This week has been a busy time for conservative icon Glenn Beck. During his Monday program, Beck admitted to his audience at TheBlaze.com that he had been suffering from a rare neurological disease for five years, but after undergoing hormone therapy, electric stimulation and other treatments -- not to mention relying on his faith in God -- the disease has been reversed, and he's on his way to an almost total recovery.

Then on Tuesday, MSNBC's Ed Schultz stated that Beck had “access and opportunity” to get the best treatment possible and declared: “I hope that his story motivates those who think that ObamaCare is bad, that maybe they will rethink” their opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

According to Daily Kos writer Dante Atkins, the D.C. Circuit’s Halbig decision resembled a plot twist in a movie in which “evil” conservatives know they’ve lost the Obamacare battle but “refuse to go quietly and seek to cause as much destruction as [they] can on [their] certain path to oblivion.”

Atkins wrote in a Sunday post that two factors made the court’s ruling possible: “imprecise language by the authors of the Affordable Care Act” and the “destructive psychopathy of the right wing.”

What did conservative leaders and activists feel when they learned of the D.C. Circuit Court decision on Obamacare subsidies? Happiness? Relief? American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman seemed to have another word in mind: schadenfreude -- “satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.”

In a Tuesday post, Waldman opined that, sure, righties were “excited” that the ruling was a setback for President Obama and the ACA, but “what actually had them so pleased is the possibility that millions of Americans will lose their health insurance.” Republicans, he added, “will gladly crush the lives of ordinary people if it means gaining some momentary partisan advantage.”

On Tuesday, July 22, two federal appeals courts ruled in different directions over the constitutionality of tax subsidies given to individuals who purchase health insurance through the federal ObamaCare exchange. At issue, was language in the law where subsidies would be given to individuals who purchased health insurance in an exchange “established by the state.”

In a 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the IRS went too far by providing subsidies to individuals on the federal exchange but a separate ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld those same subsidies. Despite the contradictory rulings and the likelihood that the Supreme Court will take up the case, ABC was the only network evening news show to cover the story on Tuesday night. [See video below.] 

Obamacare is succeeding, declared American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman on Thursday, and he predicts that ongoing development will bifurcate Republicans’ approaches to their 2014 congressional campaigns. Waldman thinks that purple-state GOP candidates will refrain from bashing the Affordable Care Act, but red-state candidates will discuss it in “apocalyptic terms” in order to agitate “voters [who] will still get angry every time the word [‘Obamacare’] is spoken.”

Waldman sees that split as part of a “larger Republican dilemma” caused by “the interests of the national GOP [being] at odds with the interests of the bulk of the party's officeholders,” who have to answer to the base. One result of this dilemma, he added, will be that in 2016, the eventual Republican presidential nominee “will face two dramatically different electorates; [i]t's as though they'll be running in Mississippi in the primaries, then in Ohio in the general election.”