The Commentariat -- Nov. 1, 2013

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked the confirmation of two of President Obama's nominees, one to a powerful appeals court and another to a housing lending oversight post, setting up a confrontation with Democrats that could escalate into a larger fight over limiting the filibuster and restricting how far the minority party can go to thwart a president's agenda." ...

... Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call: "'I think it's worth considering it,' Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said of changing Senate rules on nominees after Republicans filibustered two nominees." CW: Biden is, of course, president of the Senate. ...

... John Stanton of BuzzFeed: "Senate Republicans Thursday successfully blocked the nomination of Rep. Mel Watt to head up the federal agencies overseeing the real estate industry, only the second time a sitting member of Congress has had a nomination blocked since before the Civil War." ...

... Susan Davis of USA Today: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., vowed to try again after Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked the nomination of Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., to head the agency that oversees mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at a critical time for the industry. 'Republicans' unprecedented obstruction continued today with a step that we have not seen since the Civil War,' Reid said."

Mike Lillis of the Hill: "Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back hard Wednesday against those hammering ObamaCare for forcing some patients out of their current insurance plans. The House minority leader said the number of patients who will have to change plans under the law is small, and they will ultimately benefit by moving into new plans with better coverage.... Pelosi said the sharp rise in medical costs, combined with the transient nature of the individual insurance market, would eventually have forced people out of their individual plans -- ObamaCare or not." ...

** Todd Purdum in Politico: "To the undisputed reasons for Obamacare's rocky rollout -- a balky website, muddied White House messaging and sudden sticker shock for individuals forced to buy more expensive health insurance -- add a less acknowledged cause: calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step." Purdum outlines many of the sabotage tactics.

... David Firestone of the New York Times: "The so-called cancellation letters waved around at [Wednesday's] hearing [on the ACA] were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that they didn't include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage of other serious conditions. Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company's freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.... In the face of absurd comments and analogies..., Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country will be far better off." ...

... The "Daily Show" issues a correction:

... Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker interviewed "Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. economist and an architect of both Mitt Romney's health-care plan in Massachusetts and Obama's Affordable Care Act" about the "winners & losers" ObamaCare will create. CW: Gruber's assumptions about the "losers" so annoyed me that I wrote to him about it. ...

... Update: I wrote to Gruber:

From the Ryan Lizza piece...:

... three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.'s more stringent requirements for individual plans. A significant portion of these roughly nine million Americans will be forced to buy a new insurance policy with higher premiums than they currently pay. ...

Gruber summarized his stats: ninety-seven per cent of Americans are either left alone or are clear winners, while three per cent are arguably losers. 'We have to as a society be able to accept that,' he said. 'Don't get me wrong, that's a shame, but no law in the history of America makes everyone better off.

Wait a minute. These people are 'giving up' their junk policies, some of which don't even pay for hospitalization, to get -- and pay for -- more comprehensive policies. Some of these 'losers' will also get tax subsidies and/or Medicaid assistance. (Yes, there may be some real losers in those states that refuse to accept the Medicaid expansion, but they still can get the tax breaks, at least at this point.) Most of those among the 3 percent who don't get assistance can afford to pay for their own insurance -- so the rest of us don't have to cover their hospitalizations, maternity complications, etc., -- via higher premiums on our own policies -- when they get sick & can't afford to pay the resulting huge medical bills.

These people, for the most part, are 'losers' only if you mean by losers that they're financially-comfortable jerks complaining about having to pull their own weight. What's a shame is not that they have to pay more for better policies but that they are caterwauling about it.... Your characterization of the 3 percent as losers is misleading.

Gruber responds,

that is a good point. Really it comes down to whether these folks were in crappy policies that they misunderstood, or whether they were rationally buying very skinny coverage. If the latter they have some complaint, but to my mind it is pretty small relative to the gains to everyone else. ...

     ... Ed Kilgore makes pretty much the same point I made to Gruber: "The bottom line is that the 'losers' are people with really bad individual insurance policies that expose them to ruinous out-of-pocket costs.... But these 'victims' do get to buy much better insurance without fear of being disqualified for pre-existing conditions, and if their incomes are below 400% of the federal policy level, they qualify for tax credits to help pay for it." ...

     ... Turns out bloggers were much taken with Lizza's piece; economist Justins Wolfers even created a pie chart reflecting Gruber's numbers. ...

     ... Josh Barro of Business Insider claims -- accurately, I think -- that Gruber's analysis is even worse than I realized. Barro asserts that Gruber's "numbers are garbage," & explains why. CW: How could this happen? Gruber is the expert's expert on the ACA & RomneyCare. AND he's an MIT professor. So the tendency is to defer to him. The Villagers simply accept an argument from authority -- which is no argument at all. Paul Krugman wrote an excellent blogpost a few weeks back (I think I linked it then) or "experts" v. "just bloggers" that applies here. ...

... Joshua Holland of Moyers & Co. debunks the latest ObamaCare horror claim, this one by conservative "intellectual" Avik Roy. ...

... Henry Aaron, in the New York Daily News, has a good piece that explains those policy cancellations to the somewhat dimwitted: "Obamacare is removing insurance products from the market that are bad for your health." You could send it to your somewhat dimwitted friends. ...

... AND a reminder from Josh Barro: "The American health care system sucks."

Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "In recent stump speeches and policy remarks, Bill and Hillary Clinton have offered sharp criticisms of the partisan gridlock paralyzing Washington, signaling a potential 2016 campaign theme if Hillary Clinton chooses to run for president. The Clintons' critiques in recent days have been explicitly aimed at congressional Republicans, who helped spur a 16-day government shutdown and potential debt default in October. But their remarks also seem to contain an implicit rebuke of President Obama's failure to change Washington as he pledged when first running for the White House." CW: Right. Because Obama should have been able to turn sludge into honey. ...

... Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "President Obama's top aides secretly considered replacing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2012 ticket, undertaking extensive focus-group sessions and polling in late 2011 when Mr. Obama's re-election outlook appeared uncertain.... The idea of replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton had long been rumored, but the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in their new book, 'Double Down,' provide a detailed description of the effort inside the senior circle of Obama advisers. It was pushed by the chief of staff at the time, William M. Daley...." ...

... Sean Sullivan & Philip Rucker of the Washington Post outline a few more revelations from the Halperin-Heilemann book.

** Paul Krugman: "Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn't really stand for anything else -- and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality." ...

... War on Poor People, Ctd. Alex Rogers of Time: "Just as Congress sits down in a new bipartisan conference committee to the hard work of funding the future of the food stamp program, benefits are set to drop Friday as stimulus spending dating from the 2009 recession expires. The cut of $5 billion for fiscal year 2014 equals 21 fewer meals a month for a family of four, or 16 fewer meals for a family of three, according to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.... The decline in benefits is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. In fact, Congress is preparing to impost [sic.] further cuts in the coming years."

Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker has some thoughts on "What did the President know & when did he know it"?

They could well be spying on the president, for all I know. He has a cell phone, and, in fact, my guess is that they have collected data on the president's phone. -- Sen. Rand Paul (RTP-Ky.), on the NSA

Here is one instance where Rick Hertzberg & I more-or-less agree with Li'l Randy (tho neither of us assumes the NSA is listening in to the President's calls). But do read on. We ain't with Sen. Conspiracy Theories on much. -- Constant Weader ...

... CW: The Plagiarist. Aah, I was wrong. I said Rand Paul learned everything he knows about science from science fiction movies. Forget the movies. Li'l Randy doesn't have time to go to the movies. Turns out he learned everything he knows about anything from copying -- verbatim -- Wikipedia movie synopses. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed elaborates. Thanks to contributor Tommy Bones for the lead. Sorry I missed it earlier. ...

Well, we, we borrowed the plot lines from 'Gattaca,' a movie, and I gave credit to the people who wrote the movie. I think they're arguing about whether things are properly footnoted. And there are technicalities to this. But nothing I said was not given attribution to where it came from.... The rest of it is making a mountain out of a molehill from people I think basically who are political enemies and have an ax to grind. -- Rand Paul responding to a Rachel Maddow segment in which she outed him for plagiarism

This is something that high school students know not to do. And you are presenting yourself as potential candidate for president. -- Rachel Maddow, responding to Rand Paul

The speeches do appear on Paul's website, without footnotes. -- Andrew Kaczynski ...

If I didn't care so much about our country, I would hope he would get the Republican nomination for president, because that would mean the end of the Republican Party. -- Give-'em-Hell Harry (Reid, that is), on Ted Cruz

... The Essential Cruz. David Korn of Mother Jones: Ted Cruz's father Rafael Cruz, "speaking to the North Texas Tea Party on behalf of his son ... [while Ted] was then running for Senate, called President Barack Obama an 'outright Marxist' who 'seeks to destroy all concept of God,' and he urged the crowd to send Obama 'back to Kenya.' ... It's appropriate to take Rafael Cruz into account when evaluating his son the senator. Ted Cruz ... has often deployed his father as a political asset. He routinely cites his Cuban-born father, who emigrated from the island nation in 1957, when he discusses immigration and justifies his opposition to the bipartisan reform bill that passed in the Senate. (Ted Cruz hails his father as a symbol of the 'American dream' ....) Moreover, Ted Cruz campaigns with his father.... Rafael Cruz regularly speaks to tea party and Republican groups in Texas as a surrogate for his son...." ...

... ** "Sins of the Father." Ed Kilgore has an excellent take on Corn's report.

Brad Plumer of the Washington Post: A Brookings Institution study finds that the "Cash for Clunkers" program of 2009 wasn't a very efficient stimulus.

Senate Race

Charles Pierce is thrilled that some crazy teabaggers will or may primary Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Pierce is particularly happy about the potential candidacy of "historian" David Barton, whose "life's work is dedicated to proving that the Founders were as god-nutty as he is."

Local News

Joseph Goldstein of the New York Times: "A federal appeals court on Thursday halted a sweeping set of changes to the New York Police Department's practice of stopping and frisking people on the street, and, in strikingly personal terms, criticized the trial judge's conduct and removed her from the case. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, 'ran afoul' of the judiciary's code of conduct by compromising the 'appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation.' The panel criticized how she had steered the lawsuit to her courtroom when it was filed nearly six years ago." ...

... Scheindlin's removal outrages Jeff Toobin.

News Ledes

CBS News: "A gunman walked into Terminal 3 at Los Angeles International Airport Friday morning, pulled an assault rifle out of a bag and opened fire, killing a Transportation Security Administration officer at a security checkpoint and wounding three other TSA officers, authorities and law enforcement sources said. U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed to CBS News correspondent Bob Orr that the suspect has been identified as Paul Ciancia, 23, of Pennsville, N.J. Officials said he also spent some time in the Los Angeles area. A preliminary review of government terror databases and watchlists found no connections to Ciancia, and he does not have a significant police record, Orr reports."

     ... The Los Angeles Times story is here.

Washington Post: "A U.S. drone strike killed the chief of the Pakistani Taliban on Friday, local intelligence officials said, in an attack that could cripple the group but undermine an effort by Pakistan’s government to engage militants in peace talks. If verified, the death of Hakimullah Mehsud would be a victory for U.S. officials who have spent years hunting down a leader implicated in a 2009 attack that killed seven Americans at a CIA outpost in eastern Afghanistan. But the drone strike also threatened to add to strains between the United States and Pakistan, whose new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, had announced earlier in the day that his government would begin talks aimed at reaching a negotiated settlement with the group."

New York Times: "An international scientific panel has found that climate change will pose sharp risks to the world's food supply in coming decades, potentially reducing output and sending prices higher in a period when global food demand is expected to soar."

The Commentariat -- Oct. 31, 2013

This came to me via democrats.org with a request for a donation at the bottom. Naturally, I cropped that out. But feel free to give.

... Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Obama on Wednesday offered an impassioned defense of his Affordable Care Act, promising to fix the malfunctioning health care website but pledging to 'grind it out' over the weeks and months ahead to prove the law's Republican critics wrong. Speaking at Faneuil Hall, where Mitt Romney, his onetime rival for the White House, signed into law a similar health care program for Massachusetts, the president accused his opponents of trying to undermine the national law. But he said the experience in the Bay State gives him hope." ...

... Justin Sink of the Hill: "Vice President Joe Biden apologized Wednesday for the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, calling the technical issues plaguing the website 'inexcusable' ... during an interview with HLN. The vice president said President Obama 'tried to get online'" to check out the website glitches.... He also depicted the president as diligent in the weeks leading up to the debut of the website. 'We were under the impression that it was ready to go,' Biden said. 'We had the president to his credit almost seven weeks out asking, was it ready, and we were told by the pros we were all ready to go -- all online.'"

... John Dickerson of Slate: "What started as a website debacle is growing into a relitigation of the underlying operation. The Affordable Care Act passed with cracks and inconsistencies that are now re-emerging in the context of the website's bad launch. In some cases that simply gives Republicans new lines of attack. In others, like this argument over keeping your old health care, the failure of the site is weakening the administration's ability to engage in those old debates.... When the website doesn't work and the promises of 2009 and 2010 are revised, questions of credibility infect everything the administration says.... This debate over his initial claim lends credibility to [Republicans'] longstanding opposition to the law." ...

... Ed Kilgore: "... most of the caterwauling is over a small minority of a small minority of a small minority: people who don't have employer-based insurance, and want bare-bones policies (or no insurance at all), and don't qualify for the Obamacare subsidies.... There's scarce an argument about the horrific 'rate shock' facing healthy individual policyholders that isn't ultimately an argument against insurance -- risk-spreading via broadly constituted pools of people -- itself." ...

... ** Reality Chek. Jonathan Cohn: "Republicans have repeatedly endorsed proposals that would take insurance away from many more Americans -- and leave them much, much worse off. Start with the federal budgets crafted by Paul Ryan.... According to projections prepared by Urban Institute..., between 14 and 20 million Medicaid recipients would lose their insurance. And that doesn't even include the people who are starting to get Medicaid coverage through Obamacare's expansions of the program. That's another 10 to 17 million people. And it's not just people on Medicaid who would lose coverage if Republicans got their way.... Under the Republican plan..., people losing employer insurance would end up in the dysfunctional, non-reformed individual market -- the one full of confusing, junk policies that might not cover basic services.... The people losing Medicaid ... would end up with ... nothing at all." ...

... Gail Collins: "'In almost every case, you can argue that the second terms have been pretty dreadful,' said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian. Think about it. Richard Nixon had to resign. Bill Clinton got impeached. George W. Bush had an average second-term approval rating of 37 percent, which the Gallup people say was the worst presidential plummet in modern history. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and spent much of his second term in the bedroom."

... William Branigin & Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post: "New problems emerged Wednesday with the implementation of President Obama's health-care law even as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius assured lawmakers that 'miserably frustrating' problems with a nearly month-old health-insurance Web site would soon be fixed. The Web site, HealthCare.gov, was down again most of the morning while Sebelius was testifying before a House committee. And new security issues with the site were raised Wednesday after an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post and other media outlets showed that, days before the Web site's launch, administration officials knew it put the privacy of user data at risk.... [See also AP story linked below.] Sebelius, testifying Wednesday morning before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, offered assurances that consumers' personal data were safe." ...

... Humor Break. Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post highlights "five genuinely bizarre topics that have occurred this morning." ...

... Dana Milbank: "... whoever came up with House Republicans’ plan to deal with Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday didn't have a brain. It was their big chance to flambé the secretary of Health and Human Services and the person who has overseen the disastrous launch of Obamacare.... The hearing ... didn't turn out to be the humiliation for Sebelius that Republicans had in mind.... Sebelius doused her questioners with an unexpected and extended confession of responsibility. This was a sneaky and dastardly thing for her to do: sneaky, because it wasn't in the advance testimony she gave the committee, and dastardly, because in today's Washington, any acceptance of responsibility is so rare that the Republicans -- who were counting on her evading and deflecting -- were caught off-guard."

... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "... Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly told the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday that it would be 'illegal' for her to sign up for coverage in Obamacare's health care exchanges, raising eyebrows from health care journalists and pundits. The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein wrote that 'in reality, as stated on Healthcare.gov, she would be eligible to obtain coverage through an Obamacare exchange. She just wouldn't be able to claim government subsidies to help her purchase insurance,; he claimed. CNN made a similar claim. But ThinkProgress has confirmed that Sebelius, who turned 65 in May, is enrolled in Medicare and is thus ineligible to enroll for insurance through the exchanges." ...

... Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar & Jack Gillum of the AP: "An internal government memo obtained by The Associated Press shows administration officials were concerned that a lack of testing posed a 'high' security risk for President Barack Obama's new health insurance website. The Sept. 27 memo to Medicare chief Marylin Tavenner said a website contractor wasn't able to test all the security controls in one complete version of the system." ...

... As contributor P.D. Pepe suggests, the video below is an amazing thing to see. Fox "News"'s Greta Van Susteren partially debunks Jan Crawford's misleading CBS "News" report about Floridian Diane Barrette, who is unhappy with ObamaCare because the new plan her insurer offered her cost ten times the premium of her current junk plan. As soon as Crawford ran her phony story, Fox "News" was anxious to interview Barrette. After Van Susteren's interview, Fox "News" cancelled another interview Fox had scheduled.

... Humor Break. Matt Miller of the Washington Post imagines a "Crossfire" segment of December 1936 as Americans begin signing up for FDR's new "Social Security" program. Clever. ...

... How Not to Respond to the GOP Talking Point of the Week. Manu Raju of Politico: "Sen. Mary Landrieu said Wednesday she would propose legislation to ensure all Americans could keep their existing insurance coverage under Obamacare, a fresh sign of the political problems the law&'s rollout has created for congressional Democrats. Landrieu, a Democrat who faces a tough reelection in Louisiana in 2014, said she would either offer her own bill or formally sign onto another measure that would ensure that the law would not force anyone off of their existing health policies." CW: For the most part, the policies people are "losing" are junk policies that will either (a) force the policyholders to pay expensive medical bills should they become ill, or (b) force the well-insured to pay the bills of the underinsured (or essentially uninsured), as we're doing now thru increased costs for medical services, which translate into increased premiums. ...

... Sabrina Siddiqui of the Huffington Post: "For all their fury, most of the House Republicans who had demanded their own closed-door briefing from the administration on President Barack Obama's struggling health care rollout were no-shows on Wednesday. Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) told reporters that 'about 20 members' attended the House GOP briefing, at which senior Health and Human Services Department official Mike Hash laid out some of the issues facing the Healthcare.gov website. The meeting was scheduled after House Republicans cried foul when they weren't included in last week's closed-door session with Democrats." CW: They were going to show up -- till they found out "closed-door" means there are no cameras to ham for. ...

... Humor Break. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed: "Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took to Facebook Wednesday to troll President Obama, arguing that while his health care reform plan in Massachusetts is an example of good reform, it should not be used as a model for the nation." Kaczynski goes on to link numerous stories about Romney's urging Obama to copy RomneyCare for the national program.

"In this slide from a National Security Agency presentation on 'Google Cloud Exploitation,' a sketch shows where the 'Public Internet' meets the internal 'Google Cloud' where user data resides. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing." -- Washington PostBarton Gellman & Ashkan Soltani of the Washington Post: "The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot." ...

... Gellman, et al., provide a graphic here charting how the NSA infiltrates private networks. ...

... Tony Romm of Politico: "A new report that the U.S. government had infiltrated links to Google's and Yahoo's data centers around the globe drew a sharp rebuke Wednesday from the National Security Agency.... The program ... relied on a broad, decades-old executive orderand allowed the NSA access to data-center connections in secret outside the United States, according to The Washington Post.... Asked about the leak, Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA's leader, said earlier Wednesday he was unaware of the Post's report -- adding the NSA is 'not authorized' to access companies data centers and instead must 'go through a court process' to obtain such content. The NSA, meanwhile, emphasized it hadn't tried to circumvent U.S. law under the executive order.... 'The assertion that we collect vast quantities of U.S. persons' data from this type of collection is also not true,' a spokeswoman said. But the NSA aide declined to discuss further whether the agency -- perhaps under other authorities -- had infiltrated data center connections at all." ...

... The Washington Post has the full NSA statement here. ...

... Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "The director of the National Security Agency conceded on Wednesday that it may need to scale back some of its surveillance operations on foreign leaders, in the wake of an international outcry. Launching a public defence of the NSA for the second time in as many days, [Keith] Alexander acknowledged that limiting the program may be necessary in order to maintain diplomatic relations. 'I think in some cases the partnerships are more important,' he told an audience in Washington." ...

... NEW. Mark Mazzetti & David Sanger of the New York Times: "How the N.S.A. continued to track [Angela] Merkel as she ascended to the top of Germany's political apparatus illuminates previously undisclosed details about the way the secret spy agency casts a drift net to gather information from America's closest allies. The phone monitoring is hardly limited to the leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties. It is all part of a comprehensive effort to gain an advantage over other nations, both friend and foe." ...

