Not surprisingly, Village blogger Ezra Klein recommends these 20 Questions from Nate Silver. I thought about answering them (though most of them showed a complete ignorance regarding the nature of the debate on health care reform this year (disingenuous too - Silver asks how insurance company profits MARGINS will grow instead of asking about profits)), even though I am undecided on the Lieberman Bill. Until I read Question 20:

20. How many of the arguments that you might be making against the bill are being made out of anger, frustration, or a desire to ring Joe Lieberman by his scruffy, no-good, backstabbing neck?

In the word of Ezra, sigh. That someone could insinuate today that the arguments made by rational, intelligent, thoughtful people are a result of anger about Lieberman instead of from firmly held, reasonable and LONG HELD views, demonstrates that that person is a dilettante who just started paying attention in the last few days. It tells you a lot about Silver and Klein that they think these are good questions.

Update below:

Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC this afternoon:

Good to have Glenn making some key arguments on this issue.

A federal magistrate judge in Chicago yesterday denied bail for Tahawwur Hussain Rana, co-defendant of David Headley, aka Daood Gilani. Rana is charged with providing material support to terrorists via a planned attack on a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Court found Rana had immigration expertise and a net worth of $1.6 million and was a flight risk. The Government alleged in a brief (available on PACER) that recorded conversations showed Rana knew of the Mumbai attacks before they happened and expressed his approval of them. Rana is not alleged to have participated in the Mumbai attacks. His lawyer argued the recorded conversations were in large part unintelligible and Rana is not a flight risk. [More...]

Ezra Klein writes:

The key to cost control is a politics that forces Congress to make the hard decisions that lead to cost control. Right now, the ranks of the uninsured grow, the cost of insurance rises, and Congress can pretty much ignore the whole thing. The individual mandate controls average premium costs, but more than that, it is the political mechanism for cost control. Kill it, and you've killed our best hope of making the next reform better than this one.

The next reform? Ha! Actually, Ezra has it precisely backwards.The mandate is the bargaining chip necessary for putting health care reform on the table. We are not getting reform in this bill and if you give up the mandate now you will NEVER get reform. [More...]

While something called "health care reform" will be passed, it's pretty clear now that there will be no real reform in the bill. If there is good remaining in the bill, it will be Medicaid expansion and subsidies for less well off person to purchase minimal insurance.

How can you get the good in this bill and still have a chance for health care reform in the future? The mandates are a sticking point of course. They are the lever for the political bargaining that might make health care reform possible in the future. But there are others. Ben Nelson is not done yet and Bart Stupak is still waiting in the House. The problem with the subsidies is that they are going to be channelled through exchanges which will be subject to a Stupak Amendment. The current bill makes that too bitter a pill to swallow I think.

There is a solution to these problems I think. Instead of channeling the subsidies through the exchanges, eliminate the exchanges and make all persons who would have been eligible for the exchanges able to use their subsidies to purchase Medicaid. More . . .

The release of this draft report (pdf)on New York's juvenile justice system should be eye-opening. To call the system failed, horrific and beyond the pale of acceptable policy doesn't begin to describe it.

The New York Times reports here.

The report, prepared by a task force appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson and led by Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, comes three months after a federal investigation found that excessive force was routinely used at four prisons, resulting in injuries as severe as broken bones and shattered teeth. The situation was so serious the Department of Justice, which made the investigation, threatened to take over the system.

The financial aspect is also absurd: New York is spending $210,000 per child to keep these juveniles, more than 50 % of whom were sentenced for misdemeanors, locked up. And,

More than 80 percent were black or Latino, even though blacks and Latinos make up less than half the state’s total youth population — a racial disparity that has never been explained, the report said.

This is a system in crisis, and New York needs to address it -- sooner, rather than later.

Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

Also see Jon Walker's persuasive argument that no bill is better than the Senate bill (the House bill (even without a public option) is clearly superior to the Senate bill and arguably better than the status quo.)

Greenwald mentions this in his article I posted on earlier, a WaPo poll:

Do you think the government should or should not expand Medicare to cover people between the ages of 55 and 64 who do not have health insurance? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

The result is 63% favor, 33% oppose.

Ezra Klein:

[I]f I could construct a system in which insurers spent 90 percent of every premium dollar on medical care, never discriminated against another sick applicant, began exerting real pressure for providers to bring down costs, vastly simplified their billing systems, made it easier to compare plans and access consumer ratings, and generally worked more like companies in a competitive market rather than companies in a non-functional market, I would take that deal.

Me too. Call us when that deal is offered. Of course, Ezra is arguing that that is the deal being offered - "And that may be the exact deal we're getting." It isn't. More . .

"'Health Care Reform' has only suffered a flesh wound." - Village Bloggers (h/t KD commenter.)

As part of the Village Bloggers' attack on Howard Dean, I enjoyed our friend Kevin Drum's turn of phrase:

If healthcare reform dies this year, it dies for a good long time.

If? Oh. I see. The Senate bill is "health care reform" for Kevin. Let's count the reasons why:

Via Glenn Greenwald, Russ Feingold lets one slip:

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold.

Probably true. Here's a little focus on Feingold though - what was he doing to stop this capitulation? He helped nobody by his undermining of the reconciliation strategy. It's great that Feingold has his "noble principles," but what exactly did he do to forward them? Not that much really. Same for Sherrod Brown and all of Ezra's heroes. Lose the war and be crowned a King by the Village. Sheesh.

Speaking for me only

House Democrats introduced an immigration reform bill today that provides a path to legalization for the undocumented. It's called the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (CIR ASAP). In addition to some border security measures, it provides for:

• Improving Conditions of Detention:This section includes measures to: