As long as Fox News continues to present itself as “fair and balanced,” Jon Stewart will have plenty of material to work with.

Howard Dean no longer wants to kill the health care bill. He finally figured out what every progressive should have known (unless they were so consumed with anger and emotion over the loss of the public option) – that this bill is a good start.

It appears that most Democrats in the House feel the same way. Now, will other hysterical lefties like Keith Olbermann come along? We’ll see.

I just watched Howard Dean on Meet the Press, and while he’s not supporting the health care bill, he’s no longer arguing that we should “kill the bill.”

Dean acknowledged that a number of improvements have been made the the Senate version over the past week, and he insists more improvements need to be made in conference. Many of his points might be attainable, so we can expect more improvements as the conference gets underway.

He doesn’t support the bill, and he may not support the final compromise, but his arguments are now much more constructive in how the bill can keep improving. He didn’t mention the reconciliation process once, and he refused to repeat his suggestion that Democrats should kill the bill.

I stopped watching MSNBC in the mornings because Dylan Ratigan is incredibly annoying. He has some good points at times, but he’s only interested in repeating his own opinion . . . over and over again.

Here’s a clip of Ratigan at his worst with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even Chris Matthews rarely gets this annoying.

If he wanted a real discussion, he could have gotten an answer. Insurance stock went up after the public option was dropped for very obvious reasons – yes, the public option would have resulted in real competition. Fine. End of story. That does not mean, however, that the bill is a “giveway” to the insurance companies as he implied, because as the Congresswoman tried to explain, the bill does include robust regulation of the insurance companies.

Is this perfect? Of course not. Would a public option be better? Of course. But Ratigan just wanted to yell and scream about his simple point that the insurance companies are now better off than if the public option had stayed in the bill.

Of course, a child could probably figure that out as well, but Ratigan thought he was making a big point, so he acted like an ass.

He also explains why conservatives naturally hate it. It will, over time, lead to more government as the notion of universal coverage becomes expected by Americans.

Ezra Klein has made a name for himself during this health care debate. He’s one of the most sensible writers out there, and he’s great with the details and the big picture.

Here’s the latest big picture argument as to why liberals should move the bill forward.

I still believe health care will look more similar than different when the day is done. A good bill will pass, if not a sufficient one. A sum of money will be appropriated, and a basic infrastructure constructed that will be, in the long-run, understood as a tremendous, even unlikely, political victory. The next steps will be easier, because $80 billion is easier to find than $900 billion, and because the argument over whether America has a universal health-care system and whether government provides some of the funding and scaffolding will be over. The money will be there. The scaffolding, too. The universal structure, built around the mandate and the exchanges and the subsidies, will be firmly in place.

At this point, an odd dynamic has developed, in which most all of the right, and some on the left, believe they’d be better served by the defeat of this bill. It is unlikely that they are both correct. But the right has had substantially more experience than the left opposing government initiatives before they can take root and grow into popular entitlements.

Look at the development of Medicare and Social Security, of Medicaid and S-CHIP, the Swedish and Canadian health-care systems, public education. Social Security was designed to exclude African Americans. Medicare didn’t cover prescription drugs. Medicaid was mainly for pregnant women and their young children. Canada’s system was limited to a single province. There was no University of California at Los Angeles.

It’s difficult to conclude that these things slip backward rather than marching forward. The $900 billion for people who need help, the regulations on insurers and the exchanges that will force them to compete, the structure that will make health care nearly universal and the trends that suggest more people — and more politically powerful people — will be entering the new system as employer-based health care erodes — it all makes this look even more like the sort of program that will take root and be made better, as opposed to the sort of common opportunity people should feel comfortable rejecting. It doesn’t feel like that now. But then, it rarely does.

Every liberal should read this. There’s a reason the Republicans are abusing every stall tactic they can muster in the Senate to delay this bill. They want to kill it all costs. It will lead to everything they despise, and everything liberals want. The details now really don’t matter. Once this is set in motion, they’ll never be able to turn back the clock.

In that context, it’s stunning to hear people like Howard Dean and Keith Olbermann play into the GOP’s hands by arguing that the bill should be scrapped. In one sense, as Kos pointed out, it’s healthy to have a real debate on the left. But Dean and Olbermann have taken it too far, risking everything.

Ezra Klein has it right – Howard Dean has become a “hostage-taker” in the process, threatening to blow everything up on one or two points. How does this make Dean any different from Joe Lieberman?

Klein also goes on to explain the prudent purchasers language in the bill and why it should be sufficient. As Dean acknowledged, this was John Kerry’s issue, and Kerry is very happy with the language.

