The Week That Was

Beer! Tanning beds! Texting truck drivers! Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Madonna! Paul Slansky indexes it for us here. But Swampland commenters, we suspect, have some ideas of their own.

Cash for Clunkers?

The House is racing to get outta Dodge this afternoon and despite rampant senioritis on the Hill, Speaker Pelosi kept enough members here long enough to pass H.R. 3435 to provide an additional $2 billion in stimulus funds to the wildly successful cash for clunkers program. The vote was bipartisan, passing 316-109 with six voting [...]

Dodd Has Prostate Cancer

As if things weren’t bad enough for poor ole Chris Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut today at a press conference at 2pm in Hartford, Connecticut is expected to announce that he has early stage prostate cancer. The Banking Committee Chairman and defacto chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in Ted [...]

Barack Obama Polls Like Normal Presidents

Early in the 2008 presidential cycle, I followed then ex-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner around a Las Vegas casino. He kept saying phrases like “Transformative change as opposed to incremental change.” It was at about that moment that I decided the adjective “transformative” does not mean anything in politics. It only sounds like it means something. [...]

Badda Bam

Sure, last week’s dramatic arrests in New Jersey of 44 people including three mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis wasn’t great news for the already embattled Jon Corzine. On the other hand, Corzine’s pegging his campaign to New Jersey’s economy, so what does he care? At least someone’s having fun with it:

Health Insurance Reform?

My cover story on health care reform in this week’s TIME focuses in part on this famously eloquent President’s frustration at his inability to come up with a message at a time when, as he acknowledges, public opinion is slipping away from him. (Also, be sure you don’t miss Kate Pickert’s excellent click-through guide of [...]

The Beer Heard Around The World

Four men sat at a table drinking beer–the most photographed beer in the world. That is pretty much all there is to say, which is just how President Barack Obama wants it. Across the Rose Garden lawn, on a small landing outside the Oval Office, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs and Vice Presidential Spokesman Jay [...]

1,000 Words

From our White House Photo Blog and fellow Swamplander Brooks Kraft:

Re: Not So Fast

Pushback on yet another front: The emerging deal the bipartisan negotiators of the Finance Committee (whom some of their colleagues have begun to refer to as “the Coalition of the Willing“) isn’t going over so well with all the Democrats on the panel. Senator Jay Rockefeller, who chairs Finance’s health subcommittee (and who hasn’t been [...]

The Moment Is Beer

Sometimes the Associated Press pulls out one of those leads that just says it all. From Ben Feller’s story just moved on the wire about the Obama/Gates/Crowley Bud Light/Red Stripe/Blue Moon moment: Offering cold beer and careful words, President Barack Obama is trying to bury a political distraction and show the nation how conversation can [...]