Research 2000. 3/8-10. Likely voters. MoE 4%, 5% for Democratic primary. (8/10-12/2009 results)

Let's start with the Senate race:

Democratic Primary

Arlen Specter (D) 51 (48)
Joe Sestak (D)    32 (33)

It's all within the margin of error, so it could be just float, but Sestak needs to do more than just tread water. Still, Specter has run the perfect primary, morphing into the most dependable Democratic vote in the Senate, and giving suspicious activists zero ammunition to use against him. Given his record, there's nothing to suggest his great voting record will remain post-primary. In fact, given his record, we could expect to see him turn hard right for the general, and then be a pain in the ass his final six years in the Senate. But it's hard to build an entire narrative along those lines, when everything he does and says is so perfectly designed to appeal favorably to Democrats. It's quite the opposite from what we're seeing from Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas. In the general:

Arlen Specter (D) 47 (45)
Pat Toomey (R)    41 (40)

Joe Sestak (D) 39 (42)
Pat Toomey (R)    42 (41)

Favorable/Unfavorable/No opinion

Arlen Specter (D) 48/42/10 (52/40/8)
Joe Sestak (D)    35/23/42 (37/19/44)
Pat Toomey (R)    41/36/23 (37/34/29)

All of this is float within the margin of error. It's as if nothing happened the last seven months. As could be expected, both Dems crush Philly, dominate the Philly suburbs, and get slaughtered in the middle, Alabama part of the state. Nothing surprising there. What's a little interesting is that Specter beats Toomey by a decent 46-38 in Pittsburgh, while Sestak is deadlocked 38-37 versus Toomey in Steeler country.

Given that Specter runs about 7-10 points stronger across the board, It's hard for Sestak to make an electability argument with numbers like these. What he can do is point to the 44 percent who don't know him, and argue that he has greater upside than Specter. That argument is only valid if he starts improving on that name ID.

In the Governor's race:

Democratic primary

Dan Oronato (D) 19
Joe Hoeffel (D)  12
Jack Wagner (D)    10
Anthony Williams (D) 3
Undecided 56

In other words, it's one big "huh'" None of these candidates have name ID above 50 percent, and only 12 percent of people pretend to have heard of Anthony Williams, a Philly-area state senator. Oronato is Allegheny County Executive, Hoeffel is a former congressman and currently serves on the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, and Wagner is Pennsylvania's Auditor General, a statewide elected office.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett, who is flying the GOP's colors in the governor's race, is also surprisingly unknown for someone twice elected to that job. But he starts with the edge in matchups:

Democratic primary

Dan Oronato (D) 34
Tom Corbett (R)  40

Joe Hoeffel (D) 31
Tom Corbett (R)  41

Jack Wagner (D) 32
Tom Corbett (R)  41

Anthony Williams (D) 19
Tom Corbett (R)  47

Give Corbett the early lean, but it's slight at best. He's a long way to 50 percent. And if you look at the crosstabs, Republicans already support him overwhelmingly (in the 80 percent range). The Democrats, on the other hand, have only locked down 50-60 percent of Democratic support, giving them plenty of room to grow.

Republicans have been lying about reconciliation being the "nuclear option" for weeks. So it should come as no surprise that CQ (subscription) now reports:

Republican aides, reporting the decision, interpreted it to mean the House would have to clear the Senate bill and President Obama would have to sign it before the reconciliation bill could be passed. House leaders had been hoping that the two bills could be passed almost simultaneously.

The parliamentarian, however, later reportedly clarified his position to Senate aides, saying that the reconciliation bill could be written in a way that would not require Obama to sign the Senate bill into law before the reconciliation bill is voted on.

Thank you, and have a pleasant day.

If you don't have a CQ subscription, for now you'll have to settle for Politico's story:

[A]ccording to reporting by POLITICO’s David Rogers, the accounts aren’t accurate and misconstrue what the Senate parliamentarians have said. That is that reconciliation must amend law but this could be done without the Senate bill being enacted first. “It is wholly possible to create law and qualify law before the law is on the books,” said one person familiar with situation.

For example, if the big bill itself amends some Social Security statute, reconciliation could be written to do the same --with changes sought by the House. Then if reconciliation is passed and signed by President Barack Obama after he signs the larger bill, the changes made in reconciliation would prevail.
This jives with what Pulse sources were saying soon after the first wave of stories hit – in essence, don’t take the reported parliamentarian’s declaration to the bank.

In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

FLOOR SCHEDULE FOR FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 2010

House Meets At... 9:00 a.m.: Legislative Business
First Vote Predicted... 9:30 – 10:30 a.m.
Last Vote Predicted... 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

"One Minutes" (5 per side)

H.R. 3650 - Harmful Algal Blooms and Hypoxia Research and Control Amendments Act (Rep. Baird – Science and Technology) (Subject to a Rule)

Postponed Suspension Vote (1 Bill):

Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.

In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

The Senate will not be in session on Friday, March 12.

So, uh... yeah. A Friday suspension. OK. And, well, harmful algal blooms are... harmful. So we're gonna want to do something about that. I don't know that it was something we wanted to do on a Friday, but everyone else has to work, so what the hell, eh'

The Senate is... what' They're not working' Damn it! I knew this was a stupid idea!

Fine! No committee meetings, then! Screw you all, I'm doing this algae thing and then I'm going home!

Oh, by the way, Adriel Bettelheim, Managing Editor at Congressional Quarterly, Tweets this:

Senate parliamentarian telling hill staff that GOP aides misinterpreted his opinion on health care + reconciliation process. #hcr

So, you know, I'm kinda curious about that.

Ruth Marcus:

Chief Justice Roberts is a big crybaby

Gotta love that headline.

Mark Silva:

The level of disapproval, interestingly, does not represent a record high in Gallup's daily tracking -- that was 48 percent, in late January. But 46-percent approval marks a new low for the president by Gallup's count, by one notch. Other polls have measured lower nadirs, others higher -- Obama's approval has held at 53 percent in a new AP-GFK poll -- but we've showcased Gallup for some time for its neutrality and for the convenience of comparing its measurements of past presidents for six decades.

Gallup itself says Obama's numbers are pretty steady if you look at the weekly numbers.

Speaking of polls, this is from playing with pollster.com's graphs (long time readers know I like to set sensitivity up high, and look at the Big Mo.)

Daniel Gross:

The bogus Republican claim that Obamacare is a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy

First, the proposed health care reform does not take over the system in any sense. Much to the chagrin of progressives, the bills under consideration don't contain a public option and don't provide for a single payer. In fact, they provide subsidies for millions of people to purchase private insurance...

In pretty much every year of the Bush administration, the government "took over" a greater chunk of the health care sector. And many of the Republicans who are complaining about reform proposals today didn't utter a peep. In fact, they helped the process along by voting for the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003. ...

So, to reiterate, we're already half way toward fully socialized medicine. The government has already taken over one-twelfth of the economy—and more every day. That's the status quo the opponents of reform are defending.  

David Brooks:

Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term.

This explanation is as far off as any, since it glosses over the disaster that was Bush's first term, and doesn't acknowledge the foreign policy nonsense from the Cheneys and other Bush dead-enders. There's certainly more consternation over economic policy and coddling Wall Street.

Charlie Cook:

So when is news that appears to be good for a party not really something it should cheer about' This week may have been just such a time, after the Gallup Poll released a national survey showing Democrats with a 3-point advantage, 47 percent to 44 percent, on the generic congressional ballot test...

But as Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport pointed out in releasing the results on Tuesday, "Republicans generally are more likely to vote in midterm elections than are Democrats, usually giving the former an advantage among likely voters." Over the years, Gallup has found that when it converts from registered to likely voters, support for Democrats usually drops about 4 points.

It needs to improve. But the election is not today.

Ron Brownstein:

As the final health care votes approach, the Democrats' enduring dream of covering the uninsured rests mostly with Democratic lawmakers more concerned about controlling costs than expanding access.

These fiscally conservative, center-right members of Congress will likely cast the determining votes, especially in the House. Inevitably, they must decide whether they can sell the plan nearing completion to swing voters in their closely contested districts. But even if these Democrats cross that threshold, they also must decide whether the plan is more likely to slow or accelerate the crushing rise in health care spending. "There is risk either way," says Len Nichols, director of George Mason University's Center for Health Policy Research. "There is risk if you [pass it], and there is risk if you don't."

But the risk if you don't is greater, both fiscally and politically.

Tom Engelhardt writes Premature Withdrawal: Washington’s Cult of Narcissism and Iraq:

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years.  Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.  And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded'  In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better.  In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.    

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us.  After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they’ve done best in recent years: cut one another’s throats'    

Modesty in Washington'  Humility'  The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience'  None of the above is evidently appropriate for "the indispensable nation," as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to "see further into the future."  None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us.

An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners are now calling for the Obama administration to alter its plans, negotiated in the last months of the Bush administration, for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.  They seem to have taken Albright’s belief in American foresight -- even prophesy -- to heart and so are basing their arguments on their ability to divine the future.

