Providing a case in point is National Review editor Rich Lowry. In his latest hagiography this week, Lowry basks in Palin's "roguish charm":

It's September 2008 all over again. All the same players are lining up to put a good hate on Sarah Palin. She's like an isotope designed to course throughout our politics and culture, lighting up press bias, self-congratulatory liberalism, Christianity-hating secularism, and intellectual condescension wherever they are found.

The contempt of her enemies only increases the ardor of her fans.

And none is more adoring, it turns out, than Rich Lowry.

As you may recall, in October 2008 Lowry reported on his near-orgasmic bliss watching Sarah Palin's debate performance against Joe Biden. The impact of a vice presidential candidate winking at him left a breathless Lowry weak at the knees:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

As Lowry suspected, he's not alone. At the Weekly Standard, right-wing worker-bee Matthew Continettti has dedicated himself to protecting his queen. In his new tome, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, Continetti defends the "young, attractive, and pro-life conservative mom who connected with ordinary Americans" from the left's campaign of "distortion, exaggeration, fabrication, vilification, ridicule, and abuse." Disgusted that Palin on the one hand is branded a "true Stepford candidate," Continetti argues on the other:

If you had gone into a chemical laboratory to concoct a politician whose background and manner would sound liberal alarms, you probably would have come up with someone like Sarah Palin.

To be sure, given that opportunity the usual suspects among Palin's bathwater drinkers would be sure to manufacture a right-wing American version of Princess Diana. Rush Limbaugh, who in 1993 famously called the young Chelsea Clinton a "dog," blasted the likes of NBC's Andrea Mitchell for simply observing Sarah Palin is "not deeply read. She hasn't thought through a lot of these policies, and you have to do that." As he groused in July:

Okay, and I hear this from a lot of people on our side, too. Primarily women, primarily women. And I think many of them have been in Washington too long. "Lord knows she's attractive." That's the rub. That's the rub. Well, it's not the whole rub, but it's part of what grates on 'em. Trust me, my friends. Trust me. When your poster chick is Barbara Mikulski, you get the drift. When your poster chick is Nancy Pelosi. I don't care, pick one.

(To illustrate his point, Limbaugh features side-by-side photos of Sarah Palin and Democratic Rep. Barbara Mikulski.)

Palin's apparent sex appeal isn't limited to the men of the right. Ann Coulter, too, made clear that if loving Palin is wrong, she doesn't want to be Right:

The peculiarly venomous hatred of Palin is driven by women of the left and their whipped consorts. All that needs to happen is for a feminist to overhear two Nation readers saying, "I hate to admit it, but Palin is kind of hot" and ...

WHAT??????????? YOU CALL THAT HOT? I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW WE'VE GOT A MEGA-SUPER HOTTIE IN DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. AND NEED I REMIND YOU AGAIN OF THE RAW SEX APPEAL OF RACHEL MADDOW?

Democrats are a party of women, and nothing drives them off their gourds like a beautiful Christian conservative. (How much money has that other beautiful born-again, Carrie Prejean, been forced to spend on lawyers to respond to liberal hysteria?)

(Unsurprisingly, the public statements of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean are virtually indistinguishable.)

No doubt, the Republican Party's leaders past and present share Limbaugh and Coulter's adolescent assessment of the beauty of the right and the beasts of the left. After all, in 1998, Palin's running mate John McCain followed in Limbaugh's footsteps, joking, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." (McCain later apologized to Hillary and Bill Clinton, though not to Janet Reno). For his part, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in May laughed off Time magazine's selection of Sarah Palin as one of America's most influential people:

"But was that the issue on the most beautiful people or the most influential people?"

Back in July, Politico asked leading figures from the left and right "Are women in politics still routinely demeaned in the news media, or is it all about Sarah Palin?" (Grover Norquist argued that "Sarah Palin is not being attacked by the establishment media because she is a woman," but because she's a "possible leader of Reagan Republicanism.") This week, former Bush press secretary and new Obama appointee Dana Perino left no doubt where she stood on the question:

"There is a special burden for women in politics. And we saw that even for Hillary Clinton. And especially if you're an attractive woman and a conservative woman, then that burden is even greater."

