Why is this a big deal:

The 2,074-page Senate health care bill would take 34 hours to read cover to cover—and that’s just what Sen. Tom Coburn wants done on the Senate floor.

The Oklahoma Republican has threatened to invoke parliamentary rules to force the Senate clerk (or more likely, a team of clerks) to read the massive bill before the full Senate begins formal debate on the legislation.

The move is strictly according to Senate rules, which say any senator can demand a bill be read in its entirety before debate begins. While Democrats could, if they wish, repeatedly make motions to end the soliloquy, Republicans on the floor could object, and the reading would continue.

Thirty-four hours seems like a pretty short amount of time in the scheme of several decades of trying to attain health care reform. Let them read it. Who cares?

Am I not understanding something here?

Remember that mantra from the past eight years? At any rate, the Democrats finally broke the filibuster on one judicial nominee:

Senate Democrats broke a GOP filibuster Tuesday against a district judge first nominated eight months ago by President Barack Obama for a seat on the federal appeals court.

The Senate voted 70-29 to end debate over the nomination of Indiana Judge David Hamilton, who was tapped by Obama in March to fill a vacancy on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamilton was Obama’s first judicial nominee.

The full Senate is now expected to move forward quickly on a final vote on the nomination.

I’m as shocked as you are that the Democrats fought this. In other news, even the media is starting to notice the hypocrisy:

In 2005, Republicans spoke for days about the insult of the judicial filibuster, calling it unconstitutional. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the Senate Republican leader, said in 2005 of the Democrats: “For the first time in 214 years they’ve changed the advise and consent responsibilities to advise and obstruct.”

North Carolina’s Richard Burr, like many other Republicans, said the debate was about “fairness” and “about principle and …. allowing judicial nominees an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.”

And the man who is now the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, contended that “the Republican leadership have been consistent on this issue even when it was not to their political benefit to do so. We have opposed judicial filibusters and have not supported them.”

Imagine that- taking what the Republicans have said in the past, show that what they are doing today is completely at odds with their past statements, and point out they are hypocrites. Have these guys been watching the Daily Show to figure out how this reporting thing is done?

Once upon a time, the conventional wisdom was that “all politics is local.” Now, it’s conservative heterodoxy to, suggest, as Larison does, that

defeating Crist will be a hollow victory so long as the movement conservative alternative to the Crists of the party seems increasingly pre-packaged and crafted by national activists who are oblivious to and uninterested in local conditions around the country.

Granted, Tip was not a conservative, obviously. So I ask: have conservatives always though that some broad, vague, Randian, Burkean vision superseded any and all local, “parochial” issues? Or is this something new?

Update. Some point out that conservatives used to talk a lot about “federalism”. I always thought that people just talk about states’ rights when their party has no power at the federal level. So it seems strange to focus on a top-down, unified national message when you are completely out of power at the national level.

But maybe that is the central lesson here, that despite the fact that there are few Republican elected officials in Washington, the city is still wired for Republican control in a way that makes conservatives act as if they were in power. When the Politico says you’ve got a headwind at your back, the pundits say it’s a center-right nation, and you’re enjoying a Balzian resurgence , why not run cookie cutter conservatives in every district in the country? The conservative philosophy has never failed and whatever happens will be some form of good news anyway.

Quoted in I09*:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization.

It’s a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells’s stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

The general theme here, that we would benefit more from utopian fiction than from the other kind, is not just off base but dangerously wrong.

It lets off utopianism far too easy to say that it works less well than dystopian thinking to make society better. Without exaggerating, I could fairly say that utopian thinking sparked some of the worst things that humans have ever done. It is not even a debatable point. Communism started as a utopian ideal. Gated cults that commit mass suicide (or worse) nearly always stem from a utopian vision. In general the concept of utopia is one of the most efficient means ever found to get well-intentioned people to do awful things.

Fictional dreaming of dystopia is not just less dangerous, it has the polar opposite effect.

Think of the most influential fiction of the twentieth century. Can you remember one utopian work? 1984 and Animal Farm weave so deep in the western psyche that almost every criticism of government that doesn’t go straight to Hitler (that is to say, the effective ones) references Orwell instead. Ditto Lord of the Flies for group psychology. Brave New World looms over every discussion of science ethics since the year it was published. Maybe hippies cared about Ecotopia, but environmentalism has Silent Spring to thank. I read it part way through an ecology degree at an extremely liberal school, in 1998, and the book still punched me in the gut. Has the kook right attacked Edward Abbey lately? I doubt it. They love him just like they love Earth First! and the ELF and any other group that follows Callenbach’s utopian line of thought. If you want to know why the pollution lobby and their GOP pets still throw hate at a marine biologist who died in 1964, read her book. Fifty years later and it still changes minds.

