The whole Todd Akin fiasco is kind of fascinating, isn’t it? It’s hard to remember the last time the Republican establishment has turned against one of their own quite so fast or quite so furiously. Normally they’d circle the wagons and invent some bizarrely creative reason why Akin had done nothing wrong, and even if he had, Democrats have done far worse.

But not this time. This time the lynch mob is out. Why? I think it’s because they learned a lesson from 2010: the tea party yahoos can seriously hurt them. Candidates like Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, and Christine O’Donnell cost them Senate seats that they could have won, and with control of the Senate genuinely within reach in 2012 they’re just not willing to take any risks this time around. Claire McCaskill is a sure goner running against any halfway normal Republican opponent, and no one wants to let Todd Akin get in the way of that. Ideological purity may be important, but winning elections is even more important. Right now, Akin isn’t running against McCaskill, he’s running against the ghosts of Angle, Buck, and O’Donnell.

David Brooks writes today that Medicare is our biggest budget problem going forward (true) and that President Obama deserves some credit for tackling Medicare reform (also true). Still, he says, all Obama has done is “trimmed on the edges” of entitlement spending. Mitt Romney, by contrast, has shown “surprising passion” about reining in Medicare. And for all you non-tea partiers out there, it gets even better:

By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has put Medicare at the center of the national debate….When you look at the Medicare reform package Romney and Ryan have proposed, you find yourself a little surprised. You think of them of as free-market purists, but this proposal features heavy government activism, flexibility and rampant pragmatism.

The federal government would define a package of mandatory health benefits. Private insurers and an agency akin to the current public Medicare system would submit bids to provide coverage for those benefits. The government would give senior citizens a payment equal to the second lowest bid in each region to buy insurance.

This system would provide a basic health safety net. It would also unleash a process of discovery. If the current Medicare structure proves most efficient, then it would dominate the market. If private insurers proved more efficient, they would dominate. Either way, we would find the best way to control Medicare costs. Either way, the burden for paying for basic health care would fall on the government, not on older Americans.

How can Brooks write something like this? It just isn’t true. The Romney/Ryan proposal for Medicare is an almost pure free-market plan. Its only cost-control mechanism is competitive bidding, and Romney has very specifically rejected all the cost-control mechanisms currently in the Affordable Care Act. If competitive bidding doesn’t work, there’s no flexibility, no pragmatism, no Plan B at all.

Beyond that, how can he ignore the growth cap in the Romney/Ryan plan?¹ Neither man has promised that “the burden for paying for basic health care would fall on the government, not on older Americans.” Quite the opposite, in fact. They have very specifically refused to say who would pay if competitive bidding fails to keep costs below their growth cap. And unless they stand willing to adopt the kind of command-and-control measures they say they reject, the only possible answer is older Americans.

As near as I can tell, the truth is almost exactly the opposite of what Brooks has written. He may not be impressed with Obama’s plan, but that’s not a good excuse for so badly misrepresenting what Romney and Ryan would do.

¹I’m assuming that Romney supports the growth cap in Ryan’s plan, since he’s said that his plan is nearly identical to Ryan’s. It’s not really possible to know this for sure, of course, since Romney’s plan is almost laughably thin and he has declined to produce any actual details about it. However, if there isn’t a growth cap, then it’s just a joke in the first place. It’s vanishingly unlikely that competitive bidding on its own will seriously rein in Medicare costs.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s worth repeating my assumption that what we’re really talking about here is Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan. The reason for this assumption is that Mitt Romney, almost literally, doesn’t have a plan of his own. If you read through his description, what you learn is that (a) all seniors will get a voucher to buy health insurance, and (b) that’s it. There are essentially no other details aside from the now pro forma assurance that current seniors won’t be affected. It’s really not even possible to assess this plan, let alone suggest that it shows “surprising passion” about reforming Medicare.

