Who didn't see this orgy of media "analysis" coming? According to the media, anything at all that happens is good news for Republicans, as Atrios says.

You know how crazy it is when Bob Schieffer's making sense.

But the question is, why are Democrats such wankers? Really. We just gained two more proudly progressive seats in Congress (one of them replacing a Blue Dog), but instead they're fixated on 1) a state that has always voted for the out-of-power party in gubernatorial races, helped along by a very bad Democratic candidate and 2) another state that, like the self-destructive electorate of California, loves to vote for anyone who says they have a magic secret formula to cut property taxes. Sheesh.

Do they really not understand the point of healthcare reform? There are many reasons, but the economic argument is simple: It's so people who lose their jobs won't have to worry. It's so employers who are afraid to hire because of premium costs can afford to do so. This has everything to do with jobs - and it's their job to make that clear.

Are they really that appallingly bad at the sales and marketing of this simple idea?

Democrats on Capitol Hill began a nervous debate Wednesday about the course President Obama has set for their party, with some questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president's agenda.

The conversations came as White House officials insisted that the party's gubernatorial defeats in Virginia and New Jersey had few implications for Obama's standing or for Democratic prospects in the 2010 midterm elections.

But moderate and conservative Democrats (Editor's note: Or, as we like to call them, aspiring Republicans) took a clear signal from Tuesday's voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt. Liberal lawmakers, meanwhile, said the party's shortcoming came in moving too slowly on health-care reform and other items that would satisfy a base becoming disenchanted with the failure to deliver rapid change in government.

Voters in both states cited the economy as by far their top concern, and many lawmakers said the outcomes were a blunt wake-up call to put the issue front and center.

"The question is, do people think we're tending to the things they care about?" said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) as he left a meeting of Senate leaders. He said there was palpable concern among his colleagues Wednesday that the main agenda items Democrats are pursuing -- health care and climate change -- resonate very little with voters focused on finding or keeping jobs.

Are they kidding me? Do they actually know any unemployed people? Because I do, a ton of 'em. And every single one over 40 talks about how they can't wait until they get some help with health care.

Why, oh why are Democrats so out of touch with reality? I guess because they don't have to worry about paying for health care or getting another job if they lose this one - they can always become lobbyists. Really, they need to sit down with some bloggers and stop listening to Beltway soothsayers.

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Michele Bachmann was on Glenn Beck's show yesterday -- with Judge Andrew Napolitano sitting in for Beck, who came down with appendicitis after his candidate, Doug Hoffmann, lost in the NY-23 race -- plumping her big Tea Party protest of the House health-care reform bill today on Capitol Hill -- which she calls "Super Bowl of Freedom".

According to ThinkProgress, Bachmann is calling on protesters to “scare” members of Congress into killing health-care reform. “Republican organizers are planning for activists to go into the House office buildings and the U.S. Capitol and confront members directly.”

You have to be a little concerned about the kinds of nutcases she's calling upon to visit their Congresscritters. After all, Bachmann herself is a promoter of far-flung "constitutionalist" conspiracy theories about replacing the American currency, youth re-education camps and Obama-ordered "concentration camps." Napolitano opened the segment with a clip of Bachmann grilling Tim Geithner with her otherworldly questions about the "constitutionality" of the stimulus package.

So of course, they couldn't help but indulge in a fresh round of paranoia about security for today's 'Tea Party':

Napolitano: I have to give you a little bit of a warning. I have a friend in the American intelligence community who lives and works around Washington, D.C., who told me: 'Watch out for Mrs. Pelosi making the security requirements almost impossible to get to this rally.' You guys have to watch out for that, that she doesn't do something to make it very difficult for the folks to come to this gathering at noon tomorrow.

Bachmann: Well, she controls the Capitol. She's a very powerful individual. And she controls ingress and egress, and so, I think it would be a big mistake for Speaker Pelosi to prevent the American people from coming to their House. This is their House, after all. This is why we need to make this emergency 'House Call' on Congress tomorrow.

