Prime minister will hail potential to open new interactive form of politics in which citizens develop new relationship with MPs

Gordon Brown will tomorrow liken the arrival of superfast broadband to the invention of electricity, saying it will save the government billions of pounds and revolutionise the provision of public services.

The prime minister will also hail its potential to open a new interactive form of politics in which citizens develop a new kind of relationship with their MPs.

In a speech designed to show that he is the man to renew Britain, Brown will say superfast broadband can "give voice and choice to citizens, parents, patients and consumers".

He will suggest the technology can allow Britain to become "the world leader in the new politics where that voice for feedback and deliberative decisions can transform the way we make local and national decisions".

The prime minister believes discussions using the web will make it far easier to find out in depth what the public believes about specific issues, thus changing the current role of MP as the representative of a constituency.

Brown will argue that the digital revolution will be especially vital in job centres, schools, hospital records and ensuring that, when people move home, they need only inform one website rather than a plethora of government agencies.

Council tax, rubbish collection, parking permits, as well as finding a new doctor and dentist, would automatically appear when someone logs on to their government account to change their address.

The developments should also allow the sidelining of Whitehall planning, because it will be far easier to predict the services the public needs and wants.

In an indication of the scale of savings available to Whitehall, the work and pensions secretary, Yvette Cooper, will publish findings showing her department has already saved more than £1bn, largely because of services going online.

Cooper's report says the government can save more than £100m a year by helping people claim their pension and Jobseeker's Allowance online, £40m by reducing office space, over £110m by getting more value out of contracts and £200m by benefit delivery changes.

Ministers have been looking at delivering some benefits entirely online, but are wary because of the large numbers of people not on the internet.

The next benefits to be put on line are likely to be full Jobseeker's Allowance, followed by child benefit and tax credits.

Jim Knight, the work and pensions minister, said: "People will be able to look up jobs, have new jobs in their areas pushed to them, and manage their benefits claim."

Brown will also attempt to draw a dividing line between Labour and the Tories, saying only state intervention in the form of the government's telephone tax will ensure superfast broadband infrastructure is available across Britain.

Brown will say the £6 a year digital tax on phones will raise between £175m and £200m each year, enabling the superfast broadband infrastructure to be extended nationwide.

"Faster broadband speeds will bring new, cheaper, more personalised and more effective public services to people; it will bring games and entertainment options with new levels of sophistication; it will make accessing goods and services immeasurably easier," Brown will say.

"In short, the world available to those with superfast broadband will be unimaginably richer than to those without."

The government has called for superfast broadband of 50 megabits persecond r above to be made available to 90% of the country by the end of 2017.

The Conservatives plan to raise a smaller sum from 2013 from cash left over from the digital TV switchover fund.

BT plans to offer a mixture of high-speed broadband technologies to around 40% of the country, while Virgin Media has made cable broadband, capable of speeds of around 50Mbps, available to half the UK's homes.

• Gordon Brown
• Politics and technology
• Labour
• Conservatives
• Broadband

As the strike enters its second day there are conflicting claims from BA and Unite on the level of disruption. Meanwhile, the government is trying to end the dispute and the Tories continue to highlight Labour's links with the union. Follow live updates

9.40am:
What do the Sunday papers make of the strike?

The Sunday Express is talking about a "spring of discontent" and has little sympathy for the union.

Those old enough to recall the Winter of discontent in 1979 look on current events with horror and disbelief. Have unions and management forgotten the lessons of 30 years ago?

The dispute between BA and the Unite union is one that should never have started. Cabin crew have a grievance but it's no more than millions of people must deal with today. They are backed by a trade union that also happens to be paymaster to the Labour Party.

The Observer complains about both sides and the lack of sophistication in the dispute.

The two sides' positions do not, on paper, look irreconcilable. But the personalities involved seem pathologically indisposed to reconciliation.

Even before the current dispute, BA chief executive Willie Walsh believed that trade union activism was a persistent drag on the company's performance. He is now convinced that facing down Unite, breaking a strike if necessary, is a vital step in the airline's evolution. Naturally, the union then accuses BA of failing to negotiate in good faith.

Across the table, Tony Woodley, one of Unite's two general secretaries, is a career trade union pugilist. He has rarely in his life credited a management team with the capacity to negotiate in good faith.

From the very start of the process, there was a lack of trust and a surplus of stubborn pride. The interests of BA customers and the wider economy were much deployed in the rhetoric of both sides, but not served in Mr Walsh's and Mr Woodley's brinkmanship.

