Paul Krugman is not one to exhibit irrational exuberance, so his saying this gives me hope:

I suggested yesterday that we’re probably heading for a turning point in the health reform discussion. Conservatives are operating on the assumption that it’s an irredeemable disaster that they can ride all the way to 2016; but the facts on the ground are getting better by the day, and Obamacare will turn into a Benghazi-type affair where Republicans are screaming about a scandal nobody else cares about.

And it’s already starting to happen.

A CNN poll indicates a majority of Americans still have an open mind about whether the ACA will work, which is remarkable considering the relentless screaming coming from the Noise Machine.

Just to show it isn’t just righties who can be irrational — I give you Lambert and his readers, who still believe we’d have a single-payer health care system today if Obama hadn’t sold us out. Scott Lemieux snarks back.

Dana Milbank notes that Republicans began screeching about “appeasement” and “distracting attention from O-care” before any of the details of the recent temporary deal with Iran were announced.

A couple of minutes after 9 p.m. on Saturday, word crossed the news wires that negotiators in Geneva had reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Then, at 9:08 p.m. — before any details of the pact were known — Ari Fleischer delivered his opinion on the agreement, via Twitter.

“The Iran deal and our allies: You can’t spell abandonment without OBAMA,” he wrote. …

… Three minutes after Fleischer’s tweet came one in agreement from Ron Christie, another veteran of the Bush administration. “Precisely,” he wrote, also without the benefit of knowing what was in the agreement. “A disgraceful deal.”

An hour later — still before Obama detailed the accord in a statement from the White House — John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, had analyzed the administration’s motives in reaching the deal.

“Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care,” he tweeted at 10:15 p.m., 19 minutes before the president spoke.

Of course, the fatal flaw in the recent deal was that it was negotiated by the Obama Admnistration. Milkbank goes on to document the mounting worse-than-Hitler hysteria in the rightie echo chamber, but most of you know about that, so let’s go on …

Charles Pierce reminds us what a Republican-negotiated deal looks like.

I am a simple man. Years ago, I made it a policy of mine that I would approve of any deal with Iran so long as it didn’t involve selling missiles to the mullahs. I developed this policy in January of 1981, when I was in Washington covering the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, and the Iranians, in one last attempt to stick it to Jimmy Carter, refused to release the remaining American hostages until Reagan had taken office. Almost immediately, the propagandists in the employ of the new president started floating to a credulous media that the Iranians had done so because they were terrified of the awesome awesomeness of Ronald Reagan. Turns out, of course, that they did it in exchange for Reagan’s unfreezing their American assets and also because Reagan’s people opened up a yard sale at the Pentagon where the Iranians could get good deals on TOW missiles. Ronald Reagan, as we all know, would never negotiate with — let alone sell weapons to — nations that sponsored terrorism. That is why Ronald Reagan was a great man who has many large and ugly buildings named after him.

(Whether or not these deals were cut by officials of the Reagan campaign prior to the election — in other words, whether or not Bill Casey et. al. committed something like treason by undermining American foreign policy in order to win an election — is still very much an open question. But there were, ahem, precedents.)

So, unfreezing assets as part of a deal that might make the world safer from nuclear weapons is bad. Unfreezing assets as part of a deal to elect a Republican to the White House is good. Let’s remember to keep that straight.

Didn’t I mention recently that righties tend to exaggerate? Get a load of this —

Munich II
By James Jay Carafano

No, that’s not a facile, partisan jab. What just went down in Geneva is, in fact, a replay of the greatest diplomatic tragedy of the 20th century.

The Munich deal rested on the ridiculous notion that Hitler could be satiated. The new pact builds on the equally ludicrous idea that Iran would give up the means to build a nuclear weapon that will serve as the tip of its foreign-policy spear.

Seriously. Carafano — vice president of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation — went there. And they wonder why we laugh at them.

Carafano says that the only outcome acceptable to right-thinking Americans is regime change, and sanctions must not be modified until the current regime utterly collapses. The possibility — probability, seems to me — that a new regime might be even more radical and anti-western than the old one is not on Carafano’s radar.

John Holbo explains why Carafano’s preferred scenario boils down to, oh, what the bleep, let’s just nuke ’em now. In Carafano’s world, potential enemies are enemies, period, and they must be treated with extreme prejudice and not be allowed any opportunities to moderate or become less of a threat. We make sure they remain enemies until they do something awful enough that we are justified in killing them.

It’s a bit like the righties who say they never hear about moderate Muslims, which is mostly because their definition of “Muslim” is “psychopath anti-Christian mad-dog terrorists who wear strange clothes.”

