• Now that the public option, triggers, opt-outs and buy-ins have been felled by a Senate without 60 votes and a White House eager to sign the bill and move on, the question is whether what remains of health-care reform is any good. On the activist side of the debate, I'd say the consensus is that passing no bill would be better than passing a bill without a public option. Amongst progressive wonks and disinterested observers, the pragmatic, glass half-full perspective is that a dead health-care reform bill benefits no one, particularly Democrats who really ought to be worrying more about enacting reform that takes effect immediately.
  
• Inadvertently, the focus on the public option and its eventual defeat allowed the other elements of the reform bill to survive relatively unscathed (insofar as they were not the targets of months-long assaults). But now the Senate gets to hear a stream of amendments (I'm intellectually curious as to how many votes single-payer gets) and then muster those 60 votes. The real worry is what will emerge from the conference committee to merge the House and Senate bills. Although the committee process won't be subject to amendments, it won't matter if even more concessions are acceded to in conference.
• Setting aside the symbolic importance of the public option -- and I don't deny that its existence would go some ways towards reversing the public's long-held skepticism of government programs -- it should be noted that the public option was never designed to be open to everybody. Its scope was limited, its pool small, and it would have mostly been off-limits to the healthy and already-insured. This, along with the political cost of failure, is reason enough to hold my nose and support a bill that at least will regulate private insurance and subsidize care (read: increase coverage) and at most can be improved in the future.
• Remainders: It doesn't look like Joe Lieberman is going to lose influence any time soon; nothing good can come of the DOD's incredible surge in defense contractors; the sooner everyone agrees bipartisanship is a fiction, the better off this country will be; and why am I not shocked by these poll results?
  

--Mori Dinauer

As Sen. Joe Lieberman continually moves the goal posts for reform, contradicting his own stated beliefs of what he would prefer in a health-care package and straight up lying about what the legislation does, everyone is trying to understand his logic. Bloggers are scouring Lieberman's past statements, the platform he ran on before, interviews, website caches, whatever they can find for an "ah-ha!" hypocrisy hit. And it's pretty easy to do. But I think the most instructive Lieberman quote actually came from the New York Times this afternoon:

But in the interview, Mr. Lieberman said that he grew apprehensive when a formal proposal began to take shape. He said he worried that the program would lead to financial trouble and contribute to the instability of the existing Medicare program. And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system. “Congressman Weiner made a comment that Medicare-buy in is better than a public option, it’s the beginning of a road to single-payer,” Mr. Lieberman said. “Jacob Hacker, who’s a Yale professor who is actually the man who created the public option, said, ‘This is a dream. This is better than a public option. This is a giant step.’”

You see, it's not about the mechanics of a Medicare buy-in, the implications on the deficit, or anything about the actual policy. If a single payer leftist like Rep. Weiner had said he hated the Medicare buy-in, and a popular liberal academic like Jacob Hacker had spat on it, that would politically place the Medicare buy-in outside the sphere of accepted progressive ideas. However, they said they like the Medicare buy-in, and thus Lieberman is against it. He wants to be to the right of the Democratic mainstream -- it's that simple.

--Lee Fang

Here's an interesting argument from Double X: Assuming that a Stupak-style amendment isn't included in the final health-care reform bill, it could end up increasing access to abortion for low-income women across the country.

It works out that when the bill's Medicaid expansions go into effect, they'll cover women in 13 states -- including biggies like California, New Jersey and Massachusetts -- where Medicaid is legally obligated to cover abortions. This would expand abortion access to roughly 3 million women who might not have been able to afford it before. (This doesn't violate the Hyde amendment because the programs are jointly administered by the state and federal governments.) At first glance, the argument makes sense, and it's the first bit of good news about the bill -- and about the bill's treatment of women's health -- that I've heard in a while.

-- Tim Fernholz

Forces on both sides of the marriage equality debate spent several hours huddled in close proximity to one another today, as they waited for Washington, D.C.'s City Council to handle its more mundane business before voting on whether to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. Bishop Harry Jackson, head of the anti-equality group Stand4MarriageDC, was present; seated behind him, two young African American women clasped their hands together as council members announced their votes.

Council member David Catania, the bill's chief sponsor, noted that it had only been two decades since the city overturned laws criminalizing sodomy. "In less than 20 years we've gone from criminals to full equals," Catania said, "and that does speak to the magic of the Constitution." He praised Marion Barry and Yvette Alexander, the two council members who were expected to -- and ultimately did -- vote against the bill, calling Barry a "gracious defender of LGBT rights" despite the former mayor's opposition to marriage equality. Barry, for his part, called his vote "a decision of conscience, a decision of my constituency." Barry added, "It takes courage to fight, but that courage exists on both sides."

Shortly after the D.C. City Council voted 11-2 to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in the District, the room erupted into cheers and applause. Leaders from each side scrambled into the hallway to field questions from reporters. Bishop Jackson warned that his group would be "bringing their voices to the Hill" in the hopes of persuading a Democratic Congress to overturn the marriage equality bill; Congress has a month to overturn D.C. laws after they've been passed and signed by the mayor. Overturning the law this way would require majorities against the bill in both houses and the signature of the president, which Mike DeBonis points out is an unlikely scenario. But DeBonis also notes that there are other ways Congress could circumvent the law, either by restricting the city's funding or by adding riders to unrelated bills. Still, all that it will take for marriage equality to become law in the District is for Congress to simply do nothing -- something which Congress is generally pretty good at.

Jackson already planned to appeal the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics decision not to allow a referendum on marriage equality in the District. Now, he said his group will file another referendum request to overturn the bill tomorrow, a statement made only moments after the City Council approved the legislation. Attempts by groups opposed to marriage equality to force referendums have so far failed because they run afoul of the District's Human Rights Law, which Jackson called "an illegal construct that will ultimately be overturned."

Pro-equality forces, however, expressed confidence that Jackson's efforts will also come to nothing. "The Bishop and his allies don't have a good track record" with legal challenges, said Rick Rosendall of the D.C.-based Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance."They've overplayed their hand, and they seriously underestimated the people of this city. Bishop Jackson acts like gay people just arrived from another planet."

