Christian evangelist Oral Roberts, who died today at age 91, often gets lumped in with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson by those who don’t know any better and assume he was a leading member of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 80s. But while Roberts was of the same generation as the other men, [...]
Greg Sargent is reporting that Howard Dean is recommending a “no” vote on the Senate Health Care bill now that the public option and Medicare buy-in have been dropped. This means he would scuttle a bill that would benefit the vast majority of Americans (by forcing insurers to cover those with pre-existing conditions and chronic [...]
OK, so Howard Dean doesn’t have an actual vote, but his contention that Democrats should kill the public option-less Senate bill and instead push pieces of health care reform through via reconciliation is still significant. Greg Sargent at the The Plum Line got early word of a public radio interview with Dean scheduled to air [...]
Our colleague Bobby Ghosh sends in this report: Two Georgia men have been sentenced to more than a decade in prison on terrorism charges. Ehsanul Islam Sadequee got 17 years and Syed Haris Ahmed got 13, for trying to aid terrorist groups by conducting surveillance in 2005 on several landmarks in the Washington DC area. [...]
President Obama went out on a limb today, during an event at Home Depot: I know the idea may not be very glamorous, although I get really excited about it. We were at the roundtable and somebody said, “Insulation’s not sexy.” I disagree. Frank, don’t you think insulation is sexy stuff? Here’s what — here’s [...]
In a gaggle just now in the Senate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., explained the apparent contradiction between his current opposition to expanding Medicare to allow those between 55- and 64-years-old to pay a fee to join the program and his past support for similar proposals. “I didn’t change my mind on the Medicare buy-in,” Lieberman [...]
Progressives are sad. It now appears that the public option will be stripped out of the Senate health reform bill. Joe Lieberman said he would filibuster legislation that included a public option, so he is the villain of the moment, but other key senators – including Democrat Ben Nelson – had also voiced strong opposition [...]
Senators Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders and Al Franken just introduced an amendment to the Senate health reform legislation that will make the unions happy. They proposed eliminating the bill’s tax on so-called “Cadillac health plans” and replacing it with a new tax on immensely rich Americans. The new tax would be 5.4% and would apply [...]
Marc Ambinder has a fine (mixed) metaphor to describe the frustration of many Democratic lawmakers: “Lieberman has designed his public campaign as a way to streeeetch out the debate as much as possible, and just as Democrats seem to be on the verge of reaching him, like a quantum particle, he appears instantly at a [...]
