"When I’m drafting right-to-life language, I don’t call up the nuns," Stupak told Fox News. Instead he said he consulted "leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and the National Right to Life Committee." Thursday, on MSNBC's "Hardball," he repeated his dismissal of nuns' opinions, insisting he listens only to the bishops and that he's never even been lobbied by nuns. To his credit, Chris Matthews pointed to his aunts and other nuns he's known who are smart about public policy and vocal in their political opinions, but Stupak was too stupid or stubborn to pick up on Matthews' invitation to walk back his remarks. (The video isn't online yet.)

There was a way for Stupak to say he disagreed with the nuns without condescending to them, but two days in a row, he didn't find it. In fact, his disrespect of the nuns seems of a piece with his stubborn stance not only on abortion but the healthcare reform bills. He joins the patriarchal leaders of the Catholic Church who never listen to the voices of women, either, and he's proud of that.

So is Catholic League blowhard Bill Donohue, who released a statement saying only the bishops could speak for the Catholic Church. Not only the nuns but the Catholic Health Association disagree with Donohue and Stupak, joining the push to pass the bill. Here's hoping Stupak's disrespect pulls away some of the handful of House members who are at risk of voting with him.

In his remarks this morning, Kucinich sounded concerned, and pained, about the crazed and vicious opposition that the Obama presidency has inspired on the right. "One of the things that has bothered me is the attempt to try to delegitimize his presidency. That hurts the nation when that happens," the Cleveland congressman said, sounding genuinely anguished. "We have to be very careful" that "President Obama's presidency not be destroyed by this debate ... Even though I have many differences with him on policy, there's something much bigger at stake here for America."

Kucinich knows as well as anyone that the president is far from a socialist; he's a centrist corporatist Democrat, and that was clear back when Kucinich stood well to his left during the 2008 primaries. And even though the Cleveland progressive normally avoids partisan calculations about power and opportunity, and votes his conscience and ideology, Kucinich decided to support Obama's healthcare reform plan because right now, partisan calculations about power and opportunity actually serve his left-wing conscience and ideology.

Kucinich understands that there will be no healthcare reform for another generation if this bill doesn't pass. There will be no second Obama term either (and don't dream about lefty primary challenges -- there won't be a Democrat in the White House in 2013 if his name isn't Obama). The only thing worse than being an alleged socialist in American politics is being a weak, ineffectual socialist, and if the president and his party can't get this package passed, despite controlling the White House and a healthy majority in both houses of Congress, they will be rebuked by the voters. And maybe rightly rebuked. What better sign that a party isn't ready to govern?

I've written extensively about my disappointment with Obama and the Democrats, particularly around the healthcare reform plan. He gave Republicans and conservative Democrats too much power for too long, and he sold out early to the insurance and pharmaceutical industry. I don't like the deals Obama made, but he did what he thought he had to do. The left thinks he's wrong; we can prove that when we have a better hold on power. But we won't move the party left by abandoning Obama on healthcare (on detention and secrecy issues, I mostly have abandoned him). Like it or not, Obama is roughly at the party's center; we should work to pull him left. If progressives set him up as a right-winger to try to demonize and defeat him, they will become irrelevant.

This bill isn't perfect, but it will help millions of people. That's why Republicans are fighting it so hard -- and why they decided to fight it before Obama made a proposal (as this profile of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell shows). Right now, I believe, conscience and ideology are served by looking at the political calculations: This bill is the best we can do right now. Obama was the best we could do in a president. A defeat hurts not just Obama, but the progressive movement in this country.

I found myself surprisingly moved by the decision of 60 Catholic nuns, representing 59,000 sisters, to buck the power-mad bishops and come out for the bill today, even as opportunists like Bart Stupak continue to insist it somehow funds abortion. (They made up for the exorcist/moron who blamed the priest/pedophilia problem on working mothers.) The nuns speak for me, too:

The health care bill that has been passed by the Senate and that will be voted on by the House will expand coverage to over 30 million uninsured Americans. While it is an imperfect measure, it is a crucial next step in realizing health care for all. It will invest in preventative care. It will bar insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. It will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children. And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments – $250 million – in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.