There was an article in the September 2013 issue of Harper‘s that described in detail exactly how the sanctions are affecting Iran, and it’s actually pretty horrific and not, I don’t think, likely to win the good will of the Iranian people. So if we want to compare Iran to the Third Reich, we might consider how a nation became radicalized by a policy of humiliation and economic hardship. Anything that smacks of “appeasement” is anathema to the Right, but I don’t recall when rock-hard rigidity ever forced a good outcome, either.

See also “How Bush Let Iran Go Nuclear.”

Just want to point your attention to a couple of items in the NY Times. The first, Right vs. Left in the Midwest, looks at the neighbor states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 2010 gubernatorial elections Wisconsin elected Scott Walker; Minnesota elected the progressive Mark Dayton of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Minnesota has been more progressive even as Wisconsin lurched right. So guess which state is enjoying economic growth and which isn’t?

The other is Two Gunshots On a Summer Night, an in-depth look at the death of a young woman that was ruled a suicide, but which probably wasn’t. The woman’s boyfriend was a deputy sheriff, and he claimed the shooting was a suicide, and his brother-cops just believed him and barely investigated. It’s a chilling thing to read, and in some ways reminds me of how the cops handled Trayvon Martin’s shooting.

If this had been meant ironically it would have been amusing:

Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care

— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) November 24, 2013

They’re like a dog with a bone, you know. Once they’ve got their teeth sunk into a tasty talking point, they don’t let go.

This morning I read Fred Kaplan’s take on the Iran deal:

The Iranian nuclear deal struck Saturday night is a triumph. It contains nothing that any American, Israeli, or Arab skeptic could reasonably protest. Had George W. Bush negotiated this deal, Republicans would be hailing his diplomatic prowess, and rightly so.

Of course, right after that I saw reactions from the Right, screaming bloody murder. John Bolton thinks it represents an abject surrender. Bibi Netanyahu thinks it is a historic mistake. If those two are against it, it must be brilliant. See also Business Insider for a reasonably nonpartisan analysis..

From all the screaming on the Right, you’d think Senate Dems were a tribe of ax-wielding Visigoths. Rush made a really creepy rape analogy. The usual stuff.

Steve M. reminds us that righties always see themselves as picked-upon (but noble) victims. Whatever happens is never their fault.

Bullies claiming to be bullied — does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of a wife beater who gets a restraining order against the wife he beats, and who otherwise claims that he’s the real victim. Fight back against a guy like that, even strictly in self defense, and he’ll show off every tiny bruise as proof that you’re the monster, not him.

Explains why they so fervently embrace George Zimmerman as one of their own.

Paul Rosenberg writes about the rightie proclivity to exaggerate. Any misstep on the part of the Democrats is “worse than Watergate” or “Obama’s Katrina.”

Case in point: As early as April 2010, Media Matters had counted eight different things that had been touted as “Obama’s Katrina,” including the BP oil spill (Limbaugh, Drudge, Fox.etc. vs. facts here); the GM bankruptcy (Politico, June 8, 2009); the H1N1 flu (Rush Limbaugh, Nov. 3, 2009); the Fort Hood shootings (Human Events, Nov. 11, 2009); the Christmas underwear bomber (Pajamas Media, Dec. 29, 2009); the Haiti earthquake (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2010); the Kentucky ice storms (Confederate Yankee, Feb. 1, 2010); and even housing policies in Chicago back when Obama was a state senator (Mickey Kaus, Slate, June 30, 2008).

They’re also prone to comparing anything they don’t like to slavery. While I don’t entirely agree with part of his premise, Rosenberg makes one interesting point. The Fundamentalist right, Jerry Falwell et al., did not immediately jump on abortion as their signature issue right after Roe v. Wade. At the time, they were still locked in the final battles of their war on racial desegregation. Many seem to have embraced pregnancy enforcement only when they realized segregation was lost.

For several decades now, conservatives have clung to abortion as their great moral equalizer, which they consequently just love to equate with slavery. Ever since its meteoric rise in the late 1970s, the religious right has clung to the abortion issue as the foundation of its claims to moral superiority — and for good reason, since their true, sordid origin story lies in fighting to preserve segregation, as Max Blumenthal explained in the Nation magazine at the time of Jerry Falwell’s death (“Agent of Intolerance“). …

…Remarkably, Falwell and his ilk were so focused on defending segregation, that they rebuffed early Catholic attempts, spearheaded by Paul Weyrich, to turn their attention to abortion. They only broadened their issue agenda to include abortion some years later, as they came to realize they needed allies who had little motivation in helping them preserve the separation of the races.

I well remember there was plenty of antipathy to abortion among religious and political conservatives even before Roe v. Wade (1973). But the degree to which the Right has made abortion the ground of Armageddon itself might be partly explained by their position on what they think is moral high ground. They’ve lost or are losing every other moral/social issues fight of the 20th century, but they’ve still got abortion. Plus, it gives them an excuse to slut-shame sexually active women. So they aren’t likely to let go of abortion anytime soon, even if it’s beginning to cost them elections.

My quibble with Rosenberg comes up in this paragraph:

What connects all these patterns is that they involve bad things that conservatives were responsible for in the past, things they still, apparently, feel appropriately guilty about. but cannot consciously admit to, and hence, keep on trying to find liberal versions of, in order to unburden themselves by pushing their guilt onto others. It’s an example of what psychologists and psychiatrists know as “projection,” and the rest of us know as “the pot calling the kettle black.” But often it’s actually even worse than that — it’s not just the past bad behavior that’s being projected, but ongoing bad behavior as well, in part because of this same refusal to come to terms with past mistakes.

Yeah, sorta, but I don’t think it’s guilt they feel. Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s more like existential fear. They are so utterly invested in their own moral certitude that it has become who they are. Any challenge to their inner core of white-hot righteousness about whatever is a mortal threat.

This accounts for another tendency, the way in which admired historical figures must be assimilated by the Right. Thus the absurd argument that Martin Luther King was a rightie — they sure didn’t think that when he was alive — or the belief that John Kennedy was a conservative, even though he called himself a liberal. It must not be that anyone who was “good” could not have been one of theirs, and not one of the hated liberals.

If there were a competition for cluelessness between the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Wapo would win, hands down. Behold their opinions of the filibuster bomb:

The New York Times, in an editorial headlined Democracy Returns to the Senate:

For five years, Senate Republicans have refused to allow confirmation votes on dozens of perfectly qualified candidates nominated by President Obama for government positions. They tried to nullify entire federal agencies by denying them leaders. They abused Senate rules past the point of tolerance or responsibility. And so they were left enraged and threatening revenge on Thursday when a majority did the only logical thing and stripped away their power to block the president’s nominees. …

… It would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, when the majority leader, Harry Reid, was still holding out hope for a long-lasting deal with Republicans and insisting that federal judges, because of their lifetime appointments, should still be subject to supermajority thresholds. But Mr. Reid, along with all but three Senate Democrats, was pushed to act by the Republicans’ refusal to allow any appointments to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, just because they wanted to keep a conservative majority on that important court.

That move was as outrageous as the tactic they used earlier this year to try to cripple the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which they despise) by blocking all appointments to those agencies. That obstruction was removed in July when Mr. Reid threatened to end the filibuster and Republicans backed down. The recent blockade of judges to the D.C. appellate court was the last straw. .

…Given the extreme degree of Republican obstruction during the Obama administration, the Democrats had little choice but to change the filibuster rule….Today’s vote was an appropriate use of that power, and it was necessary to turn the Senate back into a functioning legislative body.

The Washington Post, After filibuster vote, both parties will face nasty “nuclear” fallout:

THE REWRITING of filibuster rules by Senate Democrats on Thursday changed the legislative body in fundamental ways, and for the worse. Republicans whose unjustified recalcitrance provoked the change should be ashamed. Democrats who are celebrating will soon enough regret their decision. The radical action, a product of poisonous partisanship, will also be an accelerant of poisonous partisanship. …

…The impact of changing the rules in this way may be even more far-reaching. The Democratic action sets a precedent that a future Republican majority will use to change procedures when it gets into a political jam, rather than negotiate with Democrats. The logical outcome is a Senate operating more like the House, with no rights for the minority, no reason for debate and no incentive to cooperate. For those who view that as an improvement, we offer today’s House as a counterargument.

Democrats understood all this very well when they were in the minority. “You may own the field right now,” then-Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D) said in 2005, when Republicans threatened to invoke the nuclear option. “But you won’t own it forever. And I pray to God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.” Republicans resisted pushing the nuclear button then; both parties should have stepped back and hammered out a bipartisan compromise reform now.

This time Republicans proved incapable of exercising their minority rights in a responsible way. Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) proved not enough of a leader to resist the “naked power grab.” American democracy is that much poorer as a result.

From the comments:

Let’s see … the Democrats and Republicans should have compromised, but Republicans refused to compromised, therefore it was wrong for Democrats to take action.

This is an editorial so stupid it could only have been written by Fred Hiatt.