... Michelle Nichols of Reuters: " The United Nations said on Wednesday that the United States has pledged not to spy on the world body's communications after a report that the National Security Agency had gained access to the U.N. video conferencing system." ...

... Adam Taylor of Business Insider: "According to a new report in Italian magazine Panorama..., the NSA ... is believed to have been intercepting calls within the Vatican before and during the [Papal] Conclave. There are also suspicions that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would later be chosen as Pope Francis, was under surveillance for a number of years." CW: If true, that would be too much. I don't want my taxpayer dollars wasted spying on cardinals. And, can we have a teensy bit of respect for religious freedom? ...

... NEW. Steven Myers of the New York Times: "Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor living in asylum in Russia, now has a job at one of the country's major Internet companies, a lawyer who has represented him since he arrived here as a fugitive from American prosecution four months ago said Thursday.... [The lawyer's] assertion about the employment offer could not be verified. Other claims about Mr. Snowden's secretive life here have turned out to be unsubstantiated."

Mike Lillis of the Hill: "New revenue must be part of any bipartisan agreement to eliminate the sequester, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday. Although President Obama has reportedly signaled an openness to tackle the across-the-board cuts without hiking taxes, Pelosi warned that such a strategy wouldn't fly with House Democrats." Contributor James S. wrote in yesterday's Comments that Democrats finally seem to have a leader in Harry Reid. May I remind him that Nancy Pelosi was standing tough when Harry Reid was still dancing with Mitch McConnell -- and letting McConnell lead. ...

... Sahil Kapur of TPM: "Paul Ryan killed any lingering hopes of a grand bargain within moments of the budget conference kickoff on Wednesday. In his opening remarks, the Wisconsin congressman and chairman of the House budget committee laid down a firm marker against new taxes, which are essential to any major deficit reduction proposal that can pass Congress and be signed into law."

Erik Wasson of the Hill: "The federal budget deficit for fiscal 2013 was $680 billion, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday. This is the first time that the deficit has fallen below $1 trillion during President Obama's time in the White House."

Congress of the Absurd: 27 Senators in Search of an "Out" Clause. As if they were characters in a Beckett or Ionesco play, all 27 GOP Senators who voted to allow President Obama to raise the debt ceiling & re-open the government voted on Tuesday to "disapprove" of the bill they voted for. Sahil Kapur reports, "The purpose was to give these senators political cover to say they disapprove of a debt limit hike." ...

     ... Charles Pierce: "... the people who did the right thing, and helped the country avoid the fiscal abyss, find themselves obligated, essentially, to apologize to the people who did the most damage, and to the people who supported them, because, otherwise, there might be a political price to be paid for not wrecking the economy. This is not leadership. This is submitting to an ideological show trial because you want to keep your job at the expense of actually doing your job."

Hunter Walker of TPM: "Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker submitted a resignation letter to the city clerk ahead of his swearing in as a U.S. Senator on Thursday."

John Harwood of the New York Times: "American politics has grown increasingly polarized by race, as well as by party and ideology." CW: Yeah, depending upon the setting, of course, I generally "suspect" every white person I meet is a Republican/conservative & every black person I meet is a Democrat/liberal. Of course I know that isn't true, but my suspicion works pretty well in Southwest Florida.

A People in Transition. Ta-Nehesi Coates goes to homecoming at Howard University.

Linda Greenhouse: when history proves judges' and justices' assumptions wrong.

Gubehrnatorial Race

Roanoke College: "Democrat Terry McAuliffe has opened a 15-point lead over Republican Ken Cuccinelli (46%-31%), while 14 percent of likely voters in Virginia remain undecided in the 2013 Gubernatorial election, according to The Roanoke College Poll. Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis claimed 9 percent of respondents." CW: Hmm. So was the Quinnipiac poll I linked yesterday, which showed Kenny closing in on Terry an outlier? I hope so. (Never thought I'd be rooting for Terry McAuliffe.) ...

... Hoist with His Own Pen. Paul Schwartzman of the Washington Post: "For years, [Ken Cuccinelli] articulated [his] conservatism in the Cuccinelli Compass, honing a combative political persona and providing opponents with material that has now driven up his negative poll ratings and lifted McAuliffe." ...

     ... CW: Turns out Cooch has a macabre sense of humor which, not surprisingly, involves offing a prominent woman. Schwartzman writes, "In 2008, as the Democrats convened for their national convention, Cuccinelli relayed in his newsletter a satirical schedule of events, including, '1:35 am -- Bill Clinton asks Ted Kennedy to drive Hillary Clinton home,' a joke that evoked reminders of a fatal accident in which Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., nearly 40 years earlier. In a subsequent issue, he ... [wrote] 'How to Start Each Day with a Positive Outlook,' which involved naming a computer file after the former first lady and sending 'it to the trash. Your PC will ask you, "Do you really want to get rid of Hillary Rodham Clinton? (Firmly) Click "Yes."'"

News Ledes

AP: "Government safety rules are changing to let airline passengers use most electronic devices from gate-to-gate. The change will let passengers read, work, play games, watch movies and listen to music -- but not make cellphone calls."