One can only imagine some of these doofus teabaggers getting lost on the Metro and then blaming Nancy Pelosi for it.

I'd like to thank John for letting me spread the word about this cause, and I'd like to thank everyone here at Crooks and Liars for helping pitch in. It's important that we work to end the war in Afghanistan, and it's important that we support progressive voices who work to do so.

Six months ago, President Obama had ordered in tens of thousands of new troops to Afghanistan while admitting that there was no strategy. Support for the war in Afghanistan was at 50%. Today, 58% oppose the war in Afghanistan. And President Obama right now is engaged in the process of "rethinking Afghanistan."

For the last few months, too, progressive blogger Derrick Crowe has been writing on the Afghanistan war. And his posts have made a difference.

Derrick has brought to bear facts, video testimony, statistics, political insight, and thoughtful arguments to drive home the point that escalating the war in Afghanistan is the wrong policy. Derrick has been writing and researching so prolifically because he's been on a three month fellowship, using funds provided out-of-pocket by the good folks over at Brave New Foundation and the editors at The Seminal.

Yesterday, Derrick's three month fellowship came to an end. Now I'm asking for your help to keep it going, and to support a strong voice against the war in Afghanistan.

Can you pitch in $10 or $20 to help extend Derrick Crowe's blogging fellowship against the war in Afghanistan? Your contribution will go directly to Derrick, and if we can raise $5,000, we can keep the fellowship going for an entire year.

Click here to donate.

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It's good news that unpaid bloggers are included in this compromise, but since I don't know the details, I don't know if this would have kept Judy Miller out of jail:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, leading Senate Democrats and a coalition of news organizations have reached tentative agreement on legislation providing greater protections against the fining or imprisonment of reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the deal, made public Friday, federal judges could quash subpoenas demanding testimony or information from reporters if the judges determined that the public interest in news gathering outweighed the need to uncover the source of a leak, including, in some circumstances, unauthorized disclosure of classified government information.

Protection under the so-called shield law would also be extended to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news.

A version of shield legislation was approved by the House in March. But a similar bill has stalled in the Senate, and its prospects appeared to dim significantly in September when the administration, responding to apprehension expressed by intelligence agencies and prosecutors, took a harder line with regard to cases in which the government could claim national security concerns.

With the new agreement, however, the White House has now moderated that position.

[...]The leading proponents of the legislation, Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both Democrats, expressed confidence that the compromise would move quickly through the Senate.

“We still get most of our information from investigative journalists,” Mr. Specter said. “If you can’t protect sources, there is a lot of public corruption and private malfeasance that will go undetected and unpunished.”

So it may turn out that Harry Reid was the hero in the public option after all.

Much of the hoopla surrounding Reid's decision centers around a tense Thursday night meeting between President Obama and Senate health care principles--including Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)--at the White House. But according to sources briefed on White House-Senate health care negotiations, things began boiling over earlier in the week, when a key question was, Who's going to take the blame when the public option doesn't make it in to the base health care bill?

{}

On the morning of the meeting, anonymous sources--and even some high profile senators--came forward to say that Reid was leaning very heavily toward backing the public option. And that's the news he and other senators brought to the White House that night.

"Reid actually asked Schumer to make the pitch," the first source said. When he did, "Obama was less than responsive and asked questions that suggested he preferred an option that could get the trigger and bipartisan support."

How the meeting ended remains unclear. But what we do know is that, early Friday morning--hours after the parties went their separate ways--Politico's Mike Allen reported that, according to a top administration official, Obama's preference was still for triggers, and he'd let the senators know that...read on

And mcjoan says that reconciliation may still be on the table after all.

This is the correct answer to the bleating of Joe Lieberman, and Blanche Lincoln, and Ben Nelson. If you don't want to be a part of the most critical domestic policy reform in generations, we can always do it without you.

