August has been bad for Barack Obama. No doubt about it. He has been stuck repeating the same talking points for a health plan that he can’t get through Congress–largely because of dissent within his own party–while the media busies itself alternately covering the virulent, if contained, backlash to his proposal, and trying to cut …
Health Care
Beyond the Public Option
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein has become an imporant voice in the health care debate, with President Obama at one point declaring him “required reading” in the White House. In today’s column, Pearlstein argues that the public plan has become a “a political litmus test imposed on the debate by left-wing politicians and …
Conservatives Defend Zeke Emanuel
As Michael Scherer wrote the other day, Zeke Emanuel, one of President Obama’s health care advisers, has become the bogey man in some of the nuttier attacks on health care reform. Now, Jonathan Cohn hears from two leading conservative voices in the debate, people who know Emanuel and his work:
Re: Re: Public Droption
Both Joe and Karen weighed in on this earlier today, but I thought I would just add my voice to the choir saying I don’t quite understand what the big deal was Sunday over the “public 0ption” statements by administration officials–beyond the press needing a Monday story in the middle of summer. As Karen wrote, anyone who has been paying …
Re: Public Droption
I agree with Joe that this development shouldn’t have been news to anyone who has been listening over the past months to what President Obama has actually had to say about the public option. Here’s what I wrote on that score last night for TIME.com.
Now, back to my vacation, where–despite my best efforts to avoid it–the saturation …
1,000 Words
Our White House Photo Blog caught this one from President Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire earlier this week (when I was in neighboring Vermont, and well outside the range of any kind of signal). So, Swampland commenters , what do you think that last question should have been? (I’m looking at you, commenter deconstructiva.)
Sarah Palin, M.D.
The former Alaskan governor, Sarah Palin, better explains today why she is concerned about President Obama’s support for allowing doctors to offer living will consultations to patients with government funding. It is, I believe, a must read, if only as an exercise in logic. Palin is arguing in plain terms that doctors cannot be trusted to …
Obama’s Mexican Press Conference
For a few minutes Monday, the cable news networks turned live to a presidential press conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, an event most American viewers experienced as a brief respite from the regularly-scheduled health care reform horror show–the looped videotapes of angry protesters screeching at town hall meetings, the attack ads …
More Fact Check: The Obama Flip-Flop On Medicare Drug Prices
The New York Times reported Saturday that the pharmaceutical industry has “authorized its lobbyists to spend as much as $150 million on television commercials supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul.” By all appearances this seems like clear payback for Obama’s decision to, among other things, reverse his campaign promise on …
The New White House “Reality” Website
The White House has released a new website, the “Reform Reality Check,” the latest “fact-check” sites, aimed at debunking some of the more egregious characterizations of the still-amorphous health care reform effort. It is a signal that the Obama Administration is settling in for a long slog against its conservative critics, a fight not …
Health Care Mobs: Week #2
A week ago, Lloyd Doggett, a Democratic congressman from Austin, Tex., became an instant YouTube sensation when his “office hours” at a South Austin grocery store turned into a mob scene. It was one of the first indicators of what a lot of his colleagues would see in their own districts over this very rocky August recess. But Doggett …
#deathpanel on Twitter
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah…
Sarah Palin, via her Facebook page, is the latest to spread the most bizarre rumor about what is in the health care legislation that is being drafted on Capitol Hill.:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his
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