odd sort of pity them. The real question is whether it will gain any traction, and if it does, will it even matter? The story, as funny and inflammatory as it is, might be a little too political insider for most to care, but who knows. For the moment, the Dems are working their way up into a full throated rage over the presentation and are, of course, using it as a fund raising prop.

I have to admit being none too sure of Rand Paul. He is, of course, Ron’s son, and I know him to be a good guy by all accounts, and he will almost certainly be a pretty interesting character who can do a lot of good in the Senate. But, unlike his dad, he seems more willing to pander to who he perceives as his core audience, and what’s more is he seems particularly likely to pander in a very particular way. Remember my ideological objections about some of Ron Paul’s inner circle, who always seemed to be trying to get Ron to gin up on immigration, downplay non-interventionism, remind everybody how pro-life he is, that sort of thing? There are a fair few of the high guards in the Paul movement who were formed in the fire of the Buchanan campaigns in the late 90s and 00s, and a lot of effort went into molding Paul in that image (which, to be fair, wasn’t a bad idea in and of itself, just their idea of what was important about the Buchanan campaigns). I always got the impression that Paul himself was pretty core libertarian, but a lot of those around him really threw elbows to try to put a more paleoconservative spin on him, and Paul was often just too nice to put his foot down. Again, fair enough, and it didn’t wind up mattering a whole lot anyway—resting as it did entirely on Paul himself, it was pretty hard to put a spin on anything he said beyond “This is what Ron Paul thinks”.

But I sort of get the impression that we might not be so lucky with Rand. Which is not to say I don’t like him (I do) or I wouldn’t vote for him (I probably would) or I don’t think he would be in general a force for right-libertarianism in the Senate (I do), just that I have my reservations. But Ron always struck me as an entity unto himself, and Rand strikes me more as kind of a convenient personage to represent the thin line in the Tea Party movement between, say, Jim Bunning this week, and Sarah Palin last.

Anyway, I say all that really just to pass along a new Rasmussen poll which says that if Rand Paul beats Trey Grayson, the Secretary of State, in the GOP primary (a good bet), he now runs 15 points ahead of Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway, and 17 points ahead of Democratic Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo. Making this seat look very, very solid for Rand.

Belongs to Nick Gillespie.

I mean Google. Besides frequent use of the word “youngsters”, there is also this:

This isn’t the first time Topeka has switched its name to mark a cultural trend. In 1998, former mayor Joan Wagnon temporarily changed the name of the city to “ToPikachu, Kansas,” in reference to the Pikachu anime character, from the show and game called “Pokemon,” which was popular at the time, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Bunten, the current mayor, was quick to attribute that bizarre “ToPikachu” happening to another local administration.

“I read in the paper this morning that they did a similar thing a number of years ago. Hold on, maybe I can get this sorted out. Just a minute,” he said, turning to an assistant for details.

“We did it for a day,” he said, sounding perplexed. “I can’t remember why.”

Makes ya proud.

For playing this song while I stocking up on some soda. I was wandering the aisles and was immediately transfixed by the song coming out of the store speakers; the draw of the song was enough to prompt me to move to get an unobstructed sightline to the ceiling speakers where I quickly scrambled for my phone to jot down enough of the lyrics to determine the song. After successfully Googling the song, I have completely fallen in love with the song and the artist, both of which were previously unfamiliar. I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I do.

Tracy Chapman – Thinking of You

Results from the Texas gubernatorial primary are coming in, Charlie Rangel will step down as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee amidst ethics complaints, and Jim Bunning gives up his filibuster of flat-out Democratic hypocrisy.

And you thought news dumps were just for Fridays.

Although a lot of people might not guess this, at heart I identify very much as a Catholic—it defines me at a pretty deep level. I have considered very seriously joining the clergy at various times in my life. Ironically, this has gotten stronger the older I get. I say ironically because as I have gotten older, I have also diverged more fundamentally with a lot of what is today taken as basic Catholic catechism/dogma. I have become, in other words, both a more loyal Catholic, and a shittier one, at roughly the same clip and at the same time. That’s probably hard to adequately explain to someone that’s not there—and I really don’t mean that glibly—but so it goes.

Hence it’s no surprise, maybe, that Andrew Sullivan and I are pretty well on the same wavelength on such matters. Hence it’s no surprise that things like this amaze me. If you haven’t followed it, gay marriage is going to become the law of the land in D.C. this week. Hand-in-hand with that, if married couples who are gay are legally recognized as being on equal footing, in terms of rights, as any married couple, it would clearly be illegal to treat the two classes (hetero married couples, homo married couples) differently. Where that most plays out: Catholic charities, who enjoy tax exempt status but who also, as a matter of catechism, cannot accept gay married couples as, well, married. No distinction is allowable, apparently, between civil and religious marriage (a point which I am irrationally confident the Holy See will clarify/reverse at some point in the not-too-distant future).

