From all the screaming on the Right, you’d think Senate Dems were a tribe of ax-wielding Visigoths. Rush made a really creepy rape analogy. The usual stuff.

Steve M. reminds us that righties always see themselves as picked-upon (but noble) victims. Whatever happens is never their fault.

Bullies claiming to be bullied — does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of a wife beater who gets a restraining order against the wife he beats, and who otherwise claims that he’s the real victim. Fight back against a guy like that, even strictly in self defense, and he’ll show off every tiny bruise as proof that you’re the monster, not him.

Explains why they so fervently embrace George Zimmerman as one of their own.

Paul Rosenberg writes about the rightie proclivity to exaggerate. Any misstep on the part of the Democrats is “worse than Watergate” or “Obama’s Katrina.”

Case in point: As early as April 2010, Media Matters had counted eight different things that had been touted as “Obama’s Katrina,” including the BP oil spill (Limbaugh, Drudge, Fox.etc. vs. facts here); the GM bankruptcy (Politico, June 8, 2009); the H1N1 flu (Rush Limbaugh, Nov. 3, 2009); the Fort Hood shootings (Human Events, Nov. 11, 2009); the Christmas underwear bomber (Pajamas Media, Dec. 29, 2009); the Haiti earthquake (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2010); the Kentucky ice storms (Confederate Yankee, Feb. 1, 2010); and even housing policies in Chicago back when Obama was a state senator (Mickey Kaus, Slate, June 30, 2008).

They’re also prone to comparing anything they don’t like to slavery. While I don’t entirely agree with part of his premise, Rosenberg makes one interesting point. The Fundamentalist right, Jerry Falwell et al., did not immediately jump on abortion as their signature issue right after Roe v. Wade. At the time, they were still locked in the final battles of their war on racial desegregation. Many seem to have embraced pregnancy enforcement only when they realized segregation was lost.

For several decades now, conservatives have clung to abortion as their great moral equalizer, which they consequently just love to equate with slavery. Ever since its meteoric rise in the late 1970s, the religious right has clung to the abortion issue as the foundation of its claims to moral superiority — and for good reason, since their true, sordid origin story lies in fighting to preserve segregation, as Max Blumenthal explained in the Nation magazine at the time of Jerry Falwell’s death (“Agent of Intolerance“). …

…Remarkably, Falwell and his ilk were so focused on defending segregation, that they rebuffed early Catholic attempts, spearheaded by Paul Weyrich, to turn their attention to abortion. They only broadened their issue agenda to include abortion some years later, as they came to realize they needed allies who had little motivation in helping them preserve the separation of the races.

I well remember there was plenty of antipathy to abortion among religious and political conservatives even before Roe v. Wade (1973). But the degree to which the Right has made abortion the ground of Armageddon itself might be partly explained by their position on what they think is moral high ground. They’ve lost or are losing every other moral/social issues fight of the 20th century, but they’ve still got abortion. Plus, it gives them an excuse to slut-shame sexually active women. So they aren’t likely to let go of abortion anytime soon, even if it’s beginning to cost them elections.

My quibble with Rosenberg comes up in this paragraph:

What connects all these patterns is that they involve bad things that conservatives were responsible for in the past, things they still, apparently, feel appropriately guilty about. but cannot consciously admit to, and hence, keep on trying to find liberal versions of, in order to unburden themselves by pushing their guilt onto others. It’s an example of what psychologists and psychiatrists know as “projection,” and the rest of us know as “the pot calling the kettle black.” But often it’s actually even worse than that — it’s not just the past bad behavior that’s being projected, but ongoing bad behavior as well, in part because of this same refusal to come to terms with past mistakes.

Yeah, sorta, but I don’t think it’s guilt they feel. Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s more like existential fear. They are so utterly invested in their own moral certitude that it has become who they are. Any challenge to their inner core of white-hot righteousness about whatever is a mortal threat.

This accounts for another tendency, the way in which admired historical figures must be assimilated by the Right. Thus the absurd argument that Martin Luther King was a rightie — they sure didn’t think that when he was alive — or the belief that John Kennedy was a conservative, even though he called himself a liberal. It must not be that anyone who was “good” could not have been one of theirs, and not one of the hated liberals.

If there were a competition for cluelessness between the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Wapo would win, hands down. Behold their opinions of the filibuster bomb:

The New York Times, in an editorial headlined Democracy Returns to the Senate:

For five years, Senate Republicans have refused to allow confirmation votes on dozens of perfectly qualified candidates nominated by President Obama for government positions. They tried to nullify entire federal agencies by denying them leaders. They abused Senate rules past the point of tolerance or responsibility. And so they were left enraged and threatening revenge on Thursday when a majority did the only logical thing and stripped away their power to block the president’s nominees. …

… It would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, when the majority leader, Harry Reid, was still holding out hope for a long-lasting deal with Republicans and insisting that federal judges, because of their lifetime appointments, should still be subject to supermajority thresholds. But Mr. Reid, along with all but three Senate Democrats, was pushed to act by the Republicans’ refusal to allow any appointments to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, just because they wanted to keep a conservative majority on that important court.

That move was as outrageous as the tactic they used earlier this year to try to cripple the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which they despise) by blocking all appointments to those agencies. That obstruction was removed in July when Mr. Reid threatened to end the filibuster and Republicans backed down. The recent blockade of judges to the D.C. appellate court was the last straw. .

…Given the extreme degree of Republican obstruction during the Obama administration, the Democrats had little choice but to change the filibuster rule….Today’s vote was an appropriate use of that power, and it was necessary to turn the Senate back into a functioning legislative body.

The Washington Post, After filibuster vote, both parties will face nasty “nuclear” fallout:

THE REWRITING of filibuster rules by Senate Democrats on Thursday changed the legislative body in fundamental ways, and for the worse. Republicans whose unjustified recalcitrance provoked the change should be ashamed. Democrats who are celebrating will soon enough regret their decision. The radical action, a product of poisonous partisanship, will also be an accelerant of poisonous partisanship. …

…The impact of changing the rules in this way may be even more far-reaching. The Democratic action sets a precedent that a future Republican majority will use to change procedures when it gets into a political jam, rather than negotiate with Democrats. The logical outcome is a Senate operating more like the House, with no rights for the minority, no reason for debate and no incentive to cooperate. For those who view that as an improvement, we offer today’s House as a counterargument.

Democrats understood all this very well when they were in the minority. “You may own the field right now,” then-Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D) said in 2005, when Republicans threatened to invoke the nuclear option. “But you won’t own it forever. And I pray to God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.” Republicans resisted pushing the nuclear button then; both parties should have stepped back and hammered out a bipartisan compromise reform now.

This time Republicans proved incapable of exercising their minority rights in a responsible way. Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) proved not enough of a leader to resist the “naked power grab.” American democracy is that much poorer as a result.

From the comments:

Let’s see … the Democrats and Republicans should have compromised, but Republicans refused to compromised, therefore it was wrong for Democrats to take action.

This is an editorial so stupid it could only have been written by Fred Hiatt.

Seriously. The genteel, bipartisan Senate you are mourning died awhile back, Fred, and its corpse rotted. You didn’t smell it?

Charles Pierce wrote, “They may need the Jaws of Life to pry Ruth Marcus off the fainting couch.” Yep; Marcus is furious with the Democrats because (as she admits) Republicans forced their hand to end the filibuster, and they actually did it. She is even now swooning on the sofa and calling for smelling salts.

Filibuster rule change passed, 52-48. For the record, the Dems voting against the change were Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Mark Pryor (D-AR).

Jeremy Peters reports in the New York Times that “Senate Democrats are on the verge of moving to eliminate the use of the filibuster against most presidential nominees.” This would be for cabinet posts and the federal judiciary, I understand. The filibuster could still be used for Supreme Court nominees and other legislation.