"Sure, it's always an option," Reid said after leaving his press conference Monday, when he announced that he'd be pushing forward with a public health insurance option with an opt-out provision that would give states the right not to participate....

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who is in charge of corralling and counting votes, also said that reconciliation is still being considered. "The failsafe on this is reconciliation," Durbin said. "I hope we don't reach it because you can only do a limited amount of things on reconciliation."

Reid's comments were from Monday, before Joe put on his show, which could mean that Reid's now definitely put it on the table.

You know how much the Villagers hate this idea, so what that means to mean is it's awesome.

Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show yesterday, via Media Matters:

You -- In 2008, in our presidential election, we had a, a, a war veteran, Vietnam War veteran, John McCain, against an elitist, five-minute career senator of a hundred and fifty days. That senator was running as a Democrat, and had actively sought the defeat of the U.S. military in Iraq -- had actively sought to undermine General Petraeus, who was the author of the surge that led to a turnaround in Iraq and a victory. And now that same man is dithering in Afghanistan while American soldiers -- not Bush soldiers, not Obama soldiers, American soldiers -- are dying. At record numbers.

The threat that people in this country who want to be free face is now within our own borders. That's the stark reality. We'll be back.

Obama and the liberals are, in the land of the Limbaughst, the True Enemies of America.

If only Limbaugh really were "just an entertainer." Then we could dismiss him as a clown. But "entertainers" don't have audiences of "dittohead" acolytes who absorb their every word as gospel truth. "Entertainers" don't make condemnations of half the country as being the "enemy within" and actually stand -- and actually stand a chance of the other half nodding its head in agreement.

This, of course, is how you whip up violence: You scapegoat, you demonize, you dehumanize, and most of all, you paint a target on people's backs and say they're they Enemy. And you can't help but suspect Limbaugh is perfectly aware of this.

I devote a fair amount of space in The Eliminationists to Limbaugh. For a lot of reasons. Obviously, he's been doing this for awhile. But he's also stepping it up quite bit.

PROMOTIONAL NOTE: I'll be speaking tonight in Mount Vernon, Wash., at the Lincoln Theater at 7 pm. I'll be discussing my book as well as the recent visit to the city by Glenn Beck.

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The Bitter Man strikes back.

Democratic moderates who control the balance of power on health care legislation balked Tuesday at a government-run insurance option for millions of Americans, underscoring the enormity of the challenge confronting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid one day after he unveiled the plan as a consensus product.
{}

The decision to include a government insurance option in his legislation had obvious appeal for liberals who account for a strong majority inside the Senate Democratic caucus, and it is likely to please labor unions and party activists in Nevada.

But it has gained less-than-effusive support from Obama, who is eager to have at least a dollop of bipartisanship for his signature domestic issue. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, the only Republican who has sided with Democrats in committee this year, has announced she will not support the bill Reid drafted.

Still, if Reid is pressed in coming weeks by moderates to fall back, he can explain to liberals that he was forced to do so because his preference — a government insurance option — proved to be unobtainable in the Senate. Already, that pressure is evident...read on

Joe Lieberman is a bitter old man who was looking for some media juice yesterday when he decided to spit in the face of Americans who want real health care reform. Can you trust either his motives or what he says anymore?

Joe Lieberman has once again rolled a political hand grenade into the Democrats’ tent.

The Connecticut independent obliterated any illusion that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) can quickly ram through health care reform with a public option, telling reporters on Tuesday that he would join Republicans in a filibuster to prevent a vote on Reid’s plan if it isn’t changed first.

“We’re trying to do too much at once,” said Lieberman, who signaled he would vote with Reid on the first procedural vote that requires 60 votes, the motion to proceed.

The media will never call out Lieberman over his bullshit.

And Lieberman’s justification on this is just nonsense – the public option would SAVE money for the government, to the tune of $100 billion dollars over 10 years according to the Congressional Budget Office. It also would cost nothing to the taxpayer, being financed by individual premiums.

