[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.c-spanarchives.org/flash/cspanPlayer.swf" fvars=" pid=286314-4 ; clipStart=981.89 ; clipStop=1066.28 ; autoplay=0 " width="365" height="340" /] (As usual, thanks to our friends at the C-SPAN Video Library)

Senate Republicans are expected to bring down the first of President’s nominees: David Hayes, Obama’s pick for the No. 2 slot at the Interior Department. The vote, expected at 10:30, has nothing to do with Hayes’ qualifications; he was confirmed to the identical post nine years ago under the Clinton Administration. Western Republicans have been [...]

Maureen Dowd is very good today, putting this extraordinary jerk into perspective. For those who haven’t read Bart Gellman’s excellent Angler–I’m reading it now–you should pick it up immediately for a complete portrait of evil in office.

Hard to miss in the flood of health care news this week is the fact that it has been all about cost–with relatively little mention of the other goal of health care reform, universal coverage. Of course, many health experts argue that it is impossible to achieve the former without the latter. But curbing the [...]

As a start, Peter Orszag uses his blog today to try to, uh, “clear the air” of the growing controversy over OMB’s document suggesting that the EPA’s recent carbon regulation will cause serious economic problems. MEANWHILE: Marc Ambinder solves the entire nothing burger that is this OMB document controversy. The OMB document was a product [...]

It’s not a surprise, exactly, but scary nonetheless: The recession is taking its toll on the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, which are careening even faster toward insolvency: The new projection, in an annual report from the programs’ trustees, says that Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will be exhausted in 2017, just a year [...]

Protesters favoring single payer health care showed up today at the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on financing health care reform. Their demonstration is silent, until about 5:30, at which point Chairman Max Baucus ejects them from the hearing room. (H/T C-SPAN Video Library)

The Washington Post has an interesting tidbit today on the McKiernan sacking. Apparently, the general was cautious about standing up local militias to defend against the Taliban, an experiment that has recently begun in Wardak Province: One senior government official involved in Afghanistan policy said McKiernan was overly cautious in creating U.S.-backed local militias, a [...]

Rep. Pete Hoekstra today called on the CIA to release notes taken in a September 2002 intelligence briefing of him and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, marking week two in a fight of he said she said that is growing to Dostoevskian proportions. Presumably the notes, which Hoekstra [...]