The problem, as Democrats see it, is that Republicans have effectively rewritten Senate rules to create a supermajority requirement for confirming presidential nominees. Filibustering cabinet-level officials, once extremely rare, is now routine.

While Democrats filibustered their share of judicial nominees when they were in the minority under President George W. Bush, including people named to the powerful District of Columbia appeals court, what Republicans say they intend to accomplish goes beyond simply blocking a vote. Their goal is to reshape the nation’s most powerful appeals court by shrinking it to just eight full-time judges. By law it has 11 judges who regularly hear cases.

Democrats said that was a step too far. The court is split with four judges appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans. But among the six semiretired judges who still hear cases, five are seen as conservative, one as liberal.

Ryan Grim writes for the Hufington Post,

It’s still not clear if Reid has the 51 votes to make the change, but it certainly looks close. There are 55 Democrats in total, which means Reid can lose up to four. HuffPost tracked down a number of Democrats on Tuesday to see who remains opposed to making the change, and only one, Levin, definitively said no. A couple of others, Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), avoided the question.

See also Gail Collins:

“If the Democrats proceed to use this nuclear option in this way, it will be Obamacare II,” cried Senator Lamar Alexander on Wednesday. This was in keeping with a brand-new Congressional tradition under which Republicans making remarks on the floor of the House or Senate are required to mention the Affordable Care Act at least once every 35 seconds. …

… Since the nominees were two women and a black man, Democrats have strongly suggested — well, you know.

“When the other side gets desperate, they turn to their last line of defense: accuse us Republicans of bias,” said Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa during a brief and rather desultory debate.

Yes, and when the Republicans get desperate they … wait for it.

“There is no crisis in the D.C. Circuit because they don’t have enough work to do as it is,” said Grassley. “There is a crisis occurring now all across the country as a result of the health care reform bill that often goes by the terminology of Obamacare.”

Honestly, it’s a wonder they make it through the opening prayer.

Grassley argued that reducing the size of the DC court by three judges would save the country $3 million a year. Whether a DC circuit court judge really costs the country a million a year is unclear, but Collins says $3 million is still a lot less than the $50 million Grassley once wanted to build an indoor rain forest near Des Moines.

GOP senators have blocked the nominations of three judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The senators didn’t even pretend to argue that the nominees (an African-American man and two women, btw) were not qualified. No, they argued that (1) the court doesn’t need 11 judges and can make do with three less; and (2) the court is balanced between Republican and Democratic nominees, and three Democratic nominees would throw it out of balance..

As to the first claim, we’re talking about the nation’s second-highest court, which handles cases involving federal regulations and national security. Complicated stuff. Eleven judges don’t seem too many to me. As to the second claim, Media Matters says that isn’t entirely true. And, anyway, Barack Obama won the 2012 election.

Harry Reid is once again threatening to “go nuclear” and change filibuster rules. But will he really do it this time, or wimp out again? Word is that some Dem senators who were cool to the idea in the past, e.g., Diane Feinstein, are frustrated enough to have changed their minds.

Changing the filibuster rules is not without risk, if you consider a future hypothetical right-wing Congress. And Brian Beutler thinks the Republicans want the Dems to at least try to change the filibuster rules for that very reason. Right now they think they can take back the Senate in 2014, and “Getting Democratic fingerprints on the nuclear rule-change precedent, will provide Republicans the cover they’ll need to eliminate the filibuster altogether in January 2015.”

But, as Charles Pierce says,

It’s time, Harry. Really, it is. I was on the other side of this issue for a very long time because I didn’t want to confront the possibility of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with the unlimited power to do anything that President Scott Walker wanted. That kind of thing still gives me pause. But this business with the judges has long passed over the International Fk You Line.

Yeah, pretty much.

