Doug Hoffman losing is to conservatives winning as Barack Obama failing is to America succeeding.

Do you see?

ALSO:

Because I’d like to teach more about the educational value of South Park, I direct you to Matt Taibbi’s awesome take on this quote by Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths:

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”

Taibbi writes (among other long-winded, of course, but ultimately satisfying and humorous passages):

If you happen to be a rich dweeb who went to the right schools and hung around with the same group of people your whole life, and those people actually run the world, well, then, you’re in the very happy position of having your own bullshit adolescent belief system become self-reinforcing.

You think that reality coincides with your beliefs because your beliefs are true, whereas in truth it’s because you spend all your time with people who believe the same nonsense you do, and generations of your cultural ancestors just happen to have built very high walls all around you fools to keep reality from getting in and spoiling things.

Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash.

There’s another name for this doctrine, besides FYIGM: “gods and clods.”

I wasn’t even 10 years old when I first saw the “Chickenpox” episode of South Park, and I already knew all there is to know about capitalism. It wasn’t until years later that I would learn that there is an entire political party in America which is based on the “gods and clods” line of thinking.

And it was only two days ago that I learned that this party thinks losing is really winning. But this actually makes perfect sense, given the party’s entire worldview is ass-backwards. Start pre-emptive wars to make peace, approve warrantless wiretapping to preserve freedoms, hand every college student a gun to keep campuses safe, cut taxes for the rich in order to help the poor, and, finally, lose to win; the list goes on.

We all know Politico always delivers the most original angles that no other establishment media outlet even considered publishing - like the important scoop that a few friends of Roman Polanski gave some dollars to President Obama, which (I hope) was too trivial for even Jake “I smell cigs” Tapper.

Today’s most Serious scoop out of Politico centers on the number of pages in the House’s health care reform bill:

It runs more pages than War and Peace, has nearly five times as many words as the Torah, and its tables of contents alone run far longer than this story.

The House health care bill unveiled Thursday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. With an estimated 10-year cost of $894 billion, that comes out to about $2.24 million per word. .

And for some members, that may not be enough.

You may want to know what’s actually in the bill, but I don’t. I’d rather know, what can you do with the bill other than read it?

North Carolina Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry, 34 years old and a few inches taller than 5 feet, said a print-out of the bill could act as a ”booster seat.”

Most importantly, what does the House’s biggest moron think?

But Republican Rep. Joe Barton, who is Texan, said the bill is “about four reams of paper” that add up to the American public “getting reamed.

You know, if Politico was around to cover the lead-up to the Iraq War, I firmly believe we’d live in a safer world.

They would have told us that the Iraq War Resolution - which prints out at 3 pages and contains less than 2,000 words - would eventually cost more than $281 billion a page, as of 2008. The Bush administration initially projected that the war would cost roughly $16 billion to $20 billion per page.

These statistics would have piqued my interest much more than questions like, does Saddam Hussein actually pose a threat to the international community? Yawn!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid almost has the votes for cloture on a health care bill that includes a public option, which, as Jane Hamsher notes, means that there a few members of the Democratic caucus who will not pledge to vote for cloture and are threatening to participate in a Republican filibuster of the bill.

Extra emphasis has been placed on keeping the vote of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), who was the lone Republican vote on the Finance Committee in favor of a bill but adamantly opposes a public option. The thinking here has been that her vote for the bill would make it safer for conservative Democrats to support the bill as well as cloture.

The status of Snowe would be no more than a sideshow if Reid could whip together the 60 votes in his caucus. Bob Cesca sees this as a failure of leadership, but it’s more than that.

There are (at least) two fat sellouts in the Democratic caucus who (supposedly) will not vote for cloture despite pressure from Reid, liberal groups, or the seeming inevitability of reform. These sellouts are a bigger obstacle than leadership because they are willing to torpedo genuine reform - it’s in their best interests.

A number of Blue Dogs who have spoken out against the public option indicated last week they were not keen on joining Republicans in a filibuster - these include Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

There are a few whose positions on cloture are not immediately clear, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT).

