The paper explains:

Embracing the progressive--and sometimes politically risky--principle that the cost of carrying out public policies should fall to the well-off more than the disadvantaged, both the House and Senate bills would place new taxes on the wealthy to help pay for expanded insurance coverage.

Since mostly people aren't "well-off," and raising taxes on the wealthy tends to be rather popular with most people, what exactly is the political risk here? Surely the article will tell us. Oh, here it is:

In a recent Associated Press poll, 57 percent of those surveyed favored taxing people who earn more than $250,000 a year to pay for the healthcare overhaul. Of a variety of financing options tested in the survey, that tax was the only idea supported by a majority.

In other words, the not-very-risky idea of raising taxes on the wealthy.

Mr. Mohammed's initial defiance toward his captors set off an interrogation plan that would turn him into the central figure in the roiling debate over the C.I.A's interrogation methods. He was subjected 183 times to the near-drowning technique called waterboarding, treatment that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has called torture. But advocates of the C.I.A's methods, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have said that the interrogation methods produced a trove of information that helped dismantle Al-Qaeda and disrupt potential terrorism attacks.

Apparently Holder's views need to be balanced by Dick Cheney's.

More to the point, what Eric Holder thinks is torture is mostly irrelevant: If something is torture, then it should be called torture. The Times has failed on this question before; in 2004, the paper's public editor Daniel Okrent wrote this response to a FAIR Action Alert (6/10/04):

But just as a terrorist is sometimes, in fact, a terrorist, torture is inescapably torture. The reader who moved me out of the muddled center on this did it with a simple question: "If the same things [that happened at Abu Ghraib] had been done to American prisoners by Iraqi authorities, would the Times have hesitated to use ‘torture’ over and over again?"

Over the past five years, the paper has used the word to describe the actions of authorities in Iraq, China, Mexico, Turkey, Chad and elsewhere, including a precinct house in Brooklyn, in the Abner Louima case. In each case, I believe, there was a sense that the torturers were characterized, in part, by their otherness--other nationalities, other political systems, or in the Louima instance other, depraved moral codes.

In Iraq, the perpetrators of the prison horrors were our representatives--ordinary Americans whose behavior may have been altered by circumstances, but who in their origins and histories are as familiar to us as our neighbors and co-workers.

[New York Times standards editor Allan] Siegal, who notes that the Times has no policy on the use of "torture," cautioned me in an e-mail that his sense of the word (and of "abuse") was "impressionistic rather than researched," but I buy what he ended up with: "Torture occurs when a prisoner is physically or psychologically maltreated during the process of interrogation, or as punishment for some activity or political position. Abuse occurs when the prisoner’s jailers maltreat her or him separately from the interrogation process."

Siegal also acknowledges that there's a continuum that has to be measured. If, for instance, a man is kept hooded for an hour, is that in itself torture? What about five hours? What about 24? If the headline language has in fact been delicate, maybe that's because the distinctions are delicate. But as good reporting brings us greater knowledge of what has gone in prisons and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions become firm enough to be indisputable.

Diehard right-wing congressmen do not deserve all the blame. Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn't try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left. Obama seems reduced to fencing with Fox News, which won't get him very far or earn him a place in the history books.

I'm not sure how much more ground Obama (or Democrats in general) is supposed to give. They added a bunch of non-stimulative tax cuts into their stimulus package in order to attract Republican support (which didn't work). They took the most progressive ideas off the table in the health care debate (single-payer and a robust public option), and in the House adopted the "Stupak amendment" limiting abortion rights. The White House almost immediately sent almost 20,000 troops to Afghanistan, and seems ready to send more.

If the notion is that the Democrats (in Congress or the White House) have pushed hard-left policies, I'd like to see some evidence. Thomas (like Doyle McManus in the L.A. Times last week) points to the White House's criticism of Fox News Channel as an example of their partisanship--perhaps because there aren't many other actual examples.

So what, exactly, is the point of all this "Obama isn't bipartisan enough" chatter? Here we go--presidents move to the right to be successful:

The two greatest postwar presidents understood this. Dwight Eisenhower governed in the 1950s by deftly uniting center and right, and Ronald Reagan did the same in the 1980s.

And:

Since taking office, Obama has so far failed to win the battle for the center. The post-election polls show that the country is, if anything, drifting to the right. Obama needs to win some of those drifters back if he wants to get things done.

A Democrat needs to go further right--somehow you just knew that would be the advice from the corporate media.

CHARLIE GIBSON: We understand he's raising new questions about a number of plans that are in front of him. What new questions are there to be asked after all this time?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Well, you would think he'd be through with the questions, Charlie.

Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (11/15/09):

Barack Obama is in danger of giving deliberation a bad name.

David Broder, Washington Post (11/16/09-- headline: "Enough Afghan Debate")

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.

O'REILLY: You committed the cardinal sin of all time. You left a liberal network, and you went to a traditional right-leaning network. So you're never, ever going to be liked again by anyone. Does that make you sad?

STOSSEL: Well, I live with these people. They all live in my neighborhood. So that makes me sad.

O'REILLY: Move out to Long Island where I live, because I live with the folks.

STOSSEL: I like taking the subway to work.

O'REILLY: You're a pansy. Come out to Long Island. All right?

For anyone keeping score, you can find aerial maps of what is purportedly O'Reilly's humble Long Island home. Man of the people, indeed.

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.