"We have deep roots in this city," Rosendall said.

-- A. Serwer

Dalton Conley weighs in on the inequality debate:

When I was growing up, my mother used to sing me the old adage, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," before hastening to add, "And it's all Ronald Reagan's fault." Because I had campaigned for Jimmy Carter as a wide-eyed 11-year-old, this was one of the few maternal claims that I did not dispute in my adolescence.

In decrying the rising inequality of the 1980s, my mother was speaking from a long tradition, extending back at least a century, of progressives shaking their fists at economic disparities. During the 1970s, just as the midcentury compression of economic difference was ending, philosophers and social scientists were becoming concerned with the issue. In 1971, philosopher John Rawls penned A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus arguing that social policy should be based on the imperative to narrow the difference between the welfare of the most and the least well-off in society. The following year, sociologist Christopher Jencks and his colleagues authored a book titled Inequality, in which they argued that attempting to promote the American dream of economic mobility was futile and that if we were truly concerned with equal opportunity, the only real solution was to lessen inequality.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn't think (and I agree) that Joe Lieberman will pay any price for his disgraceful behavior on health care and that while Lieberman "deserves" to lose his chairmanship, "it's simply not clear to me that--in terms of passing legislation--the Dems would be better off" if Lieberman got his just deserts. David Kurtz agrees with less regret. I don't disagree with the idea that getting good legislation passed is more important than taking revenge per se. And while I was skeptical about not stripping him of his chairmanship after the 2008 elections, I had to admit that whether it was a good idea or not was an open question. If he was willing to go along with major Democratic priorities -- at a minimum, not filibustering them -- I could live with his keeping the perks of office despite his endorsement of McCain.

But surely, at this point, the question is closed and I can't agree with Coates and Kurtz at all. We now know that the Democratic leadership didn't extract any major concessions from Lieberman in exchange for undeservedly keeping his Homeland Security seniority. We certainly know that nothing he says about his alleged support for other Obama administration initiatives can be trusted at all, and to let him keep his privileges in the hope that next time he'll hold on to the football would be insane. And if you care about passing progressive legislation there are also very real costs in allowing someone -- even if he endorsed the other party's presidential candidate! -- to double-cross you again and again all while keeping his committee privileges.

Party discipline is critical to getting anything done in the Senate, and signaling that there's essentially nothing you can do to get sanctions from party leadership ensures that the playing field between the two parties will remain asymmetrical.

Coates addresses that last argument, arguing that the Democrats don't want to become a regional rump party like the current Republicans. I certainly agree that having an ideologically pure minority -- while in many ways useful for conservatives -- doesn't help progressives in most respects. So this is a good argument for not drumming Ben Nelson out of the caucus despite his marginally more principled obstruction. But surely this argument is irrelevant to Lieberman, who after all represents a state Obama carried by 23 points. Disciplining Lieberman isn't maximalist party discipline -- it's the minimum a party should be expected to do if they're serious. And the fact that Reid is unlikely to do anything about Lieberman's betrayal simply doesn't speak well of his leadership.

--Scott Lemieux

On October 11, tens of thousands of Americans participated in the National Equality March, held in Washington, D.C. Today, the city council voted 11 to 2 to approve legislation of same-sex marriage. Council member David Catania commented, "In 20 years, we've gone from criminals to full equals." The legislation will now be sent the Congress for review.

(Flickr/J Photographs)

We've talked before about the long-term problems of income inequality in the United States, and how they played into the dynamics of the financial crisis. (It is hard to have a bubble, after all, without a lot of investment funds to pump into it.) From the right, though, people have argued that income inequality is less important than consumption inequality, since standards of living have risen for the poor -- they've got TVs and stuff now, right? Well, Jon Chait demolished that argument on moral grounds a while ago, but now there is new empirical evidence that indicates consumption inequality has actually been increasing, too.

Zubin Jelveh points us to this new working paper [PDF] that suggests erroneous data collection has left us with the wrong impression: In fact, it seems likely that consumption inequality has been increasing at about the same rate as income inequality.

What is to be done? Well, we can certainly start by not eliminating the minimum wage, Chuck Lane. In fact, current Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy Alan Krueger co-wrote a whole book disproving the myth that minimum wages hurt employment rates (summary here). Policy-wise, health care is actually going to put some money in people's pockets. But over the long term, the key to dealing with income inequality comes from education, tax reform and increased unionization.

-- Tim Fernholz

Paul Starr explains why the Democratic Party's fate is tied to the passage of health-care reform:

The moment of decision on health-care reform is arriving for progressives in Congress. Some of them have insisted they will refuse to vote for any bill without a public option, and that is now the only bill that has any chance of passing. If they hold to their position, the most significant social reform on behalf of low-income Americans in 40 years will go down to defeat.

It should hardly be surprising that we have come to this point. The requirement for 60 votes in the Senate to pass ordinary legislation was always going to empower the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus or the few moderate Republicans who might support a bill. For a while this past week, it seemed as though a provision to allow 55- to 64 year-olds to buy in to Medicare might provide an acceptable alternative to the public option and secure the 60th vote for the bill. But when both Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe said they wouldn't support a Medicare buy-in, that hope dissolved.

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I spend a lot of time talking about the general pale/male/stale-ness of the media (h/t to Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark for that description), and I generally find myself chalking it up to a number of big, interrelated factors: Men are socialized to be more aggressive and confident, which translates to pitching more articles and getting published more often. Men are more likely to be well-connected to other powerful men in the business. Men are more likely to tout their expertise, while women will seemingly do anything to downplay their knowledge and experience. A disproportionate amount of care-giving responsibility forces women to down-shift their time-consuming media jobs. And on and on.

Really, just one word is needed: sexism. Take it from a woman at Copyblogger, who decided to adopt the pseudonym James Chartrand and began earning double and triple the income she did with her given name. Even I would never have guessed the difference would be so stark.

