Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) is Chair of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel.

As we have seen since the attempted terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253, there are those who never will understand the difference between talking tough and acting smart. Instead of using the near-tragedy above Detroit as fodder for political fundraising letters, we in and out of government should be making sure our intelligence and law enforcement organizations are working smoothly to guard against attacks like that.

Since the 9/11 Commission issued its report, there have been some real improvements in America's counterterrorism capabilities, but as President Obama has acknowledged, a key deficiency remains: intelligence and law enforcement personnel do not seem to be able to tell real threats from imagined ones and to share the relevant information. The President mandated reports from National Security Council advisor John Brennan and Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano about the specific recent occurrence. That is good. And Congress must also look at the specifics to determine how someone on the TIDE watchlist and who buys a last minute ticket with cash and checks no bags can get on a flight without the most careful scrutiny. As the chair of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I am pursuing those investigations.

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When Congress passed Medicare in 1965, it went into effect one year later. In contrast, the major provisions of the health-care reforms now before Congress would not go into effect for three years (January 1, 2013, under the House bill) or four years (January 1, 2014, under the bill being voted on by the Senate).

The House's timetable is bad enough, but the Senate's timetable is, to put it bluntly, nuts. A four-year delay in delivering benefits from reform would give rise to widespread disappointment and confusion during the intervening years, and it would expose the entire program to the risk of being overturned in the 2012 election, if not in 2010.

When I worked at the White House in 1993 on the Clinton health plan, one of my responsibilities was to think through the "phase-in"--the series of steps that would be required to put the legislation into effect. I haven't been involved this time, but I don't think it's a deep mystery as to what is motivating the decision to delay the program, though it seems to me to invite more problems than it avoids.

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The other participants in our dialog have already made a series of mainly overlapping cases for passing either the current senate bill or the senate bill plus some minor improvements in conference that look likely to be the only changes that will be possible. But there's another point that Theda alludes to that I'd like to take a moment to discuss.

The big thing that scares me about this current bill is 2014 -- the year when a lot of the key reforms actually go into effect. Assuming this bill works at least something like it's supporters anticipate, once it fully takes affect it should be pretty hard to undo, because people will see in tangible ways how it improves their access to and the security of their health care coverage. People's own real world experience should trump all the crazy that's getting pumped out of the Fox-o-sphere about death panels and needing to get your mammogram at the Post Office and all the rest of it.

But until there's any real world experience to have, there's no reason to think the lying will be any less effective.

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The 2009 health reform end game -- yes, the end of the beginning is in sight -- has been excruciating for progressives. Reforming health care in the real world in which we live means paying to include millions more Americans while fending off all of the tricks America's privileged, left and right, use to resist paying taxes; and it means finding ways to use public regulations and subsidies to put health delivery and finance on a more sustainable path for us all, while watching key mechanisms like the public option shrink and disappear to buy the votes of a few weasly "Democrats" in Congress who want to guarantee profits for private insurers.

Understandably, some progressives see what's left at the end of these struggles as not worth their support. But history tells us this is mistaken. We should take the many big steps forward that are on the table now -- above all the expanded entitlement, the regulations of private insurance, and the increased subsidies for the less fortunate -- and accept that true "health care reform" remains a multi-year, multi-election struggle. Social Security took several decades to become universal and adequate; Medicare did not include cost controls or key benefits for many years. Both programs moreover, had to be improved and defended at the same time, because conservatives attacked and tried to dismantle, even as liberals fought to improve and expand. The same will happen here.

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Here's my position. In these final days of the health care fight, progressives should work hard to improve the health reform bill in the Senate and in the conference with the (better) House bill. But we should support the passage of the best bill we can get - and then keep fighting for more and better reform.

We always knew that winning health care for all Americans would not be easy. Yes, the health care crisis is hitting more and more Americans, but the special interests that now control America's health-industrial complex would fight fiercely to stop reform (as they did against Bill Clinton) or to shape change to their own ends.

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Bob Reich agrees we should pass health care reform. But, like a lot of our fellow travelers on the left, he's not at all happy about it, given the way it's likely to work out. Insurers will win. Drug and device makers will win. Doctors and hospitals will win. Basically, everybody will win except the public.

Broadly speaking, I agree with his list of winners. Almost every group in the health care industry complaints that reform will squeeze them and, in fact, some members of each group will be squeezed. (Small insurers will have probably have trouble surviving once they have to compete in the exchanges, inefficient hospitals will struggle with more scrutiny from Medicare, etc.) But overall, I think, there's no question these industries stand to benefit on the whole. All of them will benefit from millions of new customers. They may have to change the way they do business. But, once they do, they should make out well. In some cases very, very well.