The Mail on Sunday reports that the strike has "failed to take off" as BA's "strike-busting exercise" appears to be working.

While unions and management slug it out, they both seem to be forgetting that BA exists only because of considerable privileges which are a hangover from its days as a nationalised company.

Writing in the paper LibDem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable claims the dispute could be resolved by the government if it threatened to take away its historic privileges.

BA has preferential take-off and landing slots at Heathrow which it receives free of charge, much to the fury of competitors such as Virgin and BMI.

The expansion of runway capacity at Heathrow – bitterly opposed by large numbers of Londoners who live under the flight paths – is being undertaken at the behest of BA as well as the airport's owner BAA.

It is time to stop this pampering. If Gordon Brown and Lord Adonis seriously want to stop this strike they could make it crystal clear to both sides that these privileges will be taken away, leaving the airline and its jobs at the mercy of competitors. They would settle soon enough.

In the Sunday Times, the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe depicts Gordon Brown as a broken BA aircraft tumbling to earth

9.07am:
Unite claim that Heathrow's terminal five is like a ghost town with 80% of cabin crew joining the strike.

BA's chief executive Willie Walsh says the company's strike contingency plans are working well and that some of the cancelled flights have been reinstated.

The government is reported to desperate to end the strike. Gordon Brown's officials are close touch with Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite, according to the Observer.

The Conservatives continue to highlight the government's embarrassment over the dispute and its financial links with the union. It has launched a new poster claiming "Gordon's doing sweet BA". It depicts the prime minister in a Unite cabin crew uniform.

A new ICM poll for the BBC shows that only 25% of people think the strike is justified.

Where do your sympathies lie in the dispute and has it affected your travel plans. Please let us know in the comments section below, or email me at matthew.weaver@guardian.co.uk.

• British Airways
• Trade unions
• Transport

Matt Canham / Salt Lake Tribune:
Dem Rep. Matheson to vote against health reform, again  —  Holding to form, Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, announced Saturday that he would oppose his party's health reform bill, just like he did when the House version came up for a vote late last year.  —  Matheson, a conservative Democrat …

Alistair Darling will announce plans to back low-carbon transport and energy projects in 'budget for growth'

Alistair Darling will this week announce a £1bn fund to kick-start investment in green transport and energy projects as part of a "budget for growth".

With Wednesday's budget coming weeks before an expected general election, the chancellor will use his plans for the new low-carbon infrastructure scheme to contrast Labour's support for industry with the Conservatives' more hands-off philosophy.

Business secretary Lord Mandelson, who has spearheaded the government's new, more interventionist approach, told the Observer that the Conservatives "wouldn't lift a single finger" to help manufacturing.

With the public finances tight, the new green fund will be relatively small in scale, but the government hopes to use the cash to tempt private investors to back innovative new ideas. "It's about saying there are ways in which the government can play a role, which are not necessarily multibillion-pound projects," said a Treasury source. He cited the model of the Sheffield Forgemasters plant, where Mandelson last week used an £80m loan from taxpayers to secure a £170m financing package that included support from the European Investment Bank and nuclear supplier Westinghouse.

The Sheffield Forgemasters deal – which will create 180 jobs initially and provide 1,000 apprenticeships – was one of several new industrial investments announced in recent weeks that have been secured with the help of public subsidy.

Mandelson said: "People say: why am I securing Vauxhall, why am I securing the Nissan electric car to be produced in Sunderland, why am I securing the development and production of Ford's green technologies, why did I go to Sheffield Forgemasters to deliver funding for a 15,000-tonne press? It's because if the government doesn't act here, some other government will. If we hadn't bridged the final mile in the way that we did, because the market couldn't or wouldn't provide, then the investment would have gone elsewhere."

With the government committed to reduce UK carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, radical changes in infrastructure and power generation will be needed over the coming decades. Labour hopes that by boosting low-carbon energy such as wind, wave and solar power, and helping to upgrade the transport system to use cleaner fuels, it can help to meet those targets while creating thousands of new "green-collar jobs".

But environmental campaigners warned that £1bn would not go very far. Andrew Simms, director of the New Economics Foundation, said: "If what they're talking about is less than one five-hundredth of the amount that was thrown at the banking system, at a point where investment banks have bonus pots bigger than £1bn, then while the idea is right, the size of the ambition smacks of skewed priorities."