I’ve had Hardball on in the background for the past hour (I know, I know), and I just have to say that sometimes Chris Matthews stuns me. The topic was Todd Akin, and Matthews kept insisting that there was no difference — none, zero, nada — between Akin’s infamous reflections on “legitimate rape” and Paul Ryan’s view that abortion should be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest. He ended up badgering his guests over and over to admit that the two things were identical.

WTF? I assume Matthews is right about Ryan’s view (though I’m not sure if Ryan has ever explicitly clarified this), but what does that have to do with Akin? I don’t have any reason to think that Ryan believes some rapes are “legitimate” and others aren’t. He simply believes that abortion is murder, and it’s murder even if the fetus is the result of rape or incest. This is an extreme pro-life view, but it’s hardly a fringe view.

Does anyone have any idea what Matthews was talking about?

UPDATE: The consensus in comments seems to be that Matthews wasn’t referring to Ryan’s view that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. Instead, he was referring to a bill that Ryan and Akin (and most of the GOP caucus) cosponsored last year that would have narrowed Medicaid funding for abortion in rape cases. The legislation would have restricted Medicaid funding only to cases of “forcible rape.”

The theory here is that “legitimate” is just another word for “forcible,” and Ryan agrees with Akin that there’s some kind of distinction here. Unless I missed something, Matthews didn’t actually say this, but I suppose he might have meant it and just forgot to say the actual words. Or something.

Ryan Cooper points out that in the world of paid blogging, you don’t get to write posts only when the mood hits you. You have to write every single day, no matter what’s going on and what your mood is:

The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something, with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts.

….If I had my dream job, I’d like to post 4-6 times during the day, and write longer pieces during the extra time. More importantly, I don’t want to get into the situation where the demand for content pushes me so hard that I stop taking new stuff in. (I think I could get the hang of full-time blogging, say, but no more than that.) And Andrew Sullivan’s habit of regular long breaks, disconnected from the machines, seems very smart, even necessary. I don’t think I could keep up with the likes of Matt Yglesias or Joe Weisenthal, and trying looks like a recipe for burnout.

I’ve long thought that although putting up a dozen posts a day may be good for your traffic numbers, it’s a mistake to do it even if you have the talent to pull it off. It reminds me of one of my favorite passages from The Power Broker, about what happened to Robert Moses when he simply got too busy to pay attention to his building projects the way he had early in his career. Those early projects had been works of genius because Moses, for all his faults, was a genius. But later in the book, author Robert Caro passes along an anecdote from Richard Spencer Childs, who was in the room when architect Aymar Embury interrupted to present Moses with a stack of drawings for some new parks. Moses zipped though them, making split-second decisions about which ones to keep and which ones to discard:

“There were no hard feelings. Moses and Embury were good friend,” [Childs said.]….”But here perhaps $100,000 worth of public business was settled on Moses’ offhand taste.” And, recalls Childs, when Moses finished with the drawings, Embury pointed to one he had rejected and said, “That one you threw away was the best of the lot.”

Embury may well have been correct: the offhand taste even of a genius is offhand taste.

Even if you have the talent, it’s hard to consistently produce good work, let alone memorable work, if you don’t have time to think. And these days, I suspect that an awful lot of writers no longer really have time to think.

In any case, I have good news for Ryan: his dream job exists! The bad news is that I already have it. I try to write about half a dozen posts a day, not ten or a dozen, and I doubt very much that anyone misses the four or five posts that therefore never get written. And the extra time (mostly taken during the afternoon, West Coast time) allows me to spend a few hours reading stuff I might not otherwise have time for, and to escape the tyranny of my RSS feed for a bit and think a little more about what everyone else is saying. Or even to change my mind about something I’ve written myself. It also gives me time to write three or four longer-form pieces each year for the magazine.

If I had the sheer energy and stamina to write more posts each day, maybe I’d do it. There’s no telling if I’d have the self-discipline to deliberately pace myself. But I don’t, and in the end I think I’m better off for it — and my readers too.