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When I proposed an alternative to the individual mandate last week in The American Prospect, I mainly thought of it as a means of averting a backlash by conservatives and by people who would be so poorly informed about the subsidies in health-care reform that conservatives could scare them into a revolt. Little did I realize that once the Senate dropped the public option, there would be a revolt against the mandate by some progressives who are doing their best to sound like Tea Party right-wingers.

Let's go over the reasoning behind the mandate. If you eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions but don't have a mandate, the rational thing for healthy people to do is not to pay for insurance until they get sick. But if healthy people don't participate, the whole insurance system breaks down. And this would be true if all insurance was governmental.

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The health-care reform legislation pending in Congress would be the largest program on behalf of low- to moderate-income people in the United States since the 1960s. Besides subsidizing coverage, it would create a new mechanism for purchasing insurance that would give greater buying power to people who now purchase policies individually and through small employers. It would eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions. It would enable people to buy policies at the same price regardless of their health (albeit with some allowance for differences in age). It would raise the standards of coverage for millions of people who are underinsured. It would represent a commitment by the federal government to make health insurance affordable to every American. And by making that commitment, the government would effectively commit itself to controlling both public and private health-care costs.

Oh, and by the way, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it would reduce the deficit and, according to the Medicare actuary, it would extend the life of the Medicare trust fund.

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Like a lot of people I don't have a firm grasp of the details of health care policy. So I've found it difficult to untangle for myself just what to think about the different iterations of the health care reform bill as it's evolved over the summer and fall. So I've pulled together a group of journalists and health care policy experts to try to help me hash these questions out.

My general take on this is that many people are overstating the centrality and significance of the Public Option, especially in the very constricted form it took in all versions on the Hill this year. At the same time, I'm wary of the political impact of the mandates -- even though I suspect they're necessary in any private-sector based plan because you have to broaden the risk pools.

Here's my question. What is in this bill (to the extent we can take the commonalities of the House and Senate versions) that makes it significant, meaningful reform -- assuming Public Options, Medicare Buy-Ins etc. are stripped out of it? Or is it?

On the front page of Sunday's print edition and home page of the online edition, the New York Times was clucking about an animation it puts in the category of "Maybe Journalism." The widely seen video, from a Hong Kong media company, purports to show what transpired between Tiger Woods and his wife in the recent incident that has dominated our celebrity-addled news programming lately.

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A friend of mine who is the publisher of a very successful news site has a joke: In the future the Internet will consist entirely of Sarah Palin slide shows. Anyone who's ever had occasion to look at traffic statistics for a news website understands what he's saying. Few things draw in readers and garner clicks more reliably than articles (or, even better, pictures) of Sarah Palin. We can't look away. We can't stop talking about her even when we desperately want to. The very fact that we've been blogging about her all week attests to that.

My first experience of this Sarah Palin effect came during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. As a progressive opinion journalist who routinely reports on conservatives, you come to develop a kind of practiced disassociative state when behind enemy lines. You'd never be able to gain any understanding whatsoever if you spent all your time arguing with and hectoring people at evangelical colleges or anti-immigration rallies, so it's both psychologically and professionally necessary to put yourself in a state of mind where you simply listen.

On the night Palin gave her big debut national speech, I sat through the speeches that preceded hers in that same slightly removed state. Then Palin came to the stage. The crowd grew more and more raucous, and the room began to feel like a Roman Colosseum. When Palin went after the "reporters and commentators" in the "Washington elite" for having disparaged and condescended to her, the crowd erupted and began pointing and jeering at Tom Brokaw, sitting in the NBC booth. I watched all this still, I thought, with equanimity.

About a third of the way through the speech, when she delivered her infamous potshot at community organizers--

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities"--

I suddenly felt like the room was 100 degrees. Realizing my face was burning with heat, I went to touch my cheeks, which felt feverish. I couldn't for the life of me understand what was going on, and was about to get up for a breath of fresh air or water until it hit me: I was furious.

My father is a community organizer and spent years toiling in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, doing the painstaking, unglamorous work of attempting to build power among people who were routinely getting screwed over. And Sarah Palin had just spit in his face.

Despite my best efforts, she had gotten to me.

What I was experiencing was a strange kind of dislocation: Palin had managed to bypass one part of my brain and reach down deep into another. There are two kinds of politics: There's politics of the prefrontal cerebral cortex, the politics of analysis and facts and discussion, and there's politics of the limbic system, the sub-rational, emotional, ancient part of the brain that controls the bodily responses like the blood flushing my cheeks in that seat in the Xcel Energy Center.

As degraded as our politics may be, it's impossible for me to imagine a politician as purely limbic as Sarah Palin ever managing to ascend to the White House. But democratic politics in a heterogeneous society like ours is inevitably tribal, and millions of Americans view her as their vessel and their chief. The political potency of someone who can provoke that kind of visceral reaction shouldn't be underestimated.