Comparing the task of preparing for a new low-carbon era to the long drive from London to Edinburgh, he said: "You won't get very far on a teacupful of petrol." The Stern review on the economics of climate change suggested it would cost more than £10bn a year to prepare the economy for cuts in emissions on the scale needed.

Mandelson stressed that as well as underpinning growth, the budget would also reaffirm Labour's determination to tackle the public deficit. The latest official figures showed that the public finances are in a healthier state than the chancellor feared at the time of December's pre-budget report, and he could reduce his £178bn estimate of this year's deficit by as much as £10bn.

But Mandelson said that would not alter the government's plans for tax rises and public spending cuts in the years ahead. "We will maintain a tough deficit reduction programme: there's no question about it. It's necessary for the health of the economy, for the confidence of the markets. We will make it absolutely clear that what we have committed to, we will follow through."

However, Darling will also stress that – unlike the Conservatives, who would start cutbacks immediately – Labour will "lock in recovery" by maintaining its financial support for the fragile economy for another year.

The UK emerged from recession in the final quarter of 2009, growing by 0.3%, but Bank of England policymakers have left low interest rates in place, making clear they remain nervous about the sustainability of the upturn.

Separately, Mandelson is also likely to be given the task of overseeing a new state-backed investment bank, which will help to support businesses struggling to secure funding from banks.

• Budget
• Energy
• Carbon emissions
• Transport policy
• Alistair Darling
• Peter Mandelson
• Nissan

Unite and Labour are in an abusive relationship that stops any chance of worthwhile change

Success hasn't spoiled Charlie Whelan. He was a character assassin and thug long before he became famous. I last met the political director of Unite in the autumn of 2008 as he was encouraging compliant journalists to go after Alistair Darling. I thought I had witnessed all varieties of political hypocrisy, but Whelan still shocked me because he was attacking the chancellor for a crime that was no crime at all to anyone in the centre-left tradition.

Darling had correctly identified that allowing speculators to run riot had left Britain facing the worst financial crisis in 60 years. Gordon Brown had to betray a friend and denigrate an ally for this statement of the obvious because he was the bedazzled dupe who had borrowed as if the riotous market could roar on forever and told City bankers at the Mansion House in 2007 that Britain needed more, rather than less, of their "vigour, ingenuity and aspiration". Despite their loudly professed left-wing principles and equally suspect mockney accents, Whelan and Damian McBride went for Darling for honestly admitting that boom and bust had not been abolished after all. Lobby correspondents behaved like children egging on the playground bully, and allowed "government sources", hiding behind the coward's cloak of anonymity, to tell their readers that the chancellor's job was on the line.

The Thick of It does not give you the half of it. Before Darling, Whelan's target was Martin Bright, the New Statesman's political editor. He boasted to Bright's wife at the 2008 British Press Awards that he had the power to instruct Geoffrey Robinson, the magazine's Brownite owner, to fire her husband and father of her children for not showing due respect to Gordon Brown and for making a documentary about Ken Livingstone's indulgence of the Islamist far right. "He can't allow this. He can't allow criticism of Gordon. If Geoffrey's got any sense, he'll listen." Bright was duly forced out, although the paper insists that it remains a part of the free press, and that its compliance with Downing Street's publicly declared wishes was a coincidence.

I drag up these ugly scenes because the Tory attack on Whelan and Unite is missing the point. Conservatives claim that by making Brown's spin doctor its political director, Unite is using its powers of patronage to take over the Labour party. Unite officers are getting Labour nominations for plum seats – John Cryer in Leyton, Jack Dromey in Birmingham Erdington – while Unite money is funding the fight against the Tories in the marginals.

The money matters, of course, but the story isn't quite right. Manufacturing Birmingham was always going to look favourably on Dromey, who has been involved in industrial disputes since the 1970s. Meanwhile, far from being a Whelan placeman, Cryer was another of his targets. Along with fellow Unite officials, Cryer went on long-term sick leave after Whelan came to the union, the cause of which may be guessed by the grievance procedures they brought against him citing stress.

Unite isn't running Labour. Both are caught in an abusive relationship, and it is hard to know who is the abuser and who is the victim. The union is hurting Brown's cause by dragging him into air strikes just before an election, but the union movement and British politics is suffering as badly.

From the narrow trade unionist point of view, the BA cabin crew are not benefiting from having Whelan, the supposed master of spin, as a comrade. The media always turn on strikers, because managers briskly deunionised most of the industry in the 1980s, and because editors know that more readers will complain about a strike than support it. Even if you accept that bias, you ought to be surprised that Unite is putting its case so poorly. The public does not know that air hostesses and stewards are not revolutionary militants, but reasonable men and women who made a conciliatory offer to accept a pay cut instead of redundancies which extremist managers refused to countenance.

