The health care summit may be important. Or not. But there is another summit Thursday that could prove absolutely crucial: the resumption of talks between India and Pakistan. The initial prospects don’t seem very good. The Indians want to talk about Pakistani support for terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which committed the Mumbai massacre in 2008; [...]
NPR’s Julie Rovner debunks Republican claims that this process has never before been used to make sweeping changes in health care law. Indeed, the COBRA law that allows those who lose their jobs to continue buying their employer’s coverage is actually an acronym for (*cough*) Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (*cough*). Rovner tells [...]
In Politico, Carrie Budoff Brown reports signs of a potentially important development:
Under normal circumstances, as our colleague Andrew Butters reports here, the assassination of Hamas arms supplier Mahmoud al-Mabhouh would be seen as Middle East tradecraft as usual–if a bit clumsily done, since the assassins used the passports of actual Israelis with British, Irish and French dual citizenship and since the Mossad clearly underestimated the sleuthing [...]
Some excellent reporting from our colleague Tim McGirk about the complicated relationship between the Pakistanis and the Taliban–and the recent capture of Mullah Abdel Gani Baradar, the Taliban military commander who may have been on the outs with Mullah Omar. Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that the Pakistanis seem to have captured yet [...]
Public option supporters inside and outside the Senate are still pushing Harry Reid to bring back the idea and pass it via reconciliation, Jay Rockefeller’s hesitance notwithstanding. My guess is Rockefeller’s opposition to this plan is based on concern that the public option could completely blowup the renewed push for Democratic health care reform. The [...]
White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer lays down a blog challenge to Republicans: Post your own plan for health care reform, or suffer the consequences of public humiliation. (Yep, this is what public discourse has come to: Obama has showed his, now Republicans have to show theirs.) It is an ironic coming from a White [...]
What was missing from yesterday’s White House health bill? Any new ideas that might win Republican support. That’s why I’ve been wondering if President Obama has been holding back, and might have something along these lines up his sleeve at Thursday’s health care summit. The obvious one is malpractice reform. It’s something that Obama has [...]
This theme—the government is broken, frozen, incapacitated, petty, pathetic—is everywhere. TIME and CNN have even made it a week-long theme. Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, in typical mahogany-paneled erudition, devotes his weekly column to assuring his readers that history has seen even worse. A new poll shows that 86 percent of Americans think the thesis “government is [...]
