Political Bloviation

Matthew Yglesias » Judd Gregg, When Left to His Own Devices, Is an Orthodox Conservative Who Doesn’t Care About the Deficit.
h/t to Ezra Klein who points out that no one who voted for the programs that drive the deficit (Bush Era tax cuts, Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, financial bail out and the regulatory [...]

Ezra opines about what might happen to the conference report, if the House and Senate versions don’t line up, and they most certainly will not:
The Senate is trickier. But the conference report can’t be amended. It can’t be changed, or held up in committee. It can be filibustered, and it can be voted against. Those [...]

Oxdown Gazette » American Prospect’s Public Health Plan Debate, Part I.
This is an interesting debate about the relative virtues of “strong” vs “weak” public plans and the interaction with insurance exchanges. I was in grad school for an Masters in Public Health at Emory, specifically looking at the role on insurance on the delivery of [...]

Ezra on the non-budget from my favorite wankers in the GOP. It’s easier to snipe when you have no real proposal of you own:
EzraKlein -MY FAVORITE BUDGET EVER
It’s reads like what would happen if The Onion put together a budget. “Area Man Releases Proposal for 2010 Federal Spending Priorities.” (Though, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, [...]

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect – WATERBOARDING AND PROFIT MARGINS

Ezra riffs on good ol’ Grover Norquist, heh.

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect.
Ezra defends Andrew Sullivan by way of an actual real world example of interrogation techniques that work, as opposed to the Reuel Marc Gerecht fantasy created whole cloth from episodes of 24. Important points to note:

Torture and abuse at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib was a prime motivating factor in recruiting [...]

Let us ponder on this election day what a train wreck of a god awful leader we have now.
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
As a president, he has been monstrous, responsible for the needless deaths of, at least, tens of thousands. As one of those rare individuals who had the opportunity — indeed, the power [...]

Obama ought to make a bigger deal about this. The important take away is that the continued American presence in Iraq helps al Qaeda.
Op-Ed Columnist – The Endorsement From Hell – NYTimes.com
John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days [...]

Ezra covers the mendacity of the whole Republican voter fraud meme:
EzraKlein Voter Fraud Fraud | The American Prospect
CNN has been running a story about bogus voter regsitrations by ACORN today. They emphasize invalid registration forms without balance. ACORN, or any organization that assists voter registrations, must turn in every form. This includes incomplete and obviously [...]

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
John McCain’s contention is that Wall Street has, for years, been rotting in a toxic mixture of greed and overreach and corruption. Simultaneously, a 70-year-old regulatory structure has proven inadequate at checking the institution’s excesses. This is, in other words, a crisis composed of trends, rather than a singular, unpredictable, [...]

Co-Payments for Expensive Drugs Soar – New York Times
Perhaps this should be viewed as a good thing for the prospects of true systemic health reform, given of course you personally don’t die of cancer or become disabled by MS because you can’t afford the drugs to treat the illness. When the middle class begins to [...]

Exra wonks out on the cost savings of EPI health care plan that democrats have adopted with a few marginal changes anf find an extra trillion over 10 years:
EzraKlein | The American Prospect – National Health Care Saves Money
The bottom line is that the Hacker structure covers just about everyone and saves huge amounts [...]

The Clinton campaign has plans to take the nomination even if Obama has wins the delegate count. This has the potential to be more destructive than using super-delegates to steal the election. Perhaps this come up as the possibility of having enough super-delegates to make difference fades. It doesn’t really matter to me that party [...]

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
I strongly agree with Ezra’s post. Job one: Close Guantanamo. No dallying around thinking about it. Scrap the military tribunal kangaroo court. Put them in a Federal maximum security facility and start civilian trials. The issue will be that evidence gained through torture won’t be admissible, and it shouldn’t be [...]

From Ezra Klein at The American Prospect:
When it comes to racism, I’ve been somewhat surprised to find that I was wrong. Very little of the narrative around Obama’s run has touched on race; very few of the attacks on him have been coded racism, and those that have — the occasional mention of his drug [...]

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
A new report from the Campaign for America’s future tabulated the number of cloture votes — essentially, votes taken to break a filibuster — in recent Congresses. The results are startling. The Republicans have broken the record only halfway through the term. They are on track to not only [...]

This nails the conservative approach to health care reform perfectly:
THE NEW REPUBLIC | Blogs
The conservative health care strategy works like this: endorse subsidies in theory, since it would seem unacceptably heartless to simply say that people who can’t afford medical care shouldn’t get it. Then, whenever anybody proposes a plan to actually implement subsidies, vehemently [...]