The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be happening in the present, Iraq’s future prospects are terrifying, making leaving, if not inconceivable, then as massively irresponsible (as former Washington Post correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed) as invading in the first place.  Without the U.S. military on hand, we’re told, the Iraqis will almost certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into major civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, possibly of the sort that convulsed their country in 2005-2006 when, by the way, the U.S. military was present in force. ...

In Iraq, only one thing is really known: after our invasion and with U.S. and allied troops occupying the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did descend into the charnel house of history, into a monumental bloodbath.  It happened in our presence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to us.

But why should the historical record -- the only thing we can, in part, rely on -- be taken into account when our pundits and strategists have such privileged access to an otherwise unknown future'  In the year to come, based on what we’re seeing now, such arguments may intensify.  Terrible prophesies about Iraq’s future without us may multiply.  And make no mistake, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq.  They could happen while we are there.  They could happen with us gone.  But history delivers its surprises more regularly than we imagine -- even in Iraq.

In the meantime, it’s worth keeping in mind that not even Americans can occupy the future.  It belongs to no one.

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:

Until recently, Claude Allen was the Assistant to the President of the United States for Domestic Policy. Allen is, or was, one of the darlings of the religious right led by the likes of James Dobson and his Focus on the Family. Allen was a big abstinence only crusader and led several assaults on AIDS service organizations as well. This paragon of moral values was recruited by Karl Rove. A couple of days ago, Claude Allen was arrested in connection with a massive shoplifter and refund operation.

Tonight's Rescue is brought to you by Got a Grip, ItsJessMe, jlms qkw, Shayera, watercarrier4diogenes, and YatPundit, with ybruti editing.

terryhallinan examines a couple of vehicles powered by heaping piles of...various stuff...in Biomass Is Developing A Head of Steam. (YatPundit)

hiphoplawyers outlines how corporate influence has led to a culture of Legal Abandon: How Corporate Tort Reform Trashed the Economy. (Got a Grip)

BorderJumpers tells us about someone who is one of only five opposition voices in a country of thirteen million people, in In Zimbabwe, the Voice of the Worker. (ItsJessMe)

otto shares the joy of identifying what he loves and then doing it in Teaching is my Life and My Job. (Got a Grip)

rturner229 shares A tribute to a middle school principal. (shayera)

MsSpentyouth describes a conversation with a health care consultant, in Q: "Who's your medical provider'" A: Schrödinger's Cat. (ItsJessMe)

veritas curat ponders the cost of our societal bent toward greed and instant gratification as it pertains to Justice and Population Biology. (Got a Grip)

In response to veritas curat's diary, vahana unites some hard realities and their possible solutions in "Justice and Population Biology" and HCR. (jlms qkw)

jotter has High Impact Diaries: March 10, 2010.

IrishPatti has tonight's Top Comments Attack of Insomnia Edition.

Please join us in this open thread by suggesting your own favorite diaries from today and sharing the latest news.

Disgusting:

Glaad reports that sponsors have “refused to allow” American figure skater Johnny Weir to join the Stars on Ice Tour because they deemed him “not family friendly.” While Weir — a three-time national champion — has never “officially announced his sexual orientation, he has garnered a significant amount of LGBT fans” and is also known for his flashy costumes. Weir won an online poll that asked fans who they wanted to see in the tour, but Stars on Ice seems to have barred him because of his “perceived sexual orientation”.

And as is so often the case, bigoted homophobes wouldn't know family-friendly if it bit them on the ass:

To say that Weir is “not family friendly” would be a clear jab at his perceived sexual orientation. Weir is extremely involved with his family. He is putting his younger brother through college, and supports the family financially because his father’s disability prohibits him from working. Weir’s dedication to his family can be clearly documented in the Sundance series, Be Good Johnny Weir, which follows him and his family and friends through his life and career as a championship skater.

In case you missed it, the Bunning travesty of last week ended relatively happily yesterday, at least in the big picture of Senate battles.

The Senate approved $140 billion in extended tax breaks and unemployment benefits on Wednesday in a largely partisan vote.

The bill was approved on a 62-36 vote, with six Republicans joining most Democrats in backing it....

Most of the cost in the bill approved by the Senate goes toward prolonging increased levels of federal unemployment aid and COBRA healthcare benefits for the jobless through the end of December. The cost of those extensions is about $80 billion.

The House has some issues with this bill, namely that it doesn't include the infrastructure spending and aid to states and localities that were included in the $154 billion bill passed last December by the House, and that it relies heavily on tax cuts. Reid says he will bring up a jobs bill that includes those measures eventually, but given the pace of the Senate, the House seems skeptical.

As for the bill the Senate just passed, "Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said it’s “an open question” whether House members will force a conference to resolve differences between the two chambers." But what the forward movement on this bill shows is that, at least on jobs, Republican obstruction can be broken.

Greg Sargent gets the results of MoveOn's survey of its membership on whether MoveOn should support passing President Obama's health care reform plan:

Should MoveOn support or oppose the final health care bill if it looks like the plan recently proposed by President Obama'

Support - 83%
Oppose - 17%

That's about as emphatic an endorsement as you're going to see. Now it's up to the House and the Senate to finish up their work and get this thing passed into law.

It looks like the F.B.I.'s criminal probe of John Ensign (R-NV) is bearing some fruit:

Previously undisclosed e-mail messages turned over to the F.B.I. and Senate ethics investigators provide new evidence about Senator John Ensign’s efforts to steer lobbying work to the embittered husband of his former mistress and could deepen his legal and political troubles.

Mr. Ensign, Republican of Nevada, suggested that a Las Vegas development firm hire the husband, Douglas Hampton, after it had sought the senator’s help on several energy projects in 2008, according to e-mail messages and interviews with company executives.

The messages are the first written records from Mr. Ensign documenting his efforts to find clients for Mr. Hampton, a top aide and close friend, after the senator had an affair with his wife, Cynthia Hampton. They appear to undercut the senator’s assertion that he did not know the work might involve Congressional lobbying, which could violate a federal ban on such activities by staff members for a year after leaving government.

According to Ensign's spokeswoman:

Senator Ensign has consistently acted in an ethical manner to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

No word on whether Mrs. Ensign agrees.

And for more on John Ensign's woes, check out Steve Benen's excellent article on the traditional media's double standard when it comes to Republican sex scandals.

In the best news all day category, House leadership has washed their hands of Stupak. There really wasn't any way around it, since he refused to budge. But it also suggests that leadership doesn't think the 12 supporters Stupak has claimed are firm in their support of him.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the leadership will press ahead without reworking the abortion provision adopted by the Senate. Abortion opponents say the provision falls short in restricting taxpayer dollars for abortion coverage.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., has been pushing for stricter provisions and says he and a dozen or so abortion opponents would vote against the health care bill if the Senate's version is retained. Leaders will try to peel off some of those lawmakers and make up for any remaining deficit with Democrats who opposed the health care legislation on the first round, when it passed 220-215.

"Many of the pro-life members are going to support passage of the health care bill," Waxman predicted. "They're either satisfied enough with the Senate provision, or they decide that that's as much as they're going to get and they don't want to defeat health care."

Dday has been keeping a whip count and has the current numbers at 189 yes, 202 no. With Massa's resignation, the magic number in the House is 216.

The latest dispatch from Tokyo Rose McConnell comes via subscription only Roll Call:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

It's amazing that the parliamentarian, who does not talk to the press, is reported by anonymous Republicans to have verbally told Republicans exactly what those Republicans wanted Democrats to hear.

Could it be true' Sure.

But it's also the opposite of what former Senate parliamentarian Bob Dove said, and he said it on the record:

Dove says the Dems' planned use of reconciliation is highly unusual. "I've never seen a two-bill strategy" where reconciliation is used to fix another piece of legislation, he says. "It's permissible, I've just never seen it."

Why would he say that' Because the law appears to say so, too:

§ 641. Reconciliation

(a) Inclusion of reconciliation directives in concurrent resolutions on the budget
A concurrent resolution on the budget for any fiscal year, to the extent necessary to effectuate the provisions and requirements of such resolution, shall—
  (1) specify the total amount by which—
         (A) new budget authority for such fiscal year;
         (B) budget authority initially provided for prior fiscal years;
         (C) new entitlement authority which is to become effective during such fiscal year; and
         (D) credit authority for such fiscal year,
contained in laws, bills, and resolutions within the jurisdiction of a committee, is to be changed and direct that committee to determine and recommend changes to accomplish a change of such total amount;

As does the Congressional Research Service (PDF):

Congress and the President could use reconciliation procedures to quickly make any adjustments in existing law or pending legislation that were required to achieve budget policies as they changed between the adoption of the spring and fall budget resolutions.

Could the current Senate parliamentarian just see things the exact opposite of the way the former parliamentarian sees it' And opposite the way the law appears to read' And opposite the way CRS reads it'

Sure.

But Republican Senate aides, who want more than anything to avoid the use of reconciliation, would prefer that you just stop asking. Thanks!

UPDATE: The strongest case, in my view, for what's purported to be the parliamentarian's insistence that the reconciliation bill address current law rather than pending legislation is that the instructions authorizing the use of the expedited process contained in the FY10 budget resolution call for "changes in laws," and not changes in "laws, bills and resolutions" as the Budget Act appears to allow.

I have three more things to say about that:

So it seems at least reasonable to me that we spend some time probing the latest Conrad assertion. At least if we think that having the option of passing reconciliation first helps net Democrats any votes for passage of the Senate bill in the House. If not, then perhaps there's little point in the exercise. But if there are votes that can be moved this way, then yeah, it probably pays to know what you do and don't actually have to do.

UPDATE 2: Adriel Bettelheim, Managing Editor at Congressional Quarterly, Tweets this:

Senate parliamentarian telling hill staff that GOP aides misinterpreted his opinion on health care + reconciliation process. #hcr

So, you know, I'm kinda curious about that.

UPDATE 3: CQ (subscription) now reports:

Republican aides, reporting the decision, interpreted it to mean the House would have to clear the Senate bill and President Obama would have to sign it before the reconciliation bill could be passed. House leaders had been hoping that the two bills could be passed almost simultaneously.

The parliamentarian, however, later reportedly clarified his position to Senate aides, saying that the reconciliation bill could be written in a way that would not require Obama to sign the Senate bill into law before the reconciliation bill is voted on.

Glenn Beck tells his radio audience about an amazing conversation he had with a Fox News executive. The key quote:

I was in this meeting and I pulled one of the guys out, he’s a vice president of Fox. And I said, "When I first started working with you — let’s have a frank conversation here — you thought I was nuts."

And he smiled and he said, "No, I would say I just thought you were on the cutting edge."

And I said, "okay, alright, sure." I said.

"Now'" he said, "Glenn, everything you’re talking about is coming. Everything you’re talking about — everything you’ve been talking about for the last year and a half. It’s all here now. And what you’re saying is coming, I don’t see any other way."

Beck went on to say that the executive told him "we have to convince the audience that this is really truly true."

So what is the "this" that the Fox executive wants Beck to convince people is true' None other than Beck's crazy theories like his week-long special from last August claiming that "America is burning to the ground."

If you didn't see it, it was a perfect encapsulation of Beck's lunacy...lunacy that apparently Fox execs want him to convince his audience is "really truly true."

Beck's big problem is that his fantasies aren't grounded in reality. At some point, his bubble will burst -- things that aren't sustainable just aren't sustainable. Don't ask me...ask Morton Downey, Jr. All bad things come to an end.

While the worst of the layoffs in the private sector are over, we're on the cusp of major layoffs, furloughs and paycuts in the public sector as states and municipalities face revenue shortfalls that could total more than $350 billion in the next two years. State and local payrolls have already been trimmed by 191,000 jobs from August 2008 until January 2010. How bad the situation may become is illustrated by a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued pink slips Friday to 17,000 of the city's 26,000 workers. Most will be rehired for a shorter workweek amounting to a 6.25% pay cut. Los Angeles has begun cutting 4000 city workers from its payroll. And it's the same from Abilene, Texas, to Columbia, South Carolina.

Rep. George Miller is seeking support in the Democratic Caucus for his Local Jobs for America Act, H.R. 4812, a two-year $100 billion that he hopes will leverage a million public and private sector jobs. It's precisely the kind of medicine the economy needs. But Republicans and deficit hawks among the Democrats aren't likely to find it to their liking. The details of the proposal, which Miller put together with the help of mayors from around the country, include:

 • $75 billion over two years to local communities to hire vital staff
 • Funding for 50,000 on-the-job private-sector training positions

The bill also includes provisions already approved by the House:

 • $23 billion this year to help states support 250,000 education jobs
 • $1.18 billion to put 5,500 law enforcement officers on the beat
 • $500 million to retain, rehire, and hire firefighters

The Economic Policy Institute said of Miller's proposal:

Misguided critics will undoubtedly say we can’t afford legislation like this, but they are wrong. The fact is that the costs of inaction to our future prosperity are far greater than the cost of this bill. The best first step toward reducing the deficit is to get people back to work, since high deficits will be with us as long as high unemployment is.

Misguided critics, indeed. If anybody should be keeping their powder dry at the moment, it's deficit hawks and peacocks. Under the best of circumstances, it will take a minimum of three years to employ as many Americans as were working in December 2007 when the Great Recession began. Doing nothing to help curb tens of thousands of public sector layoffs will delay that process even further.

Imagine my surprise to discover the same stalkers showing up at the BBC who showed up at Dangerous Minds and Boing Boing, spewing the same hate speech: BBC - Blogworld - Best International Blogs: USA: Charles Johnson.

I really do live inside their heads. It’s pretty comfortable there, once you get over the slightly unpleasant smell of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Excuse me while I microwave some popcorn in their temporal lobes.

It’s almost too easy to mock Glenn Beck and his few remaining idiotic advertisers, but Stephen Colbert makes it look even easier.

As I read over the list of organizations to whom President Obama is going to donate his $1.4 million Nobel Prize money, the question that occurs to me is: how are the wingnut blogs going to spin this to demonize Obama' President Obama, Feeling Charitable in a Nobel Way.

We probably won’t have to wait too long to find out.

Mitt Romney in 1994:

… As a nation we recognize the right of all people to believe as they want, and not to impose our beliefs on other people. I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a US Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice. And my personal beliefs like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.

Mitt Romney in 2010:

I never really called myself pro-choice.

Mitt Romney’s position on abortion has devolved, as he increasingly panders to the religious right for votes. It’s a sign of how extreme the Republican Party has become; Romney knows that in the current climate, his political career in the GOP will be finished if he holds to his earlier principled stance.

UPDATE at 3/11/10 12:41:29 pm:

Uh oh.

“I think I’ve made it very clear. I was pro-choice, or effectively pro-choice, when I ran in 1994.”

(Hat tip: simoom.)

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog has some interesting information about white supremacist blogger Robert Stacy McCain — who is apparently writing for the Washington Times again (in addition to posting articles at Pajamas Media and Hot Air).

Robert Stacy McCain, a former key Washington Times editor who has suggested that “perfectly rational people” react with “altogether natural revulsion” to interracial marriage, apparently has returned as a free-lancer to the newspaper he left in January 2008. In a “Special to The Washington Times” article published today, McCain covers a congressional race in upstate New York involving a candidate with connections to the Tea Party movement.

A casualty of the housecleaning that occurred at the Times three years ago, McCain left the paper on his own accord after managing editor Fran Coombs, with whom he was close, was terminated (Coombs had his own connections to white supremacy).

Once identified as a member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, McCain’s reporting while at the Times was always controversial. As editor of the “Culture Briefs” section of the paper, McCain used excerpts from racist publications including American Renaissance magazine and the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. In fact, McCain may be the only mainstream newspaper reporter to have covered four American Renaissance conferences. Twice, he offered no description at all of the group he was covering, which is devoted to race science. Once, he said it was “critical of liberal positions on race and immigration.” Only in 2004 did he note that some viewed it as racist.

Breaching journalist ethics by reporting on causes he was personally involved in, McCain regularly quoted neo-Confederate activists favorably in his stories. In 2005, stories freelanced by McCain to the website of the conservative newspaper Human Events were scrubbed after that publication’s editor, Thomas Winter, was given information by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report about McCain’s racism.

The enormous Chilean earthquake last month not only shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the length of a day, it actually moved the city of Concepción 10 feet to the west.

Studying precise GPS images of the area struck by the quake, a team led by earth scientist Mike Bevis discovered that the Chilean city of Concepción had moved 10 feet to the west. The epicenter of the quake was 71 miles northeast of Concepción, which is Chile’s second largest city.

The effect was widespread: The capital city, Santiago, was wrenched 11 inches west-southwest, while Beunos Aires, located nearly 800 miles from the epicenter, jumped an inch to the west. The earthquake was the fifth largest ever to be recorded by seismographs and even caused far-off areas like Fortaleza, Brazil and the Falkland Islands to change location slightly.

UPDATE at 3/11/10 10:05:50 am:

And the continental plates are still shifting: More quakes hit Chile as new president takes over.

SANTIAGO, Chile – A series of strong aftershocks from last month’s devastating quake rocked Chile on Thursday as a new president was sworn into office and immediately urged coastal residents to move to higher ground in case of a tsunami.

The strongest aftershock, with a magnitude of 6.9, was nearly as strong as the quake that devastated Haiti’s capital on Jan. 12. There were no immediate reports of damages or injuries.

Richard Metzger has posted part 2 of his interview with me: Dangerous Minds | Charles Johnson: Why I Parted Ways with the Right (Part II).

Richard includes these comments:

Charles Johnson joined me for a discussion of the right wing flame war directed at him, the Darwin-hating, know-nothing Creationists and the frenzied insanity (and racism) of the anti-Obama right. Part one is here. In case you are wondering if some of the comments are being removed, they are. Some of them go too far. We didn’t pull them because Charles asked us to. We’ve removed them because they don’t belong here, okay'

(And of course, the ranters are already at it in the comments for part 2 of the video. They hate me — they really hate me!)

