Monday Five

* Longtime gerrycanavan.wordpress.com favorite Kim Stanley Robinson profiled in the L.A. Times. Great photo.

* It’s hard not to love Taibbi: The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There’s even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn’t call the cops is known as the “Cool Off.” More at MetaFilter.

* See also: doomsday cycle capitalism.

* The White House proposal for health care is now online. The oh-so-crucial bipartisan summit is this Friday, and hopefully that will give the Democrats sufficient political cover to finally get this over with.

* And now Ezra Klein looooooooves Evan Bayh. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

(Not-Actually-) Thursday Night Linkdump

* People who write sonnets should be hung!

* Inside Philip K Dick’s FBI file.

* If I recall correctly, Jon and Hayden’s first screenplay was an American Pie rip-off called Gross, so it’s a little strange to see them now taking over the franchise. Congrats, guys!

* Democrats continue to stupidly chase voters they’ll never get.

* Pandagon has an update on the many lies of James O’Keefe. If accountability actually mattered to the mainstream press they’d have given ACORN’s exoneration the same press they gave the original, bogus story. I don’t think they’ve given it any.

* On filibuster reform, Chris Dodd is a bad guy and Evan Bayh is a good guy. Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

* Related: Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans.

* Meet The Tea Partiers: Male, Rich and College Educated.

* 80% of Americans hate the Citizens United. Of course, that’s still not enough consensus for Democrats to act.

* Yes, use reconciliation to bring back the public option. It’s good policy and people want it. (And then there were nine.)

* Maddow v. Beck.

* Black Man Puts His Feet On Desk, Wingnuts Furious.

* And Bill Simmon links to officially the best Super Bowl photo ever.

Nothing Can Save Us Now

* In the spirit of Lost 1967, Lost the Sitcom.

* The stimulus worked; it just wasn’t big enough.

* Terrible people saying terrible things: How the GOP’s deregulatory health-care solution would just make things worse.

* By the time you read this, the 39-year-old Ford will either be a serious candidate for the Senate seat (with his eye on the White House) or a footnote in New York’s long history of oddball and carpetbagger campaigns. But more interesting than Ford himself are the characters egging him on: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, pollster Douglas Schoen, and Joe Trippi, the Internet-politics whiz who ran Howard Dean’s and John Edwards’ presidential campaigns. These men and others represent a kind of perpetual, recurring dream in American politics that some sort of Brand X candidate or third party, transcending all known partisan divides, will emerge. Ford was merely the latest vessel for this fantasy. Via Ezra Klein, who posits Evan Bayh as the next vessel after Ford.

* Breaking: Voters don’t make rational decisions. (Via Barker.)

Human groups are unusual among primates in that our leaders are often democratically selected. Faces affect hiring decisions and could influence voting behavior. Here, we show that facial appearance has important effects on choice of leader. We show that differences in facial shape alone between candidates can predict who wins or loses in an election (Study 1) and that changing context from war time to peace time can affect which face receives the most votes (Study 2). Our studies highlight the role of face shape in voting behavior and the role of personal attributions in face perception. We also show that there may be no general characteristics of faces that can win votes, demonstrating that face traits and information about the environment interact in choice of leader.

Three for Monday

* The final screwing: After all it’s cost to keep him, Evan Bayh will retire. But stay calm, citizens: there’s an outside chance the Tea Party will save Harry Reid.

* Rachel Maddow’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday has spanned two separate must-see videos. She’s that good.

* Libertarianism defined, courtesy of Iain Banks.

Health Care Reform and Other Late Night Sunday Links

* The health care bill has now cleared the first of three filibuster hurdles. Would-be bill-killers like Howard Dean are dialing back, with the new line being that there was never any such thing as a bill-killer in the first place. The other current talking point is that the manager’s amendment magically fixes everything. Feingold still says Obama is to blame for the loss of the public option, and Webb’s not happy either. Republican obstructionism has somehow turned Evan Bayh into a diehard Democratic partisan. The father of the public option says it’s all all right. With final passage looking assured—Schumer, weirdly ominously, declares “the die is cast”—Kevin Drum has one last post about the late implementation date for many of these programs, while (via Vu) Kuttner and Taibbi discuss health care reform on Bill Moyers. The filibuster, of course, is still the biggest problem.

* ‘No climate justice without gender justice.’

* ‘Earth on track for epic die-off, scientists say.’

* This headline hit me unexpectedly hard: ‘Could ocean acidification deafen dolphins?’ Perhaps I’ve always had a soft spot for dolphins, but the idea that potentially sapient species might go collectively deaf as a side effect of human action strikes me as unbearably sad.

* An early clip from Toy Story 3.

* The most important comic events of the decade.

* Is the Secret Service responsible for keeping the president from getting drunk?

* Dale Beran, creator of the sorely missed A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, has started a new web comic series, The Nerds of Paradise.

* And Jezebel has what could be the Internet’s only remotely thoughtful post about the death of Brittany Murphy.

Thursday Night Health Care

Let’s start with health care. With the Senate bill out, most of the lefty politics blogs are trying to figure out the details of what’s next. A few highlights:

* The Senate bill by the numbers.
* What takes effect before 2014? Ezra Klein elaborates with a longer list.
* States will probably be able to opt out immediately, though I doubt many will.
* Reid, obviously concerned that I don’t totally hate him lately, explicitly rules out reconciliation.
* At least the self-proclaimed “centrists” remain consistently terrible. Bayh and Nelson have confirmed they’ll bring the bill to the floor, so I guess there’s that.

Liebermania

The big news yesterday was, of course, Joe Lieberman’s threat to join the Republican filibuster on the health care bill, proving right my suspicion of everything that guy does. Never a popular figure in the progressive blogosphere, Lieberman is especially loathed today; see Steve Benen, Open Left, Steve Benen, Nate Silver, Steve Benen, Kos, and Steve Benen, for starters. I confess that Jonathan Chait’s take is pretty close to my own:

He’s not a Democrat and won’t be running on the Democratic ticket in 2012. Moreover, my read on him is that he’s furious with the party, resentful of President Obama (who beat his friend in 2008) and would relish a Democratic catastrophe.

Lieberman strikes me as a creature of spite with a long list of enemies, and I think he’d happily be the lone vote to scuttle the sixty-year dream of health care reform if he thought it would hurt Ned Lamont voters. I’ve never trusted him as a reliable vote and I question the wisdom of continually bending over backwards to keep him “happy” when it makes no apparent difference in his actions. The man spoke at the Republican National Convention, for heaven’s sake. He’s not on our side.

For what it’s worth, Ezra Klein says it’s probably a bluff, and I hope he’s right.

Sadly, Lieberman’s threats are emboldening the other conservative Democrats to make similar threats.

I sure hope reconciliation is still in the tank if Reid’s miscalculated.

Health Care

It’s being reported today that Reid’s bill is ready and is being sent to the CBO for budget impact. Here’s the Wall Street Journal on its likely contours:

Details of the legislation could change, but its broad outlines are becoming clear. Employers with more than 50 workers wouldn’t be required to provide health insurance, but they would face fines of up to $750 per employee if even part of their work force received a government subsidy to buy health insurance, this person said. A bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee had a lower fine of up to $400 per employee.

The bill to be brought to the Senate floor would create a new public health-insurance plan, but would give states the choice of opting out of participating in it, a proposal that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada backed last week.

Of course, in the kabuki dance that is the American legislative process, neither this bill nor the House bill will actually become law, but rather the House/Senate conference bill, which will be some sort of amalgamation between the two.

For more on this subject, Steve Benen has another post this morning concerning cloture, suggesting Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln are the holdouts. As far as I know Evan Bayh is still uncommitted as well. Stay tuned.

Public-Option-mentum

News keeps rolling out about the public option today; ABC is reporting that a public option is likely to be in the final Senate bill (about which Max Baucus is said to be “apoplectic”), and Open Left’s informal whip count has 58 votes for cloture. (Most Important People in the Country by this count: Mary Landrieu and Evan Bayh.)

Open Left also discusses reports that suggest Pelosi’s “robust” version will pass the House. Genuine health care reform seems very close today.

UPDATE: Steve Benen has some thoughts on Mary Landrieu and her stated opposition to the public option. Of course the real question is not whether she’ll vote for the bill but whether she’ll vote for cloture—and call me a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I find it hard to imagine, when push comes to shove, that any member of the Democratic caucus would cast the lone vote to destroy health care reform by denying it a floor vote. (Landrieu or Bayh would basically have to switch parties if they did, and no one jumps onto a sinking ship.) Because he’s a proud member of the notoriously independent Connecticut for Lieberman caucus, I’ve been much more worried about Lieberman’s loyalty than anybody else’s—so I’m glad to see he’s already confirmed he’ll vote for cloture.

UPDATE 2: Apparently Landrieu announced today that she won’t support a Republican filibuster. If Open Left’s count is right, that just leaves President Bayh.