Rush’s opening shot at Mediaite, in response to an article by Jon Bershad:

“They wrote about [Rush calling Obama's reaction to the healthcare ruling 'lawless'] as though I’m some kind of a kook – which is fine. They think the whole idea that the Constitution might be in crisis here is silly.”

Given that Rush claims to operate with “half his brain tied behind his back” in order to make it fair, I’m amazed that he has the power to deduce from Bershad’s completely objective and non-judgmental article that somehow Bershad truly believed Rush’s idea was silly. However, not to disappoint Rush, I will go on the record now and tell him unequivocally, yes, the idea is silly.

A constitutional crisis is a circumstance where the constitution is unable to resolve a problem and where a breakdown in the operation of government results. Think the Civil War, or more recently, the Supreme Court decision of Bush v. Gore, where the Supreme Court could have dismissed the case as a “political question” beyond their jurisdiction to decide, but instead justified deciding the President specifically to avoid a constitutional crisis. In other words, regardless of Rush’s suggestion, “spitting on the Constitution” prior to exhausting the potential remedies available from each branch of government does not in and of itself rise to the same level as a constitutional crisis.

Rush read from a CNBC article for support and dares us, “go ahead and make fun of pointing that out if you wish. Let’s see if the Mediaite people go after this guy.”

However, what Rush glosses over are several key facts, first of which, that there are now two trial court decisions supporting the individual mandate of the healthcare reform bill, in addition to the two opposed to it. Admittedly, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson goes further to suggest that the whole bill is void absent a severability clause; however, given that Vinson explicitly did not issue an injunction to halt implementation of the bill and given that federal district courts in different states should be entitled to the same level of respect, Obama’s moving forward with implementation, for the time being, cannot be deemed “lawless.” Instead, given that the Supreme Court exists for the very purpose of deciding constitutional questions and settling differing interpretations amongst the lower courts, until the Supreme Court rules, then and only then would Obama’s defiance be deemed a constitutional crisis.

Regardless of this rather long diatribe over what amounts to a dispute over semantics, when Rush’s “the regime is ignoring the court” hyperbole is peeled away, underneath lies a legitimate argument. Does it really make sense to continue to waste time and money with implementation of the healthcare reform bill if its constitutionality is essentially an unpredictable jump ball to be decided by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy?

Check out the clip below from The Rush Limbaugh Show:

On Fox News, Shepard Smith and Judge Napolitano discussed the implications of today’s decision, and how Shep was convinced this was major news since he had never before seen so many urgent news alerts related to one subject appear on his computer screen. Given that today’s decision involved governors and attorneys general from 26 states, today’s decision is certainly significant. With today’s decision, now two lower courts have ruled the healthcare bill constitutional and two have ruled it as beyond the scope of what Congress has the power to enact.

Yet all roads lead to the Supreme Court, and Napolitano predicts it will be ruled on by the Supreme Court in about three years, which is definitely shaping up to be a hugely anticipated case and quite possibly the most political one since Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Watch the clip from Fox News below:

Worried that political propaganda from the Republicans was working, Cohen vowed that “if you don’t stand up to lies, they become the truth.” Cohen felt obligated to speak up given that polls show people believe healthcare reform is socialized medicine, includes “death panels” and represents a government takeover, all of which Cohen disputes and at least on the last point, the nonpartisan group Politifact called the biggest lie of the year. While Cohen’s passionate eagerness to stand up for the truth might be admirable, King questions whether injecting Nazi comparisons really makes his argument more effective, especially given the horror that the Nazis caused. Cohen’s response:

“I’m Jewish and I think it’s something that we understand. And how awful it was. And that’s why you need to remind people, that when you have countenance lies, that’s what it can lead to. And countenancing lies here can lead to problems too. But people shouldn’t lie and we should not permit it to go on and on and on.”

Cohen argued he wasn’t saying Republicans are like Nazis and stated “I think the press was hypersensitive,” however he did not back away from alleging similarities in propaganda methods or warning that tolerating lies could lead to problems again. To conclude, King smartly suggested maybe everyone should avoid any type of Nazi comparisons, to which Cohen replied, “certainly didn’t want to, and I don’t think Mel Brooks was being nice to the Nazis either.” King forcefully swatted away this clumsy attempt at humor by informing Cohen, “Mel Brooks was making a comedy movie, there’s a difference from a serious political debate.”

Watch the clip from CNN below:

Cohen’s comments:

“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing the Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it – and you had the Holocaust. . . . And we’ve heard it on this floor, government takeover of health care. Politifact . . . said the biggest lie of 2010 was government takeover of health care because there is no government takeover.”

While many Democrats are expressing frustration with the claim that government now controls healthcare, when in fact, a “public option” was sacrificed by the Democrats to secure passage, no Democrat was as extreme as Cohen with their rhetoric. For a more effective, and less offensive Republican rebuke, see Rep. Anthony Weiner and his passionate remarks.

Watch the clip from ABC News below:

When Maddow pressed Pelosi about her defensive strategy against Republicans, Pelosi insisted that making the case to Americans that the reform bill has many benefits and Republicans are trying to “sabotage” them should work. Maddow smartly questioned whether “the effort to sort of take a second stab at selling the virtues of the bill to the public, does that reflect a failure to have done that effectively during the initial debate?” Pelosi said Democrats in the House did not fail in any way, implying that Democrats elsewhere may have dropped that ball.

Maddow and Pelosi agreed that much opposition to the bill actually reflects people who feel the bill didn’t go far enough without having a public option. Yet regardless, Pelosi does not feel this past election was about healthcare reform and instead was about jobs, since “it’s hard to talk about health reform if people don’t have jobs.” Pelosi also declared “if we had not past healthcare reform we may have lost more seats for being ineffective.”

Pelosi may be right, if the Democrats did not pass healthcare reform, and instead did nothing, they likely would have lost even more seats. However, if Pelosi now admits that when unemployment is high, jobs should be their number one focus, then maybe if Democrats had listened to that advice and took action on jobs last year instead of healthcare, they would not have lost any seats?

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:

First some background. Reporting for CNN, Bill Mears writes:

A Virginia federal judge on Monday found a key part of President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care reform law unconstitutional, setting the stage for a protracted legal struggle likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson struck down the “individual mandate” requiring most Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014. The Justice Department is expected to challenge the judge’s findings in a federal appeals court.

Hudson’s opinion contradicts other court rulings finding the mandate constitutionally permissible.

But it turns out that the federal judge in Virginia who ruled on the constitutionality of health care reform, owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in a GOP political consulting firm. That consulting firm just so happened to be opposed to the very health care reform bill that the judge ruled unconstitutional. Writing for Gawker, John Cook reports:

As the Huffington Post and others first noted last July, Hudson’s annual financial disclosures show that he owns a sizable chunk of Campaign Solutions, Inc., a Republican consulting firm that worked this election cycle for John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, John McCain, and a whole host of other GOP candidates who’ve placed the purported unconstitutionality of health care reform at the center of their political platforms. Since 2003, according to the disclosures, Hudson has earned between $32,000 and $108,000 in dividends from his shares in the firm (federal rules only require judges to report ranges of income).

Campaign Solutions was instrumental in the launching of Sarah Palin’s PAC (though Palin has since split with the firm), and Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia attorney general who filed the lawsuit that Hudson ruled in favor of today, paid Campaign Solutions $9,000 for services rendered in 2010.

Finally, during today’s White House briefing, Mr. Gibbs assured the press in attendance that the health care reform is in fact constitutional, and that there should be no expected change in how individuals should expect new reforms to take place.

Watch the video from C-SPAN below:

All this after Fox News’ Brett Baier spent a good chunk of his POTUS exclusive grilling President Obama on whether he supports the maneuver. Just to be thorough, I took a shot at the question with First Dog Bo Obama. Not surprisingly, he agreed with the President.

Here’s my brief interview with Bo.

Obviously, Bo doesn’t care about “Demon Pass.” After a week of grilling Robert Gibbs and President Obama about it, it should be obvious that they don’t care about it, either. It would be like asking them, “Do you support stir-fry or saute´?” Gibbs and Obama are saying “Just get the food on the plate.”

That might not be the answer most people want to hear, but it’s the one they’ve been giving all week. If I had to guess, I’d say that Obama and Gibbs probably have the same view of the House Dems’ attempt to insulate themselves from GOP attacks in the midterms: it’s stupid, it won’t make a difference, and who cares? The net effect is the same either way.

Transcript: (emphasis mine)

TC:    And, secondly, the President now admits that on health care the White House fell somewhat short on transparency. Now, I’m wondering if the White House would be willing to go back and rectify that and make available transcripts, tapes, documentation from the meetings that took place in the spring and the summer with the pharmaceutical lobby and the — health care.

MR. GIBBS: There are not tapes of any meetings. I think that ended about the mid-70s. There are not tapes or transcripts of –

TC:    Minutes?

MR. GIBBS: — of meetings. There’s not a stenographer in these — in these events.

See how my question was broad, and Gibbs narrowed it to “tapes or transcripts?”

Anyone who has followed this story closely knows that there was at least one memo produced at these meetings. The White House and PhRMA denied the memo’s authenticity, but the third party at those meetings, the Senate Finance Committee, stonewalled me on the question, even issuing orders to staff to do so.

While there may not be tapes or transcripts of those meetings, it seems impossible that there’s no documentation at all of what went on at them, which is probably why Gibbs didn’t actually say that. The point here is that the White House has no burning desire to remedy the issue.

It’s also unlikely that some groundswell of public pressure will force them to do so. As I said before, the focus for criticism has been lack of transparency in conference negotiations, which is idiotic. TV cameras or not, all of that comes out in the wash. Everyone knows who got a Medicare Advantage carve-out, or $300 million in Medicaid funding.

But thanks to these secret meetings, we will never know what went into these (well-intentioned or not, wise or unwise) deals with the devil.

At issue was the contradiction between the President’s call for the Senate not to push anything through in advance of Scott Brown‘s swearing in, and Gibbs’ assertion that the House voting on the Senate healthcare reform bill was still on the table. Gibbs explains, but Keith is still muttering about it long after the pre-taped interview.

Here’s Keith’s interview with Gibbs:

Not only did he talk about the “contradiction” while introducing the clip, he’s still wondering about it as his next segment starts:

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Of course, there’s an apparent difference between the letter of the President’s remark and the spirit, but he clearly says that the Senate shouldn’t jam anything through. As Gibbs points out, if the House votes on the bill that already passed the Senate, they’re not bypassing Brown. That is, unless Republicans send Brown back through a portal in time to vote on that bill. “Come with me if you want to scuttle healthcare reform!”

What’s funny to me is that Gibbs isn’t really employing any sleight of hand here. Olbermann just misses it. Maybe that’s part of the problem the President is starting to have with many on the left: they don’t seem to realize he’s a politician.

The sparks kicked up by C-Span’s request to televise healthcare negotiations have erupted into a firestorm, as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was grilled about the President’s campaign promise of complete transparency, and responded testily. CNN’s Jack Cafferty delivered a stinging j’accuse to President Obama, calling the pledge a “lie just to get elected.”

At today’s White House briefing, Robert Gibbs answered another raft of questions about President Obama’s campaign promise to show all healthcare negotiations on C-Cpan. He was testy from the start, referring Chip Reid “to yesterday’s transcript.”

When pressed, Gibbs reiterated his answers from yesterday, asking if the media had lacked information about the healthcare reform process in producing stories. Finally, Fox News’ Major Garrett asked Gibbs if the President kept his promise. The answer he gave was surprising.

“Yes.” That’s not what I got from his answers yesterday. It sounded more like “We did pretty well with that,” a debatable position, but there’s no way to square this with the President’s promise to air everything.

On the other end of the scale sits Jack Cafferty, whose apoplectic comments during the 2008 campaign made him an unlikely darling of liberals. He came out firing at Gibbs and the President, saying the transparency promise was a lie.

While Gibbs is clearly wrong, Cafferty well overstates his case here, saying that President Obama “hasn’t even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency.” To be sure, the failures at transparency are big ones, but this administration still has a record of openness that is unprecedented.

The decision to skip formal conference committee negotiations, and not to televise them, is going to continue to cost the administration politically. The calculation here, I believe, is that entrusting the healthcare reform bill to a full conference of a Congress that can’t get out of its own way is a recipe for disaster. If skipping conference saves the bill, it may well be worth all the bad press.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was pressed on the issue of Health Care transparency yesterday, spurred by a letter from C-SPAN which requested access to the upcoming process of reconciling the House and Senate bills. Here’s some of what Gibbs had to say:

Transcript:

Q Okay, just lastly, why can’t you answer the C-SPAN question –

MR. GIBBS: I did.

Q Well, you didn’t, because you said –

MR. GIBBS: I said I hadn’t seen the letter, which I haven’t –

Q Why do you need to see a letter? I mean, this is something the President said during the campaign and he talked about he wants everything open on C-SPAN –

MR. GIBBS: Dan asked me about the letter and I haven’t read the letter.

Q Well, I’ll just ask you about having it on C-SPAN –

MR. GIBBS: I answered Dan’s question and I answered this before we left for the break, Keith. The President’s number-one priority is getting the differences worked out, getting a bill to the House and the Senate. We’ve filled your newspaper and many others with the back-and-forth and the details of what’s in these bills. I don’t want to keep that from continuing to happen. I don’t think there’s anybody that would say that we haven’t had a thorough, robust, now spanning two calendar years’ debate on health care.

Q There are a lot of reasons not to do it on C-SPAN — people could showboat. Does he regret making that statement during the campaign?

MR. GIBBS: No.

This isn’t the first time this has come up, and Gibbs’ responses are pretty consistent. This White House, as even consummate skeptic Jake Tapper points out, has an excellent record of transparency relative to past administrations. This has been the White House’s drumbeat, that the Obama administration has been more transparent than any in our history. The release of the White House visitor logs and the almost real-time reporting of Recovery Act data are good examples of this, as well as some of the problems that can accompany this kind of openness.

Even on Health Care, the promise of openness has been partially fulfilled. Gibbs is quite correct that there has been an unprecedented level of public involvement in the debate. An extensive healthcare summit at the beginning of this process was a model of what the President had promised, engaging a wide variety of stakeholders in full view of C-Span’s cameras. Along the way, there has been copious coverage of various debates and votes in Congress.

But Gibbs’ responses yesterday failed to address the most important part of that pledge, the one that has gone unfulfilled. Secret negotiations like the one between the pharmaceutical lobby, the White House, and the Senate Finance Committee are the Obama pledge’s raison d’etre. Hours of debate and information are nice, but the real value of transparency is in keeping everyone honest. By meeting with insurance and pharmaceutical industry leaders in private, the administration has shielded the parties most in need of being kept honest, the ones most likely to poison the process.

In fact, the President even referenced the pharmaceutical lobby specifically when explaining the benefits of an open process:

If there had been television cameras at those negotiations with PhRMA, would that deal have ever been struck? Probably not, and that might be the tough answer that’s being left unsaid. If the administration felt that removing the pharmaceutical lobby as an obstacle was crucial to getting reform done, so much so that it outweighed their pledge for transparency, that would be an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless.

We were promised transparency filet mignon to replace the bread and water of  previous administrations, and we’ve ended up with Domino’s Pizza. Granted, it’s the new and improved Domino’s, but still. The White House owes the American people a better explanation of the menu change.

Players of social media games like Mafia Wars need money within the games in order to advance and win. Business Insider explains how they can do that without “earning” it in the game or paying for it with real money:

By accepting offers from third-parties — usually companies like online movie rentals service Netflix — who agree to give the gamer virtual currency so long as that gamer agrees to try a product or service. This is done through an “offers” provider — a middleman that brings the companies like Netflix, the Facebook gamemakers, and the Facebook gamemaker’s users together.

It’s this third method that an anti-reform group called “Get Health Reform Right” is using to pay gamers virtual currency for their support.

After the report ran, Get Health Reform Right suspended the site (you can see the cached page here) with the following explanation:

Because of unauthorized use of the Get Health Reform Right name and logo, we have temporarily suspended the Get Health Reform Right website.

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association runs the website, and they say they had nothing to do with the ads. In a written statement, they said:

“Get Health Reform Right does not pay or incentivize people in any way to communicate to Congress their opposition to government-run healthcare. Under the terms of the contract with the advertising network, it explicitly states that no such incentivized ads may be used. Get Health Reform Right activities have been temporarily suspended until the source of these ads can be determined.”

BCBSA spokesman Jeff Smokler told Mediaite that the advertising network they use, WebClients of Harrisburg, Pa, has confirmed to them that they did not use any incentivized ads. “We’re investigating the use of Facebook to determine how this happened, but we’re not responsible for it, and we’re looking forward to finding out who is.”

I asked if it was possible that a subcontractor of Webclients was responsible. He said “Webclients uses blocking software to prevent any incentivized publishers from delivering incentivized leads, and the blocking was working on the site consistently.”

Smokler says they anticipate putting the website back up “shortly.” The association’s legal counsel is contacting Facebook to advise them that they suspect this is a case of fraud.

As Business Insider points out, “astroturfing” is not illegal, but it does apparently carry enough of a stigma for BCBSA to take extraordinary steps, like shutting down the Get Health Reform Right website, to distance itself from it.

In many ways, therefore, I’m a regular voter. Most people, even accounting for inflation, weren’t involved in protests over health care, and didn’t make calls for Obama. Most people didn’t watch C-SPAN all day yesterday. Most people don’t pay attention, but get their information tangentially. With the exception of the C-SPAN thing, that’s me.

And, as a regular voter, not a Capitol Hill wonk, it’s hard for me to see the House vote on health care as anything but a massive victory for President Obama.

Universal health care (and particularly single payer) has been progressive Xanadu for decades. It’s a plank in the platform of every Democrat running for office in an even moderately progressive district, from Congress to City Hall. It’s been on the radar of every Democratic President since FDR – and was famously attempted most recently by a just-elected Bill Clinton.

Clinton struggled for two years, but, despite polling showing over 70% of Americans supported reform in late 1994, the effort failed. Of course, Obama has more Democrats in the House than did Clinton. One more, to be precise.

What Obama did right has gotten lost in the artificial smoke of Republican opposition. Among many lessons he learned from Clinton’s effort, he allowed Congress to control the process, creating a strong sense of ownership among Democratic leaders. Nancy Pelosi, who deserves enormous credit, fought as hard as she did because this was her bill, too. Obama needed warriors on his side that were as fervent as his opponents – especially as those opponents were dragged into the murky mire of the extreme right.

Let’s not forget: the bill has a public option. Four months ago, the public option was as welcome in Washington as a pre-existing condition. People wondered, after the town hall fury, if anything would pass, much less that. But here we are.

It didn’t come cheap. The Catholic Church and other anti-abortion leaders pressured moderate Democrats to strip funding for the procedure before passing a final bill. It was a low point in a fascinating day, and it demonstrates exactly why, even if they had nine ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justices, Republicans would never want abortion to be banned – it’s their best wedge.

220-215. One Republican — the most recently elected — crossed party lines. Dozens of Democrats did, too. When and if a bill comes out of conference, there will be another fight on the floor, just as there will be fights on the other side of the Capitol.

There’s only one reason, though, that health care was on the Congress’ agenda this year: President Obama put it there. He put it there in the face of staggering odds. He did work visibly and behind the scenes to assure that it was viable. And, yesterday, a crucial, unprecedented battle toward implementing his vision was won.

In the eyes of this detached observer, that win belongs to Obama. And it’s a big one.

I’ve also asked several questions about the origins of a memo that was published by Huffington Post, purportedly containing details of a July 7 meeting between the 3 parties, and for a list of attendees of that meeting.

While the White House says it is still working to fulfill my request, the Finance Committee, after nearly daily followup by me, has taken a different route. A staffer from the committee confirmed to me, in an extraordinary admission, that both of the committee’s press secretaries have issued a standing order to blow me off whenever I call. Specifically, they have been instructed to tell me that Jennifer Donohue and Erin Shields are not in, regardless of the truth of that statement.

Why is this story important? The White House entered into a bad deal with PhRMA, one that was brokered by Senator Max Baucus’ committee. Baucus is considered, by many, to be compromised by the amount of cash he has accepted from the healthcare and pharmaceutical lobby, and his ties to lobbyists. The deal gets worse and worse as more of it is revealed.

The fact that when asked about the biggest problem with the deal (the fact that it came with a provision that no other concessions would be sought), the White House didn’t know and the Finance Committee wasn’t saying, tells me that perhaps the President has turned too much control of this process over to bad faith negotiators. The fact that the committee concealed this fact from me, a representative of the press, is unacceptable. If that fact had been known just after the deal was struck, perhaps something could have been done to improve it. In any case, the people asked, and had a right to an answer.

It is the duty of the press to hold our leaders to account, and it is the duty of those leaders to respond to us. We represent the American people as surely as they do. When I called today, and the staffer who answered the phone was forced to lie to me, all of you were lied to as well.

Early last month the WSJ published a straight-news report on the then current tactics used by the White House in the health care debate that raised a few eyebrows. Janet Adamy and Naftali Bendavid filed the following report in an article entitled “Lawmakers Rethink Town Halls:”

The health-care debate was supposed to play out at rallies and inside gymnasiums when lawmakers headed home for the August recess.

But after a series of contentious town-hall meetings, some Democratic lawmakers are thinking twice about holding large public gatherings. Instead, they are opting for smaller sessions, holding meetings by phone or inviting constituents for one-on-one office hours.

Democrats have accused Republicans of manufacturing the opposition by organizing groups to attend the events and encouraging disruptive behavior. Republican organizers say the unrest reflects genuine anger about the proposed health-care changes.

An innocuous enough lede — certainly germane to the ongoing debate. However, the follow up paragraph’s feature two quotes, both of which are clearly anti-Democrat in nature:

“Democrats may think that attacking or ignoring this growing chorus of Americans is a smart strategy, but they are obviously forgetting that these concerned citizens are voters as well,” said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm.

Rick Scott, who leads Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, a group that has helped publicize the local meetings, said: “The polls reveal the real picture of what is happening across the country — people are genuinely concerned, some are genuinely angry, and they are expressing themselves.”

One could argue that this is appropriate, since the article is about the Democratic lawmakers under pressure from large style town halls. But no where in the article is there any quote taking an opposing view from the stated thesis: that Democratic lawmakers, were at the time, getting their rear-ends handed to them in the Town Hall formats.

Criticism of a conservative slant to the WSJ has been growing in the past few months. There was piece published a couple of months ago by Neil King Jr. and Jonathan Weisman that labeled President Obama as a “micro-manager“, with an inevitable comparison to Jimmy Carter. Further, the recent headline titled “Taliban Now Winning” sparked similar questions of bias from ForiegnPolicy.com.

Since News Corp acquired WSJ parent company Dow Jones in August of 2007, there have been few critics or perceptions of bias in the financial paper. But that is beginning to change with increased political rancor brought about by the debate over health care reform. Are we starting to see a new era for the WSJ?

Update – David Carr gives merit to this idea:

Many fans of The Wall Street Journal worried that the newspaper would become a cat toy for Rupert Murdoch after he bought it, but the paper’s shift toward a more general interest newspaper has not been accompanied by tendentious politics, near as we can tell.

He goes on to cite the “Full Court Press blog“, who “found deep meaning in a recent insert into the obituary of Sen. Edward Kennedy.”

The political bias of cable news is a time-worn tale, particularly with Fox News. But  it seems like that narrative has made us so numb to blatant subjectivity that we can no longer see clear bias when its right in front of our faces. Does no one care anymore? Or maybe it’s just August and everyone’s on vacation?  Simply put — the amount of propaganda put forth from Fox News is far from fair and balanced — they are very near inciting riots.

Not so? If you watch Glenn Beck or listen to his radio show, you hear a lot of phrases like “waking the sleeping giant” and “we don’t want this country to become Russia.” Cut to the language of protesters confronting their elected officials in the town halls of the past week and one hears the same exact phrases spoken through held back tears and barely restrained emotion.

During Wednesday’s “Talking Points Memo,” O’Reilly made the rather bold claim that the Obama administration is specifically targeting Fox News. How did he make the deduction? Because White House spokesman Robert Gibbs recently said “Well, I think we all have something to lose, Matt, if we let cable television come to town hall meetings and kill health care reform for another year and put the special interests back in charge.”

Fox News – particularly O’Reilly – have always been quite savvy at “punching up” – that is, targeting entities that are well above their accepted station (i.e. their current debate with GE). Does claiming to be engaged in a “fight” with the White House serve their purpose? In terms of pleasing their audience it does — just hear the rabble rousers yell to their democratically elected representatives that they want their country back. From a publicity standpoint it’s a genius move – evil genius maybe.

There is  legitimate criticism that the Obama White House has not been able to articulate their new health care agenda in a simple and understandable way. The truth is that it’s currently a very complicated issue. But isn’t that part of the problem — that unnecessarily complex solutions create a multitude of loopholes that allow big corporations to turn a healthy profit? Is that how a free market is supposed to work? Is that the American way, or is it the problem?

The problem is not just with Fox News, nor with cable news in general. We are truly in a nation divided by media consumption, exacerbated by the rise of opinion journalism (at the cost of capital J – journalism). As Kurt Andersen has said, American’s now only consume media the reaffirms their pre-existing opinions.  The vacuum of differing views has been profitable for a number of media outlets, but what cost victory?

Mediaite Mash-up of Glenn Beck’s take on the health care debate:

That week, I took extraordinary steps to determine if this was the case. I spoke personally with a White House Deputy Press Secretary twice, followed by multiple emails. I also spoke, personally, to the press official for the Senate Finance Committee, followed by multiple emails. There was no doubt as to what I was asking. I never got a response from either of them.

That Thursday, I asked Gibbs about it at a daily briefing:

Q Thank you, Robert. I have two quick ones on health care. The first one, in the speeches about the $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical companies, I haven’t heard anything a bout negotiating price — Medicare negotiating price with the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to know if that was one of the tradeoffs for getting this $80 billion was that we’re not going to pursue that now.

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, again, the structure of part of that agreement was to use a portion of that $80 billion to pay up to — for the pharmaceutical industry to pay up to 50 percent of the cost for a name brand drug for a senior that falls between the point at which Medicare Part D stops providing help, and when catastrophic coverage — I think it is $6,500, a little bit more than $6,500 — level kicks in. So filling in that — what’s commonly known as — ironically, in health care — the doughnut hole, about — that up to 50 percent of the name brand — the price for that name brand drug would be paid for, and I think that provides a hefty discount that will bear appreciable benefits for seniors all over the country.

Q Has there been an agreement not to pursue a Medicare –

MR. GIBBS: I don’t know the answer.

Q I’m talking about S. 330.

MR. GIBBS: What was that?

Q Senate bill 330?

MR. GIBBS: You’re 330 bills ahead of me on that. (Laughter.) I will check on it.

Of course, now, the New York Times reports that the White House confirms that the deal did include an agreement to kill price negotiation laws:

In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement….A deputy White House chief of staff, Jim Messina, confirmed Mr. Tauzin’s account of the deal in an e-mail message on Wednesday night.

“The president encouraged this approach,” Mr. Messina wrote. “He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”

This is deeply disturbing on many levels. If Gibbs didn’t know about this provision after the deal was made, then it stands to reason that the President didn’t know, either. With the Senate Finance Committe stonewalling me about it, one could conclude that they kept the President in the dark about it until it was already a fait accompli.

The other possibility is that Robert Gibbs was left in the dark, a frightening prospect for a White House reporter, and for any American.

Beneath it all is the fact that the government dealt away our right to negotiate lower drug prices (just like any other large customer), and they did it for peanuts. This is a disgrace.

I emailed Gibbs and his deputy for an explanation, and am awaiting a reply.

UPDATE: Jake Tapper asked Gibbs about the discrepancy at today’s White House Press Briefing.

TAPPER: Can I just ask a quick follow up? In June you were asked about the deal and whether or not the deal with PhRMA implied that the White House signed off on no other legislation, such as allowing Medicare to renegotiate with PhRMA. And you said you didn’t know the answer to that. Was it because you personally didn’t know or because the Senate Finance Committee hadn’t informed the White House of that aspect of the deal?

GIBBS: You’re asking me to recall why I didn’t remember something in June. I — I — that I don’t know the answer to. Obviously, the agreement that we have is — is in the confines of health insurance reform that’s being worked on right now.

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The ad has sparked a wave of anger and defiance from conservatives online, who collected their grievances under the hashtag “I am the mob.” The common refrain is that the ad amounts to demonization of dissent, similar to 2007′s “Moveon.org Resolution”, and fearmongering, similar to conservative attempts to convince people that the reform bill mandates euthanasia.

The media, meanwhile, continues to debate the authenticity of these protests as grassroots movement vs. special interest-funded astroturf.

Mary Katherine Ham, however, has broken one of the spokes in the DNC’s ad. She reports at The Weekly Standard that the Right Principles “playbook” featured in the ad doesn’t actually spring from “high-level Republican political operatives” at all:

Right Principles has a Facebook group with 23 members and a Twitter account with five followers. MacGuffie describes himself as an “opponent of leftist thinking in America,” and told me he’s “never pulled a lever” for a Republican or Democrat on a federal level. Yet this Connecticut libertarian’s influence over a national, orchestrated Republican health-care push-back is strong, indeed, if you listen to liberal pundits and the Democratic National Committee, who have crafted a nefarious web out of refutable evidence.

It would be hard to characterize these folks as high-level, even in today’s Republican Party.

Ham goes on to deconstruct the route between Think Progress’ story, MSNBC’s reporting of it, and the DNC ad.

This is a great example of the pitfalls of taking shortcuts. The DNC would have been better served by laying out the funding sources of healthcare reform opposition, a difficult concept to fit into a 2-second graphic.

As for attacking the protesters themselves, the wisdom is questionable. The White House has avoided this so far, drawing a line between the protesters and the special interests behind them. The risk is that ordinary Americans will identify with the protesters, and see this as bullying.

On the other hand, the anger of the right at this ad might play right into the DNC’s hands, making opposition to healthcare reform seem unattractive.

A less risky, but tough to fit into 60 seconds, strategy might be to engage the protesters. Keith Olbermann reported last night on just such an example, a town hall meeting by Texas Democrat Gene Green that seemed to go pretty well. Given a fair hearing, it’s tough to relate to the fact that almost all of them have adequate healthcare, yet they oppose extending it to those who don’t.

In any case, it’s obvious that what the healthcare debate needs is less fearmongering, and more factmongering.