One More Reason To Read Krugman

From today's NYTimes:

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

Me, too.

Krugman goes on to describe progressives' reaction and the nature of the "public option", how it's supposed to lower costs and how the "co-ops" are a sham.

But here's the important stuff:

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Win it back.

DOJ Misconduct Scandals NN09 Panel (The Selective and Wrongful Prosecution of Don Siegelman)

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman(after he let go of my arm)


Dr. Cyril Wecht takes one for the blog
The full title of the panel was Reporting DoJ Misconduct Scandals: Why Netroots Remains Last Hope for Justice and panelists included former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former coroner of Allegheny County Cyril Wecht, MD, JD.

Most Pittsburghers have some familiarity with Wecht's trial (read here if you don't) and some thought his case was an example of selective prosecution by the Bush administration and U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.

Less Burghers may have followed the case of Don Siegelman. Way back in 2007, The New York Times in an editorial titled "Selective Prosecution" described it thusly:

Putting political opponents in jail is the sort of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. In the United States, prosecutions are supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. This principle appears to have broken down in Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department — where lawyers were improperly hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party membership, and United States attorneys were apparently fired for political reasons.

Individual Democrats may be paying a personal price. Don Siegelman, a former Alabama governor, was the state’s most prominent Democrat and had a decent chance of retaking the governorship from the Republican incumbent. He was aggressively prosecuted by both the Birmingham and Montgomery United States attorney’s offices. Birmingham prosecutors dropped their case after a judge harshly questioned it. When the Montgomery office prosecuted, a jury acquitted Mr. Siegelman of 25 counts, but convicted him of 7, which appear to be disturbingly weak.

The prosecution may have been a political hit. A Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, has said in a sworn statement that she heard Bill Canary, a Republican operative and a Karl Rove protégé, say that his “girls” — his wife, the United States attorney in Montgomery, and Alice Martin, the United States attorney in Birmingham — would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman. Mr. Canary also said, according to Ms. Simpson, that Mr. Rove was involved.

The Rove controversy is still ongoing.

You can watch the 60 Minutes expose on the front page of Siegelman's website: http://www.donsiegelman.org

Unfortunately, like many of the Netroots panels that I wanted to see, the DOJ one conflicted with two others (Torture, Accountability, and Prosecutions: Looking Back to Move Forward and Advocating for Reproductive Rights in the Age of Obama).

But Siegelman wasn't having any of that. He stood outside his panel room and literally grabbed people in the halls (including me) to convince them to hear him speak with the line, "I'll be speaking during the first 10 minutes -- just stay for that."

I did just stay for his part (mostly because I already knew a lot about his case and the Wecht case), but if you're not as familiar, I urge you to check out his website, watch the 60 Minutes piece and then take action.

By the way, Siegelman did have something new to say in those first 10 minutes.

He had a chance to speak with Valerie Jarrett -- one of Obama's most trusted advisors -- that very day. He implored her to remove Rove's clones from the DOJ.

I found her reported response to be terribly discouraging. He said she told him that it was up to us to lobby for that reform.

[sigh]

You can contact Jarrett via Siegelman's website here.
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iBurgh @ Netroots

(Still playing catchup from being ill.)

By now, you've all hopefully have heard about iBurgh: the first iPhone application for registering citizen complaints through a mobile phone. You also know the part played by Councilman Peduto in trying to advance "e-democracy."

Peduto hosted a panel at Netroots Nation 2009 called "How Technology Can Enhance Democracy in Pittsburgh and Beyond."

Priya Narasimhan of YinzCam which developed iBurgh spoke during the panel and you can see her presentation here:




Pittsburgh City Councilor Bill Peduto at NN09


Priya Narasimhan, Director Carnegie Mellon'sMobility Research Center (left) at NN09
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I'm with stupid ->

"There were a couple of people in the crowd “with YouTubes.” [meaning cameras]
- Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT)


"Will you ask the President to show me his gift certificate — I mean, his — gift certificate — his birth certificate."
- Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Dancing With The Stars)

The "controversy" over First Lady Michelle Obama's shorts.
- Here (and everywhere)

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PittGirl Fired

Well this sucks but is not totally unexpected.

