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You've just got to love this framing for Chris Matthews' first panel segment on his weekend bobble head show. Does President Obama have the "bedside manners" to tell the left they're not going to get a public option? How about this one instead Chris? Does President Obama have the "bedside manners" to tell anyone who wants to filibuster a public option to break out the cots and the Depends? How's that for a different lead in to this segment Chris? In case you didn't notice, it takes 51 votes to get something passed in the United States Senate, not 60. It's time for the Democrats to quit allowing these silent filibusters.

INTRO: Bedside manners--the time is coming when our Democratic President will have to break the bad news to his liberal supporters and have to tell them that they can't get the kind of health care bill on which they have set their hearts. Does he have the strong bedside manner to give them the bad news and still keep their spirits up?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Boy, Dan, this is a rock and a hard place. The liberals in the Congress are pushing and pushing, and the president has to face reality. He needs 60 senators, 218 members of the Congress.

Mr. DAN RATHER: Uh-huh.

MATTHEWS: Can both meet peacefully?

Mr. RATHER: No. The president isn't going to get a--the--what's been described as a public option. He may get something close to that, something he can camouflage up as if--he isn't going to get it. And this is going to take a long time, Chris. I wouldn't be surprised if we aren't talking about this same subject late into December. And there is the question of public fatigue. I think he will get a bill, I think it will be progress along the lines of health care reform, but he's going to need a health care reform number two. And whether he can get that in an election year of 2010 is a real open question.

MATTHEWS: Kelly, you cover it all the time, and my question is, can you square a circle? You've got people on the Republican side now, Olympia Snowe, who's aboard so far. Maybe Susan Collins, the other senator from Maine. Maybe, maybe. But you've also got Joe Lieberman of Connecticut saying, `I'm here for the--for the insurance industry of Hartford. I'm not going to be for this bill as it stands.'

Ms. KELLY O'DONNELL: Well, getting all the Democrats will be tough if you're talking about a government insurance plan. That is going to be difficult because not only Joe Lieberman, but there are a number of moderates. When you're talking about Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, the Republican ladies of Maine who get a lot of attention, they're kind of--they're using their influence really effectively right now. They still can have a phone call with the president, a one-on-one meeting with the president, which most Republicans don't have any chance of having, and they're still also talking to Republicans, expressing concerns about what it would cost, how big the change would be, could government be competent to have this kind of a program. So they're keeping the conversation going. In the end you could see Snowe, you could see Collins joining on, but that might be crucial to get to 60 because you may lose some of the moderate Democrats.

MATTHEWS: Right. Well, that's what I don't get here. Helene, jump in here. I mean, you cover the White House. How in the world does this president deliver health care if the price is a public option, when so many people who will have to vote for this to pass are against it? I don't see how it works.

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They Gave Us a Republic: Big bank execs make out like bandits.

Majikthise: Nicaragua's shocking abortion ban, and the deadly consequences.

Sadly, No: Megan McArdle argues against health care reform, ignoring pesky facts, including an important medical innovation.

Cheyanne's Campsite: Celebrate Pete Seeger's 90th year and the Newport Folk Festival's 50th.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily send tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com. Thanks.

The Washington Post is dead to me:

(T)he Washington Post has terminated its relationship with liberal columnist/blogger Dan Froomkin. Froomkin authored the "White House Watch" blog and was told today that the blog had essentially run its course.

Washington Post Media Communications Director Kris Coratti tells POLITICO that "our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com."

"Run its course"???? WTF? But David Broder, who has been at WaPo since God was a little boy and whose never been in a coffeeshop he couldn't find some colorful local to confirm his preconceived (and generally wrong) notions, is still relevant? Bill Kristol, for whom the Washington Post had to issue not one or two, but THREE retractions for direct misinformation he tried to squeeze into his typical hack op-ed, is still worth holding on to. Charles farkin' Krauthammer, who has no business opining anywhere he has gotten so much wrong, is still collecting a WaPo paycheck.

But Dan Froomkin, whom Andrew Sullivan calls the "best blogger" at the paper and who is the author of 3 of the 10 most linked to articles at WaPo, is not someone worth keeping on staff?

