• Kevin Drum takes a look at the arduous process to extend unemployment benefits, noting that after weathering three filibusters, the legislation passed unanimously. It's a good example of modern Republican obstructionism, and a handy reminder that institutional reform is something Democrats in Congress should be taking seriously if they ever want to pass legislation that makes a difference in people's lives. Meanwhile the Senate voted down an amendment designed to combat imaginary illegal immigrant vote fraud and stopped Lindsey Graham's proposal to bar the 9/11 suspects from being prosecuted in federal court.
• Speaking of amendments, Tom Coburn, when he's not placing holds on veterans benefits bills, has made it his crusade to strip funding for political science from the National Science Foundation. Fortunately, that amendment failed, with voting falling mostly along partisan lines, although the scatterplot of votes is worth a look.
• Jon Chait demonstrates with some choice embarrassing examples that when it comes to The Weekly Standard, there isn't any news that can't be spun as big wins for Republicans. He distinguishes this from magazines like National Review, which are more inclined to push the conservative agenda, not necessarily the interests of the GOP, although I'd argue that these days the party and the ideological movement are less distinguishable from one another than at any point in the recent past, and that new coalition's face has been the endless stream of incoherent tea parties this year.
• Remainders: Do we need another WPA?; cheap labor conservatives forever; and the horrors of government sponsored health care are too terrible to countenance.
  

--Mori Dinauer

As Ezra noted earlier this week, much of the reason that American health care is so expensive is because we pay so much per-unit of care, whether it's a prescription or a CT scan. In order to insure health care remains affordable and that reform is sustainable in the long term, these costs need to be brought under control -- a point conservatives, to their credit, have repeatedly raised. Democrats have tried to address the issue by trying to extract savings and price-control measures from groups like the drug industry, given the federal government's buying power through entitlement programs like Medicare. But, as The New York Times points out today, there's at least one area in which rapidly escalating costs will be far more difficult to constrain: the medical device industry. And it's not certain that the current health-care legislation will be able to make a big difference.

At the heart of the problem is that device makers, unlike the drug industry or health providers, don't receive Medicare payments directly from the government. Instead, as the Times article explains, the government gives a flat fee to hospitals, who are left to negotiate individually with device makers and manufacturers. Hospitals, however, often have little data to be able to gauge the relative effectiveness of different devices. Moreover, they're often contractually prohibited from disclosing how much they end up paying. As a result, hospitals -- and public entitlement programs -- end up relying on devices whose cost can vastly outstrip their value.

What's more, given the current fee-for-service model, hospitals themselves can also profit from inflated prices. In a separate Times story, David Leonhardt reveals how the Intermountain hospital chain managed to negotiate a significant price reduction for a certain medical device but still decided to charge patients -- and insurers like Medicare -- the old price:

A few people in the meeting were clearly bothered by this. They asked the finance executive, participating by speakerphone, if anything could be done. One committee member argued that Intermountain (which is nonprofit) should not overcharge for a treatment, even if it helped the hospital cover its overall expenses. The finance executive replied, apologetically, that changing the reimbursement rate would cost Intermountain millions of dollars and that there did not seem to be any way to make up for the loss.

Unfortunately, the current health-care legislation doesn't do anything to change this payment system, and legislators decided not to hit up hospitals themselves on the issue of medical-device payments. Unable to use Medicare price negotiations as a point of leverage, Congress ended up having to use a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel: they imposed a direct $40 million tax on the device industry itself. The device lobby lashed out and immediately rounded up a slew of Democratic legislators to protest the tax on the grounds that it would stifle innovation and job creation in their home states. And it seems like the device lobby has won: the House decided to halve the tax to $20 million, and the Senate is likely to follow suit.

Given the fact that medical-device costs are rising even faster than drug costs, such a measure hardly seems like it will squeeze adequate savings from the industry. It is a small consolation, at least, that the bill's comparative-effectiveness research will enable hospitals to make better cost-value judgments. But, in the end, it doesn't seem like it will be enough to fix a faulty, bloated payment system.

--Suzy Khimm

 

Reihan Salam weighs in on the Ft. Hood shootings:

The danger is that Hasan's despicable crime will subtly and slowly change these perceptions for the worse. Overnight, Twitter feeds and message boards pulsed with anti-Muslim anger. This kind of venting is important to a free society. But it could also be an ominous sign of tensions to come. It is thus no surprise that groups like the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations have been so quick to condemn the violence. The vast majority of Americans recognize that Hasan doesn't represent all Muslims, just as the Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho didn't represent all Korean-Americans. Yet people who are on the fence about whether Muslims can be trusted could tip over into believing that they can't. Back in 2004, a survey sponsored by Cornell University found that 29 percent of Americans believed that "all Muslim Americans should be required to register there whereabouts with the federal government," a policy that would be a massive propaganda coup for America's rivals.

I think Salam is, in some sense, correct--Hasan's alleged crime will have the practical effect of making some non-Muslim Americans more mistrustful of American Muslims and more likely to support counterproductive policies that will benefit America's enemies.

I also can't help but be frustrated by the fact this is another example of collective guilt--Muslims aren't just responsible for themselves individually, they're responsible for making sure people don't hold bigoted feelings toward them. There's no sense in Salam's piece that the people who hold anti-Muslim views, or the people who will be inclined to indulge their prejudices against Muslims and use Hasan's actions as an excuse, who hold Muslims as a people collectively guilty for Hasan's actions, are at all responsible for doing so.

This is the paradox of being a minority in America--you're not only responsible for your own actions as an individual, but the bad acts of everyone in your community. Yet while we are all utterly aware of this reality, we seem to rarely question the logic behind it. 

-- A. Serwer

Mark A.R. Kleiman's book, When Brute Force Fails, has been making the rounds in the blogosphere, from Matt Yglesias to The Economist to The Volokh Conspiracy. The book is about how to improve criminal justice policy so that America has "less crime and less punishment." A centerpiece of Kleiman's argument is Judge Steven Alm's HOPE probation program in Hawaii, which has had startling success in reducing violation rates among probationers.

The main insight Kleiman draws from the program is that punishment is most effective as a deterrent when it is swift and certain, not necessarily severe. Our current method of dealing with crime, inconsistently doling out long, draconian prison sentences, Kleiman argues, is counterproductive and imposes significant social and financial costs on society--particularly in the communities offenders call home.

While Kleiman's ideas have gotten a lot of traction in the blogosphere, today is where some of those ideas begin to become policy. Earlier, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California -- a state struggling to cope with a massive prison population -- joined with Republican Rep. Ted Poe of Texas in announcing the introduction of the The Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) Initiative Act. The bill would create a grant program for states interested in replicating Hawaii's HOPE program, in order to "reduce drug use, crime, and recidivism by requiring swift, predictable, and graduated sanctions for noncompliance with the conditions of probation."

It's worth mentioning that both Poe and Schiff are former prosecutors -- Poe also used to be a judge. The ideological landscape of criminal justice policy has shifted so significantly in recent years that ending the nightmare of mass incarceration is becoming a bipartisan proposition -- often with current and former law enforcement officials leading the way.

-- A. Serwer

David Brooks has a column on the independents in the wake of Tuesday's election, deploying his usual technique of communing with them via stereotypes -- "They’re looking for a safe pair of hands." The piece is economically unserious and also follows the time-tested pundit model of demanding politicians follow public opinion when it suits Brooks' views but lauding as courageous those politicians who ignore it when it doesn't. Noam Scheiber does a good job taking Brooks to the woodshed, but I want to focus on one particular argument:

Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast.

Brooks makes no attempt to justify the idea that Obama is moving too fast, in part because it's hard to find evidence that supports such a statement. Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last winter, the president hasn't convinced Congress to pass a major piece of legislation. That's not to say he hasn't done anything -- he has shepherded health-care reform through a long and thorough public debate, he has made numerous important executive-branch appointments and decisions, he has developed a budget that will cut the deficit in half in four years.

Of the major parts of his legislative agenda, though, he has yet to achieve ... any of them. True, congressional Republicans have been in the habit of saying things are moving too fast, but in comparison to what, they don't say. Nor do they offer any real alternatives for solving problems. If they don't like what the Democrats are offering, they can vote against their agenda, but requesting time to talk and then having nothing to say doesn't cut it. Meanwhile, I'm not the first to note, Republicans are demanding that Obama make immediate decisions on foreign-policy matters. It's hard to take them seriously.

In any case, I'd be very curious to hear what Brooks thinks Obama is doing so quickly that it alarms independents, and why he thinks that his fast action on these policies with which I'm unfamiliar is of greater concern to independents than, oh, the economy.

-- Tim Fernholz

Next week the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments about two cases in which juveniles were sentenced to life without parole for non-homicides. The most disturbing thing about these cases that is that both sentences seem egregiously unjust even before considering the age of the defendants. One of the convicted teenagers received the draconian sentence even though he had been fairly convicted only of one robbery and a parole violation, a remarkably disproportionate sentence.

The case of Joe Sullivan, sentenced to life without parole at 13, is even more appalling. His conviction is riddled with so many potential constitutional deficiencies that his sentence would be utterly indefensible irrespective of his age. The evidence used to convict him of sexual assault would need quite a bit more heft to even be considered "thin": the uncorroborated testimony of two self-interested accomplices and the victim's claim that her attacker's voice -- she never saw him -- "does sound similar." Even more problematic, however, was the performance of Sullivan's counsel, Mack Plant, who has now been suspended from practicing in Florida. Amy Bach has the grim details:

Plant punted at every step, beginning with his failure to address whether Sullivan was even competent to stand trial. Social science research shows that most teens don't have the ability to determine whether to take a plea deal, much less make decisions about strategy for trial. But from the record, it appears Plant never had his client's reasoning and comprehension skills evaluated.

The lawyer declined to give an opening statement, which is like a batter not taking a swing. Plant also failed to cross-examine witnesses vigorously. He did not explore Gulley's and McCants' backgrounds to show they had a motive to lie. He never asked: "Did you get a deal here?" Michael Gulley had an extensive criminal history that included one sexual offense, according to court papers. A lawyer might have used this information to cast Gulley as a possible suspect instead of Sullivan. Plant did not. Instead, he focused on the fact that Gulley had to have his memory refreshed about the entire crime before testifying. This was a good point, but Plant blew through it. (Entire cross: a little more than a page.) And he never challenged the victim's identification of her assailant's voice as Sullivan's or asked her to listen to the other two boys' speech.

If this constitutes an adequate defense, we might as well just repeal the Sixth Amendment right now and be done with it. The idea that anyone -- let alone an adolescent -- was locked up for life with this kind of representation is an abomination.  And just for the poison cherry on top, the judge didn't seem to understand the sentence he was doling out.

And if all this isn't depressing enough, Sullivan -- who, at least based on the evidence presented in court, should never have been anywhere near an adult prison -- was repeatedly sexually assaulted in prison and is now confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. The Supreme Court overturning his sentence can't repay him for what he's lost, but it would be a start.

--Scott Lemieux

Linda Li on Ayn Rand's place in the conservative movement:

David Boaz read all 1,168 pages of Atlas Shrugged in four days during his senior year of high school. "It was the most fascinating thing I'd ever read," he announced to the Cato Institute audience. As Cato's executive vice president, Boaz launched last week's Ayn Rand book forum with a clarion call for "individual rights, free enterprise, and strictly limited government." Conservative groups of every stripe were represented: the gun-toting U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation; the protectionist Manufacturers Alliance; and the Atlas Society, heir to the original Objectivist Institute. These varied delegates all could pinpoint the feverish moment in their adolescence when they experienced a Randian epiphany. One audience member testified that he, too, "was one of those 19-year-olds" who discovered The Fountainhead
and thought he was "the only rational person on the earth."

The publication of two new Rand biographies by Jennifer Burns and Anne Heller coincides with Rand's apparent resurrection. In February, CNBC's Rick Santelli inspired the tea party movement when he decried President Barack Obama's housing bailout as anti-Rand and encouraged every freedom-loving American to go John Galt. That same month, Atlas Shrugged's sales ranking on Amazon.com surged into the top 100, well above its place in the 500s over the past two years. After languishing at the sidelines of the political arena, Rand has entered into public discourse. Will this "Ayn Rand moment" last?

KEEP READING ...

Terence Samuel asks if Tuesday's elections mean anything at all:

Given the orgy of gloating on the right and the hand-wringing on the left that followed this week's elections, it would not seem unreasonable to conclude that next year's midterm elections have already been decided via Tuesday's results.

The parties -- and their associated franchises in the punditocracy -- have split in predictable ways. Progressives see the two congressional special elections, which Democrats won in New York and California, as way more predictive of the national political mood than the two governor's races, which they lost in Virginia and New Jersey. Meanwhile, Republicans are ecstatic about their high-profile gubernatorial victories and what the results portend for 2010. The truth is that Tuesday's wins and losses tell us next to nothing about next year's elections.

KEEP READING ...

Should illegal immigrants be able to purchase private health insurance within the newly created federal exchanges if they use their own money? That question, as I noted yesterday, is one of the biggest sticking points in the fight about immigration in the health-care bill. The Senate supports such a prohibition, while the House hasn't done so. Spooked early this fall on by accusations that the bill would cover illegal immigrants -- e.g. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson -- the White House has made it clear that it prefers the Senate's prohibition. Congressional Democrats wary of looking soft on illegal immigrants have echoed such concerns: Rep. Gerald Connolly told The Washington Post yesterday that he wants to make sure that those "who are here illegally cannot avail themselves of the infrastructure that we're creating."

But what these wary Dems seem to be overlooking is just how extreme such a prohibition would be. Those who advocate for cracking down on illegal immigrants always insist that taxpayer money shouldn't be spent on supporting their welfare. But the federal government wouldn't be spending any more money if it allowed unauthorized immigrants to purchase private plans on the exchange, as they wouldn't be receiving any subsidies to do so. And, yes, while taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the infrastructure for the private insurance exchange, the same can be said for the nation's public transportation system, energy supplies, and agricultural output. Should unauthorized immigrants also be prohibited from riding buses, filling up a tank of gas, or buying groceries because these industries are supported by federal subsidies and infrastructure? That's essentially the logic that those who want to exclude illegal immigrants from the exchange are subscribing to.

