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Glenn Beck invited on professional liar and smear artist Michael Goldfarb -- whose skill at distorting and misleading and obfuscating we have some personal experience with -- to promote Beck's latest ginned-up-out-of-nothing "scandal", namely, the claim that the White House threatened Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska with yanking Offut Air Force Base if he didn't play ball on the health-care reform bill.

Well, as Media Matters observes, this story has in fact been denied by all the parties involved, including Sen. Nelson's office:

His spokesman quickly dismissed a report by conservative columnist Michelle Malkin that Nelson was even being threatened with “closure of an air force base,” presumably Offutt Air Force Base, which is south of Omaha and home of U.S. Strategic Command. Malkin also said Nelson has been promised a “bribe bigger than Sen. Landrieu's.”

That's a reference to Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat and one of the last holdouts on the vote to begin the health care debate. The legislation includes a provision to increase Louisiana's Medicaid funds that Landrieu says is worth $300 million.

Nelson spokesman Jake Thompson said both of Malkin's claims about Nelson are false.

“The rumor is not true,” Thompson said. “This misinformation is coming from inside-the-Beltway partisans who only want to derail health care reform.”

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer likewise chimed in:

Proving that they will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to undermine health reform, some blogs opposing reform are now trafficking an absurd rumor that Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base is being threatened over Senator Ben Nelson's vote on the Senate reform bill.

To be perfectly clear: these rumors are completely baseless and false.

These denials, of course, were a matter of public record well before Beck went on the air. Not that dishonest hacks like Beck and Goldfarb would have informed the public of their existence.

Indeed, you'll see that Goldfarb has to start out retracting one of the key elements of his original reportage -- that it was Rahm Emanuel who had made the call. As you can see, he has to explain that this was false, though he does not use that word.

Ultimately, his only source for this story is an anonymous, unidentified "Senate staffer".

But wingnuts are never content to just call an unconfirmed rumor an unconfirmed rumor (unless it's one that makes wingnuts look bad). So of course the shrinking contingent of wingnuts in the Senate, led by moral paragon Sen. John Ensign, R-C Street, is demanding an investigation.

Now Goldfarb is using that fact to continue defending his disappearing "scandal", illustrating just how deeply these guys are breathing their own exhaust:

They protest a little too much. I do not know this story is "absolutely false." To the contrary, I'm confident it's true. Twenty senators are now calling for an investigation, and each is presumably pretty well sourced in the Senate. If the charges are "absolutely false," maybe the White House will encourage Senate Democrats to call this Republican bluff. I won't hold my breath.

And we won't hold our breath waiting for a correction when Goldfarb is eventually proven wrong once again.

Meanwhile, Sen. Nelson is calling it "yellow journalism at its worst." Sounds about right.

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At the end of separate interviews on Hardball, Chris Matthews gives Howard Dean a chance to respond to Mary Landrieu's statements and he comes at her hard for forcing everyone into private insurance by not allowing other choices in the bill. I'd call that a smack down for sure.

John Amato:

Sen. Landrieu drones on and on about her blind love and devotion to the insurance industry that has been a nightmare for many Americans. Why does she hate the idea that Americans deserve to have a choice about who they buy their health care from?

Dean: Mary, I'd like to know why you deny my people of the choice to sign up for an alternative? You are forcing us in to insurance companies. You took away our choice.

You would not let us choose another program. You forced us into the insurance industry and we don't want to be forced into the insurance industry and you took away our choice. That is wrong.

Landrieu: That is not true. You never had that choice to begin with.

Dean: The president campaigned on it, Mary...

Landrieu: No, he didn't. He did not campaign for a public option.

Dean: ...He most certainly did. He absolutely did, you are not accurate. He campaigned for a federal employee benefit with a public option. That's what he campaigned for.

Landrieu obviously never bothered to read the health care bill that President Obama ran on in the general election.

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Ed Schultz talks to United Steel Workers President about the mood of union leaders right now after Joe Lieberman torpedoed the health care bill. Gerard points out that it's not just Joe Lieberman but also what he calls the "insurance company Democrats", Nelson, Lincoln and Landrieu. Schultz asked if the unions would work against them.

Gerard: I can tell you this, point blank. If we don't get a meaningful health care bill that reduces costs and has everybody in and doesn't have an excise tax, has a pay or play for employers, has a public option or Medicare buy-in, we're not going to campaign for any Democrat that voted against this bill and we're going to go out and try and defeat them.

I agree with Gerard on that move. I think he gave the President way too big of a pass here.

Recently the Senate passed Sen. Barbara Mikulski's Women's Health Amendment, which requires health insurance companies to provide free mammograms and other preventive health services for women. Sounds good, doesn't it? Women's health needs have traditionally been underserved by the insurance system. But, ironically, the Senate's excise tax will force many women to pay indirectly for these "free" services.

Here's how: For one thing, the cost of the services mandated in the Mikulski Amendment will cause even more health plans to exceed the cost cap for the excise tax. And it's expected that 20% of plans will already be over the limit when the tax takes effect. In practical terms, any added costs for new services provided by these plans (like those mammograms) will be taxable. So, in one very real sense, the Senate plans to tax some of this preventive care for women - at a staggering 40% of cost.

The Mikulski Amendment looks like a step forward, but many women will pay for these services indirectly - in the form of higher premiums or increased out-of-pocket costs. One hand giveth and the other taketh away. And speaking of irony ...

Guess who voted for the Mikulski amendment? Some Senators who haven't even committed themselves to voting for the final bill, including Lieberman, Landrieu, and Snowe (who even cosponsored the amendment. Here's an idea: They can make sure these women's services really remain "free" by supporting the Sanders-Franken-Brown Amendment, which would replace the excise tax with a tax on the extremely wealthy (the way the house does it.)

That would remove the irony in the Senate's actions and replace it with fairness.

If Reid doesn't get this done, he won't be Majority Leader for long:

Talk about using budget reconciliation to pass healthcare reform in the Senate has faded from public view, but Democratic leaders continue to hang the threat over centrists in private.

FYI: They're not "centrists" - they're corporate conservatives.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) discussed reconciliation with wavering centrists before an important procedural vote to begin debate on healthcare reform.

On Saturday, Nov. 21, three centrists, Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), voted to commence debate, despite heavy pressure from Republicans and conservative groups to oppose it.

Nelson wrote in an op-ed last week that he voted for the motion to avoid the prospect of Reid bringing healthcare legislation to the floor under budget reconciliation, a process with special procedural protections originally intended for legislation to reduce the deficit, such as tax increases or spending cuts.

[...] Under reconciliation, healthcare legislation could pass with a simple majority after a strictly limited floor debate. But lawmakers would have to carve up the bill to eliminate provisions that do not clearly raise revenue or cut spending and therefore would be subject to parliamentary objections. Reid has said that he could pass a government-run health insurance program, known as the public option, under reconciliation.

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Howard Kurtz points out the hypocrisy by those on the right and at Fox News who had a hissy fit over Alan Grayson calling a lobbyist a whore, but ignoring Glenn Beck calling Mary Landrieu a prostitute. The guy from The National Review's answer killed me.

GERAGHTY: I think I expect more out of a member of Congress than the 5:00 p.m. hour of FOX News.

Well, so do I but that doesn't excuse Glenn Beck for that pile of dung he calls a television show. I also don't think it's is a fair comparison. Grayson didn't call the lobbyist a street walker like Beck did Landrieu. He used the term whore which can also mean "a venal or unscrupulous person".

KURTZ: You know, a few weeks ago on this program, I talked about why I thought that CNN and MSNBC and other news outlets should have devoted more attention to something that Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson said. He called a lobbyist a "K Street whore."

FOX News went wild on this story. I thought it was underplayed elsewhere.

Now we have Glenn Beck using a similar term on FOX News. Let me play that for you and we'll come back on the other side.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GLENN BECK: Well, I'm sorry. So we know you're hooking, but you're just not cheap. It's $300 million...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: OK. He's talking there about Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who did get a provision in order to get her support for breaking the filibuster on the health care bill, $300 million for Louisiana.

He said she was hooking. He basically called her a prostitute.

Let's go back a couple of weeks to what Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin were saying on FOX News when the Alan Grayson "whore" comment was made.

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Really? Yes, Really. For reasons unknown, Time Magazine's Mark Halperin decided to post a photoshopped picture of Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu with semen in her hair, ala Cameron Diaz in the movie There's Something About Mary. One would think he could have come up with something a little more appropriate. Jason Linkins has more at HuffPo:

...There are lots of ways to serve up this news story! And there are lots of creative ways to put it together for web trawlers. How about, "Mary, Mary, quite contrary?" or, if you're old-school retro, "Mary, Mary, why you buggin'?" Or you could just decide that the best thing to do is be straight about it. Not Halperin, though! Here's the imaginative Photoshop that went along with his "story." Read on...

