CBS Legal Correspondent: Senate Democrats Can Blame Themselves for Kagan Confirmation Difficulties

Limbaugh responds to Obama: ‘Never in my life have I seen a regime like this’

GOP wary of pitfalls in Obama’s health care summit

By CHARLES BABINGTON,

WASHINGTON – Even as Republicans publicly welcome President Barack Obama’s call for a bipartisan confab on health care, some privately worry that he might be laying a trap to portray their ideas as flimsy.

If so, a shaky showing by GOP leaders could possibly embolden congressional Democrats to make a final, aggressive push to overhaul the nation’s health care system, with or without any Republican votes.

Some Republicans doubt that scenario, saying Democrats have lost momentum for any plan that’s certain to draw fierce criticism. But they noted Monday that the White House has not backed away from its support of legislation similar to what the Democratic-controlled House and Senate passed separately in December over strong GOP objections.

“This is a clever tactic by the president to try to put the Republicans on the defensive,” said John Feehery, a GOP consultant and former congressional aide. “There’s a vast ideological gulf” between the two parties on health care, he said, making it likely that the Feb. 25 half-day meeting will be more showmanship than substance.

The House’s top two Republican leaders openly questioned Obama’s sincerity and hinted they might skip the meeting if he uses the Democratic bills as the starting point for discussions.

“Assuming the president is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over?” said a letter to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel from House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio and GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.

“If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate,” Boehner and Cantor wrote.

They asked Obama to rule out the possibility of using “budget reconciliation” rules, which could allow Democrats to enact some health care provisions with a simple Senate majority, not the 60-vote super majority needed to halt filibusters. Democrats control 59 of the Senate’s 100 seats.

In response to the letter, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement contending that Obama is “open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny.”

White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said the president will not rule out the reconciliation route but is sincere in wanting to hear Republicans’ ideas for improving the health care legislation.

In announcing his call for the bipartisan event in a CBS News interview Sunday, Obama was vague when asked whether he was willing to start from scratch on health care. But the White House circulated talking points saying the president is “adamant about passing comprehensive reform similar to the bills passed by the House and the Senate” shortly before Democrats lost their filibuster-proof Senate majority.

If that’s true, Republicans said, what is the point of the Feb. 25 meeting? Some looked to the CBS interview for signs that Obama may use the televised event to depict Republicans’ proposals as falling short in key areas.

“What I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there,” Obama said. “And I want to be very specific. ‘How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance markets so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care? How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don’t have health insurance can get it?’”

Republicans say their health care proposals are frugal and practical. But Obama may be able to cast unkind lights on some details, such as nonpartisan estimates that the House Republican bill would cover 3 million uninsured people while the Democratic version would cover 36 million.

All presidents command a bully pulpit, and Democrats feel Obama was especially nimble in parrying House Republicans’ arguments and criticisms at a Jan. 29 televised event. The Feb. 25 setting could offer him a similar chance to spar with his critics.

The Boehner-Cantor letter sought to even the sides a bit. It called on the White House to invite pro-Republican analysts and Democratic lawmakers who voted against the Obama-backed legislation in December.

Liberal groups hope Americans will see the Republicans as obstructionists, possibly encouraging Democrats to use their still-sizable congressional majorities to enact their health care proposals via the budget reconciliation rules, without GOP help.

If the Feb. 25 meeting clarifies the sharp differences between the two parties, “that might be helpful,” said Richard Kirsch of the liberal Heath Care for America Now.

But some Republicans said Obama runs the risk of appearing insincere if he convenes the bipartisan gathering without showing greater willingness to shelve or greatly change his party’s proposals.

It’s a gamble Democrats appear willing to take.

“I think the greatest risk for Democrats is passing nothing,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. “There are a lot of things the public may not support in a given moment, but later on, when things have quieted down, they may think of highly.”

An overhaul of U.S. health care could fit that description, he said.

Read the original article on Yahoo

Glenn Beck’s Experimental Melodrama

The Fox News star terrifies America with his realistic news theater.