And then there is one whose position on the public option has been clear from the beginning yet who has faced surprisingly little public pressure: Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), the Senate’s biggest sellout.

Bayh recently refused to commit to voting for cloture on a bill with a public option, telling Politico, “It’s not fair to ask people to facilitate the enactment of policies with which we ultimately disagree.”

Why might Bayh disagree with the enactment of a public option? And why might this difference in opinion provoke him to vote against cloture?

True Slant’s Rick Ungar may have it figured out: Bayh’s wife Susan sits on the board of directors at Wellpoint (a position coincidentally awarded after he was elected to the Senate) and the Bayh family thanks Wellpoint for much of its income.

Susan Bayh earned more than $2 million from Wellpoint between 2006 and 2008 and holds stock options worth between $500,000 and $1 million. What’s good for Wellpoint is good for the Bayhs, and a public option would not be good for Wellpoint. Susan Bayh has publicly opposed the creation of a public health insurance option.

And to think - Evan Bayh was a top contender for the Vice Presidential nod. What a sorry selection he would have been.

Late Update (8/29/09):

I’d look like a fool if I didn’t follow up on this post and explain that Joe Lieberman has proven himself to be the Senate’s biggest sellout. There hasn’t been much movement in the Senate since he announced he will not vote for cloture on a bill with a public option, but I bet he’ll have some competition soon.

Today, Time’s Mark Halperin posted a rant written by an anonymous “Close Observer of the Health Care Debate” who thinks that “ObamaCare Is/Might be in Deep Doodoo.” Halperin calls this “Essential Reading.”

First off, turning over Serious website to an anonymous source is irresponsible, even for a Serious Journalist. For all I know, it could’ve been some blogger writing for Halperin today. It’s even more irresponsible to call this “Essential Reading,” given that the source’s facts and assumptions are terribly wrong.

Anonymous writes:

And as kumbaya fades, Business is getting increasingly antsy because they know they are paying the bill at the end of the day and there is positively nothing in the legislation that will bring down costs, and they know the main point of the PWC study is dead on.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers document that Anonymous characterizes as “dead on” is the widely panned study commissioned by America’s Health Insurance Plans that even PWC has basically admitted is misleading. As The New Republic’s Christopher Orr notes, the study excluded all elements of reform that would would lower premiums.

Anonymous writes that pushing for a public health insurance plan is a loser:

Everyone is for “reform” but here is why this whole enterprise has always been bad politics: At a time when we have 10% unemployment and record deficits, Congress is going to  1) cut Medicare and 2) raise taxes to 3) pay for health care for the uninsured. None of these are popular.

Congress is not going to cut Medicare. That would be unpopular. Efforts to streamline Medicare should be popular with all Americans, especially among ‘fiscally responsible’ conservatives - you know, the people who wanted to privatize Medicare until they changed their tune and started fear-mongering to score some political points.

Democrats in Congress do not want to flatly raise taxes. They want to raise taxes on the rich, which is in fact popular. Gallup found in April that 60 percent of Americans believe upper-income people are paying too little in federal taxes.

Paying for the health care of the uninsured is not exactly unpopular either. Actually, it’s very popular.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 76 percent of Americans would support having the federal government create a new health insurance plan that would compete with private health insurance plans, is run by state governments, and is available only to people who do not have a choice of affordable private insurance.

This assumption by Anonymous is also wrong:

And when McDonnell wins in Virginia despite his encyclical, Blue Dogs and moderates will get even more nervous about midterms. Likely Corzine win gets discounted because it’s New Jersey and GOP nominated a hapless candidate.

Just because Chris Christie has run a poor campaign does not make him a “hapless candidate.” New Jersey Republicans have wanted to run Christie for a few years now based on his corruption-buster credentials. Sure, this corruption buster status has always been sort of laughable, but Republicans did believe in it.

Creigh Deeds has also run a bad campaign. Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote on Sunday that “many in the party privately believe [Deeds] has run a mediocre race.”

Anonymous’s contribution to the health care debate is inherently worthless. But it will do for the Village.