My thoughts exactly. Halperin is a hack, with little to no journalistic integrity, but this is low even by his standards. While I don't agree with Senator Landrieu on all her votes, the health care bill in particular, I think she has an apology coming from both Mark Halperin and Time.

I'm not feeling incredibly optimistic this morning. Sounds like the most conservative (and most expensive) version of this bill will make up the final version, and I don't see much to celebrate. Is it better to have a crappy bill - or no bill at all?

And why should those be our only options?

The fact is, the Democratic leadership lacks, well, leadership. They think constructing a stage set and acting out a scene that looks like they're leading on the public option is enough to placate the people who so desperately need their help. It isn't. They simply don't get it, and it will cost them:

From the liberal end, Burris repeated a threat made earlier: That if the public option is taken out, he's gone. "I won't vote for it," he said.

"You'll lose people on the left," confirmed Brown.

Reid, aware of the fine line he's walking, told reporters that Landrieu, Schumer and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) are working on a compromise public option, perhaps something that 60 folks could support and save face.

That's what you don't understand, Harry. It's not about "face." But then, it's been so long since you had to worry about paying for your health care, I suppose it's too much to expect.

Yes, this will eventually be good for the country and perhaps our grandchildren - but it won't do much to help the people who need help during these desperate times, and it's certainly going to hurt the Democrats in the midterm elections:

After announcing her intent to support a health care debate this afternoon, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) told reporters she thinks Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will soon have to choose between a triggered public option and no health care bill. She also says Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)--the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate one of its most fierce and vocal public option advocates--has been tasked as a point man on the issue.

"I believe it's going to be very clear at some point very soon that there are not 60 votes for the current provision in the bill, and that the leader and the leadership are going to have to make a decision and I trust that they will figure out how to do that," Landrieu told reporters.

Landrieu has been in negotiations with a number of centrist senators about a compromise that would eliminate the public option, except in states where insurance remains unaffordable. Interestingly, though, Schumer is playing a big role in that process.

"Senator Schumer's working on that. He's sort of been tasked as one of the point people," she told me. "He's been tagged as one of the point people to help negotiate that."

Schumer's involvement as a liaison between liberal and conservative Democrats puts the trigger issue in a new light. When Reid announced that he'd include his opt-out plan in the health care bill in lieu of triggers, many, including trigger-author Olympia Snowe, believed the compromise to be dead. But it now appears to be one of the central points of discussion between leadership and conservative Democrats as they try to find 60 votes for a reform bill.

It's half a victory, and a weak one at that.

Nate Silver on why we shouldn't celebrate just yet:

Needless to say, it would have been very, very bad news for the Democrats if the motion to proceed to debate on their health care plan had failed tonight. But I'm not sure how newsworthy this really is. The potential hold-outs, like Lincoln and Ben Nelson, are going to have much greater leverage later on, when the bill nears its second major procedural hurdle: the cloture motion to proceed to the final vote.

And there's some bad news for Democrats too: Lincoln has joined Senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman in making a fairly explicit threat to filibuster a bill that contains a public option. Mary Landrieu, on the other hand, sounds a little bit more open to compromise. But this impromptu Gang of 3 -- Lincoln, Nelson, Lieberman -- could be a tough one for progressives to penetrate.

Yeah, it's going to be ugly by the time they get done dealing away any real hope of competition for the insurance companies. I'm not optimistic about the short-term results here and I have to keep muttering to myself that this will be good for our children and grandchildren - probably.

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[H/t Heather]

Blanche Lincoln was complaining today about all those outside group ads that were attacking her, but in the end she says she'll vote for cloture today.

Blue America has been running another massive media blitz in Arkansas demanding give us an up or down vote.

Lincoln: For months now groups from outside my state have assigned various motives for my deliberations on health care and tried to define the meaning of my vote. According to the last tally there has been more than 3.2 million dollars worth of media ads that have been purchased from my home state of Arkansas by groups from outside of our state. certainly none by me. And most with my name in the ad. These outside groups seem to think this is all about my re-election. I simply think they don't know me very well. I'm focused on my opportunity to to influence the final version of health care reform legislation in a way that most helps my state. That's why the people of Arkansas sent me here.
--

I will not allow my decision on this vote to be dictated by pressure from my political opponent nor the liberal interest groups from outside Arkansas that threaten with their money political opposition. The multitudes of emails and ads that we have received, Unbelievable types of threats about what they're going to do and how they're going to behave.

