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- Chuck Grassley is a sick man. Here is someone who was tasked by Max Baucus to be a big player in an elite group writing health care reform legislation, yet he has the nerve to refer to end-of-life counseling as "pulling the plug on Grandma" before later "clarifying" his comments and then denying the hypocrisy of voting in favor of a similar measure in 2003. Here is a man who think his constituents ought to be reading books written by professional jingo Glenn Beck. And now, via Ezra Klein, here is Grassley ranting in public about Comrade Pelosi's death squads or some such nonsense before confirming that he will vote against his own compromise legislation if there aren't enough Republicans on board.
- I would like to reiterate that for all of the wild talk out there about health care reform fundamentally remaking America, the basic scope of reform is actually quite modest, as this chart makes clear. Private insurance gets a bit more regulated. There might or might not be a public option available for poorer folks. Little else changes.
- Via Steve Benen, Bruce Bartlett is making a lot of sense on where the Republican party finds itself these days: remorseless, arrogant, and unwilling to take responsibility for error. Bartlett adds that a deferential media enables discredited Republicans by treating their concerns as legitimate -- agreed! -- but I would add that there is a bit of self-delusion happening here that lets Republicans believe they only lost power because voters punished them for not being conservative enough -- and Democrats exploited this to fool voters into thinking they weren't radical socialists.
- I don't know where this concept of "libertarian Democrats" came from (Kos, perhaps?), but it's pretty self-serving to just assume "independent" voters (whatever that means) are the equivalent of libertarian voters. Obviously this is to make libertarians feel more assured that they are the linchpin of American electoral politics, whose nominal party has never carried a state in a presidential election and only once (1980) cracked one percent of the popular vote.
- Weekend Remainders: The unprincipled rule on the Senate Finance Committee; are there unseen consequences to losing Tom Daschle or is he too cozy with the insurance industry; conservatives should definitely be taking the advice of thugs who want to beat the Speaker of the House; and the gritty work of climate change legislation goes on behind the scenes.
--Mori Dinauer
