If you know anyone who is buying the wingnut snake oil being termed “climategate,’ direct them post-haste to Lee Fang’s post, “A Case Of Classic SwiftBoating: How The Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’ ” in ‘The Wonk Room’ at Think Progress web pages. Fang not only demolishes the allegation that global warming is a myth; he also shows quite clearly how the wingnuts distort and manipulate facts to smear scientists and policy makers who are raising concerns about global warming. An excerpt:

…Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed “Climategate,” to the cover of the New York Times and newspapers across the globe. According to a Nexis news search, the Climategate story has been reported at least 325 times in the American press alone.
…As the right attempts to use the Climategate story to derail the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this week, arctic sea ice is still at historically low levels, Australia is still on fire, the northern United Kingdom is still underwater, the world’s glaciers are still disappearing and today NOAA confirmed that not only is it the hottest decade in history, but 2009 was one of the hottest years in history. But how did the right-wing noise machine hijack the debate?

Fang then describes how the media was manipulated to serve the wingnut scam:

The methods for the right-wing political hit machine were honed during the Clinton years. Columnist and language-guru William Safire, a former aide to actual Watergate crook President Nixon, attached “-gate” to any minor post-Nixon incident as a “rhetorical legerdemain” intended “to establish moral equivalence.” (See phony manufactured scandals “Travelgate,” “Whitewatergate,” etc.) A right-wing echo chamber — including the Rev. Moon-funded Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, and the constellation of various conservative front groups and think tanks — would then blare the scandal incessantly, regardless of the truth. But the more troubling aspect of this gimmick is the increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.
One of the most successful coups for right-wing hit men was the “SwiftBoat” campaign, a well financed effort orchestrated by lobbyists and Bush allies to smear Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record. But “Climategate” is no different, with many of the same conservatives actors playing their respective roles…

The rest of Fang’s post is a richly-linked, detailed chronology of the media campaign to puff up “climategate” and discredit scientists who are doing serious work on the issue — required reading for anyone who cares about the crisis of global warming.

The plan President Obama laid out last week for Afghanistan has confronted anti-war Democrats with a profoundly difficult strategic choice – one that will have far-reaching implications not only for Afghanistan but for America as well.
The first option is to conclude that Obama is either a helpless or a willing captive of the pentagon and to dismiss his entire administration as hopelessly and irrevocably committed to militarism. The second is to view the Obama administration as instead the arena where a strategic debate between the advocates of a political solution and a purely military one is now going on and to attempt to influence that key strategic decision.
For many anti-war Democrats there is a powerful temptation to embrace the first alternative. After all, on the surface there seems little difference between the views of Obama and his generals. Compared with the clear and disciplined agreement among Obama’s cabinet members in favor of sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, any slight disagreements over the details seems trivial.
Disappointed Democrats can point to evidence to support this view. A Dec 7th Washington Post analysis entitled “McChrystal’s Afghanistan plan stays mainly intact” begins by saying that McChrystal “will return to Kabul to implement a war strategy that is largely unchanged after a three month-long white house review of the conflict… the new approach does not order McChrystal to wage the war in a fundamentally different way from what he outlined in an assessment he sent the White House in late August.”
This would seem quite conclusive, but, it is, in fact, not the complete picture. Obama actually did modify McChrystal’s original plan in four significant ways. To see this, it is necessary to clearly describe several key elements of a standard counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.

1. The enemy – called the “insurgents” in COIN – are broadly defined as any people or groups actively opposed to a “host government” that is supported by the U.S. In the case of Afghanistan, the leading COIN strategists define the enemy as any and all of the seven quite distinct groups that comprise the Taliban as well as a variety of other forces influenced by jihadist Islam or who oppose U.S. troops on nationalistic grounds.
2. The mission is defined in purely military terms. The enemy must be defeated and his will to resist broken. The goal is victory, not a political compromise.
3. A counterinsurgency campaign’s basic strategy is not simply to defend static positions or train soldiers but to create stable governments, deliver services, build new institutions and promote pro-western development. A COIN campaign is said to be a failure if it does not win the support and loyalty of the population for the U.S. supported “host government”.
4. The timetable is long-term and open-ended. Historically a few counterinsurgency campaigns have been successfully concluded in 8-14 years while a larger number dragged on for decades. COIN advocates realize that long, indecisive wars are deeply unpopular so they usually define the timetable as simply “as long as it takes” or “until victory” rather than defining any specific number of years or decades.

