Let me see if I can put some perspective on this week in politics. Today, 47 million Americans are seeing their Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits cut as a temporary program comes to an end. Of these, 47% are children; 8% are senior citizens. But according to the Republicans in Congress and on Fox News, 100% of them are loafers who refuse to get a job because of the SNAP gravy chain. Never mind that 41% of SNAP-receiving households have at least one employed person.

You aren’t going to see much reporting on this issue in the conservative media echo chamber. That’s because they will be too busy wringing their hands about all those unfortunate people who are losing their health insurance because of Obamacare. In case you haven’t heard, these are people who currently buy really bad insurance on the individual market. Obamacare dictates that if companies are going to sell insurance, it has to be of a certain level. So all of those useless policies that people think cover them but end up abandoning them when they go to use them will be gone—or close to it. In 2009, the New York Times reported that roughly 75% of people filing for bankruptcy for medical bills had insurance. One of the biggest things that drives this—and the reason Obamacare is forcing some insurance policies to be canceled—is yearly and lifetime limits on the amount of care that will be paid for.

A lot of people misremember what Michael Moore’s film Sicko was about. It starts with a rundown of how many people in the United States are uninsured and how horrible the system is. And then he said, “This film is not about them.” Sicko is about how even those lucky enough to have health insurance are screwed. So the fact that there are some people in America who currently live with the delusion that they have insurance should not be seen as a good thing. Forcing them to get insurance that will actually do what they think their current policies will do is a feature of Obamacare and in no way a bug.

But how many people are we really talking about? Listening to Fox News you would get the impression that half the people of the nation are losing their current health insurance plans. Luckily, economist Justin Wolfers put together a chart to show what we are talking about:

So we are talking about 3% of the population. And as I’ve discussed, those people really aren’t losing. Rather than paying for a false sense of security, they will be paying more for a real sense of security. Still, that it upwards of 10 million people. But that is 20% as many people as are seeing their food budget go down today. And those who are being forced to get better insurance can afford it. The conservatives don’t even have crocodile tears for the 47 million poor people who cannot.

It’s been a quiet week in Washington, where all the staff members are strong, all the pages good looking, and all the Republicans well below average. It has been a quiet week. The big story of this week is the same as it was last week: the Obamacare website. Normally, reporters claim this kind of stuff isn’t worthy of coverage. It’s old news! But they keep at it because the Republicans keep pushing it. Of course, it isn’t the only old news. Benghazi is back thanks to a really pathetic bit of agitprop by 60 Minutes. And that brings us back to the oldest of stories: the continuing Republican use of the filibuster as de rigueur.

First, there was Lindsey Graham’s stupid tweet Monday, “I’m going to block every appointment in the US Senate until they are made available to Congress.” One has to be surprised, “Oh! So you’re saying that you have reasons for your filibusters now?! How exciting!” Of course I’m just being silly; the occasional politician may claim a reason for a filibuster, but they were planning on it regardless.

And right on schedule, we have filibusters of non-controversial nominations. The Republicans filibustered Patricia Millett for the DC Court of Appeals. In this case, the faux reason isn’t that she is too liberal. As usual for Obama nominations, she’s a moderate. The reason is that the court leans conservative. If Obama is allowed to fill the three vacancies, the court will lean very slightly liberal. So the Republicans have come up with a argument that says the court already has enough judges on it. I won’t get into the specifics because (1) it is highly misleading; and (2) it’s not their real reason anyway.

To blunt the charge that the Republicans are sexist, they also filibustered Mel Watt to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency. You can say a lot of things about him: a sitting member of Congress; an African-American; extremely well qualified. But he is not—and I’m sure that Mr. Watt will confirm this—a woman. It appears he is the first sitting member of Congress to not be confirmed since before the Civil War. But I think it is wrong to say that Republican racism towards Watt is the reason. Much more likely is that it is Republican racism towards President Obama.

Rick Ungar over at Forbes wrote, Enough! GOP Once Again Proves Too Irresponsible to Handle the Filibuster. He notes that during the hearings for Millett, no Republican expressed any concern about her. He’s exactly right when he says, “The use of the filibuster to deny Millet’s nomination is but one more example of the Republicans simply refusing to recognize and accept that Barack Obama won the 2012 election and, having done so, gets to appoint people to fill vacancies in the federal court system.”

But here’s the thing. We can have a friendly game of chess. Or, if you are black and not that good a player, you can bring out the rule book and use every technicality against me. In fact, this used to happen. In the very old days of professional chess, some masters would simply take forever to move in order to force a draw in a lost game. As a result, clocks were introduced. If the game is important enough, people will throw out the norms of fair play and exploit the holes that exist in any rule book.