“For the first time in his life, Paterson is gonna be a massa.”

Fox News is going to be heavily pimping the “founding fathers were Christian fundamentalists” canard tonight, courtesy of Michelle Malkin, James Dobson (Malkin does her interviews from Dobson’s TV studio), and Sean Hannity:

michellemalkin: Will be on @hannityshow on FNC tonite 930pm Eastern to talk Texas educ stds/txtbook controversy. @seanhannity

Why is there suddenly a push to promote this revisionist nonsense' Because the Texas State Board of Education is holding hearings on the state’s social studies curriculum, and Governor Rick Perry has stacked the board with religious fundamentalists dedicated to ruining the minds of Texas schoolchildren.

The Texas Freedom Network has been live-blogging today’s hearings, if you’d like to see the kind of garbage Fox News defends.

UPDATE at 3/10/10 6:57:06 pm:

Malkin may have gotten bumped off the show in favor of yet another discussion about the incredible wonderfulness of tea parties. Meanwhile, the Texas State Board of Education continues their important work of revising the history of the United States to be more like something the founding fathers would have abhorred.

Via Joshua Green at The Atlantic, here’s the latest info about the man Glenn Beck said was going to change the course of American history (before saying he was a fraud the next day): Eric Massa’s Navy Files.

According to Peter Clarke, a Navy shipmate, Massa was notorious for making unwanted advances toward subordinates. He tells the story of his friend Stuart Borsch, with whom Massa shared a hotel room while on leave during the first Gulf War. “Stuart’s at the edge of the bed,” Clarke says Borsch told him at the time, “and [Massa] starts massaging him. Massa said, ‘You’ll have to get one of my special massages.’ He called them ‘Massa Massages.’” Ron Moss, a Navy shipmate and Borsch’s roommate, confirmed that Borsch told him this story at the time.

Borsch, now a history professor at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, didn’t addresss that specific incident, but did confirm to me in an email that he was groped by Massa: “In 1990, aboard the U.S.S. Jouett, I was awakened when a senior officer, Lt. Commander Massa, seemed to be groping me. (I was a lieutenant at the time.) I believe he may have been drinking. I shouted at him and he left. I mentioned the incident to several other officers. I did not officially report it.”

Clarke says that Massa’s roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. “Tom lived on upper bunk,” Clarke say. “When you’re on ship, you’re almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do—you never crawl up on somebody else’s bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him.”

Snorkel him' I don’t even want to know what that means.

(Hat tip: torrentprime.)

Rachel Maddow has been doing some excellent investigative work looking into the secretive religious-political group known as “The Family,” and their connections to the “C Street House” where anti-choice health care opponent Rep. Bart Stupak lived until very recently.

I’ve had serious differences of opinion with Media Matters blogger Eric Boehlert in the past, but his latest piece on the desperately absurd efforts of the right wing blogosphere to label Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell as a “left winger” is right on the money: The Pentagon shooter, insurrectionism, and right-wing bloggers.

On the one hand, right-wing media love mainstreaming vile, alarmist, anti-government rhetoric. Yet they’re also hyper-sensitive to the charge that they’re, y’know, mainstreaming vile, alarmist anti-government rhetoric and might also be goading some crazies into action. Consumed with Obama Derangement Syndrome, ‘wingers literally cannot help themselves. Just this weekend, one prominent, albeit unhinged, right-wing site branded Obama as “suicide-bomber-in-chief.” They’ve removed all sensible filters, which means the crazy talk flows 24-7.

Similar to the problematic birther brigade, the right-wing’s crazy uncle who keeps showing up at public functions, radical insurrectionist rhetoric (i.e. war may have to be waged against the government) has been unleashed into the far-right masses and there’s nothing that supposed leaders can do to contain it. They can’t limit the violence that it continues to set off, either. Instead they scramble, like after last week’s Pentagon attack, to shift the blame to the political left.

But the clumsy scapegoating doesn’t work for obvious reasons: There are no major American liberal players, in media or politics, who today routinely preach the need to take up arms against the federal government. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson certainly couldn’t point to any in his laugh-out-loud funny rewriting of history, in which he dutifully absolved the right-wing of any responsibility for anti-government violence, and instead blamed liberals. …

Bloggers also pointed to the fact that Bedell was reportedly a registered Democrat as more proof of his allegiance to the left. But that doesn’t make much sense, either. Are bloggers really suggesting that no registered Democrats have attended anti-government Tea Party rallies this year' Haven’t Tea Party leaders been bragging about how they’re attracting a wide range of disaffected voters' And in fact, haven’t Tea Party leaders been stressing how wrong it is to assume the movement is synonymous with the Republican Party' But suddenly a distant political registration proves all.

For the record, I’m not suggesting that Bedell was a dedicated Glenn Beck fan, or that Rush Limbaugh made him do it. I think the specifics of this case are too muddled for those kinds of conclusions. But the idea that panicked right-wing bloggers can turn Bedell into a tree-hugging Greenpeace activist is ludicrous. The allegation doesn’t withstand scrutiny, simply because dangerous, anti-government rhetoric is not part of today’s liberal dialogue.

It is however, a proud cornerstone of the conservative one.

Unfortunately, very true.

Paul Coletti of the BBC’s Blogworld site interviewed me via webcam a few days ago, and the video is now up: BBC - Blogworld - Best International Blogs: USA: Charles Johnson.

BBC Video

Another big success today in the global war against Islamic terrorism, as Indonesia’s president confirms that another of the leaders of the terror cell that perpetrated the Bali nightclub bombings has been killed in a police raid.

(Reuters) - A leading Southeast Asian militant, wanted for the 2002 Bali bombings, was the man killed in police raids in Jakarta, Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Wednesday.

“Today I can announce to you that after a successful police raid against the terrorists hiding out in Jakarta yesterday, we can confirm that one of those that was killed was Dulmatin, one of the top Southeast Asian terrorists,” Yudhoyono said in a speech in Australia’s parliament house in Canberra.

Indonesian police shot dead Dulmatin, wanted in the suicide bombings that ripped apart two night clubs in Bali that killed 202 people, and two others in a series of coordinated raids in southern Jakarta on Tuesday.

The raids are a coup in the country’s fight against Islamist radicals ahead of a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama later this month.

(Language warning. NSFW.)

A public service announcement from Glenn Beck. Apply directly to the forehead.

Here’s an open thread as we rub our hands in glee waiting for the Glenn Beck show to begin.

The big questions: will Eric Massa even show up' Will he throw a fit and stalk off the set' Will Glenn Beck go nuclear on Massa about the groping investigation' (He pretty much has to, to keep any street cred with the kookosphere.)

Will Massa muss Beck’s hair'

Good grief. Is this story ever blowing up in Glenn Beck’s face: Massa under investigation for allegedly groping male staffers.

Former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has been under investigation for allegations that he groped multiple male staffers working in his office, according to three sources familiar with the probe.

The allegations surrounding the former lawmaker date back at least a year, and involve “a pattern of behavior and physical harassment,” according to one source. The new claims of alleged groping contradict statements by Massa, who resigned his office on Monday after it became public that he was the subject of a House ethics committee investigation for possible harassment.

Massa had said that the allegations were limited to his use of “salty language” with his staff.

At the Boston Review, Ned Block and Philip Kitcher have an excellent piece on a new book titled “What Darwin Got Wrong,” that tries to cast doubt on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by approaching the subject from a philosophical standpoint: Misunderstanding Darwin.

Since the science isn’t in question, it makes sense that attempts to discredit evolutionary science don’t actually involve, you know, science. The interesting thing about the book, though, is that the authors aren’t the usual fundamentalist religious fanatics, but materialists. (Or so they say.)

… Even as some scientists suggest that natural selection may be limited in ways Darwin could not envisage, they accept his basic insights and work to improve our biological understanding within the framework he set forth.

In their controversial new book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini set out to dismantle that framework. They argue that standard evolutionary thinking—what they call Darwinism—is guilty of a basic logical error, not a mistake in biology but an “intensional fallacy.” That fallacy, they say, undermines the entire enterprise. To be clear, the authors preface their demolition with a disclaimer: in attacking Darwin, they are not supporting any religious view of “origins”; thoroughgoing materialists, they do not think that biological patterns require an intelligent designer. But their criticisms are intended to knock evolutionary theory from its scientific pedestal by demolishing the scientific credentials of natural selection.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are not biologists. Fodor is a leading philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist, best known for his ideas about the modularity of mind and language of thought; Piattelli-Palmarini is a cognitive scientist. They do not have new data, new theory, close acquaintance with the everyday practice of evolutionary investigations, or any interest in supplying alternative explanations of evolutionary phenomena. Instead, they wield philosophical tools to locate a “conceptual fault line” in contemporary Darwinism. Apparently unshaken by withering criticism of Fodor’s earlier writings about evolutionary theory, they write with complete assurance, confident that their limited understanding of biology suffices for their critical purpose. The resulting argument is doubly flawed: it is biologically irrelevant and philosophically confused. We start with the biology.