As for Palin herself, she made clear in March 2008 that she had no patience for the whining of women candidates - like Hillary Clinton:

"Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it...When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism or, you know, maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, man, that doesn't do us any good. Women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country. I don't think it's, it bodes well for her -- a statement like that...It bothers me a little bit hearing her bring that attention to herself on that level."

But far from producing crippling cognitive dissonance among her supporters, Palin's transparent hypocrisy and stunning contradictions only deepen her hold over them. For the likes of Rich Lowry, no Palin transgression could wipe the starbursts from his eyes. No Palin failure could ever lead to a political divorce. Echoing Palin's own words about her continued commitment to her husband, they doubtless think: "Have you seen Sarah?"

ThinkProgress has a helpful table (above) comparing the House and Senate bills, including the number of additional Americans each would cover (36 million vs. 31 million), their price tags ($894 billion vs. $848 billion over 10 years), their deficit impact ($104 billion vs. $130 billion cut over 10 years) and more. Importantly, each program is fully funded and reduces the future deficit through a combination of Medicare savings and a range of excise, payroll and income taxes. (The House bill relies heavily on an income tax surcharge on the wealthiest Americans, while the Senate revenue mix includes levies on so-called "Cadillac" employer health care plans.)

Looking at the Senate version, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein believes the Democrats' deficit discipline and bending of the cost curve is an impressive feat:

One actual surprise is that the Senate bill doesn't just pay for itself. It balances itself out. That is to say, the bill is not deficit neutral because it costs a billion dollars and then the government raises a billion more dollars in taxes. In that scenario, the government is spending more, but paying for it. Rather, "CBO expects that, during the decade following the 10-year budget window, the increases and decreases in the federal budgetary commitment to health care stemming from this legislation would roughly balance out, so that there would be no significant change in that commitment."

In the first 10 years, in other words, the bill improves the deficit a bit, but the government is spending $160 billion more on health care than it otherwise would have. In the second decade, however, that ends: The savings from Medicare and Medicaid, paired with the excise tax (which CBO says "is effectively a reduction in the existing tax expenditure for health insurance premiums") and a handful of other changes, leaves the government spending no more on health care than it otherwise planned to. That's impressive stuff given that some 94 percent of the country has health insurance. And it implies, of course, that in the third decade, the federal commitment actually goes down relative to expectations. The curve, as they say, is bent.

The contrast with the Republicans' cynical 2003 Medicare Modernization Act couldn't more stark. Passed in the House by an identical 220-215 margin as the Democrats' HCR last week, the GOP's $395 billion/10 year Medicare Part D program was completely unfunded. Of course, it wasn't $395 billion, either. The Bush administration threatened to fire Medicare actuary Richard Foster if he informed Congress of his estimated price tag of $534 billion. By 2005, the forecasted cost of the drug benefit rose to $720 billion.) While the rise of generic drugs among other factors has lowered that figure, the GOP's prohibition of government direct negotiation of Medicare drug prices with pharmaceutical firms ensured a heavier burden for beneficiaries and taxpayers alike.

The role reversal between 2003 and 2009 is stunning. The Republicans didn't just lose the White House and Congress, but any remaining credibility on budgetary matters as well.

Back then, Bill Thomas (R-CA), the legislation's architect, sounded a refrain that Democrats would repeat this week:

"If we are trying to destroy Medicare, why is the AARP supporting us?''

While only one of 177 Republicans supported the House health care reform bill, six years ago 204 House Republicans voted yea on the Medicare prescription bill. Among them were current GOP leaders John Boehner (R-OH) and Eric Cantor (R-VA).

And to be sure, the Republican position then as now wasn't about preserving conservative principles, but instead a GOP majority at all costs. As House Majority Leader Tom Delay defended his party's fiscal recklessness that November night:

"We must forget about ideological absolutes."

The born again deficit virgins of the GOP can also forget their claim to be the Party of Fiscal Discipline. The saga of the Medicare drug bill in 2003 only confirmed what Vice President Dick Cheney proclaimed the previous year, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Not, that is, unless Democrats are in power.