Anyway, so the conundrum for Catholic charities in D.C. was that they couldn’t offer spousal benefits for hetero couples but not for homo couples.

The solution?

Catholic Charities President and CEO Edward Orzechowski sent a memo out to employees yesterday informing them that spouses’ who have already been enrolled in the health plan would continue to receive care under a grandfather clause, but that new employees or newly married employees would no longer be eligible to obtain coverage for their spouses through Catholic Charities.

The change goes into effect today. The District of Columbia will begin granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples beginning on March 4.

Got that? Heterosexual marriage, we are told, must be protected. It is not about discriminating against homosexuals, it is about protecting heterosexual marriage.

So the moment those two values come into direct conflict? Throw heterosexual marriage under the bus for the sake of protecting discrimination against homosexuals.

Make absolutely no mistake, that is the decision the Catholics have decided to make. That punishing homosexuals is of more value than supporting heterosexuals. Full stop.

Now you know.

Reason today pointed to a really curious case that I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about. In Germany, the state takes very seriously its responsibility to educate children—so seriously, in fact, that the laws are written in such a way as to make homeschooling your kids effectively illegal. German kids are mandated by law to attend school except in cases of ill health, and kids that don’t attend class can be picked up by the cops and marched on down there. If parents try to prevent their children from school, they risk fines and even losing custody. Such was the situation for a family of 7 German Christians, who wound up emigrating to the states after facing massive fines and seizures of the children by the cops. In January, a judge in Memphis granted their request—to seek political asylum in America. From Germany. Whose public education system, the judge found, did indeed amount to oppression.

The family has been here for some time, having left Germany in 2008. But it was not until Jan. 26 that a federal immigration judge in Memphis granted them political asylum, ruling that they had a reasonable fear of persecution for their beliefs if they returned.

In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied on home-schooling parents, including taking custody of their children.

How fascinating.

Two quick additional thoughts above and beyond the Reason commentary (which is good, as always):

1. Rojas will occasionally mention (as with our recent conversation on trust laws) that there are certain areas of libertarian philosophy where he just hasn’t quite worked out his own thinking, which is admirable. The care of children is one for me. I absolutely believe in the right to homeschooling, but some say that that can only go so far—that since kids are a captive audience who have to be protected as not of sound mind and body, you can’t just homeschool them however you please. They are not, in other words, property, they are vehicles of natural rights same as anybody but without the ability to assert their own sovereignty. But where do you draw that line? Most would draw it, say, before faith healing and denying medical care (although that’s a real tough philosophical (if not practical) debate for me), but before, say, teaching your kids intelligent design. But where do you draw it between making generalized standards for education (if, indeed, you even believe that is a responsibility of all parents), and forcing a state-sanctioned regiment on parents?

2. Secondly though, the judge is right that it is sort of an American value. I (we) have a gay Texan friend who always gets enormously pissed off when the question of whether gays would make suitable parents comes up. He rejects the premise outright, and his usual rejoinder is “I have the same right to raise f*$#ed up kids as any straight couple.” Does he? Do you? Do FLDS members? Do the Germans?

That’s sort of not necessarily relevant to this case, I suppose—I’m sure these parents are great homeschoolers. But, the German system is predicated on the idea that a basic level of schooling and, to put it another way, sanctioned required knowledge, is necessary—a public responsibility. And that raises all kinds of thorny issues, even for libertarians.

Watch all the way through to Obama without his backing vocal track.

Obama Caught Lip-Syncing Speech

So, as I mentioned yesterday, Blanche Lincoln has finally, mercifully, drawn a primary challenger, Bill Halter, the state’s Lieutenant Governor.

Well lo, with that announcement did the floodgates blow open. I knew liberals often got cheesed off at Lincoln, but man, I had no idea the amount of pent-up frustration. Suddenly, every liberal grassroots blog I visit just blew up. “BLANCHE LINCOLN IS THE BANE OF OUR DEMOCRACY!” Donation pages were set up for Halter, a big fundraising drive was made (so far, Halter’s raised nearly a million overnight in small donations), Halter got the victim card shoved in his closed fist, and it just seemed like every hit that liberalism has ever taken from Lincoln was taken from the closet, dusted off, and set on fire in effigy.

Institutionally, the dogpile has begun as well. Memorably, Lincoln filibustered with the Republicans against the Employee Free Choice Act, the only Democrat to do so. Well, today, the AFL-CIO dropped their endorsement of her (she was better than the Republican, presumably), switched to Halter, and threw a staggering 3 million on him.

(And quick, someone remind the liberal grassroots: they AFL-CIO can now use that money to directly make their views on Lincoln known. It’s the end of democracy! A point I am gleefully making to triumphant Dailykossers this morning.)

So yeah, Lincoln still has 5 million cash on hand, and now her opponent raises 3.5 million overnight. The election is in MAY.

I, like Nate Silver, can’t help but think that this is an enormous waste of time for liberals. There’s good reason to think that Halter doesn’t have any better a shot of winning as Lincoln did (both are down 23 points against the Republican, whose name I can’t even remember anymore). My hunch is he closes that some (vs. Lincoln, who had nowhere to go), but not enough to ever have a great shot at winning. But still, Dems might lose Illinois this cycle. Taking out the liberal purity stick and beating Blanche Lincoln over the head with it seems, to me, sort of pointless, time and money and energy not being spend doing things like, you know, trying to save the House.

But, the Dems do need to get Lincoln out of there to have any shot of saving the Arkansas seat, and I guess I understand the catharsis, so I suppose my response should be “more power to them.” But still, if you’re Robin Carnahan or Michael Bennet or whoever, you have to be a little cheesed off this morning.

In a case of a guy trying to run something up the flagpole, getting his underpants caught, and then inadvertently running himself up the flagpole with his pants down and everyone at the base standing around laughing up at him, Harold Ford decides to do the merciful thing and kill his Senate run in the cradle.

I actually kind of like Harold Ford, but man, talk about a disastrous rollout in which a person does everything, and I mean literally everything, wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives:

Pelosi: Health care bill can be bipartisan even without GOP votes

Read the article for the full rationale underlying that statement. You will enjoy it, particularly if you like feeling your brain cells die.

After a few weeks of, err, technical difficulties. We’re grateful to our South African friend for his gracious hosting, because we know what a pain in the ass hosting, when it goes bad, can be. Glad that we still have Jason to kick around, although if he does indeed jump to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, we might have to throw that on the blogroll, which we probably should do anyway.

You’re an insurgent conservative movement. In this particular state, Nevada, you go third party. You have a great candidate who you really like, against a Republican whore. Only, if you field him, you wind up possibly reelecting the Democratic Senate majority leader, who would surely lose otherwise.

What do you do?

What. Do. You. Do.

Crazy ole Senator Bunning may have single-handedly caused a 21% cut in Medicare fees paid to doctors in March.

Quick, someone tell John McCain!

Two words, actually: hockey, and suck. But man…hockey!

Since McCain’s come up a lot today, worth passing on that his challenger, who some have described as Birther-curious*, and who the McCain campaign ran an add on his Birtherness, disavows the whole schmiel. Speaking on the O’Reilly Factor:

“I view this entire debate as esoteric. It’s as esoteric as arguing about the eligibility of Chester Alan Arthur well over a century after he served as president,” said Hayworth, referring to the 19th-century president whose detractors would spread rumors that he was born in Canada. “Look, Barack Obama’s the 44th president of the United States. His election was certified. I believe he was born in Hawaii. I made certain statements on the air to — to provoke conversation. That’s what happens in broadcasting.”

I only pass that on because he is one of those Tea Party backed challengers trying to take down an establishment candidate. His answer is pretty similar to the other marquee Tea Party candidates, Brown, Hoffman, Rubio, Paul, et al. They can be accused of, at times, flirting with Birtherism, but I’ve never heard any of them directly express anything any more potent than “I think it’s fine if people want to ask questions) which is, to be sure, a dog whistle, but is also probably the correct answer objectively speaking.

*My favorite political coined term of 2010.

There is a very fascinating redesign going on. For the gist of it, just compare the mainpage for Ta-Nehisi Coates (one of their brightest lights, to my mind), to Andrew Sullivan’s (which is the only one they didn’t reorganize into the new “headline” format).

It’s kind of fascinating, because it sort of lays bare the tension between business and blogging. And it IS a tension, in the same way that file-sharing vs. IP is a tension – pretending otherwise is useless, as the whole point and draw of a blog is, in essence, giving away a mass amount of commentary for free. The redesign over there, which is so clearly designed to spur pageclicks and to try to funnel people away from the blogs individually and more to the site generally (hence the whole “channels” concept), is a fascinating case in point. The thinking behind it is not wrong, per se—advertisers do care more about clicks and breadth of experience than reads and depth—but it’s sort of a great illustration of the desire to get lots of eyeballs vs. the desire to get lots of eyeballs, you know, reading. Ta-Nehisi Coates has his thoughts on the redesign here, Andrew Sullivan has his here (bonus: an implicit threat to leave the Atlantic is dropped in there).