Paul Krugman is asking progressives to take a deep breath.

There’s enormous disappointment among progressives about the emerging health care bill — and rightly so. That said, even as it stands it would take a big step toward greater security for Americans and greater social justice; it would also save many lives over the decade ahead. That’s why progressive health policy wonks — the people who have campaigned for health reform for years — are almost all in favor of voting for the thing.
*****
By all means denounce Obama for his failed bipartisan gestures. By all means criticize the administration. But don’t take it out on the tens of millions of Americans who will have health insurance if this bill passes, but will be out of luck — and, in some cases, dead — if it doesn’t.

The hysteria gripping the progressive movement is out of control, capped by Keith Olbermann’s melodramatic comment last night. Get a grip, keep negotiating, and pass a bill.

Some like Keith Olbermann and Kos have suggested that the health care bill should be opposed unless the individual mandate is removed.

Ezra Klein explains why the mandates are necessary.

Here’s another example of why progressives can’t govern. If they don’t get what they want, many of them get self-righteous and go home. It’s pitiful.

I’m watching Keith Olbermann, and he’ll soon be giving a “special comment” and it looks like he agrees with Howard Dean. Dean’s notion that we can just go to reconciliation or take this up again next year or in two years is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in years. Killing the bill is a political disaster for Democrats, and for President Obama.

It’s a good bill. Get it passed.

Olbermann is arguing that reconciliation is a real option. It’s not. It’s a last resort for a reason – you can’t get much done with it. It’s messy as hell and will hold up a host of other progressive priorities. If this deal blows up, of course I support reconciliation, and if the threat of it helps move the last Senator now, then I’m all for the bluster. But the best option is to pass the bill now.

Fortunately, congressmen like Anthony Weiner are not rushing to side with Dean. That’s been left to the blowhards.

UPDATE: Markos was on Olbermann and sounded much more balanced on this issue. Surprisingly, he didn’t join the “kill the bill” chorus and expressed some hope the bill would be improved through the conference. Of course he was pessimistic as hell, but at least he’s not being as unhelpful as Howard Dean.

UPDATE 2: This is Olbermann at his worst. He’s focusing on the name-calling coming from the right. He’s lost in the politics. In his mind the bill will “cost Obama the left.” Really? He’s completely lost his mind.

Jay Rockefeller slammed Howard Dean for his ridiculous call to kill the health care bill just because the public option is gone.

“It’s nonsense. And it’s irresponsible. And coming from him as a physician, it’s stunning. And he’s wrong. Does that answer your question?” Rockefeller responded. He ticked off the good things that were still in the health care legislation. “This’ll be good for people. Am I angry that the public option appears to have been dropped? Of course I’m angry about that,” he said. “I proposed the original bill on the floor that was the tough one. … Was I for the Medicare buy-in? Of course I was. … So what do I do? Do I take my football and run home and sulk and complain?”

Mitchell cut in, but Rockefeller wasn’t done. “I’m a grownup, you’re a grownup,” he added. “We’ve been around this business for a long time. And you never get everything you want. You don’t sulk about it. You try to keep improving the bill.”

Good for him!

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Unlike other progressives who are taking their football and going home, Nate Silver explains why progressives are batshit crazy to vote against the Senate health care bill, even after the public option has been stripped from the bill. The posts looks closely at the economics and how it will affect a typical American family, and Nate is convinced that “for any ‘progressive’ who is concerned about the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in America, this bill would be an absolutely monumental achievement.”

Photo from fOTOGLIF

It’s because his judgment stinks. His latest call to “kill the bill” is a ridiculous and irresponsible response to the latest round of negotiations in the health care bill. I understand his disappointment in the Lieberman fiasco, but the bill in it’s current form is a good bill. 31 million people will not have access to health insurance, with many of them getting generous subsidies from the government. The bill also has numerous cost controls that will change the way we pay for health care over time.

Progressives made a strong push for the public option. I understand their anger. I agree that they should encourage primary challenges to lawmakers who oppose the public option. But killing the bill is going too far.

Great stuff . . . again.

Fox News took umbrage at the White House’s assertion that the network is oftentimes a research and propaganda arm for the Republican Party. “The Daily Show” reveals the relationship between FNC’s supposedly non-partisan news anchors and the opinion people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

FNC apologists like to point at MSNBC and say that they’re just as biased the other way, but I’ve personally heard Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews be highly critical of Obama’s WH on a number of issues (torture, GITMO, the public option, etc.) over the past few months. Can Beck, O’Reilly and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” say they did the same thing when Bush was in office? And what about the hypocrisy of complaining about Obama’s WH treatment of Fox News when the same people were saying that the Bush WH should hang MSNBC out to dry? (Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino admitted in an interview on Fox that the Bush WH didn’t do anything with MSNBC late in his second term.)

