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When Sen. Lamar Alexander resigned his leadership position in the GOP, I had a faint hope that Alexander was protesting the caricature his party has become with the increasing but clueless influence of the tea party. But no, that was for naught, as his very first Sunday show appearance after his Good Bye Cruel GOP letter of resignation was to blame Senate Leader Harry Reid for "manufacturing a crisis" in terms of the potential for another government shutdown over funding disaster relief for Hurricane Irene:

CROWLEY: Senator Alexander, let me ask you if you buy into Senator Warner's premise, which is that tea party folks are basically at fault, I think I'm -- that's not a direct quote, but that the tea party-backed folks in the House are the ones behind this stalemate that is now threatening yet another government shutdown. Do you agree with that?

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER (R), TENNESSEE: No, I don't. You know, I'll give the Senate Democratic leader most of the credit. He manufactured a crisis all week about disaster when there's no crisis.

Everybody knows we're going to pay for every single penny of disaster aid that the president declares and that FEMA certifies. And the House sent over a bill that does that and the Senate should have approved it.

What it did was take $1.5 billion of unobligated funds and say, we're going to -- instead of adding to the debt we're going to not add to the debt when we do this.

No crisis? Our third approach to a government shutdown in a year due to the ridiculous hostage taking of the Republican Party and it's Harry Reid that is manufacturing the crisis? We are well and truly in Bizarro-land. But of course, it's not for Candy Crowley to point out that every little thing is being held up by the Republicans in congress, making this one of the least productive congressional sessions in history.

And if "everybody knows" that Congress will approve the disaster aid, then what is the kabuki theater that the tea party Republicans insist upon? Why are Republicans suddenly now looking for budgetary offsets when they approved trillions of off-budget expenditures while they held the majority?

Of course, none of this was raised by Crowley in response. Why give her viewers any context or facts to assess Alexander's statement?

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Credit: McClatchy

As the debate over health care reform heated up in the fall of 2009, Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander called Medicaid "a medical ghetto" that "none of us, or any of our families, would ever want to be a part of for our health care." As it turns out, Alexander and his GOP colleagues were as wrong as they were cynical. A breakthrough study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reveals that Medicaid recipients have far greater access to doctors, live healthier lives and enjoy more financial stability than those who must go without. Nevertheless, 98% of Congressional Republicans voted to gut Medicaid spending by over $1 trillion in the next decade and with it, add up to 44 million people to the ranks of the uninsured.

Currently, the $300 billion Medicaid program serves roughly 60 million Americans. On average, the federal government picks up 57% of the tab, with poorer states like Mississippi and Alabama getting 75% of the funding from Washington. Medicaid not only pays for a third of nursing home care in the United States; it covers a third of all childbirths. (In Texas, the figure is one-half.) As with Medicare, Medicaid provides insurance for substantially less than private insurers (27% less for children, 20% for adults.) Still, the likes of Senator Alexander and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) suggested that it is better to be uninsured than on Medicaid.

Not according to the NBER. The same nonpartisan group that determines the official beginning and end of recessions, NBER found, as Harvard researcher and former member of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers Katherine Baicker put it, "Medicaid matters."

The NBER study avoided the pitfalls of past studies by examining the case of Oregon. After Oregon in 2008 established a lottery to add 10,000 people to it limited Medicaid rolls, the NBER team interview 6,000 of the lucky ones and 6,000 of the 90,000 who lost out. The results were striking:

We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.

The New York Times provided some of the details of the Medicaid success story:

Those with Medicaid were 35 percent more likely to go to a clinic or see a doctor, 15 percent more likely to use prescription drugs and 30 percent more likely to be admitted to a hospital. Researchers were unable to detect a change in emergency room use.

Women with insurance were 60 percent more likely to have mammograms, and those with insurance were 20 percent more likely to have their cholesterol checked. They were 70 percent more likely to have a particular clinic or office for medical care and 55 percent more likely to have a doctor whom they usually saw.

The insured also felt better: the likelihood that they said their health was good or excellent increased by 25 percent, and they were 40 percent less likely to say that their health had worsened in the past year than those without insurance.

As Ezra Klein of the Washington Post summed up the findings, "knowing that Medicaid matters is good, but we already sort of knew that." But back in Washington, in response to that self-evident truth, Democrats and Republicans have drawn contradictory lessons and offered diametrically opposed plans for the future.

By extending Medicaid coverage to families earning up to 133% of the poverty level, starting in 2014 the Affordable Care Act passed by Democrats in Congress will bring insurance to millions more Americans. A March study by the Commonwealth Fund revealed that revealed that when fully implemented, the ACA will bring relief to "nearly all of the 52 million working-age adults who were without health insurance for a time in 2010."

Not if the Republicans get their way.

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Lesley Gore--It's My Party

This week should have been our party. A decades-long fight to bring America to the notion that health care should be a right, not a privilege has cleared the first, biggest hurdle: getting to the starting gate. The fight isn't over--not by a long shot--there are many hurdles yet to clear, but yet I see progressives everywhere demanding the right to cry. It's your party, Dems, cry if you want to.