The bottom line: clearly, the redesign really screws up the whole experience, but what’s fascinating is how it seems to take EXPLICITLY as its premise a desire to play down what had heretofore been the strengths—a really quite good merging of old print with new media, and an outstanding dais of singular voices—and to cram the traffic they’ve generated through those strengths into a more traditional revenue model. Which is both the #1 complaint people have with the redesign as well as the whole point of it. What you wind up with is sort of a logjam. And I have no idea how that is going to be resolved, if at all. But it’s sort of a fascinating car accident to rubber neck, because it, I think, says a lot about the world of new media and the fact that nobody quite has figured out yet, and the things that work seem to work by accident, and the things that don’t seem to be the ones that are the most planned.

Anyway, sorry Atlantic writers. Suck to be you, and I hope they (mgmt) figure out a good compromise.

I can’t help but noticing the still quiet but notable rumblings in favor of Mitch Daniels for the Republican nomination in 2012. The best writeup in his favor probably goes to Ross Douthat in the NYT.

Anything that inches out Romney and Palin is okay by me.

So, John McCain and Lindsay Graham are introducing a bill that will specifically exempt Medicare from reconciliation—ergo, the Democrats can pass their entire health care bill via reconciliation EXCEPT the one major measure of fiscal responsibility in the damn thing, offsetting costs with cuts to Medicare. Worth noting Social Security already is specifically exempted from reconciliation (thank you, Senator Byrd!). McCain’s bill would like to add Medicare to that to further insulate the entire entitlement state from legislative fiddling. Because the main fiscal problem facing America today is that it’s too easy for Congress to cut entitlements.

On the verge of a procedural fight over health care, Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican’s presidential nominee in 2008, said Sunday that he plans to introduce legislation that would prevent Congress from changing Medicare through a process that only requires a simple majority in the Senate.

“Social Security cannot be considered in reconciliation,’ McCain said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to a rule established in the 1970s by veteran Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). “We should do the same thing with Medicare. (Sen.) Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and I will be introducing legislation: Entitlements should not be part of a reconciliation process — i.e., 51 votes. It’s too important. … Let’s start over. … It’s not too late.”

Democrats are trying to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare to pay for their health care bill, something that wouldn’t be possible under McCain’s proposal.

(Sidebar: as RCP notes, McCain himself has voted for reconciliation 9 times, most of them during the previous administration).

Of course, as Dailykos notes, in practice this is essentially meaningless pandering from McCain (who has become a curious creature of calculating his every political move of late based on a constant and seemingly disproportionate fear of his primary challenger).

But O’Connor is also neglecting another important fact: reconciliation will probably not be used to pass the entire health care reform package. Instead, the House will pass the Senate’s version of the health care bill, and reconciliation will be used to amend the Senate bill.

Since the Medicare cost-savings measures won’t be touched by the reconciliation process (the Senate has already passed them with 60 votes), McCain’s proposal wouldn’t have any impact on the health care legislation whatsoever, even if Democrats were to enact it.

Another way of looking at this: John McCain is whistling in the wind while walking backwards, and for some reason, the news focuses on the melody he is carrying…instead of the fact that he is whistling in the wind while walking backwards.

But that just adds insult to injury. It won’t have any affect on THIS use of Medicare cuts, just any other potential attempt to deal with it through the reconciliation process (which Reagan used extensively to make unpopular spending and tax cuts in a hostile climate). And it adds to a growing trend within the mainstream GOP, which I have noted before, to become the party of Not Putting Up or Shutting Up as it pertains to spending cuts. At some point, we’re going to have to deal with Medicare, and that becomes infinitely more difficult the more EITHER party throws up roadblocks or keeps ginning up political obstinacy on any attempts to reign it in. Amazingly, it’s presently the DEMOCRATS who are willing to entertain thoughts of carving into Medicare spending, while the GOP has decided to totally flip itself into the party of scaring seniors and making sure that nobody ever takes away their free candy (but socialism bad, m’kay?).

With some very notable exceptions from guys that actually have an ounce of political courage (I’m looking at you Ryan), the GOP is totally collapsing as a party willing to even pay lip service to fiscal responsibility. The new message is:

Fiscal responsibility: We mean tax cuts and no new programs not proposed by us. That’s really all we’ve got.