The Republicans' shameless cynicism was perfectly captured by Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2002 proclaimed, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Not, that is, if a Republican is in the White House. But when Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office and the $1.2 trillion deficit George W. Bush left for him there, the GOP quickly changed its tune. While the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under President Bush, House Minority Leader John Boehner in February decried the $787 billion emergency economic recovery spending as "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." By June, Boehner warned of the "crushing debt Washington Democrats are running up." And Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), Obama's aborted choice for Commerce Secretary, slapped the President last month, "we're basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country." And, Gregg added:

"You can't keep throwing debt on top of debt."

Of course, throwing debt on top of debt is precisely what Gregg and his GOP allies have done for over a generation.

The Republicans' fiscal rot didn't begin with George W. Bush, but with Ronald Reagan. It was the legendary Gipper whose financial recklessness and tax-cutting fetish came to define the modern GOP.

The numbers tell the story. As predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe (a fact conveniently forgotten in the conservative hagiography of Reagan), the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt. The $998 billion debt he inherited in 1981 exploded to $2.9 trillion by the end of his second term. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history.

For his part, George H.W. Bush hardly stemmed the flow of red ink. And when Bush the Elder broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge to address the cascading budget shortfalls, his own Republican Party turned on him. While Bush's apostasy helped ensure his defeat by Bill Clinton, it was Clinton's 1993 deficit-cutting package (passed without a single GOP vote in either house of Congress) which helped usher in the surpluses of the late 1990's.

Alas, they were to be short-lived. Inheriting a federal budget in the black and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, President George W. Bush quickly set about dismantling the progress made under Clinton. Bush's $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the yawning budget deficits he produced.

Like Reagan and Stockman before him, Bush resorted to the rosy scenario to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009. Before the financial system meltdown last fall, Bush's deficit already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By this January, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

But despite studies showing that the payday for the richest Americans accounted for half of the mushrooming budget deficits of the Bush years, Judd Gregg in an interview with Forrest Sawyer on PBS Frontline tried to maintain the tried and untrue GOP talking point that tax cuts produce revenue gains for the Treasury:

SAWYER: Way back in 2000, there were surpluses projected, and that had come after some good luck with the economy and some hard work. And then came along this massive tax cut. Was that in retrospect a mistake?

GREGG: No, absolutely not. The surpluses that were projected weren't lost because of the tax cut. They were lost because of...the fact that we went into a recession as a result of 9/11 and the Internet bubble bursting...much like the real estate bubble we are going through today...The surpluses which we were running, which we thought we were going to run for a long time, simply weren't realized as a result of those two events.

Sadly for Gregg, his revisionist history is both transparent and wrong.

As David Leonhardt documented in the New York Times in June, "President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying."

(Click to see the full image.)

In that jaw-dropping chart illustrating how today's trillion-dollar deficits were created, the Times concluded that even before the Bush recession commenced in December 2007, Dubya's dangerously irresponsible tax cuts and unfunded spending produced an ocean of red ink that dwarfed the impact of President Obama's stimulus and other spending programs:

"The economic growth under George W. Bush did not generate nearly enough tax revenue to pay for his agenda, which included tax cuts, the Iraq war, and Medicare prescription drug coverage."

Looking at the fiscal year 2009 data, former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett three weeks ago destroyed the mythology of the born again Republican deficit hawks:

Now let's fast forward to the end of fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30. According to CBO, it ended with spending at $3,515 billion and revenues of $2,106 billion for a deficit of $1,409 billion.

To recap, the deficit came in $223 billion higher than projected [in January], but spending was $28 billion and revenues were $251 billion less than expected. Thus we can conclude that more than 100 percent of the increase in the deficit since January is accounted for by lower revenues. Not one penny is due to higher spending.

It should be further noted that revenues are lower to a large extent because of tax cuts included in the February stimulus. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, these tax cuts reduced revenues in FY2009 by $98 billion over what would otherwise have been the case. This is important because the Republican position has consistently been that tax cuts and only tax cuts are an appropriate response to the economic crisis...

I think there are grounds on which to criticize the Obama administration's anti-recession actions. But spending too much is not one of them. Indeed, based on this analysis, it is pretty obvious that spending - real spending on things like public works - has been grossly inadequate. The idea that Reagan-style tax cuts would have done anything is just nuts.