Here’s what the judge did to poor GZ:

Bail for George Zimmerman, charged with felony aggravated assault and two misdemeanors on allegations that he pointed a shotgun at his girlfriend in Florida, was set Tuesday afternoon at $9,000 during Zimmerman’s first court appearance.

A Seminole County judge put conditions on Zimmerman’s bail: That he cannot return to two Florida addresses; he cannot have contact with the accuser; he cannot possess weapons; he must wear a monitoring device; and he cannot travel outside Florida.

The judge initially said Zimmerman could return to one of the banned addresses with law enforcement to retrieve his belongings, but later — at the urging of the prosecutor — reversed that allowance, saying a third party could get the belongings instead.

Also, too:

Bail would normally be around $5,000 on the charges against Zimmerman, but the judge said he was increasing it to $9,000 after the state’s attorney informed the court that Scheibe had disclosed an alleged incident a week and a half ago in which Zimmerman purportedly tried to choke her. The girlfriend decided not to report it to police, the state’s attorney said.

See also Joan Walsh:

I would hate to be a former Zimmerman juror today. I’d also hate to be Sean Hannity, but that’s true every day.

Nice.

Pathetic waste of human protoplasm George Zimmerman was arrested again yesterday, and right now he’s sitting in a Seminole County jail cell. This afternoon a judge will decide if he can be released on bail.

Of course, right now it’s a he said, she said story, but the elements of the story that seem fairly indisputable are that Zimmerman shoved his girlfriend out of her home, barricaded the door, and smashed up a bunch of her furniture. He then called 911 and whined to the operator that nobody understands him.

She said he pointed a gun at her, he says he didn’t. He says that she asked him to leave, and that he was perfectly happy to do so, but then she went crazy and began smashing her own furniture and stealing his stuff, so he was forced to shove her out of her home and barricade the door. He denies he pulled out his shotgun at any time.

She says she asked him to leave, and that he lost his temper and began breaking furniture. She says he pointed a shotgun on her. She says he broke a glass coffee table with the butt of the shotgun.

He said she asked him to leave because she is pregnant and wants to raise the child alone. She says she isn’t pregnant.

GZ’s 911 call is an exercise in dissembling. Highlights: When the operator understood that police had already been called and were outside wanting to talk to him, she asked (with a hint of irritation in her voice) why he had called 911 if the police already were there. He complained to the operator that he called because he wanted people to know the truth, but then he didn’t want to talk to the police who were already there because “I don’t have anything to say.”

Even better: The geniuses commenting at the racist hate site Weasel Zippers have decided that this arrest is a ruse to distract people from Obamacare. For example:

This has A$$older’s and the Department of Just Us’ fingerprints all over it. Seeing as Obama is getting pummled in the media and Dem’s are running away from ObastardCare, time for a little distraction away from the truth. Presto Chang-o, let’s trump up some race based charges against a white guy.

” Monday and when they responded to the home three minutes later,”…really? Tell me how often the police show up in three minutes? Sounds like they were waiting for the call…

So, apparently, Zimmerman’s GF was paid by the Obama administration to file false charges against poor old GZ. No doubt she threw herself out of her home and barricaded the door behind her using magic power. No, wait, the furniture used to barricade the door was rigged to pile up against the door using some remote control device provided by Eric Holder. That’s it.

I’m feeling a tad under the weather, so here’s some stuff to tide you over.

And what do the phrases “under the weather” and “tide you over” really mean? They make no sense.

Well, anyhoo — couple of big anniversaries this week. Tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. That’s seven score and ten years ago if you want to be formal about it.

And, of course, Friday is the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. Get ready for a Kennedy Assassination Truther Festival.

A couple of articles — see “America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy” by Michael Kimmel. It’s mostly what you all already know, but the author makes one point that is intriguing —

In the United States, class is often a proxy for race. When politicians speak of the “urban poor,” we know it’s a code for black people. When they talk about “welfare queens,” we know the race of that woman driving the late-model Cadillac. In polite society, racism remains hidden behind a screen spelled CLASS.