AFP: "US Secretary of State John Kerry will launch a nine-day trip by traveling to Riyadh for talks on Sunday with King Abdullah amid tensions with the Gulf Kingdom."

The Commentariat -- Oct. 30, 2013

Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "The head of the National Security Agency on Tuesday vigorously challenged recent reports that the United States had been gathering the phone records of millions of Europeans, saying that the records had in fact been turned over by allied spy services.... The Wall Street Journal reported on its website on Tuesday that intelligence services in France and Spain had collected phone records of their citizens and turned them over to the N.S.A. as part of an arrangement to mitigate threats against American and allied troops and civilians.... [NSA director] General [Keith] Alexander and James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence, broadly defended the N.S.A.'s practice of spying on foreign leaders. Such espionage, they said, was a basic pillar of American intelligence operations that had gone on for decades.... Such spying was essential, the officials said, because other countries, including allies, spy on the United States. The Wall Street Journal story, by Adam Entous & Siobhan Gorman, is here. The lede: "Widespread electronic spying that ignited a political firestorm in France and Spain recently was carried out by their own intelligence services and not by the National Security Agency, U.S. officials say." ...

... Ellen Nakashima's more extensive report for the Washington Post is here. "Army Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said reports to the contrary, based on revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, were 'completely false.' ... Apparently referring to a slide outlining the information, Alexander said the leaker and reporters 'did not understand what they were looking at.' ... The French and Spanish intelligence agencies have had extensive, long-running programs to share millions of phone records with the United States for counterterrorism purposes, according to current and former officials familiar with the effort.... Current and former U.S. officials also said the United States has been the target of espionage by its allies, including those in the European Union. In 2008, the German foreign intelligence service targeted the communications of at least 300 U.S. citizens or residents, according to two former officials. The surveillance was exposed, according to one of them, when the Germans inadvertently turned over communications data to their U.S. counterparts." ...

... Mark Landler & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "... James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that the N.S.A. had kept senior officials in the National Security Council informed of surveillance it was conducting in foreign countries. He did not specifically say whether President Obama was told of these spying efforts, but he appeared to challenge assertions in recent days that the White House had been in the dark about some of the agency's practices." CW: This report is more-or-less an update of Schmidt's earlier report, linked above.

... New York Times Editors: "That Chancellor Merkel's cellphone conversations could fall under that umbrella is an outgrowth of the post-9/11 decision by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that everyone is the enemy, and that anyone's rights may be degraded in the name of national security. That led to Abu Ghraib, torture at the secret C.I.A. prisons, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, grave harm to international relations, and the dragnet approach to surveillance revealed by the Snowden leaks." ...

     ... CW: Because spying on Merkel is like Abu Ghraib & other torture??? Can't we work in Nazis & Hitler somehow? At least over at Firedoglake Peter Van Buren is describing Jay Carney as a more professional version of Goebbels. I know I'm the lonely liberal who can't get worked up about spying on our allies, but, well, I can't. ...

     ... Update. Keir Simmons & Michele Neubert of NBC News: "Amid the growing furor over allegations that the United States spied on some of its closest allies in Europe -- including German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- a quiet refrain is being repeated by intelligence insiders across the [European] continent: We all do it.... Former head of French intelligence Bernard Squarcini sounded more surprised at the claims that the political class did not know about the snooping." ...

... He Only Knows What He Reads in the Papers. Dana Milbank: "It stretches credulity to think that the United States was spying on world leaders without the president's knowledge, or that he was blissfully unaware of huge technical problems that threatened to undermine his main legislative achievement. But on issues including the IRS targeting flap and the Justice Department's use of subpoenas against reporters, White House officials have frequently given a variation on this theme.

"Question: What did Obama know and when did he know it?

"Answer: Not much, and about a minute ago." ...

... Peter Baker of the New York Times: "President Obama finds himself under fire on two disparate fronts these days, both for the botched rollout of his signature health care program and for the secret spying on allied heads of state. In both instances, his explanation roughly boils down to this: I didn't know. As a practical matter, no president can be aware of everything going on in the sprawling government he theoretically manages. But as a matter of politics, Mr. Obama's plea of ignorance may do less to deflect blame than to prompt new questions about just how much in charge he really is." ...

... NEW: Robert Pear: "Kathleen Sebelius ... apologized Wednesday for the frustration that millions of Americans have experienced while trying to shop for insurance on the HealthCare.gov website, even as she defended the problem-plagued rollout of President Obama's health care law and tried to explain the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of individual insurance policies." CW: The Times will likely update this story as testimony continues.

... Jonathan Easley of the Hill: "Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is kicking back at the contractors who blamed her agency for the botched ObamaCare website rollout. Sebelius blames a 'subset' of contractors who 'have not met expectations' for the website's problems in an opening statement she'll deliver Wednesday to the House Energy and Commerce Committee." ...

... Alex Seitz-Wald of the National Journal: "As Republicans in Washington prepare to grill Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday over problems a broken website is creating for accessing Obamacare, their fellow party members in a dozen-and-a-half states have added complications for people trying to access those benefits through alternate means.... Whether by fees, background checks, tests, extra training, certifications, threats of civil penalties, or delays, Republican legislatures and officials in at least 17 states across the country have thrown up all manner of bureaucratic roadblocks in front of the program. The officials say the regulations are necessary to protect consumers and their personal information, but health care reform advocates say the regulations, adopted only in states controlled by Republicans, are just part of a multipronged campaign to obstruct the implementation of the Affordable Care Act at every turn." ...