We all know about the pay gap, sure. But this isn't just about payment levels. For opinion writers, especially online journalists, a female byline is a liability when it comes to the amount of harassment received. Anecdotally, the women writers I know -- especially vocal feminists -- get much more hate mail than the men writers I know. Research backs this up: One study by the University of Maryland showed that people with female usernames are 25 times more likely to experience harassment.

Women adopting masculine pen names is nothing new. See: George Sand, the Brontës, J.K. Rowling, Digby. But, Amanda Hess points out, "James Chartrand" was more than that. It was a fully constructed online identity -- under which the writer disparaged "mommy bloggers," made sexist comments about female coworkers, and was accused by her commenters of failing to create an "inviting community for women." It wasn't a test of whether you can get ahead by adopting a male pen name. It was a test of whether you can get ahead by pretending to be part of the ol' boys club. And the answer is a resounding, but not surprising, yes.

Recently, a friend decided to change her byline from her given name, Nicole McClelland, to her nickname she answers to in real life, Mac McClelland. Now, Mac is a total bad-ass. She wrote a soon-to-be-published book about Burma. She reports on international human rights issues for Mother Jones. Her career was well underway with the "Nicole" byline. She didn't decide to change it because she felt the female connotation held her back -- she wants people to know she's a woman. She just wants her byline to match up with what she's called in real life. Still, she told me, many women were unenthusiastic about the switch. She also struggled with the feeling that she was rejecting her gender by adopting a male-seeming byline. As Spencer Ackerman notes, there is a proud tradition of women doing seriously tough reporting, and I imagine Mac doesn't want to be excluded from that pantheon because her byline makes her seem like she is a grizzled old man who likes to down beer at the VFW.

--Ann Friedman

The Washington Post has a great piece up explaining why previous efforts at reconciliation -- getting Taliban fighters to lay down their arms -- have failed. The Afghan government seems to have a habit of luring fighters away with promises they have no intention of keeping:

The men who recruited Mohammed to the government's side said they feel sorry for him, and for the dozens of other insurgents they have persuaded to stop fighting this year through promises they knew to be false.

"We have nothing to offer these people," said Haji Jan Mohammed, director of the government's reconciliation program for Nangarhar and Laghman provinces, in Afghanistan's volatile east. "We don't get any kind of assistance from the central government, so we promise them jobs but there are no jobs, and we promise them land but there is no land."

The piece reports reconciliation efforts under the previous administration were all but ignored, and the program's budget was apparently $3 million, which isn't much for something that is presumably a huge part of the new strategy. It's less clear about how much better funded the program will be from now on:

A recent Japanese government pledge of $5 billion in aid for Afghanistan is expected to be applied largely to reintegration efforts, and the United States has also vowed to commit money.

I guess my question would be, how effective or alluring will future offers be given the Afghan government's reputation for breaking its promises?

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman on health care's fate:

The debate over health-care reform has been many things. It has been an education in both the intricacies of public policy and the ease with which fears can be activated and deception accomplished. It has been a dispiriting exercise in the limits and pathologies of American politics. And it has been a clash of values.

Because progressives think government can actually solve problems, they tend to have at least a partially technocratic view of policy. At least in theory, it should be possible to analyze a problem, assess various solutions to it, select the one most likely to solve it, and then implement that solution. Yet so often in our country, this self-evidently sensible approach ends up feeling like an unattainable ideal.

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Dahlia Lithwick has a must-read column up at Slate explaining how the Obama administration's attempts to block torture victims from getting their day in court will preserve the legal architecture justifying torture for the next unscrupulous administration. 

But Lithwick also considers the consequences of dealing with torture solely in the context of the 9/11 trials, in which torture is justified because the only context in which it is considered involves someone most Americans believe to be guilty of planning the deaths of thousands of Americans:

[Khalid Sheik Mohammed] is a monster. Nobody disputes that he was central to the planning and execution of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. If the trial of a man who was instrumental in killing thousands of innocent Americans becomes the sole forum in which the legality of prisoner abuse is to be litigated, public sentiment in favor of torture will only grow stronger. As David Feige argued recently in Slate, the KSM trial is poised to make a lot of bad new law as a result of the pressure to convict. But the most appalling result might well be a judicial determination followed by widespread public acceptance that torturing KSM wasn't that bad. The Obama administration will have been instrumental in selling the public on future torture in a way that is even more distressing than its recent efforts to immunize the torturers themselves.

Rather than becoming an opportunity for accountability as well as justice, the 9/11 trials could turn out to be the greatest victory torture advocates could ever imagine--at least as long as civil liberties groups are unable to get a ruling from the courts that firmly establishes that the way detainees were treated by the Bush administration was illegal. Obama outlawed torture by executive order, but if Lithwick is right, he may be close to making torture a permanent fixture of American national security policy, subject to the whims of whomever happens to occupy the White House.

Remember when Republicans tried to minimize torture as a "policy difference" rather than a criminal act? The Obama administration is making it a policy difference.

-- A. Serwer

The Associated Press is plainly trying to nail agricultural giant Monsanto for unfair licensing practices that use a variety of tactics to lock small farmers and small seed companies in binding relationships, for better or for worse. Sometimes, Monsanto requires that its modified seeds make up a majority of a seed company's stock, edging out competitors. In other cases, they've made companies agree to both exclusivity and non-disclosure agreements.

Is Monsanto in anti-trust trouble here? Perhaps, and legal authorities are rightly looking into it. But let me take what might be a controversial suggestion: The unyielding focus on Monsanto's supposedly evil ways might serve to make us less knowledgeable about what's going on with American agriculture, not more.

Monsanto makes a ripe target. You've got your unquestioning boosterism of genetically modified plants. You've got the fact that they were the folks who whipped up the first batch of Agent Orange. And yes -- science, in Monsanto's hands, tends to become a means for getting nature to break to human desires.

But were Monsanto to disappear, problems in the American agricultural system wouldn't necessarily follow. The American agricultural landscape is only a distant cousin of what it was only a few decades ago. What we're left gawking at now is a system where individual farmers and small suppliers either plug in to a larger corporate ecosystem or are left to scratch out a living from the land alone -- in a world where pretty much everything is institutionalized against them.