General McChrystal’s August memo actually incorporated all four of these elements, but none remained in the final plan. With the help of Joe Biden, Obama was able to modify these basic principles in four key ways:

Read more…

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
At fivethirtyeight.com, Professor Tom Schaller offers an interesting explanation of the recent obsession of Republicans with resisting any second look at health care costs for seniors. It’s just a matter of identity politics, he says:

Republicans point at Democrats in Congress and the White House and charge that they and they health care reform plans must be stopped because (a) they are going to cut seniors’ Medicare; and (b) they are going to institute “death panels” to pull the plug on seniors.
In other words, although the end-of-life use of Medicare is a government problem that violates almost every philosophy they espouse about the proper role of government—public sector over private; easily exploited by, rather than protected from, trial lawyers; a moral hazard, consequence-free billing system as opposed to rational, need-based spending; a program with rising outlays as opposed to slow or zero growth outlays—Medicare is instead the very program they are rallying behind.
And why? For votes—specifically the votes of those angry, mostly-white seniors upon whom they are betting their electoral fortunes in 2010 and beyond. In short, the GOP has now become so wedded to its dying, white majority that it is willing to sacrifice not only good public policy and smart long-term budgeting, but its very own core principles.

That may be largely true. But there’s another reason for the conservative focus on end-of-life care: the threat of euthanasia has long been a major talking point for the Right to Life movement, which in today’s shrunken GOP continues to play an outsized role. The argument, such as it is, suggests that the contempt for human life reflected in legalized abortion will eventually lead liberals to begin croaking the elderly on grounds that they are as inconvenient as fetuses. That’s why the late Terri Schiavo became such a cause celebre for anti-abortionists. And that’s why it was no accident that the whole “death panel” smear of health care reform was first given wings by the queen of the RTL movement these days, Sarah Palin.
This observation reinforces Schaller’s broader point that the GOP’s message is being dictated by its constituencies. Anything that simultaneously thrills the Culture War Right while frightening white seniors looks like electoral gold to today’s Republicans.

When I first heard the outlines of the “Team of Ten” deal, well-limned in Ed’s post below, I assumed there would be a fierce storm of opposition from the most pro-public option Senators and among progressive bloggers and organizations. Thus far, however, the critique has been surprisingly mild, with a couple of exceptions.
One of the exceptions would be Steve’s post “One Lame-Ass Effort” at The Left Coaster, where he disses the deal, “…voters see no benefit from any of it until after the 2010 midterms, which is a recipe for a Democratic drubbing next year.” Mother Jones Senior Editor James Ridgeway concurrs, adding at Alternet that “…any genuine, government run public option, which so many saw as the key to true health care reform, is nothing more than a corpse being dragged through the streets.”
Other progressive bloggers have been less critical. Also at Alternet, Adele Stan sees merit in the latest Senate compromise, explaining:

…The formula for public options considered by senators were so watered down as to be virtually meaningless. In its place, reports say, the bill will offer two features that could lead to a more progressive form of health-care reform in the long run:
an opening of Medicare to people between the ages of 55 – 64
a federal health-insurance exchange based on the system enjoyed by federal employees and the senators themselves

Stan adds, that “by experimenting with the expansion of Medicare to include a younger population, we have something of a laboratory for a future single-payer system.”
At Open Left, Mike Lux concedes “The loss of a public option is a bitter pill to swallow,” but adds “there is still plenty of good in this package.” His Open Left colleague, Chris Bowers seems even more optimistic about the deal and makes an important point about the campaign for the public option doing considerable good:

Read more…

Word is the so-called “Team of Ten”–a group of Democratic senators that includes five perpetually shaky “centrist” votes on health care reform–has come up with a compromise that could hold the 60 Democrats more or less together going into the next savage phase of floor debate.
Details on the deal are skimpy; its authors want the Congressional Budget Office to “score” the proposal’s budget impact before releasing a plan description. But here’s what Ezra Klein is reporting:

The deal looks pretty much like it’s looked for the past few days: The Office of Personnel Management will shepherd national, non-profit plans into existence. Medicare will open to folks between 55 and 64 who are eligible for the exchange. If the national non-profit plans don’t materialize, then there appears to be a trigger that will call a public plan into the market, but that seems pretty unlikely. All of this, of course, is contingent on CBO giving it a good score.
The details will be important here. What are the conditions for the non-profit plans? How many plans do there need to be? What does the regulation look like? When does the Medicare buy-in start? But assuming those pieces don’t come in much worse than expected, the combination of national non-profits and a Medicare buy-in seems like a pretty good deal. Better by far than what Democrats looked likely to get a week ago. And more likely, by far, to seed health-care reform with scalable experiments.