And to be sure, making the Bush tax cuts permanent would make the federal government's fiscal picture worse - much worse. As the AP detailed in October, continuing President Bush's massive tax windfall for the wealthiest Americans who need it least constitutes a grave threat to the nation's fiscal stability:

No doubt, the announcement this week that the monthly deficit for October reached a record $176 billion is a stark reminder of the dark clouds hanging over the U.S. budget. But given the magnitude of the economic downturn gripping the United States, deficit cutting will have to wait.

As for what shape that will take, the early signs are not promising. President Obama is said to be investigating a freeze of domestic spending in next year's budget, and may even advocate a 5% cut. But if that sounds like a warmed over version of Congress' Gramm-Rudman monstrosity of the Reagan years, the calls from some moderate Senate Democrats like Evan Bayh (D-IN) to outsource responsibility by creating a "deficit commission" is even worse. As the New York Times groused in March 1989, President George H.W. Bush tried that something like that, too:

The National Economic Commission's majority report on balancing the budget is a shamelessly superficial summary of President Bush's proposals. It endorses them all and rejects higher taxes. A minority report by six Democrats is more analytical and more critical of Mr. Bush. But it ducks the tax question, too. The enterprise thus ends, just as Mr. Bush had hoped, as a bipartisan flop.

Of course, President Obama is unlikely to follow in Bush 41's footsteps, who "scorned the commission publicly." In addition to pushing for the savings contained in the health care reforms now before Congress, Obama is more likely to back a package of entitlement reforms, spending cuts and tax increases. (Whether the President ultimately reverses course on his campaign promise not to raise taxes on those households earning less $250,000 a year, post-recession budgetary realities may off him no alternative.)

As for the Republicans, their formula is more of the same dogma that produced the deficit catastrophe in the first place. Butchering history and the truth, Sarah Palin regurgitated the Republican recipe in Hong Kong and (in almost identical language) in her book:

Ronald Reagan, he was faced with an even worse recession, and he showed us how to get out of here.

If you want real job growth, you cut taxes! And you reduce marginal tax rates on all Americans. Cut payroll taxes, eliminate capital gain taxes and slay the death tax, once and for all. Get federal spending under control, and then you step back and you watch the U.S. economy roar back to life. But it takes more courage for a politician to step back and let the free market correct itself than it does to push through panicky solutions or quick fixes.

Then again, Sarah Palin is also among the ranks of Republican crusaders for abstinence-only education. Her daughter, a poster child for its failure, has emerged an ambassador of sorts for teen abstinence despite her belief that "it's not realistic at all."

Neither is believing born again Republican deficit hawks.

UPDATE: Almost on cue, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) this week offered a comical response to President Obama's plans for post-recession deficit cutting. Boehner, who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug program in 2003, claimed, "Washington Democrats' so-called 'war on deficits' is about a year late and more than a trillion dollars short."

A nation which has chosen to depend on an all-volunteer military must have clear standards for admitting and retaining those courageous few who wish to serve in its name. Needless to say, they should not pose a threat to themselves or their fellow servicemen and women. They should uphold their oath to the Constitution of the United States and its government. And importantly, they should not undermine either American national security objectives or our timeless democratic values by advancing their own.

To be sure, as the always execrable Michelle Malkin fumed in the wake of the Fort Hood slaughter, potential Al Qaeda sympathizers and possibly deranged Muslim extremists like Major Hasan and Sgt. Hasan Akbar must be prevented from entering or quickly weeded out of the American military.

But the danger to America's security at home and goals abroad hardly ends there.

Consider the growing infiltration of neo-Nazi groups within the armed services. In 2006 and again in 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which monitors racist and right-wing militia groups, concluded:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization...

The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."

That zero-tolerance policy was put in place in the aftermath of the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 Americans, the largest death toll from a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland before 9/11. As the New York Times recounted:

The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.

But a more widespread if more subtle threat to the success of America's military and foreign policy objectives may be the creeping Christian fundamentalism extending throughout the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

The aggressive push to entrench Christian conservative personnel and propaganda at all ranks of the armed services manifests itself with growing frequency. An early warning came in 2003 in the guise of Lt. General William Boykin. Boykin, who later became a deputy under secretary of defense, claimed during speeches to prayer groups and breakfasts that militant Islamists sought to destroy America "because we're a Christian nation." General Boykin also explained to evangelical audiences that Muslims worship an "idol'" and not "a real God." While President Bush expressed his disagreement (noting Boykin "''didn't reflect my opinion" and "it just doesn't reflect what the government thinks"), Boykin remained on the job.

