On Tuesday, the highly respected, non-partisan Institute of Medicine released a report that is sure to draw fire from some critics of Democratic health reform. In a much-anticipated paper on which services should be classified as preventive medicine under the Affordable Care Act – and therefore be 100% covered by insurers – the IOM said [...]
It’s not easy to get to Michele Bachmann. Her appearance at a rally on Tuesday in Aiken, S.C., attended by perhaps 150 people, featured three uniformed police officers and two plainclothes bodyguards. One of those guards spent much of the day preventing reporters from getting too close to the candidate. After her speech, as she [...]
–Republican Senator Tom Coburn, making the case that excising exceptions from the tax code doesn’t count as raising taxes.
Rupert Murdoch, at first exhibiting the air of a slightly confused old man, testified in front of a parliamentary committee in London on Tuesday. He began with a slightly off-cue interruption saying unsolicited that he was happy to be testifying. He followed up with the headline-baiting assertion, again by way of an interruption, that “This [...]
Updated, 2:18 p.m. An ambitious deficit reduction framework crafted by the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six earned two key endorsements on Tuesday as President Obama called it “broadly consistent” with what he wants from negotiations to raise the debt ceiling and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the upper chamber, fully embraced [...]
Columbia, S.C. Michele Bachmann spoke on Tuesday morning to a Christian group here, whom she told about growing up poor and her devout Christian faith. (“The most important thing is eternity, and what we can do for eternity.”) The Minnesota Congresswoman is looking awfully strong in Iowa, but as one GOP operative put it to [...]
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have heard that President Obama has pledged to cut $400 billion out of security spending between now and 2023. But what you may not know is that the $400 billion won’t be a cut as far as Joe and Jane Taxpayer are concerned. Todd Harrison, Washington’s defense-budget wizard, [...]
Analysts say 30-year Treasury yields are now showing signs of Washington deadlock worry. House Republicans prepare for a fight on McConnell’s contingency plan. Conservative lawmakers don’t plan on being mollified by this week’s symbolic votes. CBO’s Elmendorf on the “cap” part of “Cut, Cap and Balance”: “… limiting federal spending to 18 percent of GDP would require a [...]
There are plenty of reasons Congress is playing a high-speed game of chicken with the debt-limit negotiations, but one of the main ones is that the two parties can’t agree on what would happen if they crash. On one side, the Obama Administration, Capitol Hill Democrats, Wall Street whizzes and budget experts have been wearing [...]
Here is a Washington truism for 2011: It’s all about jobs, except when it is not, which is most of the time. House Republicans are about to put their deficit cutting plan on the table, a snappy sounding piece of legislation called Cut, Cap, and Balance. It has three main parts: First, cut $111 billion [...]