Read the whole thing and give your cerebral cortex some exercise. This review kind of made me want to read the book, just to see if it’s as bad as Block and Kitcher say it is. (Boo! There’s no Kindle version yet.)

PZ Myers also has an interesting post, responding to a summary of the book published in New Scientist. (He’s not fond of it either.)

Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck have a right wing slap fight over Beck’s decision to have wacko Democrat apostate Eric Massa on his show, and it gets pretty nasty.

This is what happens when your entire ideology is based on crazy hatred. People like Glenn Beck aren’t making rational decisions — they’re seizing on whatever comes up to make the “other side” look bad, and in the process beclowning themselves.

(Hat tip: Killgore.)

And here’s a good post by Bob Lonsberry on Eric Massa’s cynical shell game.

Eric Massa is a snake.

But he is a brilliant snake.

And in one of the most audacious p.r. moves ever, he has conned Limbaugh, Drudge and Beck – and untold millions of Americans. From a little radio studio beside a swamp, with the help of a couple of deluded backwoods yokels, he has made himself a national star.

It is astounding.

And proof that in American politics, it’s not how big your lie is, it’s how loud you can yell.

And so it is that Eric Massa, who fled the Congress out of fear of what Ethics Committee investigators would find out about him, has wrapped himself in the robes of a patriot martyr.

A guy who – until yesterday – belonged to the House Progressive Caucus has, with one nicely disseminated rant, transformed himself into a conservative darling. Limbaugh and Beck have trumpeted him, and Beck has promised him an entire hour of national television tonight. Massa opposed Obamacare because it wasn’t liberal enough – because it didn’t entirely nationalize health care with a single-payer system – and Beck is about to crown him queen of the tea party.

It is a media move of astounding proportion. It takes spin to a whole new level.

And it shows Massa to be a genius.

And, if anybody’s paying attention, a liar.

But, nobody is paying attention, and his con is working.

(Hat tip: avanti.)

A Catholic preschool in Boulder Colorado has refused to admit a child with gay parents.

What can you even say about an appalling story like this' Punishing the innocent doesn’t seem like something Jesus would have approved of.

BOULDER, Colo. — A preschooler is caught in the middle of a fight between religion and sexuality. Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, in Boulder, has refused to readmit a preschooler because the child has two moms. Her parents are lesbians.

“God and Jesus would not allow discrimination in that way,” said Joellen Raderstorf, one of about two dozen demonstrators who turned out at Sunday’s church service.

Most of the protesters stood silently, across the street, holding signs. One read “God loves all people.” Some of them went inside during mass. The priest addressed the situation in his sermon.

“He feels like it’s a calling to be strict with upholding the Catholic principles,” said Dave Ensign, president of the Board of Directors of Boulder Pride, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender organization.

“People who understand the Catholic teaching will understand why the decision was made,” said Fabien Ardila, a member of the parish.

Mandolin maestro Chris Thile’s latest band is called Punch Brothers, and here’s a beautifully twisted song from their album Punch. [iTunes]

A comment posted at YouTube:

the album “Punch” outlines the story of Chris Thile’s divorce… it opens with this song, Punch Bowl… IF you listen to the words, you find out that this song is about the night his (then) wife went to a party and got drunk on punch… she then slept with some fellow…

the dissonant chords are when the song is about her…. when they go to the pretty “Major” chords… that’s him speaking from his point of view….

it truly is genius…. go buy the album…. then you’ll understand….

I don’t know if the rest is accurate, but I completely agree on the last point. This is a recording you need to hear if you like music; its roots are in bluegrass, but Thile and his gifted acoustic band are doing something entirely new.

It might take several listens to get (it did for me), but the best music is often like that.

The wingnut blogosphere is in full shrieking harpy mode over Glenn Beck’s statement about anti-Muslim Dutch MP Geert Wilders (who wants to ban the Koran and make Islam itself illegal).

This is one of those Bizarro days, because I actually find myself agreeing with Glenn Beck. Geert Wilders is a far right ideologue, and the European far right does often equal fascism. How the heck did Beck ever get this one right'

Of course, he also confuses Dominique de Villepin (a leftist-centist by US standards) with Jean-Marie Le Pen (a far right Holocaust denier by anyone’s standards), so it could have been a shot in the dark.

Blatant hypocrisy — it’s spelled P-A-L-I-N: Sarah Palin sees eye-to-eye with Albertans in Calgary speech.

The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic'”

Good thing the “death panels” didn’t get her; we would have been deprived of Palin’s great wisdom.

LGF reader Killgore Trout points out that the wingnut blogs are trying to spin this by saying Canada didn’t switch to single payer health care until 1966 — but that’s highly misleading (as usual):

In 1957, the federal government passed the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act to fund 50% of the cost of such programs for any provincial government that adopted them. The HIDS Act outlined five conditions: public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability, and accessibility. These remain the pillars of the Canada Health Act.

By 1961, all ten provinces had agreed to start HIDS Act programs. In Saskatchewan, the act meant that half of their current program would now be paid for by the federal government.

UPDATE at 3/8/10 3:41:40 pm:

LGF reader Jadespring adds:

She was born in Idaho in 1964 and move to Alaska when she was an infant. Single payer came in 1966. So in order for the defenders ‘defense’ to work she’d have to be talking about a very, very small window of time.

Does this qualify as a mild form of child abuse: teaching children to distrust science and believe lies'

I think it does. I don’t believe it’s appropriate to try to stop these parents (through legislation) from destroying their children’s ability to think critically, but it’s not hard to make a case that this kind of Dark Ages indoctrination is very bad for the United States. Evangelical homeschoolers are raising a generation of kids who are “culture warriors,” spreading a message of ignorance and superstition, in an age when science and technology are vitally important.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn’t taken a friend’s advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old’s biology lessons.

Mule’s precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth’s excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin’s theory.

“I thought she was going to have a coronary,” Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. “She’s like, ‘This is not true!’”

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.”

“The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians,” said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.”

And if you want to see how widespread and irrational this anti-science craziness is on the religious right, check out this thread of comments at the dependably insane Free Republic.

Remember the story last week about California State Senator Roy Ashburn, the Republican “family values” anti-gay politician who was arrested for driving drunk after leaving a Sacramento gay nightclub with an “unidentified male'”

Well, today, Ashburn uncloseted himself: Capitol Alert: Sen. Roy Ashburn: ‘I’m gay’.

“I’m gay,” Ashburn told KERN radio host Inga Barks in an interview this morning. “Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long.”

“For so long” is right; for years Ashburn voted against every gay rights bill that crossed his desk, while carrying on a secret gay lifestyle. His excuse:

Ashburn said on the radio show: “My votes reflect the wishes of the people in my district. I have always felt that my faith and allegiance was to the people, there, in the district, my constituents. And so as each of these individual measures came before the Legislature I cast ‘no’ votes, usually ‘no’ votes, because the measures were … almost always acknowledging rights or assigning identification to homosexual persons.”

That said, if you must read about healthcare -- particularly, if you must read non-NRO content --  then I think this should be the last thing you read for a while. Tevi Troy has written a monster, omnibus essay for Commentary on the history of health care as a political and policy issue.

Anyway, was the Keep America Safe ad too strident' Maybe. Reasonable people can differ on that.  But on the general question of whether it's permissible in a democratic society to criticize lawyers for the kinds of clients they take, I'm baffled as to how this suddenly became a serious debate. And on the question of whether it is legitimate to question the past clients of lawyers working in the Justice Department, all I can say is "huh'"

Take the first point. When did lawyers become this infallible priesthood of do-gooders' As a general rule, mob lawyers are somewhat less admirable than, say, first amendment lawyers. Personal injury lawyers understandably get less respect than civil rights lawyers. I spent much of the 1990s listening to liberals like James Carville demonize dirty, filthy, "tobacco lawyers." Of course, honorable lawyers sometimes pick unsavory or unpopular clients on principle. I think reasonable people can debate the merits of those decisions. I think it ludicrous, however, to simply have a flat rule that any lawyer who represents any unpopular villain is heroic -- and beyond criticism -- for doing so. Just as I think it would be ludicrous to have a blanket policy of condemning as villainous any lawyer who represents any criminal.(And let us put aside the fundamental argument about whether al-Qaeda detainees are "criminals" in the conventional sense).

Then there's the twofold issue of these lawyers working for DOJ and the administration keeping their identities a secret. How is this not a legitimate issue' I don't get it. As USA Today concedes, lawyers who defended al Qaeda suspects need to recuse themselves from these matters. Everyone concedes that there are conflict of interest issues here. Are we to suddenly believe that Congress has no right to inquire about such things' Tell that to environmentalists who want lawyers for "polluters" kept out of the EPA. Seriously, has no one listened to Henry Waxman for the last 30 years' Do Obama's countless promises to be "transparent" have no validity when it comes to these lawyers' Why on earth would that be the case'

And yet, to listen to Holder's defenders, the people who ask these questions are being denounced as demagogues and (Joe) McCarthyites. This is coming from the same croud that wanted to criminally prosecute Bush's lawyers' Spare me.

