The meta-title of Bill Kristol’s most recent column is “The future of the GOP is outside the Beltway.” I saw this and thought, wow — Kristol is right. In fact, the future of the GOP is not only outside the Beltway, it is also outside anyplace with reliable cell phone service. The way it’s going, I expect the GOP to make a last stand somewhere near a bald cypress bog in rural Mississippi, no later than the end of 2016.

However, the perpetually sunny Kristol thinks it’s a great time to be a conservative. This is because more people self-identify as “conservative” than as “independent” or “liberal.” As I’ve said of such surveys in the past, nobody knows what those terms mean any more. Thus, the self-identification is meaningless.

To see what I mean, check out the comments to this Hot Air post. Allahpundit complains that the teabaggers are splitting the Republican vote in NY 23, making a Dem win likely. In Glenn Beck world, apparently it is more important to purge moderates from the Republican Party than to defeat Democrats.

“One crushing defeat away from total victory, in perpetuity,” Allah grumbles. “What is the endgame?”

The endgame, according to the commenters, is to cleanse the GOP of alleged RINOs. Once this has been done, the GOP then will retake its natural place as the dominant party, and liberals will once against be drop-kicked out of sight. “The end game is to make the GOP so afraid of a third party happening that they start articulating some coherent conservative arguments and principles and nominate candidates who are not liberals,” says one. Another says, “The end game is a break of the stranglehold the dem and repub parties maintain on the electoral process, financing system and electorate, returning a representative republic to the people.”

They’re sounding like Ralph Nader supporters ca. 2000. I’m not sure Kristol himself would qualify as a “conservative” with this crowd.

Kristol notes that the current front-runners for the 2012 Republican nomination are all people who are not in office at the moment — Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich, Palin, in no particular order. Steve M explains that current officeholders have a big disadvantage with the wingnuts:

“Current officeholders, even Republicans, have to act with some reference to objective reality.”

Clearly, a huge turn-off to teabaggers.

Steve compares wingnut government strategy to the Underpants Gnomes Business Model of South Park, which is:

1. Collect underpants
2. ?
3. Profit

Look famaliar? How about —

1. Get rid of Saddam Hussein
2. ?
3. Peace in the Middle East

or

1. Cut taxes
2. ?
3. Revenues increase

It’s all so plain now. Why didn’t I see this before?

Harry Reid just announced the Senate bill will have a public option with an opt-out for states. No trigger. This is great news. Plus, he says he has the votes to pass the bill once it’s been run past the CBO for analysis.

There were rumors flying around last week that the White House was pushing back against the proposed state “opt out” provision in the public option, advocating for a trigger instead. Now the White House is trying to knock down those rumors and says it backs whatever Harry Reid is doing.

I suspect the Booman is right — the White House was holding back on endorsing a particular approach because it didn’t want to get boxed in, but as a result they were taking a beating in the media and making the Senate grumpy. The important point is that the White House is not, it seems, trying to block the opt-out provision.

The bad news is that even if health care reform passes this year, it will be three or four years before most of the benefits, including the public option, kick in. Carrie Brown at the Politico writes that some Dems are pushing for some provisions (althought not the public option) to kick by next year so the Dems have something tangible to show voters in the 2010 election campaigns.

Even so, Paul Krugman is optimistic. Krugmarn found poll numbers that say Massachusetts health care reform is enormously popular in Massachusetts. This is a good sign for national reform, he says. Conservatives want health care to fail and hope for a voter backlash against it, but the Massachusetts experience says that is unlikely.

Update 10/26: Thanks to your help I am out of immediate danger, although I am not able to completely pay off the debt and I will remain in some jeopardy until I do. So more donations are welcome. I still hope to hear something from the state attorney general’s office, to which I sent a complaint several days ago.

Update: I’m keeping this at the top for a couple of days; check below for new posts.

I hate to ask for help again, but I’ve had a major setback and feel defeated. I posted the story below at Salon to see if it could get some attention, and so far I’ve just gotten snarky advice to get another lawyer. This is not helping. I am sincerely afraid I will be homeless by Christmas. At the very least, please help me get this linked around the blogosphere.

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Here’s the video of Faux Nooz clips shown on Countdown last night. I don’t have a transcript, but there’s a roundup of sorts at Media Matters.

There are those who don’t understand why the White House isn’t stoically putting up with whatever Faux dishes out. But Joan Walsh has a piece at Salon, a review of The Clinton Tapes by Taylor Branch, that clarifies things.

Joan isn’t writing about Faux, but about the rest of the media during the latter part of the Clinton Administration. She describes the “backdrop of childish media snickering” that enabled the “selection” of George W. Bush in 2000.

“The Clinton Tapes” makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media — from the New York Times’ lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free “opinion” journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn’t shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever — and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000. …

… You find yourself wishing and hoping Branch could find some Washington pooh-bahs who’d realize they’d been played by the Republicans. Nope. None at all.

I think the White House is serving notice to the Media generally: Be serious. Stop acting like cliquey high schoolers. Stop enabling propaganda. Do your jobs.

Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray write in the Washington Post:

House Democrats are coalescing around an $871 billion health-care package that would create a government-run insurance plan to help millions of Americans afford coverage, raise taxes on the nation’s richest families and impose an array of new regulations on private insurers, in part by stripping the industry of its long-standing exemption from federal antitrust laws.

Senate Democratic leaders, meanwhile, huddled with President Obama on Thursday, and lawmakers said Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) was increasingly leaning toward the idea of including a version of a public insurance option, albeit one that would allow states to opt out of such a system, in the chamber’s bill.

This sounds like great news, but as I read other stories this morning the air spluttered out of the balloon, so to speak.

Some reports are saying the House mostly seems ready, or close to ready, to pass a good bill. However, Mike Allen of The Politico says Pelosi doesn’t have the vote for a robust public option and is considering the “trigger” compromise as “the most likely compromise because it can probably satisfy liberals.”

Memo to Allen, Pelosi, et al. It will not satisfy liberals. We know a bait and switch when we see one. A public option subject to a “trigger” amounts to no public option at all, because the “trigger” will never be pulled without a bruising political fight.

For a rundown on the three compromises being proposed at the moment, see Ezra Klein. And then for the odds on which compromise will be accepted, see Nate Silver. If you go by Nate, Congress may pass something it can call a “public option,” but it won’t be what we want.

Matters are even more iffy in the Senate than in the House, as insurance industry lackeys like Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson still refuse to support any bill with a public option, even with the state opt-out provision.

Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn write in the New York Times,

In pushing to include a government-run health insurance plan in the health care bill, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is taking a calculated gamble that the 60 members of his caucus could support the plan if it included a way for states to opt out. … Mr. Reid’s outlook was shaped, in part, by opinion polls showing public support for a government insurance plan, which would compete with private insurers.

People watch Washington in wonder. A provision with huge public support is considered “risky” in Washington. We know why that’s true, but it still makes the Senate look like a cheap carnival sideshow.

Franken 1, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth zip. Transcript here.

Before I go on to the good news, let’s take a look at this paragraph from yesterday’s Washington Post (by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen):

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.

It’s good news, yes, but note the phrase “government-run health-care plan.” Will you allegedly nonpartisan reporters please stop using code terms churned out by the right-wing propaganda machine? The more accurate phrase is “public insurance option.”

Now let’s check out what Deirdre Walsh at CNN has to say:

A preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office projects that the House Democrats’ health care plan that includes a public option would cost $871 billion over 10 years, according to two Democratic sources.

Ooo, cost. Bad, bad. But let’s go on to the second and third paragraphs:

CBO also found that the Democrats’ bill reduces the deficit in the first 10 years.

This new CBO estimate, which aides caution is not final, is significantly less than the $1.1 trillion price tag of the original House bill that passed out of three committees this summer. More importantly, it comes under the $900 billion cap set by President Obama in his joint address to Congress last month.

Here’s the best part:

Moderate, “blue dog” Democrats in the House largely oppose the robust public option and instead argue for a government run insurance option that could negotiate reimbursement rates directly with doctors and hospitals. CBO’s analysis of that approach was not available according to Democratic sources, but aides say the preliminary analysis shows it does not save as much as the approach pushed by Pelosi.

Mike Soraghan of The Hill says that some Dems want to re-brand the public option “Medicare Part E,” as in Medicare for Everyone. Mostly a good idea, says Publius. Interesting, but could cause other problems, says Jonathan Singer.

If they do it, get out your stopwatches and time how many seconds it takes before Republicans are bad-mouthing Medicare again.

If you’re familiar with American history, you have to savor the irony of an Irish-American Catholic identifying with those who are “losing their country.” In the 19th century the Irish weren’t exactly “we.”

Forgive the ugly stuff, but I think it’s good to know where we’ve been sometime.

San Francisco : White & Bauer, between 1860 and 1869

Thomas Nast, 1876

Thomas Nast, 1882

The big type war of the yellow kids, 1898

Just a reminder that journalism wasn’t always professional. Well, whether it was ever purely professional could be debated. But William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers really did play a big role in getting the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.

Fast forward to today. Jacob Weisberg writes that Fox News is un-American. By this he seems to mean that Fox’s grotesque partisanship is outside the tradition of American journalism, and that it is bad for America. Regarding the tradition of American journalism — um, there are a lot of traditions. I think in the 20th century journalism really did create some professional standards and more or less upheld them, although that’s all out the window now. But Fox has done a great job of reviving the 19th century standard of yellow journalism for which William Randolph Hearst is remembered.

As for whether this is bad for America — of course it is.

In the October Atlantic, Mark Bowden writes that journalism is collapsing all over. It isn’t just Fox, although Fox played a big role in its collapse. He begins by recalling how all the news cable networks had the same clips of obscure Sonia Sotomayor sound bytes (the “wise Latina” comment and the clip about judges making policy) as soon as Judge Sotomayor was nominated to SCOTUS. “The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men.” He continues,

The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance.

This process–political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts–is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery. The very smart and capable young men … who actually dug up and initially posted the Sotomayor clips both originally described themselves to me as part-time, or aspiring, journalists.

The fact that interests groups churn up propaganda to feed to media isn’t shocking. That’s always been done. What’s disturbing is the degree to which the cable newsies throw the stuff at audiences undigested and unfiltered, without checking to find the context or noting where the obscure clips came from. Fifty years ago, that would have been considered a breach of journalism professional standards. Now, it’s what everybody does.