Do these people realize that people are recording everything they say on television?

This kind of outrageous behavior from the insurance industry must be stopped. It’s strange to hear people express their fear of the government being involved in health care when we see the abuses byt the insurance industry. Private insurance companies care about profits – that’s it.

Christina Turner was drugged and raped by two men in 2002. After taking anti-HIV drugs prescribed by her doctor as a preventative measure, Turner was denied health insurance. The HIV drugs, Turner was told, raised too many health questions for her insurer.

Follow the link and watch the video. It’s stunning that we’ve been allowing this stuff to happen in this country.

I’m not suggesting that Obama policies alone are driving the stock market. Many factors, particularly earnings, drive the overall market.

But, many conservatives were quick to blame Obama when the market slipped in the spring, implying he was to blame as opposed to the economic crisis he inherited. Melissa Francis and some of the other conservative market worshipers at CNBC were just a few of the examples. Well, the market is now up, and we’re not hearing conservatives talk about it much any more.

One of the original supply-siders, Bruce Bartlett, explains in a brilliant op-ed why the ideas that worked so well in the early 1980’s are irrelevant today. Bartlett is promoting a new book, The New American Economy.

I continue to believe that what the supply-siders did was good for the economy, good for the country and good for the advancement of economic science. The best economists in the country were pretty clueless about our economic problems during the Carter years. It was widely asserted that the money supply had no meaningful effect on inflation, that marginal tax rates had no incentive effects, and that it would take decades or another Great Depression to break the back of inflation.

As all economists now know, these ideas were wrong. All economists today accept the importance of the money supply–perhaps too much; during the recent crisis many asserted that fiscal stimulus was unnecessary because an increase in the money supply was the only thing necessary to restore growth. (How this would have been accomplished when interest rates were close to zero was never explained.) All economists now accept the importance of marginal tax rates to economic decisionmaking, and organizations like the National Bureau of Economic Research publish vast numbers of papers on this topic.

During the George W. Bush years, however, I think SSE became distorted into something that is, frankly, nuts–the ideas that there is no economic problem that cannot be cured with more and bigger tax cuts, that all tax cuts are equally beneficial, and that all tax cuts raise revenue.

These incorrect ideas led to the enactment of many tax cuts that had no meaningful effect on economic performance. Many were just give-aways to favored Republican constituencies, little different, substantively, from government spending. What, after all, is the difference between a direct spending program and a refundable tax credit? Nothing, really, except that Republicans oppose the first because it represents Big Government while they support the latter because it is a “tax cut.”

Bartlett exposes the caricature that has taken over conservative economic thinking, the slavish devotion to dogma that makes it impossible to consider the circumstances of our new reality. Think about it. Talk to a conservative about economic policy, and the answer, regardless of the circumstances, is usually the same – spending bad, tax cuts good. I can teach a three-year-old to repeat that.

Bartlett goes on to explain why massive spending was necessary with the economic collapse we faced last year, and the obscenely stupid response of many conservatives who suggested addressing the problem with more tax cuts.

Bartlett was an adviser to Jack Kemp and helped write the Reagan tax cuts. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the history of supply-side economics and why one of its chief architects is arguing that it doesn’t apply today.

Bob Dole is stating the obvious, which is a very rare thing in Washington, particularly among Republicans.

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kans.) told a group of local Kansas reporters on Wednesday, that opposition to the president’s health care package had been driven by knee-jerk partisanship and urged Congressional Republicans to get on board a version of reform.

* * * *

“Sometimes people fight you just to fight you,” he said, according to The Kansas City Star. “They don’t want Reagan to get it, they don’t want Obama to get it, so we’ve got to kill it…

We’ve also seen an AP poll today that shows a rebound in President Obama’s approval rating and the approval for health care reform, along with a score from the CBO that shows the Senate Finance bill would actually reduce the deficit by over $80 billion, which would give plenty of negotiating room for liberals who want to expand certain parts of the bill.

Here’s a good article detailing all the childish gloating from the right. This is another example of how low our politics have sunk in recent years. Conservatives used to rail against liberals for alleged “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” but the contempt and hatred for Barack Obama has reached bizarre levels on the right. Frankly, they sound like a bunch of dumb teenagers taunting a rival team.