More widely, an opportunity to change the terms of public debate is being missed. Commentators announce that the recession and strikes herald a return to the 1970s, and cannot see that today's crisis is nothing like the collapse of social democracy a generation ago. Margaret Thatcher won three election victories because enough voters believed that exorbitant wage demands had wrecked the economy. This time, no one can plausibly maintain that the unions brought ruin to the country. The folly of the financial elite, and the neglect of the public officials and politicians who should have been regulating, brought us low in 2008. Trade unions ought to be agitating for causes which are close to their hearts: how to create a new Britain which is not so fatally dependent on the manipulation of money markets; how to revive manufacturing; and how to regulate the City so that never again do working- and middle-class taxpayers have to bail out the super-rich.

If they did, they would find that many Mail and Telegraph readers would support them, because they know that their taxes will rise and services will be cut to pay for the City's blunders. Yet Britain's largest union cannot begin an urgent conversation because it is not just tying itself to Labour but to the Brownite faction, which Unite's leaders dumbly believe to be a left-wing alternative to the hated Tony Blair. They don't understand that the Brownites are not rough yet honourable street fighters in the Labour movement, but the Westminster equivalent of Mafia enforcers who try to eliminate anyone who stands in their don's way regardless of their political beliefs. They assail the chancellor for knowing a classic crisis of financial capitalism when he sees it and journalists for criticising politicians who court religious reactionaries. When Brown is gone, they hope to extend the Brownite reign by persuading the unions to put the unprepossessing Ed Balls in his place, even though as Brown's deputy at the Treasury he was as culpable for the regulatory failure as his equally unprepossessing patron.

Outsiders look at our clannish politics and ask why the Conservatives cling to Lord Ashcroft and Labour continues to listen to Whelan when they bring nothing but disrepute to their parties. More striking is the torpor of the trade unions, which ought to be seizing the chance to create a new political consensus, but are letting it slip away.

• Gordon Brown
• Alistair Darling
• British Airways
• Trade unions

The French four-piece talk to Hermione Hoby about ants, surrealism and creeping success

In a bar in the Opéra district of Paris, brothers and guitarists Laurent Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai – also known as one half of French band Phoenix – are reflecting on a cover version of the band's single, "Lisztomania".

"It would... bring a tear to the eye of an SS officer," says Brancowitz, shaking his head with wonderment. Later, speaking from New York, singer Thomas Mars agrees: "We all had tears in our eyes when we watched it." Google "PS22 Chorus Lisztomania" and you'll find a video of an American kids choir whose members look and sound like they've never loved a song so much in their lives.

It makes perfect sense that a bunch of elementary schoolchildren should have made such a brilliant cover. As Brancowitz himself explains, the band's fourth studio album was written without ties to a record label or manager because "we wanted to do something like kids again. That's always what we're looking for."

The album's reception last year suggests they found it. As you might guess from the title (in their words, "an equally glorious and stupid" one), Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is a record blessed with a breezy playfulness, though its songs are meticulously crafted. Ten years on from their debut, the album has earned Phoenix two rather different badges of distinction: a Grammy for best alternative album, and the perhaps even greater accolade of being the most blogged-about band of 2009 (according to website the Hype Machine).

The band also has a fearsome reputation as a live act, something you can judge for yourself on the Observer's live album giveaway (see panel, left), an exclusive recording of the band performing in Sydney a few weeks ago.

They could be forgiven a spot of bumptiousness, then. Instead, they seem genuinely surprised that their London Roundhouse dates later this month sold out so fast. Brancowitz jokes that "there's been a lot of resistance from your little island; we feel like Napoleon trying to invade". Mars agrees: "It's a mystery in the UK. I feel like it's a love and hate relationship. Most of the things we were listening to come from the UK. But maybe before we weren't in sync with the era we were living in..."

Brancowitz has another theory as to why this album has been such a success: "It was the album we made with the most humility. The good things we do are the product of luck and not from our personal songwriting genius." So modest! "No, but it's true," he protests gently. "It takes a lot of courage to admit it. It's a long, chemical process. We just sit and a few thousand tries later..."

That slow-burn approach to songwriting (they took two years to make the album so "a few thousand tries" perhaps isn't too outrageous an estimate) is mirrored in the steadiness of their rise. Gradual success has been, as Mazzalai puts it, "a pure pleasure at every step".