Take the land-grant college system as just one example. Land grants were established in the Civil War era to put government dollars behind producing self-sustaining Americans. It ranks as one of Congress' better ideas. Today, those schools are sustained by huge sums of money from corporations like DuPont and Syngenta. Texas A&M boasts a "Dow Chemical Professor" of agriculture. Gene modified soybeans are the darlings of those labs. All of it is perfectly legal. Meanwhile, a young person who wants to be a farmer finds the cost of basic equipment beyond reach. We end up like those poor Kentucky chicken farmers in Food, Inc. who find themselves "investing" in half-million-dollar chicken coops just so Tyson or Purdue will return their phone calls.

That's not all Monsanto's fault. You can make the argument that focusing on one corporation's bad behavior has provided a useful bad guy in the ag debates. But I'm beginning to wonder if we're setting our sights far too narrowly.

--Nancy Scola

(Photo credit: Darin)

The Associated Press reports that the White House is poised to announce a state prison in Thomson, Illinois, as the location for housing former Guantanamo Bay detainees:

Administration officials as well as Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn will make an official announcement at the White House.   

Officials from both the White House and Durbin's office confirmed that President Barack Obama had directed the government to acquire Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Ill., a sleepy town near the Mississippi River about 150 miles from Chicago.

A Durbin spokesman said the facility would house federal inmates and no more than 100 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.

Expect a great deal of hysteria over this decision. Andy McCarthy has already proclaimed that it "will inevitably result in trained terrorists being released in the United States — bank on it."

The American Correctional Association and the Federal Prison Officers' Union, however, have released statements supporting the decision to move Gitmo detainees to the U.S. A conservative legal group, The Constitution Project, supports the transfer of detainees to the Illinois facility.

An anonymous administration official told the Washington Post that the prison's security level would be "beyond supermax." The statement was later clarified to a member of the ACLU, and it was explained that the official meant in terms of perimeter security, not 24-hour isolation for all prisoners.

-- A. Serwer

• The filibuster relies on the assumption that after negotiating in good faith, one of the parties to negotiations can single-handedly hold the passage of legislation to a super-majority vote. What has broken down in this gentleman's agreement, and what Joseph Lieberman has brought front and center, is that parties who negotiate in bad faith still get to use the filibuster. At this point, Lieberman's motivations hardly matter. He has announced to his colleagues that he is unprincipled and cannot be trusted. There is no point in even engaging someone like this anymore. Either end the filibuster or start looking at budget reconciliation, because Lieberman has set the new standard for deliberations in the U.S. Senate.
• Who says there's no consensus in Washington when it comes to jobs and the economy? Over at The Washington Post, Charles Lane proposes, among other things, to cancel the minimum wage hikes enacted by the Democrats when they took over Congress in 2006. Fox News thinks this policy might even help workers. And RNC chairman Michael Steele takes it a step further, proposing slashing the parasitic capital gains tax alongside unemployment benefits. Consensus: the poor must suffer for destroying the economy.
• Let's all take a moment to thank The New York Times' Adam Nagourney for providing us with yet another fascinating glimpse into the career of perhaps the most important politician of our time -- nay, the history of the Republic -- Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Here we learn that the Maverick is gone, replaced with a conservative "attack dog," freed from the constraints of presidential ambitions to pursue politics in an ever feistier fashion. One scant paragraph discusses McCain's flip-flops on virtually every issue other than war, hardly informing the reader that policy ignorance is McCain's M.O.
• Weekend Remainders: The Supreme Court tackles campaign finance law with potentially significant consequences; anti-intellectualism is still the key to understanding much of the American political landscape; conservatives vastly overstate the ability of blockbuster movies to decisively change culture; political apathy has no tangible benefit; the poor and ignorant will suffer because of climate change; and is America ungovernable?
  

--Mori Dinauer

Former chief Guantanamo prosecutor turned military commissions critic Col. Morris Davis was fired from his post-military job at the Congressional Research Service after he penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the Obama administration for reviving them. The ACLU claims that Davis was threatened with termination over his op-ed before finally being let go.

Elizabeth Pugh, general counsel for the Library of Congress, insists that his termination was legit. Pugh quotes Daniel Mulhollan, director of the CRS, saying that Davis had "not adequately demonstrated the Senior Level Executive qualities and characteristics necessary to serve effectively as Assistant Director in the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service," and that Davis had "failed to adhere to the CRS policy on Outside Speaking and Writing."

Aden Fine, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, disagrees and has said the organization will sue on Morris' behalf if he isn't officially reinstated, on the grounds that the CRS violated Morris' free speech rights. Fine claims that Mulhollan met with Davis just a day before his op-ed was published and told him he was doing a good job.

"If the library is not willing to reinstate Col. Davis, we will be forced to bring an appropriate lawsuit on his behalf, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, attorney's fees, and costs," Fine wrote in his letter today. "We look forward to hearing from you shortly."

-- A. Serwer

Michael Leahy of the Washington Post offers a California snapshot on the ideological war happening within the Republican Party. The protagonist is Assemblyman Anthony Adams, a humble sweater-donning "citizen politician." Despite his solidly conservative voting record, the GOP politician has been harassed by a right-wing recall effort all because he voted for Schwarzenegger's tax-increasing compromise budget.

The story mentions that Adams became the target of frequent death threats, but glosses over the extent to which two unnamed conservative talk show hosts stirred up this extreme anger. John and Ken -- a wildly popular duo of "white men" who "have a right to be angry" -- come from the Glenn Beck school of political commentary. Apparently, as soon as Adams told the Sacramento Bee he was considering support of the budget weeks before the vote, John and Ken responded by circulating an image of Adams' decapitated head on a stick -- an image embraced by California's tea party protesters. In a Fault Lines documentary aired earlier this year, John excitedly described his exploits:

We were beating the governor in effigy. We had Governor Schwarzenegger naked and upside down as a piñata, and we had kids beating him with baseball bats until gold coins came out. [...] And then we were feeding him into a giant shredder mounted on the inside of a truck. And the first rally was particularly angry. People really were in a mood to kill. If we had given the signal, they would have stormed Fullerton and burned it down.