Obviously this doesn’t mean that writers must shelve whatever book project or the world will end. On an average year the United States prints over 150,000 books. The UK prints over 100k more. Throw in the hundreds of thousands printed everywhere else and you have almost a million, save four or five, that people a century from now will never know existed.

It doesn’t bother me that Kim Robinson doesn’t roll with the dystopian cool kids. Admit it, zombies and Atwoodian parables and world-ending Emmerich movies are getting stale. The prob here is that Robinson took it one step further and justified his artistic (or commercial, whatever) decision with an academic argument that could not be more wrong if he took the truth and made a photographic negative.

(*) Although our current version of WP hides it for some reason, this is a link.

Ever, in the history of the country, have state Governor’s races not even in a midterm election year, but one year into an administration, been portrayed as a referendum on the President. And this is ignoring the fact that the two Democrats running for national office both won, one of which in a seat that has been in Republican hands for a century and a half, giving national Democrats one more seat than they had yesterday.

Could Chuck Todd explain to me how many votes in Congress for health care reform Chris Christie and McDonnell have? Our media is just hopeless.

So, to review, the wingnuts took a seat that would have been a win for the Republicans, so much so that the seat had not gone to a Democrat since Reconstruction and the Democratic candidates had been getting about 35% of the vote the last few elections, ran the Republican out of the race, brought their own special kind of crazy to town, and the voters rejected them handily.

Even I didn’t expect Owens to win. I seriously hope they pursue this strategy nationwide.

In other news, a Goldman employee has finally lost a job, with Corzine out in NJ. I know nothing about the election there, nor the one in Virginia, but I do know that Terry McAuliffe is not Governor. That is a good thing.

The only really bad thing is the repeal of the gay marriage law in Maine. Other than that, I’d be hard pressed to draw any conclusions from yesterday other than that Sarah Palin is still a loser. I’m sure that won’t stop the right-wing hacks from claiming this has been a bad result for Obama, but let’s face it- everything is good news for Republicans.

It looks like the tea bagger lost in NY-23. And you know what happened in the other two races.

There’s not much of a lesson to be learned from a bunch of low turn-out races in an odd year. But if you didn’t already know that running to the center in a state your party lost last time (I’m referring to McDonnell in VA) is smart and running to the far right in a swing district (NY-23) is dumb, this is more evidence.

There was a period under Bush where it became accepted wisdom that Bush had “won the center by moving to the right” (this is pretty close to a verbatim quote from Howard Fineman). I think that era is over.

Update. I am now putting all posts in the category “Good News For Conservatives”, btw.

Update update. Also consider this a late-night open thread.

As goes the special election in Michigan’s 19th State Senatorial district, so goes the nation.

I remember talking to voters in this district back in 1980, with Jack Germonde and R. W. Apple, at an old diner that only served coffee, donuts, and burgers. You could tell something was in the air. You could tell the Reagan revolution was coming. People were angry. Regular people, gritty people, blue-collar workers with plastic crucifixes on their dashboards.

I suppose one day Rick Moran will learn:

Because Rick is not sufficiently conservative wingnutty, we are told he is just angling for a Democratic job and he is comatose. I would hope that the lesson Rick would learn from this is that the party we both loved at one point is now run by insane people, but I’m afraid he drinks deeply from the cup of Broder and will decide that “if Pam Gellar and Robert McCain hate me and the Daily Kos doesn’t link me, I must be doing something right.”

At any rate, go give him some encouragement in the comments. Someone has to save the GOP, and it damned sure isn’t going to be me. I’ve got wooden stakes, garlic, and an attitude.

Be prepared for a lot of good news for conservatives tomorrow, in Virginia, in New Jersey, in NY-23.

I think there may be so much good news that we start hearing a catch phrase like “anti-Obama backlash”, “conservative realignment/resurgence/rebirth”. Has anyone heard anything catchy along these lines yet?

Nothing surprising about this (via the GOS):

It is in this spirit that I am writing to let you know I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same.

It’s not in the cards for me to be your representative, but I strongly believe Bill is the only candidate who can build upon John McHugh’s lasting legacy in the U.S. Congress. John and I worked together on the expansion of Fort Drum and I know how important that base is to the economy of this region. I am confident that Bill will be able to provide the leadership and continuity of support to Drum Country just as John did during his tenure in Congress.

