Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to product real savings

I’ve been saying in various ways that Democrats lost because they never provided tangible benefit to people’s lives. They never made a decent case for government to do that, either. But crucially, the one program where struggling people did interact with their government, HAMP, has resulted in making many of them worse off than before. This is a crushing blow to liberalism and the theory of government as effective.

Elizabeth Warren was asked about the foreclosure fraud scandal, and she agrees with me – the 50 state AGs have the best path to getting a legitimate solution to the problem for their constituents.

But all of this “hippie punching” isn’t about turning out voters. To do that, as Obama well knows, you have to inspire them. Notice that nobody actually running for office is wagging their finger at voters and scolding them like a bunch of children.

No, this isn’t about GOTV. It’s about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election. And once again, the White House doesn’t care if they make matters worse in order to deflect responsibility from Obama.

Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the Brown vote correlates strongly with the decline in housing values.

I’ve put the blame on the “veal pen” in the past, who largely abandoned their Wall Street critiques when the bankers told Obama they didn’t want their bonuses criticized any more. Without the normal liberal validators driving the economic argument from the left, the media is left with little to cover and the danger has always been that all of that discontent would accrue to the right — which is exactly what happened. But credit where credit is due, Fox’s constant “Obama is a socialist” drumbeat has played a huge part in the ridiculously inadequate economic conversation that has driven pissed off old people with declining mortgage values to the right.

Want to see into the future? Look at the ongoing fight over premium increases for policies on the Massachusetts Connector (exchange), and the effort by the state regulator to control prices, and you’ll get a glimpse–because the health care plan just put into law would effectively replicate the Massachusetts health care system in every state. What we are seeing in Massachusetts is a complete failure of middlemen–health insurance companies–to do their main job, which is to use their size to negotiate good prices with providers.

Poll results show that Massachusetts voters punished Democrats for neglecting the issue most vital to them: jobs. The message of Massachusetts should be clear: If Democrats want to save their own jobs in the mid-term elections this fall, they must create jobs now.

Massachusetts voters sent a strong signal to Washington lawmakers Tuesday that they want results—and aren’t seeing any. Not on health care reform, not on job creation and not on fixing the nation’s economy.

The working class has spoken. Will Democrats listen?

Jane, Matt, and Nate talk with Dylan this afternoon about big business and big government, catering to special interests, secret deals, lack of trust, and voter anger.

I voted without hesitation for Martha Coakley, this morning. The choice was a no-brainer, between someone who actually sees the world in 21st century terms and a cynical buffoon whose views are at least a century out of date, and they were wrong even then, and whose party is moving backwards.