This interview with former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson and Reason.TV’s Nick Gillespie and Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch is worth watching.  Johnson represents the best of modern American libertarian-leaning conservatism.  I appreciate his candor and especially his rational take on the disastrous war on drugs.  Rather than laughing it off, he recognizes the deadly-seriousness of the issue and its many social and fiscal repercussions.

Some more information on the former governor and his Our America Initiative here.

I get the feeling I’ll have a lot more to say about Johnson, a man who I think stands a much better chance of taking the Republican party in the direction Ron Paul started. Johnson is a little less radical than Paul, and a little more the libertarian rather than the Austrian-school paleoconservative type, which I think will work in his favor with the electorate.

This should be interesting:

As it turns out, Senate Democrats may not be able to force healthcare legislation through the chamber on a simple majority vote.

Republicans say they have found a loophole in the budget reconciliation process that could allow them to offer an indefinite number of amendments.

Though it has never been done, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says he’s prepared to test the Senate’s stamina to block the Democrats from using the process to expedite changes to the healthcare bill.
Experts on Senate procedural rules, from both parties, note that such a filibuster is possible. While reconciliation rules limit debate to 20 hours, senators lack similiarconstraints on amendments and could conceivably continue offering them until 60 members agree to cut the process off.

Another option for Democrats would be to seek a ruling by the parliamentarian that Republicans are simply filing amendments to stall the process. But such a ruling could taint the final healthcare vote and backfire for Democrats in November.

Or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could use a tactic similar to the so-called nuclear option to quash the GOP tactics.

What this means for healthcare reform is essentially that Republicans may be able to transform even the reconciliation process into a filibuster-like scenario, stalling indefinitely (and possibly changing entirely in the process) the Senate bill.  Whether this will actually be the case is harder to tell, since it has never been done before.  Certainly Harry Reid’s people are working furiously to find loopholes to counteract this loophole.  We’ll have a veritable war of the loopholes.

Andrew posted this video in response to David Frum’s call for a center-right conference to provide counterweight to CPAC which has become the epicenter of doctrinaire conservatism.  Recall when Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson was booed offstage by CPAC attendees for saying that the New York Times was a good newspaper and that conservatives should emulate its news model.  Anyways, here’s Frum:

If moderates are to flourish, they need an infrastructure to support them. The Democrats worked hard in the 1980s and ’90s to showcase their centrist governors. They invented superdelegates to balance the left-wing activists who had saddled them with unelectable presidential candidates. They altered their primary schedule to enhance the clout of must-win states in the West and border South.

Republicans can learn from these examples. But first they have to say it loud and say it proud: The time has come to restore the center to the center-right coalition. Maybe it’s even time to start a new convention so the centrists can meet face to face at least once a year, just as their conservative colleagues do. CenPAC, anyone?

This is a sensible idea, and I imagine there are a good few moderate Republicans who would join up.  My only qualm with the concept is more with the terms “moderate” or “centrist” themselves.  Simply because someone isn’t fully in line with all the proper talking points that the GOP expects, or that talk radio conservatives like Limbaugh or Beck demand out of thinkers or politicians on the right does not mean that one is a “centrist.”  If anything, that term seems either a convenient way to take the easy, comfortable middle road or, conversely, to sling around as a pejorative in order to marginalize political opponents.  One man’s centrism is another man’s radicalism, or something to that effect.  Either way, I don’t think the debate is really between “moderates” and “conservatives” so much as it is between reasonable people and people who are in it entirely to win.

In this sense, the reasonable people may be very conservative – Paul Ryan, for instance, is hardly a “centrist” but he is in every sense of the word a reasonable man whose politics are well grounded in first principles.  Bruce Bartlett has added to the conversation not by being a “moderate” but by coming up with new and relevant ideas.  Conversely, there are those on the right with very little grounding in conservative first principles who take so well to the rightwing populism of the day that no one would ever consider them to be “centrists”, even if philosophically they are anything  but principled conservatives.  A certain former governor of Alaska leaps to mind.

The fault lines on the right these days are too many to count, and just as difficult to parse out.  I think Frum is on to something here, but I think the problems run much deeper than merely a battle between two points on the political left-right spectrum.  I’m leaning toward placing equal blame on establishment – and indeed “centrist” – figures in the movement, and on the recent uptick in aimless populism manifested not just in the Tea Parties but increasingly on the right since the Iraq War.  Until both these elements can own up to their shortcomings and work to bridge the gap, I don’t think there’s much hope that anything terribly interesting will emerge out of CPAC or Frum’s imagined CenPAC.  The right has lost its center, no doubt, but it won’t necessarily find it by simply being “moderate” any more than it will find its way through purity tests.

