They can enforce party discipline by stripping recalcitrant Dems of chairmanships and withholding campaign funds.

It’s not just that we don’t enforce party discipline. Recalcitrant Democrats seem to believe they have something to gain from threatening to defect on key votes. What else explains Mary Landrieu’s long shadowboxing rigmarole that she has just brought to an end?

And let’s not even talk about Blanche Lincoln. I’d ask if anyone in their right minds really believes that she will side with the Republicans and vote against even bringing up the healthcare reform bill for debate (let alone a vote). Except, that would assume Lincoln is in her right mind. And I must confess I have seen no evidence of that for a good long while now.

*** Update, 11:48 a.m. ***

I had totally missed this piece of news:

Take Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. She’s now likely to vote with Mr. Reid on Saturday after an amendment was inserted to increase her state’s federal Medicaid subsidies by $100 million. The amendment devotes two pages to language making certain that only Louisiana would be entitled to the extra cash.

Why enforce party discipline using the stick when there are all these fat, juicy taxpayer-funded carrots you can dole out instead? Never mind that it gives anyone with the least bit of credibility the leverage to demand a bribe in exchange for their vote. The taxpayer-funded-carrot farm yields more than enough carrots to go around.

Am I the only one who keeps hearing Rod Blagojevich in the background, going: “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing.”

Blagojevich tried to sell his power to nominate Obama’s Senate successor (for corporate cash, for himself), and that was venial and contemptible and reprehensible. Mary Landrieu sells her Senate vote (for tax-payer money, for her constituents), and that’s somehow not?

Like the man in the joke said: “We’ve already settled who you are, lady. We’re only haggling over the price now.”

*** Update #2, 12:07 p.m. ***

Blanche Lincoln has also finally stopped playing hard-to-get:

“Although I do not agree with everything in this bill, I have concluded that it is more important that we begin this debate,” she said. “I will vote in support of cloture to debate this bill.”

No word yet on whether she, too, prostituted herself.

When she goes “it is more important that we begin this debate,” in case you’re wondering “more important than what?”, I think she means “more important than giving up any hope of ever being re-elected, now or in the future” (at least as a Democrat).

Senate Democrats moved to the brink of a crucial preliminary victory on major health care legislation as Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, one of two last hold-outs, announced on Saturday afternoon that she would vote in favor of bringing the bill to the floor for weeks of full debate.

This is what we are now reduced to. With 60 Senate seats, the Democratic caucus is celebrating not even being able to bring its key legislative initiative to the Senate floor, but being on the verge of being able to bring its key legislative initiative to the Senate floor.

Long live the Democratic Party! As I said once before, whoever saddled us with that donkey sure knew what they were doing.

How many brinks away we are from a final victory remains to be seen. I very much suspect that the healthcare reform bill will set a record for the most number of filibusters ever heaped upon a single bill. (Any debatable motion can be filibustered. There will probably be several debatable motions before the legislative life of this bill comes to an end. Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t come to a premature end along the way.)

How long that record holds also remains to be seen. After all, there’s a climate change bill just around the corner.

So, what we might end up with is a Senate Democratic Caucus that holds 98% of its members but still fails to pass healthcare reform,¹ AND a mob of angry progressives who are screaming for the heads of “the Democrats.”² This isn’t fair,³ but more importantly, it’s self-defeating.⁴ If progressives REALLY want to transform America,⁵ they’ll make an issue of the anti-democratic rules of the Senate which make real change virtually impossible.⁶ Blasting their elected Democratic officials, the vast majority of whom will vote for the Senate bill (and would also support a more robust public option if we didn’t need 60 votes to achieve cloture⁷), may make folks feel good, but is both short-sighted and stupid.⁸

Now I’m going to pretend for a minute that Josh didn’t just post this tripe without comment. It’s possible that he doesn’t agree and is only giving all of us plebes a rare look behind the scenes. One would hope so, anyway.

But on to our SDCoS, a man clearly plugged directly into the thinking of our smashingly effective Congressional leadership.

I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time. Certainly not in my kid’s face.

Buttars pulls no punches. He doesn’t want it in his kid’s face. He doesn’t want it stuffed down his throat. So why is he so strangely silent about not wanting it up the butt?

For that matter, should we attach some significance to the fact that he only objects to having it stuffed down his throat all the time?

It was the most abject and craven performance ever turned in by any politician. But at least it was understandable. The man may have compromised every last principle he once claimed to hold dear, but he was doing it in the deluded belief that it would give him a real shot at being elected President.

The pathetic thing, though, is that McCain is still at it, when there is no possible reason for continuing to do so:

Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have been working overtime to craft a climate bill that can attract significant GOP support. But they aren’t exactly scoring points with their mutual best friend in the Senate, John McCain.

“Their start has been horrendous,” McCain said Thursday. “Obviously, they’re going nowhere.”

McCain has emerged as a vocal opponent of the climate bill — a major reversal for the self-proclaimed maverick who once made defying his party on global warming a signature issue of his career.

Now the Arizona Republican is more likely to repeat GOP talking points on cap and trade than to help usher the bill through the thorny politics of the Senate.

McCain refers to the bill as “cap and tax,” calls the climate legislation that passed the House in June “a 1,400-page monstrosity” and dismisses a cap-and-trade proposal included in the White House budget as “a government slush fund.”

Former aides are mystified by what they see as a retreat on the issue, given McCain’s long history of leadership on climate legislation. McCain and Lieberman authored their first climate bill in 2003 and reintroduced the legislation in 2005 and 2007. “The only reason we are debating climate legislation in the Senate right now is because of the leadership he showed three Congresses ago,” said Tim Profeta, a former staffer for the Connecticut independent on climate issues who is now a professor at Duke University.

“I wouldn’t be here on this issue without him,” said Graham, a South Carolina Republican who spent much of last fall campaigning for McCain. “He’s the guy that introduced me to the climate problem.”

McCain’s spokespeople have evidently reached the point where they don’t even begin to try to make sense when they defend or “explain” McCain’s reversals. This was the best that McCain spokesman Brooke Buchanan could do: “This really hasn’t been done in a bipartisan fashion.” She’s talking about the climate change bill put together by a Democrat (John Kerry), a Republican (Lindsey Graham) and a political transvestite (Joe Lieberman).

The chief federal appeals court judge in San Francisco bluntly ordered the Obama administration Thursday to stop resisting his finding that the wife of a lesbian court employee was entitled to government insurance coverage.

The federal agency that oversees benefits for government employees “shall cease at once its interference with the jurisdiction of this tribunal,” Judge Alex Kozinski said in response to the Office of Personnel Management’s rejection of his earlier ruling in the case.

He told the agency to let Karen Golinski, a staff attorney at the court’s headquarters in San Francisco, enroll her wife, Amy Cunninghis, in the family health plan that already covers their 6-year-old son.

He also ordered court officials to reimburse Golinski for the costs of buying insurance for Cunninghis since she applied for coverage in September 2008. That coverage now costs $429 a month, Golinski’s lawyer said.

It was the second order from a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge in two days rebuking the Office of Personnel Management for denying insurance coverage to the same-sex spouses of court-supervised employees. The agency, whose director was appointed by President Obama, intervened in both cases in February and invoked the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that bars federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples.

But Obama is your fierce advocate, right? Right?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday afternoon set the procedural wheels in motion for a crucial vote on a major health care reform bill Saturday night at 8 p.m. and scored a coup by apparently persuading Republicans to abandon their plans to have the entire 2,074-page bill read aloud on the Senate floor.

Republicans were all set to incarnate their healthcare obstructionism by acting like a bunch of petulant five-year-olds, probably under the full frontal glare of the mainstream news media. Americans, who are already pretty pissed off at Republicans for opposing healthcare reform for partisan political reasons (without offering any meaningful plan of their own), stood to become even more disgusted at Republican tomfoolery. Harry Reid comes riding up on a white charger, and saves Republicans from themselves, just to avoid a delay of two or three days in scheduling key votes on the bill. And that makes him a hero, that counts as a Democratic coup?

*** Update, 7:15 a.m. ***

Just thought I should support the statement above that Americans are pissed off at Republicans’ non-constructive opposition to healthcare reform. Question 9 in a Washington Post poll conducted this week asked:

Do you think leaders of the Republican Party are mainly (presenting alternatives to Obama’s proposals), or mainly (criticizing Obama’s proposals without presenting alternatives)?

61% of respondents said that Republicans were engaging in empty criticism; 31% felt that they were presenting alternatives.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) says he will make sure the entire healthcare bill is read out loud on the Senate floor before debate can proceed.

Though the final Senate bill hasn’t been revealed yet, the House version spanned almost 2,000 pages. The Senate bill is likely to be at least 1,000 pages.

It would take the Senate clerk at least a few days to complete the task.

Democrats hope to take up the bill by Friday. But if Coburn follows through on his threat, a motion to proceed could be delayed until next week.

“The American people are going to get to hear this bill,” Coburn told reporters Monday night.

Under Senate rules, any senator can demand that a bill be read before debate. Republicans, however, would have to stay on the floor the entire time to object to Democratic motions to stop the reading.

To the extent that Coburn is the poster child for Republican obstructionism in the Senate, it is entirely fitting that he will be the one to pull this stunt. However, Roll Call reports that “earlier this month, Republican leadership aides said Coburn was unlikely to make such a move without the blessing of GOP leaders.”

Assuming that Roll Call’s conjecture is correct, and the guys who pass for leaders in the Republican Party have blessed this piece of obstructionism, one has to wonder if they have actually thought this through (assuming they are capable of thinking, which is not a proposition that is lent any credence by any of their actions over, say, the last year).