I personally don't feel like crying. I recognize that this a marathon, and we're barely in Mile 1. We've got far to go before we've won this race, but I'm just happy we've started. I don't particularly understand those who are upset that we haven't crossed the finish line right now. To me, that completely disregards the hurdles that blocked us from the starting gate and that now pepper our pathway like landmines, waiting for us to take a wrong step.

Don't believe me? Look at the bookings: yet another Sunday of Republicans telling us that this is a slippery slope to the dreaded socialist/Maoist/Leninist state. People like Lamar Alexander on State of the Union, Jim DeMint and Michelle "Bat Crap Crazy" Bachmann on Face the Nation and Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press. And even on Chris Matthews, that learned panel of pundits thinks health care reform will ultimately be a "winner" for Republicans over the Democrats. But fear not, because we can always count on the GOP laying some landmines for themselves too. Look at the mano a mano between Florida senate rivals Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio on Fox News Sunday. So I'm taking the long view, pacing myself, but don't look to me to cry at this party.

ABC's "This Week" - White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Howard Fineman, Kelly O'Donnell, Andrew Sullivan and Gloria Borger. Topics: Real Health Care Push: Will It Be A Winning Issue for Dems or Republicans? Elephants in the Room: Are Tea Partiers The Real Republicans Or Party Spoilers? Meter Questions: Will Health Care Be More of a Winning Issue for Republicans Than Democrats? YES: 8 NO: 4; Should Obama Move To the Center Instead of the Left As A Reelection Strategy? YES: 11 No: 1.

CNN's "State of the Union" - White House senior adviser David Axelrod; Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Two great heads, probably the two most articulate commentators in the health care debate -- who happen to disagree on this bill -- Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times and Robert Samuelson of Newsweek and the Washington Post, battle it out. But first, Fareed travels to Mexico City to speak with the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, on the violent drug war wracking that country, sparking civilian death rates that rival Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Fox News Sunday" - Debate between Republican candidates for U.S. Senate: Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and former state House Speaker Marco Rubio.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

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You'd think rape would be one issue Republicans would be smart enough not make into a partisan issue, but no. They couldn't help themselves.

Franken passed an amendment that was attached to a defense bill that would withhold government contracts from companies that refused to let employees bring rape cases before the courts. It should be tough voting against rape, but thirty Republicans did just that and now they are whining the night away because bloggers and some MSMers have highlighted their atrocity. And in their usual silly reality, they are blaming Sen. Al Franken because they are getting hammered over their malfeasance.

Al Franken fallout has GOP fuming

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.

“I think it’s going to make a lot of senators leery and start looking at things he’s doing earlier on, because I don’t think it got appropriate attention ahead of time.”

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Franken, who declined to be interviewed, has said previously that the measure was inspired by the story of former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleges that she was drugged, beaten and gang-raped at age 19 when stationed in Baghdad. She fought the arbitration clause in her contract, and in September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Jones’s sexual assault allegations were not “related to” her employment, allowing her to proceed in court. KBR is fighting the ruling.

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“I don’t know what his motivation was for taking us on, but I would hope that we won’t see a lot of Daily Kos-inspired amendments in the future coming from him,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in the Senate Republican leadership. “I think hopefully he’ll settle down and do kind of the serious work of legislating that’s important to Minnesota.”

Aides point out that despite attacks on Republicans by liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and on blogs such as Daily Kos, Franken never appeared on any of the shows or on the blogs to make a partisan argument about the matter, saying that the senator turned down entreaties to do so.

Also, they point to the 10 Republicans who voted for the amendment as proof that it wasn’t a partisan measure.

“Sen. Franken has been proud to partner with both Republicans and Democrats to find common-sense solutions to the problems we face,” said Jess McIntosh, his spokeswoman. “He’s been working hard for Minnesota since he got here five months ago and has already introduced 10 bills — four of which were introduced with Republican co-sponsors, and two already passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support.”

Cornyn should be embarrassed by the Republicans, but instead tries to say they were misrepresented. Really? Did he vote yes or no? That's the only question that should be debated. All the Republicans who voted against Franken's measure have a lot more to answer for. Bad PR is just the beginning.

The Sunlight Foundation:

Today Russ Feingold and Dianne Feinstein brought S.223, the Senate electronic disclosure bill, to the floor for a unanimous consent vote. When they asked if there was any objection, Sen. Lamar Alexander, filling in for the minority leadership, announced that he had an objection, indicating that some Senator in the Republican caucus has placed a secret hold on the disclosure bill. This is twice in two years that a Senator has placed a secret hold on legislation providing for more disclosure to the public.

Update: Here's Feingold's statement.

Would it be wrong of me to guess that Sen. Stevens is once again the secret hold placer, due to his fear of disclosure on the internet tubes?

Freedom of Expression

Lamar Alexander