What’s going on in the Senate is very important. And the Republicans have not only been losing for a long time, they are likely to be losing a long time into the future. (Their only real chance is in 2014.) So they are quite understandably doing the only thing they can to exert force. But the filibuster dates from better times when the Senate was engaged in a much more friendly game of politics. Its time has gone. Actually: long gone. That was clear as soon as the nightly television news announced things like, “The Senate blocked Patricia Millett’s nomination by a vote of 55-38.” That’s right, she got 17 more votes and 59% of the vote but she didn’t succeed. And most observers just accept this as the way things ought to be.

My argument about this stuff has always been different than this. I see it only from a tactical standpoint. Minority rights are great and the Senate has a natural tilt toward conservatives. But once the Republicans have the White House and all of Congress, the Senate will eliminate the filibuster. (They did it before.) They will not stand for the minority being able to do to them what they have done to the Democrats the last 5 years. So the filibuster is going away. So why not at least get the advantage of pushing the courts a bit further back in the liberal direction? But no. It seems that Democrats would rather stand up for a very vile tradition (pdf), and then when the Republicans eliminate it, they can scream about how unfair it is.

What this whole thing shows is that the Republicans really do respond to power. When Harry Reid was hopping mad, the Republicans caved. Now that he’s cooled down, they are back to their old ways. The only way the abuse of the filibuster ends is if the filibuster ends. Sadly, the party who ruined the filibuster, will almost certainly be the party that ends it—gaining all the advantages that go along with that. Think the courts are conservative now? Just wait until President Cruz fills every open seat with nary a word from the Senate.

I just saw a segment on All In talking about why it is that the Democratic Party hasn’t gotten behind Barbara Buono for governor of New Jersey. Steve Kornacki was guest hosting and he was on with E J Dionne. I admire both of those men and usually agree with them. But I thought they both demonstrated the problem. Democrats just don’t seem to give a shit. They are so used to dealing not just with extreme Republicans, but politically clueless Republicans. Chris Christie is an extremist but he is anything but clueless. Most Democrats mistake this for being reasonable.

Both Kornacki and Dionne talked about how the Obama administration didn’t want to attack Christie because they were grateful to him for the nice things he said during Hurricane Sandy. There are a couple things they’re missing. First, Obama was leading Romney during the entire general election. I believe the nadir of his campaign was when he had a two-thirds chance of winning and Romney had a one-third chance. That was the worst that Obama ever did. By the time of Sandy, he was doing far far better—he was almost certain to win.

The second reason this narrative is ridiculous is that Christie didn’t do any of that for Obama; he did it for himself. What’s more, he likely enjoyed poking Romney in the eye. As I reported right before the election, Christie did want to be Romney’s VP, so he was probably a bit angry about not getting picked. But more to the point, I’m sure that Christie (who is not an idiot) understood that Romney was going to lose. He used Hurricane Sandy to look good on the national stage. And that was mostly about getting along with Obama and not seeming like some ideological dick.

In general, when a very popular politician runs for re-election, it is hard to find good candidates of the opposing party to run against him or her. But in this election, the Democrats got a great candidate: Barbara Buono. She is currently only a state senator, but she has the polish of a national politician. And she’s run a good campaign. No one expected her to win. It would have taken a major error on the part of Christie to allow that. But it is absolutely unconscionable the way the state and federal Democratic Party have abandoned her. “Unconscionable” but hardly surprising.

In the modern Democrat Party, overrun as it is with New Democrats, standing for anything really is an uncomfortable notion. And it’s not a party that rewards loyalty. You know the old saying: Republicans fear their base and Democrats hate theirs. Well, that’s not just true of the base. Where is Obama in New Jersey? I guess we liberals can add it to our long list of things the president has done to show his contempt for us. What does it matter if the Republicans take the White House in 2016 as long as Obama has his “legacy” as a bipartisan deal marker? The whole party disgusts me.

I’ve been more or less on Rand Paul’s side in the whole Wikipedia plagiarism scandal. From a legal standpoint, there is nothing because Wikipedia is not copyrighted. And from an ethical standpoint, it just isn’t that big a deal. The obvious (And correct!) reaction would have been for Paul to admit that one of his speech writers screwed up. But now he is claiming that he did not plagiarize and that this is all about footnotes. No! You lifted exact sentences from Wikipedia and pretended they were your own work. That’s not that big a deal, but pretending that you didn’t do that very much is.

One of the great things about this is that Rand Paul is supposed to be this good old fashioned politician who really believes in things. Well, I never bought that load of crap. But one thing I am constantly impressed with is just how slippery Paul is. He is one of the very best at avoiding questions and, as in this case, finessing questions so that they sound like something wholly other than what they clearly are. He is the most corrupt of politicians and he is every bit as dangerous as Ted Cruz.

Here is The Rachel Maddow Show on the latest:

Update (1 November 2013 9:58 pm)

Now it appears that Rand Paul plagiarized copyrighted material from the Associated Press. If he had just admitted to error in the first place, none of these new bits of plagiarism would have been uncovered. What it looks like to me is that Paul has an extremely lazy staff who aren’t good at their jobs. But then we’ve long know that he doesn’t have the highest standards.

Jonathan Chait makes a good point today, The Republican Health-Care Plan: Repeal and Cackle. He quite rightly notes that while the Republicans having much fun with their faux outrage about the Obamacare exchanges and the fact that some people are going to have to give up their terrible insurance plans for something that will work, their own healthcare reform ideas are far less popular.

Republicans, of course, do have healthcare reform ideas. I went over them in some detail recently. Pretty much all of them are things that they want to do anyway. Big on the list is always tort “reform,” which is just another way of setting up the law so individuals can’t get justice when the rich and powerful harm them. But Chait is right to focus on their really big idea of providing tax credit for people to buy health insurance while making employers pay taxes on the health insurance they provide to employees.

This would have the effect of throwing huge numbers of people off employer plans and onto the terrible private insurance system that we used to have (and still do to a large extent). He writes:

So if people hate Obamacare because of the fairly modest changes it has made to their policies, the tens of millions with employer provided healthcare would be furious with the Republican plan.

Of course, we would never get a Republican plan. Obamacare is the conservative plan. When the Republicans decided their best strategy was to pretend it was a communist conspiracy shat from the decaying corps of Stalin, they effectively yielded the entire healthcare debate. They couldn’t get Social Security privatized, there is no way they would be able to pass a healthcare law that threw the whole system into chaos while simultaneously costing the poor and middle classes more than they were paying before.

So once again, we come to this point where the Republicans themselves don’t know what to do. In this way, they are lucky that Romney lost. If they were in power, what exactly would they have done? Repeal Obamacare, of course! But after that? Nothing would have been done. They might have passed a law or two that would stop parents from suing when some doctor killed their kid. But that’s about it. Because Republicans have no healthcare ideas. It’s all wish lists and magic thinking like in the cartoon above.

This morning, Charlie Pierce wrote, The Reign Of Morons: Absurdity In The Senate. It is about a remarkable bit of political posturing in the Senate. The 27 Republican senators who voted to reopen the government and lift the Debt Ceiling just voted to repudiate the vote. In other words, “We voted to raise the Debt Ceiling, but we now disagree with that vote.” Except: not really.

At the last minute of the Reid-McConnell negotiations, the latter put into the bill some language requiring this subsequent vote. So from the very beginning, the the Republicans in the Senate were planning to repudiate their votes. In other words, “We voted to raise the Debt Ceiling, but we always disagreed with the vote.” I’m not exactly sure who they think they are fooling. Do they imagine that moderates are only going to look at the first vote and extremists are only going to look at the second?

Pierce notes that John Kerry was widely criticized “from hell to breakfast” for his comment about the Iraq War funding bill, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” That, of course, was typical conservative molehill mountainizing. Congress generally votes on major bills any number of times and that’s all that Kerry was talking about. Forced ignorance is a common conservative tactic, “I just don’t know what you’re talking about!” The situation with yesterday’s vote is entirely different. It is the Republicans’ attempt to have things both ways.

I think that Pierce gets it wrong when he talks about the need of the non-crazy Republicans to show some backbone and stand up against the extremists. I just don’t buy this narrative. Sure, the John McCain wing of the Republican Party wants to placate the crazies. But this is very much like a mother placating her overeager child. The mother is also excited about going to Disneyland. But it is a thousand miles away. It doesn’t matter how much mother and child would like to be on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride but there are reasons why it just is not possible right now.

The current state of the Republican Party is that the extremist mothers are trying to calm their overeager extremist children so they can all get to the extremist promised land. There is no need for a mother and child reunion. They are in union right now. And as he matures, even Ted Cruz will understand that. He and John McCain are separated by 35 years, but absolutely no ideology.