When I ask whether their inclusion of musical "naffness" (Alphabetical, their second album, betrayed a penchant for 70s soft rock, for example) has been a conscious thing, Brancowitz replies with a typically rococo turn of phrase. He concedes it's semi-conscious, but is, he says, always based on "an instinctive ravishment".

Such un-English wording possibly accounts for the charm of their (English) lyrics. As Mars explains: "We like doing lyrics that are cryptic and abstract, we leave out all the in-betweens, everything that makes sense. That's impossible to do in French, because every word betrays what's going on. In English you can put all these pieces together and create this weird, poetic thing." He pauses. "It's very like French surrealism in a way."

As that mental leap from truncated English to French surrealism indicates, the band remain utterly Gallic, despite their formative diet of My Bloody Valentine, the Smiths and any other British band that, as Mars puts it, have "something about them that makes me lose my balance".

The two brothers, plus Mars and bassist Deck D'Arcy (all four are in their early 30s), grew up in the conservative Parisian suburb of Versailles, a place where, Brancowitz says, "it's really easy to be a rebel without a cause – you don't have to have a very crazy haircut. It's very Catholic, so there are a lot of families of old nobility..."

"They're scary," adds Mazzalai.

Scary though it may have been, there's no question that being four kindred spirits in what they paint as a cultural wasteland has gone a long way in binding them together. "Alone we are poor, but together..." Mazzalai trails off.

Brancowitz, a man of many metaphors, continues: "You know ants? They have very minimal tasks but in the end they build these very complex structures. That's the same for us. Really, I don't remember taking creative decisions, they just happen."

They also insist they're "really bad musicians in terms of technique". "I don't even know how to do a scale," claims Brancowitz, prompting Mazzalai to add: "We don't know how to play with other musicians. I tried with friends to do sessions a few times and it's always a disaster."

Touchingly, Mars echoes many of these sentiments when we speak later. While the other three live in Paris, he's now based in New York with his film director girlfriend Sofia Coppola, who is expecting their second child in May. His relocation hasn't put any distance, musically, between him and his bandmates though.

"On our own we are not really great," he tells me. "It's not that I don't believe in my friends but the four of us have this thing, this balance of us all together."

Accounting for that balance, Brancowitz says: "Thomas has a very abstract vision of everything, and Deck is more of a mathematician – when there's a decision about harmonic complexities, he's there. He knows every equation."

There's a certain indulgent affection to the way they talk about their bassist, I suggest. "Ah, but we're all weirdos," smiles Brancowitz. Mazzalai takes up the theme: "We're all fascinated by mathematics, we love it. But you know," he adds with a shrug, "even beats are mathematical – it's mathematics that makes people dance."

This is as perfectly Phoenix-like a sentiment as there can be. Cerebral precision and mindless abandon are an irresistible combination – and those jiving elementary school kids aren't the only ones to know it.

• Phoenix
• Pop and rock

Fox News' Special Report suggested that a "deal" in the health care bill was sought by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) for a proposed hospital in Connecticut and discussed other purported "deals" for Tennessee and Louisiana. In fact, Connecticut would potentially have to compete for funding against other states, and Republicans and Democrats have said that provisions for Tennessee and Louisiana are crucial to fixing an imbalance in Medicaid funding in those states.

From the March 19 broadcast of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier:

BRIAN WILSON (correspondent): Deals still alive for the moment? Well, Republicans claim that Democrat Bart Gordon changed his vote from "yes" -- from "no" to "yes" after he got $100 million for Tennessee hospitals that treat the poor. Other deals still in play? Yes, the Louisiana Purchase: $300 million in Medicaid money is still alive; Connecticut hospital handout -- $100 million sought by Senator Dodd.

From the March 19 edition of Fox News' Hannity:

HANNITY: Retiring Congressman Bart Gordon is doing a 180 as well. Now he voted "no" in November, but after securing millions of dollars in Medicaid funding for low-income patients in his home state, well, he's now in the "yes" column.

Connecticut would reportedly have to compete for the hospital funds. The Hartford Courant reported that Connecticut would have to compete for the funds. Also, Dodd reportedly said that at least 14 other states could apply for the grant.

