It's not a good sign that the Iraqi people are dodging mortars and car bombs as they make their way to the polls. This election is very important, both for the Iraqis and for the United States. If we want to get our troops out of there on schedule, we need these elections to go smoothly and for a government to be formed in a timely manner.

I like David Axelrod, but it's ridiculous that he allowed this piece to land on the front-page of the New York Times. I mean, he actually sat for an interview for the article, and I don't see how the article is helpful to the administration in any way. Axelrod is in charge of the administration’s communication strategy and this is the best he can do when the Times comes knocking?

The main things I took away from the article are that Axelrod is unhappy, unhealthy, burned out, and pissed off. He hates Washington and doesn't "give a flying fuck" what anyone in town has to say. He loves the president and even his sister thinks he may be too much of a yes-man.

This isn't how you want to be presented. I know the author, Mark Leibovich, made the choices of what to include and what to leave out, but getting played like this doesn't speak well of Axelrod's savvy. I actually am willing to cut him some slack on his performance to date. While communications haven't been as strong as they were during the campaign, they haven't been terrible. In looking for areas to blame for the polls and the stalled health care reforms, I have to put it more on the people in charge of working with Congress (Messina and Emanuel) than on Axelrod or Gibbs. And I have to give credit to the Republicans. They have been very effective in creating wedges, including on Gitmo, detainee policy, climate, and health care.

After reading the article in the Times, I'd like to see Axelrod take a break after this year so he can rest up for the 2012 election. If he's unhappy, tired, and unhealthy, he's going to continue to make mistakes. And I know he doesn't want to do a disservice to the president he so admires. He can best serve him by getting his head right and preparing for the next campaign. It's what he really excels at.

It will probably not help U.S.-Iranian relations that Ahmadinejad has now officially joined the 9/11 Truther Club.

You can tell that the media is liberal by looking at the Sunday morning political talk show lineups. On Face the Nation, Lindsey Graham is balanced by Evan Bayh. On Meet the Press, Orrin Hatch is balanced by Harold Ford. On This Week, Mitch McConnell is balanced by no one. On Fox News Sunday, Mitt Romney is balanced by no one. On State of the Union, Tom DeLay is balanced out by Chris Van Hollen and Brian Baird. Obviously, that means there are no progressives and, aside from Van Hollen, no mainstream Democrats. It's extreme right-wingers matched up against the most 'centrist' Democrats in the business. The only person on any of these shows other than Van Hollen who will wholeheartedly defend the president's health care plan is Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. That's how they game the system against us.

The Republicans think that the media is liberal because the reporters believe in things like global warming and the value of the United Nations and the theories of evolution and plate tectonics. But, just because the media is educated and cares about world opinion doesn't mean that they are helpful to liberal causes like avoiding senseless wars or extending health care accessibility to 30 million Americans. They're not helpful. If they were, they'd have invited Raul Grijalva and Sheldon Whitehouse on their shows instead of Harold Ford and Evan Bayh.

It's like people are competing to set the record for stupid. (h/t to Matt Waite).

Iraq will have national elections tomorrow and the Washington Post has a preview up this morning. What I found most interesting is their choice of man-on-the-street quotes. In a country as diverse as Iraq, you could find someone to say almost anything, but the Post chose these:

"If Ayad [Allawi] wins, he will become a dictator," said Ahlam Aboud Karim, 33, as she shopped for vegetables in central Baghdad. "If we have a strong man, we don't need a democracy. A strong leader is better. Democracy won't work in Iraq."

Mesen Fanar Dawood, a merchant at a Baghdad pet shop, said he will be at the polls Sunday. But he was all but certain that the vote would be rigged.

"Iraqi people need a strong man, they need a strong man like Saddam Hussein," he said, voicing his dislike of the brand of democracy in today's Iraq. "But this is all we have available. If you leave your ballot blank, it will be abused by another person."

I have no idea how representative those sentiments are, but it's significant that the Post didn't offer any other quotes to balance them out.

UPDATE! We posted on craigslist.org with her picture (thank you, SecondNature, for that brilliant idea, and she was found by a nearby vet's wife, and they have her at one of the surgical tech's house. We are so incredibly lucky.

