9/16: Thanks For Nothing, Baucus

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) is getting hammered by the netroots even more than usual today. Liberal bloggers are exasperated that Baucus spent months negotiating a health care compromise with three GOP senators in private, only to finally introduce a bill that has no GOP support and which is also bleeding Dem support. "Well, that's six months we'll never get back," Attaturk quips. Liberal bloggers are now urging Dem senators to forget about Baucus's proposal and instead focus on passing a more progressive bill, even if that means using the reconciliation process.

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Most liberal bloggers (Lewison, Cole, Kleiman) support the House resolution rebuking Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) for shouting "You lie!" during Pres. Obama's speech to Congress, although some think it's unnecessary. Meanwhile, conservative bloggers (Malkin, Liebau, Hinderaker) are uniformly criticizing the resolution. RedState reacted to the resolution by urging readers to donate money to Wilson and his son, SC AG candidate Alan Wilson (R).
• Liberal bloggers (Singer, Kleiman, Aravosis) rarely have nice things to say about Senate Maj. Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), but they're pleased that Reid is threatening to cancel the October break in response to "GOP efforts to slow floor proceedings."

BAUCUS: Well, That's Six Months We'll Never Get Back

Liberal bloggers are blasting Baucus for his unsuccessful effort to negotiate a bipartisan compromise on health care reform:

• Firedoglake's Attaturk: "Who could have anticipated Max Baucus' amazing strategy of negotiating against himself, cleverly produced a plan that still failed to gain a single Republican supporter. [...] So, can we at least go back to the plan you used to have Max, you sly dog? The one that had a public option."
• Balloon Juice's Tim F.: "Do you live in Montana? Call your Senator to thank him for giving Republicans a critical bonus month to whip up lies and hate over health care. Make sure to mention how you appreciate his crippled compromise bill that netted the same zero Republican votes that single payer would have done."
• Obsidian Wings' publius: "Baucus dragged out this process for months. In doing so, he exposed reform to all types of attacks. Yes, the attacks were inevitable, but the lack of a single bill limited supporters' ability to push back effectively. As of today, he has literally nothing to show for it."
• Open Left's Chris Bowers: "The only justification ever given for the Baucus bill, and all of its problems, is that it could reach 60 votes. Well, that justification no longer exists. [...] Not only is the Baucus bill a highly questionable piece of legislation, it simply is not able to pass into law. Given how frequently conservative Democrats justify abandoning progressive policy by claiming that said policy cannot pass through Congress, it gives me great pleasure to point out in order for health care reform to pass, it actually requires a more robust public option in both the House and Senate."
• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "So, to review, for some reason no one can explain, we've (they've) put all of our (their) faith in Max Baucus, who has chucked President Obama's promises to have a single payer plan, and then the fallback, a public option, and instead included lots of Republican proposals in order to woo Republican votes, but now there are no Republican votes. So why isn't Baucus' plan now moot, since it was only intended to woo Republicans? If Democrats are going to go it alone, then why not go with a Democratic plan? And here's a crazy idea, why not go with the plan the President promised when he was running for President?"

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver: "[L]et's be clear -- some of this is Baucus's chickens coming home to roost. When you make a unilateral decision to negotiate with only five other people from a 23-person committee and 100-person Senate, and two of those five people have clear electoral disincentives against supporting any plan that you might come up with, the negotiations are liable to end in failure far more often than not. The flurry of on-the-record statements against Baucus's reform plans -- not 'leaks', not trial balloons -- points toward a defective process."

HEALTH CARE REFORM: What Happens Now?

Several liberal bloggers are discussing how Dems will pass health care reform now that Baucus's approach appears to have failed:

• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "A few things to keep an eye on: how many (and what kind of) changes Baucus is willing to make to keep Dems on board; whether the leadership tells [WV Sen. Jay] Rockefeller to pass Baucus' plan now and they'll fix it when it's being reconciled with the HELP bill; whether Rockefeller gets Democratic allies to force Baucus' hand (and how many); whether [ME Sen. Olympia] Snowe gets on board with Baucus' plan; and whether Harry Reid considers just circumventing the Finance Committee altogether, moving the HELP bill to the floor with a bunch of amendments."
• Open Left's Mike Lux: "Here's why the Senate Finance markup that will come out next week is nowhere close to what will be in the final legislation: [...] Harry Reid still needs to marry the Finance bill and the HELP committee bill. [IA Sen.] Tom Harkin, who took over the chairmanship of the HELP Committee after Ted Kennedy passed away, is from what I hear bound and determined to make a major push to have the language of the HELP bill be a major part of the package that goes to the floor, including on the big issues like the public option and affordability for the middle class."
• Daily Kos' Jed Lewison: "Harry Reid better get used to the idea that there won't be any significant Republican support for health care reform. Letting Max Baucus continue chasing Olympia Snowe around the block will only serve to drag the process out, and, perhaps, to eventually drag it down. [...] To get a decent bill through the Senate, it's going to be reconciliation or bust. It's astonishing that Reid & Co. haven't yet come to that conclusion."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Cultural Plasticity

Jonah Lehrer:

"Clearly, what the world needs is another blogger weighing in on the Kanye West/Taylor Swift controversy. But I have no interest in castigating Kanye -- I don't pick my music based on the politesse of the artists. Instead, what struck me about this peculiar celebrity moment was the fact that I really enjoy both Kanye and Taylor and their immaculate pop confections. In the last few months, my brain has been infected by the melodic memes of 'Fifteen' and 'Heartless', 'Tim McGraw' and 'The Glory'.

So far, so obvious -- I enjoy (with a touch of snobbish guilt) Top 40 radio. But here's the interesting thing -- Taylor and Kanye create completely different kinds of music. One is a talented teeny-bopper with a touch of country-western twang, while the other is a hip-hop star with a weakness for Auto-Tune. Although it's easy to take this cultural diversity for granted, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate just how modern it is. Ninety-seven years ago, people rioted because Stravinsky wrote the 'The Rite of Spring' -- now we dance to the dissonance of Girl Talk. Fifty years ago, Top 40 radio consisted of Elvis, The Everly Brothers and doo-wop. (Dylan, Motown and the Beatles were still several years away from taking over the airwaves.) The point is that, until recently, we listened to (and enjoyed) a far narrow range of sounds. The rest of the sonic universe had yet to be discovered.

This isn't the place for a discussion of the corticofugal network, or the peculiar ways in which our brain cells learn how to listen to new songs and melodies. I'm simply pointing out the obvious -- that the twentieth century was a powerful demonstration of human plasticity, cultural proof that that we can learn to tolerate (and even enjoy) an astonishing range of music. Kanye might have started a riot in 1913 Paris, just as Stravinsky did, but we now sing along to his choruses, and can steal some emotion from his sample driven tunes. What began with the atonality of Schoenberg, et. al. has led, somewhat inevitably, to that strange moment at the MTV Music Video Awards, where a hip-hop star interrupted a country-western dynamo, and two musical forms that didn't even exist 75 years ago reminded us that they're here to stay."

LEST WE FORGET: Book Titles, If They Were Written Today

Scott Simpson (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

Then: The Prince
Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)