Funding for health care facilities would be decided by Health and Human Services secretary. The text of the Senate health care bill as passed states that the $100 million grant for "infrastructure to expand access to health care" "may only be made available by the Secretary of Health and Human Services upon the receipt of an application from the Governor of a State" that meets certain requirements:

(b) REQUIREMENT.-Amount appropriated under subsection (a) may only be made available by the Secretary of Health and Human Services upon the receipt of an application from the Governor of a State that certifies that-

(1) the new health care facility is critical for the provision of greater access to health care within the State;

(2) such facility is essential for the continued financial viability of the State's sole public medical and dental school and its academic health center;

(3) the request for Federal support represents not more than 40 percent of the total cost of the proposed new facility; and

(4) the State has established a dedicated funding mechanism to provide all remaining funds necessary to complete the construction or renovation of the proposed facility.

Proposed UConn hospital part of Republican Gov. Rell's health care proposal. Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, has reportedly proposed a $352 million University of Connecticut Health Center that would rely on $100 million in federal funds available as a grant in the health care bill under the provision inserted by Dodd.

Under health care bill reconciliation "fix," $100 million in Medicaid would go to "disproportionate share hospital" payments. Changes proposed to the Senate health care bill included a section that, in part, gives disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments to states that otherwise would receive no payments after FY2011. The House Rules Committee summary of the changes describes Sec. 1203:

Sec. 1203. Disproportionate share hospital payments. Lowers the reduction in federal Medicaid DSH payments from $18.1 billion to $14.1 billion and advances the reductions to begin in fiscal year 2014. Directs the Secretary to develop a methodology for reducing federal DSH allotments to all states in order to achieve the mandated reductions. Extends through FY 2013 the federal DSH allotment for a state that has a $0 allotment after FY 2011.

Entire TN delegation asked Energy and Commerce Committee to deal with the fact that the state is scheduled to get no DSH money. As reported by the Nashville Business Journal, a May 2009 letter from Tennessee's entire House delegation -- consisting of both Democrats and Republicans -- to the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested DSH funding. According to the letter, Tennessee had given up DSH funding in 1993 when it created a special state insurance program, TennCare, in lieu of traditional Medicaid. The letter added that, since March 2006, Tennessee hospitals have "returned to a traditional Medicaid population," but are not getting DSH payments, unlike almost every other state. From the letter:

As you may know, with the onset of the TennCare waiver in 1993, the state agreed to eliminate the DSH payment for Tennessee, using the rationale that the majority of the uninsured and uninsurable would have the opportunity to enter the new TennCare program and, consequently, hospitals would be getting TennCare reimbursement for the majority of the patients that would have been charity care patients. Although there was an initial 25 percent-decline in charity care under the program, the cost of charity care in Tennessee hospitals returned to pre-TennCare levels by 2000 and has continued to grow at a pace consistent with hospitals across the country. As of March 2006, the state Medicaid program began to disenroll adults who were eligible for TennCare as uninsured or uninsurable previously. This leaves Tennessee hospitals in the dilemma of having returned to a traditional Medicaid population covered by a Medicaid program with no DSH payment. Tennessee is one of only two states with no DSH payment. The other state is Hawaii.

Tennessee reportedly got temporary fixes in the past. The Nashville Business Journal article also reported:

The imbalance has existed since Tennessee gave up its payments when it created TennCare in the 1990s -- and it has been similarly addressed by lawmakers in the past. Early last year, a $32.8 billion bill to insure poor children included a provision extending DSH payments to Tennessee hospitals by $30 million a year for two years.

TennCare spokeswoman Kelly Gunderson said the majority of Tennessee hospitals receive some level of DSH payments.

Funding would fix FMAP rates for "certain states recovering from a major disaster." The Senate bill as passed includes a provision -- often referred to as the "Louisiana Purchase" by conservative media -- that would adjust the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) rate for "certain states recovering from a major disaster." The bill requires that it only apply to states "for which, at any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President has declared a major disaster" and "determined as a result of such disaster that every county or parish in the State warrant individual and public assistance or public assistance from the Federal Government."

The Department of Health and Human Services states that FMAP is "used in determining the amount of Federal matching funds for State expenditures for assistance payments for certain social services, and State medical and medical insurance expenditures. The Social Security Act requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to calculate and publish the FMAPs each year."