Like Beck, John and Ken playfully blur the line between impassioned rhetoric and calls for political violence. When Sen. Lindsey Graham similarly violated conservative orthodoxy by reaching out to negotiate a climate change bill, he was met by an almost identical response. Shortly after Beck dubbed Graham a target, attack ads went on the air, a roving truck featured a dummy Graham being flushed down a toilet, enraged activists flooded his town halls, and a right-wing party chair issued a censure.

But John and Ken aren't the only provocateurs in this recall drama. Former state party chair Mike Schroeder launched the crusade against Adams in the following fashion:

Schroeder presented Adams with formal papers announcing the recall bid at a fundraiser for the assemblyman. He told Adams that the campaign against him was started on behalf of the citizens of California. "Let the games begin," Schroeder proclaimed. Adams didn't have much to say to that. "Drive safely," he replied. Schroeder, who has a reputation for flamboyance, was dressed in a black "Star Wars" T-shirt with an image of Darth Vader on it.

Sure, confrontation and flare can be helpful in galvanizing your party's base, but doesn't casting yourself as Darth Vader take away any semblance of seriousness from a policy dispute? Also, just saying -- you may want to wear the Luke shirt next time.

--Lee Fang

Rep. Bart Stupak's amendment to the health care bill became a flash point for conversation about how health care overhaul could affect women's access to reproductive care. In San Francisco, supporters of health care reform gathered to protest limits on abortion coverage.

(Flickr/Steve Rhodes)

I've got a piece up today over at The Daily Beast on why Jenny Sanford's decision to divorce South Carolina Gov. Mark "hiking the Appalachian trail" Sanford doesn't automatically make her a feminist hero:

The heart of feminism is choice—that a woman is the agent in her own decisions, political and otherwise. Being the victim of infidelity, on the other hand, is something few spouses would choose. Yes, Jenny Sanford has now chosen to leave her marriage; she filed for divorce Friday, rejecting the path of so many wronged political wives who came before her, from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Edwards to Silda Spitzer. Leaving a marriage, however, is not a particularly groundbreaking thing for a woman to do in 2009. The only other woman we’ve cheered this year for finally walking away from her marriage is Betty Draper. And Mad Men, let’s recall, is set in the early 1960s.

There are two other things that we should spend far more time thinking about. One is why women who have chosen, as Ann put it, the "stand by her man" routine aren't recognized for their own actual, ahem, careers that do far more to actually promote gender equality. Like, say, Hillary Clinton.

But there's also the question of what comes after the end of a marriage. As Dana noted in her review of The Good Wife, political marriages are generally well-financed enough that politician's wives aren't desperate for to re-enter the workforce. But for women who do re-enter after taking years off to focus on family, the pay cut is steep.

Still, I do wish Jenny Sanford the best. Skeeter Davis was right:

--Phoebe Connelly

Over the past week or so, there seems to have been some real progress in tamping down the hysterical narratives surrounding ACORN -- namely that they're some sinister combination of the Communist Party, the Corleone Family, and the Illuminati. Last week an independent review requested by ACORN and conducted by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger found no pattern "of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff." Their problems were instead the result of "a lack of training, a lack of procedures, and a lack of on-site supervision."

The report did note, however, that the "prostitution" videos that caused the original controversy had been heavily edited and that the videographers refused to make the originals available. Even a writer at Big Hollywood -- a website owned by Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing activist behind the videos -- conceded that ACORN didn't break any laws.

Then over the weekend, Judge Nina Gershon ruled that the defunding of ACORN, passed during the height of anti-ACORN hysteria in Congress, amounted to an unconstitutional "bill of attainder."  Glenn Greenwald does a great job of summarizing the constitutional issues here:

The reasons the Founders barred such bills of attainder are perfectly highlighted by the ACORN case. During the reign of abusive Kings, it was a favorite instrument for enabling unpopular parties to be convicted, punished and deprived without benefit of a trial. Under the Constitution, parties aren't supposed to be found guilty of wrongdoing as a result of a Fox-News-led witch hunt joined by cowardly members of Congress. The recent finding of the Massachusetts Attorney General that ACORN had not committed crimes in connection with the notorious prostitution videos underscores the danger of the state's assuming someone's guilt outside of the judicial process. Congress is especially ill-suited to pass judgment on whether a particular party has violated the law, as they are far more likely to protect the powerful and popular and punish the weak and unpopular (which is one reason, incidentally, why it was wrong for Congress to retroactively immunize rich and powerful telecoms based on the consummately judicial finding that they acted in "good faith" when violating eavesdropping laws).

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented ACORN in ACORN v. USA, released a statement on Friday saying, "Our Constitution forbids lawmakers from singling out a person or group for punishment without a fair investigation and trial, precisely to avoid the kind of political retribution and grandstanding we saw in the case of ACORN."

Congress' behavior in this case underscores the absurdity of the right-wing narrative surrounding ACORN. ACORN was vulnerable precisely because they are an organization focused on the needs of America's low to moderate income residents. If they were Halliburton or Blackwater Xe -- which is to say, if they had anything remotely like the access to power they were alleged to have had -- they never would have been treated this way, regardless of their institutional problems. 

But Congress wasn't the only institution throwing up its hands and shrieking wildly in the aftermath of the Breitbart videos. Many mainstream publications were quick to proclaim ACORN a major story that had been overlooked because of liberal bias, and then they promptly proceeded to get the story wrong in a mad scramble to show conservatives how fair and balanced they could be.

-- A. Serwer

Adam Serwer on criminal justice reform:

Eric Haines lives in his father's basement in Paterson, New Jersey, just across the street from a freshly anointed memorial to a childhood friend who was shot to death two weeks ago -- Haines' second friend to die violently in as many weeks. A white sheet hangs over a chain-link fence, facing an audience of Jesus candles sprinkled with dirt kicked up from a recent rainstorm. A few dozen feet away, several men are gathered outside a corner store, where they will remain past nightfall.