--Suzy Khimm

Adam Serwer on the continuing battle over voter fraud:

Two days before New Jersey's gubernatorial election, Wall Street Journal columnist and voter-fraud hype-man John Fund warned the election might be stolen away from Republican Chris Christie through voter fraud. "Local politicos," he wrote, "tell me Philly operatives associated in the past with Acorn may now be advising their Jersey cousins on how to perform such vote harvesting."

That's quite a hedge -- and understandably so, given that ACORN had "conducted absolutely no political or voter registration activity" in New Jersey during the 2009 cycle. A few hours later Fund went on The Glenn Beck Show to strike fear into the hearts of Beck's viewers: "People are going door to door in parts of Camden with Hispanics that don't have very much knowledge of English, and they're saying, 'We have a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar; just fill out these papers.'"

KEEP READING ...

And it's official: We've broken into the double digits with 10.2 percent unemployment. That brings me to our favorite beginning of the month chart, above and here, which includes the all important U-6 number. The U-6 number measures all of the people who have been adversely affected by the labor market, including the unemployed, those who have stopped looking for jobs, and people who have been forced to work part-time when they'd like to work full hours: 17.5 percent of the labor force. That's a huge number, nearly one-in-five workers, and spells out more clearly than any other measures what happened during Tuesday's election.

The White House, while realistic, tried to focus on the good signs: unemployment declined at a slower rate, again, with fewer jobs lost in October than September, and there was an up-tick in temporary employment, traditionally a sign that economists look for to see if the labor market is improving (employers hire temporary workers first, then make permanent hires as recovery looks to stick around). The real question now is what the governing Democrats will do, and I think Steve Benen has a nice framework for looking at this problem: Go Big, Go Home or Take a Detour.

To my mind, this situation calls for "take a detour." The administration should push Congress to finish health care as soon as possible, let the relevant committees continue working on financial regulation, and devote the rest of its efforts to the problem of unemployment, whether by passing a jobs tax credit or fiscal aid to states. While Going Big is awful tempting, it's not clear to me that Congressional Democrats have the stomach to do what is necessary to get through the president's agenda against the substance-less carping of the opposition party, which wants to take more time to talk about the ideas they don't have. Given that, doing what can be done and focusing on the economy seems to make the most sense. But I'm certainly in agreement with Matt: Going home isn't an option, and the moderate Democrats who want to use the economic situation as an excuse to do nothing at all ought to be ashamed. Democrats were elected to solve problems, and if they fail in that responsibility, not only will they be booted out of office, they'll deserve it.

-- Tim Fernholz

Dave Weigel reports that the conservative Committee for Justice is complaining in the aftermath of the nomination of one Latino and one African American to the federal bench, that President Obama's judicial nominees aren't diverse enough because there aren't enough southern white men among them.

Does President Obama or his advisors believe that southern white men are likely to be bigoted, making them unfit to serve on the second most powerful court in the land? We hope not and readily concede that it is difficult to know if any such stereotype lurks in the White House. The absence of southern white male circuit nominees could, instead, be an innocent coincidence or the not-so-innocent byproduct of a judicial selection process dominated by racial and gender preferences.

But regardless of the reason for the pattern we noted in 2007 and again now, even the appearance that Democrats are biased against southern white men is a potential problem for the party generally, and for President Obama’s goal of transcending old racial divisions.

Just to put this in perspective, a whopping 18 percent of judges on the federal bench are people of color. But in the eyes of this conservative group, assigning more white men to the federal bench "transcends racial divisions," and that doing otherwise reflects a selection process "dominated by racial and gender preferences." Conservatives regularly try to cast affirmative action as racially discriminatory, but rarely does someone openly admit that their only issue with the process is simply who is being discriminated against. 

There's something to be said for considering diversity of life and professional experience in picking judges, but some conservatives often don't seem too concerned about such things unless -- as in this case -- they're making the argument on behalf of white men.

-- A. Serwer

Soon after news of the Ft. Hood shooting had reached the airwaves, the Council on American Islamic Relations released a statement saying, "We condemn this cowardly attack in the strongest terms possible." The name of the alleged assailant, Major Malik Nidal Hasan, had necessitated a quick response from the group because of the fear that Muslims as a whole would be assigned collective responsibility for the actions of one man whose religious affectations were, at that point, unknown. Some reporters began pontificating about the dangers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was just as irresponsible.

But CAIR's fears were sadly confirmed quite quickly, as John Nichols wrote yesterday evening. Michelle Malkin, whose book In Defense of Internment advocated for the use of racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims, quickly recycled a 2003 column suggesting that there was something wrong with allowing Muslims to serve in the armed forces. "Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror," Malkin tweeted. Don't you see? If we had just listened to her, and treated those people as enemies to begin with, this would never have happened. There are thousands of Arab-Americans serving in the armed forces, and many have given their lives defending this country -- Malkin would have us see all of them as potential traitors.

This is not unusual. In every community, there are those who make it their role to assign collective responsibility of the group's miseries to outsiders. Shortly after the shootings at Virginia Tech -- the immediate aftermath of which was rife with the same sort of Islamophobia -- Pat Buchanan was shrieking about immigration because the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was a South Korean national.

Indeed, the attempt to assign collective responsibility to Muslims worldwide for the murderous actions of a few is sadly predictable. Doing so is the first step in rationalizing the unthinkable and justifying the unjustifiable. But where this sort of reaction is to be expected from the likes of Malkin and Buchanan, far more shocking was the exchange between Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson and FOX News anchor Shepard Smith. Upon discovering Hasan's name, Smith said "The name tells us a lot, does it not, Senator?" to which Hutchinson responded, "It does. It does, Shepard."

How shameful. At the time, it told us literally nothing. But here were a sitting senator and a man whose job it is to report the news indulging their personal prejudices on national television. They were as ready to assign collective responsibility for the Ft. Hood massacre to Muslims as a whole as the pundits who do it for a living.

In the past few months, we've seen a number of shootings performed by white men with right-wing fringe beliefs. But while an attempt to assign the responsibility for the murder of George Tiller, or the killing of police in Pittsburgh, or the assault on the Holocaust Museum to white men as a whole would rightfully be seen as idiotic, there are those who sit poised and prepared assign the alleged actions of one man to an entire people. This is, quite frankly, the best reaction groups like al-Qaeda could hope for: The strength of their narrative of a war between Islam and the West ultimately rests on our own actions. We should not indulge them or those that share a similar worldview.

I'm glad Hasan is alive so that he can be tried for his alleged crimes -- if he is guilty, he will be a martyr to no one's cause. His motivations will be clear in time. But even if his motives were religious or political, the responsibility is his and his alone. In the meantime, I only hope that Americans will listen to the better angels of their nature.

-- A. Serwer

This piece in the Times emphasizes something that comes up a lot regarding the McChrystal report, and many other approaches to Afghanistan: Whether or not a given strategy is a good idea, the ability to actually implement it in a reasonable time is simply nonexistent. This goes for the "civilian" surge, which is severely delayed; troop deployments, which are severely constrained by U.S. dwell policies; and now it applies to the training of Afghan troops, which is at the center of both the COIN view of Afghanistan and those who take a more middle-ground approach. It turns out that current timelines just aren't that realistic.

The latest reports offer new details that show just how tough it will be to meet General McChrystal’s training goal. Among the previously undisclosed conclusions: one out of every four or five men in the security forces quit each year, meaning that tens of thousands must be recruited just to maintain the status quo. The number of Afghan battalions able to fight independently actually declined in the past six months.

It seems that new NATO involvement may speed things up, but NATO troops often decline to accompany their Afghan partners into the field -- this probably doesn't help -- which is a critical part of the mentoring process. Once again, it seems that what the U.S. might like to do in Afghanistan may not even be possible.

-- Tim Fernholz

Details are still slowly coming in, but earlier today, gunmen killed 12 soldiers and wounded 31 others at the Ft. Hood Army Base in Texas. President Obama issued a statement moments ago, acknowledging the “horrific outburst of violence” and added that “it is difficult enough to lose these brave Americans in battles overseas, but it is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil." (View the president's remarks here.)

One of the gunmen, Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan, was killed and two others -- also soldiers -- were reportedly taken into custody. Much will likely be made of the fact that Hasan was a recent convert to Islam, and reawaken the temptation to treat Muslims as a group that, unlike other demographics, does not make meaningful distinctions between its peaceful and violent adherents.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued the following statement in response:

We condemn this cowardly attack in the strongest terms possible and ask that the perpetrators be punished to the full extent of the law. No religious or political ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence. The attack was particularly heinous in that it targeted the all-volunteer army that protects our nation. American Muslims stand with our fellow citizens in offering both prayers for the victims and sincere condolences to the families of those killed or injured.

--The Editors

• Not one but two taxpayer "bill of rights" were struck down by big majorities on Tuesday, but don't tell that to the "freedom fighters" engaged in performance art on Capitol Hill today. They think health-care reform is like the Holocaust. They think reciting the Pledge of Allegiance pisses off liberals and can't even recite it properly. They tolerate and support conspiracy theorists. They think the culture wars of 40 years ago have salience today. They openly encourage revolution. Frighteningly, they also have the support of prominent Republican members of Congress.
• House Republicans, who have no clue how to promote good public policy, unsurprisingly received a terrible score from the CBO on their version of health-care reform, primarily because it manages to embody Alan Grayson's "don't get sick" characterization. This was understandably difficult for conservatives to handle since it's at odds with their supposed commitment to fiscal discipline, leading Ramesh Ponnuru to find the silver lining: "But are voters more concerned about the effect of a plan on the uninsured and the budget, or on their own costs (in taxes and premiums)?"
• While it is true that the South has had too much influence on national politics for far too long, I don't think that began to change in 2006. In 1980, for instance, a non-Southerner was elected president. A Massachusetts liberal was Speaker of the House at the time, and Reagan defeated a Minnesota technocrat in 1984. Both presidential nominees in 1988 were from New England, even if the Republican made his money in Texas. And despite a Southern Democratic ticket in 1992, and a Georgian being Speaker of the House, the midwestern Republican Senate majority leader ran for president in 1996. Things didn't just suddenly change when Nancy Pelosi rose to the No. 3 position in the country.
• If you're still dying to know whether the special elections of 2009 are a preview of 2010, political science has answers for you. Alternatively, you could read this fine example of substance-free political analysis from Politico, secure in the knowledge that you're cognizant in the cutting edge of Beltway conventional wisdom.
  
• Remainders: Thankfully, Barbara Boxer doesn't care what James Inhofe thinks about climate change; the U.S. Senate has deep institutional problems; I wonder how long it will take Michael Steele to beg Rush Limbaugh's forgiveness; for Dick Armey, parochial concerns aren't important until they are; and clearly Congress should suspend all other business until it gets to the bottom of this unprecedented "czars" situation.

--Mori Dinauer

Today the AARP and American Cancer Society endorsed the House health-care bill, with the American Medical Association expressing its positive (if qualified support). But amid this big news, a strong message of dissent was sent to the Senate side of things -- and it didn't come from Bachmann's tea-party spectacular on Capitol Hill.

In a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today, the American College of Surgeons and 19 other physician groups stated their strong opposition to the current Senate legislation as based on the provisions in the Finance Committee's bill, primarily due to fears that it will not fix the Medicare payment system to doctors and will find other ways to cut down provider fees. The group wrote: "If these concerns are not adequately addressed when a health care reform package is brought to the Senate floor, we will have no other choice but to oppose the bill." 

At heart, the AMA's qualified support of the House bill and the surgeons' problems with the Senate bill are rooted in the same key issue: fixing Medicare's flawed payment system for providers. As Jonathan Cohn points out, in the endorsing health reform, AMA underscored the fact they they were supporting not one but two bills: the primary bill Nancy Pelosi has put forward, and a separate $210 billion bill that would do away with planned reductions to Medicare physician payment to bring them in line with the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). On the Senate side, however, the attempt to pass a version of the latter -- the so-called doc fix -- failed when Senate Democrats joined Republicans to defeat a $245 billion, unfunded bill. And ACS's letter today intended to send the message to the Democrats that such a move was unacceptable.

So, in different ways, both the AMA and ACS made it clear today that their support for the health-care legislation is significantly contingent upon Congress's ability to pass some form of "doc fix." Problem is, it's far from certain that this will happen within the time frame of health-care reform debate. As Cohn notes, "Congress seems disinclined to pass an SGR fix, even as a separate bill, without new revenue or savings to offset the cost" -- and finding extra money will be extraordinarily difficult. If that's the case and the doc fix doesn't get passed, will doctors and surgeons end up turning against health reform? Surgeons certainly issued a credible threat to the Senate today.

--Suzy Khimm

Rep. Paul Kanjorski proposed legislation that would break up the banks, but the specifics are nonexistent (because that's the hard part). The committee is already working on legislation that would allow regulators to chop up banks on a case-by-case basis, as Barney Frank described to me in this article. I've been rather agnostic on the issue of breaking up the banks "in general," because I have a hard time conceiving of a standard method to use to split them up, especially given that the problems of the financial crisis didn't stem from size but rather from connections between the banks. Instead, I've been more focused the tools that are needed in place to make large banks safer and dissolve them effectively, and without bailouts, if they are failing.

Advocates of breaking up the banks have jumped on the news that the British, led by their Fed chair equivalent, Mervyn King (right), are planning on splitting apart their banks. It's an interesting precedent, but it's important to keep in mind that the British banking sector is already much more concentrated than the U.S. If this data is right*, then the three largest banks in the U.K. are all nearly a trillion dollars larger, in terms of assets, than their largest U.S. counterparts. This more recent data puts things in more perspective: The largest, Royal Bank of Scotland, has $3.5 trillion in assets, while the largest U.S. Bank, JPMorgan Chase, has "only" 2.2 trillion -- and there are two other British banks larger than JPMorgan. (Which, incidentally, is one of the banks that has been strongest throughout the financial crisis.) Additionally, there are many fewer banks in the U.K. compared to the U.S., which has a much stronger regional bank system.

What does that mean? I think policymakers in the U.K., seeing that they have essentially three huge banks, the largest of which it owns 70 percent of, are probably wise to decide to break up their banks. Here in the United States, by contrast, we seem to have much more variety and competition, so their situation doesn't seem entirely relevant to ours. We should definitely look into ways to have banks where the U.S. has major ownership stakes sell of divisions to pay back taxpayers sooner -- in the case of Citibank, something that is already happening. The broader U.S. problem is that, when push came to shove in 2008, regulators could either bail out banks or send them into bankruptcy; neither was a good option but bailing them out was better than freezing the lending economy. That's why giving the government the ability to dissolve safely in the case of failure is such a good idea.