Seriously. The genteel, bipartisan Senate you are mourning died awhile back, Fred, and its corpse rotted. You didn’t smell it?

Charles Pierce wrote, “They may need the Jaws of Life to pry Ruth Marcus off the fainting couch.” Yep; Marcus is furious with the Democrats because (as she admits) Republicans forced their hand to end the filibuster, and they actually did it. She is even now swooning on the sofa and calling for smelling salts.

Filibuster rule change passed, 52-48. For the record, the Dems voting against the change were Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Mark Pryor (D-AR).

Jeremy Peters reports in the New York Times that “Senate Democrats are on the verge of moving to eliminate the use of the filibuster against most presidential nominees.” This would be for cabinet posts and the federal judiciary, I understand. The filibuster could still be used for Supreme Court nominees and other legislation.

The problem, as Democrats see it, is that Republicans have effectively rewritten Senate rules to create a supermajority requirement for confirming presidential nominees. Filibustering cabinet-level officials, once extremely rare, is now routine.

While Democrats filibustered their share of judicial nominees when they were in the minority under President George W. Bush, including people named to the powerful District of Columbia appeals court, what Republicans say they intend to accomplish goes beyond simply blocking a vote. Their goal is to reshape the nation’s most powerful appeals court by shrinking it to just eight full-time judges. By law it has 11 judges who regularly hear cases.

Democrats said that was a step too far. The court is split with four judges appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans. But among the six semiretired judges who still hear cases, five are seen as conservative, one as liberal.

Ryan Grim writes for the Hufington Post,

It’s still not clear if Reid has the 51 votes to make the change, but it certainly looks close. There are 55 Democrats in total, which means Reid can lose up to four. HuffPost tracked down a number of Democrats on Tuesday to see who remains opposed to making the change, and only one, Levin, definitively said no. A couple of others, Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), avoided the question.

See also Gail Collins:

“If the Democrats proceed to use this nuclear option in this way, it will be Obamacare II,” cried Senator Lamar Alexander on Wednesday. This was in keeping with a brand-new Congressional tradition under which Republicans making remarks on the floor of the House or Senate are required to mention the Affordable Care Act at least once every 35 seconds. …

… Since the nominees were two women and a black man, Democrats have strongly suggested — well, you know.

“When the other side gets desperate, they turn to their last line of defense: accuse us Republicans of bias,” said Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa during a brief and rather desultory debate.

Yes, and when the Republicans get desperate they … wait for it.

“There is no crisis in the D.C. Circuit because they don’t have enough work to do as it is,” said Grassley. “There is a crisis occurring now all across the country as a result of the health care reform bill that often goes by the terminology of Obamacare.”

Honestly, it’s a wonder they make it through the opening prayer.

Grassley argued that reducing the size of the DC court by three judges would save the country $3 million a year. Whether a DC circuit court judge really costs the country a million a year is unclear, but Collins says $3 million is still a lot less than the $50 million Grassley once wanted to build an indoor rain forest near Des Moines.

GOP senators have blocked the nominations of three judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The senators didn’t even pretend to argue that the nominees (an African-American man and two women, btw) were not qualified. No, they argued that (1) the court doesn’t need 11 judges and can make do with three less; and (2) the court is balanced between Republican and Democratic nominees, and three Democratic nominees would throw it out of balance..

As to the first claim, we’re talking about the nation’s second-highest court, which handles cases involving federal regulations and national security. Complicated stuff. Eleven judges don’t seem too many to me. As to the second claim, Media Matters says that isn’t entirely true. And, anyway, Barack Obama won the 2012 election.

Harry Reid is once again threatening to “go nuclear” and change filibuster rules. But will he really do it this time, or wimp out again? Word is that some Dem senators who were cool to the idea in the past, e.g., Diane Feinstein, are frustrated enough to have changed their minds.

Changing the filibuster rules is not without risk, if you consider a future hypothetical right-wing Congress. And Brian Beutler thinks the Republicans want the Dems to at least try to change the filibuster rules for that very reason. Right now they think they can take back the Senate in 2014, and “Getting Democratic fingerprints on the nuclear rule-change precedent, will provide Republicans the cover they’ll need to eliminate the filibuster altogether in January 2015.”

But, as Charles Pierce says,

It’s time, Harry. Really, it is. I was on the other side of this issue for a very long time because I didn’t want to confront the possibility of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with the unlimited power to do anything that President Scott Walker wanted. That kind of thing still gives me pause. But this business with the judges has long passed over the International Fk You Line.

Yeah, pretty much.