Times-Picayune: Temporary post-Katrina spending "spiked" per capita income "long enough" to skew Medicaid funding formula, causing state Medicaid funding shortfall. The Times-Picayune reported on January 22 that "FMAP refers to the percentage of a state's payments under Medicaid that are covered by the federal government. Louisiana usually gets a higher match because of how poor the state is, but because of all the recovery and rebuilding money that poured in after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, state per capita income spiked long enough to throw the formula out of kilter and threaten to blow a hole [in] the state budget. [Sen. Mary] Landrieu's fix was, according to state officials, only the beginning of a solution for a huge Medicaid shortfall the state is facing." The article stated that Landrieu said "attaching the Medicaid provision to a health-care bill made sense, and there is no obvious and feasible legislative alternative."

Jindal: "If not corrected in Washington, D.C.," FMAP problem will cost $500 million a year. Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's fiscal year 2010-2011 budget proposal states that the "Louisiana state government faces significant, multi-year budget challenges, compounded by a faulty federal FMAP formula that, if not corrected in Washington, D.C., will cost the state approximately $500 million a year in Medicaid funding, impacting services for the poorest in our state, and often those who need care the most." The proposal also says that "[w]hile there is discussion in Washington about extending the enhanced federal Medicaid match rate for six months for all states, without a permanent fix to Louisiana's faulty FMAP calculation, combined with the loss of federal stimulus funding, Louisiana will still face a projected $1.7 billion shortfall for FY 12."

You know those special amps used by Spinal Tap that go to 11, in order to provide "that extra push over the cliff"? It appears Fox News has gotten a hold of some and hooked them up to its coverage of health care reform.

As the reform bill moved closer to a vote in the House, the Fox News noise machine went into overdrive, hurling every false and misleading claim it could muster.

The week in Fox News health care hysteria began with an oldie-but-goodie -- Steve Doocy, Bill Hemmer, and Bill O'Reilly all claimed or suggested that the bill will, in O'Reilly's words, "require American taxpayers to fund abortion." But it doesn't, at least not beyond what is currently permitted under current law. Fox News, unfortunately, is not alone in repeating this falsehood.

Then, Doocy and Hemmer, joined by Neil Cavuto and several other hosts, jumped on the idea that a legislative procedure the House is reportedly considering to pass the Senate's version of health care reform would allow them to do so without a vote. Wrong again -- the House would need to vote to implement that procedure.

Carl Cameron, however, broke through the noise on this issue, pointing out that the process would simply pass the bill "in one vote instead of two" and that the process "has been used, literally, for centuries" -- indeed, Republicans made copious use of the "self-executing rule" when they controlled Congress. Even Charles Krauthammer conceded that it's constitutional. Still, that didn't keep Alisyn Camerota from scoffing that the rule "might as well be a self-immolating rule."

Fox News then pounced on a survey claiming to have found that 46 percent of primary care physicians would consider leaving their profession if health care reform passes. O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and contributor Dr. Marc Siegel all portrayed the survey as having been published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

Except it wasn't. The article was written by the physician-recruiting firm that conducted the survey, and it actually appeared in an employment newsletter produced by the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, not the Journal itself. Further, the survey itself was not all that scientific -- done via email contacts taken from the recruiting firm's database -- so any claim that the survey's results accurately reflect the view of the American medical community is dubious at best.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly did eventually note that the survey was "not a scientific poll." But that didn't keep Glenn Beck from insisting -- hours after Kelly corrected the record -- that "The New England Journal of Medicine says that if this bill is passed nearly one-third of doctors will quit practice medicine."

(Beck, meanwhile, is keeping up the long tradition of Fox News hosts pushing partisan political agendas by joining with Republican Rep. Steve King to promote an anti-reform rally in Washington.)

Fox News contributor and serial misleader Dana Perino made her own non-contribution to the health care debate, asserting that the reform bill's Medicare investment tax on those making over $200,000 a year is "so disturbing ... because the people who make that money are the small business owners." In fact, fewer than 1.3 percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax.

When the Congressional Budget Office released new numbers detailing how the reform bill would reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, Fox News didn't want to talk about that -- it spent far more time highlighting how much the bill would cost instead of how much it would save. And when that didn't seem to work, it tried to discredit the CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. Never mind that when the CBO issued "favorable" numbers last fall on a Republican health care reform plan, Fox News praised the CBO as "nonpartisan."

The Fox News spin is even confusing its own hosts. Brian Kilmeade can't quite comprehend how a bill can cost money yet reduce the deficit, and Kelly admitted, "I don't understand anything they're talking about when it comes to this potential law."

Fox News' inept war against health care reform, while in keeping with its function as the communications arm of the Republican Party in exile, is making itself look like the Spinal Tap of news. It doesn't really need that "extra push over the cliff" -- after all, that's what it's been speeding toward for years.