That doesn't mean it would be a bad idea to go back to Glass-Steagall, although the mix of commercial and investment banking didn't have much at all to do with last year's crisis, and even the biggest advocate of that position, Paul Volcker, has now said he doesn't want to go back to Glass-Steagall, only to stop banks from running hedge and private equity funds, which seems very wise.

Basically, if regulators have the tools to force banks to divest themselves of certain business areas they shouldn't be in, that's a smart move. But more important than capping bank size is making sure that bad practices are discontinued, and that tools exist to deal with bank failure the right way in the future. All that just underscores the fact that, at the end of the day, having regulators who will enforce rules and take action is just as important as having the right structures in place.

-- Tim Fernholz

* Anyone know where I can find data on British banks comparable to this? I had no luck at the FSA or Bank of England, but I might not know what I'm looking for.

The House may be closer to settling the immigration issues in the health-care bill this week, but the issue is sure to rear its head again further down the road in the legislative process. In the manager’s amendment to the bill released Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the House would not adopt the stricter measures included in the Senate Finance Committee’s bill to bar illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance in the federal health exchanges. With Pelosi's amendment now included, both the House and Senate bills follow the Social Security Act’s verification process to allow only immigrants who can provide a valid name and Social Security number to receive government subsidies to buy insurance on the exchanges. However, the House bill does not prohibit illegal immigrants from using their own money to purchase private insurance in the exchanges or the public plan, while the Senate bans this practice.

Groups advocating for a crackdown on illegal immigrants had been lobbying hard for the stricter provisions to be adopted on the House side, but they were met with fierce opposition from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), who threatened to hold up the bill if stricter prohibitions were adopted. Interestingly, though, few House Democrats entered the fight to exclude illegal immigrants from accessing health care -- on the Hill, the concerns about immigration were essentially taken up by proxy, via DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen, who wanted to protect vulnerable members from getting slammed on the issue. The conservative House members angriest about the immigration provisions are Republicans like Joe Wilson who were going to vote against the bill anyway, giving their side little leverage compared to powerful Hispanic Caucus members like Xavier Becerra. With few conservative Dems making threats, the House seems to have reached a resolution of the issue that the CHC can live with.

But the immigration question is far from being resolved in the larger legislative debate. For one thing, the White House supports the Senate's prohibition on allowing illegal immigrants to purchase health insurance with their own money on the exchange and had a meeting scheduled with the CHC today to discuss the issue. While allowing such access wouldn't entail government handouts to illegal immigrants, Senate Democrats and administration officials remain wary of such accusations. And when the Senate bill comes to the floor, expect a slew of Republican amendments that could force Democrats to take politically difficult votes on the issue.

--Suzy Khimm

On the left, one controversial part of health-care reform is the Senate's health insurance excise tax, which forces insurance companies to pay a tax on high-cost insurance plans. Unions oppose the tax because many of their members have expensive health benefits in lieu of higher wages -- leaving them more vulnerable to its effects -- while health wonks love it because it provides an incentive for insurers to rein in costs on their most expensive plans. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has pretty much convinced me that the excise tax, properly tailored, is a good idea. Now here's Ezra making the progressive case for the tax:

The reason is that, unlike the House's surtax on family income over $1,000,000, the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans is not simply a tax. It's also a policy. Economists believe, with substantial evidence, that it will restrain the growth in health-care costs by making employers less willing to pay the automatic increases that insurers pass down each year. That money, they believe, will be routed back into wages. This is not intuitive, but it is, again, heavily backed up by evidence.

Few forces in American life are as regressive as the rise in health-care costs. At the bottom of the income scale, the rising costs make it impossible for employers to offer insurance coverage and convince some employers to end their health benefit programs, throwing their workers into the ranks of the uninsured. Moving up, working-class folks see their wages stagnate and their premium payments increase.

Ezra emphasizes the evidence because many of the arguments against the tax are simply that economists don't know what they're talking about it -- it's just the "egghead economist approach," says the AFL-CIO's Jerry Shea. But barring better arguments, I think labor is wrong on this one. An excise tax, appropriately targeted, is what one administration official calls "a revenue raiser and a game changer": It doesn't just cover the costs, it brings them down, too. That means both more subsidies for low-income health care and cheaper premiums for everyone; if economists are right, it also means higher wages.

-- Tim Fernholz

Pirates of the song-ripping, not Somali, variety.

Cory Doctorow passes along word that a draft version of an international agreement on copyright law has leaked, as have earlier documents from the hush-hush negotiations over what's called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Officials from the U.S., Japan, Switzerland and other countries have been hammering out the details of the trade agreement in far-flung places for the last five years or so. Round six -- with the participation of Obama's U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk -- happening this week in South Korea. What the draft text says about a new global regime for "Internet distribution and information technologies" is, says Cory, "very bad." And you can certainly make a strong argument that what's being debated this week would move forward the current front line of the copyright wars.

You can also make a good case that that's exactly why we're seeing this latest battle in the copyright wars playing out in secured conference rooms in Seoul rather than in front of C-SPAN cameras in the Senate. Congress, for all of Orrin Hatch's musings about blowing up computers, has stopped short of turning such aggressiveness into law. ACTA, then, takes a top-down approach. ACTA would get done at the level of international law something copyright interests like the RIAA, MPAA, and some software firms have wanted for years. It would do away with an understanding we have in the U.S. about the Internet: that, generally speaking, the networks and platforms that make up the online world (whether that's TimeWarner Cable or YouTube) have some protections against being held liable for what people post onto their services, like swapping songs they don't have the rights to.

Here's where the ACTA approach brings to mind how '80s-era mandatory sentencing for drug crimes came to be such a mess. Drug reform advocates wanted some sort of standardization on what had been the chaotic enforcement of drug laws. Short and consistent terms, the thinking went, would benefit overworked courts and defendants. After a zealous Congress got done with the idea, though, we had uniformly draconian sentencing laws that judges came to despise. Copyright enforcement, especially online, is similarly fuzzy. Internet companies get caught in the ambiguity. So ACTA offers what seems to be a tempting escape hatch.

The agreement that seems to be on the table in Seoul would give Internet services a safe harbor that protects them against what's called intermediary liability. That's arguably a positive step -- only to get there, the Internet services would be required to enact a mandatory zero-tolerance policy against copyright infringement. They have to agree to filter copyrighted material and strip infringing content from their networks. And more than that, Internet service providers would have to set up their services in a way that allows them to cut off copyright-infringing customers, a step they've fought against. (That tactic even goes by the name "three strikes and you're out.") That's a drastic, speech-limiting step that even Congress has shied away from.

That's why they call it the copyright "wars." And actually, it's reasonable to even tease out this whole war on drugs analogy further. You can argue that there's some similar cultural blending at work here. Like how Nixon and his team purposely grouped the marijuana beloved by long-haired counterculturalists with heroin and cocaine without much public consensus, the international agreement on the table lumps in illegal song-sharing -- rightly or wrongly -- with big global problems like counterfeit pharmaceuticals and even the big business of fake handbags. It's strategic for copyright interests to have all those things bundled together if and when it's time for Congress to have its say on the matter.

--Nancy Scola

(Photo credit: swanksalot)

Exciting news on the housing front: Effectively nationalized mortgage lender Fannie Mae has adopted a new policy to deal with foreclosures: Letting homeowners remain in their homes as renters instead of kicking them out and abandoning the property, as happens in many foreclosures.

"The Deed for Lease Program provides an additional option for qualifying homeowners who are facing foreclosure and are not eligible for modifications," said Jay Ryan, Vice President of Fannie Mae. "This new program helps eliminate some of the uncertainty of foreclosure, keeps families and tenants in their homes during a transitional period, and helps to stabilize neighborhoods and communities."

The new program is designed for borrowers who do not qualify for or have not been able to sustain other loan-workout solutions, such as a modification. Under Deed for Lease, borrowers transfer their property to the lender by completing a deed in lieu of foreclosure, and then lease back the house at a market rate.

To participate in the program, borrowers must live in the home as their primary residence and must be released from any subordinate liens on the property. Tenants of borrowers in this circumstance may also be eligible for leases under the program. Borrowers or tenants interested in a lease must be able to document that the new market rental rate is no more than 31% of their gross income.

This is really excellent news. Foreclosures are a source of economic problems not just for residents who become homeless but also because property values decay, hurting the broader housing market. Many people have advocated adopting this policy for some time, including our own Dean Baker, as it became increasingly clear that the central program designed to prevent foreclosures, Treasury's Making Home Affordable, hasn't been working nearly as well as it needs to be to have real effects on the crisis.

Of course, given that Fannie requires tacit approval from government regulators for any major decisions (since taxpayers own the firm), you'd have to think someone in the administration had a hand in this ...

-- Tim Fernholz

The administration's biggest economic mistake so far was to badly underestimate last January how terrible the employment situation would become by fall. As a result, it low-balled the stimulus -- settling for a plan that, while avoiding even worse job losses, didn't go nearly far enough.

Obama has to return to Congress, seeking a larger stimulus.

Yes, I know. We're already in the gravitational pull of the midterm elections (look at the bizarre attention given to gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and even to a congressional election in the 23rd district of New York, as supposed harbingers of voter behavior a year from now!). So it will be even harder to round up the needed votes from Blue Dog Dems fretting over the deficit. And you can forget the Republicans.

And yes, I know: Only about half the current stimulus has been spent, so it will be awkward to make the case that we need a larger one.

But here's the problem. Everything else on the table -- a new jobs tax credit, more loans to small businesses, more help to troubled homeowners, another extension of unemployment insurance, another round of subsidies to first-time home buyers -- are small potatoes relative to the importance and likely effect of a larger stimulus. Some of these initiatives may do some good, but even combined they'll barely make a dent in the growing numbers of jobless Americans.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

The circumstances of yesterday's conviction in absentia of 23 CIA agents by an Italian court for the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar, who was disappeared from Milan, were strange to me. The U.S. usually only uses rendition when the host country is either unfriendly or can't be seen cooperating with the U.S., and Italy is neither. Furthermore, five "high-ranking Italians" charged in the case were given immunity for reasons of "national security."

Peter Bergen reported on the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar for Mother Jones in April of last year, and his reporting confirms my suspicion that the Italian government had been told in advance of the abduction:

[Milan CIA Station Chief] Robert Lady, who speaks fluent Italian and had good relations with his local counterparts, emerges from this tale as something of a tragic figure. He had opposed the snatch of Abu Omar on the grounds that it was counterproductive; he knew that Italy's counterterrorism police had been trying to build a case against the Egyptian militant and had even warned a top Italian counterterrorism official, Stefano D'Ambrosio, that the CIA was planning the Abu Omar operation. D'Ambrosio told Italian investigators that Lady considered the whole scheme "stupid." But Lady was forced to lead the operation by his bosses in Rome and Langley, who were under intense pressure from the White House to produce results in the war on terrorism. Lady told Pironi that he'd never have spent all his savings to buy a retirement house in the Italian countryside "unless he had been sure that no inquiry against him was under way."

Bergen's piece is also important for putting in context what extraordinary rendition, which began during the Clinton administration and increased during the Bush administration, is and is not supposed to do. For example, it's not for the purpose of getting intelligence:

The extraordinary rendition program was not primarily intended to yield information, according to Michael Scheuer, the CIA official whom the Clinton White House tasked with implementing it. "It came from an improvisation to dismantle these terrorist cells overseas. We wanted to get suspects off the streets and grab their papers," Scheuer explains. "The interrogation part wasn't important." He also claims that the program was overseen by congressional committees and "was lawyered to death." After 9/11, "The White House was desperate," Scheuer says. The rendition program quickly expanded because holding any but the most important Al Qaeda prisoners was a "burdensome proposition" for the Agency.

There's one word here that sticks out to me: "suspects." These people hadn't necessarily committed any crimes, and the government didn't even believe they had valuable intelligence information, but the U.S. sent them to countries to be tortured because dealing with them ourselves was a "burdensome proposition." The government simply suspected that these people were dangerous, and the Bush administration was desperate for "results" in the war on terror, even to the point of committing crimes in friendly countries.

The Obama administration claims to have ended the practice of "extraordinary rendition", or the deliberate rendering of suspects to countries where they will be tortured. The Department of Justice says they have developed better procedures for getting "assurances" from foreign countries that the individuals the U.S. renders to them will not be tortured--an experienced FBI interrogator in Bergen's piece said that "assurances" given during the Bush administration were "worthless."

Back in August, White House counterterrorism official John Brennan suggested that the Obama administration might be utilizing rendition more as a result of the administration's attempts to avoid instituting a preventive detention regime for the "hard cases" at Guantanamo.

-- A. Serwer

Mark Schmitt on how his daughter could be the next Hideki Matsui:

When it's her long-awaited turn to play an inning behind the plate, I rush over to my daughter and help her strap on her leg guards, chest protector, and mask and then watch as she does her best imitation of Jorge Posada, crouched unsmiling behind the batter. When there's a chance of a play at the plate, she whips off the mask and positions her glove exactly where it's supposed to be.

It still brings a tear to my eye. I didn't expect to be much of a Little League dad -- I never played organized baseball myself and don't have much of a competitive streak. But I'm very much a Title IX dad. My 8-year-old is the only girl on her team this year, but that's mostly a trivial fact. She's hardly conscious of it, and the only time I've ever heard any of her teammates mention it was to worry about whether she was going to switch to softball, as other girls have done -- something she has no intention of doing. She was thrilled when she learned that there was no actual rule or law against women playing Major League Baseball, just that it hadn't happened yet. Her aspiration to play for the Yankees is not measurably less realistic than any other 8-year-old's.

KEEP READING ...

I reported last week that human-rights groups have been using Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategic assessment to argue for detention reforms in Afghanistan. One of my sources for that story, Sahr MuhammedAlly, is among the authors of a new report from Human Rights First that cites both McChrystal and Marine Reserve Gen. Doug Stone to make the argument that reforming the detention system isn't just a human-rights issue but will "more fully align U.S. detentions with strategic priorities."