Via Andrew, Jonathan Bernstein thinks the Democrats should pass the bill in spite of the public’s distaste for the process:

Reconciliation is thirty years old, and there’s nothing at all wrong with using it to pass legislation.  What’s more, pass and patch (or pass-then-patch) involves passing health care reform through perfectly normal, regular, procedures — and then fixing the original bill through reconciliation.  Now, granted, Republicans are apt to complain about procedure, and it’s true that Americans don’t like partisan squabbles and don’t like hearing about procedure.  But once the bill is passed, it seems very likely that the national press will tire of procedural complaints about a bill passed weeks, and then months, ago.

Second, it’s a real mistake for Democrats to worry too much about how Republicans will portray things that they do.  Republicans are naturally going to bash Democrats for everything; should Democrats respond by doing nothing?  Surely not.  Democrats should do things that they believe are good for the nation.  Democrats believe that health care reform is good for the nation.  They are, like it or not, going to be attacked for health care reform. Those who get their information only from Republican news sources will believe those attacks — but people who get their information only from those sources are not swing voters.

Regardless of my own feelings about this bill – which are mixed, to say the least – I think Bernstein is correct.  The electorate has a short memory. Tangible results stick in that memory far more than abstract procedures. Six months after the bill is passed, most Americans will still not know what reconciliation is, which deals were struck, and so forth, but a healthy portion of voters will know that healthcare reform succeeded (for now).  More Americans will be glad to hear that an end to pre-existing conditions clauses has been hammered out then will become emotionally revved up over the Democrat’s handling of the process.  It’s possible that the bill will remain unpopular, but it’s hard to see how giving up entirely will look any better for the Democrats.

That being said, I don’t think the Democrats have what it takes to push this thing through reconciliation or patch it up after passing it in the House.  Unlike their opponents, the Democrats have very lackluster party discipline.  The centrists are already calling a halt, and the progressives in the House seem unwilling to pass the Senate bill because it’s too conservative for their taste.  The president hasn’t taken much of a leadership role either, and so the bill remains in legislative purgatory.  My guess is that Keith Hennessey is correct, and the bill is dead.

Perhaps legislators can come back with more modest proposals in the future, but I imagine it will be far in the future.  While I would love to see market reforms in the health insurance market, I don’t believe that Republicans are very serious even about their own ideas.  This is largely the basis for my own support of the Democrats’ bill.  While there are certainly libertarians and conservatives with alternative proposals for healthcare reform, Republican leadership has historically been against any changes to the status quo.  I don’t think the status quo is sustainable.  If the bill dies, I’m not really sure what we can expect.  If I thought the Republicans would take up the cause of a bill like Wyden-Bennett and join ranks with Democrats to push something through as an alternative, I would be more optimistic.  As it stands, every outcome looks grim.  Healthcare costs in the public and private sector continue to rise unsustainably, and our system is too broken to do anything about it.

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zilliontimes). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

~

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

For those of you not paying attention to Arizona politics, the state is a mess – both fiscally and politically.  Yes, at one point it was the home of the great Barry Goldwater – a man whose legacy, alas, has all but vanished from contemporary conservative politics.  Now it is the state which has repeatedly elected the civil-liberties quashing Joe Arpaio as the country’s “toughest sheriff” and whose Senators include the hawkish and increasingly irrelevant John McCain, and the ultra-right-wing and rather vapid Jon Kyl.

The libertarian politics so dear to Goldwater have dried up faster than the water supply.

Now, stepping up to challenge John McCain in the coming Republican primaries is prominent Minuteman, Chris Simcox – a guy who believes in limited government only so long as it comes part and parcel with a really big fence – and J.D. Hayworth, a talk show host and tea-partier who has endorsed the birthers.

Arizona may not be as red as Massachusetts is blue, but the chances of a Democratic Scott Brown pulling off a victory over McCain or his challengers is similar to snowfall in Phoenix.  True, Janet Napolitano was a twice-elected and very popular Democratic governor, but she was plucked up by the Obama administration. Furthermore, Napolitano is a uniquely savvy politician (if not such a terrific DHS bureaucrat), and it is doubtful any remaining Arizona Democrats have either her skill or name recognition, and even less likely that any could pull off a Senate victory over McCain or his challengers.