If you’ve woken up today, you know that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize. I don’t really understand why he was awarded it, but the idea that this is a sure loss for the White House is so stupid I can’t believe our mindless mainstream media would say it.

In fact, it’s a win for the White House, if only because conservatives thoroughly embarrassed themselves today and proved once again that they hate Obama more than they love America (with kudos to Jon Stewart). Today’s wingnut reaction might have been even more off-the-wall than the outcry over Obama’s supporting the bid to bring the Olympics to Chicago - which is still part of America, if not the real America.

Erick Erickson was the moran of the day, essentially writing in separate posts that Obama was given the Nobel Peace because he (a) is black, and affirmative action and dey took er jobs (!!!); and (b) is a terrorist like Yassar Arafat and Jimmy Carter.

But this is the best post from Erickson yet:

From: Sean Stutzman sean_stutzman@hotmail.com
Subject: Affirmative Action
Date: October 9, 2009 1:06:06 PM EDT
To: Erick-Woods Erickson

F**k you, you racist piece of s**t! Was it because of affirmative action when Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Prize? What about Nelson Mandela? While I don’t necessarily agree with Obama winning the Peace Prize this early in his Presidency either, to invoke affirmative action is just low. I’m telling you this as a white, United States Marine from Texas, so you can’t dismiss me as some left wing idiot. I read what you wrote and got pissed off enough to write you back. So when a white Marine from the south calls you out for being a f**king bigoted a**hole then perhaps you need to reevaluate yourself.

Bigot - noun: a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.

After posting a letter from the mail bag in which a Marine took the fattest shit on his face, Erickson retorts, “These people crack me up.” Why did he even post this letter? Does Erickson seriously think he won that exchange?

Stepping back for a minute, I’ll remind you all that Erickson is a City Councilman in Macon, GA. I will now put on my outrage face and declare: Erick Erickson must resign!

If the first day of the SEC’s Securities Lending and Short Sale Roundtable and today’s list of panelists are any indication, the SEC has no intention of curbing naked short selling.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi writes:

“What’s interesting about this round table is that virtually none of the invited speakers represent shareholders or companies that might be targets of naked short-selling, or indeed any activists of any kind in favor of tougher rules against the practice. Instead, all of the invitees are either banks, financial firms, or companies that sell stuff to the first two groups.”

Sens. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) also took note of the guest list and released this statement yesterday:

Tomorrow’s SEC roundtable is long awaited, but it is clear that the panel is stacked against the need for restrictions on naked short selling. In the recent financial decline, there was abusive short selling enabled by the repeal of the 70-year-old uptick rule and a lack of so-called pre-borrow or hard locate requirements.

The recent bull market, however, has lulled us into a false sense of security. If we do not enact these proposals – the uptick rule and either a pre-borrow or hard locate requirement – the same people who drove down certain stocks in the past will just do it again.

We need to focus on giving the SEC’s Enforcement Division the tools to end naked short selling once and for all.”

Deep Capture’s Judd Bagley left yesterday’s event with the well-founded impression that the SEC doesn’t get it: “In the simplest terms, I’d say the situation at the SEC is one of extreme disconnection. This is an agency that has completely lost track of its founding mission.”

Naked short selling is an abusive form of stock manipulation in which an individual sells shares without ever borrowing them, creating Fails to Deliver and “counterfeit” or “phantom” stock and driving a stock’s price way down. The illegal practice has been blamed for the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

But there are always a few journalists who rush to the defense of naked short selling when it becomes the subject of public debate.

In a critique of Taibbi’s piece, John Carney of Business Insider suggests that naked short selling doesn’t hurt any party involved because there is “no counterfeiting of shares involved at all, and no more downward pressure on the stock than would be involved in a traditional short sale.”

Carney mainly discusses short selling - which is a totally different animal than naked short selling - and doesn’t broach the subjects of illegality or fail to delivers, but why would he?

No, concern over naked short selling is overblown. He writes (his bold):

“Much of the fear of naked shorting seems to be based on a very simple mistake. People assume that most naked short sellers are momentum traders accelerating the decline of a troubled company. That’s actually not true at all. The overwhelming amount of naked shorting takes place when companies announce abnormally positive results and contrarian traders scramble to fight the tape. They aren’t seeking to manipulate the market—they’re betting against the crowd.”