Sorry for the light blogging. Our Shih Tzu disappeared sometime after dinner last night and we didn't realize it until this afternoon. I guess our attention to detail is diminished with a new baby to care for. We're very concerned, but hopeful that perhaps someone picked her up out at the road and will turn her in to the SPCA. It's always tragic to lose a family pet, and this dog was very special. So, we're feeling pretty sad tonight. But maybe tomorrow will bring good news.

This is what happens when a Regent University law graduate is able to pass himself off as a rational person and get himself elected as the governor of a state:

“It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including ’sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly,” [Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli] wrote. Colleges that have included such language in their policies — which include all of Virginia’s leading schools — have done so “without proper authority” and should “take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia,” Cuccinelli wrote.

There are no moderate Republicans. After eight years of Bush and Cheney, the moderates are extinct.

It's a sad day when only liberals and "some government lawyers" are disappointed to learn that we, as a country, are incapable of holding public trials for terrorism suspects in normal courts of law. Of course, that characterization in the Washington Post's article on the subject is false. There are people from every ideological point of view who are disappointed by this.

How did we get to a situation where the price for closing Guantanamo Bay is to have sham-trials for the most notorious criminals in the world? We're too afraid to hold on to our system of justice?

It's more like the Republicans will stoop to any level to score political points. They'll even wet their pants in public to score a few political points. No leadership, no statesmanship, no concern for our cherished system of justice.

It's an interesting thing to see the new Republican talking point that uses Barack Obama's own words against him. Several times since be became a candidate for federal office he has discussed the need to get 60 votes to pass significant legislation through the Senate. In context, he has used this argument to explain why more aggressive health care reforms that are preferred by progressives are non-starters in our current political system. As you might imagine, a Democratic politician who is touting anything less than the kind of health care enjoyed by every other industrialized nation in the world is going to get asked about their rationale for compromising on the issue before negotiations even begin. And, the honest answer to that question is that you need 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything and no Republicans are going to vote for cloture on a single-payer system that does away with or significantly diminishes the profits of the private health insurance industry. So, rather than promising something that cannot be delivered, Obama has all along said that we must settle from something sub-optimal or get nothing.

Now, a funny thing happened that confused things a bit. The Senate Democrats actually had 60 votes in their caucus for four months (Sept-Jan) and they passed Obama's health care on Christmas Eve. So, while they didn't get any bipartisan support, they did reach the magic number. And the Senate does not intend to vote again on that bill. They expect the House to pass it as well, and then they will both send the bill up to the White House for Barack Obama's signature.

I know that the passage of health care reform is more complicated than that, but we really need to focus on the fact that the 60 vote threshold has already been met. The fact that the Democrats now only have 59 members in their caucus means that the Senate cannot amend their bill any further, and that means that the House can't make any changes either. The loss of Teddy Kennedy's seat to republican Scott Brown short-circuited the negotiations over the House and Senate bills to find a middle ground both chambers could support. So, the House is not inclined to vote for the Senate bill because they like their bill much better and want to see some of their ideas incorporated. So, the problem we have is that the House won't pass the Senate's bill with a simple majority. The obstacle is the House and the only reason that 60 votes matter at all is because the Democrats no longer have the votes to make changes to a bill that they have already passed.

That is where the reconciliation bill comes into play. The concessions the Senate would have made to the House if they still had 60 votes will be made in a separate bill that incorporates just those changes. That bill will only require 51 votes to pass. It's a way of making Scott Brown irrelevant. Nothing more or less. The Senate Health Care bill has already passed through the Senate, and it will be the bill (god-willing) that the president signs.

So, the president may have said in the past that any health care bill will need 60 votes to pass, and he wasn't wrong. It did.

I knew that Lanny Davis was perhaps the least principled person in Washington, but I didn't know that he was willing to make himself look like a complete idiot to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the issues related to health care reform. I mean, who is his audience for such nonsense? If he posted this crap in the USA Today, I could understand. Let me give just one example:

On mandatory coverage with pre-existing conditions, at least some Republicans, such as Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) at the summit, have said they favor some way to address this issue, and apparently some states already do by regulation. Obama and McCain should be able to agree on a base standard for state regulation to minimize denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

No, they shouldn't be able to do that unless they mandate that everyone buys coverage. Insurance companies are in business to make money, and you don't make money by insuring someone's home against fire damage if their house is already on fire. Likewise, you don't give someone with diabetes health insurance and agree to pay the cost of their dialysis. You can't make insurance companies take on customers whom they know will cost them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or, more precisely, you can't do that unless you also force millions of healthy people to buy their product, thereby making it a profitable trade-off.