Two particular notes here: if the deal is as reported, it represents a break with past Senate reliance on a state-by-state method for adjudicating differences of opinion on the public option. National non-profit plans could achieve economies of scale that could make them as effective as a negotiated-rate publicly run plan. The approach also coopts the conservative hobby-horse of insurance sales across state lines, with the crucial difference that these national non-profit plans would be federallly regulated.
The inclusion of a Medicare buy-in was a crucial concession to Senate (and indirectly, House) progressives who have for ages longed for an expansion of Medicare beyond the population eligible for Social Security. Letting near-seniors “buy in” has been discussed off and on for at least a decade, and has been a particular focus for Sen. Jay Rockefeller (a member of the Team of Ten), who had been threatening to blow up any deal that deep-sixed the public option.
It’s worth noting that the Democratic senator considered most likely to join a Republican filibuster of health care reform, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, is a member of the Team of Ten. He will certainly need to make up his mind soon, since the Senate voted down his amendment yesterday seeking to impose the same sorts of restrictions on abortion funding that the House adopted in the Stupak Amendment. Nelson had been threatening to join a filibuster if his amendment failed; now we’ll see where he really is.
We’ll also see how the public and key stakeholders–and House members–react to the Team of Ten’s work. Will public option advocates react as sunnily as Jay Rockefeller seems to have done? Is Olympia Snowe interested in any “trigger” approach other than her own? Will Joe Lieberman–who was initially appointed to the Team of Ten by Harry Reid, and failed to show up–try to blow up the deal? Or will CBO blow it up with “bad” numbers? All these things are currently up in the air.

At the New Republic today, TDS Co-Editor William Galston notes that President Obama has begun a crucial pivot towards an emphasis on job creation in his speech at the Brookings Institution.

But he’s just beginning. To complete the pivot and make 2010 the year of jobs, two other things must happen. First, the White House must fully integrate the jobs focus into the president’s schedule. Some equivalent of the Allentown visit should occur at least weekly, and it wouldn’t hurt to see the president in a hard hat, cheering on projects that wouldn’t have gotten started without government action.
Second, the legislative agenda for 2010 must reflect and reinforce the renewed focus on job creation. That means postponing items that the American people are bound to regard as diversionary as long as unemployment remains high. While action on items such as climate change and immigration is worthy in principle, the time is not right. If the president and congressional leaders try to force the pace, they are likely to fail—and pay a heavy political price in November.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about where the unemployment rate is likely to go during the next year, with or without a major new administration initiative. But a presidential focus on job creation that’s frequent and visible enough that no one will miss it could be an important political asset no matter what happens.

Republicans’ favorite polling outfit, Rasmussen, sure gave the GOP a toxic little gift this week, in the form of a “generic ballot” for Congress listing the Tea Party Movement (hypothetically organized as a political party) as an option. The Tea Party brand outperformed the GOP 23% to 18% (Democrats lead the pack with 36%).
The Tea Party movement has been around for roughly ten months, compared to 156 years for the Republican Party.
Unsurprisingly, another political parvenu is being closely linked to this third-party talk. On Friday, Sarah Palin was pressed by a conservative talk radio host to rule a third-party presidential run in 2012 out or in. She responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.”
Palin nicely sums up the real meaning of the Tea Party threat. It is exceptionally unusual, not to mention counter-intuitive, for a major party to move away from what is general perceived to be the political “center” and become self-obsessed with ideological purity immediately after two crushing general election defeats. But the Republican Party has been doing just that; it is a far more conservative party, in terms of its overall message, than it was going into the 2008 election cycle. But it’s not conservative enough just yet for a lot of activists, and for those Tea Party participants who really do think “looters” and “loafers” elected Barack Obama and are busily constructing a totalitarian society. Palin’s telling the world the rightward trend needs to continue, or she’ll be pleased to act out the GOP’s worst nightmare in 2012.