But the fact that naked short sellers are “betting against the crowd” doesn’t exculpate them at all. As TocqueDeville notes on Daily Kos, “naked short sellers will often try to pump a stock before they trash it to create a wider spread and, consequently, more profit.”

CNBC’s Jim Cramer has explained at length how hedge funds routinely generate profits through manipulation:

The great thing about the market is that it’s got nothing to do with the actual stocks. Maybe two weeks from now the buyers will come to their senses and realize that everything they heard was a lie. But then again Fannie Mae lied about their earnings for $6 billion. It’s just fiction and fiction and fiction. And I think it’s important for people to recognize that the way the market really works is to have that nexus of: Hit the brokerage houses with a series of orders that can push it down. Then leak it to the press. And then get it on CNBC — that’s also very important. And then you have kind of a vicious cycle down. And it’s a pretty good game. It can be played for a percent or two.

Cramer is familiar with this process because he’s done it himself and has admitted that it’s “actually blatantly illegal.”

But all of the complaining by victims of naked short selling is just sour grapes. These victims are pissed they were robbed greedy people.

“Corporate executives tend to hate short-sellers, and want use their connections to politicians to inhibit short-selling,” Carney writes. “And this, really, is what’s going on here. While it’s not quite as blatant as the short-selling ban we saw last year, the crack down on naked shorting is really meant to increase the costs and risks of short-selling generally.”

Expect to hear more of the same from the participants in today’s SEC discussion on naked short selling.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas continues to post the results of Research 2000 polls commissioned by Daily Kos that test support for a misleadingly defined public option.

The survey asks respondents: “Do you favor or oppose creating a government-administered health insurance option that anyone can purchase to compete with private insurance plans?”

This language does not accurately reflect the reality of the public option as it’s being debated in Congress. I noted on Aug. 24 that the public option in the House bill, which has strong progressive support, would not be available to everyone. The problem is, Markos has continually suggested the poll question gauges support for “the Public Option.”

For instance, Markos writes today that the results of polls of four Blue Dog districts show that “none of these four [Representatives] are on solid electoral footing, none have positive ratings on health care, and all would suffer electoral harm (to varying degrees) by opposing the Public Option.”

Ezra Klein wrote two weeks ago:

“The strongest public plan on offer is in the bill being considered by the House of Representatives. This plan is limited to the health insurance exchanges, which are in turn limited to employers with fewer than 20 workers. So that’s the first point: The vast majority of Americans would be ineligible for the public plan, even if they wanted it.”

The Congressional Research Service’s July 27 report on the bill states:

“The Exchange would consist of a selection of private plans as well as a public option. Individuals wanting to purchase the public option or a private health insurance not through an employer or a grandfathered nongroup plan could only obtain such coverage through the Exchange. They would only be eligible to enroll in an Exchange plan if they were not enrolled in other acceptable coverage (e.g., from an employer, Medicare, and generally Medicaid).”

I would prefer to see health care legislation include a strong public option, as described by the Research 2000 polls. But the reality is the only public option being considered is a weaker one. It doesn’t help the progressive cause by suggesting that the public option would create a government health insurance plan that anyone can buy.

Case in point:

When Evan cross-posted on Daily Kos his story on OFA’s dropping its demand for a public health insurance option, the disinfector wrote of the petition’s new language:

“the change and it’s a significant one, is that the public option will now only be an option for those who are uninsured.

this is not competition.  clearly, insurers will simply continue to cut benefits and raise costs, confident that, as long as they don’t drop you entirely, you can’t take your business elsewhere.”

“This has been in there for months,” CS in AZ responded. “I can’t believe how many people were/are not aware of this.”

TooFolkGR added, “Community Fault for This.”

If there is a pervasive lack of accurate information about the public option in the Daily Kos community, blame lies at the top.

After all, the community’s leader has regularly contended that “the Public Option” is a “government-administered health insurance option that anyone can purchase [and would] compete with private insurance plans.”