She's trying to feign shock that her name showed up in ads targeted at her in her own state over this issue. Jaysus. Our problem is that we know her too well. If she were truly representing her state, then she would get behind the public option and stop joining with the Republicans, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Lieberman to kill it. She does have a D in her title and she should start acting like one. Why is Lincoln so against the public option and using right-wing language to define it?

She has an opportunity to be part of a great moment in our history. She's a politician looking to survive. She hates that she's running for re-election at this time. Well Blanche, sometimes you have to do the right thing and not put your own political career before the entire country's health care. Right now she's saying she won't vote for it. If she joins with the Holy Joes, then she votes at her own political peril.

Here's Blue America's new ad that is running now.

Here's our Blue America Act Blue fundraising page on health care.

(h/t Heather for the video)

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C-SPAN Nov. 21, 2009

Sen. Mary Landrieu announce she will allow debate on the health care bill to move forward

Landrieu: I've decided that there are enough significant reforms and safeguards in this bill to move forward, but much more work needs to be done.

Sadly the work she wants to see done is watering down the public option to make sure it's not robust enough to offer any real reform. I wonder what kind of deal they had to make with her already just to get this vote.

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, a discussion of the political machinations around the public option:

On the Roundtable, Bloomberg’s Al Hunt says that a health reform package can’t pass without the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe. She provides cover for moderates like Sens. Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu and may pull over a couple of Republican votes.

HUNT: "Olympia Snowe, I think, thinks privately that in the end the trigger will be the compromise everyone has to rally around and give a little bit of face-saving to liberals and she and a few other republicans can go for it."

They really don't get it, do they? They're so out of touch with reality that they don't understand the kind of serious harm they're doing to the Democratic brand with this bait-and-switch routine on the public option.

A trigger? A frackin' trigger? How much longer do we have to wait to get relief from the predatory practices of the insurance industry? And how much more obvious does it have to be that the priority in the Senate is incumbency protection?

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This has to be one of the more infuriating things to come out of one of these Conserva-Dems mouths in a long time. Do you think you could be a little more insulting to the American public Sen. Landrieu? Of course both David Shuster and Tamryn Hall waited until after Landrieu got off the air to question whether what she was saying was complete B.S. or not. That's not included in the above clip but here's my beef with the two of them. While they still had her there, they should have asked her how lining the pockets of insurance industry CEO's and their stock holders is doing anything to help small business or the general public that isn't fortunate enough to have her health care plan paid for by our tax dollars.

And nobody thinks that having a public option is going to be "free". Landrieu apparently pulled that talking point out of the land called her butt, since that's the first time I've heard someone use it. That or some health insurance lobbyist fed it to her and we're going to hear more of the same from Landrieu and the rest of her fellow Corporate-crats as this debate goes on.

Hall: I want to talk about the public option. You just heard Gov. Dean and he said “What’s the point in having a sixty vote majority in the Senate if you can’t get the public option passed?” “That is health care reform, not insurance reform and that is what the American people want.” Where do you stand? I know that you’ve been under a lot of pressure about your opinions on public option, but where do you stand now after we saw new numbers come out and it passed in the Senate Finance Committee yesterday, without the public option in that committee?

Landrieu: Well first of all Gov. Dean has been a wonderful leader and he is a great guy and a wonderful American, seriously. I just don’t agree with him on his statement that unless you have a public option you can’t have real reform. And I don’t agree that if you’re not for a public option you’re for insurance companies, you know, scamming tax payers…um…or consumers. I’m not for either. I wish it was as simple, but it’s not.

The bottom line is we want choice and competition and a reformed market place. I don’t believe as a Democrat and I’m proud to say this as a Democrat, I believe in the private sector. I don’t believe in the government running every program and for everybody. I believe in public/private partnerships.

Hall: Do you believe in the polling that says that the American people want a public option? Do you believe in that desire from the folks that you and all of the others represent that say that they want a public option to happen to help offset these costs?

Landrieu: I think when people hear public option they hear free health care. Everybody wants free health care. Everybody wants health care they don’t have to pay for. The problem is that we as governments and business have to pick up the tab and as individuals. So I’m not at all surprised that the public option has been sold as free health care, but there is no free lunch and it’s costing us 16% of the gross national product and it’s driving businesses out of business.

So I wish it was as simple as saying you can have a public option and everything’s going to be great or not. The fact it’s more complicated than that and it’s been a very I think unfortunate debate between public option and not public. We should be thinking about public/private partnerships and cost containment.

Sen. Landrieu, cost containment would mean putting a stop to your campaign donors taking 30% for moving our money around and making the bankers happy while they deny their customers the coverage they thought they paid for.

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Mary Landrieu on This Week with George Stephanopoulos defending the "need" to keep the private insurance system in place. Would somebody please ask one of these politicians just what value the industry provides to the American public? They do nothing but move money around and skim 30% off the top for doing it. And then do their best not to pay out benefits after they've got their take. Of course we know why. The amount of money pouring into campaign coffers. That and enriching Wall Street.

Jello Jay Rockefeller still is strongly in favor of having a public option and explains why he thinks it's one way to keep the insurance industries costs in check in this segment. I think we need single payer, but we're going to need to vote out about half the members of Congress for any hope of that ever happening.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what's the problem with the public health option?

LANDRIEU: Well, many of us believe, George, that it will undermine the private insurance system. And that's one of the criticism of the direction that the House of Representatives took. Because 55 percent of those covered with insurance today are covered through a private insurance model, 45 percent are covered through a public model.

So, many of us would like to take the president at his word, which is, let's not completely revise the whole system. Let's build on the strengths.

Now I'm with Jay in the sense that if we can find a middle ground here, where we can keep insurance honest, regulate insurance companies, no American supports unregulated insurance companies, so that there is competition in the market, we can maybe achieve the goal through a different way.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the different ways that has been talked about, and then I want to move on to other subjects, is this proposal put forward by Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, which would say, let's give some time to see if the president's health insurance reforms work to bring down costs, increase competition, if not, then we'll have a trigger which will set the public option a few years down the road.

LANDRIEU: And I have to say, I think both Jay and I can agree that what Democrats want -- and I'm hoping that some Republicans will join us in this effort and not just leave Americans out there with a too-expensive system that they have and a system that's going to crash and burn shortly if we don't do anything.

I hope that we can agree that we've got to have a reformed market where individuals can buy insurance that's affordable. Where small businesses get a chance. These small businesses, 27 million of them, George, are basically out on their own.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So can you support the Snowe trigger?

LANDRIEU: I can support potentially a fallback, but only if the private sector is allowed and given a great opportunity to get this right. I believe they can.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about you?

ROCKEFELLER: I think that's too easy an answer with all...

LANDRIEU: That's OK.

ROCKEFELLER: Lots of love.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCKEFELLER: I mean, I said I didn't think there were any good alternatives. And if you're not going to vote for something, then you have to do something about insurance, because they have been very rapacious about ripping off consumers. We have done a lot of work on that to show that, and had whistleblowers come forward.

But I'm not dispassionate on the public option.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You're going to keep fighting?

ROCKEFELLER: Yes, I am going to keep fighting, because it's probably not going to attract more than -- it will probably attract less than 5 percent of the American population. And, you know, Tim -- the governor will say, it's going to track over 100 million. It won't. It won't.

But it's an option. And the very fact that it is there says to the other insurance companies, hey, if we don't bring our costs down, because the public option doesn't have -- they just live on their own premiums...

You can always count on the Ben Nelsons in Congress to try and destroy any chance we have of health-care reform. He and his five buds sent a letter to President Obama and are asking for a delay in crafting health-care legislation.

What's up with all these gangs and letters?

A bipartisan group of centrist and conservative senators sent a letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders on Friday urging delay in consideration of health care reform.

The letter, obtained by the Huffington Post, was drafted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and is also signed by Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.). Independent Joe Lieberman (Conn.), who caucuses with Democrats, signed on, as did Maine Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins -- moderates heavily courted by President Obama.

The organized effort to slow down the process is a blow to the reform effort. Obama has pushed hard for a final vote before the August recess, arguing that delaying until September could slow momentum and risk missing a historic opportunity.

It's the same old song being played over and over again by these creeps. And it's the same old tired song we heard back in 1994

Greg Sargent:

If today’s demand by “centrist” Dem Senators that we slow health care reform sounds familiar, that’s because it is: Almost exactly the same thing happened in 1994, courtesy of then-centrist-Senator Bob Kerrey versus Hillarycare.

This is one of the major reasons why our health-care system has remained in shambles for decades. They use the same tactics over and over again because they work. Corporate shills and elitist views trump the hurt that the American family is feeling. President Obama needs to stop issuing orders about deficits and actually get in there and tell these people what he wants.

It's infuriating that suddenly "deficits" are more important than actual reform. Obama is planting the seeds to their own demise by talking up the deficit like it's the Holy Grail. That's just what the teabaggers and conservatives want to focus on in 2010. If you asked most people in America how a large federal deficit hurts them specifically, they couldn't tell you, but just "know that it's bad."

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