From KDKA:

Virginia Montanez, also known as PittGirl, was the marketing director for the Pittsburgh-based scholarship program NEED.

Montanez revealed her identity in an interview with KDKA's Jim Lokay on Wednesday.

She said she was fired this morning.

You can read her take on it at her blog.

And some people wonder why so many bloggers remain anonymous . . .

[sigh]
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Tom Ridge Confirms It

From USNews:

Tom Ridge, the first head of the 9/11-inspired Department of Homeland Security, wasn't keen on writing a tell-all. But in The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...and How We Can Be Safe Again, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake "public complacency" over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over. [emphasis added]

Atrios put it best:

Sometimes it's a bit hard to remember just how nutty the world was in those post-9/11 days. Suggesting that Bush was using the terror alert for political purposes would have made you a crazy person, the mere suggestion of it would've put you outside the bounds of acceptable discourse.

And now it's been confirmed. Wonder how that'll get played out.

Wise Words From EJ Dionne

Remember this?

EJ Dionne continues the idea:

Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush?

How would our friends on the right have reacted to someone at a Reagan or a Bush speech carrying a sign that read: "It is time to water the tree of liberty"? That would be a reference to Thomas Jefferson's declaration that the tree "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Pardon me, but I don't think conservatives would have spoken out in defense of the right of every American Marxist to bear arms or to shed the blood of tyrants.

A few paragraphs later:

This is not about the politics of populism. It's about the politics of the jackboot. It's not about an opposition that has every right to free expression. It's about an angry minority engaging in intimidation backed by the threat of violence.

And that's all they have left.

One More Reason to Love Barney Frank

NOTE: I haven't been blogging lately because what started out the first day of Netroots Nation as an annoying sinus thingy (perhaps a summer cold/allergies) turned out to be a nasty, raging infection. I've been taking antibiotics since Monday and am starting to get better (missed the Friday and Saturday NN parties). I'll try to start really blogging again soon. Make sure you check out all the great photos Spork took (scroll down at his blog).
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Just How Stupid ARE The Birthers?

From a poll from Public Policy Polling.

First off how many "birthers" are there?

The answer is that 62% of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24% think he was not and 14% are unsure.

So 38% are ignorant of the fact that Obama was born in the US.

PPP breaks down that 38% into:

10% of the country thinks that he was born in Indonesia, 7% think he was born in Kenya, and 1% think he was born in the Philippines.

That leaves 20%, which includes at least some people who correctly believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, but who don't consider Hawaii to be part of the United States. You read that right- 6% of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4% are unsure.

How stupid are these people?

The full results are here.

Digging deeper into the crosstabs. Looking at both data-sets (Was Obama born in the US and the education of the person answering the question we see that;

1. Of those with some post-graduate education, 70% said YES while 30% said NO or WEREN'T SURE (split 19/11).
2. Of those with a bachelor's degree, 66% said YES and 34% said NO or WEREN'T SURE (split 22/12).
3. Of those with a some college, 56% said YES and 45% said NO or WEREN'T SURE (split 31/14).
4. Of those who graduated high school, 49% said YES and 50% said NO or WEREN'T SURE (split 28/22).
5. Of those who didn't graduate High School, 48% said YES while 52% said NO or WEREN'T SURE (split 33/19).

And let's be clear here - it's a fact that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. We're not talking about something subjective here. If this part of this poll is to be believed (and there's no reason why it shouldn't be), the less educated you are the more likely you are to be a birther.

Pitt Girl: Anonymous No More

At her blog (which has been renamed "That's Church") she gives up some info:

1. My name is Virginia Montanez. My friends and family call me Ginny, but you can continue to call me Your Majesty, because I’ve grown accustomed.

