Franken 1, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth zip. Transcript here.

Before I go on to the good news, let’s take a look at this paragraph from yesterday’s Washington Post (by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen):

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.

It’s good news, yes, but note the phrase “government-run health-care plan.” Will you allegedly nonpartisan reporters please stop using code terms churned out by the right-wing propaganda machine? The more accurate phrase is “public insurance option.”

Now let’s check out what Deirdre Walsh at CNN has to say:

A preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office projects that the House Democrats’ health care plan that includes a public option would cost $871 billion over 10 years, according to two Democratic sources.

Ooo, cost. Bad, bad. But let’s go on to the second and third paragraphs:

CBO also found that the Democrats’ bill reduces the deficit in the first 10 years.

This new CBO estimate, which aides caution is not final, is significantly less than the $1.1 trillion price tag of the original House bill that passed out of three committees this summer. More importantly, it comes under the $900 billion cap set by President Obama in his joint address to Congress last month.

Here’s the best part:

Moderate, “blue dog” Democrats in the House largely oppose the robust public option and instead argue for a government run insurance option that could negotiate reimbursement rates directly with doctors and hospitals. CBO’s analysis of that approach was not available according to Democratic sources, but aides say the preliminary analysis shows it does not save as much as the approach pushed by Pelosi.

Mike Soraghan of The Hill says that some Dems want to re-brand the public option “Medicare Part E,” as in Medicare for Everyone. Mostly a good idea, says Publius. Interesting, but could cause other problems, says Jonathan Singer.

If they do it, get out your stopwatches and time how many seconds it takes before Republicans are bad-mouthing Medicare again.

If you’re familiar with American history, you have to savor the irony of an Irish-American Catholic identifying with those who are “losing their country.” In the 19th century the Irish weren’t exactly “we.”

Forgive the ugly stuff, but I think it’s good to know where we’ve been sometime.

San Francisco : White & Bauer, between 1860 and 1869

Thomas Nast, 1876

Thomas Nast, 1882

The big type war of the yellow kids, 1898

Just a reminder that journalism wasn’t always professional. Well, whether it was ever purely professional could be debated. But William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers really did play a big role in getting the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.

Fast forward to today. Jacob Weisberg writes that Fox News is un-American. By this he seems to mean that Fox’s grotesque partisanship is outside the tradition of American journalism, and that it is bad for America. Regarding the tradition of American journalism — um, there are a lot of traditions. I think in the 20th century journalism really did create some professional standards and more or less upheld them, although that’s all out the window now. But Fox has done a great job of reviving the 19th century standard of yellow journalism for which William Randolph Hearst is remembered.

As for whether this is bad for America — of course it is.

In the October Atlantic, Mark Bowden writes that journalism is collapsing all over. It isn’t just Fox, although Fox played a big role in its collapse. He begins by recalling how all the news cable networks had the same clips of obscure Sonia Sotomayor sound bytes (the “wise Latina” comment and the clip about judges making policy) as soon as Judge Sotomayor was nominated to SCOTUS. “The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men.” He continues,

The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance.

This process–political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts–is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery. The very smart and capable young men … who actually dug up and initially posted the Sotomayor clips both originally described themselves to me as part-time, or aspiring, journalists.

The fact that interests groups churn up propaganda to feed to media isn’t shocking. That’s always been done. What’s disturbing is the degree to which the cable newsies throw the stuff at audiences undigested and unfiltered, without checking to find the context or noting where the obscure clips came from. Fifty years ago, that would have been considered a breach of journalism professional standards. Now, it’s what everybody does.

Neal Gabler has an excellent column at the Boston Globe called “One Nation, Under Delusion.” He writes that the myth of American exceptionalism is going to be our downfall.

One of his arguments is that we’ve often had government that is better than the people. That’s kind of a tenuous point, I think. Basically, he’s saying that at times outstanding leaders have come forward who inspired America to do the right thing or make progressive change, even when politically unpopular. One could quibble those were exceptions rather than rules, but on the whole Gabler makes some good points.

The conclusion:

The Greeks understood that the gods punished mortals for their hubris – for feeling that they were godlike. They knew that overweening pride preceded a fall. One suspects that nations are no more immune to punishment than individuals. A nation that brooks no criticism, a nation that feels it is always better than any other, a nation that has to be endlessly flattered and won’t face the truth, a nation whose people think they possess some special moral exemption and wisdom, a nation without humility is a nation spoiling for calamity.

We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. The result may be a government that is as good as the American people, which is something that should concern everyone.