Who Runs Gov

* The very knowledgeable Juan Cole says that Joe Biden wasn’t giving Israel a “green light” to attack Iran at all.

* The State Department tries to offer more clarification.

* Wow, that was quick. There’s already an Act Blue fundraising page for Michael Jackson fans to raise money against GOP Rep Peter King for his claim that Jackson was a “child molester” and a “pervert.”

* Harry Reid threatened today to make Senators work weekends to get health care reform done. But NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh emails that Reid has repeatedly made this threat in the past and rarely follows through:

“Harry Reid’s tired threats about forcing his fellow Democrats to work weekends have proved to be as transparent as his rhetoric about fiscal discipline — there’s a lot of bark, very little bite and inevitably, it’s the taxpayers who ultimately pay the price.”

* Marc Ambinder notes that the sudden revival of health care reform, after pundits had recently left it for dead, is “a classic case of Daily Divination bias, where long-term trends are foretold on the basis of a few day’s worth of media churn.” True enough. Thank God those who botched this one will promptly acknowledge error and never jump to premature conclusions again.

* BarbinMD flags one of the weirder moments in today’s Washington Post epic on health care lobbying: Senator Max Baucus meeting with not one, but two top former staffers who now represent industry interests.

* Speaking of which, Ezra Klein deconstructs the truly insidious nature of D.C. lobbying.

* Steve Benen and Josh Orton think Obama doesn’t really want the lefty groups to stop pummeling moderate Dem Senators.

* And here’s today’s installment in the Michele Bachmann chronicles:

“Right now in Washington, D.C., we are seeing nothing short of the deconstruction of America’s free-market system.”

This points up the perils of relying on increasingly whacked out quotes as a way of getting quickie bursts of attention and fundraising cash. If you regularly call for revolution or link the census to Japanese internment, no one really blinks when you claim Obama wants to destroy economic freedom as we know it. The bar for whackitude just keeps getting inexorably higher.

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