That’s one type of public option; it’s not “the Public Option,” the public option included in President Obama’s plan, or the public option being considered in Congress.

A day before his formal rebuke by the House, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) continued to raise funds off of his blatant display of disrespect during President Obama’s address to Congress.

“My outburst during the president’s speech was poor timing, and for that I have personally apologized to the president himself,” Wilson wrote in a Sept. 14 fundraising email to supporters.

But Wilson has not personally apologized to the President himself.

“They have not spoken,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in an email. “On the night of the speech, Rep. Wilson telephoned the President’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emaunel, to offer his apology.  Mr. Emanuel accepted the apology on the President’s behalf.”

Wilson released a statement to the press, but this too does not qualify as personally apologizing to Obama.

In his email, Wilson invited his supporters to “Stand with me against liberal attacks” and mistakenly claims, “I’ve been under attack by the liberal left for months because of my opposition to their policies, especially government-run healthcare.”

The Congressman was “relatively obscure” before shouting, “You lie!”

Full email after the jump. Read the rest…

Organizing for America has dropped the demand for the public option from their open letter to members of Congress. As recently as Sept. 11, the letter featured on OFA’s Health Care Action Center stated that health care reform must:

“Guarantee choice - Every American must have the freedom to choose their plan and doctor - including the choice of a public insurance option.”

A cached version of OFA’s site from Sept. 11 can be viewed here.

Below is a screen shot of the original letter:

The letter appearing on the current site still urges members of Congress to support President Obama’s plan for health reform - which includes a public option - however the word “must” has been dropped.

This change confirms Obama’s position on the public option: he wants it, but is willing to drop it to pass legislation.

The recent revision also signals that the Democratic Party and its leadership will no longer insist that health reform legislation include the choice of a public insurance plan, given that the Democratic National Committee operates OFA.

The DNC inherited OFA - formerly known as Obama for America - after the 2008 election.

Update: Sign up here to join hundreds of Obama campaign staffers and thousands of Obama volunteers and donors in telling the President that any reform short of a public option is not change we can believe in.

Update (New):

Susan from the Florida Progressive Coalition Blog adds some useful context:

I noticed at Saturday’s OFA healthcare rally that the pledge forms they were asking people to sign didn’t include the words “public option.” I asked OFA state director Ashley Walker about it and she told me it was probably just an old form they were using. I was skeptical.

Having read that OFA had dropped its demand for the public option, Susan writes: “Please remember this when OFA and President Obama ask for your time and money. They led you to believe they were standing up for you. They never intended to.”

George Will’s Newsweek column on “Why No One Believes Obama” is the best ever.

He writes, “[Obama's] incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.” Does he back this up? No, but he writes it, and he’s a MSM journalist who blindly pledged allegiance to the Bush administration for eight years and thus has the most credibility.

Will doesn’t need facts because he has the brainpower and the venue to present his own facts which resemble the rosiest of conservative talking points.

He writes of the President: “He deplores ’scare tactics’ but says that unless he gets his way, people will die.” Of course, if we don’t reform the health care system, people will die. In the past year, 5 million Americans have lost their health insurance. But why would Will care about that? He’s got a column to write.

Next, Will states, “He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars.” Obama’s opponents are liars.

Will continues: “He says the nation’s economic health depends on controlling health-care costs.”

Conservatives sometimes like the CBO’s findings, so let’s look at their projections if we preserve the system we have:

Total spending on health care would rise from 16 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007 to 25 percent in 2025, 37 percent in 2050, and 49 percent in 2082. Federal spending on Medicare (net of beneficiaries’ premiums) and Medicaid would rise from 4 percent of GDP in 2007 to 7 percent in 2025, 12 percent in 2050, and 19 percent in 2082.

Those facts are swell, but Will would rather focus on tort reform. He writes, “Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing ‘defensive medicine’ intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers.”

More CBO:

Evidence from the states indicates that premiums for malpractice insurance are lower when tort liability is restricted than they would be otherwise. But even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on health care spending–private or governmental–because malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of that spending.

Give this man a raise.