Meanwhile, evangelical proselytizing at the Air Force Academy makes a mockery of both Pentagon policy and American values of democracy and religious freedom. In May, 2005, Lutheran minister and Captain MeLinda Morton was removed from her post after warning evangelical Christians were trying to "subvert the system" in trying to win converts among cadets at the Academy. A June 2005 study at USAFA described other incidents of religious intolerance, insensitivity and inappropriate proselytizing, and concluded:

"Additionally, some faculty members and coaches consider it their duty to profess their faith and discuss this issue in their classrooms in furtherance of developing cadets' spirituality."

Even minor restrictions on proselytizing produced an avalanche of opposition from Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition and other groups which protested that new proposed guidelines abridged "the constitutional right of military chaplains to pray according to their faith."

Undaunted, the push to proselytize in the U.S. military continues. In 2007, an inspector general's report highlighted ethics violations among current and former officers, including two major generals, for appearing in uniform for a promotional and fundraising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy. As the Washington Post noted, the report "offers a vivid picture of how inappropriately intertwined Christian Embassy had become with Pentagon operations by the time the video, with its extensive scenes inside the Pentagon, was filmed in 2004." Nonetheless, the New York Times reported earlier this year that military personnel were shown videos featuring football's Terry Bradshaw professing his Christian religion as part of an official military production dealing with depression, suicide and "the importance of faith."

The blind eye turned towards these extremist ideologies may not merely overlook the next Terry McVeigh. At a time when the United States is trying to win hearts and minds among Muslim faithful in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new crusader culture risks undermining the fight against Al Qaeda.

As Jeremy Scahill documented in the Huffington Post in May, these kinds of incidents are an affront both to the U.S. military code of conduct and America's Afghan allies:

Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him."

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

(The U.S. military later confirmed that Bibles meant to be distributed to Afghan civilians were destroyed.)

After that embarrassment, Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen reminded his countrymen:

"It certainly is, from the United States military's perspective, not our position to ever push any specific kind of religion, period."

"As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well."

Which is exactly right. Americans are still trying to determine whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan was a would-be Islamic jihadist, a disgruntled serviceman, criminally insane or possibly all of the above.

In the mean time, thousands of Muslim American soldiers, sailors, marines and air force personnel continue to defend their countrymen around the world. Some now reside at Arlington National Cemetery, like 20 year old Army Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, having given their lives for our nation.

Which is why it is so essential both that Americans now resist the dark urge to prevent Muslims from serving in the United States military while remaining vigilant in keeping religious, racial and political extremism of all kinds out of it.

NOTE: For information on how you can help support the victims of the Fort Hood tragedy, visit the BBB listings for the Fort Hood Chaplain's Fund, the local Red Cross, USO Fort Hood, Fort Hood Fisher House and other charities serving Fort Hood and the Killeen, Texas community.

And on this Veteran's Day, show your support for our military veterans and the troops and their families who sacrifice every day to protect our nation. The Defense Department has a helpful directory of homefront groups and charities.

A quick glance back to November 22, 2003 in the national rear view mirror shows a mirror image of last night's House vote. The Bush White House, which flip-flopped on adding a prescription benefit within the Medicare program in order to win over elderly voters as the 2004 campaign neared, put last minute pressure on the caucus to back the program. President Bush touted the AARP's backing for a 678-page bill his administration duplicitously claimed would cost $400 billion over 10 years. Bill Thomas (R-CA), the legislation's architect, sounded a refrain that Democrats would repeat this week:

"If we are trying to destroy Medicare, why is the AARP supporting us?''

While only one of 177 Republicans supported Saturday's health care reform bill, six years ago 204 House Republicans voted yea on the Medicare prescription bill. Among them were current GOP leaders John Boehner (R-OH) and Eric Cantor (R-VA).

And to be sure, the Republican position then as now wasn't about preserving conservative principles, but instead a GOP majority at all costs. As House Majority Leader Tom Delay defended his party's fiscal recklessness that November night:

"We must forget about ideological absolutes."