The public option saves money and Holy Joe knows it. And the Senate will never take action against another Senator no matter how outrageous their behavior is.

But Lieberman’s fellow Connecticut senator, Democrat Chris Dodd, who faces a tough reelection fight in 2010, dismissed the idea that Lieberman would incur any retribution.

“No, no, no. People are going to be all over the place,” he said when asked if Lieberman should be punished. “The idea that people are going to be reprimanded because somehow they have a different point of view than someone else is ridiculous. That isn’t going to happen.”

Lieberman can thank President Obama for retaining his committees and unless he gets caught in bed with a goat, he gets to do whatever he wants. The House of Lords always protect their royal status over their constituents. Well, Mr. President -- it's time to reign in this herd of Conservadems if you really want the public option. All this could be the awesome kabuki dance that pols do as they negotiate legislation through the media. Well, Mr. President, you got him -- you own him now so make him pony up. Oh, wait -- Senators are immune to any type of accountability. Sorry, I forgot what I wrote earlier in this piece.

Too bad Ned Lamont didn't win in 2006, but we forced Joe out of the Dem Party and Ned is still speaking up against Lieberman. They did debate health care and Holy Joe was for "universal health care" at the time, but now he has a Republican base to protect.

I asked Lamont if he thinks that Obama, who intervened last November to keep Senate Democrats from stripping Lieberman of his committee chairmanship, was guilty of trusting Connecticut's junior senator too much.

"I would really hope that Senator Lieberman would have returned that courtesy by talking to the president's team before walking out on this filibuster plank," he replied.

Lieberman's seat will be up in 2012. His polls numbers have improved a little this year, but they're still very shaky, a 48-45 percent approval rating among all voters in the state. But among Democrats, they're poisonous. Does Lieberman's latest move mean he's abandoning any thought of running as a Democrat again in '12?

"He got re-elected in '06 with overwhelming Republican support," Lamont said. "So I guess he's just taking care of his base."

Do me a favor and contact Joe's offices and tell him to give us an up-or-down vote on health care and not to join Republicans in a filibuster. He likely won't listen, but it's important that he hear our voices.

One Constitution Plaza
7th Floor
Hartford, CT 06103
(860) 549-8463 Voice
--
706 Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-4041 Voice

And please: Donate to Blue America's Campaign For Health Care Choice so we can continue to fight for health care reform. We have several actions we're working on...

From the Center for Public Integrity, some very interesting news. This sort of undercuts Obama's "let's make the Blue Dogs happy" strategy, doesn't it?

It’s official. The Blue Dog’s fundraising slowdown was not just a symptom of the dog days of summer. Newly released public disclosure forms indicate that over September, the coalition’s PAC took in its smallest monthly total yet this year.

Our analysis of the fiscally conservative and increasingly influential Blue Dog Coalition and its funding noted that the group’s political action committee had averaged more than $176,000 in receipts from other PACs over the first half of 2009. Their monthly haul dropped to a surprisingly low $27,000 in July, rebounded somewhat in August, and but then dropped again to just $12,500 in September.

That September money came from just three donations — $5,000 from accounting and professional services giant Ernst & Young’s PAC, $2,500 from the Food Marketing Institute PAC, and $5,000 from the National Rifle Association of America Political Victory Fund.

After raising $1.1 million from January to June, the committee raised less than $87,000 between July and September — less than it brought in during any one of the preceding five months. And in just three months, the Blue Dog PAC’s monthly fundraising average dropped by more than $50,000 — probably not the sort of fiscal conservatism the 52-member coalition was hoping for.

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Glenn Beck has become a cartoon. You can pretty much guarantee that every afternoon, you can tune in and find Beck saying something so stupidly outrageous, so detached from reality, so unhinged in its lunacy, that you just have to shake your head. It's not really a very funny cartoon, though.

