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- Last month, Jon Chait predicted a conservative freakout over health-care reform, once they realized that the election of Scott Brown was insufficient to kill the legislation. In the final days leading up to a close vote in the House on Sunday, the freakout has begun. The mood at The Corner is a combination of resignment, fear, and anger. Activists are planning a "code red" rally in D.C. tomorrow. Peggy Noonan is writing columns that make it sound like the Republic is coming to an end. And David Brooks, contra his more solemn Friday column, is freaking out in an online conversation with Gail Collins. Just to recap, this radical legislation will cover the uninsured, reduce the deficit, control costs, and regulate insurers while preserving the private insurance market. People need to get a grip on themselves.
- Here's a good example of how obtuse the elite news media can be, courtesy of the gang at First Read: "How did the Eric Massa mess dominate the news for an entire week, while the latest allegations surrounding John Ensign -- which include an ACTUAL FBI investigation -- have registered just a blip on the media radar?" It's a good question, so I did a quick-and-dirty tally for references to "massa" and references to "ensign" at the First Read blog: 18 references to Massa compared to three references to Ensign in 2010. So, the answer is they chose to lavish Massa with six times the coverage they did Ensign. Though, to be fair, there were a great deal of references to Ensign last year, but that wasn't the question that was being asked.
- Remainders: This chart is as good as any for tracking yea and nay votes on health-care reform; and here I thought conservatives were opposed to frivolous lawsuits; the right wing piles on 11-year-old kids to make sound arguments against reform; yeah, a government "garage sale" ought to take care of our long-term fiscal problems; and did the GOP push a hoax memo purporting that the Democratic leadership is trying to hush a "doc-fix" amendment to the health-care reform bill?
-- Mori Dinauer