In 2010, this is as good as it gets when it comes to healthcare reform. Progressives have to work harder to build support -- real, voting support, not just opinion-polling support -- for our views. (I know people nominally support the public option in opinion polls, but it doesn't yet drive their votes like other issues do.) We can make the healthcare system better after the bill passes, and we can make Congress better. But it will be very hard to do either if Obama and the Democrats lose this one.

(An earlier version of this post included Michael Moore among the progressives who oppose the health care reform bill. Moore reversed his earlier opposition in a letter to fans Wednesday morning, which I missed.)

Even Starr is outraged by Cheney's despicable attack on Justice Department lawyers who've defended terror suspects in their past. She's labeled the group "the al Qaida seven," and suggested they should be ineligible for Justice Department work.

By contrast Starr called such work "in the finest traditions of the country." He noted that American founder and president John Adams "represented the British redcoats who were accused of the Boston Massacre – and he successfully defended seven of the British troops who were accused of these crimes." Starr worked in Atticus Finch from "To Kill a Mockingbird," remembering Finch told his kids "'I've got to do this as a matter of conscience,' and it was the conscience of a great profession… One needs to be courageous at times and stand up to power."

Starr isn't the only conservative who signed the letter. Former Solicitor General (and counsel to the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project) Ted Ols0n did too. Maybe most remarkable to me, since I've debated him, is the signature of torture-defender David Rivkin. If Cheney's gone too far for Rivkin, that's pretty far indeed.

I'm amused by the fact that Cheney's biggest defender is Wrong-way Bill Kristol, who's almost always wrong about almost everything. He predicted some conservative lawyers would sign the letter of protest, sneering "The legal fraternity doesn't like criticism of lawyers."

Starr's response? "I love Bill Kristol, I view him as a friend. But this is not consistent with the great traditions of our country and certainly of our profession...very fine traditions. [The condemned lawyers] deserve commendation. They do not deserve criticism at all. This was very unwise."

I love that it's Cheney and Kristol, two of the nation's top beneficiaries of affirmative action for conservative white people (which is far more widespread than any preferences for minorities), who are still insisting their shameful attacks are reasonable. Like naughty spoiled children, they're happy their high jinks are rattling their elders. Kewl!

But I don't think this helps Liz Cheney in her reported quest to redeem her father's legacy by running for Senate in Wyoming or Virginia. For all these conservative lawyers to immediately smack her down suggests she's a) dead wrong and b) not well respected. This is a public humiliation for Cheney, and on a lesser scale, for Kristol. It shows they don't understand "the finest traditions of our country."

Honestly, both of them are starting to look like the washed-out later generation of once-relevant elite families. We all know how that happens. I could be wrong, because being mean and conscience-free counts for a lot in politics today. But this won't be the last time Cheney is rebuked.

Before I attack that false equivalence, let me make clear: I'm not defending these Democrats. I said on "Morning Joe" Tuesday that Paterson should resign, given the mounting evidence that he abused his power to help an aide duck a serious domestic violence charge. I was a Blagojevich critic like every other Democrat, and I wrote at the time that it was wrong to seat Roland Burris in Barack Obama's Senate seat after Blagojevich's cynical appointment. 

But this is another dramatic case of the double standard the media can't seem to avoid when it comes to Republicans and Democrats. The big difference between the two sets of scandals is that GOP corruption in 2006 was big-time, it was systemic -- and much of it was covered up, ignored and, in some cases (House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, anyone?), perpetrated by congressional leadership. Nancy Pelosi's team came in and developed ethics standards and investigation protocols that are working in the Rangel case, standards that many Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, opposed. 

If you simply examine the corruption scandals, there is no comparison. (This post by the great Joe Conason is a must-read.) 

Rangel is accused of taking a free trip to the Caribbean and failing to report $70,000 in rental income on his taxes (though there are other allegations being investigated); disgraced GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham admitted he took $2 million in bribes. Rangel gave up his committee chairmanship (admittedly reluctantly) once he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee this week; Tom DeLay didn't resign his leadership post after he was admonished by the House Ethics Committee, or cited for campaign finance violations by the FEC. 

And unlike Democrats, Republicans rallied around their corrupt leader. Unbelievably, the House GOP changed its own rules so that DeLay could stay on as majority leader even if he was indicted. 

Indeed, DeLay was indicted, and he finally resigned his speaker post after that. But it took him months to resign his House seat. 

There's also nothing on the Democratic side like the Jack Abramoff scandal, which tainted a lot of GOP Congress members and reached up into the Bush White House (where Karl Rove's secretary was a former Abramoff employee; the two men enjoyed dinners and basketball games together). The Abramoff scandal resulted in the conviction of GOP Rep. Bob Ney, two Bush White House officials and nine GOP congressional aides. 

Let's move on to sex. Rep. Eric Massa resigned Friday, only days after reports surfaced that the House Ethics Committee was investigating whether he sexually harassed a male aide. Former GOP Rep. Mark Foley, by contrast, survived several reports of wrongdoing and only resigned after ABC News revealed sexually inappropriate instant messages with an underage House page. The bigger scandal in the Foley case was the way GOP House leadership treated the sexual harassment reports. A chain of high-level GOP aides, reaching into the office of former Speaker Dennis Hastert, was shown to have known about Foley's issues months before the conclusive IMs were revealed.

Finally, contrast the fates of Democrat Eliot Spitzer and Republican David Vitter. Both men admitted patronizing prostitutes. Spitzer resigned; Vitter didn't, and he's running for reelection to his Senate seat with his party fervently behind him. 

I could go on. Clearly corruption and sexual high jinks go on in both parties. But Republicans tend to rally 'round their wrongdoers, and Republican leadership protects them, while Democrats have done a demonstrably better job dealing with their messes, which are also smaller potatoes than what we witnessed with DeLay and Abramoff. But will voters be able to tell the difference? Not if the media collude with Republicans to push a false equivalence. 

I discussed these issues Friday with Chris Matthews and Bob Shrum on MSNBC's "Hardball." I think I did OK. 

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The video produced by FoundingBloggers.org opens with three quick shots of Breitbart shrieking – at journalist Max Blumenthal, One Peoples Project Daryle Jenkins and The Washington Independent's Dave Weigel. If we'd edited it quite that way, Breitbart would have called it unfair. But this is how his Big Government site wants the story to go.

"You're the most despicable life form I've ever seen!" he screams at Blumenthal. "Get out of my face, get out of my face, get out of my face!" he yells at Jenkins. "Fuck. You. John. Podesta!" he shrieks into Weigel's….notebook? I think so. The sight of the large-ish Breitbart bending over to be at shouting level with Weigel's pupik doesn't seem to belong on a video trying to deny he's having a breakdown. As the opening to a pro-Breitbart video, it's a counter-intuitive approach, I gotta say.

The narrative gets a bit more Breitbart-friendly from there, for a minute, mainly because the video is shot from behind the rightwing media mogul's back, which makes him look less unhinged than when the viewer is staring into his snarl (as when watching Mike Madden's Breitbart's videos on Salon). But you can't accuse Marcus and the videographers of cutting out the crazy. They actually show Breitbart's ultimate breakdown: When Madden asks, reasonably, whether James O'Keefe and Breitbart ever exposed ACORN abetting actual prostitution (rather than the prank prostitution O'Keefe and Hannah Giles tried to represent), Breitbart, by anyone's measure, kind of goes off the deep end, shaking and shuddering and flapping his hands as he yells at Madden:

They posed as a pimp and a hooker! I don't understa-a-a-nd what you're taking about! Why do you think that's a point? Why don't you care about ACORN? Why don't you care about ACORN? Do you only care about the nuances? Did you see the tapes? Are you insane?

At the end of that segment the video shifts to show my Breitbart blog post on Salon, so you can actually see Breitbart's face, as filmed by Madden, full of rage. So they're not white-washing what went on, to their credit. I guess.

The crux of Marcus's argument is that Breitbart's hysteria is justified, because in Breitbart's words, "The worst thing you can do ...in politically correct America…is accuse somebody of being a (sic) racism." Certainly some journalists have examined the racial point of view that motivated Breitbart's young protege, O'Keefe. Blumenthal's Salon article detailed O'Keefe's involvement in a white nationalist debate featuring American Renaissance's Jared Taylor (we corrected the article to take out the charge that O'Keefe helped organize the event). Blumenthal and the New York Times and others have written about O'Keefe's racially tinged pranks at Rutgers, where he organized a spoof "affirmative action bake sale" (where minorities got discounts) and protested the cafeteria carrying "Lucky Charms" cereal because it belittled Irish Americans. Then there's that silly pimp stunt, with a fur coated costume borrowed straight from blaxploitation movies. It's fair to raise questions about O'Keefe (and Breitbart's) racial attitudes.

But even more to the point, it's ludicrous to say the worst thing you can accuse anyone of today is "being a racism," or even a racist, as Breitbart argues. It's clearly worse to be accused of supporting death panels for elderly people, of usurping the presidency you're not eligible for, of being the murderous "Joker" from the Batman series, of being a totalitarian Marxist when you're a mainstream corporate Democrat – all the charges the increasingly unhinged right routinely toss at Barack Obama.

So Breitbart's playing the victim is particularly funny, especially as he tries to build his self-promoting "Big Government," "Big Journalism" and "Big Hollywood" sites -- and also make Big Threats. The video ends with Breitbart once again menacing liberals. "Fuck. You. John. Podesta!" we see him yell again --again into Dave Weigel's pupik. Breitbart walks on, bent over, a little breathless: "What's in your closet, John Podesta? Big Podesta? Big Soros? Do you want us to play these games? Because we're playing to win!"

Then he walks away from Weigel, his bulky backpack slung over the shoulder of his rumpled suit, into another CPAC breakout room, a lonely warrior looking for his next battle with liberalism.  A few days later he promised Fox News's Greg Gutfeld he'd bring down the "institutional left within the next three weeks." That doesn't leave much time. Stay tuned.

Here's the Founding Bloggers video posted on Big Government:

But it's also possible that the public option is dead. I will mourn it, but if that's the end, there's a new opening for progressive Democrats: Organize around the expansion of Medicare, even demanding Medicare for all. It's a simple demand for a popular program. Hell, the Republicans even made defending Medicare part of their dishonest crusade against the Democrats' reform efforts. If they like Medicare so much, they should be happy to expand it.

Of course they won't. But as Joe Conason argued Wednesday, the dishonest Republican "defense" of Medicare should be the Democrats' best argument at Blair House Thursday. Because the fact is, many leading Republicans still want to unravel Medicare and turn seniors over to private insurance. Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the party's rising stars (he doesn't come off as stupid, mean or irrelevant on television; God bless John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, but they're unwatchable), is actually pushing privatizing Medicare. This after his party made the Democrats' efforts to cut wasteful Medicare spending the foundation of its counterattack on reform bills. Suddenly the GOP was defending the program it spent years fighting, while deluded Republican voters of a certain age spent the summer demanding the government keep its hands off of Medicare, which is, yes, a government program.

Seriously: Even as the Senate minority leader is waxing outraged about Obama's healthcare proposals, here:

"Our constituents don't want yet another partisan, back-room bill that slashes Medicare for our seniors, raises a half-trillion dollars in new taxes, fines them if they don't buy the right insurance and further expands the role of government in their personal decisions."

Paul Ryan's fiscal "road map" would give senior citizens vouchers to buy their insurance on the private market -- to cope with Anthem, the poster child for profiteering, rate-hiking insurance companies.

The GOP hypocrisy on Medicare is staggering. Let's hope Democrats take Conason's advice. And if the public option goes down this year, as many predict, liberal Democrats should come back and organize around an expansion of Medicare, a popular program made more popular this year. I'm an ardent defender of the so-called public option, but even I have admitted I'm not entirely sure what it means -- and if I'd been in charge of naming it, I'd have picked something else entirely.

But about this year, I want to be clear: Even if Democrats like Tom Harkin find they don't have the political strength to pass the public option, I believe that the outlines of a health reform bill visible now, only attainable with the 50-vote maneuver of reconciliation, is still worth making the law. If it passes, it will be the most important social justice legislation passed since Medicare. Yes, it is flawed, but it can be fixed. It must pass.

Finally, on this point: I'm disappointed that Rep. Anthony Weiner wasn't invited to the Blair House Summit. His outburst on CSPAN Wednesday -- denouncing the Republican Party as a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the insurance industry -- made Democrats across the nation cheer out loud. There was only one problem with it: Weiner could have noted that some of his Democratic colleagues have been purchased by the insurance companies too. Still, watch Weiner as captured on "The Rachel Maddow Show," and let's hope some of the Democrats attending the Blair House summit show the same spine.

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