Despite their marked tendency to give Republicans a pass on practically everything, the TV news media will surely be unable to resist reporting on this piece of political theater. Especially if Democrats force the reading to take place over the weekend:

Harkin said Democrats expect Republicans will try to stall the debate by asking for the entire bill to be read on the Senate floor. If that happens, Harkin said, the majority party is likely to use a procedural maneuver to keep the Senate in session this weekend.

“If the Republicans want to stay here this Saturday and Sunday to read the bill, then let them stay here,” Harkin said, adding that Democrats would hold a “live quorum,” where the sergeant at arms requests the presence of all absent senators.

“I’ll tell you, we’re going to do something like that,” Harkin said. “We are planning to do something that would require Republicans to be there 24 hours a day, and if they leave the floor, we’ll ask unanimous consent to dispense with the reading, and that’ll be the end of it.”

As Coburn says, the American people are going to get to see all this happening. He seems to have deluded himself into thinking that’s a plus. However, Americans are already pretty fed up at Republican Party obstructionism of anything and everything under the sun. The spectacle of the Republicans forcing a reading of the entire 1,000 page bill is only going to reinforce their “no effing way” image, and make Americans even more fed up at not just rampant obstructionism, but also at the increasingly childish forms it takes.

So he seems to have started taking the necessary steps to do so. Make a complete fool of himself, that is.

On election night, he conceded the election to Democrat Bill Owens, after finding himself trailing by more than 4,000 votes.

When the initial vote tally was completed, Hoffman was behind by more than 5,000 votes. But, since then, “a standard process of correcting human errors in election night spreadsheets” has reduced Owens’ lead to 3,000 votes. On November 13, on Fox News, Hoffman started to make un-concession noises:

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in the NY-23 election, appeared today on the Neil Cavuto show, where he kept the door open to challenging his narrow defeat by Democrat Bill Owens, who was sworn into office last week after Hoffman had conceded the race.

Hoffman said “I don’t think we’ll have an answer to this for at least a week or two,” and thats (sic) when the totals are completed, “each candidate will still have another week to protest.” He also said that with “20-20 hindsight,” he would not have conceded on Election Night.

Then, on Monday, in a paroxysm of mentor-worship, he officially un-conceded the election when prompted by that mighty leader of the Republican Party, Glenn Beck:

BECK: Alright, so let me ask you two questions. Are you currently bowing to me at the waist? (LAUGHTER) Have you bowed, or will you bow, to anyone, at the waist? No? Okay, good. Second question for you, are you officially un-conceding at this moment?

HOFFMAN: Yes, if I knew this information at the election night, I would not have conceded.

BECK: So are you un-conceding?

HOFFMAN: If that’s possible, yes.

Yesterday, Hoffman decided that had been a premature ejaculation, so — as Amanda Terkel put it at ThinkProgress — he un-unconceded:

Hoffman is not “un-conceding” the race, contrary to what he said Monday when pressed by Glenn Beck on his national talk radio show.

“What really matters is the count that is taking place today,” Rob Ryan, Hoffman’s spokesman told The Post-Standard. “When we see the direction that is taking, we will make the decision.”

Ryan added, “There has been no formal action to contest the vote, and depending on how the absentee count turns out we will decide how to proceed.”

As astute readers will have noticed, this act of strategically un-unconceding is only a precursor to what Hoffman’s people are hoping will be an act of re-unconceding. So depending on how the absentee count turns out, we may still see several more rounds of unconceding and reconceding.

Norm Coleman was more annoying, but he was nowhere near this funny.

It’s funny how that seems to be working out.

First, a bit of background. When George Bush introduced Medicare Part D in 2006, drug companies didn’t just sit back and rub their hands in glee at the enormous increase this would mean for their profits. No sir, they went out and pro-actively magnified the enormous increase:

A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a … pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years.

“They try to maximize their profits,” Mr. Newhouse said.

So now that healthcare reform is in imminent danger of taking effect, and the drug industry will have to deliver on that promise to shave $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs, what do you think the drug companies are busy doing? Raising prices at the highest annual rate since 2004. Specifically, in a year when the Consumer Price Index has fallen by 1.3%, the drug industry has increased prices by about 9%:

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

Like the man said, they just hate it when their profits go down. So the best thing all round is to just push up prices by an unwarranted $10 billion before you shave them by $8 billion. It may not be the best thing for you and me, but it’s the best thing for everyone who really counts (or who’s taken into account)—the drug companies, their army of lobbyists (whose families depend on the continued excess profitability of the drug companies), the long line of Congressmen and Senators with hands held out in classic “brother, can you spare a dime” fashion, and every Congressional aide and administration official who’s looking forward to boarding the drug industry gravy train in the near future.

Looks like the Obama administration has been royally taken. Given the past behavior of this industry — amply documented by widely available research — wasn’t it a monumentally stupid idea to make the kind of deal they did? With no control over what the base line would be from where the drug industry would start their $8 billion shaving.