Remaining in the governor’s shoes is the moderate, if uninspiring, Jan Brewer.  She has little of her party’s support, and even less support from the Democrats in what has become an almost comical attempt to square away the state’s faltering budget.  Said budget is positioned firmly in the red at this point, and nobody in the state legislature can agree on how best to cook the books.  The fiscal year beginning in July will usher in spending shortfalls of at least $2.6 billion dollars, as property values and tax revenues continue their downward spiral, and tourism dollars dry up.

Brewer wants a sales tax hike but both Democrats and Republicans oppose such a move.  Republicans want to cut taxes and cut spending, but nobody – including the Republicans – can explain how this would actually work.  (The cut taxes part always seems so much easier to pull of than the cut spending part.  Imagine that!)  And Democrats want to continue spending at unsustainable rates while raising income taxes, even though such a move would almost certainly deepen the recession further.  A sales tax hike coupled with spending cuts is probably the best of the options on the table, but it doesn’t seem likely that Brewer will get her way.  Nor is it exactly clear where the spending should be cut – which has led legislators to propose all sorts of crazy things, like privatizing Arizona prisons or selling and then leasing back the state capitol building.

Unemployment hovers just under the national average at 9% and voters are unhappy.

In other words, things are not looking good for incumbents in Arizona this year.  Jan Brewer is almost certain to be replaced by someone to the right of her – after all, asking for tax hikes is anathema to Republicans these days – and John McCain’s seat is looking about as safe as a trip to Kandahar.  His moderate stance on immigration and on social issues has long been a thorn in his side, but that thorn is looking sharper than ever these days.  Arizona, as red as it already is, is likely to turn a little redder in 2010 and 2012.  And it’s not going Goldwater red either.

“If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.” ~ <Matt Yglesias, writing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s alternative budget.

I think Yglesias actually makes a pretty strong point here.  While I’m overall fairly sympathetic to Ryan’s budget – he does, after all, balance it (at least according to the CBO report [pdf]), something virtually no other politician is willing to even propose – I think there is a fundamental flaw with implementing a healthcare voucher program without first fixing the broken, dysfunctional health insurance market.  The exchanges created in Obamacare would be one way to do this.

What Yglesias does not point out, however, is that Ryan’s budget proposal also puts an end to the tax exemption for employee benefits.  Simply coupling this tax reform with the ability to purchase insurance across state lines creates an entirely new health insurance market.  Suddenly people on the individual market are given the same tax preference as people who receive their insurance from an employer.  Health insurance drifts away from employers and becomes personal and portable.  People wouldn’t lose coverage when they left their jobs.  Meanwhile, insurers would lose their long-held local and state monopolies and be forced to compete nationally, driving down costs both through added competitive pressures and by the better bargaining powers that these large, national firms would have, with their much larger, national cost-sharing pools.

Of course, the hard questions in healthcare will center around two inextricably linked concepts – pre-existing conditions clauses, and individual mandates.  Almost all modern democracies have some form of universal coverage, and the only way that it has been achieved with any semblance of a free market has been by doing away with pre-existing conditions clauses and implementing some sort of individual mandate.  If the former is done without the latter, nobody would buy insurance until they were sick – defeating the purpose (and the viability) of insurance to begin with.

Other alternatives exist, of course.  My personal preference is a model along the lines of Singapore’s healthcare system, which mandates health savings accounts and then picks up the tab on any costs above a certain flat percentage of income.  This puts healthcare directly in the hands of the consumer (cutting out insurance companies altogether) and provides them with catastrophic coverage if something should go wrong.  Furthermore, by placing costs and transactions directly in the consumers hands, it keeps costs from skyrocketing.  The mandated savings would be flat, but the catastrophic coverage functions progressively, covering less and less as income rises.

Either way, before any privatization of Medicare and Medicaid can occur, the private insurance market must be transformed.  Paul Ryan has shown true grit in crafting a budget that is actually balanced, but the possibility of backlash to cuts in entitlements is very real if the systemic problems in our healthcare system aren’t taken care of first.  Both Yglesias and Ezra Klein see this budget as a sort of draconian rationing of benefits for seniors and poorer Americans. If the insurance market could actually be fixed, however, then the system of vouchers which Ryan proposes would be adequate and possibly even better alternatives to the status quo.

There was a satirical headline floating around after the Scott Brown victory which read: “Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate”.  I think that sums up nicely the position the Democrats have put themselves in regarding healthcare reform.  Liberals may blame Republicans for obstructionism but there is a valid argument for the minority taking an oppositional stance when the legislation in question is something they fundamentally disagree with.