But the similarities between Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi's victory last night and that of her Republican predecessor Dennis Hastert end there. From the GOP leadership's strong-arm tactics and the administration's budgetary chicanery deployed to secure the bill's passage to the industry giveaways it offered, the dirty dealing behind the Medicare drug plan showcased typical Republican politics in action.

For starters, consider Tom Delay's unprecedented machinations on the House floor to round up the needed votes. As the New York Times recalled:

Under heavy pressure from President Bush and Republican Congressional leaders, lawmakers backed the legislation by a vote of 220 to 215, sending it to the Senate, which is expected to act in the next few days. The vote, which ordinarily takes fifteen minutes to record, was kept open for an extraordinary three hours as Republicans struggled to switch votes and obtain a majority.

And what happened during those three hours was a new low, even for Tom Delay. As the Washington Post later reported, the House Ethics Committee later reprimanded Delay for trying to buy votes for the Medicare bill:

After a six-month investigation, the committee concluded that DeLay had told Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) he would endorse the congressional bid of Smith's son if the congressman gave GOP leaders a much-needed vote in a contentious pre-dawn roll call on Nov. 22.

Then there's the matter of the Medicare bill's price tag. As I wrote four years ago ("Medicare's Prescription for Failure"):

A White House desperate for an election year win on Medicare deliberately misrepresented the program's costs in order to ensure passage. On December 8, 2003, President Bush rolled out a program he claimed would cost $400 billion over 10 years. Within two months, however, the White House notified Congress that the real price tag would approach $550 billion. When Medicare actuary Richard Foster sought to present the true price tag to Congress in late 2003, then agency chief Thomas Scully threatened to fire him. Fast forward two years and the estimated 10 year price tag for the Medicare prescription plan now exceeds $720 billion for its 43 million beneficiaries.

(As the Times reported in 2004, the GAO ultimately concluded that the Bush administration "illegally withheld data from Congress on the cost of the new Medicare law" and that Scully "should repay seven months of his salary to the government." While Scully was later fined for other ethics violations, he was never held accountable for his role in the Medicare fraud. Today, Thomas Scully "now works for a law firm and a private investment firm, has registered as a lobbyist for Abbott Laboratories, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Caremark Rx and other health care companies.")

Then there's the small matter of public policy itself. From its inception, the Republicans' Medicare prescription benefit was designed to fail. With its confusing and costly "donut hole" limiting payments for beneficiaries and its prohibition on direct government price negotiations with pharmaceutical companies, Medicare Part D was a headache for recipients and a windfall for the drug companies.

For starters, the White House and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill insisted that the final December 2003 Medicare Drug bill prohibit the government from negotiating prices directly with drug companies, a key demand of the pharmaceutical lobby. The same price leverage enjoyed by the Veterans Affairs Department and its program beneficiaries was surrendered by Medicare, with the predictable results described in a 2006 House analysis.

That report released by Democratic staff on the House Government Reform Committee showed that under the new Medicare plan, prices for 10 commonly prescribed drugs were 80% higher than those negotiated by the Veterans Department, 60% above that paid by Canadian consumers and still 3% higher than volume pharmacies such as Costco and Drugstore.com. The report concluded that:

"The prices offered by the Medicare drug plans are higher than all four benchmarks, in some cases significantly so. This increases costs to seniors and federal taxpayers and makes it doubtful that the complicated design of Medicare Part D provides any tangible benefit to anyone but drug manufacturers and insurers."

Which is exactly as Louisiana Republican Bill Tauzin designed it. Just months after shepherding the Medicare prescription bill he wrote through the House, Tauzin, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, left Congress and accepted a $2 million-a-year job as president of PhRMA -- Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

And so it goes. Five days before proclaiming the House health reform bill "the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen," the man RNC Chairman Michael Steele is now calling "Speaker Boehner" warned it was "breaking the bank." But six years ago, Boehner stood with President Bush and 203 House Republicans to bring American voters the Medicare prescription bill just in time for the 2004 elections.

