Snake Oil Salesmen.

“The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.“

You know the GOP has gone too far when they start ticking off the business columnists: The WP’s Steve Pearlstein reads Republicans the riot act for their shameless lying on health care reform. (See also USA Today‘s attempt to set the record straight this morning, and Politifact’s evisceration of Sarah Palin’s bizarre “death panel” claim.)

I’m not going to get into all the current Democratic in-fighting over health insurance reform here (although I will say that I’m none too happy about this Billy Tauzin deal.) But, notwithstanding the Republicans’ recent penchant for astroturf (see also the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot and last April’s teabaggery), we already watched them road-test this reprehensible strategy — riling up scared, angry, and occasionally nutty people to alarm with hatred and patent untruths — last October. This is just more of the same, and I have every expectation it will backfire massively as it did then — hopefully before any serious violence breaks out.

Blue Sky Mining.

“One of the bill’s co-sponsors, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), said: ‘The American people wanted change in our energy and climate policy. And this is the change that the people are overwhelmingly asking for.’ He called it ‘the most important energy and environment bill in the history of our country.‘” After much wrangling and a half-hearted GOP attempt at filibuster (which is only a prerogative of the Senate), the House passes the Waxman-Markey climate bill, 219-212. (Eight Republicans voted for it, 44 Dems opposed.) The “cap-and-trade” bill “would establish national limits on greenhouse gases, create a complex trading system for emission permits and provide incentives to alter how individuals and corporations use energy.” [Key provisions.]

There is some concern that the bill has been watered down too much out of political necessity: “While the bill’s targets may seem dramatic, they are in fact less than what the science tells us is required to avoid catastrophic warming. The 2020 target in particular is far too weak and quite easy and cheap for the country to meet with efficiency, conservation, renewables and fuel-switching from coal to natural gas.“

Still, environmentalists remain hopeful. “It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times.” And, while the bill — which (sigh) gives away 85% of the new emission allowances (the heart of the “cap-and-trade” market hopefully soon to emerge) to interested parties — looks to “set off a lobbying feeding frenzy,” groups like the NRDC seem to agree that “[t]his is the best bill that can actually get through committee.”

Of course, now the bill has to get through the Senate, where the usual lions lie in wait. “”Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma said ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he declared flatly, ‘because we’ll kill it in the Senate anyway.'” And even some Dems are fatalistic about its prospects. “Mississippi Rep. Gene Taylor (D) voted against the measure that he says will die in the Senate. ‘A lot of people walked the plank on a bill that will never become law,’ Taylor told The Hill after the gavel came down.” Looks like Sen. Reid has his work cut out for him.

The Serpent on the Staff.

“As a society, we trust doctors to be more concerned with the pulse of their patients than the pulse of commerce. Yet the American Medical Association is using that trust to try to block a robust public insurance option as part of health reform. In fact the A.M.A. now represents only 19 percent of practicing physicians…Its membership has declined in part because of its embarrassing historical record: the A.M.A. supported segregation, opposed President Harry Truman’s plans for national health insurance, backed tobacco, denounced Medicare and opposed President Bill Clinton’s health reform plan.“

And don’t forget Sheppard-Towner: In his column this week, Nicholas Kristof take aim at the powerful American Medical Association. “‘They’ve always been on the wrong side of things,’ Dr. Scheiner told me, speaking of the A.M.A. ‘They may be protecting their interests, but they’re not protecting the interests of the American public.‘”

Where’s Waldo (the Lobbyist)?

“When 22 senators started working over the first health care overhaul bill on June 17, the news cameras were pointed at them — except for NPR’s photographer, who turned his lens on the lobbyists. Whatever bill emerges from Congress will affect one-sixth of the economy, and stakeholders have mobilized. We’ve begun to identify some of the faces in the hearing room, and we want to keep the process going.” Clever, clever: Also on the health care front, an NPR photographer initiates a game of find-the-health-care-lobbyist. “Know someone in these photos? Let us know who that someone is.“

Hoop Dreams in the District.

“The games are fluid. There’s a good energy on the court. People talk on defense. When Salazar finally gets in, it’s obvious he is actually pretty athletic, and he has a lot of hustle. He’s not easy to cover. Someone yells, ‘Who’s got Secretary?’” By way of a college friend, ESPN looks at Pres. Obama’s “Power Game,” and the ensuing newfound popularity of hoops in DC. (Apparently, in the Big Game, they don’t call fouls, but rather chalk them up as “enhanced defensive techniques necessary to Keep Our Lane Safe.” [Rimshot] Thanks, I’ll be here all week, be sure to tip your waiters.)

