Exposing Liberals

Krugman's Evolving 'Conscience': Conservative 'On the Take,' Liberal Doing Similar Thing 'No Big Deal'

Paul Krugman's double standards: A conservative radio host who was paid by the Bush administration to push its education agenda was “on the take,” but a liberal professor paid by the Obama administration and pushing its health care agenda “is no big deal.”

When it was revealed in January 2005 that conservative radio host and commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 by the Bush administration Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind program on his radio show, the Times ran multiple disapproving accounts of the payouts.

Columnist Frank Rich had a field day, and Paul Krugman excoriated Armstrong in a column on similar practices by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, “Tankers on the Take.”

The point is that there really isn't much difference between Mr. Abramoff's paying Mr. Ferrara to praise the sweatshops of the Marianas and the Department of Education's paying Armstrong Williams to praise No Child Left Behind. In both cases, the ultimate paymaster was the Republican political machine. And inquiring minds want to know: Who else is on the take? Or has the culture of corruption spread so far that the question is, Who isn't? 

What a difference a new administration makes. Jonathan Gruber is an MIT health care economist who's been all over the place, including the Times, lauding Obama-care. Times economics writer David Leonhardt has cited him at least four times, according to Tom Maguire, and the Times on Thursday ran a second editor's note admitting that several previous news articles had quoted Gruber. 

What few people knew: While acting as an independent spokesman who supported Obama's health reforms, Gruber was also being well paid by the Obama administration's Health and Human Services as a consultant on the health care proposal, to the tune of $400,000.

The Times has yet to report a story on the controversy.

Columnist Krugman was not happy with the news, but his disappointment lay not with Gruber, who he absolved of blame, but a left-wing blogger whose influential Huffington Post story lambasted Gruber's lack of disclosure while tracing his influence on the debate. 

Krugman wrote on his “Conscience of a Conservative” blog Monday morning:

Oy. I sort of missed the controversy over Jon Gruber and his contract with HHS. For those who haven’t been following this, Gruber -- who is one of the three or four top health care economists in the nation -- turns out to have a large research grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, for modeling the consequences of various reform plans. This has led some people, mainly Marcy Wheeler at Firedoglake, to question Gruber’s objectivity.

The truth is that this is no big deal. Gruber’s grant is from HHS, not the West Wing; it’s basically the same kind of thing as, say, an epidemiologist receiving a grant from the National Institutes of Health. You wouldn’t ordinarily say that this tarnishes the epidemiologist’s credentials as an independent analyst on infectious diseases, unless you want to say that nobody receiving a research grant can be considered independent.

After admitting that Gruber should “have made a fuller disclosure,” Krugman warned the lefty Firedoglake to get with the Democratic program.

What the folks at Firedoglake should ask themselves is this: do you really want to become just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals?

Gail Collins Wakes Up to Democratic Problems, Lashes Out at Filibusters, Tea Parties

Having closed her eyes to the Democratic Party's mounting political problems in her column last Thursday, Gail Collins seems to be panicking in today's column (“The 10 Percent Rules”) over the close race in Massachusetts to fill the Senate seat occupied for so long by left-wing Sen. Ted Kennedy. In a long aside, Collins revealed her evidently deep (and conveniently timed) hatred for the filibuster.

If Republican Scott Brown upsets underperforming Democrat Martha Coakley, he would make the 41st Republican, which would enable Senate Republicans to mount a filibuster of Obama's health reform bill. 

The campaign has not hit red yet, although, for the Democrats, the whole world has begun to look orange with dark tints. Like a decaying pumpkin. It cannot be a good sign when the Massachusetts secretary of state has to deny rumors that he plans to stall certification of the election results until after the health care bill is passed.

Of course, it’s all about the health care bill. “As the 41st senator, I can stop it,” Scott Brown, the Republican nominee, says frequently.

Collins interrupted herself with a “Special Rant” section against the filibuster, plus an extraneous insult of tea party protesters.

There are 100 members of the Senate. But as Brown is currently reminding us, because of the filibuster rule, it takes only 41 to stop any bill from passing.

U.S. population: 307,006,550.

Population for the 20 least-populated states: 31,434,822.

That means that in the Senate, all it takes to stop legislation is one guy plus 40 senators representing 10.2 percent of the country.

People, think about what we went through to elect a new president -- a year and a half of campaigning, three dozen debates, $1.6 billion in donations. Then the voters sent a clear, unmistakable message. Which can be totally ignored because of a parliamentary rule that allows the representatives of slightly more than 10 percent of the population to call the shots.

Why isn’t 90 percent of the country marching on the Capitol with teapots and funny hats, waving signs about the filibuster?

Maybe because Obama-care is quite unpopular, as shown by Republiacn Scott Brown's surprisingly strong showing in Massachusetts.