On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.

Finally, see “How We Got Obamacare to Work.” In short, states have shown us that the ACA works just fine if right-wing nutjobs just get out of the way and let it work.

Much sturm und drang today over the President’s decision to allow people to keep their cancelled health plans for another year. I’ve been busy with other things and am just now catching up with this, and from what I am reading it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Brian Beutler explains,

If your health insurance carrier has canceled your plan in anticipation of the launch of the Affordable Care Act, the administrative fix President Obama announced Thursday doesn’t guarantee you can get it back.

But setting aside logistical hurdles, it loosens regulations to allow insurance companies to reinstate the plans for another year, if they so choose — and if they first fully apprise you of your other options, including expanded benefits and the potential availability of premium support, on the exchanges.

This solution combines a clever P.R. stunt, a stalling tactic, an act of retribution, the genuine possibility of transition assistance for some, and a large political and substantive gamble. It bears the hallmarks of desperation and frustration and determination, but it just might work.

The idea isn’t to retroactively fulfill the promise he made to everyone whose plans have been canceled, but to demonstrate to the public that there’s now nothing in the law requiring carriers to dump policyholders or uphold their cancellation notices, so that the public takes its concerns and grievances directly to the carriers. That would alleviate pressure on Democratic lawmakers to vote under duress for legislation that would undermine the Affordable Care Act more dramatically.

Insurers are throwing a fit:

The health insurance industry is already attacking a White House fix to Obamacare on Thursday even before the plan is formally announced by the president.

“This doesn’t change anything other than force insurers to be the political flack jackets for the administration,” said an industry insider. “So now when we don’t offer these policies the White House can say it’s the insurers doing this and not being flexible.”

Yes, exactly. And they have only themselves to blame. Back to Brian Beutler:

But setting aside the merits, Obama’s remedy is a justified comeuppance for carriers who defaulted beneficiaries into obscenely expensive plans, which they characterized as “comparable” to the canceled coverage, without apprising them of their options, and blamed the whole disruption on Obamacare. It’s a scolding reminder to particular insurance companies that their lack of integrity exacerbated a problem that might have been contained if they hadn’t acted with such avarice. They are now reaping the whirlwind.

As I understand it, there were two proposals for “fixing” Obamacare in circulation in Congress. Ezra Klein:

The Republican Party’s play is Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” The law is poorly named: It doesn’t actually guarantee that you can keep your health care. Instead, it allows insurers to keep offering their current plans and also allows them to offer new plans that aren’t ACA compliant.

At a slim 235 words, Upton’s bill is a master class in the pitfalls of soundbite legislation. It manages to fail to solve the problem it’s actually aimed at while creating a new political problem — this time, for Republicans.

The bill gives insurers the option of renewing their cancelled plans — but, crucially, it doesn’t require them to do so. Few insurers want to renew those plans, as they don’t expect them to be profitable in a post-Obamacare world. So Upton’s bill doesn’t mean people can keep their current health insurance, but it means they can begin (wrongly) blaming their health insurer rather than the Obama administration for the cancellation of that insurance.

Meanwhile, Upton’s bill has a secondary provision allowing insurers to offer new plans in 2014 that don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act’s consumer protections. So if an insurer wants to continue turning people away for being sick, they can go right ahead. If they want to offer shoddy coverage that’ll evaporate the moment a health crisis strikes, that’s their prerogative. The result is that Upton guts the law’s extremely popular insurance regulations. “A vote for the Upton bill, in short, is a vote for everything Americans say they hate about their health-care system,” Jon Cohn writes .

The other plan already out there is Sen. Mary Landrieu’s. This plan would compel insurers to keep the old substandard plans going for those already enrolled, but would not allow them to sell new policies from those plans. And the insurers would have to send annual renewal notices explaining why the plans are crappy. Landrieu suggests that people would want to ditch the old policies once they know they have other options. I think the President’s idea may be the better one, though.