Looks like the charade of including Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi in the health care negotiations is over. It is not impossible that other Republicans who are not Senators from Maine can be located to support health care reform. But it’s also entirely possible that the Republicans will continue their kamikaze ways and oppose a reform that …
Domestic Policy
Hucka-bull
Where do they come up with these things?
Mike Huckabee told his radio audience today that under the Obama health plan, Ted Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” upon being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Leave aside the fact that, with all the medical intervention that money could buy, the Senator …
26 Lies About Health Reform
FactCheck.org takes a look at one viral e-mail whose “facts” are frequently quoted at town hall meetings and discovers:
The chain e-mail purports to give “a few highlights” from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the
…
Health Reform: The Outlook
There’s been a lot of suggestion this week that Ted Kennedy’s death might be a moment that brings his former colleagues in Congress together with a renewed sense of purpose, one that forces them to bridge their differences, to work together to pass meaningful health reform as a tribute to him. I think Ted would have been the first to …
Grassley Knocks White House, Republican Cooperation Faltering
In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a key Finance Committee Republican, raised serious doubts about the prospects of a bipartisan deal on health care in the Senate. He also offered a pointed criticism of Barack Obama’s hands-off strategy to health care reform negotiation, which is based on the idea that …
Somewhat Better Than A Dining Room Table
Jon Stewart had on Betsy McCaughey last night. McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York, who made her career and reputation in 1993 by speaking out against President Clinton’s health reform effort with arguments that often ranged from slightly misleading to outright fiction. (See here for the Atlantic’s Jim Fallows on one of …
Obama Looks To Heavens (For Health Reform Inspiration)
The debate over health reform, most days, concerns earthly things, like spreadsheets, CBO projections, medicare reimbursements rates, and health insurance qualifications. It’s a tough one to win politically, because not just because it is so boring and complicated, but also because it’s complexity makes misrepresentation easier. So Obama …
Health Care Odds And Ends
1. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, still sounding a bit like the head of the DCCC, says Republican leadership “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”
2. White …
Why August Does Not Matter
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 …
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 …