Flip the tables: Imagine there are 59 or so Republicans in the Senate and they’re pushing for the privatization of Social Security – something Democrats fundamentally disagree with and want dead in its tracks.  Should Democrats work with Republicans on this reform or should they threaten to filibuster?  Would private retirement accounts be a palatable enough alternative to the current entitlement for Democrats to compromise, or would it better suit them and their constituency to simply obstruct?

Travel back a few years and you’ll notice that the Bush tax cuts were passed via reconciliation, because Democrats, rightly or wrongly, were obstructing those cuts.  Now reconciliation may be the only way Democrats can push healthcare reform through the Senate.  Nor is there anything wrong with that.  Both sides do it, and both sides should do it, just like both sides should oppose legislation they fundamentally disagree with.  That’s why we elect representatives – not just to do things, but also to oppose things that we disagree with.  They represent us, and if we oppose healthcare reform, so should they.  If we oppose going to war, so should they.  If we oppose privatizing Social Security, so should they.

Nevertheless, Republicans are wrong to think that they’ve worked miracles by stalling or possibly killing the Senate healthcare reform bill, or that those efforts will translate into tangible gains in 2010 or 2012.  Much of this is self-congratulatory spin-doctoring.  In a down economy it is almost inevitable that people will begin grumbling about the incumbents.  Whether that translates into significant gains for the opposition is another matter, and so far there is little reason to believe that Republicans have made serious gains in the public trust.  Disappointment with Democrats and disappointment with Republicans are not mutually exclusive sentiments.

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While I do think that the success or failure of healthcare reform rests squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats in Congress and with the president, I still wish that Republicans would come aboard with some reasonable compromises. At this point, though, the Democrats have several options on the table and while I think there is reasonable room for compromise they could always….

….pass a healthcare reform bill via reconciliation. Yes, the Byrd rule makes this tricky. Serious holes could be shot through the bill. But it can be done. Democrats should seriously consider this approach given the continued strength of their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Whatever is cut out during the process can be added back in later. Rather than worrying so much about public opinion should they pass the bill in the wrong way, Democrats should worry about public opinion if the bill fails altogether. That’s a lot more memorable then some abstract legislative process with as benign sounding a title as “reconciliation.” But…

…if reconciliation is too daunting, Democrats could take a Republican bill and remake it into a bipartisan bill – rather than the other way around. Market and tort reforms could be coupled with subsidies (or vouchers) and some broadly popular reforms like an end to pre-existing condition clauses and some sort of optional national exchange. All the reforms I mention below could be packaged together as one bigger bill. Or…

….the Democrats could do this incrementally, with smaller moves and compromises made one at a time – in three or four separate bills over the course of a year or two or three.

First: expand Medicaid to 200% of poverty while at the same time deregulating the insurance market so that insurers could sell insurance across state lines. Shift the regulatory burden from the states to the federal government to avoid the same problems we’ve seen in the credit card industry. Finally, have the federal government pick up the tab for the Medicaid expansion.

In the next bill, introduce an excise tax on “Cadillac plans” while at the same time tackling tort reform. Toss in some vouchers (subsidies) for low-income families to purchase private health insurance. The Cadillac tax will eventually hit enough people to start a shift away from employee-based health benefits. In the future, the vouchers can be adjusted as more and more people leave the current system to purchase personal, portable insurance.

Third, lower the age of Medicare recipients to 50 while at the same time introducing significant means-testing. Change the fee-for-service model to one which relies on results rather than services rendered. In other words, have a Medicare bill that adds more healthy, younger people to the pool, while reducing benefits and/or raising premiums for wealthier elderly while at the same time changing the biggest and most fundamental flaw with how service providers are paid.

Somewhere in here pass a VAT. Put a bunch of money into community health centers, and nursing programs. Deregulate the medical cartels allowing more barefoot doctors, nurse practitioners, and midwives to provide more of our health services. Let low-cost, easy access, for-profit medical centers set up in shopping malls and other easy access places. Make sure Medicaid is accepted at these new walk-in clinics. Let Wal*Mart run them from its stores, all across the country. Let people start tax-deductible HSA’s regardless of the their health insurance.

And so on and so forth. Plenty can be done – even incrementally – to enact change in the status quo. Things can get better for people without enacting sweeping change that scares voters and kills the process in its tracks.