Now that her name's out of the way, I'll paraphrase the other stuff. She's married, two kids ("HOLY SHIT, PITTGIRL IS A MOM!"), four sisters and she still hates pigeons.

Nice to meet you, Virginia. Good to have you back.

Lynn Cullen Show

The OPJ reported in early July:

We get near daily hits from folks searching for info on where they can listen to Lynn Cullen.

Well, she's back -- not on the airwaves -- but live streaming audio courtesy of the Pittsburgh City Paper.

It will be a one hour, weekday show at 10:00 AM starting on August 18th. The shows will be archived and downloadable.

Yesterday's show was pretty good - she had Chris Potter on.

Today, it'll be me.

I hope she's not setting a precedent of only having bald and/or balding men on but if Tony Norman's on tomorrow, we'll know for sure.

The show starts at 10AM. Just go to City Paper and follow the link with Lynn's picture on it.

Political Pundits

Hey, look:
Don't know if you can see it, but BOTH POLITICAL JUNKIES will be on the McIntire's stage this Saturday.

BOTH of us.

And Gab's playing trumpet. That I wanna see. My undergraduate degree is in trumpet playing, you know.

Here's McIntire's description:

SEE YOU THIS SATURDAY NIGHT! PITTSBURGH PUNDITS SHOW ON BIG BEN - BIG SCANDAL - PLUS BIRTHERS AND HEALTH CARE AND DOPES, OH MY!

Saturday Night - 10:30 PM - Cabaret Theater - Downtown Pittsburgh - 7th St. and Penn Ave. - Parking and Food and Alcohol! - Be There And Be Theater Square!

I Wish I'd Written This

In response to reading about the dozen or so people carrying at Obama events in Arizona, watertiger at Firedoglake had this to say:

Once again we see how irony deficiency maims the conservative's ability to reason: those most terrified of The Negro Socialist Non-Citizen Grandmother-Killing President taking away their assault weaponry [roll eyes here] are free who to openly carry them at Obama events without fear of reprisal.

Could you even begin to imagine that sort of apparently lackadaisical approach during Bush's Orwellian tenure? Contemplate what would have happened to audience members had they shown up at one of Bush's "socha scurty" town halls packing heat. People wearing even vaguely anti-Bush t-shirts were summarily ejected from his little Potemkin village affairs and those whose cars brandished "liberal" bumper stickers were no doubt assigned to some DHS anti-American no-fly list. Anyone with a firearm at a Bush event would have found himself wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles faster than you could say "Dick Cheney's man-sized safe."

Damn, I wish I'd written that.

Jack Kelly Sunday Part II

But the real news of this week's column is how Jack Kelly uses this whole set-up to plant the idea that it's possible that the "death panel" stories might be true just because he's "proven" that Obama lied about the health care plan. He begins with a dangerous statement (for Jack, that is - it's sentences like these that usually come back to haunt):

People who lie about some provisions in the health-care bill will lie about others.

This, of course, is true. But then Jack defends as possible Sarah Palin's "death panel" lie.

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said in a post on Facebook.

Hyperbole? You betcha! But wrong? Maybe not. [emphasis added]

Now you gotta watch carefully. He quotes Washington Post columnist Charles Lane:

"The measure would have an interested party -- the government -- recruit doctors to sell the elderly on living wills, hospice care and their associated providers, professions and organizations," Mr. Lane wrote. "You don't have to be a right-wing wacko to question that approach."

But Jack omits from that same column this part:

Enter Section 1233 of the health-care bill drafted in the Democratic-led House, which would pay doctors to give Medicare patients end-of-life counseling every five years -- or sooner if the patient gets a terminal diagnosis.

On the far right, this is being portrayed as a plan to force everyone over 65 to sign his or her own death warrant. That's rubbish. Federal law already bars Medicare from paying for services "the purpose of which is to cause, or assist in causing," suicide, euthanasia or mercy killing. Nothing in Section 1233 would change that. [emphasis added.]