Yesterday he treated us all to a long rant about how liberals are indoctrinating our children with inhuman values that are OK with letting grandma die at the hands of death panels, or something. "We have raised a generation of potential killers," he warned, inspired by a letter to the editor from a young woman who wants health-care reform for her generation especially. Yeah, that's exactly the same thing as pushing for euthanasia.

Beck, obviously, hears strange things when he listens to other people -- things they don't actually say. Instead, they seem to be edited by the voices inside his head.

He featured a later segment with right-wing economist Arthur Laffer -- one of the progenitors of Reaganomics -- who tells Beck all the damage could be repaired overnight with just a simple injection of Reagan-style economics. Of course, Laffer neglects to mention that G.W. Bush followed his economic prescriptions (especially those tax cuts for the wealthy, and the deregulation of the financial sector) to the letter, too -- and we can see where that got us.

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But Beck concludes anyway that Obama is marching us right into a Soviet-style decline and crumble:

Beck: Did you ever read Pravda?

Laffer: I did read Pravda, as a matter of fact.

Beck: Did you read that? Where they're like, 'What is wrong with the Republicans?' We're watching what happened to Russia -- Pravda gives us more truth than the American press!

He's referring, of course, the Igor Panarin's dire predictions of the fall of America, which, so far, have proven laughably wrong.

Indeed, Panarin is actually just a classic Russian propagandist, engaged in the process of explaining to his readers why post-Soviet rule has not exactly been a smashing success -- by claiming that the USA is about to go into a similar decline.

We had no idea Beck was such a fan of post-Soviet propaganda. Quick, someone alert Glenn Beck and see if he can do another of his McCarthyite exposes.

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Bill O'Reilly is still all worked up about the White House's "war" on Fox -- which, actually, he says he hopes end soon. Yeah, I'll bet he does. I'll bet a lot of people at Fox are not happy that we are having this national conversation right now and kicking over all kinds of rocks.

You never know what turns up when you start looking at Fox's record, do you?

What angered O'Reilly was Joe Klein's recent column in Time, which really was a classic piece of Village excrement (a la Sally Quinn) about how silly the Obama White House is to stand up to Fox. Along the way, of course, he offends O'Reilly by writing this:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

But I don't understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on Fox.

If the problem is that stories bloated far beyond their actual importance--ACORN's corruption, Van Jones's radical past--are in danger of leaching out of the Fox hothouse into the general media, then perhaps the Administration should be a bit more diligent about whom it hires and whom it funds.

If the problem is broader--that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience--the Administration should probably be stoic: the wingnuts will always be with us. The best antidote to their garbage is elegant, intelligent governance. The next-best antidote is occasional engagement: I thought Obama came away from his O'Reilly and Chris Wallace interviews much the better for it. (Though you don't want to sit down with a thug like Hannity or a weirdo like Beck.)

Now, understand: The Fox-bashing here is simply classic Villager ass-covering, so that Joe Klein can go back later and say, "See? Both sides are mad at me. I must be right!"

Nonetheless, it outrages O'Reilly, who not only devotes a whole Talking Points Memo to "refuting" the Klein column with an even larger dose of flatulence, but then brings on Bernard Goldberg to chew it over some more:

Goldberg: But when you start throwing words around like sedition. I mean, who exactly at Fox News is inciting a rebellion against the government?

Not that we're much interested in defending Joe Klein, but this was too silly not to take note. So we've provided Bernie with some handy reminders just who at Fox News has indeed been inciting rebellion against the government -- some of it by outright, straight-on incitement (see the tea parties for more of this), and some by fear-mongering. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I remembered this morning that, while not on Fox, Rush Limbaugh has touted the idea of a military coup against Obama.

So the pressure we brought to bear on Harry Reid's office over the weekend did have some effect. The bill does have a public option, despite mutterings from unnamed sources that the mythic and coveted 60 votes would be a whole lot easier without the public option. But we're not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.

