[Welcome, Lubbock bloggers! -- lambert]

The GOP is in retreat across the land. They don't want to admit it, but they are. So they're responding with ratcheting up their rhetoric and trying to dodge the truth via dissembling, distraction, and pretty pictures.

They remind me of academics fighting over whose name goes first on a paper.To give you an example of that kind of infighting: Niall Ferguson and Paul Krugman are feuding.

The tone of the discussion is ... .

One of them is a “poseur”. The other is “patronising”. One suffers from “verbal diarrhoea”. The other is a “whiner”.

A bust-up on the set of High School Musical 4 perhaps? A scrap behind the catwalk at a Milan fashion show? No. Those accusations were slung round in an increasingly bitter public row between two of the world’s most distinguished commentators on global finance and economics, professors Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, of Princeton and Harvard, respectively.

It started as an argument about bond prices. But last week it blew up into a row about racism, printing money, spending our way out of recession, and the fate of the global economy.

Nice to see that economists can be as well-behaved as United States Senators.

Perhaps constituents can evolve toward more professional treatment of one another than their Senators and Congressional Representatives indulged themselves in over the slavery that, the North will tell you, provoked the Civil War.
Today, at least, a few of us seemed able to avoid beating each other with sticks on the floor of a town hall meeting to discuss health care reform.

Not that there weren't comments and statements designed to provoke reaction aplenty.

I could cherry-pick the phrasing for the code, but if I give you just one example perhaps you can fill in the rest for yourselves. One pro-Republican audience member summed up his objections to the socialism emanating from Washington this way:

"When you've got a coon up a tree, bark at him!!"

That's Lubbock. In 2009. You can probably find out a fair amount more at lubbockleft.com. I met the blogger from that platform today, and several other progressives, liberals, Democrats, and folks who had questions for Congressman Randy Neugebauer.

A friend of mine pointed out recently that a post which doesn't stir up comment -- and rebuttal -- is an inefficient use of space.

My experiences in academia are few (thank you FSM, Ceiling Cat, and *all* the gods!), but it's a famous axiom that the battles there are so vicious 'cause the stakes are so small.

My experiences in politics, so far, are actually kinda similar. The Washington Post Writers' group bloggers invoked this axiom about a year ago to describe a tempest-in-a-teapot among conservatives. Being me, I invoked Will Rogers to describe the party county convention I attended, having voted in the primary happily and survived the caucus stubbornly afterward.

There's a graphic by John Boehner (that's Bay-ner, right? or is there another one?) that purports to show the organization chart for HR 3200. It was at my Congressmember's town hall today, as a colorful "visual aid" up front, on about a 3x5-foot display, still illegible in the first row of audience seats, and reproduced on the handout given away (along with a housekeeping handout offered by the sponsoring organization, the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce, concerned with decorum).

I knew I was in hostile territory when I saw it. But I was surprised that we did not have screamers or picketers in the parking lot. Maybe they were down the block at the Chamber's offices, where, according to the introduction we were provided, the event had originally been scheduled. Overflow response caused them to move a block to the gym (yep, balcony seats and retracted basketball goals and fluorescent lights overhead) of the First United Methodist Church.

The discussion was every bit as decorous as Ferguson and Krugman's.

Do let me point out that among the handouts we received, though, were the Congressman's points on why, as he proclaimed to a cheering, clapping crowd, "I will never vote to give control of your health care to the Federal Government!"

Top 5 Concerns With HR3200, House Leadership Health Plan:

• 1) Creates a government-run health care plan that will cause 114 million who currently have health care coverage to lose it
• 2)Does not reduce health care cost inflation, but adds $1 trillion in new health care costs to federal government on top of current unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Medicaid
• 3) Tax increases on small businesses trying to create jobs, with total tax increase of $818 billion
• 4) Creates a federal government health care bureaucracy that allows government to come between patients and doctors and impose coverage mandates
• 5) Insufficient safeguards to prevent coverage to illegal immigrants under the government-run health plan

It's only fair to offer the top five health care reforms he supports as well:

1. Give more options to individuals and businesses for purchasing health insurance by allowing purchases across state lines and through Association Health Plans
2. Make the tax code fair so individuals buying their own coverage receive the same tax benefits as employers buying coverage for employees
3. Improve coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions through a national risk pool and additional tax deductions and allow those who have coverage they like to keep it
4. Create more transparency for health care costs so individuals know how much their options cost and require insurance companies to improve claims settlement
5. Enact meaningful lawsuit reform such as has been done in Texas, reducing malpractice insurance costs and leading to more doctors coming to Texas

I'll have more on this later. This post is getting long. It's been a challenging day. And I want to see if I'm on my local newscast.