The President seems unsure when to salute at the July 24 Evening parade at the Marine Corps Barracks in Washington.
A webstory from me about the ongoing health care reform negotiations in both chambers on the Hill. The Senate late last night wrapped up its work on the defense authorization bill and broke for the weekend. Most of the working group of 6 have gone home. Staff will work through the weekend on cost bending [...]
Not often do you see David Brooks and Paul Krugman in substantive agreement on anything, but they are today–on the need to contain health care costs and the gravity of the President’s effort to confront this problem head on. The immediate challenge is Medicare reform: the fee-for-service system, where doctors are paid by the procedures–tests [...]
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, one of the top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, today said he would not vote for President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. The decision is a surprising blow to Sotomayor as Hatch not only voted for the last 12 nominees to the bench — Republican or Democrat [...]
Swampland commenters are constantly exhorting me on the link between health industry campaign contributions and the difficulties that health reform is having getting through Congress. There is indeed a lot of money being lavished on the key players in this fight, and there is a lot of good reporting being done on that. There should [...]
Silly me. I responded to the substance of last night’s press conference, which I thought was quite good, but heavily nuanced, since the President is in the midst of complex negotiations on health care. Most others responded to the style–actually, no, the style was pretty much the same old Obama–they responded to the “lack of” [...]
On Obama and the Iranian nuclear program. The column was done before Hillary Clinton made her statement–later sort of retracted–about the U.S. protecting the Middle East with a nuclear umbrella, but it seems to me that containment and deterrence would be a perfectly acceptable policy, if the Iranians foolishly want to proceed with a bomb [...]
Back when I was in the newspaper business, there used to be a kind of story that we called a “clip and save”–a clear, concise explanation of something that you wanted to keep handy for reference as you wrote your own stories about a complicated subject. If there’s an internet equivalent of that for health [...]
He’s good. You forget that when you haven’t seen him in a while. He seemed entirely in command, not at all rattled by the toxic political dust storm swirling in Washington. His answers were supple, substantive. The questions were pretty good. The key point that he hammered was the ugliness of the status quo. “If [...]
I just watched Brian Williams spend a precious five minutes of his evening newscast on the question of whether Barack Obama is actually American. Let me end the suspense: he is. There is a birth certificate. He was born in Hawaii. You knew that, right? But right-wing nutballs and media giants like Lou Dobbs–whose presence [...]