Following up on Ed’s post on the Ipsos-McClatchey poll below, Jonathan Chait’s “More Polling On Health Care Reform’s Popularity” at The New Republic, flags Mark Blumenthal’s analysis of a new CNN/ORC poll. As Blumenthal explains:

Immediately after their favor-or-oppose question about the recently passed health reform bill, CNN’s pollsters asked a new follow-up question that others have not. They found that while a third of all adults (34 percent) say they oppose the bill because “its approach toward health care is too liberal,” 10 percent oppose it because it is “not liberal enough.”

With 46 percent supporting the House health care reform bill, that 10 percent means 56 percent of Americans now “favor either the House-passed version of health care reform or something further to the left,” according to Texas Tech professor Alan Reifman, quoted in Chait’s post. Hopefully the Senate ‘Group of Ten’ now negotiating a consensus is paying attention.

Nate Silver has a post up at 538.com that is sure to get a lot of attention. Looking closely at an IPSOS/McClatchey poll that asks supporters and opponents of health care reform their underlying concerns, Nate notices that about one-fourth of those opposing current proposals think they “don’t go far enough to reform health care,” and suggests there’s a little-discussed segment of the electorate that might either grow if reform is further compromised, and/or might eventually come around if and when legislation is on the president’s desk.
This is an argument that Jonathan Chait made a couple of weeks ago at TNR, based on earlier polling.
Both articles are important refutations of the common assumption of conservatives that there is monolithic majority opposition to health care reform, and also a monolithic majority of Americans happy with the status quo in health care.
Beyond that, of course, this argument will be catnip to those progressives who are searching for ways to convince the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership to abandon or greatly toughen its endless negotiations with Senate “centrists” and the odd Republican, particularly over the public option. A majority of Americans, they will argue, either likes the current bill or wants something with more and more generous coverage, and a stronger public option. This is, of course, a subset of the ancient debate among Democrats between the strategy of seeking a majority coalition by peeling off “centrist” independents, or by solidifying and energizing the presumably liberal party “base” (along with “populist” independents).
There are, however, two problems with excessive reliance on the “progressive majority” analysis on health care reform. The first is that the polling numbers are based on some pretty vague ideas about what would constitute “doing more” on the health care front; it’s not entirely clear “more” means “more” of what progressive opinion-leaders want. And the second problem, more to the immediate point, is that in a Senate with a sixty-vote threshold for enactment of major legislation, a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, who represent not the nation as a whole but their own states, have the whip hand on the details of health care reform. I don’t think many progressives would want to abandon health care reform if a durable majority did, in fact, favor the status quo; this is a complex issue that’s not exactly good material for a plebiscite.
The more useful observation about the existence of a “dissent from the left” on health reform involves the wrath that Republicans (and obstructionist Democrats) may well inherit if nothing happens this year, and health care premiums, along with insurance industry abuses, continue to get steadily worse. We will then be talking not about a constantly shifting and poorly understood thing called “Obamacare,” but about one party that sees a major national challenge and wants to do something about it, and another that’s fine with an increasingly untenable status quo.
The diversity of opinion among those unhappy with the present legislation is, to be clear, an excellent argument for increasing the frequency and volume of claims that said legislation reallly will accomplish a great deal, if not everything it should or could achieve. All the news that’s been made about compromises on health reform over the last few months, along with reform advocates’ efforts to reassure seniors and others that they won’t lose anything worth caring about, have undoubtedly “undersold” the extent of change that even a “weakened” bill would make happen. A reform effort that’s marketed as a tepid bowl of porridge won’t satisfy much of anybody.

This item by Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of TDS’ Board of Advisors, is cross-posted from Pollster.com.
In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama’s approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen’s use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen’s results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval – disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.
A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen’s results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen’s polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.
According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.
One of the biggest problems in trying to compare Rasmussen’s results with those of most other polls is that Rasmussen is almost alone in using a likely voter sample to measure both presidential approval and the generic ballot. Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen’s results with those of other national polls is possible–party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen’s party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen’s results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.
Rasmussen’s party identification results have only a small impact on the overall average on this question because they only report party identification once a month. However, Rasmussen’s disproportionately Republican adult sample does raise questions about many of their other results, including those using likely voter samples, because the likely voters are a subsample of the initial adult sample. If Rasmussen is starting off with a disproportionately Republican sample of adult citizens, then their likely voter sample is almost certain to also include a disproportionate share of Republican identifiers. Of course, there is no way of knowing for certain whether Rasmussen’s results are more or less accurate than those of other polling organizations. All we can say with some confidence is that their results are different and that this difference is not just attributable to their use of a likely voter sample.