I’ve been a little too hard on conservatives lately – largely due, I think, to my overall frustrations over healthcare reform, but also because of the antics on the right which I find distasteful and discouraging.  Part of what draws me to conservatism is its respect for tradition, restraint and of course the conservative disposition (which I realize is awfully vague and fairly apolitical).  This includes not saying wildly outlandish things or using scare tactics to make your case.  Somewhere along the way, all this has been tossed aside, along with many conservative principles such as limited government (i.e. not “save Medicare from the Democrats”).  Loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dominate the conservative airwaves, and the GOP itself is headed by the inept Michael Steele.  Several weeks ago, after watching that horrible Colbert segment with Andy Schlafly, I let myself sink into despair.

The conservative movement – nay, conservatism itself – was dead (to me, or so I thought).  Or, if not dead, it was damn near.  Andy Schlafly and Sean Hannity were dancing on its grave sputtering nonsense about Jesus and the free market, giving anti-capitalist progressives all the ammunition they’d ever need to spout their own brand of crazy-passionate-yet-uninformed.  What little remained of conservatism’s once robust intellectual movement seemed cordoned off, populated by a few economists, a handful of paleocons and dissidents, and some libertarians.  The neocon’s secret mission to destroy the movement from the inside out was working – had worked.  Game over.

Then came the special election in Massachusetts.  The Scott Brown victory, if nothing else, has restored my faith in the possibility of Big Tent conservatism.  Whatever Brown’s flaws or inconsistencies – and like every politician, they are many – he nevertheless represents a shift away from vapid purity tests and toward a more regionally representative Republican party.  The lesson of the Brown victory is not that moderate/liberal Republicans should be the model for conservative candidates country-wide, but that there should be no status quo at all – no precise model for what works, no one-size-fits-all-conservatism. What works in Tennessee will likely not work in New Yrok (nor should one politician attempt to change their political views entirely to appeal to each of these states consecutively).

Furthermore, Republicans should run more broadly appealing candidates rather than hyper-partisan ones, even if the hyper-partisan candidates are the best at rousing the base.  Republicans can still run very conservative candidates so long as those candidates can speak to a wide swath of voters. – Bob McDonnell in Virginia, for instance, is just this sort of candidate.

Moreover, the liberal reaction to Citizens United (Glenn Greenwald notwithstanding) has made me realize that my recent lack of faith in conservatives/conservatism is more a reflection of my overall lack of faith in humanity/politics. People on both sides of the aisle enforce that lack of faith on a daily basis.  Liberals and progressives can be just as over the top, emotional, and absurd as their conservative and libertarian counterparts.

On the other hand, all these groups can be well-intentioned and simply disagree fundamentally on very core principles and ideas. That disagreement exists does not make one side more wicked than the other. Obstructing the majority’s agenda is not in and of itself wrong. For instance, Republicans actually did compromise on healthcare reform.  Quite a few of them backed the Wyden/Bennett bill which was a much better bill than the one the Senate eventually produced. Big Labor was the lurking opposition to that bill’s passage, and guess who happens to be situated deep in the pockets of Big Labor?

Hint: it’s not the Republicans.

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. And yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America. ~ President Obama, in his State of the Union Address

“It’s appalling on every level.” ~ Paul Krugman, on Obama’s new budget plans

It is a little strange for a Democrat to call for a spending freeze in the midst of what is still a pretty bad recession.  With unemployment still in the double digits, it’s hard to see why a Democratic president would call for cuts in spending or would care really one way or another about balancing the budget.  (And it may be that it’s all sleight of hand…)

I think there may actually be some merit to such a plan.  We can’t rely too heavily on the government or spending to create jobs, and the ones it creates through stimulus or through the growth of the government itself will either be temporary (stimulus) or will suck money and jobs out of the private sector.  Neither of these outcomes is particularly good.  If Obama can tackle job creation and put a cap on out of control growth in government then we really might see the return of responsible limited government in Washington.  But it’s hard to imagine many progressives are very happy with this move, and Republicans will almost certainly find a way to spin this against Obama:

President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have increased the deficit from $161 billion to $1.75 trillion in two years! The “cut” is to $1.17 trillion in 2010. The panic of 2008-2009 required one-time expenditures to arrest the fear, but the Democrats used the crisis as an excuse to print billions and billions of dollars.  And they refuse to stop.

Well, Obama has been in office for one year, for starters.  And had this crash happened a year earlier I imagine Bush would have done something quite like what Obama has done – especially since the process began with Bush and was continued with his successor.  The position Obama is putting himself in may make his chance for reelection more grim, but until Republicans can start approaching this with more integrity, their chances to beat him in the next election are even grimmer.