Is this really a standard the left wants to establish' That policymaking lawyers inside the Justice Department will hence forth have a cloak of inivisibility about their previous activities'  That's going to be tough news for any number of leftwing activist groups come the next Republican administration. 

The move signals that the White House -- already "all-in" on health-care -- believes a bill could reach Obama's desk this month.

The president's international trip had grown into a frustration among many House Democrats, who complained privately to the White House that they were being forced to take a quick vote on health care so Mr. Obama and his family could leave on a trip to Indonesia next week.

The president agreed to delay his departure from March 18 to March 21, an administration official said, in an effort to show flexibility in the final push on health care legislation. The three-day delay effectively sets a new timetable for the House vote on the measure.

Full story here.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its March 2010 employment data, revised its state employment numbers going back to 1990. The Buckeye Institute's 2010 'State of the State' report [PDF] highlighted several sobering pieces of BLS employment data, but, according to these new numbers, the outlook for Ohio is even worse than we thought.
 
Specifically, between January 1990 and January 2000, Ohio's job market added 714,900 jobs, which was the 37th best in America. But between January 2000 and January 2010, Ohio's job market lost 635,000 jobs -- the second-worst numbers in the country.

All told, Ohio had the third worst job market in America in the last twenty years. Only Rhode Island, Michigan, and Connecticut fared worse. (The Buckeye Institute's original 'State of the State' report had Ohio's job market only sixth from the bottom.)

What's worse, Ohio is fourth from the bottom in ratio of private jobs created to government jobs created. For every 1.19 private-sector jobs added to the state's economy over those 20 years, Ohio added 1 government job, a performance outdone only by New Jersey and bottom-of-the-list regulars Connecticut and Michigan.

Looking at the state's ten industry sectors, there are fewer jobs today than there were in January 1990 in five sectors: Mining & Logging; Construction; Manufacturing; Information; and Trade, Transportation & Utilities. Four more industry sectors have lost jobs since 2000: Financial Activities; Professional & Business Services; Leisure & Hospitality; and Other Services.

Only Education & Health Services -- the sector tied to government spending in K-12 schools, higher education, and health care -- has more jobs today than in 2000 or 1990.

Finally, when comparing states based on their labor policies, right-to-work states saw an average increase in jobs from 1990 to 2010 of 36 percent -- twenty points higher than the 16 percent seen in states that force workers to join a union. The bottom fifteen states in terms of job growth are all forced-unionization states, and 22 of the bottom 26 are. Ten of the top fifteen states have right-to-work laws.
 
Given this troubling revision of BLS data, the issues raised in our report are more critical than ever. This new employment data, when seen in light of the high tax burden and the explosion of government worker compensation noted in our report (not to mention the state's projected budget deficit of $4-8 billion), requires far bolder and more specific action than we have heard thus far from Ohio's leaders -- and those seeking to lead us.
 

The question of the day is how this data will impact Ohio's gubernatorial race. Conventional wisdom says the numbers support John Kasich's narrative that Ted Strickland is not providing the leadership to turn Ohio around and that Kasich's experience in balancing the federal budget is exactly what Ohio needs in a governor. Current polling supports this view.

The 'but' here involves two pieces of baggage. First, the data strongly supports Strickland's narrative that he inherited an enormous mess from the Republicans who had total control of state government from 1995 to 2006. He has a strong case -- government grew substantially more during those years than during his first term. Secondly, Strickland will work very hard to tie Kasich's years at now-defunct Lehman to the financial crisis that hit America -- a 'Blame Wall Street' move. This argument, although aided by Kasich's refusal to release his pre-2008 tax returns, has thus far been undermined by news stories about the role Kasich played at Lehman. Fundamentally, Strickland runs the risk of looking like a governor who's good at pointing fingers but not so good at providing solutions.

The bottom line: Things in Ohio will get more interesting as the months roll by.

-- Matt A. Mayer is president of the Buckeye Institute.

For Democrats to begin turning around their political fortunes there has to be a frank acknowledgement that the comprehensive health-care initiative is a failure, regardless of whether it passes. There are enough Republican and Democratic proposals -- such as purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage, initiatives to hold down costs, covering preexisting conditions and ensuring portability -- that can win bipartisan support. It is not a question of starting over but of taking the best of both parties and presenting that as representative of what we need to do to achieve meaningful reform. Such a proposal could even become a template for the central agenda items for the American people: jobs and economic development.

I have been deluged lately with requests asking me whether one has to answer all of the questions on the 2010 Census, particularly those about race and ethnic background. Like Mark Krikorian, I don't like those questions and don't think the U.S. government should be collecting that information -- its only use is to continue to separate us on racial grounds, for reapportionment purposes and for certain government programs.

Mark has said that he is going to answer 'American' on the race question. I have always been tempted to answer 'Native American,' since I was born and raised here. However, people need to understand that they may incur a legal liability if they use such answers or don't answer questions at all.

In Article I, Section 2, the Constitution says that an 'Enumeration' must be conducted every ten years 'in such Manner as [Congress] shall by Law direct.' Congress has directed through a federal law that anyone who 'refuses or willfully neglects'to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions' on the Census form can be fined $100 (13 U.S.C. § 221).  If you deliberately give a false answer, you can be fined up to $500. 

Although there are not a lot of reported prosecutions, this statutory requirement has been upheld by the courts as constitutional.  There is even a 1970 court decision from Delaware holding that there is a separate violation for each question you don't answer. So, on this year's ten-question Census form, you could be fined as much $1,000 -- $5,000 if you refuse to answer or deliberately give false answers. If there was a mass refusal by millions of Americans to answer parts of the form -- like the race question -- the U.S. Justice Department would not have the resources to prosecute everyone who violated the law. But you could be prosecuted and fined, and there is a court decision from New York (which the Supreme Court refused to review) holding that a conviction for violating this law is valid even if there were other persons who also refused to fill out the form but were not prosecuted. (One curious exception to that: The liberal Ninth Circuit reversed a conviction when it was shown that the defendant might have been targeted due to his publicly held 'dissident' view that the Census is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.)

Everyone should realize that if you don't complete a Census form, you are violating federal law. The chances of actual prosecution may be remote, but it could happen. The only real answer to this problem is for Congress to prohibit the Census Bureau from collecting such information and to make all government programs (and the reapportionment process) explicitly race-neutral.

'Game on,' says Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, to National Review Online. 'The Democrats are moving on reconciliation. They are revving up their machine, even though they don't yet have the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House. This is their do-or-die moment. They know can't let their members go home for Easter with this hanging out there.'

Ryan says that, come Monday, Democrats 'will bring a shell piece of reconciliation legislation' to the budget committee. 'The reconciliation process has to begin there,' he says. 'Here's what they'll do: They will take the House health-care bill and mark it up so that it can become a reconciliation vehicle. Republicans will make runs at this via motions to instruct, but since we're outnumbered, their package will get through the committee. Then they'll send that shell of a bill to the House Rules Committee. The rules committee will then gut the budget committee's reconciliation bill and drop in all of the deals that Speaker Pelosi arranges with members who vote for the Senate health-care bill in the House.' Those deals, he adds, 'will be hard to scrutinize, and we may never know their full extent, since many of them will be orchestrated outside of health-care legislation.'

Regardless of how bad a reconciliation package looks, Ryan says it is the passage of the Senate bill in the House that troubles him the most. 'The Senate parliamentarian made it clear today,' he says. 'The Senate bill has to become law before reconciliation can be taken up in the Senate. Knowing this, the Democrats are doing whatever they can to convince House members to walk the plank. But let's be very clear: If the Senate bill passes in the House, it's not just some setup for reconciliation -- it's a huge, new federal entitlement that'll be signed into law.'

'To get that, they need to make promises to members about what'll come next, so look for them to thread the needle on policy changes and abortion in the budget and rules committees,' Ryan says. 'Reconciliation is a distraction for the Democratic leadership -- something to talk about with members while keeping their eye on the main prize, which is passing the Senate bill.'

Ruth Marcus writes that Roberts is a "big crybaby" -- either for preferring not to be criticized in a forum where he cannot respond, or for responding later. She concludes that for the conservative justices to stay away from future State of the Union addresses would be "a mistake" -- although she identifies no reason for thinking that the justices have any duty to be there, nor even any good that their presence serves. She concludes, "If conservative justices boycott a Democratic president's State of the Union address, who, then, will be politicizing the court'" If by "politicizing the court" she means making the Court the subject of political controversy, then the answer is that both the president and the justices will have done so -- but by Marcus's own (correct) argument, that's alright, since "the court is and should be part of the conversation." If, on the other hand, by "politicizing the court" she means joining that conversation in some improper way, then the answer is that nobody will have done so; and she doesn't even try to explain why she holds otherwise.