... Sarah Kliff & William Branigin of the Washington Post: "Testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said: 'To the millions of Americans who've attempted to use HealthCare.gov to shop and enroll in health-care coverage, I want to apologize to you that the Web site has not worked as well as it should. We know how desperately you need affordable coverage.' She offered assurances that the Web site 'can and will be fixed' and said that already 'we are seeing improvement each week.'" ...

... Robert Pear of the New York Times: "Ms. Tavenner ... said that 'nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces' in the last four weeks. But she repeatedly refused to say how many of those people had actually enrolled in health insurance plans since the federal and state marketplaces, or exchanges, opened on Oct. 1. 'That number will not be available until mid-November,' Ms. Tavenner said. 'We expect the initial number to be small.'" ...

... Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), employing traditional New Jersey rhetorical devices, contrasts the way Democrats worked to implement Medicare Part D, which they had opposed, with Republican obstruction of the ACA:

... Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post: "The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee [Darrell Issa is on the case!] released documents Tuesday night showing one of the primary contractors for HealthCare.gov, CGI Federal, warned administration officials the Web site faced problems just weeks before its Oct. 1 launch. In a monthly report sent to Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Sept. 6, CGI officials wrote there were 'open risks' and 'open issues' that needed to be resolved. 'Due to the compressed schedule, there is not enough time built in to allow for adequate performance testing,' they wrote." The HHS pushback: It was a long report, which elsewhere said major milestones were on track, so concentrating on these few lines of the report is "cherrypicking." ...

     ... A pdf of the report is here. It is true that the bulk of the report lays out the good news. It's the last two pages that chart the bad news. It ain't sugarcoated. It should have caused tearing of hair & rending of garments. ...

No, we had tested the website and we were comfortable with its performance. Now, like I said, we knew all along there would be as with any new website, some individual glitches we would have to work out. But, the volume issue and the creation of account issues was not anticipated and obviously took us by surprise. And did not show up in testing. -- Marilyn Tavenner, yesterday, in testimony before a House committee

     ... As this CNN report by Joe Johns & Byron Wolf lays out, Tavenner's testimony is far less than truthful: "... the CGI document, which describes 'top risks currently open' and 'outstanding issues currently being mitigated' says the testing timeframes are 'not adequate to complete full functional, system, and integration testing activities' and lists the impact of the problems as 'significant.' Another element is listed as 'not enough time in schedule to conduct adequate performance testing' and given the highest priority." ...

... Lena Sun & Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post: "Notices are going out to hundreds of thousands of Americans informing them that their health insurance policies are being canceled as of Dec. 31. The notices appear to contradict President Obama's promise that despite the changes resulting from the law, Americans can keep their health insurance if they like it. Republicans have seized on the cancellations as evidence that the law is flawed and the president has been less than forthright in describing its impact." ...

     ... CW: I agree with the criticism of Obama. Long after wonks like Ezra Klein pointed out that the President's "promise" wasn't true, he continued to make it. This baffled me then; it baffles me now. Once the bill became law, all he had to say was, "Most of you can keep your health insurance if you like it." Wilfully & repeatedly misinforming the public is a serious problem for a president. ...

     ... Update. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post elaborates:

... Catherine Thompson of TPM: "White House Press Secretary Jay Carney pushed back Tuesday against reports that the Obama administration knew millions of Americans would lose their health care plans under the Affordable Care Act, despite promising that people could keep their insurance if wanted to do so." ...

... ** Kate Pickert of Time: "Many Americans buying insurance coverage for 2014 may never get the chance to claim new federal tax credits to subsidize the cost of health insurance, due to an odd wrinkle in the signup process.... New tax credits, available to individuals earning less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $46,000 per year, can only be accessed through new ACA insurance marketplaces. Those who purchase coverage outside the exchanges cannot claim subsidies, even if they qualify for them." Some insurers are helping customers through the process, but some are emphasizing that the switch to the new policy is "automatic." If customers take the insurer at its word, they won't go thru the exchange to try to qualify for the tax credit. ...

... Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times: "Developments in the rollout of Obamacare are coming with dizzying speed, though not as fast as the pileup of fiction and misunderstanding created by politicians, pundits and the news media." Hiltzik offers "a list of the latest themes you're hearing on America's healthcare reform, and what they mean." CW: Quite a good Reality Chek. ...

... Brian Beutler of TPM also delivers a good response to the "rate shock" stories that Republicans are pushing & the media are dutifully "reporting": "The disruption we’re seeing in the individual insurance market is mostly by design. And it's mostly a good thing. Until October, the individual market existed to sell insurance to people who needed it least. Rates were low for healthy people precisely because their old, sick neighbors were priced or locked out of the system. They were also low because many of the policies on the market didn't actually fulfill the function of insurance, which is to hedge against financial catastrophe.... Taken together, the changes create winners and losers, but almost by definition more winners than losers.... You could counter that by any moral standard the system the Affordable Care Act creates is preferable to the one we had before, which subsidized the Ted Cruz family to the tune of thousands of dollars a year and left 50 million people without any coverage at all." ...