Greg Beato from the December 2009 issue

In late September, President Barack Obama conducted a series of five one-on-one White House interviews with reporters from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and Univision. For some reason—perhaps he’s housing a secret civilian security force in the Roosevelt Room and doesn’t want any fair and balanced reporters snooping around—the president didn’t invite Fox to participate. For Glenn Beck, the host of the hottest show on cable news, this Oval Office slight offered an opportunity to provide some trenchant perspective. “Does the president consider Fox some sort of enemy?” he exclaimed, chortling with amiable resentment. “I mean, no, it can’t be that, because, no, he’ll sit down with our enemies. He’s even offered to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And that guy, I mean, you call me nuts?”

The bit was Beck at his best: shrewdly self-marginalizing, bitingly funny, and executed with perfect timing. A radio veteran who got his first job in the business at the age of 13, Beck, it turns out, is also a TV showman on par with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But while America’s favorite fake newsmen have clear-cut identities as comedians, the question of how to categorize Beck is more perplexing.

When Beck was 8 years old, his mother gave him a record of old radio programs that included Orson Welles’ famous performance of War of the Worlds. Apparently the fictionalized news report of an alien invasion became a foundational text for him, an archetypal example of how you could create crazy, vivid, apocalyptic drama out of mere words. To pay tribute to Welles’ work, Beck starred in a live version of War of the Worlds that aired on his syndicated radio show on Halloween night in 2002. Shortly thereafter, an heir of the radio play’s author sued Beck and his producers for copyright infringement and won an injunction that prevents Beck from ever performing the play again.

The injunction, however, doesn’t prevent Beck from spinning his own doomsday visions every day. In January he jumped from CNN Headline News to the Fox News Channel and began experimenting in earnest. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show had paved the way by showing you didn’t have to stick to the same old tried-and-true conventions when presenting the news. Anchormen could be more expressive. You could use music and graphics and video clips more creatively. And if you could do so in pursuit of comedy, why not also in pursuit of melodrama?

In February, while discussing what it’s like to be angry and enfranchised in America, legislated to the edge of Armageddon, Beck introduced a new visual technique: His image appeared simultaneously in two windows on the screen, one a typical headshot, the other a close-up of his eyes, the better to showcase his distressed but strong sincerity. On April Fool’s Day, as Beck kicked off a segment on America’s drift toward fascism, his image started shrinking until he was just a tiny torso at the bottom of the screen, looking over his shoulder at World War II footage of marching Nazis. “Enough!” Mini-Beck shouted. Then the screen went black behind him, dramatically framing his shrunken head and body as he continued his soliloquy. It was news commentary as expressionist theater.

Beck’s subjects became equally avant garde. On one show, experts tutored the host on how to survive the kind of financial meltdown in which shopping centers were ghost malls and streets were crawling with functionally illiterate meth-heads. A week later, he started investigating the rumor that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was building concentration camps around the country. When that didn’t pan out, he set about exposing the secret communist artwork adorning Rockefeller Plaza and other buildings in New York.

Whatever the subject of any given episode, a common theme always unites it with every other installment of the show: Something isn’t right with America. The country is changing somehow, subtly but surely, right under our very noses, and hardly anyone else is noticing.

In August, Beck turned his attention to the mysterious entities—alien invaders, you might say—who had infiltrated the White House with barely any scrutiny at all: Obama’s czars. Van Jones, Obama’s adviser on green business initiatives, was a former member of a communist group and a self-described revolutionary, Beck reported. Next, he aired video footage of Mark Lloyd, diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, praising Hugo Chavez’s “incredible revolution” in Venezuela. The Van Jones episode garnered Beck’s highest rating in weeks, attracting nearly 800,000 more viewers than his previous show had. The Mark Lloyd episode, boosted by an endorsement from Sarah Palin to her Facebook followers, did even better, attracting slightly more than 3 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Company.