At this rate, it probably won't be too long before a Fox anchor spontaneously combusts.

A whole lot of shaky earthquake claims goin' on at Fox

How much does Fox News oppose health care reform? It's pretending natural disasters didn't happen if they're inconvenient to the anti-reform agenda.

On March 18, Doocy took exception to President Obama's statement that a provision in the health care reform that would help Louisiana cope with Medicaid shortfalls resulting from Hurricane Katrina might also help Hawaii because it "went through an earthquake. "Hold it. What Hawaiian earthquake?" Doocy asked. "There was an earthquake in 1868 that killed 77. There was an earthquake in 1975 that killed two." After noting that the provision applies to states that have suffered a natural disaster "within the last seven fiscal years," Doocy added: "Essentially it boils down to just one state, and that is Louisiana."

Doocy seems to have forgotten that there was an earthquake in Hawaii in 2006. Not only did it cause tens of millions of dollars in damage, the Bush administration "declared a major disaster exists in the State of Hawaii and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts" as a result of the quake.

But Doocy didn't need to rely on federal agencies for information on the quake -- Fox News reported on it at the time. (Investor's Business Daily similarly ignored its own reporting to suggest there was no recent Hawaii quake.)

It seems that rather than trust the federal government or his own news organization, Doocy chose instead to trust right-wing bloggers, who were spreading the misinformation. That runs counter to a 2007 memo -- issued after Doocy and other Fox hosts falsely claimed that Obama was educated in a madrassa -- in which Fox News vice president John Moody reportedly wrote, "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC."

Media Matters has written Fox News requesting that Doocy correct the record. We shouldn't have to, since Fox News is supposed to have a "zero tolerance" policy toward on-air mistakes, but then, these are the same folks that ludicrously insisted that a Fox & Friends graphic in which poll numbers added up to 120 percent contained no errors.

The latest right-wing witch-hunt target: Jim Wallis

Fox News has long been a leader in witch hunts against Obama and his administration (or, really, anyone who can be remotely tagged as liberal). Now Glenn Beck, as an extension of his repeated challenged Beck to a debate over social justice, Beck demurred, his vaguely threatening statements making it clear his witch hunt was more important than reasoned debate: "In my time, I will respond. ... Just know the hammer's coming. ... And when the hammer comes, it's going to be hammering hard and all through the night, over and over."

Right-wing website WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, blundered into the breach with a poorly written article that attempted to put words in Wallis' mouth. WND claimed that Wallis was a "champion of communism," even though Wallis has declared communism to be a "failed" system; asserted that Sojourners has published "a slew of radicals" while ignoring that it has also published a slew of conservatives; and alleged that "Sojourners' official 'statement of faith' urges readers to 'refuse to accept [capitalist] structures and assumptions that normalize poverty and segregate the world by class,' " even though the word "capitalist" -- inserted by WND -- actually appears nowhere in the statement. WND even falsely claimed that Wallis "labeled the U.S. 'the great captor and destroyer of human life.' "

Somehow, we suspect that Beck's upcoming assault on Wallis will be just as divorced from reality as WorldNetDaily's.

Erick Erickson joins the "scumbags" at CNN

Should a blogger who once called a retiring Supreme Court justice a "goat f---ing child molester" be rewarded with a regular commentary gig on CNN? Doesn't matter -- the deal's been done.

CNN announced this week that RedState editor Erick Erickson has joined the network as a political contributor, mainly appearing on John King's new show. The network claimed that Erickson is "a perfect fit" for King's show, adding that "Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach."

Media Matters has detailed Erickson's history of outrageous statements, of which the aforementioned is but one.

Predictably, conservatives defended Erickson's new job, his fellow RedStaters among them. One of Erickson's RedState defenders, however, went a tad off-message: "From Non-Conservatives, to Academics and Liberal Elitists, to self-soiling and unprincipled Professional Politicians and firmly-entrenched good ole boys inside the M(ostly) S(cumbags) M(edia), each of these clowns has a tale of doom about the hell we're headed for compliments of CNN's hand basket."

We have to wonder: Does Erickson consider his new CNN colleagues to be "scumbags"?

This week's media columns

This week's media columns from the Media Matters senior fellows: Eric Boehlert examines the media myth of Obama's "falling poll numbers," and Karl Frisch tells you how to annoy Glenn Beck in five minutes or less.

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This weekly wrap-up was compiled and edited by Terry Krepel, a senior web editor at Media Matters for America.