Meet Your Conservative Movement.

Stay classy, GOP.

Reuters:

More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient’s physician, are rejected by California’s largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation’s biggest state

Sarah Palin is lying about health care reform. She is repeated spreading ideas that she knows to be untrue in order to further inflame her base. She is, probably, a craven and unscrupulous liar, unconcerned with the very real potential for disruption of discourse and actual violence created by spreading such lies.

The guy leading the Constitutional legal challenge to Prop 8 in California is uberconservative Ted Olsen.

He is, of course, nearly completely alone in the modern GOP.

How is it that the Onion manages to get so much right so often?

Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care.

The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists.

There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don’t retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama’s plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency has been obliterated. The party’s putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama’s political prospects.

No part of this is untrue. What makes it more interesting is how obvious it is in the angles the Right takes in this debate; a frequent go-to position is that the Administration wants something other than what they’re asking for, i.e. that they’re negotiating in bad faith and have a sekrit plan to socialize everything, etc. The Right views everything in terms of party victory or defeat, and cannot conceive that the Democrats aren’t doing the same thing. It’s classic projection.

Radley Balko found that Alan Dershowitz is also bewildered about Scalia’s anti-innocence position.

The Justice, we are reminded, believes that actual innocence is Constitutionally irrelevant if a person has been convicted in a “fair” trial. Dershowitz then asks:

Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: “Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent.”

Dershowitz then explores an angle I neglected in my prior post: Scalia is famously very, very Catholic — and has said in the past that he would have to resign if his duties ever conflicted with his faith. The Vatican is no fan of capital punishment, and surely must view allowing an innocent man’s execution as particularly egregious. How, Dershowitz wonders, does Scalia reconcile these positions?

Originalism — that bankrupt notion clung to exclusively by Catholics and other pro-lifers — aside, it’s still hard to imagine how Scalia can actually manage to support the idea that it’s Constitutionally okay to execute an innocent man as long as there was a trial at some point, regardless of new evidence or proof of innocence.

It really is extraordinary. Imagine: “Sorry, you had a trial, never mind that there’s new evidence now that shows you to be the wrong guy. Say hi to God for me.” Fortunately, his fellow justices (aside, of course, from Scalia’s notoriously taciturn and undistinguished mini-me, Thomas) disagreed.

Seriously, check this out. You do not try to argue with the nutbird fringe; as someone once said, you cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

Anyway, when asked why he (Frank) was supporting Obama’s “Nazi” policies on health care, Frank gave both barrels:

“M’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.”

Just the other day I was wondering why Robert Novak hadn’t been part of the chattering idiot masses spreading lies about every move of the Obama administration, and now I have my answer.

It’s because Robert Novak, Douchebag of Liberty, is fucking dead.

From here:

[He got] E-mail asking me what my opinion about the current state of the health care debate is, and my response is: There’s a debate? Maybe I’m reading an archaic definition, but “debate” is not synonymous with “ignit bellowsacks at public meetings shouting stupidities to drown out discussion because doughy tearsquirter Glenn Beck told them to,” which is what appears to be going on at the moment. I’m sad for the Republicans, conservatives and others with actual, substantive objections to the current health care plan wending through Congress that a genuine debate is off the boards in favor of a strategy of uninformed tools making asses of themselves for the benefit of television cameras, but this is where that side is at right now. I will say, however, that when the whole of your health care debate strategy is to scream down any discussion at all, you’re pretty baldly acknowledging that you’ve got nothin’.