In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first.

Please join me in voting for Bill Owens on Tuesday. To address the tough challenges ahead, we must rise above partisanship and politics and work together. There’s too much at stake in this election to do otherwise.

We’ll see if the wingnut purge works out for them. In related news, it turns out that Hoffman is a Glenn Beck follower and has signed his pledge. This just gets more awesome with every day.

And this from Hoffman’s position page made me chuckle: “I was brought up to believe marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s how I feel. I don’t want to persecute anyone but that’s what I believe. Marriage ought to stay marriage. Period.”

Unless, of course, your name is Michael Schiavo, and then marriage is between a man, a woman, the wingnuts, and a Republican congress.

If Pete Sessions escapes with anything less than being publicly stoned with fake dog poop, he should consider himself lucky:

Make no mistake about it, Pete Sessions and the NRCC must shoulder most of the blame and responsibility, with Michael Steele and the RNC coming right behind them. They did not listen. They would not listen. They posited themselves as the smartest people in the room.

And we’ve cleaned their clocks.

Now? We should be magnanimous in victory — and whether Hoffman wins or loses, as long as Dede Scozzafava loses it is a victory — but we should demand accountability, we should demand a reckoning, and we should demand a purge from the party establishment of those people most responsible for the Republican disaster in NY-23.

It goes without saying that whatever happens in NY-23 on Tuesday, it will be good news for conservatives. If teabagger Hoffman wins, it will signal a profound political realignment, the likes of which have not been seen since the days of Ronaldus Magnus. If the Democrat Owens wins, it will still be amazing that Hoffman came out of nowhere to make the race so close; this will probably be true no matter what the vote totals are, though there is also the possibility that Hoffman will lose by so much that it will turn out that he wasn’t a true conservative.

I have some serious question here. First off, what benefit does all the good news, here and elsewhere, actually bring conservatives? Is it really a smart tactic to claim that everything that happens is good news for your political movement? The only parallel I can think of is communism where good economic times for capitalist countries meant that capitalists were getting fat and lazy while bad economic times meant the workers were getting ready to rise up. Is this a fair comparison? And was it smart for communists to spin things that way?

Remember how the Clintons used to rent the Lincoln Bedroom out to fat cat donors? And then how Bush came in and cleaned the place up and kicked out all the lobbyists and made us all proud again? Well, Obama’s turning out to be even worse than Clinton.

I can’t wait til Tim Pawlenty gets in and restores some dignity to the place.

Well, there’s a pretty good chance now that the Republicans will have tebagged away what should have been an easy win in NY-23. There’s talk about the tea party candidate, Doug Hoffman, winning, but I think that’s quite unlikely. I doubt his base of support is much higher than the percentage of the district that consists of single issue pro-life voters (probably around 20% in the district—thrown in a more oddballs and you might get to 30% but not much higher). If you read between the lines of this NYT piece, that’s what is going on in the race:

“The No. 1 victory will be to defeat Dede,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect candidates who oppose abortion.

Ms. Dannenfelser, along with members of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes efforts to legalize same-sex marriage, are helping to coordinate efforts on the ground in support of Mr. Hoffman.

At the Days Inn on Sunday, Ms. Dannenfelser, 43, of Arlington, Va., and three other organizers from the Washington area who have temporarily relocated to Watertown joined a conference call with conservatives from across the country. A small picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary rested on top of the television, while the Pittsburgh Steelers game played with the volume muted.

Now, Scozzafava may be a bit of an outlier with her support for reproductive rights and same sex marriage, but Republicans in NYS are not, in general, that conservative. In much of the state, union support is crucial, so Republicans generally suck up to unions. Moreover, they tend to support spending on health care, education, etc. This is why the Republican party remains relevant in a state that Obama won by 26 points.

There are also lots of third parties in NYS —a Conservative party, a Libertarian party, etc., and they all have some amount of infrastructure. So it should be pretty easy to teabag Republican office-holders—specifically state legislators—all over the state. My two local State Senators are Republicans—one is a former Democrat who is in the pocket of unions (for better or worse), the other is best known for supporting local arts with earmark money. Neither is as left as Scozzafava on reproductive rights, but both would probably lose if there were a Conservative party candidate pulling even 10-15% of the district vote. They both should be teabaggable.

I’ll be curious to see if the teabagagers teabaggers are emboldened to wage a scorched earth campaign against moderate Republicans statewide. It would accomplish nothing in terms of winning races, but it might radically change the state Republican party and energize the state’s Conservative party.