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Just two days after 70 Senators voted to break the deadlock and move forward with his nomination, Hoosier Judge David Hamilton was confirmed by the full Senate this afternoon by a vote of 59-39. Senator Lugar was the only Republican to vote for confirmation.

Judge Hamilton, a Bloomington native, has served on the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana since 1994. Hamilton also served as counsel to then-Governor Bayh from 1989-1991. He was President Obama's first nominee to the federal bench in March, but his nomination has been held up by Republican Senators since the Judiciary Committee endorsed him in June.

Judge Hamilton is the nephew of former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, and the brother-in-law of Obama's stalled nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, IU Professor Dawn Johnsen.

Earlier today, I caught a horrendous anti-healthcare reform ad, targeted at Hoosiers, on the radio. Everything in the ad was either factually wrong or dangerously misleading, so I listened closely for the supplier of this misinformation campaign. As it turns out, it was the Employment Policies Institute, one of many front groups set up by the pro-drunk driving, pro-mercury in fish, pro-smoking lobbyist Rick Berman. (You may recall seeing him recently on The Rachel Maddow Show or a couple of years ago on The Colbert Report.)

This radio spot is part of a new push by the Employment Policies Institute to support their "Rethink Reform" website - while there's no mention of these radio ads in their releases, they are promoting their Fox News commercial and print ads. Mr. Berman has recently published several guest columns in papers around the country, including this one in the Times of Northwest Indiana:

But calls to force all employers to pay for health insurance are misguided: not every company has a profit margin that can afford to pay those costs. A payment mandate would often cause more unemployment (increasing the number of uninsured).

The radio ad specifically claims that the healthcare reforms being considered would raise rates on Hoosier families, encourage businesses to dump their employees' health coverage, and slash Medicare benefits. Each of these is just blatantly wrong.

In fact:

• The non-partisan CBO studies have shown that the House-passed plan would significantly lower premiums from their projected rates by 2016.
• The award-winning FactCheck.org says that there's little (if any) evidence to support the idea that employers will drop insurance, or the claim about increased unemployment that Mr. Berman makes in his NWI Times column.
• FactCheck.org says that there would be no cuts to Medicare benefits. And despite the conservative spin, the recent CMS report shows that the House bill actually extends Medicare's solvency period by 5 years.

Media Matters has a great takedown of what the coordinated TV spot gets wrong - but I think the fact that they're only running the ad on Fox News says all you need to know about its credibility.