Now we get to see the Republicans really ramp up the scare tactics--telling the gullible and easily frightened that this is just one step behind the evil Soviet Empire that St. Ronnie slayed, with its government-run health care, all evidence to the contrary. Up until this point, Obama has kept the Senate dealings at arm's length, a political calculus that made some sense, looking at what happened to Clinton's attempt to get health care passed. But it's going to take some seriously strong political leadership now to make it untenable for any member of the Senate to vote against health care reform. As Mike Lux says, "Game On":

We don't yet know whether we will get the best version of the public option in the House bill, and the Senate version is not as strong as progressives have been pushing for. But strengthening the form of the public option can be negotiated over in conference committee, once we get there.

For now, we can thank Harry Reid (HCAN has a page here) and Nancy Pelosi for their gutsy leadership, and fight like hungry dogs to win the floor fight and deliver on this hope. In the coming weeks we will have an all-hands-on-deck, all out public war with the insurance industry over whether we finally pass comprehensive health care reform or once again fall short at the bitter end after coming so far.

Here's where things are as we head into the floor fight:

1. White House staffers confirmed for me this afternoon that they are backing Harry Reid's decision "100 percent." Now that's not to say they aren't a little nervous about it. I suspect that there are still some feelings by some people working in that building that progressives should have given up and rolled over, and let them cut a deal with Olympia Snowe on her trigger-written-never-to-trigger. That would have been easier than sweating what will undoubtedly be a very tough battle to get all 60 Democrats to go along with the rest of the party. But us irritating progressive folk got in the way of doing that, and now Obama knows it's time to stand and deliver. I believe my friends at the White House when they say they will do an all-out fight for this bill. They know that starting down this path, and not being able to pull it off, would be a huge embarrassment and destroy all the momentum we've built by making it this far. They are all-in, and know how much is at stake. Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina are famous for twisting arms and doing everything in their power to get the votes that are needed, and now is their time to deliver.

That's where you come in. Progressive Change has a petition for you to sign to ask President Obama to stand firm and fight:

"Every day, insurance companies deny care and let people die. Getting one Republican senator's vote is not worth delaying reform -- too many real lives are at stake. We need you to fight and state clearly that anything less than a strong public option is not change we can believe in."

Go. Sign. Make phone calls. Let your voice be heard.

So according to this L.A. Times article, the health insurance got everything it wanted in this healthcare "reform" bill - except the death of the public option. So as relatively small a concession as that is unacceptable to them - which tells you who really owns this country. (Not us.) All the more reason to push your congress critter. Call today!

Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington - As President Obama's push for a healthcare overhaul moves toward its final act, the oft-vilified health insurance industry is on the verge of seeing a plan enacted that largely protects its financial interests.

That achievement, should it stand up in the final legislation, would be the capstone of a sophisticated lobbying and strategic campaign that began even before Obama was elected president.

The specifics of the healthcare legislation are still being hashed out on Capitol Hill, and key details will evolve in the days ahead. Even so, there is broad agreement that the final plan will, for the first time, require Americans to buy health coverage, with taxpayer subsidies for millions who cannot afford it.

For the health insurance industry, that means millions of new paying customers. What's more, there are likely to be no limits on what insurers can charge, while at the same time the plan is expected to limit competition from any new national government insurance plan that lawmakers create.

I mean, really. What's not to like?

These anticipated wins -- from an initiative that has at times been portrayed as doomsday for health insurers -- is the result of a strategy developed by one of Washington's savviest lobbyists, Karen Ignagni. Under Ignagni's leadership, the industry group America's Health Insurance Plans adopted the goal of universal coverage while setting out to shape it in a way that benefited insurers -- a crucial move that aligned their interests with those of other groups, including consumers and hospitals.

Insurers poured campaign donations into the coffers of key sympathetic members of the House and Senate, and loaded up on lobbyists. And when Obama and other Democrats began attacking the industry, insurers made a strategic choice not to walk away from the negotiating table.

"While so many in this town have been playing checkers, Karen has been playing chess," said Mark Merritt, a veteran lobbyist who heads the Pharmaceutical Care Management Assn.

[...] In addition to fighting the public option, insurers that offer Medicare health maintenance organizations are battling more than $100 billion in cuts in federal payments to that program. And they are trying to beat back a move by Democrats to go after the industry's decades-old exemption from antitrust law.

But in Washington, many marvel that lawmakers have not wrung more from an industry that, surveys show, is held in low regard by the public.

"The industry is really in no position to be making demands," said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster.

And yet, they continue to do so - especially through senators like Olympia Snowe and Kent Conrad. Don't you love it that no matter how much we donate, politicians say they can't support the netroots agenda "because you're not in my district", yet are so very sympathetic to the millions of dollars poured into their states from giant industries like insurance? Looks like our bribes contributions just aren't big enough.

For much of the last three years, industry leaders have been laying the groundwork for this battle. Amid horror stories about insurers dumping sick patients, denying coverage for medical treatment and cherry-picking customers, Ignagni and a few insurance company executives pushed the idea within America's Health Insurance Plans that the industry risked political catastrophe if it did not move proactively.

"They knew they had a very big [public relations] problem, and they knew this day was coming," said Wendell Potter, a Cigna Corp. public relations executive who quit last year. "They knew they had to be perceived as coming to the table with solutions. It was a departure from their previous point of view. But they knew they would be slaughtered if it weren't."

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To hear Joe Scarborough on Meet The Press, you would think he was sitting on Harry Reid's lap clutching an E-Ticket during the healthcare bill negotiations. Not only does he know exactly how many votes the "opt-out" option has in the Senate, he knows for a bonafide fact that the White House wants to protect "conservatives and Blue Dogs" during the 2010 election cycle by favoring a "trigger" scheme over the public option.

Scarborough is really good as usual at hoping we will read his loud, pompous 'certainty' as honesty. But not so fast, Joe: The White House issued an official communique Sunday afternoon:

A rumor is making the rounds that the White House and Senator Reid are pursuing different strategies on the public option. Those rumors are absolutely false.

Where does Joe Scarborough get his leaks? Who, exactly would take Scarborough's call? Could it possibly be...opponents of a public option?

In his September 9th address to Congress, President Obama made clear that he supports the public option because it has the potential to play an essential role in holding insurance companies accountable through choice and competition. That continues to be the President's position.

Senator Reid and his leadership team are now working to get the most effective bill possible approved by the Senate. President Obama completely supports their efforts and has full confidence they will succeed and continue the unprecedented progress that is being made in both the House and Senate.

Okay that last paragraph is a bit of Rahm-approved blah blah blah, which points to the urgent task at hand: to continue to pressure the White House to get much more involved in pushing for a public option in the final bill. Mister President? It's double overtime, and if you really want to score on the public option? Mere cheerleaders do not put the ball in the net.

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Sally Quinn went on The O'Reilly Factor to announce that she and all the other Villagers are just all a-flutter over the Obama White House's puzzling decision to stand up to its an organization that clearly declared war on his administration from its outset, i.e., Fox News.

But first she had to stop and sniff disdainfully in the direction of Alan Grayson for his gauche style of political rhetoric:

O'Reilly: Do you know this guy? He sounds like a loon.

Quinn: I don't know him. But guess what? Here we are talking about him. And I think that's what this is all about -- he's obviously getting the attention she desperately needs.

O'Reilly: OK, there could be something to be said for that. He represents the Orlando area. But he's certainly kind of unhinged. When you hear rhetoric like that -- you know, the Dick Cheney shooting the guy in the face, and this and that -- doesn't it sound a little immature?

