I thought this might be a promising approach that lends itself to bipartisan support:

I meant to write about this the other day, but Peter Orszag’s proposal for medical-malpractice reform is pretty clever. As I read it, in fact, it’s not primarily a malpractice-reform proposal at all. It’s a proposal for spreading evidence-based medicine through a vehicle that conservatives and doctors find congenial…

… Instead of protecting doctors from lawsuits by capping damages or limiting the ability of plaintiffs to sue, you could protect them by charging the American Medical Association or the Institute of Medicine with creating standard lists of best practices and then providing immunity to doctors who can show they followed them. That’s easier said than done, but if you could manage it, it would give doctors a reason to follow the best practices and, in theory, drive down overall health-care costs. That would be much more effective than just attacking malpractice suits, which aren’t a large contributor to spending and are often quite warranted.

As Ezra mentions the GOP hated the very sound of  “evidence based medicine” during the health reform debate. I guess it smacked of too much pointy headed book learnin’ gettin’ in the way of good ol’ fashioned faith healin’. Praise Jeebus! Anyway, giving real incentives to physicians and surgeons to follow scientifically derived standards of practice, rather than the “seat of the pants” method that’s stood since Hippocrates sounds like an improvement that has the potential to improve care and lower costs.

Why does this make me sad? Because it’s hard to see the country prospering when one of its two major political parties is this economically illiterate. McConnell isn’t some backbencher. He’s Senate minority leader. And he thinks there’s “no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue.”

There’s an ontological question here about what, exactly, McConnell considers to be “evidence.” But how about the Congressional Budget Office’s estimations? “The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for almost half — 48 percent — of this $539 billion in increased costs.” How about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? Their budget calculator shows that the tax cuts will cost $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018. How about George W. Bush’s CEA chair, Greg Mankiw, who used the term “charlatans and cranks” for people who believed that “broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue.” He continued: “I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don’t.”

It’s like arguing with 3 year old, there just isn’t any point Ezra.

1. The GOP and like minded conservatives are doing their level best to distort reform proposals into some kind of socialist Armageddon.
2. Assorted nut jobs, tea baggers and birthers have seized upon this to vent all manner venom on the President.
3. Much of the attacks carry a nasty racial undertone.

It certainly bears more than a superficial resemblance to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to exploit the racial anxieties of fearful white voters. A quick review of footage from recent congressional town hall meetings and some of the signs and imagery used by reform opponents are nothing less than disturbing. Nevertheless trying to label them as political terrorists is over the top.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

via Steven Pearlstein – Steven Pearlstein: Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform – washingtonpost.com.

Update:

If Krugman says your shrill, then you are pretty damned shrill…

I know I promised, but that was before I saw that post.

Bailin’ Palin penned an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post that’s festooned with the kind of proud ignorance of facts and talking point bullshit we’ve come to expect from the Wasilla Wonder. The only real question is why a major media outlet would give that level of ignorance a forum? Did they actually read what she wrote before they published it? I know it’s an opinion piece, but while you are entitled to your own opinion, you are not entitled to you own facts.

Ah, the delicious irony of it all:

According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided. Among all Americans, 53 percent prefer capitalism, 20 percent prefer socialism and 27 percent are undecided…

…The data on the young are particularly telling. Twenty-somethings are more open to socialism — or social capitalism — than 30-somethings not only because they never lived through the Soviet threat but because the economy, during the years in which deregulatory policy and Wall Street financialization were at their height, hasn’t worked very well for them. Americans under 29 scored well to the left of the general public in a recent survey by the Center for American Progress, and voters under 30 backed Barack Obama by a 34-point margin in November, 66 percent to 32 percent.

The young may now disdain Wall Street — but what do they know of socialism, past and present? Who even speaks of socialism in America today? The answer, of course, is the demagogic right. According to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their ilk, Obama is taking America down the Socialist Road. As Benjamin Sarlin has noted on the Web site the Daily Beast, the talkmeisters of the right have linked a doctrine that never commanded much support in America to a president whose approval rating hovers around 60 percent and much higher than that among the young.

Rush and his boys are doing what Gene Debs and his comrades never really could. In tandem with Wall Street, they are building socialism in America.

Go Fox, go Rush, go Sean, heck of a job there boys! They’re doing more to build socialism in American than Molotov, Trotsky and Mao put together.  Their nearly complete ignorance of what socialism is coupled with a willingness to throw around the accusation willy nilly is having the effect of pushing American youth further to the left.

This is not to say that I believe a “worker’s paradise” is imminent or even desirable, but the excesses of the right are chipping away the future of the right and the GOP. As I’ve said several times before, we need a right center party to counter balance the Democrats.

Look we’ve already tried it their way and the results are in: utter failure for American world standing and its economy. A very narrow swath of already very wealthy people did even better. But that’s about it. The rest of us have suffered stagnant wages, joblessness and destitution. Perhaps it will all accidentally bring a bit more balance to American political life.

I don’t think it’s time to break out the champagne just yet. The country’s economy is in a massive hole that took years to dig. It will take more time to get us out of it. When employment numbers start to rebound and the larger economy shows positive growth numbers for a couple of quarters, then we can pop the bubbly. Taken together it does show some signs of life in what has thus far been an economically bleak year.

Despite the side-show provided by the AIG bonus kerfuffle, it shows that the Obama administration is doing the right things to guide the economy to recovery. I fail to understand why people are so pissed about $165 million in bonuses, when that represents less than 1% of the money we gave AIG essentially without strings so they could in turn hand it to counter parties (mostly big banks) in the credit default swaps AIG backed who had already gotten billions from the government. Where was the outrage over that?

Who knows? It might happen, the Democratic Congressional Caucus might just grow some spine in the next Congress.

An honest editor might change that to:

Despite reality, Bush continues to lie.

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use – washingtonpost.com
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

Long held legal ruling uphold personal use exemptions to copyright laws. The RIAA would like nothing better than to hobble PCs, CD recorders, DVD burners or anything that threatens and already collapsed business model. What better way to ensure long term survival than suing your customers?