[Updated below]
Little noticed amid all the hubbub over Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You Lie!” screech last week was the decision by Obama’s senior advisers to plant the White House to the right of both House and Senate Democrats on the issue of illegal immigration in the health care reform bill. To understand how, one must get a bit in the …
From TIME’s Sophia Yan:
Ripples of protesters, thousands of them of all ages, lined Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol Saturday. Deafening chants could be heard, from “You lie, you lie!” echoing South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s Wednesday speech to plaintive
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Here’s a story from me about the latest in the Senate on health care reform. I was surprised to hear that the White House hasn’t been wooing any other moderate Republicans aside from Maine’s Olympia Snowe:
During the summer of discontent the White House stopped reaching out to some key potential votes: the other senator from Maine,
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The Census Bureau updates its estimate of the number of Americans people in the United States* who lack health insurance. As of the end of 2008:
At the end of a cabinet meeting today, President Obama took a couple questions from reporters. The first:
Q Do you accept Wilson’s apology, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do. I’m a big believer that we all make mistakes. He apologized quickly and without equivocation, and I’m appreciative of that.
That is right, to a point. Wilson …
The initial polling from last night’s speech is good, but looking forward, Obama must work on two levels to get this bill to the finish line. Here’s my story for TIME.com on what they were trying to accomplish last night, and how things look today.
I got the same impression from the President’s speech as the New York Times’ David Herzenhorn did:
After the jump, the text of Teddy Kennedy’s letter that President Obama cited in the speech. Also, Obama will host a group of bipartisan Senate centrists tomorrow — including, Michael Scherer reports from the Hill, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson — at the White House to talk about health care.
After the jump is the text of Rep. Charles Boustany’s GOP response to the President’s speech. Republican leaders said they didn’t want a big name to deliver this rebuttal – thus the relatively unknown Boustany, who hails from Louisiana and happens to be a heart surgeon. Also, wonder what some GOP members were waving during the …
Read along after the jump. Members named: John Dingell, John McCain, Ted Kennedy, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley.
As Michael notes, the President’s speech begins with a tribute to John Dingell Sr., a New Deal Congressman who was fighting for universal coverage 65 years ago, and whose son carries on the fight. Here’s a story I wrote on the father and the son, all the way back in the pre-internet-link days of 1993:
Here are the excerpts from President Obama’s speech tonight, which have been released by the White House:
I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and
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Tonight, President Barack Obama will once again declare his preference for the so-called public insurance option, a cause célèbre for Congressional liberals and a deal breaker for many Senate moderates. But that’s about as far as the president will go. He won’t demand a public option. He won’t threaten a veto if he doesn’t get …
