Is Max Baucus about to do to America's health care system what Phil Gramm already did to the nation's banking system? Let's hope someone stops Baucus before it's too late.

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As this chart shows, almost every major country is experiencing an upturn in export volume, except the U.S.. The news yesterday that retail back-to-school sales were down spooked investors.

Halfway through the back-to-school shopping season, retail professionals are predicting the worst performance for stores in more than a decade, yet another sign that consumers are clinging to every dollar.

The strength of the German and French economic recovery has got to be puzzling the Laissez-Faire economics crowd. As Stratfor points out, the reason is simple. Consumer spending accounts for only 18% of German GDP (as opposed to 72% of U.S. GDP) and Exports account for 46% of German GDP. So in the U.S. the sudden incidence of consumer thrift is a huge problem, whereas in Germany it is not. As I pointed out last month, until we revive our export business and lessen our dependence on the Mall Economy we are in for a ton of hurt. Forty years of Chamber of Commerce cheerleading for globalization and outsourcing have hollowed out the American manufacturing economy. Unless we can quickly build a Green manufacturing capacity for Wind and Solar equipment, this recovery will be anemic and we will continue down to road towards the Sharecropper Society, Warren Buffett warned about.

Check this out from ABC News.

Enough with the town meetings already.

One of the best things about living in the world today is that you can communicate with the American people without risking your life.

The value added from personal appearances is simply not worth the danger. And not just the danger to you but also to the country should anything happen. (The impact of JFK's assassination lasted 40 years, at least and, for obvious reasons, an attack on you would have infinitely more horrific reverberations).

The good people of both parties who would love to see you can manage without it. But the tiny minority of Americans who are hateful and violent fascists and racists should not have the opporunity to get within a mile of you or your family.

The haters will have fun with this. But remember all the warnings JFK got about the rightwing nuts in Texas. If only he had just skipped that trip.

Health care will pass or it will fail, with or without your going near Americans who are in a homicidal fury because a black man is President. They "want their country back" and a few of them would do anything to get it back.

Put your family, and the country, first and stay far away from the crazies. They are armed and dangerous.

Don't miss Rick Perlstein's WP Outlook piece, "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition / Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage." It's a fine supplement to Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, published in 1964 and never, alas, out of date. If you've been wondering whether to blame free-floating wackjob lunacy, right-wing coordinators, or the cable and radio channels of lies and viciousness for the farce that the health care "debate" has become--the correct answer is all three.

We're only halfway through August, but health care reform opponents are already in full primal scream mode. TPM readers did their best to make sense of the noise.

San Fernando Curt, looking at recent town hall protests in the context of this week's book club discussion, bashed the media's conviction that isolated protests represent a genuine grassroots uprising. Gregory North, who kept a close eye on a town hall in New Hampshire, showed how CBS creatively edited footage to conform to that narrative. And DF wondered why the anti-war protests of the last few years never garnered such prominent coverage or earned the political class's respect as a movement.

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Seasoned peace campaigners Rob Malley and Hussein Agha argue in a recent New York Times oped that the two state solution is doomed because each side's narrative stands in the way. You can read their argument and decide for yourself. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11malley.html?_r=1

But Lara Friedman, the Americans for Peace Now lobbyist, makes an excellent counterargument on the APN Website.

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This post won't be about indie rock! But I do want to pick up on a bigger point made by Amanda in her post on that subject. She writes:

[I]t's hard to tell in the melee what's going to matter. If I was around in 1960, I'd probably dismiss the whole finding that radio listeners and TV viewers of the presidential debate had different takes on who won. That strikes me immediately as a fluffy distraction story. In truth, it became a profound statement about the direction of our politics, sometimes given more profundity than it deserves. No one would have guessed in 1963 that the Beach Boys would be the single biggest influence on indie rock in 2009, either. At a certain point, we have to do our best and worry less about how much we can control the outcomes.

I absolutely agree about our relative inability to control, or even to predict, which stories from our current era will rate as important in history's judgment. But I think we can also agree that even to attempt thinking along those lines will immediately rule out whole swaths of our current news discourse. If you even try to ask the question about your news -- will we care about this in three months, let alone a year, or ten? -- then your sense of "what's going on" will become considerably different.

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Citigroup -- the giant Wall Street bank still on life-support courtesy of $45 billion from American taxpayers -- wants to pay its twenty-five top executives an average of $10 million each this year, and award its best trader $100 million. Whaaat?

Second only to healthcare reform as a test of Obama's toughness and resolve is reform of Wall Street. And like the healthcare industry, Wall Street has platoons of lobbyists and an almost unlimited war chest to protect its interests and prevent change. So what can we learn by what's going on now, regarding pay for the top brass at big "too big to fail" banks?

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Within 3 days, the NYT's Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes have graduated from considering "death panels" among the "questionable" wackjob charges (Aug. 11) to considering them--accurately--"false."

Who says there's no such thing as progress?

I knew Charles Krauthammer was mean-spirited when he said of Christopher Reeve, after the man's death, that he was no hero because he gave sick people "false hope." I knew it when he defends every Israeli military action no matter how many innocents, including kids, die. I saw it first hand on that Yom Kippur morning when, from his seat in the synagogue, he started bellowing at the rabbi for praying for peace.

The man is a hater, all vitriol, who moved from liberalism (he had worked for Walter Mondale in 1984) to the rightwing worldview that brought his politics in line with his temperament.

In today's column, he argues that Obama's health reform proposal stupidly assumes that preventing disease will save more money that treating it. In other words, a mammogram might prevent X number of breast cancers but providing mammograms to all women will cost more than treating women who would otherwise contract the disease (including those who after deferred treatment would die of it).

I'll let others argue about his faulty economic assumptions. I just want to note that the smartest guy the right has actually believes that saving lives by preventing disease is a cost society should not view as paramount. Has he ever encountered a family that lost the mom or dad (or child) to a disease that might have been prevented if the American health care system guaranteed preventative medicine to all.

Dick Cheney is running for President.

Why else is he refusing to go away, giving interviews, writing a book, and serving as leader of the disloyal opposition.

Why else would he be positing the idea that if another terror attack happens, it will be because President Obama and even George W. Bush strayed from his hardline policies.

If something happens, he wants to be the man on the white horse.

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Thanks to Haaretz's Anshel Pfeffer for telling us about Tom's recent lecture gig with the IDF general staff. (HT: As'ad Abu-Khalil.)

Pfeffer writes,

Friedman gave a lecture last week to a number of members of the IDF General Staff. He spoke to them about his impressions of his recent visits to Arab countries.

Friedman visited Israel and the territories last week and published a two-part column on the situation in the territories after most IDF checkpoints were removed and Palestinian security forces moved in.

Friedman met personally with IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi during his visit, and spoke to the deputy chief of staff, the head of Military Intelligence, the head of the Home Front Command and the head of the planning branch.

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Three years ago, my mother died after a long and painful illness. During her last months she was only partially conscious, and in her brief intervals of awareness was often distraught. At several points my father, sister, and I met with doctors to figure out how to ease her obvious suffering with pain medications, and how we could get her into a hospice facility. We could afford the counseling, but millions of other families cannot -- which is why one of the useful heathcare reforms now moving through Congress authorizes Medicare to reimburse doctors for such voluntary end-of-life consultations. The American Medical Association and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization support the provision.

But in a cruel contortion, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin calls these consultations "death panels," and in a Facebook posting late last night charges that they'll force the elderly to accept minimal end-of-life care in order to reduce health care costs: "It's misleading for the president to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients," and added, "It's all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing."

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If, as Amanda Marcotte suggests, the Internet is like the Beach Boys in 1963, then I guess we have a few more years of inspired genius before the psychosis, death, and exploitation set in. Then again, everything goes faster on the Net, so maybe we're already in the psychosis, death, and exploitation phase.

Like Amanda, I think that Bill Wasik, in his book, glosses over the fact that one of the foundational characteristics (and joys) of popular music has always been its ephemerality, the way new bands buzz in and out of consciousness like beautiful bees. As Stephen Malkmus observed in 1994 (well before MySpace):

Music scene is crazy
Bands start up each and every day
I saw another one just the other day
A special new band

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Amanda wants me not to be so sad about the state of indie-rock culture. We've always had one-hit wonders, after all; and besides, we can't guess history's judgment, so why get stressed about my sense that nothing lasts?

It's true that pop music has always had its overnight sensations. But they've almost always been manufactured by radio, or by big record labels, or by the interplay between the two. What got me thinking about indie rock, as I began to report my book, was the observation that this now Web-centric music scene, left in the hands of the fans themselves (together with some very low-budget semi-pro outfits, like indie labels and Pitchfork), was actually creating overnight sensations more quickly than the corporate music machine does. As I pointed out in my post on the "media mind," when you give amateurs the tools to compete with big media, they act, in many respects, like big media!

Beyond that, though, having formed my musical tastes (and political consciousness) during the 1990s, I find there to be something depressing about the ecstatic surf from new band to new band, from track to track, from style to style, that serves as the predominant mode of indie-rock fandom today.

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Jonathan Cohn, who succeeded in bring an unforced smile to the faux-grave face of Stephen Colbert the other night, brings a grim look to my own with this urgent blog about what he rightly calls "The Swiftboating of Health Reform." Everyone should read it. Right now.

Could it be that the crazies--them with their "Death Panels" and "Doctor Deaths" and government takeovers of Medicare--are winning?

What with a USA Today/Gallup poll that finds 34% of "adults" on Tuesday saying that town-hall demonstrations "have made them more sympathetic to the protesters' views; 21% say they are less sympathetic," it's big-worry time. (David Axelrod's attempt to explain away these numbers with a technical objection, cited in Susan Page's USAT piece, I don't find convincing.)

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Yeah, we know the rightwing now officially believes that government should do nothing to restrain health care costs, since as we know rightwing politicians have been opposed to any cuts in funding of Medicaid or Medicare for years.  But at the risk of adding fuel to the fire, how about some birth panels to think about reducing the insane overuse of surgery for births in the United States?

C-sections during birth are the most common surgical procedures each year, with roughly half of them at deemed to be unneeded and potentially dangerous to other and child.  

So to encourage more natural childbirths, beginning this month, the state of Washington will pay hospitals the same amount for an uncomplicated C-section as for a complicated vaginal birth under its Medicaid reimbursement rules.  With half of all births in Washington paid for by Medicaid, this will likely have a significant impact in reducing unneeded C-sections in the state, saving money and potentially lives.

The Alarming Rise in C-Sections:  As the Washington State Department of Social & Health Services described in adopting new reimbursement rules to encourage more natural births, the problem of unneeded C-sections had been rising dangerously in recent years:

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There is a prayer in Judaism called the Shehecheyanu in which Jews thank God for having "lived to see the day...." It is commonly uttered when something utterly wonderful and utterly unforeseen happens.

Yesterday, the African American President of the United States, gave the highest civilian honor he could bestow to Harvey Milk, the gay activist Jew from San Francisco.

What a cause for joy and for that prayer. Harvey was a Jewish atheist but I don't think he'd mind this prayer at this occasion: "Blessed are You, LORD, our God, King of the universe, Who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to see this day."

Those Congressional town meeting thugs will really be howling "I want my country back" now.

Over at one of my favorite blogs, The Awl, Choire Sicha picks up on our book club discussion and the idea of the nanostory. But, he asks, wouldn't it be easier just to call nanostories by their old-fashioned name: propaganda?

[I]n reality, the nanostory is never apolitical.

It's not just that big stories about important things are difficult to understand. It's that groups of people, with varying agendas, do not want you to understand the actual story.

That the Internet is easily excitable and people are restless is true; but what really matters is that the process of moving this micronews is easy now and can be done by any lobbyist, any Astroturfer, any cable stealth shock-jock. .... The most important thing about the "nanostory" is that it is always presented through manipulation. It is packaged. What [Wasik] calls meme warfare actually is warfare, and we don't have to look much further than OBAMA'S SENIOR CITIZEN DEATH PANELS to see that.

And if you're confused as to why OBAMA'S FINAL SOLUTION DEATH PANELS FOR YOUR GRANDMA are so captivating to the imagination of America--well, a nanostory is merely a successfully-launched propaganda wave.

I agree entirely with that first sentence: nanostories are never apolitical. The reason any nanostory takes off is that a group of people -- or even competing groups of people -- seize on it, with the belief that it confirms some larger point about the world.

But I don't think it's correct to say that all nanostories are propaganda. Nanostories are just inflammatory bits of narrative. Sometimes they're turned into propaganda, with greater or lesser success. But often they're spread most avidly by the very people whose interests they serve least. For example: progressives!

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I like Bill's distinction between the size and the pace of the big stories I cited as examples of the momentousness of our times. (And I bow in admiration to his riposte: "Our black president was elected in 2008. He's out there every day, being black! Shouldn't that keep making news?" I wish I hadn't walked right into that one.) He's right: the news conversation does now outpace the actual news, no matter how big that news is, and that's obviously a problem. It's a problem that's pretty much insoluble--unless news consumers decide to change their consumption habits and the nanostory loses mass appeal. And, maybe I'm being hopelessly naive, but I'm not totally, completely despairing about that.

Nicholas may be right that my desire to return to the days of getting all my news from the morning paper is nothing more a nice dream, that at a neuronal level I'm now simply incapable of bringing that sort of patience to my news consumption. I guess all I can say in response is that I'm going to try. And, at a certain point, if the news simply becomes too fast and too overwhelming for me to process, I think that I might just go in the completely opposite direction.

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I've not been reticent about the sinuous, the serpentine, and the sophistical David Brooks, whose star never dims for the great lights who run The New York Times' op ed page, PBS' News Hour and NPR's "All Things Considered."

But this time I'm wondering what you make of Gail Collins' response, in a recent Times "conversation" blog, to Brooks' latest attempt at re-positioning.

In this mercifully brief exchange, he and Collins mention the pros and cons of partisanship -- a worthy subject in its own right. But, then, after all Brooks' attempted political make-overs, she tells him, especially in her last couple of sentences, to crawl back into the hole he dug so deftly for himself and credulous fans across 15 years, six at the Times.

I'm inclined to pass the torch, the microphone, the podium, the floor, and every honor of Polemicist Laureate to Collins for addressing Brooks as I've never seen a Times columnist address another Times columnist before.

Maybe I'm reading too much into her tweaking. But even if, say, Ralph Nader was right about both parties, isn't it a bit late in the day for Brooks to flutter his eyelashes and ask, "Who, me, a raving partisan?" What do you think?

Check this out.

Of course, lobby-financed foreign junkets are always controversial (and should be). But this thing deftly uses anti-Semitism to skewer a Democrat who won't declare against Obama's plan.

What a surprise that the town meeting thugs are Jew-haters too. As grandma (born 1890) used to say: if they hate the blacks, they hate the Jews too. This Obama/Rahm/ Axelrad trio is their worst nightmare. (Actually, an African-American President is beyond their worst nightmare all by itself),

If I may shift gears a little, I'd like to address another section of And Then There's This---the part about indie rock. I promise that there's a political point to be made here, if you'll bear with me. But the section on indie rock really illustrates why I'm not overly concerned about the problem of nanostories, nor do I think there's anything new about the issue of flash-in-the-pan stories.

Bill writes about the constant churn of the indie rock hype machine that's largely built through online hype/distribution networks and events like South By Southwest, which happens in my hometown of Austin. I could definitely relate to his concerns about how many interesting bands rise up in the hype machine, are the flavor of the month, and then seem to disappear without a trace. In the meantime, they try to squeeze every penny they can out of their momentary fame through touring, and then they usually just die off.

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My friend, Keith, from New Orleans, just emailed to say he attended a local "town meeting" on health care and tried to get a word in favor but was almost hounded out of the room.

Why are these meetings brimming with so much anger? Because Republican Astroturfers have joined the same old right-wing broadcast demagogues that have been spewing hate and fear for years, to create a tempest.

But why are they getting away with it? Why aren't progressives -- indeed, why aren't ordinary citizens -- taking the meetings back?

Mainly because there's still no healthcare plan. All we have are some initial markups from several congressional committees, which differ from one another in significant ways. The White House is waiting to see what emerges from the House and Senate before insisting on what it wants, maybe in conference committee.

But that's the problem: It's always easier to stir up fear and anger against something that's amorphous than to stir up enthusiasm for it.

The White House has just announced a web page designed to rebut some of the insane charges that the right is instigating. That won't be enough. The President has to be more specific about what he's for and what he's against. Without these specifics, the right can conjure up every demon in its arsenal while the middle and left can only shrug their shoulders.

The President needs to be very specific about two things in particular: (1) Who will pay? and (2) Why the public option is so important -- and why it's not a Trojan Horse to a government takeover.

(1) Admit that taxes will have to be raised and that cost-savings won't be sufficient to achieve nearly universal care. But be absolutely clear that taxes will be raised only on the very top. The President needs to decide whether he favors a surcharge on the top 2 percent, or a cap on tax-free employee benefits (which would affect only the very top), or some combination, and then announce which he prefers and why.

(2) Say unequivocally that the public option is essential for controlling costs and getting private insurers to offer people better deals, not at all a step toward a government takeover of health care.

-- Being the one public plan, it will have large economies of scale that will enable it to negotiate more favorable terms with pharmaceutical companies and other providers. (Here, he must clear up any confusion about any deal made with Big Pharma.) But this won't lead to a government takeover of health care. The whole point of cost containment is to provide the public with health care on more favorable terms. If the public plan negotiates better terms -- thereby demonstrating that drug companies and other providers can meet them -- private plans can seek similar deals.

-- It will have low administrative costs -- Medicare's administrative costs per enrollee are a small fraction of typical private insurance costs -- but that's no problem, it's a strength. One goal of health-care reform is to lower administrative costs. Competition with a public option is the only way to push private plans to trim their bureaucracies and become more efficient.

-- While it's true that the public won't have to show profits, plenty of private plans are already not-for-profit. And if nonprofit plans can offer high-quality health care more cheaply than for-profit plans, why should for-profit plans be coddled? The public plan would merely force profit-making private plans to take whatever steps were necessary to become more competitive. Once again, a plus.

-- The public plan won't be subsidized by government. Subsidies go to families who need them in order to afford health care. They're free to choose the public plan, but that's only one option. They could take their subsidy and buy a private plan just as easily. The public plan may not dip into general revenues to cover its costs. It must pay for itself. And any government entity that oversees the health-insurance pool or acts as referee in setting ground rules for all plans will not favor the public plan.

Now's the time for specifics. It's impossible to fight fearmongering lies about specifics with nothing but positive principles.

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Chuck Norris, who describes himself with panache as a "a columnist and impossible to kill," has enlisted in the kick-ass fight against the government takeover of everything. You think "Death Panels" were bad? Are you ready for "Jack-Booted Parenting Nazis"?

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development.

It's outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading "home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children." The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

The bill says that the government agents, "well-trained and competent staff," would "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains ... modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices," and "skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development."

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Jason Zengerle suggests that "all we need is just a little patience," but then he goes on to confess that patience is precisely what the Net has taken from him, apparently against his will. He can't stop clicking, even though he knows that his compulsive info-grazing "often detracts from a fuller, deeper understanding of what's going on in the world."

I've argued elsewhere that our use of the Net, like our use of other informational media in the past, alters the workings of our brains - way down there at the neuronal level - and I would point to Jason as a case in point. (I'd also point to myself as a case in point.) His patterns of thought and behavior have changed profoundly as a result of the Net's influence, yet he continues to tell himself that he's in control - that at some point he'll be able to regain "a little patience," and then all will be well. He'll once again be able to read his morning paper's front-page stories in full, as he did in his pre-Net days.

Nice dream.

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Jason takes issue with my assertion that "relatively little of genuine import is happening." He retorts:

I have a hard time believing we live in dull times today, not with the global economic crisis and health care reform and two wars and our first black president and UNC's upcoming national title defense.

OK, fair enough. All of the stories he mentions (save that last one) are giant stories, some of the big narratives that will fill the history books about this decade.

But think about the pace of those stories.

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Uh, wrong. In his last post, Bill argues that our desire "to see the world around us, a world where relatively little of genuine import is happening, as full of sparkle and life and promise" is what creates our extravagant expectations for our news. "If I'm refreshing my RSS reader every ten seconds," he writes, "something important must be changing -- right?"

First, I really disagree with the idea that we currently live in a world where little of genuine import is happening. Maybe I could see this being the case, say, a decade ago--although, man, Bosnia and Rwanda and Clinton's impeachment sure did seem like big deals at the time--but I have a hard time believing we live in dull times today, not with the global economic crisis and health care reform and two wars and our first black president and UNC's upcoming national title defense. In a way, I think it's precisely the fact that so much is going on that leads us to constantly refresh our RSS readers (although, full disclosure, I don't actually have an RSS reader, owing to a combination of technological incompetence and a desire not to succumb to the temptation to constantly refresh it).

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As recently as 9/11/01 (and for a long time after) Blue America and Red America were united. Not in support of a particular policy. But in grief for what had been done to our country and in hatred for the monsters who attacked us. .

Less than a year after the stolen election of 2000, some of the most fervent Democrats I know, (and some of the angriest about Florida) , including myself, flew the flag daily, held back on our criticism of the President and hoped for his success.

This was much like 1963 when most Americans (not all) were devastated by JFK's assassination and like 1981 when the whole country (or most of it) was praying that Reagan would survive the assassination attempt.

No more. I suspect that if America was hit again, the Republicans would not unite behind the Democratic President but would blame him for the attack and demand his impeachment (which we did not do with George W. Bush although we certainly could have).

And I suspect that if something happened to President Obama, a sizable chunk of the country (teabaggers, Glenn Beckites and the like) would, at best, just keep quiet. That is at best.

As Lucianne Goldberg once told my son on the air, "if something happened to Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy, I'd shut down the site" so as not to give a forum to the rightwing celebrants.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that President Obama is facing perhaps the most important foreign policy decision of his young presidency: what to do about Afghanistan.

According to recent press reports, General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, is preparing to ask the President for 10,000 more troops for the fight against Al Qeada and the Taliban. Anthony Cordesman, a member of McChrystal's strategic review team has speculated that an additional 45,000 additional soldiers may eventually be needed.

This rise in America's military footprint should hardly seem surprising; as it is at pace with the ongoing escalation of what is quickly becoming Mr. Obama's war in Afghanistan.

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Recently Elliot Abrams, the former deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush, penned an op-ed for the The Wall Street Journal, "Why Israel Is Nervous." One might assume that an individual with a strong policy background would present an objective analysis of President Barack Obama's Middle East policy and not resort to the cheapest of partisan screeds. That assumption would be wrong.

The first clue that Abrams is interested in scoring partisan points is in his review of the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship under different presidencies. He equates the pro-Israel credentials of President George H. W. Bush's administration with those of President Bill Clinton's. Any objective student of history knows this to be a false comparison. Bush Sr. was often critical toward Israel during his term while Clinton is remembered by large majorities of Israeli and American Jews as a trusted friend.

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Nicholas Carr, in his elegant post below, pointed out a great irony of the Internet age: "If there's one thing that consumer-generated online media, including blogs, has accomplished, it's been to make it impossible for us to offload blame for the debasement of news or culture onto 'the media.'"

Needless to say, I think that's right on. Round about 2003 or so, there was an amateur triumphalism floating around, as Internet boosters not only swore enmity against the "mainstream media" (and all it represented) but also imagined that, once we all had risen up to displace that media, some entirely new and entirely "people-powered" set of values would be installed in its place.

But in actual practice, the amateur pundits and journalists who find an audience tend to do so by learning to act, and think, a lot like the pros. They rush to be first. They oversell their certainty. They put three examples together and call it a "trend." Amateurs haven't transformed the media; the process of becoming media has made them more like the professionals. In the book, I somewhat sardonically call this convergent mentality the "media mind."

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One of the things that is so pathetic about the demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck is that their understanding of history is so puerile that in any civilized debate they would be laughed off the stage. Of course they don't allow a civilized debate. The callers to their radio shows are pre-screened to maintain the echo chamber. Take their recent attempt to equate the Nazi's "National Socialism" with "Socialism". Here's Limbaugh yesterday.

But socialism is socialism, as I say. If you want me to I'll go back and give you the fascists of the Twenties and Thirties. They don't like Nazi Germany, I'll give you Mussolini's Italy. Or I can give you the Soviet Union any time in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. Whatever you want, I can give you -- I can give you the North Koreans today. Socialism is socialism wherever it is, whatever you call it. But don't forget, folks, the term "Nazi" comes from the German word for National Socialism.

This equation that National Socialism was Socialism would come as a pretty big shock to the hundreds of thousands of German socialists (many of them Jewish) who were rounded up by the Nazi's in the 1930's and sent to prison camps or shot by firing squads.

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Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told MSNBC today that there is no need to rush on health care reform.

The health care system, he said, "may not be perfect....But it's not the rabid-type issue that had to be solved by August 1 of this year, the way President Obama was saying."

And he's right. Health care reform is not a rabid-type issue. In fact, there are no rabid type issues. Rabies, in general, is attached to no issue -- left or right.

So why is Peter King have rabies on his mind. I'll tell you why. It's because his party's activists are acting as if they are rabid. He watches these violent, screaming haters on television or the web and thinks, "Jeez, these people are rabid." So later, when he's discussing the issue, he employs the term that is at the tip of his tongue. He's thinks rabid rightwing crazies. He says, "rabid-type issue."

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In reply to Jason's post: I absolutely agree that cable TV and the Internet are in cahoots. Yes, cable has the bigger megaphone, but the Internet now serves as its giant research engine. Basically the cable talk shows are watching the Internet chatter every day and plucking out the stories that seem most provocative. Their coverage then feeds back into the system the following day, and the story might gain more momentum, especially if some detail or development can be added onto it; if so, then perhaps the cable shows run with it again. Eventually the story will recede online, and the cable news shows will stop hitting it -- sometimes in that order, sometimes the other way around.

In general, I think we're almost at the point that it doesn't really make sense to differentiate between mainstream and Internet media, at least in terms of their broad cultural effects. This is, in part, because the mainstream institutions have now completely embraced the new media, throwing themselves wholesale into blogging, Twittering, etc. But also -- way more importantly -- mainstream outlets now look at the Internet as the greatest (i.e., easiest) source of wisdom about What's Really Happening in the world.

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The arc of the nanostory is, as Bill Wasik explains in his book, an arc of boredom. But it's a very interesting type of boredom. The distractions and interruptions that characterize the web as a medium trick us into feeling bored. Our brains, as neurological studies have shown, are trained to interpret an inability to pay attention as a symptom of boredom. Hence when we use a medium programmed to distract us, like the web, we experience an artificially induced sensation of boredom: My mind's wandering, so I must be bored. As Wasik argues, this is one of the great paradoxes of the internet: as we raft down its informational white waters, we're overcome with ennui.

The cycle of bunking and debunking that defines the online nanostory is familiar to us from popular news media. Newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and, most of all, TV networks all compete not only to be the first to break a story but to be the first to deflate it. Like other discretionary consumer goods businesses, news media, it might be said, have always been in the boredom business, provoking and indulging the restlessness that leads the consumer to reenact the moment of consumption - to buy the next edition of the paper, to watch the next show on Fox News or MSNBC. What the web does, as Bill also notes, is to further implicate us in the machinery of boredom and consumption. We become the producers as well as the spectators of the nanostories, creating the spectacles that leave us enervated. We become the impresarios of our own boredom.

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Thanks to Amanda and Jason for the responses. First, I'd like to expand on Amanda's point -- which she learned from experience! -- about the very real and very lasting impact of some nanostories, especially in politics.

In the book and elsewhere, I tend to stress how "forgettable" these little narratives are, and in a literal sense that's true: people argue vociferously about them for a week but then the details are soon forgotten. As Amanda points out, though, there's typically a sort of residue left behind, in the way that nanostories often serve to reinforce larger storylines and stereotypes that people have in their minds, whether about candidates, parties, demographics, etc. (During the 2004 campaign, I wrote a piece in Harper's that hit on this subject.)

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Under the anodyne headline, "White House Adapts to New Playbook in Health Care Debate," Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes offer this in the morning NYT:

WASHINGTON -- The White House on Monday started a new Web site to fight questionable but potentially damaging charges that President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health care system would inevitably lead to "socialized medicine," "rationed care" and even forced euthanasia for the elderly.

Questionable.

As in, it's questionable that Obama envisions "death panels"? Questionable that, in the language of the father of a disabled child in Michigan, a distraught man who on Fox "News" declared that Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer had sent "thugs" to his house to intimidate him because he protested at a town hall meeting, Obama intends to "put [him and his son] down"?

Is it too much to ask that America's most indispensable newspaper reward its readers, where possible, with actual, ascertainable information?

The mad charges in circulation now are only "potentially damaging" insofar as sane, well-informed people refrain from using their access to the information stream to inform people that these charges are garbage.

I would have thought that Jim Rutenberg had grown out of his bad habit of withholding judgment on whether the moon is actually or only reputedly composed of green cheese. Last October 7, he informed us that the anti-Semitic whackjob Andy Martin's charges against Barack Obama as a Muslim-furrner whose idea of community organizing (ghosted for him by Bill Ayers, yet) was a cover for overthrowing the goverment, were...wait for it... "unsubstantiated."

From "unsubstantiated" to "questionable": what a difference ten months don't make. Even though Rutenberg's October 7, 2008, tiptoe was succeeded by a follow-up five days later that dared use the words "falsehood" and "false rumors" concerning the Muslim-furrner-Manchurian-Candidate stuff that was flying around Obama, with no small assist from Martin. Then, I took the second piece as an admission of embarrassment on the NYT's part and a gesture toward rectification. Looks like I was naive, or at least premature.

P. S. As of 1:26 pm, "questionable" is still up in the running NYT coverage of Obama's attempt to turn the tide.

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It's a pleasure to be participating in this forum. Thanks for having me. At the risk of making things too copacetic, I have to confess that I agree with almost all of what Bill and Amanda have already written. Just to illustrate the ephermality of these nanostories, I'd actually forgotten about Amanda's own personal nanostory hell. (Fortunately for her, I suppose, those looking to associate John Edwards with unwholesomeness now have much richer material.)

So let me see if I can inject a possible note of disagreement into this discussion. What about the idea that cable news and bloggers are essentially in cahoots when it comes to creating nanostories? There are some nanostories, I'd argue, that reveal an almost frighteningly symbiotic relationship between the two. I'm thinking of any time Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann mouths off, and then bloggers who are these talking heads' ideological opponents pounce, drawing more attention to their provocations than they would have ever received if they'd simply been heard by their cable audiences. (People tend to forget that even O'Reilly, cable news's reigning ratings king, draws only about 3 million viewers.)

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As someone whose life was turned upside down when I had the distinct displeasure of being the focus of one of the nanostories that Bill Wasik is writing about in And Then There's This, I was predisposed to by sympathetic to his chapter lamenting the ever-shrinking life cycles of these stories. For those who don't remember, because these stories sink so fast, Melissa McEwan and I resigned from the John Edwards campaign in 2007, because the mainstream media kept humping a story about how we were potty-mouthed and irreverent bloggers who said mean things about Catholics. In truth, we were potty-mouth, irreverent bloggers who made substantive criticisms of Catholic dogma and its negative effective on gays and women, but the nanostory was mostly about bad girls vs. the faithful, and it disappeared under the horizon because Britney Spears shaved her head.

I am sympathetic to his concerns, but I had substantial criticisms after I finished the book. Sadly, Bill's clever enough to anticipate what those objections might be. I was going to argue against the idea that even small nanostories are really irrelevant, or that it's the fault of the internet that these stories come and go. My experience says otherwise. While I would argue that my opinions on Catholic dogma were irrelevant with regards to Edwards' campaign, the truth is that the nanostory was sticky because it feeds a larger, ongoing narrative about how much of our secular society we should sacrifice at the demands of "people of faith", and I was just one in a series of atheists that are being held up to be hated on by the mainstream media. I was also going to point to how the mainstream media really drove the nanostory, and it wasn't just TV, because the AP and the New York Times were also flogging it. In my experience, bloggers usually just react to nanostories, and often they only do so once we realize they're not going away. (I tried, for instance, to ignore the birther thing for a week before I gave in and wrote about it.)

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Thanks so much to TPM for hosting this discussion about my new book, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. In its (admittedly eccentric) mix of first-person reporting, experimental stunts, and honest-to-God social science, the book tries to examine how the Internet is changing culture -- specifically, how the Internet is changing the way we tell stories to ourselves about the world.

In the very first pages of the book (you can read them here), I introduce the idea of the "nanostory," which I see as the basic unit of new-media culture. Basically a nanostory is an intense media narrative about what's happening at the moment. For example, here are some examples of nanostories from last week:

* Bill Clinton's intervention to save two US journalists in North Korea
* The right-wing mobs at Democratic town-hall meetings on health care
* Nancy Pelosi's comment about "swastikas" on protesters' signs
* Sarah Palin's claim that a "death panel" might decide to euthanize Trig
* The Obama Administration's health care logo
* The "Obama as Joker" posters
* Thursday's Twitter outage
* The death of John Hughes

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Bill Wasik joins us this week at Cafe for a discussion of And Then There's This: How Stories Live And Die In Viral Culture. Cafe readers are no strangers to the best and worst of internet memes, and Wasik's breakdown of multiple new media experiments shines a fascinating light on the viral internet world. This book is central to TPM - note the Digg and Reddit buttons at the bottom of every post here. News online is reported and driven, and we're all right in the thick of it.

In addition to the subject matter, I'm also very excited about this week's discussion given the participants: Nick Carr, technology, business, and culture writer and most recently author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google; Jason Zengerle, senior editor at The New Republic; Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon blogger and Cafe book club frequenter; and Ana Marie Cox, national correspondent for Air America and master Twitterer. Props to Cafe intern Thomas Rhiel for assembling such a great panel.

Join us for a superb discussion!

Just a little musical coda to my last post. Take a couple of minutes.

The song says simply:

How is it that a single star, alone, can dare.
How can he dare, for God's sake.
One lone star, I would not have dared.
But then, in essence, I am not alone.

Listen to Mati Caspi. Listen to the young people responding. Can any prayer in the evening liturgy move educated young Israelis this perfectly? More and more I am growing aware that Israel's modern Hebrew musical culture is traditional Judaism's real spiritual rival. Can it dare, for God's sake, to outlast the orthodoxies?

This seems too weird to be true, but the source is the editor of the Charleston Gazette.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its "coalition of the willing" to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush's call and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."

It's like a rejected plot from "Ghostbusters".

I'm a strong supporter of universal health insurance, and a fan of the Obama administration. But I'm appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying arm to buy their support.

Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That's basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it's proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the Boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included. (We don't know how far the deal extends beyond Medicare because its details haven't been made public.)

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Rich Cohen, an author of several books ("Sweet and Low," "Tough Jews") , and one of the best magazine writers around (New Yorker, Vanity Fair, etc) has now taken on the story of Israel from the Bible (more or less) to today.

In some 300+ pages, "Israel Is Real" turns the history of Zionism into a story of romance and triumph and also of ineffable sadness (for the Palestinians, obviously, but also for Jews).

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I assembled a group of my former business students at the Interdisciplinary Center--not a scientific sample, but not a monolithic group either: all in their late twenties, some married, some still messing around. They all live in the Tel-Aviv area now, digging in--young Israelis at their best, talkative, hopeful, diligent, liking things their own way. They had lived in other places, New York, London, Miami--India. They were determined to make their lives right where they were. There was Milly, the sparky niece of a former Likud minister, always hating the practice of law, always sticking with it; Yaacov, the religiously observant son of a Mizrahi immigrant in Kiryat Gat, already carrying himself like the family scion; Assaf, the former fighter pilot still living on his parents' moshav, now flying for El Al and teaching yoga; and finally Yaron, the Tel-Aviv entrepreneur with a brother in New York and a genius for punch-lines. They knew something of my views and that I wanted to know theirs. Milly, as usual, jumped in first.

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