There's more rubbish. Remember someone who lies about some provisions will lie about others. Here's Jack caught in an egregious smear:

In a 1998 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama's health-care adviser, touted the fiscal benefits of physician-assisted suicide. In January, Dr. Emanuel outlined his "principles of allocation of scarce medical interventions:"

"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated," Dr. Emanuel said.

Here is the article Jack references. It's from the British Medical Journal, The Lancet (free subscription req to see the full text). Who'd'a thought The Lancet would publish an article advocating killing old people because it's too expensive to keep them alive?

Of course they didn't.

Jack wants you to believe that when Dr. Emanuel (who is also Rahm Emanuel's brother, by the way) wrote that the "principles of allocation of scare medical interventions", it had something to do with physician-assisted suicide. But take a look at the first sentence of the article as found in the Lancet:

Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge.[emphasis added]

They're (remember, there's three authors of this article) writing about the ethical issues surrouding how to allocate a limited number of organs or vaccines - not euthanasia. And it's an outright lie to say otherwise.

But don't take my word for it, here's Dr Emanuel himself (by way of Jake Tapper at ABC):

In another article used as grist for his critics, in Lancet in January 2009, Emanuel and two co-authors discussed rationing care. But Emanuel cautions the goal of the article was not to apply his views of rationing onto providing health care in general.

“We were examining a very particular situation,” he said.

The situation: “we don’t have enough organs for everybody who needs a transplant. You have one liver, you have three people who need the liver - who gets it? The solution isn’t ‘We get more livers.’ You can’t. It’s a tragic choice.” It’s a decision made in the story in the context of “absolute scarcity.”

“It doesn’t apply generally to health care services more broadly,” Emanuel underlines. “Only by ignoring what we say there could anyone come to a different conclusion. Only by taking two sentences out of their complete context.” [emphasis added]

To take that one sentence from Emanuel et al and spin it somehow into support for assisted suicide (which, by the way Dr Emanuel has already renounced) is just wrong.

Simply factually wrong. No, it's not a matter of it being a different interpretation of the facts where Jack somehow just comes up to the line separating spin from falsehood.

This is a falsehood. It's an outright lie.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Jack Kelly Sunday Part I

In this week's column, Jack Kelly wiggles his way into actually spreading the by-now debunked wingnut "government death panel" lie.

In doing so he (inadvertently I am sure) offers us a way to describe his own MO. The first line of the column is:

Who you gonna believe? Me ... or your lying eyes?

It's of course from Duck Soup. (If you're in need of a chuckle, watch the scene for yourself - the joke above is about 2 minutes in.)

The point of the joke (the exact wording of which, incidentally, Jack gets wrong) is that while it's a command to the listener by the speaker to trust the latter's statements over the former's own empirical data, it's the speaker who's wrong, he knows he's wrong, lies about it anyway and tries to get the listener to agree with him.

Jack is hoping his readers will think this of Barack Obama, though any readers of this blog will surely realize it better describes Jack himself - an inadvertent mistake of Jack's to be sure.

He finds his own "gotcha" moment to show that Obama can't ever be trusted. Here's Jack's set-up:

In response to a question asking whether he still supports a single-payer system (one in which the government is the sole provider of health-care services, as in Canada), Mr. Obama said:

"I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter because, frankly, we historically had an employer-based system in this country with private insurers, and for us a transition to a system like that I believe would be too disruptive."

He gets his "gotcha" by going waaaay back in 2003 where State Senator Obama said:

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program.

Jack continues:

Had the president said: "I used to support a single-payer system, but I changed my mind because ...," more people might give credence to the claims he's making for his health-care reform plan. Instead, he told an outright lie.

Well, no. It's entirely possible that the man simply changed his mind in the last 6 or so years. Had the earlier statement been from, say, six weeks ago, then Jack would be entirely correct.

But it wasn't.

Let me ask a question only to answer it myself: how much has changed since mid-2003? The lies about Iraq's WMD became well known, Valerie Plame is outed to protect those lies, the Bush era illegal domestic surveillance was uncovered, a number of USAttorney fired illegally, and finally there's the Bush recession. It's hardly surprising that one person's mind would change during the time when all that happened.

