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On three separate Fox News programs yesterday -- on Neil Cavuto's show, on Sean Hannity, and on Greta Van Susteren -- the hosts specifically referred to the Democrats' decision to go through "reconciliation" sessions to settle on the final form of the health-care legislation as "the nuclear option."

Eh?

Now just a gol-darned minute. The "nuclear option" always referred to the possibility of permanently changing Senate rules regarding filibusters so that the minority could not use it so readily to frustrate majority-approved legislation -- and it was an invention of Republicans who were considering bringing it against Democrats.

No such steps are being considered here.

Instead, we're seeing the health-care legislation go through the "reconciliation" process, which assures that it will only need 51 votes to pass. This is a long-established Senate procedure, and was indeed used frequently by Republicans when they controlled the Senate from 2001-2006.

Media Matters has the complete rundown.

Republicans repeatedly used reconciliation to pass former President Bush's agenda. Republicans used the budget reconciliation process to pass Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as well as the 2005 "Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act." The Senate also used the procedure to pass a bill containing a provision that would permit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (The final version of that bill signed by Bush did not contain the provision on drilling.)

These people never quit when it comes to twisting reality for their agenda, do they?

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[H/t Heather]

Most of the debate from Republicans regarding the hate-crimes bill that just passed the House -- titled the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 -- has been of the immensely silly variety that's easily exposed as the thinly built strawmen they are.

Jon Stewart had some fun last night with some of the nonsense we heard in the House as the bill progressed through that chamber. My favorite is Rep. Steve King's claim that the only reason gays get assaulted is that they flaunt their sexuality, and if they'd stop doing that, this would just go away. Reality: Gay-bashing bias crimes are often inflicted on straight people mistaken for being gay. These in fact are nonetheless bias crimes intended to terrorize a target community of gays generally, and should be (and often are) prosecuted as such.

However, David Freddoso at National Review has raised something of a fresh objection, to wit, that the new federal law’s provisions raise the specter of double jeopardy:

People usually think of hate-crimes bills as sentence-enhancers – and indeed, many state hate-crime laws take that format. The Shepard bill does not. In addition to providing financial help for local prosecutors for hate crimes, it creates a new federal charge, with a ten-year prison sentence, that can be used against those who commit “crimes of violence” with firearms or explosives, or which cause serious bodily harm, motivated by hatred toward certain groups.

Among other things, the bill permits the U.S. Attorney General to initiate federal hate-crime prosecution in cases where “the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.”

If someone is acquitted of an alleged hate crime at the state level, this bill allows federal prosecutors to haul him into federal court for the same alleged act, based only on evidence that “hate” motivated the crime that the jury says the defendant didn't commit. This makes use of a loophole in the constitutional protection from double jeopardy.

This struck me immediately as specious -– my understanding of these things, such as it is, is that the federal charges would have to undergo a strict review from the Justice Department regarding double jeopardy, states rights, and free-speech issues before proceeding. That's contained within the language of the bill:

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The nation's first real federal bias-crimes statute -- the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- just passed the House Wednesday, and is now on its way to the Senate:

On a vote of 249-175, the House passed and sent to the Senate a bill backed by the new Democratic White House to broaden such laws by classifying as "hate crimes" those attacks based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender identity or mental or physical disability.

The current law, enacted four decades ago, limits federal jurisdiction over hate crimes to assaults based on race, color, religion or national origin.

The bill would lift a requirement that a victim had to be attacked while engaged in a federally protected activity, like attending school, for it to be a federal hate crime.

As Ali Frick at Think Progress says, the religious right is freaking out because hate-crimes legislation has been one of their cornerstone bugaboos of the past decade, and it's about to slip out of their grasp after all these years.

That means, of course, the flagrant lies are starting to fly. Like Virginia Foxx's little "slip" in calling Matthew Shepard's murder a "hoax."

Time to call in the veteran liars, obviously. So who should we see shopping the right's favorite falsehoods about the hate-crimes bill on the teevee but the ole Newtster himself. Gingrich appeared yesterday on CSPAN's Washington Journal, flagrantly lying about the nature of the bill:

Let me share part of what I think concerns reasonable people who look at that kind of legislation. In Sweden today, it is illegal to quote from certain parts of the Bible. Literally illegal. So pastors can get put in jail for quoting from the Bible. On some college campuses, thought, you know, regulations have said to students you can’t think out loud whatever you want to say. The act of thinking it becomes a crime, the act of saying it. It’s very dangerous to go down a road that says you can’t have an honest debate about an issue, because we have now decided we’re protecting one group of people.

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"Poverty grew sharply between 1979 and 1982. But a study by the Census Bureau claims that official estimates may exaggerate the number of Americans who are poor."

Listening to spin in a historic context can be baffling at times. Buried in the middle of an ABC Radio "World News This Week" broadcast from February 1984 was this report about poverty levels in the U.S. between 1979 and 1982. To hear a spokesman from the Census Bureau come out, matter-of-factly and say the number of people living below the poverty line during that time wasn't exactly true, since many of those people were receiving foodstamps and Medicare and were therefore deemed no longer "at the poverty line" seems rather bizarre to me.

This is the kind of painful spin we've been getting used to over the years. A report like this lends further evidence the Reagan Years were pretty much a sham. The casual disregard for real figures in place of fancied up ones. Mythic feel-good proclamations have done nothing but stave off what has become the inevitable.

To think our current economic situation will be cured by a snap of fingers or wishful thought disguises the fact that our current situation is the result of bad decisions and distracting spin from decades earlier.

Maybe it's not a chicken, but perhaps the Ostrich has come home to roost.

(Nice shiny miracles from that City On A Hill)

It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

Ezra Klein and Marc Ambinder provide good commentary on what Barack Obama said. My remarks today are aimed at the critics who are rushing forward to defend the tender sensibilities of small-town, working class whites that Obama allegedly offended. I say that most of those expressing outrage and defending the "values" of small-town Americans are the real elitists.

Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

The only ones who aren’t bitter and frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

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