Haines might be out there with them if it weren't for the black box that's been strapped to his ankle since he violated the conditions of his parole several weeks ago. Haines, 27, has only caught two non-drug charges -- one for trespassing, one for weapons possession -- but he has been under supervision for the past nine years because he's made parole violations something of a habit. (Haines' name has been changed for his safety.)

KEEP READING ...

Late last week, The New York Times published an 800-word story about a few right-wing Jews' complaints that Barack Obama's Hannukah party was smaller than that of Bush, a purported sign of the White House's callous indifference to the Jewish people. On Friday, the CBS News Political Hotsheet blog picked up the story with a headline declaring: "White House Hanukkah Party Spawns Anger."

"Jews at home and abroad have been slow to warm to Mr. Obama – a recent poll found nearly 40 percent of Israelis believe he is Muslim – and it seems the distrust within the community is at least partly driving the anger," said the CBS item. This is, of course, untrue. Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008 -- a gain of four points over Kerry, and only a single point less than the Gore/Lieberman ticket in 2000. Obama's favorability numbers among Jews have fallen in tandem with the rest of the country, but remain high: an October Gallup poll showed that 64 percent of Jews approve of the president. No other religious group is so enthusiastic about Obama.

Yet this meme that Obama has a Jewish problem won’t die. And it spawns the type of stories -- idiotic pseudo-controversies with only the slimmest connection to reality, ginned up as blog bait and talk show fodder -- that now clog the media ecosystem like some sort of mutant intellectual algae. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the flood of BS speculation and jejune analysis. The War on Christmas was bad enough. Please don't let the right invent a War on Hanukkah, too.

--Michelle Goldberg

Mark Schmitt on the rare pieces of legislation that get better as they grind through Congress:

The very word "progressive" implies a linear view of social progress. We try to move forward, the bad guys try to take us backward. So it's not surprising that progressives have an equally straight-line assumption about what happens in legislative negotiations. We try to set the most ambitious goal possible, assuming that in the congressional process, things are likely to get steadily worse. Like labor negotiators, we try to go in with the strongest starting position, and at the end, decide whether the final result has gotten so bad that we'd rather have nothing.

But often negotiations don't take such a straight-line path.. Last week's late-night developments on the health care reform bill were a reminder that sometimes, instead of getting steadily worse, legislation can take a strange hop in a much better direction. Senate negotiations on health reform were grinding in a predictable downward direction -- as wavering Democrats met, the public option had already been trimmed to a vestige of the original vision, and that was even before the next round of negotiations with actual Republicans or whatever Joe Lieberman is. But suddenly late at night, a new set of ideas appeared on the table, including allowing older workers the option of buying into Medicare (not a new idea, but one that had earlier been shelved), and a plan explicitly based on the Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan (FEHBP).

KEEP READING ...

The Supreme Court has refused to hear a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainees Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, Jamal Al-Harith and Asif Iqbal, four British citizens who were suing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top American military officials for being responsible for approving the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that they were subjected to while in U.S. custody. The CCR says that their clients were "subject to repeated beatings, sleep deprivation, extremes of hot and cold, forced nudity, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, menacing with unmuzzled dogs, religious abuse, and racial harassment."

This case, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, is important not just because of the alleged abuse involved. It's important because civil liberties groups are seeking, as Ben Wizner of the ACLU -- one of the lawyers in the Mohamed, et al. v. Jeppesen rendition case -- said last week, a "binding definitive determination" from the courts that the kind of treatment suspected terror detainees were subjected to under the Bush administration was illegal.

Without one, government-sanctioned torture may make a comeback.The ACLU will be litigating the Mohamed, et al. v. Jeppesen case -- which the Obama administration sought to have dismissed by invoking the state secrets privilege -- in federal district court tomorrow. 

UPDATE: Steve Shapiro, the legal director of the ACLU, says that while the court's decision not to hear the Rasul case is disappointing, it's not "a decision on the merits" and shouldn't be taken as such. He also adds that it won't affect “it won’t have any impact on how the 9th circuit resolves the question in the Jeppesen case,” since the heart of that dispute is the administration's use of the state secrets privilege to dismiss the case entirely.

-- A. Serwer

Hey, all! After some fantastic writing from Laura Dean, I'm taking the spot as guest blogger. My name is Lee Fang, and in addition to writing my regular posts on ThinkProgress, I'll be here at TAPPED for a week to share a few thoughts on politics and the press. Although I write about a variety of subjects, I've been immersed this year in researching the post-Bush conservative movement. I want to better understand the powerful forces fighting against reform, and how they are doing it. But also how the battle to shape our country has reverberations in our culture and identity.

As a quick biographical note, I've lived in the D.C. area all of my life. From campaigning against local Prince George's County machine candidates in my community to exploiting the think tank free lunch circuit, I'm to some extent a product of my surroundings.

We're now in that part of the year where there's only a few weeks left for big news to happen before we are all forced to reflect on the last 12 months. Let's hope for something interesting, and positive. Whatever happens, I hope to report on it and hear from you.

--Lee Fang

Spencer Ackerman reports that administration officials may be overstating the threat of domestic terrorism in order to justify escalation in Afghanistan, something that has worked in part because of the administration's emphasis on recently foiled domestic terror plots. While it's unclear if these actually represent a rising danger of domestic radicalization, I think Ackerman's thoughts on how the alleged perpetrators get radicalized are worth considering (my emphasis):

But al-Qaeda’s message is finding at least some appeal, however marginal, among American Muslims in their teens and 20s, more than it did to their older brothers, cousins or fathers. “Those people were 10 years old when 9/11 happened” and have since “felt like they grew up under a cloud of suspicion because of their religion.” said a former counterterrorism official who declined to speak for the record. Those individuals — whom the ex-official clarified were “a few bad apples” among millions of law-abiding American Muslims — “saw issues like torture, Guantanamo, and Iraq and decided to react because they lacked an understanding of history, and view things instead from a conspiratorial view and are open to being radicalized.” By contrast, the older generation — the families of the five Virginians — were encouraged to go to the FBI with their worries about their children’s travel to Pakistan after the prompting of a major American Muslim lobby group, the Council on American Islamic Relations.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council  released a report last week making suggestions about how to counter domestic radicalization, namely by partnering with Muslim communities rather than simply treating them with suspicion. The idea is that people in Muslim communities have the proximity and cultural resources to help inform the authorities of potential dangers without incurring a backlash. Law enforcement foils plots and incapacitates would-be terrorists, while the communities themselves work on "draining the swamps," so to speak.