Anyway, the last time I lived in DC it was generally pretty easy to find a court on a weekend — We usually set up shop on either end of Adams-Morgan (or later, after I moved to VA, right down by the King Street metro), and the other folks playing/waiting to play were locals of some variety, not just aspiring politicos. I did occasionally play in one “power game” of sorts back then, which involved a number of folks from a liberal-minded journal of some repute. It was probably the most Type-A athletic endeavor I’ve ever been involved in, and that’s coming from a guy who played high school sports in the South and spent four years among Ivy League rowers. With all due respect, I prefer the random pick-up games, I think.

Dead 4 Left?

“While one can certainly use zombies to express all kinds of ideas, I would argue that at heart, the genre is a progressive one…Surviving the tide of zombies requires community and mutual responsibility. What could be more progressive than that?” In The American Prospect, Paul Waldman ruminates on the political economy of zombie flicks. It is true, we on the Left tend to be more interested in braaaains… (Via FmH.)

Rosen: Stop me before I blog again!

“How absurd is that? Let us count the ways. First, even when the most establishment ‘journalists’ such as Rosen get caught engaging in patently irresponsible behavior, they still find a way to blame blogs rather than themselves (I thought I was just blogging, and reckless gossip is what bloggers do.) It wasn’t blogs that “reported” Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of scary aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons or that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks; it wasn’t blogs that glorified Jessica Lynch’s nonexistent heroic firefight with Iraqi goons; it wasn’t blogs that turned John Edwards into The Breck Girl and John Kerry into a “French-looking” weakling; and it wasn’t blogs that presented retired military generals who were participating in a Pentagon propaganda program and saddled with countless undisclosed conflicts as ‘independent analysts.’“

Call it the State of Play fallacy: After TNR’s Jeffrey Rosen blames “blogging” for the obviously poor quality of his recent Sotomayor hit piece — and vows never to blog again — Salon‘s inimitable Glenn Greenwald sets the record straight about what can and can’t be pinned on bloggers. “Despite his efforts to blame ‘blogging’ for what he did, Rosen didn’t use journalistically reckless methods to smear Sotomayor’s intellect because of some inherent attribute of the medium. Instead, he did that because…that’s how the establishment media typically functions: ‘background reporting from people with various axes to grind, i.e. standard Washington reporting.’” (And, for what it’s worth, Rosen’s original article was hardly what you’d call blogging anyway — it was just a lengthy piece that ran online.)

42 Doin’ Work.

“If there is part of him that secretly covets Obama’s job, he is burying it inside. ‘I like my life now,’ he said. ‘I loved being president and it’s a good thing we had a constitutional limit or I’d have made the people take me out in a pine box, probably. But we had a constitutional limit and I knew that in the beginning. And so when I left, I had to go out and create another life. And I did it, and I love doing it.’“

In a wide-ranging piece in the NYT Magazine, Peter Baker checks in on the post-presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. Among the topics discussed: Election 2008 fallout — Obama is forgiven, Kennedy and Richardson are not — and Clinton’s retrospective view of his own administration’s economic policy in light of the “Great Recession.” “He added: ‘If you ask me to write the indictment, I’d say: “I wish Bill Clinton had said more about derivatives. The Republicans probably would have stopped him from doing it, but at least he should have sounded the alarm bell.”‘”

The Politics of Yecccch.

“Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.” The NYT’s Nicholas Kristof examines the hardwired psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. “The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality …For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.”

Roberts et al, meet Sotomayor.

“I chose to be a lawyer and ultimately a judge because I find endless challenge in the complexities of the law. I firmly believe in the rule of law as the foundation for all of our basic rights…Mr. President, I greatly appreciate the honor you are giving me, and I look forward to working with the Senate in the confirmation process.” Hearkening back to the pragmatists once again — “For as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience” — President Obama chooses Judge Sonia Sotomayor as Souter’s replacement on the Court. [Wiki]

Naturally, conservatives are getting their opposition ducks in a row (with some help from Jeffrey Rosen’s recent dubious hit piece in TNR.) “But some Senate GOP officials privately conceded that, barring a major stumble, the judge will probably be confirmed with relative ease. ‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that we need to tread very carefully,’ said John Weaver, a Republican political consultant who advised Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for years. ‘The only way we’ll find ourselves in a political predicament is if we don’t treat her with the same respect that other nominees received.’” Yeah, good luck with that.

In any case, early word on Judge Sotomayor is that she is very far from the liberal activist of right-wing nightmare, but rather a “highly capable technocrat,” and exactly the sort of hypercompetent and moderate — perhaps to a fault — pick one would expect from this president. “‘She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,’ said Paul Smith, a partner at Jenner & Block who participated in the call…She’s a cautious lawyer…who was a corporate lawyer herself…She reads statutes narrowly.”