Earlier this year, there was some skepticism about the amended Detainee Review Board procedures at Bagram, since they resemble the prior detention review procedures under the last administration that were deemed unconstitutional. Yet the HRF report actually says the reforms the Obama administration made are significant, but don't go far enough. HRF wants to see Afghan judges brought into the review process; it wants access to detention centers -- including Bagram -- for human rights groups; and it wants improvements in detainees' ability to "examine and challenge the evidence against them, exclude evidence gained through coercion, and create a combined repository of information." HRF wants to see detainees get legal representatives in the DRB, since even the improved procedures have them being assisted by non-lawyer "personal representatives" instead. The report also recommends making the transcripts of DRB proceedings public, and shifting detention authority over to the Afghans in part by strengthening their criminal-justice system.

But one of the most important recommendations is the one the U.S. is most likely to ignore: the repatriation or release of non-Afghans who were brought to Afghanistan in order to shield them from the eyes of U.S. courts. Back in April, Judge John Bates ruled that foreign detainees captured in a third country and brought to Bagram had habeas rights, just like detainees at Gitmo. Later, Gen. David Petraeus indicated that the FBI had been to Bagram to mirandize some detainees there. We've seen little movement on this issue since then. Given how complicated and lengthy the process of reviewing detainees at Guantanamo has been (as a result of the previous administration's practices), the administration is probably going to kick this legal time bomb down the road as long as it can.

There will be other good recommendations in the report that the administration will probably ignore, which is a reminder that while the strategic goals of the U.S. military and huma- rights groups may sometimes align in theory, they don't always in practice.

-- A. Serwer

Champion guest-blogger Suzy Khimm checks in on Connecticut state politics below, suggesting that Republican success across the state should make Dems, and in particular embattled Senator Chris Dodd, nervous. In particular, she highlights Michael Pavia, Stamford's newly elected Mayor. But even according to the article Suzy links to, it's clear his race has less to do with "Democrat versus Republican" and more to do, unsurprisingly, with local issues:

STAMFORD -- City native Michael Pavia, who promised voters he will strive to limit property tax increases and improve basic city services, won a landslide victory Tuesday over Democrat David Martin, becoming the first Republican to win the mayor's seat in 14 years.

...In his campaign, Pavia tried to paint Martin as the mayor's "rubber stamp" and voiced complaints that the city has lost focus on basic city services, such as road paving and sidewalk repair, while allowing property taxes to rise.

Pavia said the Malloy administration focused too much on bringing in big businesses while ignoring the needs of small business owners. He has not shied away from calling for major changes to the city charter, saying he favors term limits and an overhaul of the city's master plan.

Indeed, in New Jersey and Virginia voters were saying much the same thing. New Jersey voters were focused on the economy and the state's high property taxes; Virginia voters were concerned about unemployment. It's not a question of ideology or even party; it's a question of incumbency. (In fact, the only race driven by ideology, NY-23, went to the Democratic candidate.) That's an important distinction to make because it highlights the choices that incumbent Democrats have to make in the next year: Whether they continue to pursue the economic policies that have begun to demonstrate they can turn around the economy, and indeed increase their efforts with further help to the labor markets, or whether they act timidly and pursue choices that may be popular now but will end with disaster at the polls next year. Tomorrow's unemployment numbers will set the tone -- there are some signs that the number of people who lost their jobs last month will be at its lowest in some time.

Back in Connecticut, meanwhile, Dodd is in trouble because of his financial industry connections. But his new regulatory reform plan, which would create a "super-regulator" and severely diminish the Fed's powers, "stakes out an extreme position, and is likely to face major resistance, especially from the banking industry." Barney Frank told me last week he doesn't think Dodd has the votes for this, but it's a nice change from the compromise-first position asserted by the administration. It may also help save Dodd's bacon.

-- Tim Fernholz

Over at Newsweek, Ben Adler describes how the Republican upsets in New York City's suburbs are “an actual bad sign for the Democrats.” I’d actually look a bit farther east to include the results in Connecticut as another reason for concern.

Republicans ousted Democrats in municipal elections throughout the state, picking up seats in Stratford, Trumbull, Monroe, Darien, Guilford and other towns throughout southwestern and central Connecticut. In Stamford -- the state’s financial hub -- Michael Pavia trounced his Democratic opponent to become the city’s first Republican mayor in 14 years.

“With the economy so bad, people are looking for change,” Nancy DiNardo, the state’s Democratic Party chair, told the AP, linking the results to a broader, national repudiation of incumbents. Even so, the results don’t bode well for politically embattled Sen. Chris Dodd, who still trails leading Republican challenger Rob Simmons by over six points.

Less than two weeks ago, Obama himself traveled up to Stamford to attend a fundraising dinner for Dodd, praising his efforts to push for robust financial regulatory reform. But -- as I explained in a TNR piece earlier this year -- Dodd faces an uphill battle to dissociate himself from the deep-pocketed financial interests that reside in his state and shower him with campaign contributions, given his chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee. And a few of yesterday’s local Connecticut races pointed to some of the political challenges that Dodd is already facing.

In Stamford’s mayoral race, for example, Pavia railed against the Democratic incumbent for favoring the financial titans over the town’s small businesses, recalling the kind of criticisms that Simmons has levied against him over the AIG bonus scandal and federal bank bailouts. Simmons, for one, has already taken the opportunity to link 2009 with 2010, blasting Dodd for being his role in the “economic meltdown and its myriad of failed responses” in the same breath that he praised yesterday’s GOP victories in the state.

To be sure, Dodd could still have an opportunity to come back if the health-care bill and robust financial regulatory reform pass successfully. And if his Banking chairmanship makes him an easy target during economic hard times, he could conversely reap political rewards if the economy recovers to the public’s satisfaction next year. Either way, though, it seems unwise to overlook yesterday’s Republican victories in Dodd’s home state as insignificant. In a state that was at ground zero of the financial crisis, with a federal lawmaker who’s tried to guide its economic recovery, local and national concerns can be one and the same.

--Suzy Khimm

• Anyone looking for the meaning behind yesterday's elections should consult this chart from Joshua Tucker, which tells you all you need to know about the new balance of power in Washington and at the state level. And of course, if yesterday was a referendum on Obama's policies, especially health care, then "the people," as it were, voted to give Nancy Pelosi two more votes in the House.
• Chris Matthews is correct that some liberal activists had too high expectations for the first year of the Obama administration's ability to "change the Congress," but his insistence that the "netroots" are "wrong and misinformed" is confusing. During last year's campaign, the Obama team quite deliberately shut out the liberal blogosphere and constructed instead a parallel "netroots" that was composed of, unsurprisingly, those most enthusiastic about Barack Obama. Separating these different netroots, to say nothing of the less activist, more policy-oriented blogger, is something self-important media figures like Matthews have never been able to do.
  
• As Daniel Larison observes, it's impossible to take anything conservative hawks say on foreign policy seriously because so much of what passes for "analysis" on the right is designed to assess the president's actions and intent in the worst possible light. The same applies, of course, to domestic policy, and the result is that the bulk of what passes for conservative thought is so intellectually dishonest and motivated by pure partisan gamemanship that legitimate conservative criticism is lost in the noise.
• Remainders: Obama nominates two more America-hating judges to destroy the Constitution; Blue Dog Democrats are under the impression that they were elected to Congress to get nothing done; the coming turf war between Defense and State boils down to money; Hendrik Hertzberg plausibly predicts the next four years; Carly Fiorina announces gubernatorial run, is immediately labeled a RINO; and Chuck Colson is here to lecture you on religious foundations of morality.

--Mori Dinauer

House leadership is still struggling to find a compromise on abortion provisions that could threaten to derail the health-care bill, which they are trying to bring to a vote as early as this weekend. Yesterday, Indiana Rep. Brad Ellsworth, an anti-abortion Democrat, put out his own amendment to try to break the legislative deadlock. While Ellsworth has many of the same concerns as Bart Stupak, the Michigan representative who has threatened to hold up the bill with at least 39 others for not going far enough to prohibit federal funding of abortions. So what is Ellsworth asking for? Here’s the gist of his proposal (abridged for length):

• Explicitly prevents all federal tax dollars from being used to provide abortions in the public option;
• Prohibits any funds from the U.S. Treasury from paying for abortion services in any of the plans purchased through the proposed Health Insurance Exchange;
• Establishes clear, strict rules for separating public funds from the premiums of private individuals;
• Guarantees every American participating in the Health Insurance Exchange will always have access to a pro-life insurance option;
• Expands conscience protections to prevent the government from discriminating against pro-life health insurance plans.

Now, what's the difference between the Stupak and Ellsworth proposals?

The current version of the bill requires each state to have one insurer that provides abortion services and one that does not. As I explained earlier this week, Stupak's main problem is that the bill allows insurers who provided abortion services to participate in the exchange, which has participants supported by government subsidies. Stupak would thus categorically prohibit any insurers in the exchange from offering abortion coverage. Meanwhile, Ellsworth's proposal seems to require that the exchanges only have an anti-abortion insurance option, without necessarily guaranteeing an option that provides abortion services.

The reality is that most insurance companies do cover abortion services, making it fairly likely that a pro-choice insurer would be included. But Ellworth's proposal suggests that might not be guaranteed, though outside observers say it won't be entirely clear until the amendment's legislative language is released. The other provisions of Ellsworth's amendment suggest that the public plan would either prohibit any abortion coverage or have the public plan use money from private insurers (i.e. not Treasury's) for such coverage.

The Ellsworth proposal has already attracted criticism from reproductive rights and anti-abortion groups -- though anti-abortion advocates were far more vehement in their attack. While Planned Parenthood said they were "concerned" about the effect of the amendment on women's rights, the National Right to Life Committee called the move "a phony compromise" that is "only intended to wrap the pro-abortion provisions in additional layers of concealment," as Politico reported. Ellsworth has received the green light from the House leadership to try to whip other pro-life Democrats to support his compromise.

While Stupak is "reviewing" Ellsworth's alternative, he is "continuing to hold firm" in supporting his own proposal, Stupak spokesperson Michelle Begnoche said today. But though Stupak might still be willing to compromise, it's unclear whether the House leadership will have the time or patience to keep negotiating with him further. If the Ellsworth alternative manages to strip away enough of Stupak supporters, it could be enough to move the bill forward.

--Suzy Khimm

Tim Fernholz on what the election results mean for Democrats:

Not two days ago, a veteran Democratic operative told me that he expected Tuesday's election results to be a death knell for Republican moderates. But after the votes were counted, the message is that extremists are out and economic concerns are in, as voters chose a Democrat over a conservative in a New York congressional seat and two governors' races were decided over economic concerns.

Pundits will no doubt try to use the results to prognosticate for the 2010 congressional midterms, but the real significance of Tuesday's results is how they will influence politicians in the coming months, not what they predict for voter behavior a year from now.

KEEP READING ...

While conservatives are adjusting their spin to paint yesterday's loss in NY-23 as a win for the conservative grassroots, the actual outcome was that Republicans lost a vote in Congress. As I noted in my column today, some conservatives are already talking up Eric Wallace, who just dropped out of the Republican primary for the Illinois Senate race in 2010, as a potential independent conservative challenger. This has prompted worries for Mark Kirk, the moderate GOP congressman seen as the front-runner in the race; so many worries that he has contacted Sarah Palin in search of an endorsement:

After noting that Palin will be in Chicago later this month to appear on "Oprah", Kirk writes that "the Chicago media will focus on one key issue: Does Gov[ernor] Palin oppose Congressman Mark Kirk's bid to take the Obama Senate seat for the Republicans?"

Kirk goes on to write that he is hoping for something "quick and decisive" from Palin about the race, perhaps to the effect of: "Voters in Illinois have a key opportunity to take Barack Obama's Senate seat. Congressman Kirk is the lead candidate to do that."

Palin, it appears, has become something of a kingmaker among conservatives (although, to be completely accurate, people in that role typically endorse winning candidates, not losing ones). It will be interesting to see if Palin is pragmatic enough to endorse Kirk, but one thing is clear: Having an independent conservative in the race would make it very difficult for Kirk to win what would otherwise be a very competitive race for him. It's not simply the issue splitting the Republican base. The problem comes with the kind of issues Kirk would be forced to talk about during the race: While cultural issues and fiery rhetoric excite the Glenn Beck crowd, winning campaigns in the last few years have been focused on economic issues and jobs. Just ask incoming Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell or NY-23 Congressman-elect Bill Owens.

"It doesn't make sense to me how you would ever talk about things other than what actually matters to people in the district, but the House Republicans manage to do it every time," one Democratic operative told me as we discussed the NY-23 race this morning. "I was so amused with the debate over the 'heart and soul of the Republican Party.' Could there be anything in the world that the average voter cares about less than the fate of a fucking political party?"

-- Tim Fernholz

A week ago, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reported that he had raised (from himself) $85 million dollars, while opponent William C. Thompson had raised about $9 million. And yet Thompson, an uninspiring candidate with no message and no real base, came within four percentage points of defeating Bloomberg.

What is the big lesson here? Certainly it's that Bloomberg was more vulnerable than most recognized, especially all the potential candidates who were so intimidated that they not only gave up their candidacies but even backed his scheme to undo term limits. But more significantly, it is further proof of a rule of thumb in campaign finance that is often forgotten: After a certain point, more money doesn't do you any good. (Political scientists Jonathan Krasno and Donald Green showed this in a 1988 paper I can't find online.) There are rapidly diminishing returns to greater spending, as self-financed candidates before Bloomberg, whose names you might not remember because they lost, have found.

A corollary is that, to run a viable race against a big-spender, a candidate doesn't need to keep pace, but just has to reach some threshold of viability. It's hard to know exactly where that is, but it's a reasonable guess that Bloomberg's previous opponents, Mark Green, who raised and spent $17 million in 2001, and Fernando Ferrer, with $10.5 million in 2005, probably reached it, which is to say, money wasn't the main factor in their losses. (That's still a lot of money: the average successful Senate candidate in 2008 spent $8 million.) The great thing about New York City is that it is comparatively easy to reach the threshold, because of the campaign finance system that provides a public match of 6:1 on small contributions. So Thompson got, as of October 23, $3.2 million in public money; Ferrer had $4.3 million in matching funds.