It seems that voting on a rule that deems a bill to be passed differs importantly from actually passing a bill. The difference is not just formalistic but deeply functional. A core purpose of the constitutional legislative process is to ensure that lawmakers are held accountable to the public. Their legislative voting record has to be clear, so that the electorate can make an informed decision on whether to reelect them. The Slaughter Solution is a piece of subterfuge designed specifically to short-circuit this purpose of electoral accountability, so that congressmen can "say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself." The very attractiveness of the maneuver shows that it plays some role in insulating lawmakers from popular disapproval of their vote, and for that reason it is constitutionally noxious.

First, Nigel Farage, UKIP's leader in Strasbourg, was fined for describing EU President Herman Van Rompuy as having the "charisma of a damp rag" and the appearance of "a low-grade bank clerk". Now the Earl of Dartmouth has been asked to leave a debate for saying that for hot countries such as Greece and Cyprus to have an "Arctic Policy" was "as bizarre as the appointment of Baroness Ashton as the EU's high representative". Lord Dartmouth was taking part in a debate on policy towards the Arctic as the ice melts and sea lanes open up in an area until now not governed by international maritime law. Diana Wallis, the UK Liberal Democrat MEP who was chairing the debate, objected when Lord Dartmouth raised what he called the absurdity of southern European states being involved in any policy to do with the Arctic.

If you take the view that man-made climate change is a global threat that can indeed be headed off/minimized, then it is in fact easily possible to construct a rationale for Greece and Cyprus having some sort of Arctic policy. Nevertheless, it's not entirely bizarre to find it bizarre. That said, if anything is bizarre it's the appointment of Baroness Ashton as the EU's "High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy." A lifetime of patronage jobs (and a stint as a nuclear disarmament activist during the later Brezhnev era) is now, it seems, thought to be suitable training for such a magnificently titled role.

The real problem, of course, is that the EU parliament, a body noticeable mainly for the stupidity of its opinions, the greed of its representatives and the reluctance of voters to participate in its elections, just doesn't seem to get free speech.

For a reminder of a more robust approach, here's Frederick Forsyth writing in the Daily Express:

Over 200 years ago an outraged Lord Sandwich rose purple-faced in the House to shout at an opponent. 'Wilkes, you will die either on the gallows or of the pox.' 'That,' drawled John Wilkes without a pause, 'must depend on whether I embrace your Lordship's principles or your mistress.' Terribly rude but what a put-down. We should have more like that, not less.

"What are you doing'  No, no... get off.  Get off.  See... you gotta make my bunk.  See, we're in Italy.  The guy on the top bunk, he's gotta make the guy on the bottom's bunk... he's gotta make his bed, all the time.  See, it's in the regulations.  See, if we were in Germany, I'd have to make yours.  But we're in Italy, so you gotta make mine.  [Shrugs] Regulations."

But I actually think that's too logical. I think the Democrats are going for what might be called the Fizzbin maneuver. It's all crystal clear:

First they went after Ryan's proposed entitlement reforms (I've written about these attacks here and here). Liberals have every right to criticize Ryan's ideas, involving as they do a complete re-imagining of the Democrats' New Deal and Great Society defined-benefit social insurance programs. But only the most tendentious left-wing commentators would deny that these programs are going broke, and most of Ryan's critics had to admit that he had offered a real plan to fix the entitlement crisis. By contrast, the Obama administration's plan to balance the budget involves punting to a bipartisan commission.

Then Ryan embarrassed the president on national television, and now liberals have adopted a more aggressive strategy which involves denying that Ryan's plan would balance the budget after all. Two left-leaning think tanks have issued reports on Ryan's plan, each claiming that Ryan essentially fudged the revenue side of his Roadmap. Ryan has offered responses here and here, which I encourage you to read. I'll sum up the key points below:

1. Ryan did not "fudge" the revenue side of his Roadmap, unless you consider all long-term estimates of economic growth to be inherently fudged due to the uncertainties involved (which they kind of are). For reasons that had nothing to do with fudging the numbers, Ryan relied on revenue estimates from Treasury Department experts instead of the CBO or the Joint Committee on Taxation. CBO didn't want to step on the latter's toes, and the latter informed Ryan's office that it was not able to perform an estimate given the time frame of Ryan's proposal. Treasury's estimates do not get the same level of respect that CBO's and JCT's get, but there's no reason to think Ryan fudged the numbers when it's more likely that his estimates simply made different assumptions about future GDP growth than the two left-leaning think tanks.

2. With his Roadmap, Ryan has offered a starting point for debate, not a finished product. "Congressman Ryan stands by his numbers," his office states, "and of course would be open to adjustments in the specified rates under his tax reforms if in fact [the Tax Policy Center's] estimates are closer to reality than Ryan's estimates." But the point, his office states, is that "We clearly cannot chase our unsustainable growth in spending with ever-higher levels of taxes -- and the purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue -- not the other way around."

3. Certain of Ryan's liberal critics have stated that, compared to Obama's tax plan, Ryan's tax plan would involve tax increases for 90 percent of Americans while -- again, compared to Obama's plan -- the rich would pay less. First of all, according to the very same Tax Policy Center whose work these critics are citing, Obama's tax plan leaves gaping holes in the budget that, again, he has proposed no way to fill, save for his blue-ribbon panel (and we all know how effective that's going to be). To pretend that we can close these gaps simply by increasing taxes on the rich is not realistic. Second, the policy change that has the biggest effect on the distribution of the tax burden under Ryan's plan vs. Obama's is that Ryan would replace the corporate income tax with a value-added tax. This is hardly as controversial as Ryan's critics have made it sound, and there is a near-consensus among economists that VATs cause fewer economic distortions than corporate income taxes. Also, the changes to the tax burden are not as straightforward as Ryan's critics allege. The share of the corporate income tax that is borne by lower-income Americans is obscured by the fact that corporations act as tax collectors, not taxpayers, and often pass the costs of the tax onto their employees and customers.   

I don't agree with every single thing in Ryan's Roadmap. Few would look at it and find nothing they would change, and the revenue provisions are probably where conservatives would disagree the most. But it is far more substantial than anything the other side has offered. Yet, rather than taking it as a starting point for debate, which is the spirit in which it is offered, Democrats are attacking it to distract from their political problems and to distract from the fact that they don't have a plan. That's a roadmap to bankruptcy.

Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn't exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it. Surely it's time to start over.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate's original health care bill.

Information Republicans say they have received from the Senate Parliamentarian's Office eliminates that option. House Democratic leaders last week began looking at crafting a legislative rule that would allow the House to approve the Senate health care bill, but not forward it to Obama for his signature until the Senate clears the reconciliation package.

"Game Changer" is quickly replacing the various iterations of "under the bus" as the most overused political cliche of our age, but this certainly qualifies as one. And it leaves House Democrats with little but the fig leaf of the "Slaughter Rule" as political coverage.

UPDATE: From The Hill:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told colleagues about the ruling Thursday afternoon, according to a Democratic source familiar with the meeting.

[. . .]

Democrats acknowledged the parliamentarian's ruling was a setback but argued that it does not deliver a fatal blow.
 
'It's just going to require a little more trust from the House that the Senate is going to do its job,' said a Democratic strategist.
 
Democratic lawmakers such as Conrad had thought the Senate could pass the sidecar bill under reconciliation after the House had passed the Senate version of healthcare reform.

"The Senate Parliamentarian's office has informed Senate Republicans that reconciliation instructions require the measure to make changes in law," said a senior GOP aide.
 
The Congressional Budget Office could give the broader healthcare bill an official cost estimate once the Senate and House acted.

Yeah, that sounds right.

ACORN, the liberal group notorious for allegedly trying to inflate voter rolls through fraudulent practices, has seen its last election in Ohio.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now will permanently surrender its Ohio business license by June1 as part of a legal settlement with the conservative Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, both sides said yesterday.

ACORN was active in Ohio in the 2006 and 2008 elections, working to register thousands of low-income people to vote and get them to the polls. The group's efforts were marred by irregularities, including one case in which ACORN workers allegedly induced a Cleveland man to register to vote 72 times, offering cigarettes as an incentive.

Several of these outraged readers have directed me to the wbsite for SFSU's Raza Studies Department. Prof. Martínez is not toiling away there alone: there are thirteen profs and assistant profs on the faculty.

What goes on in a Raza Studies Department' Let them tell us.

This is a public university, part-funded by the taxpayers of California . . . a state that is currently in the throes of one of the worst state-level fiscal crises in U.S. history.

Why do I feel perfectly certain that, whatever measures are taken to resolve California's budgetary crisis, however many extra burdens are placed on state businesses and taxpayers, Professors Carrillo, Almaguer, Cordova, Cuellar, Davila, Duncan-Andrade, Garcia, Kury, Martínez, Mirabal, Murguia, Reyes, and Rivera need not fear any interruption to the vital pedagogical and scholarly work they are doing over there in the Department of Raza ("race, breed, strain" -- Collin's Spanish Gem Dictionary) Studies. The departments of Medicine, Business, and Engineering will be closed down first.