That's only the beginning of Lanny's idiocy. He should go back to shilling for right-wing Latin American generals.

If you guessed Illinois you win a 60% rate increase on individual health insurance policies! What a deal, eh? Congrats California, you're no longer the state being screwed over the most by the health insurance industry!

Consumers in Illinois who lose their jobs and have no other option but to buy their own health insurance will get socked this year with premium increases of up to 60 percent, according to state records. [...]

The individual insurance market is relatively small compared with consumers who get their insurance through their employers, but it has become the fastest-growing group in this economy, in which about one in 10 are unemployed. The individual market also has spawned a national debate after a California health insurer raised premiums for this group by up to 40 percent, triggering probes by state regulators and the Obama administration.

These people really have no shame, do they. They are so convinced the health care reform will not pass that they just don't care what outrageous crap they pull, and they don't care that we know about it. And all the Teabaggers who are afraid that the public option, which would force the insurance industry to actually compete for your health care business, is socialism incarnate are -- and I apologize to any family members in advance who believe this to be true -- ignoramuses.

Because it isn't just individuals that are getting hit with outrageous health insurance rate increases. Small businesses are as well:

The HHS examples did not include increases occurring in Washington. One District resident recently received a letter from CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield saying the premiums for his family's high-deductible plan are going up from $506 per month to $714 per month, a 41 percent increase. He said the company told him that the increase did not have to do with his family's use of medical care, but that it had decided a whole block of its policies was underpriced.

Stephanie Cohen, an insurance broker with the District firm of Golden and Cohen, said she is seeing many similar rate increases, including some that are even larger for small-business policies. She said the increases had been approved by regulators in the District and surrounding states. Insurance regulators in the District and Maryland were not able to provide details about the rate increases on Thursday.

What's driving these rate hikes? Not out of control health care costs. Just simple greed:

From 2000 to 2008, insurance premiums went up 97% for families and 90% for individuals. In the same time period, payments to providers like hospitals and doctors only went up 72%. Even worse, underlying medical inflation, calculated from the Consumer Price Index, went up only 39%.

In short, over the last eight years premiums almost doubled, but medical inflation went up only 40%. Premiums rose two times faster, and over three times faster than wages, which only rose 29% in the same time period.

But God forbid we reform our current health care mess. By the way, our family plan requires a $2400 deductible before we only have to pay lower rates for our health care costs. Sometime this month we will pass that number. But we have a family with many medical problems. Imagine paying thousands of dollars each month and never reaching your deductible limit. Would you call the premiums those people pay robbery?

I would, and do.

Finally! A Republican I can vote for! Who? Whomever runs against this lunatic. It's your lucky day, Pete Olson. The troubling thing is that I am so rusty with my Laroucherism. I didn't know that they think that the British control the world behind the scenes. How'd she win the primary? I don't know. Luckily, she has zero chance of winning Tom DeLay's old seat, even though her desire to impeach Obama does make her more appealing than the average Sugar Land Democrat. Don't you think?

I have a theory that the new generation of Democrats who were elected in the 2006 and 2008 elections are different culturally from the older, longer-serving members. What really happened is that after the fiasco in 2004, the base of the Democratic Party exerted itself and started to fight back forcefully against the Bush administration. The main manifestation of this was the emergence of a liberal blogosphere that backed candidates who shared their values and went after Democrats who were enabling the Republicans' radical agenda. So, it doesn't surprise me that the newer members of the Senate want to fight Republican obstructionism much more forcefully than the older ones. Many of them were motivated to run for the Senate in the first place by their disgust with Republicans. Fighting them openly and aggressively brought them victory and success.

The older Democrats seem to keep pining for a long dead age when the Senate operated with bipartisanship. I actually think there is evidence that the period of relatively low level party-polarization that existed between 1930-1970 was an anomaly.

The most obvious cause of this was the civil rights struggle, which pitted socially conservative segregationist southerners and urban machine Democrats in the North within the same party. It was an unnatural alliance that couldn't last in the absence of segregation. However, there is also an argument that increasing income inequality is to blame.

Either way, the culture and rules of the Senate that developed in the post-war years made sense because it was a period of low party polarization, but those rules don't work anymore and need to be changed if the government is going to work effectively.