Chris Hayes, along with Jane Hamsher, Amanda Marcotte and Michael Tomasky, speculate more on Palin's political future and a 2012 run for the Presidency in the closing forum of "Going Rouge: An American Nightmare," from OR Books. Comments and discussion are welcome though: After all we've seen this week, what is she up to? Is she running in 2012, or just trying to cash in?

I like Oprah Winfrey. She gets people to buy--if not actually read--books like Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. She oozes the right amount of sympathy for people who have been mauled by chimpanzees and incest survivors and recovering drug addicts like Mackenzie Phillips. She's perfected the technique of humanizing celebrities and wringing heart-wrenching stories out of victims - it's good TV.

But that's exactly why Oprah did a terrible disservice to the public in today's interview with Sarah Palin, who is no victim and no ordinary celebrity. She's a politician who has carefully crafted a bogus narrative of victimization at the hands of McCain aides, the Washington elite and the mainstream media. And now with Going Rogue, she's trying to cement that story, neutralizing McCain staffers who say otherwise (see Sam Stein and Geoffrey Dunn's reporting at the Huffington Post), and stay relevant enough to make a bid for president in 2012, while continuing to flex her Facebook-Twitter muscles to torpedo Obama's agenda.

For most of the show, Oprah pitched Palin softballs and missed opportunity after opportunity to inject some reality into the conversation. Oprah asked Palin to talk at length about how the McCain campaign dealt with the news of Bristol's pregnancy. According to Palin, the McCain team painted a picture of happy grandparents instead of the more complicated mixture of disappointment and surprise that Palin and her husband actually felt. That might be true but somewhere along the line of questioning, shouldn't Oprah have mentioned Palin's support for abstinence-only sex education? What about when Palin claimed that Bristol - who was in the audience and is a Teen Abstinence Ambassador for the Candie's Foundation--was on a mission to educate American youth about the consequences of "unprotected sex"? Just what kind of "protected sex" does abstinence-only education teach?

Then there's the segment when Palin discussed at length the empathy she felt for women who have unintended or unwanted pregnancies. The "easy" way out is how Palin characterized abortion, casting her choice as heroic and making it seem as if she regarded abortion, personally, as the wrong option. But what Oprah failed to point out is that Palin wants women to have no choice at all - not even in cases of rape or incest.

When Oprah finally asked Palin about why she left the governor's office so abruptly, Palin suggested it was because journalists and opposition researchers from the Obama campaign had come up to Alaska, filed FOIAs (oh snap!) and started ethics investigations - making her an ineffective governor. But the ethics investigation into Troopergate began before Palin was nominated and not by Obama opposition researchers but by the Alaska state legislature. Palin made herself an ineffective governor by abusing her office - as the Branchflower report found--before she was even on the national radar. Notice also the conflation of journalists with political operatives. That's what Palin is now calling fact-checking of her book by AP reporters--"opposition research."

The entire effect of the show was to cast Sarah Palin as an ordinary American woman who has been thrust unwillingly into the political and media machine. Poor Palin--in her universe Katie "the Perky One" Couric badgers her incessantly with questions like--what's your policy on abortion or what magazines or newspapers do you read? And then there's McCain strategist Steve Schmidt who bullied and manipulated her into doing things she didn't want to do--like run for vice-president. In Palin's eyes - Schmidt's a marauding chimp. But just who does Oprah take us for - chumps?

Over the next few days, my co-editor Betsy Reed and I will be reading and responding to Going Rogue, as will contributors from our book Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare, which is available only at www.orbooks.com.

So many things have collapsed in recent months (the auto industry, the stock market, a growing list of daily newspapers) that the announcement of an impending disaster has ceased to qualify as news. Maybe this explains why so few people paid attention when Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, predicted not long ago that at least 100,000 nonprofit organizations would disappear over the next two years. Light made his prognostication at a public forum in New York City back in November, before the Madoff Ponzi scheme wiped out institutions such as the JEHT foundation, a leading funder of criminal justice reform; before museums started canceling exhibits they cannot afford to put up; before a coalition of thousands of nonprofit organizations signed a manifesto calling on political leaders to boost support for their beleaguered sector.

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The lead story in today's Washington Post foretells of the impending disaster should either the Bush or Obama administrations seek access to the second $350 billion tranche of the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) "despite intense opposition in Congress," sources familiar with the discussions said.

House and Senate leaders, senior Bush administration officials, and Obama transition staff regard TARP II funds as essential in combating the worst depredations of the deepening recession. As the Post reports, "without the money, [they know] it would be nearly impossible to offer significant help for homeowners facing foreclosure, stabilize the financial system or jump-start the credit markets so more consumers and companies can get loans."

But without reforms substantially improving funding procedures and transparency, TARP 2.0 may be dead on arrival in Congress.

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Two months after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expended practically every last penny of the Bush administration's political capital to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Treasury Department itself has spent a quarter of a trillion taxpayer dollars on TARP transactions, the entire undertaking seems to have had little to no affect on the macro-economy... and has raised more questions than it has resolved.

The banking sector is buffeted weekly by reports of some venerable financial institution brought to its knees, its market capitalization all but evaporated. Hundred of billions of TARP dollars have been spent on re-capitalization, with no sustained improvement in the credit markets. Implementation of the TARP oversight process has been delayed to the point where statutory reporting deadlines are being missed. The legally-mandated public accounting of TARP transactions conflicts with private and nonprofit accounts and redactions in contract disclosures are far from a model of transparency. For better or worse, not a cent has been spent on the purchase of a troubled asset of a single bank.

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When we have a moment to reflect in the coming days on this week's election, we might pause to consider and appreciate what the people living among the farms and cornfields of Indiana, in the old textile towns of North Carolina, and in the hollows of West Virginia said when they stood and voted this week. What they said, whatever else they have have thought or felt, was that we have overcome.

If this is true, such a statement comes closer than anything else can to fulfilling the ancient hopes of our nation's founders, when they sought, in establishing our republic, to form a more perfect union.

Having trouble staying on top of the various programs and initiatives the federal government has embarked on to combat the economic crisis? You are not alone. The plans, an evolving ad hoc amalgam comprising an alphabet soup are almost impossible even for close observers to sort out. Here is a review of major efforts undertaken to date.

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Like many Americans, Sen. John McCain is caught in the vortex of the rapidly downward-spiraling American economy. Like them, he is being pushed in directions he doesn't want to go. McCain's campaign has openly wished that something would "turn the page" away from economic issues. But yesterday, a day after Sen. Barack Obama announced a four-point program to address the nation's economic problems, Sen. McCain, slow to react in the first place but not to be outdone, did likewise.

McCain's set of proposals revolves around - you saw this coming, didn't you? - tax cuts. Tax cuts for capital losses, tax cuts for capital gains, tax cuts for corporations, tax cuts for early withdrawals from retirement accounts. His other major proposals, for mortgage refinancing, cleansing banks of distressed assets, restricting executive compensation, have all been approved by Congress and signed by the President already.

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Almost exactly three weeks after he pronounced the fundamentals of the American economy strong, Sen. John McCain now comes forward with his first proposal to address what he concedes is the nation's worst economic crisis of his lengthy lifetime. He rightly focuses on an economic demographic uniquely imperiled by the crisis: U.S. homeowners.

Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com estimates that one-sixth of all mortgage holders now owe more than their houses are worth. That's a looming catastrophe for them, their neighbors and communities, and the economy at large.

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This evening at 7:30 p.m., the United States Senate is scheduled to vote on its own version of the economic rescue plan that the House voted down on Monday.

The new version comprises virtually all the provisions of the House plan, but with the following key add-ons:

• FDIC: an increase in the ceiling on bank deposits insured by the FDIC from $100,000 to $250,000

• The Extenders: an extension of tax breaks - known as the "extenders" - for renewable energy, research and development, the state sales and college tuition deductions, and numerous other provisions

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The failure of the $700 billion financial bailout package in the House yesterday (228-205) set off immediate tremors in Washington, New York, and throughout the U.S., followed by aftershocks in capital markets around the world. Never in its history has the Dow suffered a worse single-day point drop. Credit markets have ground to a complete halt. Over one trillion dollars of national wealth was lost. by the time the markets closed on Monday. Retirement plans and nest eggs are shrinking. Americans seeking mortgages, student and car loans, or bank credit are being turned away regardless of their ability to repay. If we didn't have a crisis before, we have one now. What are the next steps to take?

Yes, congressional negotiators deserved tremendous credit for their tireless efforts to reach a compromise on an economic rescue package this past weekend. But, following the bill's defeat yesterday, the rescue plan now faces a major uphill struggle in the court of public opinion and, therefore, in Congress as it prepares to reconsider the package and vote on Thursday. Vast improvements in both the legislation and the sales pitch both can and must be made.

Here is a five-point rescue plan to save the rescue plan:

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The Imperial three-page bill that the Bush Administration gave Congress 10 days ago, giving it unreviewable power over $700 billion, has not morphed into a 106-page compromise bill. And oh is it ever a complex piece of compromise.
The bill establishes a Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP.
A quick review of the bill shows that:

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There is a question journalists ought to be asking members of Congress, in good part because of a new study (pdf) by two economists that say they generally do not, that they encourage bad banking practices and they mostly just transfer wealth from people to bankers.

The study, a work in progress known as a working paper, is by two economists at the International Monetary Fund who studied 42 banking crisis in Britain, Japan and the rest of the world over the last 37 years.

The study, the IMF notes, is not official policy. OK. But the findings of economists Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia should give us all pause about out government moving with all deliberate speed to borrow $700 billion.

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