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Good old Mitch McConnell. You can always count on him for the IOKIYAR argument. He seems to have a bit of a memory problem when it comes to the use of reconciliation. Of course we can count on John King not to ask him about it either. Sadly that is all too typical of the media.

From Media Matters--LA Times reported McConnell's criticism of reconciliation without noting his past support of process:

The Los Angeles Times reported Sen. Mitch McConnell's criticism of Democrats' potential use of the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform without noting that he repeatedly voted in favor of using reconciliation to pass the Bush tax cuts.

Transcript:

KING: Well, I want you to listen, not to the president, but I want you to listen to your own voice. You spoke here in Washington on Friday to a conservative gathering about the health care debate and you voiced quiet confidence about the Republican position. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCONNELL: We're seeing it today in the debate over health care. Ordinary Americans speaking their minds, dismissed and ridiculed by people in power. The reason they are doing this is clear, because we're winning the argument.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Define "winning" for me. Is winning blocking the Democratic plans and ending this year without a health care reform bill reaching the president's desk?

MCCONNELL: No, winning is stopping and starting over and getting it right. I don't know anybody in my Republican conference in the Senate who's in favor of doing nothing on health care. We obviously have a cost problem and we have an access problem.

But there's a very big difference about whether or not it's appropriate to have a major rewrite of about one sixth of our economy in the process. My members just don't think that's the right way to go. We want to fix the health care system, but we don't want to do or have a $1 trillion over 10-year cut in Medicare, not to make Medicare more sustainable, but to start a new program for others.

We don't think it's a good idea to raise taxes on small businesses and on individuals in the heart of a recession. There are some serious differences about what ought to be done. KING: I saw your speech just before I went over to see the president. So I asked him about it. Listen to this exchange.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Mitch McConnell told the conservative group, we're winning the health care debate. What do you think of that?

OBAMA: Well, you know, they were saying they were winning during the election too.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: A confident president there, saying he will get health care. He also said in an interview with Univision that's airing this morning that he would love Republican votes, but I don't count on them. I don't count on them. Mr. Leader, let me ask you, if they go forward and they do this with all Democrats, what does that do to the environment down the road? Some Republicans have said well then don't expect our cooperation on financial reform. Don't expect our cooperation on Afghanistan. Is this one issue health care, or could it poison the well?

MCCONNELL: Look, it's not about winning or losing, it's not about the president, it's about American health care and getting it right. And if they try to use this legislative loophole called reconciliation, what they'll be doing, in effect, is jamming through a proposal to rewrite the economy with about 24 hours of debate.

Basically, a legislative loophole to do a massive rewrite of one sixth of our economy. I think that that will produce a very, very severe reaction among the American people, who are already, according to the Gallup poll, not in favor of the direction we're taking on this very important issue.

KING: Help me understand if there's a gap between the audience in the sense that you say here, it's not about winning or losing, but you were very clear to that conservative group, we're winning the argument.

MCCONNELL: Well, by winning, the definition of winning is to stop and start over and do it right.

Poet, author, and musician Jim Carroll passed away from a heart attack this weekend while working at his desk. Known best for the autobiographical book and film The Basketball Diaries, Carroll turned his personal struggles into art with tremendous amounts of humor and honesty, but somehow staying out of overearnest territory.

Howie Klein sums it up well at his place:

Jim led a poet's life, a beatnik's life, a free spirit's life. He died in his home in New York City on Friday. He left the world a better and a more beautiful place by his brief presence.

The Jim Carroll's band's 1980 single "People Who Died" is his best and most widely known musical work, but is merely a skinny slice of his very rich body of work over the years. Enjoy.

(The 50 State Strategy post has been moved to tomorrow)

(Disclosure: I'm working with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign, exposing insurance industry practices. Check us out on Facebook.)

The New York Times published a very nice press release from the desk of Humana, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies. The reporter interviewed a bunch of employees at Humana, all of whom were horrified to see themselves depicted as "villains" in the health care debate. I agree with Yves Smith, this is an absurd angle for a story, an extreme example of selection bias. The people who work at Humana probably have a sense that their employer, um, pays their salary, and thusly, what's good for the employer is probably good for them. Similarly, most people hold a favorable opinion of themselves just as a matter of getting through the day. Not to mention the fact that their understanding of the functioning of Humana is limited to their job description. It is not possible to gain much of a perspective on the health care debate or industry practices by asking a midlevel manager "Do you think you're the worst person alive?"

Since when is it legitimate, much the less newsworthy, to get a company's perception on its embattled status, at least without introducing either some contrary opinion or better yet, facts, to counter the views of people who will inevitably see what they are doing as right? I hate to draw an extreme comparison to make the point, but staff in Nazi concentration camps also thought they were good people. It is well documented that for all save the depressed, people's assessments of their own behavior is biased in their favor.

There is some revelatory stuff in the article, however. David Sirota flags one employee saying that Humana believes in keeping down costs by "controlling utilization":

Now, I know we're supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don't ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do - but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that's just not the case. The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to "control utilization" - that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are "controlled" (read: prevented) from getting it.

Sure, we're all against excessive testing - and there are good ways to deal with those inefficiencies. But that's not what the insurance industry is talking about. It is talking about its practice of rationing care - and now that reality is right there in black and white for all to see.

The truth of the matter is that many of the charges that insurance companies like WellPoint level at the public option and regulatory changes sought in the health reform bill mirror accepted industry practices. WellPoint, which emailed its own customers yesterday attacking the Democratic plan, claimed that health reform will “increase the premiums of those with private coverage.” Yet WellPoint routinely hikes their own premium prices by close to double digits annually, leading to ever-increasing profits. The email stated that millions of Americans would lose their private coverage and be forced onto a government-run option if the Democratic bill passed (nothing could be further from the truth); yet WellPoint routinely uses the practice of rescission to drop their own customers from coverage if they ever try to use it, and they've admitted they would continue doing so unless forced to stop by law.

The email is an example of the astroturf practices from the industry, including, no doubt, pitching to the New York Times a story putting the human face on insurers. Many of these astroturf efforts spring from the same sources as the corporate lobby groups activating the tea party protests at town hall meetings throughout the country this August. They're trying to change the subject, away from facts, like how they're spending less of their premium revenue on medical care over the years, from 90% in the early 1990s to around 80% today. Or how they use rescission and pre-existing condition to make profits off cherry-picking the healthy and denying everyone else care. House and Senate leaders have requested more and more information about insurance company practices; Dennis Kucinich has joined that effort. But the insurance industry, while nominally siding with reform, wants to keep the focus on efforts against it, in service to de-fanging it.

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Glenn Beck had a glass of wine with Nancy Pelosi last night.

Of course, it wasn't actually Pelosi. It was some poor Fox employee made to sit across the desk from Beck with a cardboard Pelosi mask, holding a glass of juice of some kind that was serving as a stand-in for wine.

It was all meant to spoof Pelosi for supposedly listening only to "millionaire contributors" instead of her constituents.

But then he tossed in a little "joke":

Beck: I just want you to drink it. Drink it. [Laughs] Drink it! I really just wanted to thank you for having us over here to wine country. You know, to be invited, I thought you had to be a major Democratic donor or longtime friend of yours, which I'm not. Oh, ah, by the way, I put poison in your -- no I --

Funny, it seems like only a couple of days ago Beck was imploring his viewers not to resort to acts of violence. (It was.) And now he's encouraging violence by joking about poisoning the Speaker of the House.

TIME Magazine: Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?

The most urgent question is the meaning of economic conservatism. Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, surprised me by declaring that the Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue set."

I give it one day. Once Rush mentions it on the radio, McHenry will be bowing and scraping before his altar.