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“There is no substitute for love. If you haven’t got a family, go find one.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LlaLK4Qjkk&hl=en&fs=1&]

(If you don’t want to deal with the formalities, start watching at around 2 minutes.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the striking contradiction between Barack Obama’s public statements about the need to negotiate Medicare drug prices, and the New York Times report that Obama had agreed to forego such negotiations in order to win drug industry support for health care reform. I called the contradiction a flip flop.

Sam Stein, …

The first sentences in her various obituaries inevitably refer to Anne Wexler as “an influential power broker” or a “powerful lobbyist,” which I suppose sends signals of a certain sort into the blogosphere. But I never thought of Anne that way, even though she was one of the more powerful women in Washington. She was a mentor, a …

I had to do some administrative catch-up work Friday afternoon in my office, which allowed me to flip back and forth between MSNBC and Fox News as an ambient distraction. They were, let me say, quite awful to watch. Both stations, stuck by no fault of their own in the summer no-news slide, have become parodies of themselves, begging …

Birthers! Health care riots! Manson redux! If it’s Friday, it’s once again time to learn what Paul Slansky took away from this week. What got your attention?

The federal government released its updated guidance for schools and flu this morning, a relatively short document with few surprises. As I laid out in my story this week in the newsstand version of TIME, schools will not be encouraged to close just because some students begin coming down with H1N1, a shift in policy from the …

If you read anything today about the great American writer and director, who has died at the age of 59, read this.

And then watch this.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOkNIUw0c2s&hl=en&fs=1&]

Iranian authorities have confirmed that they are holding three Americans–Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal–who were detained last Friday on the Iranian-Kurdish border, where they were apparently hiking for fun. They are all graduates of the University of California at Berkeley and range in age from 27 to 30. The obvious …

Nine Republicans voted with the Democrats to confirm. They are: Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.); Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.); Sen. Christopher Bond (Mo.); Sen. Susan Collins (Maine); Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine); Sen. Richard Lugar (Ind.); Sen. Mel Martinez (Fla.); Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.); Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio).

It is safe to assume …