Former Obama spokesman Blake Zeff is tired of the endless carping about 2012 being the nastiest campaign of all time:

The truth? Not only is this not the most negative campaign ever — it’s not the most negative campaign of your lifetime, unless you happen to be three years old.

He makes a pretty good case for this, comparing the various charges and countercharges that filled the airwaves during 2012, 2008, and 2004. And that’s without even bothering to examine 2000, when the press corps itself waged a famously vicious campaign against Al Gore; or 1992, which was dominated by charges of philandering and pot smoking and consorting with communists; or 1988, when the GOP hauled out Willie Horton to help beat Michael Dukakis. And I’m only leaving out 1996 because I think I slept through that one. But I’ll bet it was pretty vicious too.

Personally, what strikes me most about the 2012 campaign isn’t its viciousness per se, but — how do I put this? It’s somehow more petty in its viciousness than I remember in the past. Taken as a whole, the 2012 campaign has had plenty of days in the gutter, but the individual attacks all seem pretty forgettable. So far, anyway, there are no Swift boats, no Jeremiah Wright, no inventing the internet, no Gennifer Flowers, no Willie Horton. It’s all small potatoes: Obama gutting work requirements for welfare, Romney killing people’s wives, etc. Not very edifying stuff, to be sure, and I’m sure it has its intended effect when it’s running 24/7 in the entire state of Ohio. Still, there’s nothing that will ever make it into the Top Ten annals of dirty campaigning. It’s the volume of new crap that’s striking, along with the relentless daily invention of obscure new lies, not the viciousness of any one piece of it.

I dunno. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. What does the hive mind think?

What a bizarre spectacle we have today between Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson. In the latest issue of Newsweek, Ferguson writes that Barack Obama broke his pledge that healthcare reform wouldn’t increase the federal deficit. In fact, says Ferguson, the CBO concluded that it will increase the deficit. Krugman shot back that CBO said no such thing: “Anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.”

Krugman is right, of course, and I was curious to know how Ferguson would respond. I’m gobsmacked to learn that this is Ferguson’s defense:

I very deliberately said “the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,” not “the ACA.” There is a big difference.

Krugman suggests that I haven’t read the CBO’s March 2010 report. Sorry, I have, and here is what it says:

“The provisions related to health insurance coverage—which affect both outlays and revenues—were projected to have a net cost of $1,042 billion over the 2012–2021 period; that amount represents a gross cost to the federal government of $1,390 billion, offset in part by $349 billion in receipts and savings (primarily revenues from penalties and other sources).”

But thanks for trying, Paul….

Seriously? That’s it? By accounting only for the costs of ACA — that would be the insurance provisions — and not for any of the savings, Ferguson concludes that ACA increases the deficit? And then uses the CBO to back up his claim?

I’m speechless. How do you even react to something like this? Ferguson is like some clever middle schooler who thinks he’s made a terrifically shrewd point by inserting “insurance coverage provisions” into his sentence so that he can later argue that it’s technically correct if anyone calls him on it. You can almost hear the adolescent tittering in the background.

For the rest of us, the facts are simple: Covering 30 million people does indeed cost money, and Obamacare includes a number of offsetting savings to pay for that. This is what Obama promised to do: to pay for ACA. And CBO says he did. “Altogether,” says their report, the various provisions of PPACA are “estimated to increase direct spending by $604 billion and to increase revenues by $813 billion over the 2012–2021 period.” That’s a net deficit reduction of $210 billion.

Here’s more from Noah Smith, who managed to retain his powers of speech after reading Ferguson’s piece. The worst part of the whole thing, I suppose, is that Tina Brown is probably delighted by all this. After all, food fights are good for circulation.

Last week, out of a field of three candidates ranging from very conservative to whackaloon, Missouri Republicans chose the whackaloon candidate, Todd Akin. And as you probably know by now, he stepped in it big time yesterday while defending his belief that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. In cases of “legitimate rape,” Akin said, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

This is a fairly common fringe view among extreme social conservatives, but they normally don’t promote it in public, and certainly not on mainstream television. Still, my first thought was: this is Missouri. Akin’s a Republican, and Republicans never punish their own for being too conservative. It’ll all blow over and he’ll lose a couple of points in the polls, but that’s it.