It was the first time Beck’s program had broken the 3 million barrier, an incredible achievement for a cable news show airing at 5 p.m. After Beck unveiled more information about Jones, including the fact that the adviser had signed a petition that suggested high-level Bush administration officials may have deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, Jones resigned from his position at the White House. Beck followed up with revelations about a National Endowment for the Arts conference call in which artists were encouraged to create works promoting President Obama’s political agenda, and suddenly it seemed as if the crusading New Canaan populist might single-handedly save America from the attacking hordes of progressive pod people armed to the teeth with stimulus dollars.

Not everyone gives Beck’s efforts positive reviews, even on the right. New York Times columnist David Brooks accused him of “race-baiting” after Beck said Obama is “racist” toward white people. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum called one of Beck’s many vettings of a White House appointee (Cass Sunstein in this case) “beyond sloppy, beyond ignorant, proceeding straight toward the deceptive.” “How on earth did this crackpot get a national TV show?” asked Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher.

In Dreher’s question we have what is perhaps the most concise history yet of media in the Internet era. With every new technological breakthrough, it gets easier and easier to push unregulated information into the national discourse, potentially exposing millions to misinformation masquerading as news. As President Obama exclaimed in a September interview with the Toledo Blade, it sometimes seems as if we’re moving toward a future where there’s “no serious fact checking” and “no serious attempts to put stories in context.”

In theory, a charismatic paranoiac like Beck is the poster boy for this dystopian future. He’s got a very loud megaphone. His communication skills are world-class. He’s ideologically driven (even if no one can quite figure out what that ideology is). And he’s willing to entertain some pretty dubious notions. But look at his track record so far. He couldn’t sell FEMA death camps because the facts weren’t there to back the story up. His exposé of communist art at Rockefeller Plaza went nowhere because even Beck’s viewers realize an old relief of a naked farmer holding some wheat isn’t much of a threat. The Van Jones story had legs, by contrast, because most of its facts were solid. With a change in background music and a few minor edits, in fact, Beck’s first long piece on Jones could have served as an advertisement for the activist’s achievements—in part because its script closely followed a 2005 newspaper article that was written as a positive portrait of Jones.

Context, meanwhile, is Beck’s forte. He is constantly urging his viewers to connect the dots and look at the big picture, even when the picture exists only in his head. He is forever advising them to consider stories not as transient, random, isolated phenomena, as most newscasts do, but as parts of a larger, ongoing narrative that grows more and more meaningful (and menacing) the longer you study it. In a fractured, distracting mediascape, where thousands of outlets vie for our attention, it’s a smart approach that others are sure to copy. Legally barred from re-enacting Orson Welles, Beck may have to settle for being the 21st century’s answer to Edward R. Murrow.

Read the original article and listen to audio at Reason.com

House Health Care Bill Has Nowhere To Go In Senate

RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — The glow from a health care triumph faded quickly for President Barack Obama on Sunday as Democrats realized the bill they fought so hard to pass in the House has nowhere to go in the Senate.

 Speaking from the Rose Garden about 14 hours after the late Saturday vote, Obama urged senators to be like runners on a relay team and “take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line on behalf of the American people.”

 The problem is that the Senate won’t run with it. The government health insurance plan included in the House bill is unacceptable to a few Democratic moderates who hold the balance of power in the Senate

If a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent whose vote Democrats need to overcome GOP filibusters.

 ”The House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said dismissively.

 Democrats did not line up to challenge him. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has yet to schedule floor debate and hinted last week that senators may not be able to finish health care this year.

 Nonetheless, the House vote provided an important lesson in how to succeed with less-than-perfect party unity, and one that Senate Democrats may be able to adapt. House Democrats overcame their own divisions and broke an impasse that threatened the bill after liberals grudgingly accepted tougher restrictions on abortion funding, as abortion opponents demanded.

 In Senate, the stumbling block is the idea of the government competing with private insurers. Liberals may have to swallow hard and accept a deal without a public plan in order to keep the legislation alive. As in the House, the compromise appears to be to the right of the political spectrum.

 Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who voted for a version of the Senate bill in committee, has given the Democrats a possible way out. She’s proposing to allow a government plan as a last resort, if after a few years premiums keep escalating and local health insurance markets remain in the grip of a few big companies. This is the “trigger” option.

 That approach appeals to moderates such as Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. “If the private market fails to reform, there would be a fallback position,” Landrieu said last week. “It should be triggered by choice and affordability, not by political whim.”

 Lieberman said he opposes the public plan because it could become a huge and costly entitlement program. “I believe the debt can break America and send us into a recession that’s worse than the one we’re fighting our way out of today,” he said.

 For now, Reid is trying to find the votes for a different approach: a government plan that states could opt out of.

 The Senate is not likely to jump ahead this week on health care. Reid will keep meeting with senators to see if he can work out a political formula that will give him not only the 60 votes needed to begin debate, but the 60 needed to shut off discussion and bring the bill to a final vote.

 Toward the end of the week, the Congressional Budget Office may report back with a costs and coverage estimate on Reid’s bill, which he assembled from legislation passed by the Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The Finance Committee version does not include a government plan.

 Reid has pledged to Obama that he will get the bill done by the end of the year and remains committed to doing that, according to a Senate leadership aide.

 Both the House and Senate bills gradually would extend coverage to nearly all Americans by providing government subsidies to help pay premiums. The measures would bar insurers’ practices such as charging more to those in poor health or denying them coverage altogether.

 All Americans would be required to carry health insurance, either through an employer, a government plan or by purchasing it on their own.

 To keep down costs, the government subsidies and consumer protections don’t take effect until 2013. During the three-year transition, both bills would provide $5 billion in federal dollars to help get coverage for people with medical problems who are turned down by private insurers.

 Both House and Senate would expand significantly the federal-state Medicaid health program for low-income people.

 The majority of people with employer-provided health insurance would not see changes. The main beneficiaries would be some 30 million people who have no coverage at work or have to buy it on their own. The legislation would create a federally regulated marketplace where they could shop for coverage.

 The are several major differences between the bills.

 –The House would require employers to provide coverage; the Senate does not.

 –The House would pay for the coverage expansion by raising taxes on upper-income earners; the Senate uses a variety of taxes and fees, including a levy on high-cost insurance plans.

 –The House plan costs about $1.2 trillion over 10 years; the Senate version is under $900 billion.

 By defusing the abortion issue — at least for now — the House may have helped the long-term prospects for the bill. Catholic bishops also eager to expand society’s safety net may yet endorse the final legislation.

 Lieberman appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” while Graham was CBS’ “Face the Nation”

Read the original article on The Indy Channel

Obama Can't Outsource Afghanistan

By KARL ROVE

So our top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he has spoken with President Barack Obama only once since June.

This is a troubling revelation. Right now, our commander in chief is preparing to make one of the most important decisions of his presidency—whether to commit additional troops to win the war in Afghanistan. Being detached or incurious about what our commanders are experiencing makes it hard to craft a winning strategy.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor faced a similar situation: a war that was grinding on, pressure to withdraw troops, and conflicting advice—including from some who saw the war as unwinnable. But George W. Bush talked to generals on the ground every week or two, which gave him a window into what was happening and insights into how his commanders thought. That helped him judge their recommendations on strategy.

Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach to the war seems to fit his governing style. Over the past year, he outsourced writing the stimulus package to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, washed his hands of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to reinvestigate CIA interrogators, and hasn’t offered a detailed health-care plan.

Mr. Obama’s aloofness on the war will be a problem if the recent airing of Joe Biden’s views on Afghanistan is a tipoff that Mr. Obama will rely on his vice president’s guidance. According to reports in the New York Times and other publications, Mr. Biden supports reducing troop levels in favor of surgical attacks—mostly launched from offshore—and missile strikes against al Qaeda, especially in Pakistan.

Such an approach would almost certainly lose the war. Actionable intelligence—key to defeating an insurgency—would dry up. Tribal chieftains would cut deals with the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Afghan government would probably collapse, and the Afghan people would have little choice but to swing their support to the Taliban. Pakistan would likely come to see us as a fair-weather friend and increasingly resist U.S. attacks against al Qaeda on its soil. American credibility would be shattered. And militant Islamists would gain a victory.

Read more in The Wall Street Journal