As for diminishing returns, it's easy to see why more money doesn't matter -- there's only so much you can do. Once people have seen your TV ads or heard your radio ads a dozen times, another two dozen are only going to annoy them. Bloomberg seems to have engaged in a very creative experiment to see whether he could defeat the law of diminishing returns -- rather than mere robo-calls, his campaign came up with a scheme of precisely targeted calls, so that you might get a recorded call from your own building manager, or a call precisely keyed to language -- older immigrant voters might get a call in their language, younger voters in English with an accent!

It's brilliant, and expensive, but robo-calls don't work (another fact proven by Don Green!) and so it should come as no surprise that micro-targetted robo-calls don't work either. The only thing Bloomberg's $85 million campaign did was keep a lot of campaign consultants off the streets.

-- Mark Schmitt

To follow up on Adam's excellent post, Emily Bazelon raises a useful contrast between Maine and Massachusetts. In both states, a process was in place that would enable laws providing marriage equality to be changed. In the latter, however, the process required more deliberation, and ultimately opponents of same-sex marriage were unable to secure support from even the necessary 25 percent of the legislature to put the issue to a referendum. Essentially, as more same-sex couples get married (and the apocalyptic claims of opponents look more and more cruel and farcical), support for rolling back rights tends to decline. Alas, Maine voters did not even have the chance to see what the effects of the policy would be, much to the disadvantage of the dignity and equality of its gay and lesbian citizens.

The other key lesson, as I mentioned recently, is that it's foolish to think that obtaining equal marriage benefits from the legislature will somehow preempt opposition. In some states (with Iowa looking like the most recent example) judicial opinions can lead to relatively stable marriage equality, while Maine demonstrates that legislative victories provide no guarantee. As Adam says, the fact that there's a very large overlap between people furious about the courts deferring to elected officials in Kelo and people who claim that their opposition to same-sex marriage is motivated not by bigotry but by opposition to "judicial activism" should make this pretty obvious.

--Scott Lemieux

If for a moment you're tempted to believe Michael Steele's spin that yesterday's gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey were referenda on the Obama administration, let me remind you of the Democratic victories in those same two states in 2001. Remember how the elections of Mark Warner and Jim McGreevey marked a rejection of George W. Bush and the Republican agenda, and the conservative power structure never recovered from the blow? Don't remember that? Me neither.

So, no, gubernatorial elections are never referenda on the president, Congress, or national parties. They are always their own thing, involving the circumstances of the state and the individual candidates. Political parties mean something different at the state level, and states that will not go Democratic in a national election in this century, like Wyoming and Oklahoma, nonetheless have popular Democratic governors, while Rhode Island and Connecticut, states Obama carried with more than 60 percent of the vote, are governed by Republicans.

It's governance, not elections, that will matter. If Republican governors like Chris Christie in New Jersey, Robert McDonnell in Virginia, or others elected in 2008 or earlier are seen as successful governors, that's the path back to power for Republicans. The Republican surge in the 1990s owed far more to big-state Republican governors who were perceived as successful than to the congressional majority. Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, John Engler in Michigan, George Voinovich in Ohio, Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey, Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania and others implanted in those swing-state voters a sense that Republicans could be responsible stewards of government, cutting taxes without cutting services. ("Perceived" is the key word; there were often colossal gimmicks involved.) When voters looked at Bush in 2000, they quite reasonably saw him as cut from the same cloth, and very different from the deeply unpopular Republicans of Congress. Governors present a face of the party as solving problems, not stirring conflict around social issues or obstructing progress on health care.

I'm not too worried about Christie being perceived as a big success. New Jersey ran out of gimmicks a long time ago, and I think the Christie administration will dissolve quickly in scandal. (The "deferred prosecution" racket he created as a U.S. attorney should have been a major issue in the campaign: He gave a company a deal under which they wouldn't be prosecuted if they endowed a chair at his alma mater, Seton Hall! Is that so hard to explain?) But McDonnell takes office on a foundation of eight years of responsible government by Warner and Tim Kaine. The state has one of the most resilient economies in the country (thanks, big government!), and it won't take much for him to be seen as a good governor who can also cut some taxes. Such success could make McDonnell a presidential candidate someday, or more likely a challenger for one of the two Senate seats, and it will potentially restore Virginians' comfort with the Republican Party. Those are the only national consequences of yesterday's gubernatorial elections.

-- Mark Schmitt

In 2003, the CIA abducted radical Islamic cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr aka Abu Omar, from Milan, Italy. The CIA then reportedly lied to Italian authorities about his disappearance to cover their tracks. Omar was then flown to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured.

An Italian prosecutor quoted by the Washington Post back in 2005 criticized the U.S. for dodging the criminal justice system:

“The kidnapping of Abu Omar was not only a serious crime against Italian sovereignty and human rights, but it also seriously damaged counterterrorism efforts in Italy and Europe,” said Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor in Milan. “In fact, if Abu Omar had not been kidnapped, he would now be in prison, subject to a regular trial, and we would have probably identified his other accomplices.”

Italian authorities indicted the 23 CIA agents they allege were involved with Omar’s rendition, and today the 23,  were convicted in absentia of kidnapping, along with two Italian agents. This case has always puzzled me — Italy is an ally. Why was extraordinary rendition necessary? Such methods are usually reserved for apprehending individuals in countries that are not friendly to the United States precisely because those countries won't cooperate. Sometimes these things occur in countries where the host government can't be seen as helping out the U.S., but under those circumstances my understanding is the U.S. still gets under-the-table permission to act.

I will say this though, convicting people in absentia? Not such a big fan of that.

UPDATE: The Times reports that actually, no Italians were convicted, because of "state secrecy":

Judge Oscar Magi handed an eight-year sentence to Robert Seldon Lady, a former C.I.A. station chief in Milan, and five-year sentences to 22 other Americans. Three of the other high-ranking Americans were given diplomatic immunity, including Jeffrey Castelli, a former C.I.A. station chief in Rome.

The judge did not convict three high-ranking Italians charged in the abduction, citing state secrecy, and a former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolò Pollari, also received diplomatic immunity. All the Americans were tried in absentia and are considered fugitives.

Kevin Drum comments:

Let me get this straight: the Italian judge was happy to convict a bunch of Americans who he knew would never pay a price since they'll never be extradited, but he wasn't willing to convict the Italians involved in all this, who would have paid a price. You'll excuse me, I hope, if I don't exactly see this as a triumph of judicial independence. Convicting a bunch of foreigners is easy. It's holding your own people to account that's hard. Wake me up when either of our countries starts doing that.

This, quite frankly makes me very suspicious of what the Italian government actually knew about the kidnapping.It all kind of reminds me of the Obama administration crowing about transparency while invoking the state secrets doctrine every five minutes.

— A. Serwer

MORE...

Adam Serwer reviews Blurring the Color Line:

"You mean there are no white males qualified?" the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan exclaimed in disbelief in one of his many cable TV appearances at the time the president nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. 



Sotomayor's nomination and the response it drew from conservatives exemplified what the sociologist Richard Alba describes in his new book as the problem of "zero-sum mobility," namely a situation where the number of elite positions is fixed and the majority sees minorities as moving up at their expense. According to Alba, although zero-sum mobility provokes resistance by the privileged majority, non-zero-sum mobility creates a more favorable environment for minorities to gain acceptance, even to the point where ethnic and racial lines fade in significance. Non-zero-sum mobility occurs in situations where minorities can move up without displacing members of the majority group because of economic expansion or the disproportionate aging and retirement of members of the majority. 



KEEP READING ...

Despite the outcome in Maine last night, as Ben Smith pointed out, several LGBT candidates won local elections or stand a good chance of winning as of this morning. Annise Parker, a candidate for mayor of Houston looks to have a good chance of winning a runoff election there. In North Carolina, Chapel Hill elected Mark Kleinschmidt mayor.

But I think the most interesting result was in Detroit, where a city that is 80 percent black elected a black, openly gay candidate, Charles Pugh, city council president. Black voters are a key element of the liberal coalition, but they also tend to be cold toward marriage equality. Pugh may be a sign of things moving in the other direction. The other thing is that, while I'm not so familiar with Detroit, any city with such a large percentage of African Americans is also bound to have an active black LGBT community, which I think makes a great deal of difference when it comes to persuading black voters about such things.

-- A. Serwer

Last night was a good night for the GOP, but perhaps not in ways that are immediately obvious. McDonnell's win in Virginia and Christie's win in New Jersey proved that conservatism can win if it moderates itself (if only in rhetoric). Perhaps more important, the seeds of a conservative revival will be found not in the ideological purity of the tea parties or candidates like Hoffman but in the application of conservative principles to actual governance -- this is particularly true for the GOP candidates who were elected last night, one in a blue state, the other in a state that is trending blue. Of course, if McDonnell and Christie are successful governors, and the conservative base retains its paranoid and conspiratorial tone, they may ultimately find themselves tagged as RINOs for the compromises they will surely have to make.

The biggest disappointment for liberals last night wasn't the outcome of races in Virginia or New Jersey but of the marriage-equality referendum in Maine. It never ceases to amaze me how conservatives manage to erect political-cultural barriers that seem only to apply to liberals -- conservatives have argued that any path to marriage equality that goes through the courts is illegitimate, "judicial activism" so to speak, even as gun-rights advocates fight for the incorporation of Second Amendment rights into the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The path to freedom through the courts is fine for the NRA, just not for people looking for the right to marry the person they love.

Marriage quality is ultimately inevitable -- but these referendums, which put up what should be individuals' inalienable rights up to a majority vote -- nevertheless mean a great deal, as they needlessly prolong an era of inequality which this country will someday look back upon in shame. Maine relaxed prohibitions on medical marijuana last night while voting down marriage equality -- it may be time to put a picture of the state in the Balloon Juice Lexicon under "glibertarian."

As for the biggest loser last night, I'd say the president, but not because these elections are a "referendum" on his agenda. That happened in 2008. Christie and McDonnell went easy on Obama -- and discontent with the president doesn't seem to have been a factor in their wins. Meanwhile, Hoffman, who was the protest candidate of the Obama haters, went down in flames in a reliably conservative district.

No, Obama is a loser for backing two losing Democratic gubernatorial candidates while staying relatively silent on Maine's referendum. Just as this country will one day look back in shame at discrimination against same-sex couples, so should President Obama feel regret, wondering if things could have been different had he intervened and put the full force of his office behind those fighting for their rights, rather than simply looking out for his party.

-- A. Serwer

While both the exit polls and the realities of gubenatorial races make this Politico news analysis by editor John Harris overwrought -- you can tell by the excess of adjectives ("umistakable," "emphatically," "humiliating," "severe") that they're reaching -- yesterday's elections should be taken as a warning shot across Democrats' bows. More insightful than his boss, Ben Smith's article on the surprisingly close New York mayoral race -- where Democrats, with more resources, might have unseated Republican ubermoderate Michael Bloomberg -- reveals that White House officials are feeling a little stung:

“Maybe one of those Corzine trips could have been better spent in New York. Who knows?" remarked New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who weighed his own run for mayor, referring to the White House’s devout attention to the New Jersey contest.

“Maybe Anthony Weiner should have manned-up and run against Michael Bloomberg,” shot back a White House official, who attributed the night’s results across the board to anti-incumbent fervor.

That strikes me as one of the sharpest intra-party rebukes to ever come out of this mild-mannered White House (am I forgetting something?). This official is feeling a little sensitive -- and rightfully so. Democrats had best hope they can turn their pique around at their opponents on the right and avoid further sniping among their own team. Here's my full take on what the election results mean for both parties.

-- Tim Fernholz

Last night's elections were a mixed bag. Democrat Bill Owens won the incredibly hyped race in NY-23. The governor's mansions in New Jersey and Virginia went to Republicans. Incumbent New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg experienced what could best be called an embarrassing victory. Perhaps most disappointing, Maine narrowly voted to repeal a law allowing gay marriage. All of these races will be extensively parsed in an attempt to read some meaning for futures of the Democratic and Republican parties, and Tim has more on that in his column.

But one election worth looking at that hasn't received a terrible amount attention is the mayor's race that happened in my hometown, Houston. The tight competition between three Democrats and one Republican is headed to a December runoff between two of the more progressive candidates. It's not that a sea change is happening in Texas' largest city -- 78 percent of the vote went to liberal candidates, but Houston has elected Democratic mayors since the beginning of the Reagan years.

What impressed me was the diversity of the candidate field and the civility of the campaigns, much of which I think stems from the fact that it was Houston's second nonpartisan race. Annise Parker, the front-runner, is poised to be the first openly gay woman elected mayor of a major city. Her competitor, Gene Locke, would be Houston's second black mayor were he to win. The pair beat out a Republican Latino, a WASPy liberal man, a woman running for the Socialist Workers Party, and a couple of independents. Without primaries, we ended up with a pretty representative group of candidates who had to distinguish their platforms against like-minded competitors as well as members of the opposition. What came out of it were a lot of pragmatic platforms based on improvements in the realms of transit, education, and the environment. On a municipal level, this type of system seems to make a decent amount of sense.

If anything, the race may have been a little too boring and a little too reality-based, as suggested by a lower voter turnout -- which could be explained by the lack of money spent on campaigns and the absence of any real contentious issues being debated. But then again, maybe politics at its most banal is perhaps politics at its best.

--Alexandra Gutierrez

• It still astonishes that we can wring our collective hands over $90 billion per year for health-care reform while no one bats an eye when $680 billion is appropriated for defense spending for the same period of time. Even more so that seemingly uncontroversial things like transportation spending is seen as one sieg heil from the goosestep but a worldwide network of military bases is just the price of freedom.
• While Hoffmania will undoubtedly impact how the GOP handles primaries in the future, Jay Cost points out that the situation in NY-23 is sui generis because New York already has a strong conservative party presence that facilitated a challenge to the GOP's candidate, who also suffered from being handpicked by the state party rather than going through a primary.
• Posted without comment: "Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say. The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk."
• Remainders: When it comes to invoking the state-secrets privilege, Obama channels Bush; clearly the media is ignoring the national implications of the race in CA-10; it's a mystery why world industrial output avoided falling into the abyss earlier this year; and I'd like to see this poll of Southern approval of Bush vs. Obama broken down by race.