I’ve been completely buried under something like six feet of snow for the past few days, and have taken the time to catch up on non-bloggy things – like shoveling driveways and testing out the 4WD.  Will be back to blogging in the near future.

For now, some reading pointers on the recent Supreme Court decision scaling back regulations on campaign finance.

Mark Thompson gets to the heart of the matter here.

See Eugene Volokh here and here discussing the court ruling.

See Ilya Somin here and here and here explaining how people organized as corporations are still people.

My take is essentially that the wailing and gnashing of teeth over this ruling is greatly overblown.  No, this is not the end of American democracy as we know it. Yes, this is a victory for free speech.  Big corporations already had the ability to get around the campaign finance regulations we had in place by forming PAC’s among other things. McCain-Feingold did absolutely nothing whatsoever to prevent this.  The SCOTUS basically just removed a huge barrier to entry for smaller businesses and non-profit corporations who were previously regulated out of the system – essentially leveling the playing field in favor of the small guy – indeed, doing just the opposite that so many people seem to suggest.

The simple explanation is often not the correct one, at least in politics.  The knee-jerk, anti-corporate reaction may be justified well enough, but it fails to see how this ruling in fact does the big corporations no favors, and especially changes the game for the mainstream media.

But don’t take my word for it – check out those links for a much better, in-depth analysis.

P.S. – I’d just like to ask those who oppose this ruling which formally assembled groups of people should the federal government protect us from?  If not from the media corporations, than why from the big retailers?  And why exactly do we need this protection in the first place?  And even more importantly, why is that you think the federal government will either do this fairly or successfully?  Why place so much faith in the beneficence of the feds in the first place?

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

I get the optics of bipartisanship. I also get the need to show you aren’t in the pocket of liberals. As a liberal I’m fine with that–as long as it works. So if Obama needs to tell the country that Chuck Grassley is seriously working for health care reform, even as Grassley is calling him “intellectually dishonest,” it’s fine if, among other things, we’re going to get health insurance for Americas at 400 percent above the poverty line. If he does that and gets nothing, it’s just inept.

But if we lose health care, having given up on single-payer, having given up the public option, have given up the Medicare buy in. If we lose health care having watched Harry Reid claim Joe Lieberman was “the least of his problems” when he should have known he was among the biggest. If we lose and still have to suffer lectures on fake centrism from Evan Bayh, as a liberal and an Obama supporter, you’re left wondering what it was all for.

Perhaps I am wrong, and all the pageantry and delay was essential. But I’m not really seeing how.

But isn’t this always the case with the Democrats?  It seems like time and again their grand plans are defeated by a sturdy opposition.  I don’t know.  I think that all this means is that Democrats are going to have to stop kissing up to either the Blue Dogs or the progressives in their party and try to hammer something out with the Republicans.  Sure, all that pageantry was a wasted effort.  It almost always is.  But Obama campaigned on a bit of pageantry, on a new day in politics where bipartisanship would be respected.  He may have had it too, but then the stars aligned, and counting the Democrats had sixty seats.  What could go wrong?  Bipartisanship wasn’t really necessary anymore – and cutting deals with Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman seemed like the ticket to reform.  All that wasted effort courting Republicans, when in the end it was conservative Democrats….

Then this “miracle in Massachusetts” and even the best laid plans, as they say, out the proverbial window.

It’s time for Democrats to swallow their pride and come to a compromise with their Republican counterparts.  It’s time to do away with closed door meetings and gangs of six and work toward a vastly more conservative bill.  Because right now success lies in turning around the economy.  It’s all about jobs from here on out.  Not cap and trade, not sweeping overhauls of the healthcare system, not elaborate new regulations on the financial system.  Take all those areas at a pace, and focus on creating jobs and restoring economic confidence.  Once that’s taken care of the rest will fall into place.

“This one could end with a dead intern.” ~ Glenn Beck, urging people to “monitor” Scott Brown

Beck made this and several other remarks about Brown after Brown mentioned that his daughters were “available” during his acceptance speech – arguably an odd – even cringe-inducing – thing to say, but hardly indicative of anything other than a poor sense of humor, or more likely an inside joke gone terribly astray. Either way, it’s difficult to make the leap from bad joke to dead intern, but then again Glenn Beck is the master of huge logical leaps leading from nowhere to nowhere.

I think it must have something to do with money.  Nothing else makes sense.