What's really important is that law enforcement does not develop the kind of toxic relationship with American Muslims that has emerged in some urban communities in the United States, which would discourage open cooperation with law enforcement and give credence and power to extremist narratives. (Granted, in some cases, that toxic relationship is a few centuries in the making.) That's going to be a danger as long as one of the two major political parties in America continues to support torture, racial profiling, and excluding Muslims from participating in the political process.

-- A. Serwer

Ross Douthat has a good column today, basically arguing that it's time for conservatives to say they were right about mass incarceration as a solution to crime in the '60s and '70s. Now, having declared victory, they can move on to healing the damage it has caused:

Mass incarceration was a successful public-policy tourniquet. But now that we’ve stopped the bleeding, it can’t be a permanent solution.

This doesn’t require a return to the liberal excuse-making of the ’60s and ’70s. Nor does it require every governor to issue frequent pardons. (A capricious mercy doesn’t further the cause of justice.)

Instead, it requires a more sophisticated crime-fighting approach — an emphasis, for instance, on making sentences swifter and more certain, even as we make them shorter; a system of performance metrics for prisons and their administrators; a more stringent approach to probation and parole. (“When Brute Force Fails,” by the U.C.L.A. law professor Mark Kleiman, is the best handbook for would-be reformers.)

My feature from the latest print edition of TAP deals partly with this shift in conservative thinking on the issue of criminal justice and the potential for reform. Frankly if Kleiman's book, which recommends emphasizing swift rather than severe punishment, gives conservatives cover to support policies that reduce the size of the prison population and its associated social and economic costs, then great. There's no mention in Douthat's column of the devastating and disproportionate damage that the "tourniquet" of mass incarceration has had on black people in this country, or the fact that establishing a corrections policy this draconian and punitive would have been impossible without exploiting racial fears, but that's hardly surprising. (Douthat does briskly brush aside the racial elements of the Willie Horton ad -- although Lee Atwater eliminated all plausible deniability years ago.) If conservatives can be persuaded to support more effective and humane criminal justice policies that reduce the suffering and damage caused by mass incarceration, I don't really care if they want to declare victory and pat themselves on the back first.

So yesterday's post on Matt Taibbi's latest in Rolling Stone got a bit more attention than I had anticipated, including a response from Felix Salmon that I thought was worth addressing. Salmon defends Taibbi -- I'd accuse him of some logrolling in our time thanks to his appearance in the piece, but Salmon is better than that -- but it's not a very strong defense. Just to be clear, I don't object to Taibbi's polemic style, or his name-calling, or his lack of fealty to J-school convention. I don't expect everybody to be familiar with my writing, but if Salmon bothered to read any of my posts about the media, he'd realize that's the last thing I'm worried about. None of my various quibbles with Taibbi's piece had to do with his style.

Here's my point: Taibbi has written an article arguing that Obama has sold out his campaign-era economic populism by surrounding himself with Bob Rubin's lackeys and giving away the farm to the bankers -- "one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history." Only it turns out, though, that many of the Rubinites he identifies don't work on the things he says they work on, or don't take the positions he applies to them, or aren't as influential as he thinks they are. The people he says were "banished" from Obama's inner circle, like Austan Goolsbee, weren't. He manages not to mention any of the populist decisions Obama has made. These things ought to raise questions.

To deal with the two examples that Salmon questioned, on the issue of Michael Froman's role in the transition, I never say that the article doesn't identify him properly. I'm just pointing out that if Taibbi's writing an article about how these shadowy figures are undermining the bailouts and financial regulation, focusing on someone who doesn't work on the bailout or financial regulation is a weird way to go about it, unless you're just trying to identify everyone with a connection to Bob Rubin and use vague innuendo to suggest they've done something shadowy. Taibbi also claims that Froman "hired" Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, which just isn't true. Nor is it true that Froman and James S. Rubin were "running" Obama's transition economics team; they also weren't involved with the November 2008 decision to bail out Citi. On the issue of Elizabeth Warren and the CFPA inspection exemption, if you look at the interview, she specifically says that the version of the CFPA that came out of Frank's committee is strong. That's the version of the legislation with the exemption.

It is very telling that Taibbi never mentions the massive lobbying efforts by the financial sector to kill the regulatory reform legislation that the administration supports -- if the banks are trying to stop the bill that is supposedly so bank-friendly, suddenly the narrative can't be a morality play. It makes for a more complicated story, but that's the story that needs to be told. It also says something that Taibbi never mentions the Chrsyler and General Motors rescues, where the Obama administration spent billions of dollars from the TARP fund for the express purpose of saving hundreds of thousands of jobs. Pretty populist, I'd say.

Salmon says I concede that Taibbi is right when I note there are real problems with the Wall Street-Washington revolving door and that the administration isn't hard enough on the banks. I think that's just conceding reality. Taibbi's interpretation of that problem -- that the administration "proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside" -- doesn't reflect reality. Salmon suggests I'm not supposed to take this "literally," but if that's Taibbi's intent, I'd say that's pretty weak sauce. And I wasn't saying that Taibbi's story would "overshadow" all other criticisms from the left, I said it would be used to dismiss them. That's how politics works.

In other news, yesterday the House passed an omnibus financial regulatory reform bill over the objections of Republicans and the financial industry. Is it perfect? Far from it, especially in the derivatives area. But it does have the version of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that Warren says is strong, it gives federal regulators dissolution authorities that, if used properly, ought to prevent future bailouts. Federal regulators will be able to split up banks that get too risky, institute higher capital requirements and limit leverage. It's a step in the right direction in an effort that will require many steps. I wonder if Taibbi's readers will hear about it.

Update: Also Matt Yglesias makes a good point about Congress' role in all this.