--Mori Dinauer

Medicare and Medicaid aren't the only public insurance programs that could undergo a major overhaul under the current health-care reform bill. Over at The Washington Independent, Mike Lillis explains how the House bill proposes to eliminate CHIP -- the state children's health-insurance program that has enjoyed broad-based support from Democrats -- and move the low-income children covered by the government program into the health-insurance exchanges by 2013. The goal in doing so, Lillis says, is "to get family members under the same plan, to centralize control of the state-run CHIP program, and to shift more folks into private coverage to win the support of both the insurance lobby and moderate Democrats."

Opponents of the move point to independent findings that the cost of insurance for children covered by CHIP could rise if they entered the exchange and that they could lose many of the protections they currently have under the public program, which covers children from low-income families that are above the cutoff for Medicaid. Sen. Jay Rockefeller invoked many of these arguments during the Finance Committee's markup of the bill, maintaining that young children shouldn't be subject to the whims of the private market, and successfully prevented the program from being eliminated in the Senate bill.

I agree that it's important to pass additional protective measures to ensure that the benefits for these children remain comprehensive and affordable. Certainly, it would be a political disaster if Democratic reform disadvantaged low-income kids. That being said, if CHIP's dismantling ended up moving more folks into the health-insurance exchange, it wouldn't simply be a boon for "the insurance lobby and moderate Democrats." It could strengthen one of the most fundamental parts of the Democratic reform package -- a robust insurance exchange with a pool of participants that's large enough to drive down costs precisely because insurance companies have an incentive to jump in and compete for customers. Moreover, folding CHIP into the exchange would add a younger, healthier pool of participants to the exchange, offsetting its potential of becoming a dumping ground for the sick and elderly. Finally, CHIP has always suffered from under enrollment -- about 6 million children aren't insured in the program who should be -- and by bringing whole families in under the same plan, more children will be covered.

Given CHIP's popularity among Democrats and the success it's enjoyed, the proposal to eliminate the program could still be a legislative sticking point when it comes to putting the House and Senate bills together. But it's also important to remember that the program was created in the wake of Clintoncare's failure in 1994 -- a stop-gap measure, let's say, to insure that some of the country's most vulnerable citizens were covered. This time, Democrats have the chance to pass a truly comprehensive reform package and to implement changes that could help a much broader swath of the population -- kids included.

--Suzy Khimm

This election-day TTR identifies new benefits from health-care reform, warns of pernicious behavior from the credit-card industry, argues for a stronger Europe, and provides the latest data on higher education during the recession.

• Health-care reform will lower your premium. In a new paper, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber provides evidence that market reforms and subsidies included in proposed health-care reform legislation will bring down the cost of individual premiums. CBO studies, Gruber says, imply that "the same plan that cost $6,000 without reform would cost $4,540 with reform, or almost 25 percent less," and in Massachusetts, whose health-care reform efforts are similar to the new national initiatives, "the average individual premium in the state fell from $8,537 at the end of 2006 to $5,143 in mid-2009, a 40 percent reduction, while the rest of the nation was seeing a 14 percent increase." His findings suggest that even people who already have health-care insurance can expect to benefit from the passage of health-care reform legislation. -- TF

• Watch out for more bank fees. Pew Charitable Trusts reveals the continued unfair and deceptive practices by credit-card companies since the passage of the Credit CARD Act earlier this year. The report, covering 12 banks that control over 90 percent of the nation’s outstanding credit-card debt and 12 credit unions, finds that no banks currently issue credit cards that meet the requirements of the Credit CARD Act of 2009. In fact, banks have increased penalty rates and more have moved toward a "variable rate with minimum rate requirement" model that prevents cardholders from enjoying the benefits of a falling index rate. Hopefully, the new federal regulation will succeed in imposing "reasonable and proportional" limits on charges to protect consumers, and do so soon. -- LL
• A Post-American Europe? In a study released yesterday, the Brookings Institute highlights the importance of a strong Europe. “In foreign and defense policy the relationship [between the U.S. and Europe] remains one of patron and client,” the authors note with regret. Arguing that a strong EU with an assertive foreign policy would be an asset to the United States, they advise Europe to develop its own foreign-policy agenda, particularly with regard to Afghanistan, Russia, and the Middle East. As the U.S. shifts from world superpower to “indispensable” partner, a more unified and forceful Europe would be a useful ally. -- PL
• School’s in. Drawing on recent U.S. Census Bureau data, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press confirms that in the midst of a nationwide recession, college enrollment is higher than it's ever been. Results show in 2008, just under 11.5 million students – or about 40 percent of people ages 18 to 24 – were enrolled in a two- or four-year college. Community colleges benefited most – adding about 300,000 students to their enrollment rosters from 2007 to 2008. Meanwhile, four-year universities saw virtually no change. According to Pew, the split is consistent with the countercyclical nature of community institutions – “tend[ing] to rise as the economy worsens.” -- MH

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
10/27/09
10/20/09

When I posted earlier on John Fund, I hadn't realized that his typical voter-fraud fearmongering had reached four-alarm-fire status in the rest of the right-wing blogosphere, where folks like Jim Geraghty are freaking out about relaxed standards for handing out provisional ballots, which they believe may allow Democrats to steal the election in New Jersey. Over at The Next Right, David Kralik writes:

Its been said that Democrats have two growing electoral bases: trial lawyers and voter fraud.

Republican candidates who get screwed in elections by Democrat / Leftist / ACORN voter fraud is so common that its deserving of its own Wylie Coyote routine.

Naturally, even though it's "so common" Kralik doesn't provide a single link of a proven instance of ACORN stealing an election for a Democrat. Because it hasn't happened.

At any rate, what Geraghty, Kralik, and Fund don't tell you about "provisional ballots" in New Jersey is that while getting one is easy, committing fraud with it would be very hard. I spoke with Robert Giles, director of the New Jersey Division of Elections this morning, who explained that each county in New Jersey has a review board, composed of four individuals, two Republicans and two Democrats, who review each provisional ballot before validating it. In fact, it's fair to say that provisional ballots in general are scrutinized more closely than regular ballots.

"[Provisional ballots] aren’t subject to less scrutiny, they’re more scrutinized in fact," explained Gerry Hebert, a voting-rights expert with the Campaign Legal Center who formerly worked in the voting-rights section of the Justice Department. "Each one of them are generally reviewed by a verification board to make sure that the person who cast the ballot is in fact a registered voter or eligible to cast that ballot.” Just generally speaking, provisional ballots are far more likely than regular ballots not to be counted. So relying on provisional ballots to steal an election--really stupid. But it doesn't sound that stupid if you don't know that they aren't carefully scrutinized.

But hey look, we know what's going on here. The conservative media rings the ACORN bell and the base salivates. Dave Weigel, reporting from NY-23, can explain it to you:

The Hoffman backers outside of the Biden event all said they’d attended Tea Parties. Some were affiliated with Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. All worried that ACORN was going to show up in the district, or even at the Biden event–a paranoia that led to some minor awkwardness when an African-American Hoffman worker walked by.

“This guy’s with ACORN,” said Dewitt.

“Definitely, not from around here,” said businessman Erik Dunk.

Right. Look, Chris Christie might win in New Jersey tonight, or he might lose. But he's not going to lose because ACORN got all the scary minorities to cast fraudulent provisional ballots.

UPDATE: ACORN isn't even working in New Jersey.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, I was reading about how the administration's health-care strategy is poised to produce a health-care reform bill, but one that is not bipartisan.

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill.

“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

Ignoring that bipartisanship on civil rights arose from party structures that no longer exist today due to the increasing ideological alignment of the parties (there are no more moderate/liberal Republicans, and many fewer conservative Southern Democrats), Alexander does raise an interesting point. Not that the White House doesn't want a bipartisan bill -- they certainly want one and have gone to great lengths to get one. It's the idea that no one knows how to do bipartisanship any more -- because, I'd postulate, of this same ideological alignment of the parties.

I raise the question because the Republicans have finally released their alternative health-care bill, and it is a doozy that essentially does ... nothing. It doesn't even deal with the problem of "pre-existing conditions," which numerous Republicans believe is a necessary reform. Nor would it expand health insurance coverage to people who don't have it. It will, in fact, make existing insurance coverage worth by gutting regulation.

But aside from not doing much, this Republican bill isn't even remotely bipartisan. They don't even bother to include any Democratic ideas about health-care reform. Say what you will about the Democrats' process, they certainly included Republican ideas in a symbolic way, particularly on malpractice tort reform, and I would argue that they included conservative ideas because their plan is a compromise between the kind of government involvement favored by the left (single-payer as a prime example) and the private model preferred on the right.

It's plainly true, of course, that this bill -- which probably wouldn't even gain much support in the Republican caucus -- is another obstruction tactic from the congressional opposition, who have waited through some eight months of wide-ranging policy discussion to offer their alternative. However, I want to know why reporters who dwell on the Democrats' lack of success in courting Republicans aren't asking those same questions of the GOP. I'd postulate that bipartisanship is dead on a lot of big issues because of the ideological alignment discussed above, but if the MSM is going to make it their primary measure of legislative quality, they should at least hold Republicans to the same standards. Ultimately, though, the biggest problem isn't that Republicans don't know how to do bipartisan health-care reform, either. It's that they just don't want to do health-care reform.

-- Tim Fernholz

Are lobbyists really fleeing Obama’s Washington? Yesterday, the Center for Responsive Politics and OMB Watch jointly released a study revealing that some 1,400 lobbyists de-registered between April and June this year -- about 8 percent of the total number of registered lobbyists. Normally, only a few hundred lobbyists leave every quarter, but the exodus happened soon after Obama issued an executive order that imposed new rules on lobbying, restricting lobbyists' ability to serve in the administration and to have direct access to officials handling TARP and the stimulus package. The departures of registered lobbyists now outpace the number of new registrations each year, and the trend is only accelerating.

Some have interpreted the news as a sign that the Obama administration has effectively fulfilled its pledge to crack down on lobbying. “It’s been a rough few years for lobbyists,” Brody Mullins proclaimed in The Wall Street Journal, adding that K Street has also borne the brunt of the recession."They have been attacked by President Barack Obama ... and they have been hurt by the economy. And many have decided they’re not going to take it anymore.” And some liberal outlets immediately cheered the news: As Mother Jones tweeted, “Good riddance, lobbyists.”

But have all these lobbyists really fled the profession -- or have some returned under different guises? As OMB Watch and CRP note, many lobbyists who appear to have left have come back as unregistered lobbyists with executive titles like “senior adviser” or “consultant” to avoid having to comply with federal lobbying restrictions. One lobbyist I contacted confirmed this trend in an e-mail today:

For people wanting to reenter government, or who interact with "covered officials" not having to register as a lobbyist makes a job more attractive. At our firm we have brought attorneys who are not registered and used them to meet with officials who refuse to see lobbyists… I don't think many people have left the profession, in fact I'd bet the business of influencing government has actually grown over
the last year – registrations not withstanding.

If the Obama administration really wanted to crack down on the influence of lobbying, it could force anyone who met with officials “covered” under the current lobbying restrictions to register -- and cut down on the legislative earmarks that still abound. Moreover, OMB Watch’s Lee Mason told me, the White House (as well as Congress) could decide to disclose the meetings and communications it has with all the lobbyists and advocates it courts.

Without taking these kind of measures, the system “basically disadvantages the people who play by the rules while creating a whole new underground influence game that flouts a law that can't be enforced,” the lobbyist source concluded. As it currently stands -- and as the debates over health care and financial regulation have made abundantly clear -- Obama’s anti-lobbying efforts haven’t certainly diminished the clout of K Street.

--Suzy Khimm

Matthew Yglesias reviews It Takes a Pillage, Fool's Gold, and Managed by the Markets:

From the beginning of the great financial panic of 2007-2008, efforts at understanding the crisis have been hampered by the likely bias of the people in the best position to know. Anyone sufficiently "inside" the financial world to understand what was happening was also inside enough to have suspect motives. That's why someone like Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs turned muckraking lefty journalist, comes to seem invaluable. And this is never more so than when, as with her new book It Takes a Pillage, she's confirming the suspicions of those of us on the outside that there's something fishy and a bit fraudulent about the world of high finance.

Relative to the voices of the establishment, both in the political world and in the mainstream financial press, Prins is admirably clear and direct about the basically corrupt nature of many of the dealings between the government and the large banks. As she lays out, regulatory failures aren't something that just happened; they were made to happen by the political power and influence that high finance came to wield across party lines. The result has been to create a situation in which ties to major players in the banking world became a prerequisite for making economic policy at the highest levels.

KEEP READING ...

The fact that someone in the FBI submitted a proposal to have Mohamed Al-Qahtani, subjected to similar techniques as those that had been used on Abu Zubaydah was summarized in the initial part of the FBI IG report.

Later on, the IG gets into the details, including parts of a draft of the proposal that he was able to secure -- although the identity of the FBI official who submitted the proposal apparently remains unknown, even to the IG. The draft proposal states: "It is firmly believed that AL-QATANI traveled to the U.S. in 2001 for the purposes of committing or supporting a terrorist act. It is further believed that AL-QATANI possesses critical intelligence regarding the identification of individuals also involved in planning, supporting, or committing terrorist acts against U.S. interests."

The draft further states that while "some progress has been made" with al-Qahtani, that "[redacted] being used with subjects including Abu Zabaida [redacted] could greatly enhance [al-Qahtani's] productivity."

What the FBI official who drafted the report actually thought would be done, or wanted to be done to al-Qahtani is redacted, quite dramatically:

The IG states that the FBI officials familiar with the proposal did not know "specifically what interrogation techniques would be involved." Why is this part redacted then?

The IG believes the document was circled around the fall of 2002 or early 2003. It would then follow pretty closely on the heels of John Yoo's August 2002 memo giving the CIA legal sanction to torture Abu Zubaydah. The corruption of torture spread quickly.

-- A. Serwer

Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund has been doing Glenn Beck-style conspiracy theorizing about voter fraud since way before it was cool. His column today is typical fare, a great deal of innuendo that plays on right-wing paranoia about shifty minorities voting more than they should.

Jeremy Schulman dispatches Fund in one brief paragraph:

So just to recap: In a single sentence, Fund claims to have spoken to anonymous New Jerseyans somehow involved in politics who purportedly told him that unnamed Philadelphians, who are also involved in politics and who once had unspecified ties to ACORN, "may" (or may not) be giving New Jersey political operatives advice on how to do something that is apparently legal in New Jersey.