Perhaps Obama should explain himself on this, but it's hardly an "outright lie." It's not like he made stuff up.

And if anyone knows about making stuff up, it's our friend Jack.

In any case it's a tiny point. Even if it's true (which it isn't) it's hardly enough to support the entirety of Jack's argument. So let's continue. After pointing out the assessment from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) regarding the cost of the budget plan (something Obama has already refuted - not that Jack would let you know about it, though), he goes on:

And when Mr. Obama says people who like their private insurance will be able to keep it, but the Lewin Group estimates the "public option" would force 88 million people with private insurance into the government program, people worry.

He omits telling you that that same CBO says, uh no. How do I know this? It says so in the conservative Washington Times. They write:

Republicans touted a report from theLewin Group, a health research firm owned by an insurance company, that predicted 100 million people out of the 160 million now covered by employer-sponsored insurance would go to the government coverage.

But the CBO estimates about 12 million people would opt for the public plan. The wide difference in estimates is the result of drastically different assumptions about the price of the plans. CBO estimated the public plan would cost 10 percent less than private plans, compared with the Lewin Group estimate that it would be 20 percent cheaper.[emphasis added]

See that? A research firm owned by an insurance company - something else Jack didn't tell you but the Washington Times did. I'll let the other newspaper in Washington DC explain in more detail:

Generally left unsaid amid all the citations is that the Lewin Group is wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's largest insurers.

More specifically, the Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that was accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data. Ingenix supplied UnitedHealth and other insurers with data that allegedly understated the "reasonable and customary" doctor fees that insurers use to determine how much they will reimburse consumers for out-of-network care.

In January, UnitedHealth agreed to a $50 million settlement with the New York attorney general and a $350 million settlement with the AMA, covering conduct going back as far as 1994.

So, um maybe, they might not be as,uh, unbiased as Jack would maybe like you to think. Maybe - I dunno, just a guess - that they might be spinning the data to favor their, you know, bosses.

End of Part I

AP Article on Netroots Nation Quotes Both Political Junkies

From ABC News, the article opens with:

They wish he'd done more in his first eight months, but the liberal bloggers who helped propel Barack Obama to the White House are far from giving up on him.

Gathered in Pittsburgh for the annual Netroots Nation convention, they say they're not disappointed. At least not too disappointed. Yet.

David and I were interviewed separately. I was right outside the convention center -- OK, I was smoking a cigarette -- when the AP writer (Ramit Plushnick-Masti) approached me. Later on, I had met up with David inside and we were hanging with the P-G folks and the reporter saw me and I pointed out my co-blogger to her.

We're on page 2.

I will add that I said "the Great Progressive Hope" instead of just "progressive."

Also, notice that the article appears under Technology & Science and not Politics.
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NetRoots 2009 photos

Johnny Mac, Ace photographer Gab Bonesso and the best man at my wedding, Tony Norman.


A WELL-FOCUSSED photo of Maria (the Other Political Junkie), Spork (who knows absolutely everybody), and Mackenzie Carpenter of the P-G.

NetRoots Update

In case you hadn't heard, there was somewhat of a phone ruckus at NetRoots today. TPM has the story:

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) just told a crowd of skeptical progressives that he's willing to take up and dispel the death panel rumor with perhaps its most respected proponent: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Specter said he'd call Grassley from back stage and tell him "it's not a death squad."

I was there. It was sooo cool. Let me flesh out the details. Specter was being questioned about whether he thought that Grassley was wrong when he said what he said about the government "pulling the plug on grandma." Specter said he was definitely wrong. (But we all knew that).

The crowd, I should say, was somewhat skeptical of Specter throughout the talk and there was some grumbling in the crowd when he said he'd talk to Grassley. Then Specter stepped right into it.

He said he'd call Grassley today.

At that point I saw a few dozen people in the crowd lifting up their cell phones - in a sense to offer them to Specter to make the call. A few people (including me) yelled out, "Call him now! Call him now!"

After stammering through a few words, Specter then said, "And to those who yelled that out, come back stage and watch me dial."

He was done only a few minutes later. That portion of the talk over (Congressman Sestak, Specter's challenger, was set to go on after) and Specter left the stage.

A couple dozen of us went back stage to watch Arlen Specter dial his cell phone and call Chuck Grassley. Unfortunately, he didn't get through to Grassley. But it was cool nonetheless.

And now Chuck and Arlen are tweeting at each other.

Photos to come...

Netroots Nation 09 - Photos from Day One

Georgia Berner from http://www.whatifpost.com/ at the Women's Caucus
 
Fadia Halma, Politcal Director, Pennsylvania Democratic Party at the Women's Caucus (in purple)
 
The Other Political Junkie and Post-Gazette's Tony Norman and my camera functioning poorly
 
The Post-Gazette's Mackenzie Carpenter
 
The Post-Gazette's Tim McNulty


As always: What Digby Said (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/)


Braddock Mayor John Fetterman and Celeste Taylor from http://pennsylvaniaequity.org/


PA Rep. Chelsa Wagner talking about redistricting
 
Pam Spaulding from http://www.pamshouseblend.com/ takes one for the blog
 
The crowd waits for The Big Dog
 
Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato running for governor talking about our region
 
Surprisingly this was taken before the heckler. Someone shouted out about Don't Ask Don't Tell. By the time that Clinton finished answering Lane Hudson, Hudson gave Clinton a Standing O.
 
This way to the party at The Warhol


Franco "Dok" Harris outside The Warhol
http://www.harrisforpittsburgh.com .

NetRoots Today

Interesting day.

I arrived at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center a little before 10am, met Spork and Fester. Did you know Fester has a beard now? Neither did I.

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Update: Maria was there, too.
===

I got to see an amazing panel - "How to Get The Most Out Of The Polling Data You Read About":

This panel will share insights and observations from some veteran pollsters and analysts that might help you interpret the next set of poll data you see. Charlie Cook (The Cook Political Report, www.cookpolitical.com), Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin (www.pollster.com), and Nate Silver (www.fivethirtyeight.com) will join moderator Greg Dworkin (Daily Kos) on a discussion about how to get the most out of poll watching.

McNulty was there, too:

Charlie Cook of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report had bad news for the liberal Dems at Netroots Nation today -- political intensity has switched over to the Republican side and Dems are facing a bloodbath next year.

Democrats had a great run from 2006 through 2008, Cook said, running up a 54 seat advantage in the House alone. But "there's offense and there's defense -- right now you're going to be spending time on defense," he said at a polling panel today.

"Intensity matters a lot. Last time you had it, this time they have it."

Cook expects Democrats to lose about 20 seats in the 2010 midterm elections, cutting their majority in the House of Reps in half.

And:

Superstar pollster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight doesn't agree with Cook -- he thinks the Dems will do worse.

Silver said Democrats commonly told him his Obama-friendly polls comforted them last fall. "I don't think you should feel at all comforted about 2010," he said to the liberal Dems at the conference today. He said he was 80% confident Democrats will lose between 20-50 House seats and up to six Senate seats.

There was a lot more stuff in the discussion. Lotsa stuff about how to place the numbers in context. Great talk.

Lunch time - a sandwich at Sammy's. Earlier in the day, I'd e-mailed my friend Fred (who's got a radio show on KDKA) to let him know I was at NetRoots. Not really sure why I did but I did. Right in the middle of my roast beef on wheat (with provolone and mustard) my phone rang. It was Fred's producer. He wanted to know if I wanted to be on the air at 1:30. It was 1:20. I said yea, sure.

The result can be found here.

After lunch there was a panel on comedy and then a panel on the newspaper business. The former was very funny. The latter, while just as important, was (forgive me) kinda boring. Maybe I was just hungry.

More tomorrow. And Saturday.