With the House returning to session tomorrow, the final stretch of negotiations over health reform begins in earnest. While there are plenty of differences to be worked out between the House and Senate bill, the so-called “Cadillac tax” is emerging as the main flashpoint. Here’s a brief story I wrote on this for TIME.com.
There should be no surprise that Republicans have raised a considerable dust storm about Harry Reid’s obnoxious private comments about Barack Obama. Democrats would do the same, if the situation were reversed, and often have. But it is just so much baloney to find moral equivalency between Reid’s support of a black man for President [...]
George Will has a column today in which he deposits all that is wrong in California at liberalism’s doorstep. Certainly, there’s enough blame to go around–and the public employees unions in California have been an implacable force assuring that the state is run for the benefit of its employees rather than its citizens (and, once [...]
Trouble for Democrats seems to be brewing in Massachusetts where a special election to fill Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat is due to be held a week from Tuesday — on January 19. It’s hard to imagine a Republican winning in solidly blue Massachusetts but GOP State Senator Scott Brown has been steadily gaining on the [...]
In Memory of Doug Marlette… When the case of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed arose, my reaction was pretty wimpy. I didn’t think they should be published in Time Magazine, lest we make a bad situation worse and get more people killed. But my pal, the brilliant cartoonist Doug Marlette, disagreed vehemently. Doug had gotten [...]
Michael Tomasky has a really interesting post up about the efficacy of civilian v. military trials of terrorists during the Bush Administration. Guess what? Civilian procedures put a much higher percentage of terrorists behind bars. That still leaves the vexing question–if this is, as the President said, a war against Al Qaeda–of where we draw [...]
A small scandal is brewing in the health care policy world today concerning Jonathan Gruber, a health care economist at MIT. Gruber has been a source for many, many journalists covering the health care reform debate – including me. As Firedoglake’s Marcy Wheeler reports on her blog emptywheel, Gruber had been working as a government [...]
TIME.com has a surreal photo essay on Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ski vacation together:
