You will cheer.

I admit that when I first heard the Nobel Prize news I assumed it was a hoax. And my second thought was, really? Is this because he’s not George W. Bush?

I don’t have to tell you how the Right is reacting to this. Feelings seem to be mixed on the Left. To tell you the truth, what with the continued drone attacks and confusion over Afghanistan policy, I’m not sure I would have voted for him myself. The Committee is giving him props for his work toward nuclear disarmament (which began while he was still in the Senate).

From the Prize Committee (emphasis added):

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

In short, he’s not George W. Bush. Works for me.

BTW, here’s some background on President Obama’s non-meeting with another Nobel Prize Winner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Sam Stein writes that there’s a new public option “compromise” being considered.

Senate Democrats have begun discussions on a compromise approach to health care reform that would establish a robust, national public option for insurance coverage but give individual states the right to opt out of the program.

Given a choice between this and a watered-down public option (or no public option at all), I take this. Yes, a handful of the most regressive red states will opt out. And maybe when the citizens of those states realize what a dumb move that was, they’ll kick the troglodytes out of office. I think all of the states will come in eventually. And until “eventually” happens the rest of us won’t be held back by the stubborn ignorance of a minority.

I like this idea much better than another idea being floated, which is to allow each state to create its own public option. Please. This would just kick the “government run health care death panels they want to kill your Grandma” debate to the state legislatures, which tend to be even dumber and more right-wing than the U.S. Congress. We’d spend years fighting this same fight state by state. Bad, bad idea.

Meanwhile, you might have heard Rachel Maddow make this announcement last night –

Rachel says,

Two major powerbrokers on the left…are encouraging a Senate strategy in which the leadership would revoke chairmanships and other leadership positions from any Democrat who sides with a Republican filibuster to block a vote on health reform.

I really, really like that idea, too.

The most encouraging thing I’ve heard today is from Karl Rove, who has declared the GOP is winning the health care debate. If the once-mighty Turd Blossom has taken the trouble to declare the GOP to be “winning,” it’s a good sign they’re losing.

Fox’s Shepard Smith auditions for a job with MSNBC:

This is brilliant. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan refused to let Betsy McCaughey hijack the discussion with empty talking points.

I love the line from Ratigan about “corporate communism that is destroying our country.” Whoa.

Elsewhere: The National Republican Congressional Committee thinks Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal should put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “in her place.” I’m serious.

Erwin Chemerinsky explains why it is not unconstitutional to require citizens to purchase health insurance.

Michelle Cottle explains that Betsy McCaughey is an unscrupulous bomb-throwing charlatan.

Cappy McGarr explains how earlier trials at health insurance exchanges failed, and why they will continue to fail unless the private health insurance industry is regulated up the wazoo.

Bonus Read — Fundamentalism Eats Itself. Some fundies plan to edit the Bible to make it more conservative.

Paul Krugman, “The Politics of Spite.” Hammer, nail, etc. Then read Neal Gabler’s “Politics as Religion.”

Shorter Ross Douthat: If Democrats do not, in the next ten minutes, clean up the mess left behind by eight years of the Bush Administration, liberalism will have failed.

I can’t remember the last time I ate a hamburger. Now I’m glad I can’t remember the last time I ate a hamburger.

Read Sebastian Jones’s “Dick Gephardt’s Spectacular Sellout” together with Frank Rich’s “The Rabbit Ragu Democrats.”

At the Washngton Post, Steven Hayward asks, “Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?” He complains that the unwashed masses of conservative populists have taken over The Movement and sent conservative intellectuals into retreat.

The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

Conservative populism may be a Frankenstein’s monster that is destroying the conservative movement. But if so, it’s a Frenkenstein’s monster Mr. Hayward helped to stitch together. Just over a year ago, he made a blatantly populist argument in favor of Sarah Palin’s qualifications to be President:

The establishment is affronted by the idea that an ordinary hockey mom–a mere citizen–might be just as capable of running the country as a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations. This closed-shop attitude is exactly what both Jefferson and Adams set themselves against; they wanted a republic where talent and public spirit would find easy access to the establishment.

In spite of his hand-wringing, Hayward continues to set a low bar for conservative intellectualism. Going back to today’s op ed:

The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty,” Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times,” Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” and “The Bell Curve,” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man.” There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don’t sell.

Of course, Charles Murray’s books have been denounced as frauds by real scholars, and Bob Herbert called Bell Curve “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship.” Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument amounted to marshmallow fluff utopianism with big words and footnotes. Etc. But Hayward’s op ed gets even better –

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work.

I’ll pause here to let you wipe up the coffee you just spewed all over your monitor. But don’t take another sip just yet –

Rush Limbaugh adheres to Winston Churchill’s adage that you should grin when you fight, and in any case his keen sense of satire makes him deserving of comparison to Will Rogers, who, by the way, was a critic of progressivism.

For the record, Rogers was an unabashed New Deal Democrat, which makes him a critic of progressivism in the same way that Jesus was a critic of religion.

Hayward also is a big admirer of Glenn Beck.

Okay, so Beck may lack Buckley’s urbanity, and his show will never be confused with “Firing Line.” But he’s on to something with his interest in serious analysis of liberalism’s patrimony. … Beck, for one, is revealing that despite the demands of filling hours of airtime every day, it is possible to engage in some real thought. He just might be helping restore the equilibrium between the elite and populist sides of conservatism.

BTW, Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989.” He is known mostly for being a climate change denier. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Claremont Graduate School and has been funded by the Movement via a series of fellowships in right-wing think tanks.

At Slate, Jacob Weisberg writes that the late Irving Kristol really did have a brain, unlike his painfully slow son, William. Back in the 1960s 1970s, Kristol’s thinking actually had some connection to reality and “empirical social science,” Weisberg says.

How did this prudent outlook devolve into the spectacle of ostensibly intelligent people cheering on Sarah Palin? Through the 1980s, the neoconservatives became more focused on political power and less interested in policy. They developed their own corrupting welfare state, doling out sinecures and patronage subsidized by the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations. Alliances with the religious right skewed their perspective on a range of topics. They went a little crazy hating on liberals.

Over time, the two best qualities of the early neocons—their skepticism about government’s ability to transform societies and their rigorous empiricism—fell by the wayside. In later years, you might say Kristol and the neoconservatives got mugged by ideology. Actually, they were the muggers. “It becomes clear that, in our time, a non-ideological politics cannot survive the relentless onslaught of ideological politics,” Kristol wrote in 1980. “For better or for worse, ideology is now the vital element of organized political action.”

I have serious doubts about the alleged intellectual rigor of conservative intellectuals of yore. I haven’t read much of Irving Kristol, but for the conservative writers I have read it’s always been about the ideology. But, yes, they were a couple of shades brighter back in the day. William Buckley, for example, was a master at dressing up dishonest arguments with highfalutin’ rhetoric. Hayward, on the other hand, seems too dim to understand the difference between honest and dishonest argument. At this rate of devolution, the next generation of conservative intellectuals will need help dressing themselves.

Start your weekend right by listening to Alan Grayson and Ed Shultz discussing how to fight back. When hit by Republican smears that Grayson is “unstable”, Grayson replied:

GRAYSON: My response is WHATEVER. America is sick of you, Republican Party. You are a LIE FACTORY – that’s all you ever do. Why don’t you work together with the Democrats to solve America’s problems instead of making stuff up?

Personally, I can’t get enough of this guy’s attitude. Go Alan!

A few days ago I wrote a post titled The Conservative Plan: Don’t Get Sick. I don’t know if Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, reads Mahablog, but if he does I don’t mind at all that he borrowed my title. It’s the truth.

Grayson, of course, is the congressman who made a splash yesterday when he said in the House,

“It’s a very simple plan,” Grayson said in a floor speech about health care on Tuesday night. “Don’t get sick. That’s what the Republicans have in mind. And if you get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: die quickly.”

In the video above Wolf Blitzer seemed shocked, shocked that anyone would say anything bad about Republicans.

People keep saying Republicans have no health care plan. They actually do, but it’s a dysfunctional one that would make the situation worse instead of better. I’ve waded through the health care sections of the rightie think tanks and looked at the “legislation” Republicans are actually proposing, so I probably know about as much about the Republican health care plan as most Republicans.

The various health care plans being put forward by Republicans address two vital issues:

1. They provide impressive talking points to repeat on cable news programs.
2. They can be printed into respectable stacks of paper to hold up to cameras, accompanied by the declaration See? We do so have a plan.

As explained in the two posts linked in the previous paragraph, the crown jewels of the Republicans “plan” are these:

1. People should pay more for their health care so they take better care of themselves and not need health care (in other words, don’t get sick).
2. Allow the insurance industry to separate us into low-risk and high-risk pools. They can make bigger profits selling junk policies to the healthy, and if the unhealthy can’t afford their jacked-up premiums, that’s too bad (in other words, die quickly).
3. Tax credits.

Seriously. The “purchasing insurance across state lines” scam falls under “separating us into low-risk and high-risk pools,” as explained elsewhere.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in allowing health care to be paid for by “free markets” is that there is no incentive for “free markets” to cure anyone. The health care industry doesn’t make money by curing you, but by what it can sell to you at a profit. Whether you live or die, you (or your heirs) still have to pay the bills.

And speaking of health care — I have the flu. Light posting for a while.