Glenn Greenwald suspects that Froomkin was on the losing end of some internal power struggles:

Notably, Froomkin just recently had a somewhat acrimonious exchange with the oh-so-oppressed Krauthammer over torture, after Froomkin criticized Krauthammer's explicit endorsement of torture and Krauthammer responded by calling Froomkin's criticisms "stupid." And now -- weeks later -- Froomkin is fired by the Post while the persecuted Krauthammer, comparing himself to endangered journalists in Venezuela, remains at the Post, along with countless others there who think and write just like he does: i.e., standard neoconservative pablum. Froomkin was previously criticized for being "highly opinionated and liberal" by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell (even as she refused to criticize blatant right-wing journalists).

Seriously? Does the Washington Post not realize that all these neo-cons they give endless column inches to are what's ruining this country? Steven Benen:

If Froomkin is leaving the Post, it’s a real loss. Froomkin has been a great writer with keen instincts, often picking up on a burgeoning story before it’s gained traction elsewhere. Froomkin was one of the media’s most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions.

If you like to share your opinion of the Washington Post's hiring choices, you can contact Ombudsman Andrew Alexander at ombudsman@washpost.com. Me, personally? I'm just deleting the bookmark. If I wanted neo-con and fact free tripe from Will, Kagan, Kristol and Broder, I'll just watch Fox News.

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There's an ambiguity in the rhetoric used by people who fight bigotry that people like Bill O'Reilly -- people who couldn't care less about fighting bigotry, and indeed do their best to undermine such efforts -- love to exploit. It involves the word "hate."

We use "hate" generically as a stand-in for "bigotry", in part because the word better conveys the sewer of hatefulness that is part and parcel of bigoted attitudes and behavior, and it wraps up the concepts of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and ethnic bigotry all into a neat bundle.

So what properly should be called "bias-motivated crimes" we call, more handily, "hate crimes". Deeply racist and/or bigoted organizations like the skinheads and neo-Nazis, we call "hate groups." What is more precisely labeled "violently bigoted speech" we call "hate speech."

However, "hate" is a much broader term that encompasses a great deal more than just violent bigotry. So what happens then is that people like Bill O'Reilly -- right-wingers who do their best to undermine the work of fighting such bigotry -- exploit the resulting ambiguity.

We've seen this regularly over the years as part of the debate over hate crimes. (One of right-wingers' favorite dumbass retorts: "I never heard of a love crime.") Andrew Sullivan once even devoted an entire, maundering 7,500-word piece in the New York Times Magazine devoted to the argument that we cannot hope to regulate hate.

And then there's Bill O'Reilly, who regularly calls the DailyKos, MoveOn and other liberal organizations that merely criticize him "hate groups" -- which, as I've pointed out, not only is a gross overestimation of what the liberal groups say and do, it even more grotesquely minimizes what real hate groups say and do.

So last night on The O'Reilly Factor, he was up to the same thing: Comparing the cases of the six Americans forbidden from entry in the U.K. because of their propensity for hate speech -- including Michael Savage. O'Reilly says that's fine -- but wonders why not the people who attacked Carrie Prejean, too?

Let me stipulate: Some of the ugliness uttered by Prejean's critics was appalling, disgusting, and every bit beyond the pale as the horrified right-wingers shrieking about it since have made it out to be. (It's worth noting, however, that none of the people uttering this crap were identifiable liberals in any serious sense.) Some of it was very hateful indeed. (OTOH, while I thought Janeane Garofalo's teabagging remarks were unwise, there was nothing particularly hateful about them. Harsh criticism is not hate.)

In any event, that's not hate speech. Here's the dictionary definition:

Bigoted speech attacking or disparaging a social or ethnic group or a member of such a group.

That's why the British government is barring Savage and his far-right buddies: They routinely engage in the demonization of entire blocs of people, typically brown-skinned minorities, and ultimately argue for their suppression or elimination from society.

That's not what the hatefulness around Prejean was about. It was focused strictly on her and the words she spoke publicly. It wasn't about demonizing white people or Christians, it was about what a schmuck they thought Prejean was.

What O'Reilly's doing, of course, is intentionally muddying the waters -- twisting the meaning of the term "hate speech" to be used as a weapon against its opponents. There's a word for that, too: Newspeak.

...that Mike Allen of The Politico is a hack?

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and commited war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?

And how much lower can he sink in craving buzz and traffic?

He's been a Bush bottom feeder for a long time and it won't stop anytime soon.

