First off, Howard Kurtz has been fired from the Daily Beast. I didn’t know it was possible to be so bad as to be fired from the Daily Beast. How low can you go? Maybe Weekly World News has an opening.

Elsewhere — The Right has seized on a new study that they claim proves that Medicaid doesn’t help anyone and is a big waste of money. As usual, the Right can’t read. Jonathan Cohn and bloggers at the Incidental Economist explain what the study actually says. The Incidental Economist explains,

Let’s review. The good: Medicaid improved rates of diagnosis of depression, increased the use of preventive services, and improved the financial outlook for enrollees. The bad: It did not significantly affect the A1C levels of people with diabetes or levels of hypertension or cholesterol.

This has led many to declare (and we’re not linking to them) that the ACA is now a failed promise, that Medicaid is bad, and that anyone who disagrees is a “Medicaid denier”. How many people saying that are ready to give up insurance for themselves or their family? If they are arguing that Medicaid needs to be reformed in some way, we’re open to that. If they’re arguing that insurance coverage shouldn’t be accessible to poor Americans in any form, we don’t agree. Medicaid may not be perfect, but we don’t think being uninsured is better. This new study supports this view, though certainly not as strongly as it might have.

Cohn makes the point that the purpose of health insurance is not to keep you well, but to pay the medical bills.

That may sound obvious—of course people with insurance are less likely to struggle with medical bills. But it’s also the most under-appreciated accomplishment of health insurance: Whatever its effects on health, it promotes economic security. “The primary purpose of health insurance is to protect you financially in event of a catastrophic medical shock,” Finkelstein told me in an interview, “in the same way that the primary purpose of auto insurance or fire insurance is to provide you money in case you’ve lost something of value.”

And, anyway, the study has been following subjects for only two years. The difference in health care outcomes after five or ten years might be more significant, assuming the study continues.

A day that really has lived in infamy. How could I forget?

Most of the interesting news today was generated by a presidential press conference —

Obama Promises to Try Closing Guantánamo Again

Obama cautions against rush to action in Syria

Permission Structure: Getting deals done with congressional Republicans

Elsewhere: Jonathan Chait has a critique of a David Brooks column. I don’t have the strength to make it through a Brooks column today, but Chait says —

The latest offensive, or counter-offensive, in the passive-aggressive Cold War between David Brooks and Paul Krugman has taken the form of an entire Brooks column not very subtly lambasting Krugman as a tired partisan hack while justifying his own work as thoughtful, elevated, and intellectually independent. It’s unfortunately muddled and self-serving in a way that obscures some pretty important questions about how political commentators ought to do their job.

If Chait’s description is accurate, Brooks may have produced one of the purest samples of distilled bullshit of all time.

The part where the POTUS is pretending to be Daniel Day-Lewis is a tad surreal.

You might enjoy reading about it anyway —

George W. Bush: As President, incompetent and stupid.

Keynes was right; the “austerians” are wrong.

Michelle Malkin is demented.

You might remember that, shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, a Saudi man injured at the scene was identified as a “person of interest” but cleared the next day. Since then, several of the dimmer bulbs of the Right have gone overboard smearing this guy as a dangerous terrorist with connections to the White House. They have evidence he has taken the White House visitors’ tour! He also was visited by the First Lady while in the hospital (along with the other victims of the bombing)! He posted photos of himself and the FLOTUS on his Facebook page! Obviously, there’s a dangerous cover-up going on!

(Why doesn’t anyone ever bring a defamation suit against these bozos? I suppose they don’t have enough assets to make it worthwhile, but still …)

On to the real alleged perps — By now it should be obvious to anyone else that the Tsarnaev brothers were not exactly a crack terrorist unit. As Charles Pierce says,

As the days go by, we learn more and more that what we were dealing with here, as deadly as their actions were, was a plot by the Wayne and Garth of terrorism, a couple of guys who could screw up a two-car funeral if you spotted them the hearse.

It’s unlikely these guys were being directed by any global jihadi movement; more likely they were angry and alienated young men acting out their anger and alienation. Which is not to say that angry and alienated men don’t join actual global jihadi movements.

Today House Republicans pulled a bill from the floor that was intended to embarrass Democrats and undermine the Affordable Care Act. Majority Leader Eric Cantor had sponsored the “Helping Sick Americans Now Act,” which —

… would siphon $3.6 billion from the Affordable Care Act’s $10 billion prevention and public health fund, aimed at combating disease and promoting wellness, into an underfunded short-term plan to cover people with preexisting conditions until 2014, when the law will begin to ban insurers from denying coverage based on health status.

But the legislation doesn’t reflect a serious long-term effort to address the problem of sick Americans lacking access to health care or getting thrown off their insurance plan. It would shore up a costly and temporary high-risk pool under Obamacare — called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan — which expires at the end of 2013. Beyond that, Republicans continue to support repealing the rest of the Affordable Care Act, and lack economically feasible plans to address preexisting conditions.

Note that for years Republicans have promoted the idea of dumping people who need lots of medical care into high-risk insurance pools, so that people in the “normal” pool didn’t have to pay so much for insurance. The Affordable Care Act provided for something like that as a temporary fix until 2014, after which insurers can no longer refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions. The problem is that the high-risk pools sucked up money the way a black hole sucks up matter, so that plan wasn’t really working. Naturally, that was the plan some Republicans decided to like.

However, other Republicans believed the bill would actually strengthen “Obamacare,” and who cares about sick people anyway? So it was scrapped.

The larger point is that the bill had absolutely no purpose except to give Republicans a bogus talking point to use against the President. Even if the Senate were to pass such a bill, the President would veto it. And then the GOP could say he vetoed a bill to help people with preexisting conditions, never mind that Obamacare actually does help people with preexisting conditions.

In other legislative theater news — Republicans have whined for some time that Democrats have not submitted a budget. Evan Soltas writes for Wonkblog,

For the last two years, congressional Republicans have argued that the real problem in the budget debate is that Democrats have abandoned “regular order.” By regular order, Republicans mean — well, I’ll let Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, explain it.

“Secret deals have not worked and are an affront to popular democracy,” he argued in January. “The right process is the regular order. The House produces its budget–as it has–and the Senate passes its budget, all in accordance with the Budget Act of 1974. Under that law, the Senate Budget Committee must approve a budget resolution by April 1st. From there, the law requires the budget to be considered on the Senate floor where it must receive 50 hours of open amendment and debate. A budget cannot be filibustered and is adopted by a simple majority in both committee and the full Senate. Then, once the issues and differences are clarified by this open process, the work of conferencing must begin.”

Soltas writes that “regular order” became a sacred totem among congressional Republicans. Well, until the Senate Democrats passed a budget. Now Republicans want to scuttle “regular order” in favor of backroom deals.