-- Tim Fernholz

• By all means, if the Democrats want to lose control of Congress, let them make superficial gestures toward deficit reduction a top priority for 2010. Voters only care about the deficit insofar as it is a symbol of their frustration with the fact that there is high unemployment. Long-term deficit reduction is and ever shall be a structural problem, and short-term deficits won't make a difference if they lead to job growth.
• If The Washington Post's editorial page editors would just admit that they run dishonest and error-ridden columns for the sake of link traffic we could only then accuse them of embracing their inner Politico. But since serious newspapers like The Washington Post are largely coasting on a reputation for being serious sources of serious journalism, we get absurd post-hoc justifications for running dishonest and error-ridden columns.
• Matthew Yglesias throws out a few reasons why he thinks the two-party system is so entrenched in the United States, but I think he's conflating two separate questions: What led up to the establishment of the two-party system and what keeps it in place. His fourth reason, election law being written by the parties in power, effectively answers the second question. Answering the first, more historical, question is far more interesting and merits deeper exploration.
• Steny Hoyer appears to understand well the structural problems Congress faces and the degree to which deadlock will remain the defining feature of the legislative process if nothing changes, but unfortunately Hoyer is not in the U.S. Senate, where the truly egregious problems lie. He also doesn't offer any solutions to the problem but I hardly blame him. Fixing the institution of Congress would require its members to rewrite the rules, and few if any are willing to make that leap.
• Remainders: House Republicans unanimously vote to deprive the federal government of its operating budget; I'm sure taking up immigration reform will bring out the best in our members of Congress; more on the fragility of China's economic power; Dave Weigel peruses yet another incoherent book written by some conservative who has no idea what he's talking about; John Bolton glosses human nature in order to justify his own blood lust; Steve Benen is a connoisseur of Fox News polls; and, um, well...no comment.
  

--Mori Dinauer

Good evening!

Many many thanks for reading my thoughts and musings this past week. It’s been a privilege to have the chance to share them with you. Particular thanks to Phoebe for giving me this opportunity and to Alexandra, without whose editing skills and brilliant insights I would not have survived the week.

I don’t frequent the blogosphere all that much but I'll definitely be writing in the New Year so if you're interested, look for me then ...

Have a wonderful weekend and enjoy family, friends and seasonal pastimes. Be well!

--Laura Dean

For all the flak the blogosphere catches for being an insular narcissistic echo chamber, sometimes its collaborative problem-solving potential is pretty impressive. Here’s an example: One astute blogger noted that every time news outlets reported skirmishes with ISAF forces, they seemed to be killing Taliban fighters in multiples of 30. Coincidence?

Maybe. But another blogger, Joshua Foust of the Central Asia blog Registan came across a possible explanation. In a tweet, he noted that a piece in the LA Times last year offered a window into how “collateral damage” calculations unfold:

"In a grisly calculus known as the 'collateral damage estimate,' U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost."

"We don't know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon's former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, "the magic number was 30." That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OK'ed by the legal and military commanders on the ground."

While the article refers to civilian casualties rather than to the deaths of those identified as militants, when it comes to Afghanistan, the difference between a civilian and a member of the Taliban is often a tough call to make. It would stand to reason then, that commanders on the ground, not wanting to bother getting permission from the top military brass, might round all casualties down to a convenient "30."

The very fact of a political calculus implies that a higher death toll might provoke a some sort of outcry, a quaint notion when we’ve been “at war” for almost a decade and have become largely desensitized to reports of the war dead.

Like many things, it would seem that this arbitrary figure is a holdover still in place from the Bush administration. If we're going to attempt to understand what is going on in a war going on thousands of miles away, knowing how many people are dying in it would seem like a useful place to start.

-- Laura Dean

A protester in Copenhagen removes his "climate alien" make-up. Barack Obama will head to Denmark next week to take part in the United Nations climate talks.

(Flickr/Matthew McDermott)

Coinciding with a recent burst of organizing around immigration reform, Tom Barry pens a fascinating, if grueling, piece in the latest Boston Review. Barry dissects the newest species of American incarceration: the public-private immigration prison and the corresponding “prison towns” that have sprung up all across the country, but particularly along the Southern border.

The facilities, which are jointly owned by local governments and private corporations like the Corrections Corporation of America, are seen as a guaranteed source of revenue, and are often located in economically depressed communities:

Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes

...

Since funding is provided by project revenue bonds rather than general obligation bonds, the county faces no direct liability if the speculative prison fails. “Money for nothing” is a common refrain when county officers are asked about the advisability of prison deals.

Occasionally, towns -- like one in Reeves County that Barry mentions -- can run into serious debt problems, if these prisons do not fill their beds.

Luckily for them, though, the federal government has their back. Roadblocks to comprehensive reform efforts in Congress have placed the burden of enforcement on the criminal justice system. Over the last 20 years the criminalization of undocumented immigrants has allowed the number of private detention centers to skyrocket. Detention, sometimes indefinite, has replaced the earlier practice of sending Mexican immigrants back to Mexico and calling all other undocumented immigrants to appear in immigration court. The government’s most recent iteration of this is the 287(g) program: The program deputizes local law enforcement to play federal cop and lock up those found without legal documentation. Great news for the prison executives! At a hearing earlier this year, the program was found to have no metric for success or standards with dubious enforcement practices. Still, 287(g) programs continue to operate around the country.

Comprehensive immigration reform has been promised for 2010, but issues like health-care reform, financial regulation, and climate change will still take priority before it's seriously addressed. Once -- and if -- it is, the "crimmigration industry" may prove one of the larger obstacles in its path.

--Laura Dean

The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them. Some might say it's no great loss at this point because the Senate bill Harry Reid came up with contained a public option available only to 4 million people, which would have been far too small to exert any competitive pressure on private insurers anyway.

To provide political cover to senators who want to tell their constituents that the intent behind a robust public option lives on, the emerging Senate bill makes Medicare available to younger folk (age 55), and lets people who aren't covered by their employers buy in to a system that's similar to the plan that federal employees now have, where the federal government's Office of Personnel Management selects from among private insurers.

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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