Quinn: Well, I think that it's worse than immature. I mean, what he said was so completely over the top that it sounds like -- it reminded me a little bit of Blagojevich, you know. I mean --

O'Reilly: No, that's good. That's a good -- yeah. Kinda unhinged.

Quinn: Yeah, unhinged. It made no sense. So I don't think you can take it seriously. And I also think that if he -- I can't imagine the Democrats feeling good about this. Or the White House feeling good.

O'Reilly: Or his constituents.

Quinn: But you don't want this guy on your team.

Heavens no. We want people like Sally Quinn. The kind of Village maven who would go on 60 Minutes and slag the Clintons:

"If you consider the life of Bill Clinton," she said on "60 Minutes," "whenever he leaves the White House, he's going to get on a plane, and where is he going to go?"

"What do you mean?" a baffled Mike Wallace asked.

"Well, he -- he doesn't even have a home," she sniffed. "I mean, when you think about it, he's homeless. I mean, they've lived in sort of government properties all their lives."

The kind of "social adviser" who would pen long Washington Post op-eds bemoaning the way the Clintons "fouled the nest".

Yeah, we need advice from Sally Quinn, all right.

And that commentary we should take seriously? I guess you just had to tune in three hours beforehand for that.

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Yesterday, the Senate passed the Defense appropriations bill, and actually garnered some 28 "No" notes from Republicans who otherwise would normally be eager to jump on a defense-spending bill.

Their reason? Well, attached to the bill was the nation's first real federal hate-crime law. And that, it seems, was too much for them.

But then, that's par for the course for the modern Republican Party, which ever since the days of Nixon has come to represent the knuckle-dragging bloc of American culture, which resists efforts to expand and protect the civil rights of all Americans tooth and claw every step of the way -- mainly by appealing to people's irrational fears that granting civil rights to others erodes their own rights ... and usually conflating rights with privileges along the way.

With President Obama having promised to sign the bill into law, however, all this sound and fury has finally come to naught. And for that, it's worth standing back and appreciating what a historic moment it actually is.

The passage of the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act really is a momentous occasion: It marks the first time in history that Americans have collectively taken an effective stand against the thugs and bullies who have used violence through the course of our history to threaten and oppress whole populations of minorities.

Here's Brian Levin's summary at HuffPo:

The United States Senate passed landmark legislation today that expands the coverage and protection of federal hate crime laws to now include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability. While a 1994 federal law technically covered gays, the scope of the law was so narrow that it was hardly ever used. Today’s legislation is expected to be signed by President Obama soon. It marks the first practical expansion of the most broadly applicable criminal civil rights law since 1968.

Moreover, as Joe Solomonese at the Human Rights Campaign observed, this law marks "our nation's first major piece of civil rights legislation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people."

It has been a long and arduous -- not to mention frustrating -- effort. I have been observing hate-crimes laws since their beginnings: my home state, Idaho, passed one of the nation's first bias-crime statutes in 1981, largely in response to the onset of crime associated with the Aryan Nations setting up shop in the Panhandle. (To the state's lasting shame, both of its senators voted against this bill.) My second book was an examination of the phenomenon of bias crimes and the enforcement of the laws dealing with them -- and all along, it has been clear that Congress needed to act.

What kept them, of course, was a Republican Party fully in the thrall of the Religious Right, which has fought any expansion of a federal bias-crime bill generally, while doing so under the rubric of opposing the "homosexual agenda." This bill had actually passed both houses of Congress three times previously, and was derailed each time by Republican machinations.

But that's only a small part of a much bigger picture. Passage of a federal bias-crime statute finally means that we have overcome our many previous failures to stand up to the perpetrators of terroristic crimes. Remember, if you will, how the Senate back in 2005 apologized for its failures to ever pass an anti-lynching statute back in the 1920 and 1930s, when lynching was a national problem -- even as it continued to fail to enact a law to combat the modern descendant of the lynch mob, namely, the multiple perpetrators of bias crimes.

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