Just two days after the CBO dismissed a House Republican plan that would barely dent the rolls of the uninsured, Perry and Gingrich blasted Democratic health care reform in a Washington Post screed titled, "Let States Lead the Way." Besides dredging up Newt's worn out 1990's vintage talking points on unfunded mandates, the duo insist it is the Lone Star State which should be at the front of that vanguard:

Texas, for example, has adopted approaches to controlling health-care costs while improving choice, advancing quality of care and expanding coverage. Consider the successful 2003 tort reform. Fewer frivolous lawsuits have attracted record numbers of doctors to the state as medical malpractice insurance premiums dropped by half. Christus Health, a large Catholic nonprofit system with a significant presence in Texas, spent about $100 million on liability defense payments in 2003. Last year, Christus spent $2.3 million on such payments. Much of that savings has gone into expanding health-care services in low-income neighborhoods.

As the Post's Erza Klein asks, "how's that working out?"

The answer, of course, is quite poorly. While from 2007 to 2009 Texas nudged its way from a horrific 48th to a merely miserable 46th in the Commonwealth Fund rankings, the health care system there remains an ongoing calamity for its residents. Among the poster children for the failure of red state health care, Perry's state brought up the rear across the five indicators measured. When it comes to health care access and equity, Texas is dead last.

While it is predictable that Republicans Gingrich and Perry cite Texas' draconian tort reform law as an example for the nation, the data is far from clear as to its benefits in actually reducing malpractice premiums, lowering costs and attracting physicians to the underserved state.

As I previously noted in "Republican Malpractice Myths," it comes as no surprise that a cavalcade of GOP leaders, including Perry, Sarah Palin, John Cornyn and John Kyl cited the same study showing malpractice awards caps enacted in 2003 in Texas fueled an increase in the number of physicians in the Lone Star State:

According to the Pacific Research Institute, medical licenses in Texas have increased 18 percent in the last four years, with 7,000 new doctors moving to the state.

The actual impact of the Texas law, however, remains in dispute. The state's rising population, its 48th place ranking in physicians per capita, its staggering percentage of uninsured, its lack of an income tax and the 147% jump in malpractice premiums in 2003 alone make gauging the unique contribution of malpractice caps difficult to assess. Regardless, health care costs in Texas have continued their upward spiral.

What seems beyond dispute is that other similar malpractice cap states like Mississippi have not seen an influx of new doctors. The Jackson Free Press took exception to Governor Haley Barbour's claim that tort reform meant that physicians "have quit leaving the state and limiting their practices to avoid lawsuit abuse":

But non-partisan facts show that doctors were never really leaving the state in the first place. A 2003 Government Accountability Office report, "Medical Malpractice: Implications of Rising Premiums on Access to Health Care," took a hard look at five medical "crisis" states--Mississippi, Nevada, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida--and dismissed reports of doctor emigration from states.

Information compiled by the American Medical Association--which supports tort reform and President Obama's vision of health reform--shows that the number of physicians in Mississippi rose steadily in years leading up to tort-reform legislation in 2004, and even slowed its increase following 2004.

From 2004 to 2005, the state actually recorded no increase over the 5,872 doctors counted in 2004, and added only 18 new physicians in 2006. The year 2007 reflected an increase of 71 physicians--still less than the 145-increase between 2000 and 2001 and the 99-doctor increase between 1998 and 1999. Even the time between 2002 and 2003--arguably the years of the worst tort abuse, according to tort-reform proponents--experienced a growth in the state doctor population of 140.

Ironically, to the degree that Texas and other red state bastions of medical misery have made minor improvements in recent years, the credit in large part goes to the federal government and the expansion by Democrats of initiatives like the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). As the Commonwealth Fund concluded its 2009 study:

The 2009 State Scorecard paints a picture of health care systems under stress, with deteriorating health insurance coverage for adults and rising health care costs. On a positive note, there were gains in children's coverage as a result of national reforms, and improvement in some measures of hospital and nursing home care following federal efforts to publicly report quality data.

In a final irony, as Klein suggests, there is a Republican Governor with whom Gingrich could have partnered to make the case for the states as the laboratories of health care reform: Mitt Romney. Thanks to its own insurance mandate passed during Mitt's tenure, the percentage of uninsured in 6th ranked Massachusetts has dropped to 3%. But as Klein muses:

Romney, however, disowned his bill after he realized the Republican base didn't like health-care reform.

Regardless, when it comes to a model for reforming the U.S. health care system, don't mess with Texas.