Doomed! Doomed!

An excerpt:

To address these problems, 60 Senators voted to pass historic reform that will make health insurance more affordable, make health insurance companies more accountable and reduce our deficit by roughly a trillion dollars.  The House passed a similar bill.  However, many Republicans now are demanding that we simply ignore the progress we've made, the extensive debate and negotiations we've held, the amendments we've added (including more than 100 from Republicans) and the votes of a supermajority in favor of a bill whose contents the American people unambiguously support.***  We will not.  We will finish the job.  We will do so by revising individual elements of the bills both Houses of Congress passed last year, and we plan to use the regular budget reconciliation process that the Republican caucus has used many times.

I know that many Republicans have expressed concerns with our use of the existing Senate rules, but their argument is unjustified.  There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about the use of reconciliation.  As one of the most senior Senators in your caucus, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, said in explaining the use of this very same option, 'Is there something wrong with majority rules'  I don't think so.'  Similarly, as non-partisan congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said in this Sunday's New York Times, our proposal is 'compatible with the law, Senate rules and the framers' intent.'

Reconciliation is designed to deal with budget-related matters, and some have expressed doubt that it could be used for comprehensive health care reform that includes many policies with no budget implications.  But the reconciliation bill now under consideration would not be the vehicle for comprehensive reform - that bill already passed outside of reconciliation with 60 votes.  Instead, reconciliation would be used to make a modest number of changes to the original legislation, all of which would be budget-related.  There is nothing inappropriate about this.  Reconciliation has been used many times for a variety of health-related matters, including the establishment of the Children's Health Insurance Program and COBRA benefits, and many changes to Medicare and Medicaid.

***!!!!!!!

Matthew Continetti, in the course of defending Rep. Paul Ryan's 'roadmap,' links to a report by the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice. CTJ says that the roadmap would raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans. Continetti writes:

That's a swipe at Ryan's zeroing out the stimulus and replacing the corporate income tax with a business consumption tax. You see, Ryan says the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit in Obama's stimulus bill is spending, not tax cutting. He'd eliminate it. And CTJ counts a reduction in that spending as a tax hike. The business consumption tax would be passed on to the consumer, making it regressive. But Ryan notes that Americans indirectly feel the consequences of the above-average U.S. corporate tax rate today, through lost wages and higher prices. And these effects are regressive, too. Unlike the current situation, Ryan goes on, the business consumption tax "is cleaner, simpler, and it's on paper." It would also make American exports more competitive than they are today.

Reining in the EITC and child credit raises two issues. First, is it right to consider those credits "spending" rather than "tax cuts"' Republicans have generally said that "refundable" tax credits -- credits that you get even when your income tax liability is already zero -- should count as spending. But payroll taxes are taxes too, and there's a reasonable case that people should be able to use either the EITC or the child credit to offset payroll taxes as well as income taxes. (It's not as though Representative Ryan is a purist on this issue, either: His plan creates a refundable tax credit for health care.) Second: Even if it is right to consider the scaling back of the credits as a spending cut, will it fly politically' Conservatives probably don't want to be in the position of telling people who are surrendering more of their paychecks to the federal government that it only looks like their taxes are going up.

I think that Representative Ryan is right that moving from a corporate income tax to a business VAT might not do much to change the distribution of taxes. The argument that a business VAT would make exports more competitive, though, is deeply flawed. First of all, there is considerable reason to think that any gain in the trade balance would be wiped out by changes to the exchange rate. Second, there's no good reason for the government to favor exports over imports. Adam Smith taught us that a while ago; you'd think Representative Ryan, of all people, would know better than to lapse into mercantilism.

UPDATE: From a reader:

In the resolution, Republicans urge the ethics committee, based on recent media reports, to probe into allegations of sexual harassment made by Massa's former congressional staffers. Inaction by House Democratic leaders 'may have exposed employees and interns of Rep. Massa to continued harassment,' the resolution reads. The resolution also asks the committee to investigate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), and their staffs:

(1)    The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is directed to investigate fully, pursuant to clause 3(a)(2) of House Rule XI, which House Democratic leaders and members of their respective staffs had knowledge prior to March 3, 2010 of the aforementioned allegations concerning Mr. Massa, and what actions each leader and staffer having any such knowledge took after learning of the allegations;

(2)    Within ten days following adoption of this resolution, and pursuant to Committee on Standards of Official Conduct rule 19, the committee shall establish an Investigative Subcommittee in the aforementioned matter, or report to the House no later than the final day of that period the reasons for its failure to do so;

(3)    All Members and staff are instructed to cooperate fully in the committee's investigation and to preserve all records, electronic or otherwise, that may bear on the subject of this investigation;

(4)    The Chief Administrative Officer shall immediately take all steps necessary to secure and prevent the alteration or deletion of any e-mails, text messages, voicemails and other electronic records resident on House equipment that have been sent or received by the Members and staff who are the subjects of the investigation authorized under this resolution until advised by the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct that it has no need of any portion of said records; and,

(5)    The Committee shall issue a final report of its findings and recommendations in this matter no later than June 30, 2010.

Republican aides tell National Review Online that this issue is far from over. (Aides asked to remain anonymous due to this being an ongoing ethics investigation.)

'There is a fine line between acting on public information that continues to bear itself out versus taking a political opportunity, and we're very mindful of that,' says one senior GOP House staffer. 'The key here is to make sure, be it through political pressure or a formal resolution, that the American people, and other members, know about the who-what-when-where-why of the Pelosi-Massa case. It's a disturbing, horrible situation.'

'The ethics committee's decision to end the Massa investigation after he resigned does not mean that this is over,' adds another House GOP aide. 'It is unacceptable to end the investigation of this case without knowing when Pelosi and her staff knew, what they did, and why. We're going to make sure they live up to their promise to be the most ethical Congress in history. A privileged resolution raising questions is probably the most responsible course to take at this point, especially when we hear more and more about the speaker's staff knowing about this for months on end.'

A third senior Republican aide says that the ethics committee's recent ruling against Rep. Charlie Rangel (D., N.Y.), which blamed his staff for any wrongdoing, has led Republicans to believe that 'clearly members are going to be held responsible for their staff's work and actions.'

A senior Republican party official tells NRO that the 2006 ethics case of former Rep. Mark Foley (R., Fla.) could also serve as a crucial precedent in any Pelosi investigation. 'All one has to do is look at the Foley report to see how the Democrats have not held themselves to the standard they set four years ago. They criticized the Republican leadership then for not confronting the situation in a member-to-member fashion. They said that reporting allegations to the ethics committee is an important step, but it does not mitigate the situation in the interim. We need to know if Pelosi made any effort to confront Massa about these charges. Saying you punted it to Steny Hoyer won't cut it.'

Another GOP official says the Foley case could present many months of problems for Pelosi. 'The speaker may have thought that this would be over after Massa resigned, but let's remember that the ethics committee ruled it germane to continue to investigate Foley long after he left office, issuing their report months later.'

Here are some snippets from the Foley report that could trip up Pelosi:

'As a general matter, the Subcommittee observed a disconcerting unwillingness to take responsibility for resolving issues regarding Rep. Foley's conduct. Rather than addressing the issue fully, some witnesses did far too little, while attempting to pass the responsibility for acting to others. Some relied on unreasonably fine distinctions regarding their defined responsibilities. Almost no one followed up adequately on the limited actions they did take.' (p. 70)

'While some did fulfill their responsibilities, the Investigative Subcommittee finds that too many exhibited insufficient diligence or willingness to take the steps necessary to ensure that the matter was being appropriately handled.' (p. 70)

'Several people were told about the emails and were asked to take action regarding them, including confronting Rep. Foley and telling him to stop communications with the former page, but none of those people saw - or insisted on seeing - the emails prior to taking such action.' (pp. 70-71)

'Almost no one followed up to make sure that the action they had taken had been successful.' (p. 71)

'Some or all of these factors (as well as others) may have played a role in decisions that were made about how this matter should have been handled, but in the Investigative Subcommittee's view none of these factors mitigated the need for those involved to learn all the relevant facts and communicate those facts candidly and freely to those with authority to address the issues raised by the emails.' (p. 71)

'The Investigative Subcommittee finds that the weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that Speaker Hastert was told, at least in passing, about the e-mails by both Majority Leader Boehner and Rep. Reynolds in spring 2006.' (p. 85)

'All Members, officers, and employees of the House must pursue specific and non-specific allegations of improper interaction between a Member or House employee and a participant in the House Page Program -- even if the allegations are not readily verifiable or involve the sensitive subject of a Member's personal relationship with a young person. This obligation applies regardless of whether the Member and page are of the same or opposite sex.' (p. 89)

Still, even though the House has approved further investigation into the Massa affair, that doesn't mean an investigation is guaranteed. The ethics committee, controlled by Democrats and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.), a Pelosi ally, will ultimately make the decision on how to move forward -- if at all -- on their own. That distinction, the AP points out, could 'kill any further investigation.'