“I suspect that’s too strong, but it sure looks as if this is really going to happen,” writes Jonathan Bernstein, subbing for the vacationing Sullivan, and citing new reporting from Cohn and Chait at The New Republic. The logical deal seems to be emerging: The House will pass the Senate bill and then send over the “patch” to fix it via reconciliation. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m beginning to believe this landmark legislation is going to pass.
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More on the Atlantic web site redesign
Andrew Sullivan thinks it still needs a lot of work and links to colleagues’ comment on the redesign.
More on the politics of health care reform
Two useful articles from The New Republic in my inbox this afternoon on calculating what’s next for HCR: Jonathan Chait’s Reconciliation: Obsessed or Ignorant and Jonathan Cohn’s The Inkblot Test. And the big question, which Cohn doesn’t quite answer: Does Nancy Pelosi have the 217 votes?
Expanding on that Atlantic web site headline just below…
I’ve always been impressed by The Atlantic. Smart writers, an editorial mix full of frequent surprises – over the years, the magazine has always been consistently worth reading.
More recently, Andrew Sullivan’s prodigious blog led me to the online work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Megan McArdle and back to Jim Fallows, whom I’ve read in print for almost as long as he’s been writing.
I thought The Atlantic’s purchase by David Bradley and its move from Boston to Washington a few years back could signal a decline, that its combination with The National Journal and his other publications might give it a more limited inside-the-beltway perspective. Instead it just keeps getting better.
The Web site redesign’s use of “channels” looks promising, but the truncation of the blogs to two- and three-line snippets, each of which requires further investigation, feels like a mistake. Further poking around reveals that Fallows has similar concerns. Sullivan is the only one who escaped this change. All the other personal pages are now much harder to read through in a consistent way. That’s a loss.
The Atlantic’s web site redesign is impressive.
A good review of a bad book…
… and now I don’t have to read it. Michelle Cottle in The New Republic on GOP Pollster Frank Luntz’s What Americans Really Want…Really
“Matalin’s mendacity” – and others’, too
Steve Benen in the Washington Monthly has the basics on the intensely partisan politics of the reconciliation process.
Update: Benen adds to the post above, via NBC’s Chuck Todd. Health care reform has already passed the Senate with 60 votes; reconciliation is about a few budget-related amendments. Anyone ignoring that fact is missing the major part of the story.
Krugman: “Do it.” Brooks: “Not this year.”
Paul Krugman and David Brooks on the same topic on the same day – and not in anywhere near as much disagreement as the two sides at Blair House yesterday. They only disagree where it matters most.
Krugman, without even visibly holding his nose, is unwilling to let the perfect be the enemy of the merely okay, and says the Dems should pass this now with 51 (agreeing with Bob Reich just below) .
Brooks concludes, and seems to believe: “Health care reform probably will not get passed this year. But there were moments, at the most wonky and specific, when the two sides echoed each other. Glimmers of hope for the next set of reformers.”
For the 45 million or so Americans without health care insurance and the future of the American political process, I sincerely hope the engagingly thoughtful Mr. Brooks is dead wrong.
It’s Time To Enact Health Care With 51 Senate Votes
Bob Reich at the Talking Points Memo Cafe rounds up the five basic arguments for reconciliation and concludes: Do it now and do it fast.
Why Apple’s iPad Upside Isn’t Priced in Yet
Jason Schwartz at Seeking Alpha returns to his iPad enthusiasms – again. Nut graf:
So what is the opening weekend of iPad sales going to be like? Before we answer that question let me tell you what the iPad really is. It’s the first device ever built to use the internet they way it was meant to be used. It’s like taking the top off of your sports car for the first time and being able to enjoy the majestic mountain vistas of a drive through the canyon. Until now, we’ve been squinting out the back window of Grandma’s 1987 minivan (the laptop). The mobile internet is ready for it’s own device. This is it.
Bali Arts 