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The topic of these stress tests was discussed on Bill Moyers Journal this past Friday in one of the best interviews I've seen about how to get us out of this financial abyss we're in which I posted the other day at Video Cafe but here's the video again for anyone that didn't watch it already. The transcript and links to Bill Moyers are available in that post as well.

Andrew Sullivan is a bit more confident than Johnson that the banks will be nationalized and feels that the stress tests will be used as a means to justify it to the public.

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After watching the interview on Bill Moyers Journal with Simon Johnson, I hope he's right. As covered by TPM, it looks like even Lindsey Graham agrees that nationalization may be necessary.

One thing that bears noting is just what exactly Simon Johnson envisioned as to what would happen if this takes place. From the transcript of the Bill Moyers Journal interview:

Johnson: So you're looking at how the bank's balance sheets will look under stress. And then you say to them, "This is our assessment of the amount of capital you need to cover your losses, and to stay in business, and be able to make loans, through what appears to be a severe recession."

And, as the president said, we may lose a decade. So we've got to be very hard headed, and all the officials forecasters are still too optimistic on that. This is the amount of capital you need. Now you have a month, or two, to raise this amount of capital privately.

And when this was done in Sweden, by the way, in the early 1990s, they did it to three big banks. One of the three was able to go to its shareholders, raise a lot more capital, and stay in business as a private bank, same shareholders. That's an option. Totally fine. However, the ones that can't raise the capital are in violation of the terms of their banking license, if you like.

We have no problem in this country shutting down small banks. In fact, the FDIC is world class at shutting down and managing the handover of deposits, for example, from small banks. They managed IndyMac, the closure of IndyMac, beautifully. People didn't lose touch with their money for even a moment. But they can't do it to big banks, because they don't have the political power. Nobody has the political will to do it.

So you need to take an FDIC-type process. You scale it up. You say, "You haven't raised the capital privately. The government is taking over your bank. You guys are out of business. Your bonuses are wiped out. Your golden parachutes are gone." Okay? Because the bank has failed.

This is a government-supervised bankruptcy process. It's called, in the terminology of the business, it's called an intervention. The bank is intervened. You don't go into Chapter 11 because in that's too messy. Too complicated. There's an intervention, you lose the right to operate as a bank. The FDIC takes you over. I think we agree, everyone agrees, we don't want the government to run banks in this country.

So who's speaking out against nationalization? Chuck Schumer. I know everyone's shocked, right? Another corporate Democrat taking Wall Street's money and he's against it. It seems Jane Hamsher has taken notice of the Johnson inteview on Bill Moyers and Schumer's statements on This Week as well and has more on the topic here: Who Does Chuck Schumer Represent, You or the Banks?

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During a discussion on how the stimulus bill got passed where Chris Matthews wants to frame the discussion on whether there was a "win" or a "loss" for President Obama, Andrew Sullivan calls out the GOP for their hyprocrisy on when they're concerned about fiscal responsibility.

Matthews: The Republicans have taken a rather unusual position here. Well maybe not unusual but certainly a stark one Andrew. They're voting "No". That's a bet.

Sullivan: They're also saying "We are the party of fiscal conservatism". Now they managed....

Matthews: Since when though?

Sullivan: I think like ten minutes ago. I mean they spent for future debt of this country, they added thirty trillion dollars in a period of boom. We are now in the swiftest down turn in employment in decades and they're quibbling over something like four hundred billion dollars worth of spending. It doesn't make any sense. The hyprocrisy of these people, their ability to turn on a dime and not even acknowledge their own responsibility. If they hadn't spent the amount they spent in the last eight years we wouldn't have this crisis in the sense we'd have much more leeway to spend our way out a recession.

The one moment you don't want to be a fiscal conservative is when the global economy is headed down into a down draft. And yet that's the one moment these Republicans pick to allegedly stand up for their principles. It's insane I think and frankly all these news cycle spins, that's the old politics. The new politics is we're in a terrible economic crisis. Have we done enough to get ourselves out of it?

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From the Chris Matthews Show, Oct. 19, 2008.

Chris asks his panel of Kathleen Parker, Andrew Sullivan, Katy Kay and Mark Whitaker if the Republican party is out of ideas.

From a segment called: "A Good Nights Sleep,"

Is this Andy's Love mask?   Andrew Sullivan demonstrates a machine that helps with sleep Apnea.

Andrew, please stop giving us material.

We know the machine really helps.

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