... AND Paul Waldman of the American Prospect debunks two examples of piss-poor reporting by NBC & CBS. In both cases, reporters interview a person who suffered "sticker shock," but neither reporter bothers to compare the "shocked" person's potential new policy with the piece of crap they now have. (Waldman doesn't say so, but the CBS "great" reporter Jan Crawford is a well-known winger.) Thanks to contributor Janice for the link.

Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "... an unlikely coalition of business executives, evangelical groups and prominent conservatives [are] coming together to urge House Republicans to put broad immigration legislation on the House floor, ideally before the end of this year. On Tuesday, the group of more than 600 leaders from roughly 40 states descended on the Capitol for meetings with nearly 150 Republican lawmakers."

Obama 2.0. Brendan Sasso of the Hill: "The Senate unanimously confirmed Tom Wheeler, an investor and former industry lobbyist, to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday. The vote was delayed for two weeks by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who expressed concern about Wheeler's views on political disclosure rules. Cruz lifted his objection after Wheeler assured him in a private meeting Tuesday that tougher disclosure requirements for the donors behind political TV ads are 'not a priority' for him. The Senate also unanimously confirmed Michael O'Rielly, a staffer for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), to one of the two FCC seats reserved for Republicans. The confirmation of the two nominees returns the five-member commission to full-strength. " ...

... Burgess Everett of Politico: "Senate leaders are girding for a difficult fight over President Barack Obama's nominations in the coming weeks that could again raising the specter of a possible rules change in the chamber." ...

... Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "Senate Democrats plan to force a vote this week to fill a vacancy on the court widely considered the country's second highest, threatening to reopen the bitter fight over limiting the filibuster if Republicans follow through on their pledge to block the nomination."

Maureen Dowd has quite an interesting column on former Vice President Heart O'Darkness. The Sanjay Gupta interview of O'Darkness was news to me.

Rick Santelli of CNBC, who some credit with starting the Tea Party movement after he ranted against helping people with underwater mortgages, took on Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Fama yesterday. You could say Santelli was out of his depth. At one point, Fama told him, "There's so much confusion in what you said it's difficult to answer." With video.

Emmarie Huetteman of the New York Times: "The Capitol Hill memorial service for Thomas S. Foley, the former House speaker, brought together Republicans and Democrats who just two weeks ago were fighting about the government shutdown, but who were united in praise on Tuesday of a man who himself was a victim of partisan rancor two decades ago." CW: I listened to the whole service (while I was doing other things), & I found it fascinating, a rose-colored view of history by them that were there -- all of it shaded by the way things are now. C-SPAN has a page for the video, but it happens to be a black screen at this writing. ...

     ... Update: The CSPAN pages for the Foley memorial were still down this morning, but the memorial service is now up on this C-SPAN page.

Gubernatorial Race

Ben Pershing & Scott Clement of the Washington Post: "Opposition to the tea party movement has reached a new high in Virginia, a Washington Post/Abt SRBI poll shows, kicking a key leg of support out from under Ken Cuccinelli II as he tries to win the governor's race on a strongly conservative platform. Cuccinelli (R), the state attorney general, now trails businessman Terry McAuliffe (D) by 12 percentage points among likely voters, the survey shows. And Cuccinelli's decline comes as Virginians are increasingly turned off by the movement that has backed him strongly and with which he shares many views." ...

... Oops! Don't Count Out Kenny Yet. Quinnipiac U.: "The Virginia governor's race is going down to the wire with Democrat Terry McAuliffe clinging to a slight 45 - 41 percent likely voter lead over Republican State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and 9 percent for Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today." CW: If Cuccinelli can grab a chunk of Sarvis' vote (which so far has held pretty steady at 9 or 10 percent), it will be Governor Kenny.

Ben Goad of the Hill: "The Obama administration on Tuesday said it will seek to discourage the construction of coal plants in foreign countries through the World Bank and other multilateral development institutions. The effort marks the latest step in President Obama's initiative to combat the effects of global warming through executive power in lieu of action from the divided Congress." ...

Regional News

Michael Wines of the New York Times: "The leaders of three Pacific Coast states and British Columbia have announced a broad alliance to combat climate change, including new joint steps to raise the cost of greenhouse gas pollution, promote zero-emission vehicles and push for the use of cleaner-burning fuels in transportation.... The governors of California, Oregon and Washington and the premier of British Columbia said the compact could simultaneously reduce carbon emissions and create new clean-energy jobs.... But while California and British Columbia have already taken steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it was unclear whether legislatures in Oregon and Washington could be persuaded to endorse the plan." CW: Let's see if the laboratories of democracy can do what the U.S. Congress won't.

Local News

New York Times Editors on the Texas abortion law case [stories linked in yesterday's Commentariat]: "Unfortunately, Judge Yeakel largely upheld a second bogus 'safety' measure. He allowed to stand the provision in the law limiting medication abortions to an outmoded protocol for the use of abortion-inducing drugs. The protocol was established years ago by the Food and Drug Administration. Current medical practices now use a safer and more effective protocol."

News Lede

TPM: "Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (R) has been named president-elect of the Boy Scouts of America. Gates will serve both as a member of the Boy Scouts of America executive committee and president-elect, according to Scouting Magazine. Once Gates is approved by the voting members of the National Council of Boy Scouts he will serve for two years as the nation president effective May 2014." CW: Good. Maybe he can get the organization past its anti-gay fetish.