Or is it? Josh Marshall suggests Akin is in bigger trouble than we might think. “I checked what some people I consider key GOP operatives were saying on Twitter just now and they’re running for the hills a bit more than I’d expected. To be more specific, they’re advising all GOP candidates to disavow Akin as quickly as possible (no big surprise there) and don’t seem particularly optimistic he can even stay in the race (that does sort of surprise me).” ThinkProgress collects some GOP reactions here.

I’m sticking with my prediction: it all blows over and Akin doesn’t even lose much support. Am I right? Or has my cynicism about the GOP’s bottomless tolerance for lunacy gotten the better of me? Comments are open.

You might like to get answers to these questions. You might think the American public deserves answers to these questions before November 6. But you won’t get them anyway:

1. Gov. Romney, what tax loopholes will you propose closing to make up for the tax cuts on the rich that are part of your economic plan?
2. Your Medicare plan is based on Paul Ryan’s and relies on competitive bidding to bring down costs. But what if the bids all come in above your growth cap of GDP + 0.5 percent? Who pays the difference? Seniors?
3. That 13 percent you say you paid in taxes over the past decade—that’s federal income taxes, right? And it’s based on AGI?

From Doug Preisse, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party and a member of the elections board, on the reason he opposes extended voting hours in Columbus:

I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.

Points for honesty, I guess. Via Rick Hasen.

Paul Ryan fought the 2009 stimulus bill but then worked to get stimulus dollars for his constituents. I don’t have a problem with this. Once the bill had passed against his wishes, the money was going to be spent. Ryan’s constituents deserved their share of the money as much as anyone else. After all, I think the mortgage interest deduction is bad policy, but that sure doesn’t stop me from declaring it on my tax return.

Today, though, Kathleen Hennessey of the LA Times highlights a slightly lesser known part of Ryan’s record: his vigorous efforts to save a GM plant in his hometown:

A General Motors plant, the lifeblood of his hometown, was set to close. The huge Suburbans and Tahoes from the Janesville production line were no longer in vogue. The aging plant was to stop production by Christmas — unless Ryan and other Wisconsin officials could save it.

Ryan, then the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, flew to Detroit to cajole GM executives. For more than an hour, he and other officials made a PowerPoint proposal that mixed union concessions with unprecedented state and local tax breaks for GM….Ryan helped pitch a $224-million proposal that included roughly $50 million in state enterprise zone tax credits, local government grants worth $22 million, and major contract concessions from the United Auto Workers union local.

But it soon became clear that the future of Janesville — and all of GM — hinged on federal intervention.

In late November, executives from Detroit’s Big Three flew to Washington to ask for a bailout. The next day, Mitt Romney made his opposition clear in a New York Times op-ed titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Ryan disagreed. He supported a House bill that offered $14 billion in fast-tracked loans to GM and Chrysler. Ryan cited his district’s “gut-wrenching” experience with layoffs, and a commitment to the auto industry. He also suggested that, under other circumstances, he might have voted no.

“At the forefront of my mind are jobs in southern Wisconsin and the retiree commitments to workers that could be placed in jeopardy under certain bankruptcy scenarios,” Ryan said at the time. He said he backed the plan because it relied on previously appropriated money for auto technology loans, not added spending.

This is, needless to say, quite a different thing. Ryan didn’t take advantage of a program that had been passed over his objections. On the contrary: he fought hard for a corporate bailout of the kind he now says he opposes. But back when it counted, he didn’t oppose it. He supported it. Just like he supported the Bush administration’s wars, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and TARP, even though none of them was paid for.

You might, of course, believe that Ryan had a genuine change of heart on January 20, 2009, and suddenly decided that the federal deficit was out of hand and needed to be reined in. Or you might believe that something else happened on that day. It’s your call.