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- President Obama signed the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act into law today, which included Sen. Al Franken's amendment barring defense contractors from preventing rape victims from suing their employer in court. Rachel Slajda has the backstory on how the Obama administration, which at one point was bafflingly opposed to the amendment, found a loophole that made the it compatible with the federal government's ability to hire contractors.
- I agree with every word of this Kevin Drum post gaming out the political impact passing health-care reform will have on Democrats come Election Day. Of particular note, I've been arguing for some time that speeding up the pace of implementing reform could provide a political advantage for Democrats next year, but that does not mean that the opposite is true: "healthcare will be mostly forgotten within a few months. This bill affects a relatively small number of people; the people who areaffected are almost all benefitting from it; and nothing much is goingto happen until 2014 anyway. The tea partiers will stay mad, but theyweren't going to vote for Democrats in 2010 regardless. Moderates andindependents, I think, will end up voting on other issues."
- I don't understand the impetus behind the complaint that the public option was lost because of some failure on the part of Barack Obama, most recently articulated by NY Times columnist Frank Rich and Sen. Russ Feingold, given the 100 veto points in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. But what can be sympathized with to some extent is the feeling that candidate Obama unrealistically got the, err, hopes up for a lot of progressives through forceful rhetoric on specific points of contention today, and that reality of concession on those points has a sting.
- Then there's the activist wing of the progressive movement who wants to kill the reform bill altogether. Reading Ezra Klein's takedown of Jane Hamsher's 10 reasons to kill the bill, one is struck by how unproductive it is for liberal causes to have advocates engaged in misleading and sloppy analysis of what this supposedly disastrous legislation represents. Indeed, looking over the bar-chart version of Jon Cohn and Jonathan Gruber's analysis, it's immediately obvious that this legislation is going to make a difference in millions of people's lives, which ought to be the principle animating liberals' embrace of reform.
- Only U.S. senators can change the dysfunctional U.S. Senate, so I guess we can tentatively add Arlen "I see the light, and 'tis a primary" Specter to the short list of lawmakers who are honest about the institutional failure being ignored by their colleagues. Meanwhile, James Fallows ponders what it would take for wider awareness of the abuse of the filibuster to become public knowledge.
- Remainders: A postmortem on the Copenhagen deal; the perks of being a (former) House Speaker; National Review is prepared to stand athwart history to stop the progressive movement of a century hence, right-wing cranks disagree about God's political motivations in the weekend snowstorm; DNC, RNC reach parity on fundraising; the naughties are deservedly loathed by the public; and making ignorance work for us.
--Mori Dinauer