The 'Deeply and Deceptively Interesting' Harry Reid - In Black Lyrca Stretch Pants

Chief political reporter Adam Nagourney penned a 5,000-word profile of embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, “Harry Reid Faces Battles in Washington and at Home.” It will appear in the January 24 edition of the New York Times Magazine. Despite dubious assertions of how “deeply and deceptively interesting” Reid is, the senator from Nevada comes off as petulant and capricious -- not necessarily someone you want carrying your political agenda:

Harry Reid was hoarse and hacking, drawn and more stooped than usual on a Sunday morning 12 days before Christmas. It was not yet noon, and Reid was in his second-floor corner office in an empty United States Capitol. He had arrived to bad news. Joseph Lieberman, the independent Connecticut senator, had announced on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he would not support the Senate health care plan, which meant that Reid did not have the 60 votes he needed. Lieberman’s announcement, which torpedoed a compromise that Reid helped to midwife, caught the Senate majority leader by surprise. Reid had spoken with Lieberman two days earlier, and one of Lieberman’s top aides participated in the Saturday-afternoon conference call that Reid orchestrates for Democratic senators who will be appearing on the Sunday talk shows. “He double-crossed me,” Reid said stiffly, associates later recounted. “Let’s not do what he wants. Let the bill just go down.”

Lieberman disputes this in a post filed by Nagourney Thursday morning: 

On Wednesday, Mr. Lieberman went public with a different take, suggesting that Mr. Reid knew all along that Mr. Lieberman would not support the Medicare proposal.

In the magazine piece. Nagourney brought up Reid's mastery of the misspoken word, including his recently revealed description of Barack Obama as fortunately lacking “Negro dialect.” But Nagourney promptly portrayed Republicans as partisans merely using the controversy to “derail health care reform” and the rest of the Obama agenda:

The health care negotiations demonstrated Reid’s command of the Senate and his sway among his fellow Democrats -- which contrasts with his perhaps equally remarkable inability to master other elements of the contemporary politician’s game. Despite Reid’s quiet demeanor, he has an almost pathological propensity to say things that get him in trouble. He is a model of indiscipline in a city that feasts on the errant remark. In January, he would have to apologize to President Obama after being quoted in a new book, “Game Change,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, as saying that Obama would be able to become the nation’s first black president because he was “light skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Republicans promptly demanded Reid’s resignation as majority leader, seizing a chance to push Reid to the sidelines in their ongoing effort to derail health care reform -- and most of the Obama agenda, for that matter.

Nagourney lights into the Senate as being on “the brink of dysfunction” because of its failure to quickly pass a huge piece of liberal legislation, Obama-care:

For all the power and the glamour -- the personal relationship with a president, the corner office in the Capitol, the place in history -- it is hard to see why anyone would want to be Harry Reid in today’s Washington. Reid spent almost all of last year as a partisan leader in a partisan battle, which is pretty much what he should not be doing if he wants Nevadans to send him back for a fifth term. He as much as anyone has the burden of delivering the president’s agenda through a Senate that has staggered to the brink of dysfunction. “The atmosphere in Washington has changed dramatically,” Reid, who was elected to the Senate in 1986, told me. By nature a pragmatic deal-cutter, Reid is viewed with suspicion by the left, which cannot understand why he has to play ball with the likes of Lieberman. He has to sate a long-deprived and lopsidedly left-leaning Democratic conference hungry to pass big legislation, anxious that its 60-vote margin will evaporate after November.

Nagourney has a lot to answer for from this passage, besides the attempt to make Reid “deeply and deceptively interesting.” The mental image of Reid doing yoga in black Lycra stretch pants cannot be unseen.

By reputation and appearance, Reid, who is 70, is one of the blander elected officials in Washington.Upon closer inspection, he is deeply and deceptively interesting. He is a senator from Nevada who hates gambling (“The only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government”); a backroom deal-maker who does not drink alcohol or coffee; a Washington celebrity who sniffs at the dinner-and-party circuit. “Senator Daschle went to dinner almost every night with someone,” he told me. “I go to dinner never, with anyone, during the week.” He does find time, at least twice a week, to slip on a pair of black Lycra stretch pants to do yoga with Landra at their apartment in the Ritz-Carlton. He has an intolerance for fat people, manifested in asides to aides who seem to be getting portly and an office staff that is suspiciously slim. He was born out of wedlock. He is certainly one of the few members of the Senate to have a Grateful Dead poster, signed by the band’s members, hanging in a bathroom at his house. Reid has been an amateur boxer, a Capitol police officer and the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, where his tenure inspired death threats and a character in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” The mezuzah on the right side of the doorway in Searchlight is a reminder that Landra was Jewish before they converted to Mormonism.

Nagourney overstates the liberal Reid's “pragmatism” and opposition to abortion.

For the White House, Reid is a gift in a challenging year. Conciliatory, endlessly patient and pragmatic rather than dogmatic, he has different skills from those of some senators who might otherwise be in his spot -- like Schumer or Durbin -- and he seems suited to this time and this caucus.Nor is he perceived as carrying an ideological agenda. Unlike most of his colleagues, he opposes gun control and abortion, but those views are reflected only when he votes and do not color the way he manages or negotiates a bill. “Harry by any normal criteria would be considered a moderate Democrat,” Obama told me. “He’s someone who doesn’t think in big ideological terms.”

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