Yes--this attitude is why it's unsurprising that Republican attempts to curtail "voter fraud" mostly end up curtailing actual voting. Incidentally, if the right really wants to put ACORN out of the voter registration business, they might consider supporting universal voter registration.

Since the ultimate goal is to figure out ways to depress turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies, the prospect of all American citizens being able to vote easily isn't all that interesting to the voter-fraud hawks on the right, who spent the last eight years tilting at windmills. And ultimately the right would probably prefer it if it still had ACORN to kick around for years to come.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman writes a column about changes in drug policy without cracking pot jokes:

In these times of economic strife and fervent debate over health care, our great national culture war has been pushed to the side. But once in a while, it pops up its mischievous little head to remind us that the eternal battle between the hippies and the squares continues on, even if we can ignore it from time to time.

One of those moments happened on Oct. 19, when the Justice Department released a memo instructing U.S. attorneys that while prosecuting drug dealers is still an objective, they "should not focus federal resources in your States on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana." Though the next Republican administration will probably reverse the policy, the directive seems to provide more evidence that the left is winning the culture war.

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Marcy Wheeler notes that Ali Soufan appears to have gotten actionable intelligence out of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh while he was chained to the floor, and within the 45-minute window given to him by the CIA. Wheeler comments:

I’m interested in this revelation for two reasons. First, if Soufan’s claims are correct then it shows that the FBI repeatedly got intelligence the CIA was unable to get -- and that the CIA, on at least two occasions, shut down the FBI access when they were succeeding.

It's not just that; the CIA denied the IG access to Abu Zubaydah for the report, with the CIA's general counsel "asserting that OIG had not persuaded him" that the OIG had a "'demonstrable and immediate need to interview Zubaydah at that time' given what the Acting General Counsel understood to be OIG's 'investigative mandate.'" The footnote in the IG report goes on to explain:

In addition, the CIA Acting General Counsel asserted that Zubaydah could make false accusations against CIA employees. We believe none of these reasons were persuasive or warranted in denying us access to Zubaydah. First, neither the FBI nor the DOD objected to our access to Zubaydah at that time. In addition, neither the FBI nor the DOD stated that an OIG interview would interfere with their interviews of him. Second, at GTMO we were given access to other high value detainees. Third, we did have a demonstrable and immediate need to interview Zubaydah at that time, as well as the other detainees who we were given access to, nonwithstanding the CIA Acting General Counsel's position that we had not persuaded him. Finally, the fact that Zubaydah could make false allegations against CIA employees--as could other detainees--was not in our view a legitimate reason to object to our access to him. In sum, we believe that the CIA's reasons for objecting to OIG access to Zubaydah were unwarranted, and its lack of cooperation hampered our investigation.

So why didn't the CIA want the OIG to interview Zubaydah? It's unclear, but as the IG notes, the excuse the CIA gives is pretty flimsy. Maybe it had to do with Soufan again scoring information through traditional methods that the CIA couldn't get through torture. Or maybe it was that Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, and the CIA didn't want that information ending up in something like the FBI's "war crimes" file (this IG report was first issued in May 2008, almost a year before the torture memos were released, but for all I know, the IG already knew what happened). It's also possible that, as Zubaydah's lawyer claims, he's in a debilitated mental state partially as a result of his treatment, which is the kind of thing you'd like to keep under wraps.

But this is all speculation. I'm not sure why the CIA didn't want Zubaydah interviewed by the IG; it's just clear they didn't give a good explanation why he shouldn't be.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Krugman observes that even if we kept up the growth rate of the last quarter -- 3.5 percent annualized -- for the next eight years, unemployment would likely only drop to about 6.3 percent, still a bit too high. (This comes from a hard-and-fast comparison with the Clinton years, not any kind of advanced modeling.) Given broader concerns that this recession is unique because employment expansion is lagging even further behind economic growth than usual, Krugman's point underscores the need for more growth going forward.

From where, though? Economic observers have been puzzling over this question for months now, wondering what industry, or hopefully, industries, will take off and help propel the economy upward. One good sign is yesterday's news of unexpected profitability at Ford, which found sales rising both at home and abroad. Now, Noam Scheiber flags an interesting report from the Wall Street Journal: Companies that saved for a rainy day may be getting ready to start investing again, especially with more signs of growth. Right now, the 500 biggest U.S. companies are holding 9.8 percent of their assets in cash.

Large cash balances are both a curse for the economy and a potential blessing. Hoarding means companies are spending and investing less, damping economic growth. But that leaves them with more cash to deploy as the economy improves, giving them a freer hand to acquire, and to restart hiring and capital spending.

Large cash balances are "great news for the macroeconomy," says Mr. Stendevad. "A lot of firms now are in a position ... to start reinvesting again, and that ultimately is what is gong to drive employment."

Let's hope, for the sake of the economy, that this is indeed the case. We can also hope for a "crowding in" effect thanks to government spending. The great fear of running a big a government deficit is that you end up with conditions that make private borrowing very hard. But during a recession, you can get the opposite effect if that deficit is used for economic stimulus: The government creates better conditions for private investors, bringing them back to the market -- and that's precisely what economists are expecting these firms to do.

Over the long term, though, some kind of industrial policy, alongside major upgrades of our national infrastructure -- transportation, energy, and communications -- will likely be needed to develop a real foundation for future growth. I'm not sure I've blogged about it before, but this package of articles over at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas does a nice job laying out the case that the federal government should be doing more to provide a strategic backstop for private business.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Needless to say, tomorrow's elections, particularly the one for NY-23, are matters of local concern with little if any explanatory power for the national political moment. And from the point of view of conservative activists who seem to believe they've found the second coming of Barry Goldwater, the results tomorrow will either convince them that a) Hoffman's narrow win was a decisive moment in the conservative wave sweeping the nation, or b) Hoffman's narrow loss proved that there is a conservative wave sweeping the nation, and that this is only the beginning.
• As Krugman says, the Obama administration and Democrats in general would be wise to ignore advice that says they need to rein in the deficit or face a voter revolt next year. And even though a majority of voters prefer deficit reduction to deficit-increasing stimulus efforts right now, which are they going to prefer when they go to the polls in a year if the latter is starting to yield benefits that affect them directly?
• I think there is a bit to this theory of the "Californiafication" of the federal government, and it does not bode well for the future of the country. Moreover, the obstructionist tactics the minority party has at its disposal greatly benefit Republicans more than they do Democrats, the former being uninterested in the business of governing in the first place.
• I wonder if this profile of Nick Ayers, the 27-year-old executive director of the Republican Governor's Association isn't a bit optimistic about his future influence in the Republican Party. Come tomorrow, he might have two electoral victories under his belt in Virginia and New Jersey, but given that the current top three would-be 2012 Republican presidential candidates -- the former governors of Massachusetts, Alaska, and Arkansas -- are each in their own way unpalatable to the larger electorate, it's a bit premature to surmise that the next leaders of the GOP are necessarily going to come from the governor's mansion.
• Weekend Remainders: Behold the low costs of the best health-care system in the world; this pretty much sums up the radical anti-abortion movement; the 2002-era GOP fear-mongering can be applied to any situation; and compassionate conservatism, blue dog edition.

--Mori Dinauer

The race in New York’s 23rd Congressional District has turned into nothing less than a passion play for many of the election’s liberal observers: Moderate Republican gets martyred by an insurgent grass-roots base purging members who don’t meet the conservative purity test. When the news broke about Republican Dede Scozzafava’s withdrawal from the race, Redstate.com’s Erick Erickson exulted: “I said this was our hill to die on, but to paraphrase Patton, we won my [sic] making the other guys die on our Hill!”

There’s no doubt that candidate Doug Hoffman fits the mold of a tea party-friendly conservative, railing against tax increases, the stimulus, abortion, health-care reform, and gay marriage. But while the race has served as the perfect stage for high-voltage conservative leaders (with matching campaign funds) to swoop in, there’s also an underlying disjuncture between the national movement and the local electorate -- one that may point to some of the potential limits of the tea-party revolution.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver points out that despite the love that Hoffman has received from the right, there’s a distinct enthusiasm gap between the national and local grass-roots -- at least in terms of how much money they’re willing to put on the table. While Hoffman enjoyed a last-minute fundraising surge from national conservative PACs, raising over $200,000 in one week last month, the amount of local contributions has been puny. According to Silver’s rough calculations, Hoffman’s itemized contributions from within the district totaled only $12,610 through Oct. 15. Meanwhile, Democrat Bill Owens raised some $151,520 -- over 10 times as much. The huge gap suggest that the ideological makeup of the district doesn’t match the national enthusiasm for the race. After all, even New York’s own conservative party hasn’t always conformed to Glenn Beck’s ideological proclivities, having backed George Pataki’s gubernatorial candidacy in 1998 and 2002, despite the moderate Republican’s pro-choice views.

Of course, the unusual circumstances, endorsements, and national money could end up putting Hoffman over the top tomorrow, potentially growing the coffers of similar candidates within the next year. But it’s also quite possible that that the local-national disjuncture could catch up to the Republicans if they decide to take NY-23 as a sign that they should push hard to recruit and fund more conservative, tea-party-friendly candidates across the board, without connecting to the local electorate. Without reconciling the national grass-roots fervor with the voters on the ground, the GOP could conceivably overestimate how red some swing-districts are really leaning and how far it can stretch campaign dollars to fill in the enthusiasm gap.

--Suzy Khimm

Rep. Shelley Berkley is a Democratic legislator from Nevada, and boy was she mad about the Wall Street bailouts last year:

Hundreds of billions of dollars, Berkley said, has gone "to prop up Wall Street banks and investment companies, but little to help people in Las Vegas who are losing their homes."

The message Washington needs to hear, Berkley said, is this: "Our community is hurting, and we could use some help."

In an interview after the hearing concluded, Warren said she was struck by the disconnect between regular people and the big banking companies. "There was no evidence today that the money is making it past the top levels of the financial institutions," she said. "People are deeply frustrated. They worked hard and played by the rules, and now they can't find anyone to talk to."

Sounds like she really thinks the government should be coming to the aid of people who are getting hit hard by the recession. No doubt that's why she introduced a bill to further exempt the super-wealthy from taxes, increasing the deficit by $119 billion. Now, I'm not sure why that would make any sense. But surely someone who thinks that giving handouts to the wealthy is bad should think that all the time, right?

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities released a study of Berkley's bill today, revealing that all of its benefits go to the top .02 .2 percent of estates:

The current rules already are generous. Under them, an individual can inherit on a tax-free basis a trust fund worth $3.5 million, or more than a middle-class family that makes $70,000 a year — and pays taxes on those earnings every year — earns in a lifetime. With the nation on an unsustainable fiscal path and many middle-class families losing their jobs and their homes, it is difficult to justify providing the top 0.2 percent of estates — the estates of the wealthiest 1 in every 500 people who die — with a costly new tax cut so they can pass on even larger inheritances tax-free.

Berkley says she supports public investment and opposes bailouts. But she also thinks that people who inherit millions of dollars shouldn't have to pay taxes on it.

-- Tim Fernholz

Tim Fernholz on financial regulation:

Sitting in his office, Rep. Brad Sherman does not look like an angry man. Leaning back and rubbing his stomach, the Californian calmly explains his concerns about the Treasury Department's plan to regulate the financial industry, currently moving through Congress. Put him at a hearing, though, and he'll subject witnesses to scathing questioning on the subject; at a recent closed-doors meeting between White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and congressional Democrats, he launched into a short tirade.

Sherman thinks the administration's proposal -- the Financial Stability Improvement Act -- amounts to institutionalizing the expensive and controversial bailouts the government used to deal with the crash of 2008. Not surprisingly, the administration disagrees.

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I guess all this buddy-buddy talk was too good to be true -- financial regulation reform looks to be health care 2.0:

In spite of efforts by Barack Obama, US president, to woo Richard Shelby, the lead Republican on the Senate banking committee, people taking part in negotiations from both parties said they were unlikely to agree on a bipartisan draft law.

“I’m afraid we’re moving towards a partisan process,” Bob Corker, a Republican member of the committee, told the Financial Times.

Republicans complain they are being forced into an artificial timetable that is reducing the chances of agreement. People on both sides of the committee, chaired by Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator, say the chances of the law being passed by the year-end, as planned by the administration, are slight.

“The more time we [take], the more intelligent regulatory process we’ll have . . . and I hope we’ll take until the first quarter of 2010 to actually put something into law,” said Mr Corker.

What in the world does he want to talk about? It's not like Corker is pushing some specific agenda or has offered any major ideas, at least publicly. These issues have been at the forefront of the policy debate for a year now, and certainly have been bubbling underneath for a long time. If he doesn't have any specific concerns, its hard to conceive of this as anything but a delaying tactic that simply substitutes vague delays for substantive engagement. (C.f. Senator George Voinovich on cap-and-trade: "Why are we trying to jam down this legislation now? Wouldn't it be smarter to take our time and do it right?")

There's a pretty big argument going on in the Democratic Party between those who want to reshape the financial sector fundamentally and those who want to nudge it toward responsibility, which I talk about in my article today. Sometimes, though, it's easy to forget that there is also an opposition party out there that believes we should do virtually nothing -- the Republicans seem as clueless as the bankers. Here is an exchange between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Rep. Spencer Bachus, the top GOP member of the House Financial Services Committee, from a hearing last week discussing what to do about the big banks:

GEITHNER: I -- I don't think we're disagreeing, Congressman, except I think -- I think if I -- if I understand you correctly, you're in favor of making sure that these firms can be held to higher standards. This is a way of doing that, and -- and...

BACHUS: No, I -- you know, and let me say this. I'm -- I'm not in favor of -- you know, of -- I'm not in favor of them being held to higher standards. But if we are going to hold them to higher standards, I think the market's going to have to know.

GEITHNER: But hold on. You would -- you would not impose tougher standards on the largest, most risky institutions than apply to a community bank or a regional bank?

BACHUS: ... Well, I'm not.

Astonishing.

-- Tim Fernholz

Jake Blumgart on tax initiatives in Maine and Washington state:

In 2005, the people of Colorado made a counterintuitive move: They approved a referendum that basically guaranteed higher state taxes.

With the support of 52 percent of the population, Coloradans suspended the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a budget-slashing 1992 law that dramatically lowered taxes but severely restricted government's ability to function. A favorite of libertarians nationwide, TABOR left Colorado mired in the early 2000s recession and constrained spending on infrastructure and social services. Funding for higher education dropped and roads were left in disrepair, dissuading businesses from investing in the state. As a result, Colorado's average job growth between 2001 and early 2006 was a minuscule 0.2 percent; the other Rocky Mountain states averaged 8.3 percent. These shocking numbers, coupled with the defeats of TABOR initiatives in Maine, Oregon, and Nebraska the following year, should have completely discredited the program nationwide.

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Would Democrat Bart Stupak really vote against the health-care bill if it contains the existing language on abortion? The Michigan representative has raised alarm bells among liberals for threatening to derail the House bill if certain abortion-related provisions aren't taken out. The Democratic leadership claims that the bill contains multiple restrictions to prevent the federal funding of abortions and restrict access -- measures that have actually raised the hackles of leading pro-choice organizations. But Stupak claims the bill doesn’t go far enough, as it still gives subsidies to individuals who could have access to insurance plans that cover abortions -- even the Capps amendment sets up a firewall to prevent subsidy money from going to abortions. Stupak's now trying to prohibit any coverage of abortions within the exchanges. Last week, he claimed that 39 other House Democrats supported his effort to strip out the provisions. And on Friday, Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) added a few to the tally, claiming that it had gotten commitments from 43 House Democrats who said they'd oppose the bill if Stupak "is not allowed to offer his amendment or his language is not included," according to the right-leaning CNS News.

But DFLA's straw poll brings a notable distinction to light -- the difference between opposing the bill if the amendment's not brought to the floor, and opposing the bill if the abortion language is in there at all, no matter what votes are taken. And Stupak has put himself firmly in the first camp, as he explained at an Oct. 24 town hall:

If everything I want [is] in the final bill, I like everything in the bill except you have public funding for abortion, and we had a chance to run our amendment and we lost. OK, I voted my conscience, stayed true to my principles, stayed true to the beliefs of this district, could I vote for healthcare? Yes I still could.

Stupak's response drew jeers from the crowd, and conservative media outlets immediately assailed him for not taking a harder line. Fox News accused him of "trying to have it both ways," and Life Site News quoted a source calling the comments a "game-changer" and a "disaster."

At the least, Stupak's remarks underscore the fact that he isn't dead-set upon opposing the bill -- and that a compromise is within reasonable striking distance. As RH Reality Check points out, Stupak conferred with Henry Waxman about abortion issues in the bill back in July. The details of a current compromise have yet to surface. But if it's true that Stupak's effort is gaining steam, Nancy Pelosi will surely try to hurry the deal-making along.

--Suzy Khimm

According to the IG report I posted on earlier, FBI agents were occasionally told by detainees that they had been abused. There was no clear guidance on how to handle this information, but some agents were apparently told to keep the details for possible inclusion in a "war crimes" file:

FBI agents also reported to us that detainees sometimes told FBI agents they had previously been abused or mistreated. FBI practices in dealing with such allegations varied over time. Some agents were told to record such allegations for inclusion in a "war crimes" file; others were told to include the allegations in their regular FD-302 interview summaries. As noted above, other FBI agents told us they were instructed not to record such allegations at all. No formal FBI procedure for reporting incidents or allegations of mistreatment to the military was established until after the Abu Ghraib prison abuses became public in 2004.

If you're startled by the lack of euphemism in describing detainee treatment, you shouldn't be. According to the 2004 CIA IG report on "enhanced interrogation techniques," even CIA agents participating in harsh interrogations worried that what they were doing would someday result in them being prosecuted for war crimes. Keep in mind that a number of the interrogations where the FBI observed abuse appears to have involved military personnel -- which should remind us all of how narrow Eric Holder's torture probe -- which will focus solely on those CIA interrogators who may have gone beyond the "legally sanctioned" levels of torture authorized -- actually is.

Just reading through the report, I'm reminded of the impact the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal had on public opinion--and how that forced changes in policy. This becomes all the more significant when you consider that the president recently signed a bill that gives the secretary of defense the authority to exempt from the Freedom of Information Act photographs showing detainee abuse between 2001 and 2009.

-- A. Serwer

Ross Douthat talks about the third party candidates in the New Jersey and NY-23 races:

They’ve injected real substance into their races, and they’ve given voters a much more interesting choice than they would have otherwise enjoyed.

Politics should be interesting because it is important, not because the candidates are annoying to people of various ideologies, as Douthat postulates.

But substance? Sure, moderate Dagget is proposing increases in sales taxes to deal with New Jersey's insane administrative system (Republican Chris Christie is "offering little by way of workable solutions"). But what about conservative Doug Hoffman?

In a nearly hour-long session, Mr. Hoffman was unable to articulate clear positions on a number of matters specific to Northern New Yorkers rather than the national level campaign being waged in a three-way race .... former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who accompanied the candidate on a campaign swing, dismissed regional concerns as "parochial" issues that would not determine the outcome of the election. On the contrary, it is just such parochial issues that we expect our representative to understand and be knowledgeable about, if he wants to be our voice in Washington.

Douthat may relish the give-and-take of a political campaign, but he ought to take seriously the idea that politics is about more than rooting for one's favored side; it's about the results of the democratic governing process. Though he may find Hoffman's anti-gay fulminations appealing (if also indefensible), the man has brought no substance his campaign. That's the problem with conservatism right now: It's an aesthetic, not a governing platform.

-- Tim Fernholz

I'm Suzy Khimm, and I'm delighted to be guest-blogging here this week. Before I dive into the wonderful world of wonkery, a bit more about me: I currently work at The New Republic, where I spend much of my time reporting on Congress, particularly the ins and outs of health-care reform. You'll find a lot of my recent writing on The Treatment, TNR's health-care blog, where I'm lucky enough to work with TAP alum Jonathan Cohn. I've also written profiles of some of the key players behind the scenes and on the campaign trail, explaining the reasoning behind Ben Nelson's political heresies, the origin of Chris Dodd's woeful re-election prospects, and the downfall of the last New England Republican in the House.

Before coming to D.C., I was working in Cambodia as a freelance writer and editor at the English-language Cambodia Daily. Before that, I was based in Brazil, writing about human-rights issues and teaching in a women's prison. At heart, I'm interested in how the personalities and power struggles up above shape the social policies that affect the rest of us. What does that mean in Washington this week? I look forward to finding out. And for those of you itching for real-time updates, one more plug: You can follow me on Twitter, too.

--Suzy Khimm

The general narrative surrounding the use of torture is that the FBI conflicted with the CIA and the military over the use of harsh techniques to interrogate detainees. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan has famously written that he was able to get actionable intelligence out of Abu Zubayda before he was tortured and clashed with the CIA over his treatment.

But the FBI inspector general's report, released last Friday in response to a FOIA request from the ACLU, reveals a wrinkle in this narrative. While noting that "FBI witnesses almost uniformly told us that they strongly favored 'non-coercive rapport-based interview techniques,'" the report also states that:

[W]e also learned about a proposal advanced by certain officials from the FBI and DoJ in late 2002 to change the circumstances of [Mohammed] Al-Qahtani's interrogation. A draft letter prepared for the purpose of presenting this proposal to the National Security Council indicated that this proposal involved subjecting Al-Qahatani to interrogation techniques of the sort that had previously been used by the CIA on Zubaydah and another detainee. DOJ and FBI officials involved with this proposal stated to us that the rationale for this proposal was to bring more effective interrogation techniques to bear on Al-Qahtani than the ineffective interrogation techniques that the military had been using up to that time. The techniques that had been previously used by the CIA on Zubaydah included methods that did not remotely resemble the rapport-based techniques that are permitted under FBI policy.

The IG writes that FBI Director Robert Mueller, then-head of the criminal division Michael Chertoff, and Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher were unaware of the proposal and did not "participate in any specific discussion of such a proposal." In addition, the IG states that he was unable to determine whether those who made the proposal had specific knowledge of the techniques that would be used in the harsher interrogations. The concerns from FBI officials about the DoD's use of harsh techniques did reach Chertoff, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, but according to the report, the concern seemed to be the "efficacy" of such techniques and not the "legality" or "impact on future prosecutions."

Al-Qahtani was subjected to some horrific treatment while in custody, including being leashed and then forced to perform "dog tricks." Susan Crawford, the DoD official overseeing the military commissions under Bush, memorably dropped the charges against Al-Qahtani because, "We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," and that treatment made him unprosecutable.

It's unclear who within the FBI recommended that the CIA torture Al-Qahtani after the military had already done so, but it seems to me that this is a pretty harrowing example of how torture can't be contained once its use is legitimized. Indeed, after the initial flurry of FBI agents reporting the mistreatment of detainees by other agencies in interrogations, the FBI seemed to accept that this was the new way of doing things, according to the report:

As a result, once it was clearly established within each zone that military interrogators were permitted to use interrogation techniques that were not available to FBI agents, the FBI On-Scene Commanders said they often did not elevate additional reports of harsh detainee interrogations to their superiors at FBI headquarters.

According to the report, even those reports relayed to FBI on-scene commanders "were not elevated within the chain of command" because the OSCs eventually came to understand that "the conduct in question was permitted under DoD policy."

I haven't clearly established the chronology, because I haven't finished reading the report and I don't know if actual dates are set for when the FBI's request regarding Al-Qahtani was made, and when the FBI complaints about detainee mistreatment stopped. But I wouldn't be surprised if the former followed the latter. I should also emphasize that whoever made this request, according to the IG report it was apparently without the knowledge of the head of the FBI and represented a minority opinion within the bureau. By 2004, following the Abu Ghraib scandal, clear guidelines were established preventing agents from using harsh techniques or participating in joint interrogations in which they were utilized.

-- A. Serwer

The big news coming out of the Sunday shows is that Joe “with Democrats on everything but the war” Lieberman told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation that he is so vehemently opposed to the inclusion of a public option in health-care reform that he would join Republicans in their filibuster of the bill if it contains the provision. When Schieffer noted that that would mean no reform at all, Lieberman happily proclaimed that he would prefer no reform to reform that included the public option.

While we can thank Schieffer for helping to clarify things, this was one more missed opportunity of the kind we see nearly every Sunday. If Schieffer had bothered to challenge Lieberman on the blizzard of misinformation he spewed out in those few minutes, he would have exposed the hollowness of Lieberman’s arguments. But as is usually the case, all the questions he asked were about the politics of reform.

We’re not surprised when Republicans who have no goal other than to kill reform and see President Obama fail come out with lie after lie about health care in general and the public option in particular. But Lieberman has plenty of incentives running in the other direction. He comes from an extremely Democratic state, and he maintains his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee because Democrats are kind enough to let him -- presumably because he won’t do things like, say, join a Republican filibuster of the most important domestic legislation of the president’s term. Nevertheless, when he starts to talk about health care, Lieberman sounds indistinguishable from the typical disingenuous GOP shill.

Among the baloney that Lieberman sneezed all over Schieffer:

• He said a public option would “hurt the economic recovery.” The public option, and the rest of health-care reform, won’t take effect until 2013.
• He said including a public option will “end up causing the government to raise taxes, will probably raise premiums, or it will put us further into debt.” The legislation mandates that the public option be paid for entirely by premiums, so it can’t cause the government to raise taxes or take on more debt. As for the public option “rais[ing] premiums,” if Lieberman has an explanation for how it is supposed to lead private insurers to raise their premiums, I’d sure like to hear it. Some argue that competition from the public option will lead insurers to lower their premiums, while others are skeptical. But this is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest what Lieberman did, because it is simply nonsense.
• He said “The public option I think was raised in the last year by people who really want to have a government-controlled health insurance system.” Actually, there were versions of the public option in the plans proposed during the 2008 campaign by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards.

You don’t have to be a health-care wonk to know that these things are false. All you have to be is informed on the debate that is currently gripping Washington. But Schieffer challenged Lieberman on none of his claims -- in fact, Schieffer didn't ask him a single substantive question during their discussion about health care.

If hosting a Sunday talk show were your job, and you were going to be interviewing a senator and asking him about the public option, don’t you think it would behoove you to bone up a bit on the facts? And when the senator comes on and puts this kind of crap out to your viewers, don’t you have a responsibility to call him on it?

Apparently not.

-- Paul Waldman

Afghan officials declared Hamid Karzai the winner of the Afghan elections after his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew from the Nov. 7 runoff saying the Independent Election Commission was biased toward Karzai and that fair elections were impossible. At one point, the head of the IEC, Azizullah Lodin, reportedly smiled as he declared that “Karzai is going to win.”

A win for Karzai would have been the likely outcome. But with counterinsurgency, the means are as important as the ends -- and in this case, a runoff election was important to ensuring that, even if Karzai were re-elected, his government would have some veneer of legitimacy. Peter Galbraith, former deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan, called the original fraud-riddled election the Taliban's "greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners." Today, Galbraith tells Spencer Ackerman that Abdullah "did the right thing" because "[t]he run off was certain to be more fraudulent than the Aug 20 vote with more ghost poling [sic] centers and the same corrupt officials in charge."

How will this affect the administration's ultimate strategic decision about whether or not to do counterinsurgency in Afghanistan? I'm not sure that it will. The Obama administration seems to be drifting toward a strategy that emphasizes local and provincial authority over that of the central government. The counterinsurgency manual is pretty clear about how vital a legitimate government is to the process -- but then again, John Nagl literally helped write the book on counterinsurgency, and as Spencer noted, it looks like the administration is taking his and Richard Fontaine's recommendations about how to wage a successful COIN campaign by focusing on "helping the Afghan government work at the local level" into account. I'd also be surprised if the administration didn't see something like this coming anyway.

--A. Serwer

I joined Matt Lewis on Bloggingheads last week for a back-and-forth on health-care politics -- particularly Joe Lieberman's threat to filibuster any bill with a public option -- and some scrapping about NY-23 and the other elections coming up on Tuesday. The segment above has my election predictions, but with Dede Scozzafava dropping out of the NY-23 race I may be poised to eat a little crow, although conservative Doug Hoffman doesn't have the election sewn up just yet. (Scozzafava's husband, a local union official, just endorsed Democrat Bill Owens.)

You can watch the whole thing here, or check out our takes on the public option, who is responsible for Lieberman's frustrating ways, and why Newt Gingrich is sort of like Markos Moulitsas.

-- Tim Fernholz