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  • Gallup Poll: Health Care Reform Now America's Most Divisive Issue

    Sarah Kliff | Feb 9, 2010 12:40 PM
    Republican support for Obama’s handling of health care reform is at a mere 7 percent. The gap between Republican and Democrat support—67 points—is the largest for all issues that Gallup polled on, which includes terrorism (52-point gap on POTUS support) and the economy (56-point gap).

    Again, this is a shift from August: back then, the economy was the most polarizing issue, with a 71-point gap between Democrats and Republicans. More than any other foreign or domestic policy, health care reform has the dubious distinction of most polarizing policy in terms of how you view Obama. 
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  • A GOP Plan for Deficit Reduction

    Ben Adler | Feb 9, 2010 09:00 AM

    I've been hard on congressional Republicans recently for pandering to voters' ignorance by offering politically appealing but irresponsible slogans instead of a credible conservative vision of how to meet America's challenges, even those they harp on Obama for failing to address, such as our rising budget deficits. So, it is only fair that I praise Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc) for coming forward with a proposal that could actually reduce long term deficits.

    Ryan would to do so by essentially eliminating Medicare (and privatizing Social Security). Everyone under 55 today, would not get covered by the U.S. government. Instead they would get vouchers with which to buy health insurance upon turning 65. You can quickly surmise what this would lead to: insurers, with a customer base that is high-risk, would either charge rates well above what the vouchers provide, and/or offer only bare bones service for the cost of a voucher. The result: seniors who are uninsured or under-insured. Ultimately, seniors would die as a result, as younger Americans who lack insurance do now.

    This is a conservative vision of government, and you cannot expect Democrats to embrace it. But if the Republicans ran on such a proposal and won control of Congress and the White House they could claim a legitimate mandate to enact it. 

    Alas, Republicans are all but certain not to run any such program.

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  • Statistics GOP Criticized Were Originally Touted by Bush Administration

    Mark Hosenball | Feb 9, 2010 06:30 AM

    Maybe it's time to stop some of the name-calling over counterterrorism policy and start checking the facts. As the debate over Obama administration counterterrorism policies has heated up in the wake of the failed Christmas Day underpants airplane bombing, prominent Republicans, ranging from leading senators to a former press secretary for George W. Bush, have attacked the current administration for claiming that hundreds of terrorist suspects had been successfully prosecuted through the civilian court system during Bush's presidency. But it turns out that the Obama administration's claims do appear to be well documented—assuming that an official budget request sent to Congress by Bush's last attorney general was truthful itself.

    For the full story, visit Declassfied.


  • Murtha: A Macho Man Who Helped a Woman Gain Power

    Eleanor Clift | Feb 8, 2010 05:25 PM

    John Murtha was Nancy Pelosi's friend and mentor, and his backing her for leader over Steny Hoyer, a longtime insider player in the Democratic caucus, gave her the street creds she needed to win as the first woman to hold that high a position in what was an old boys' club. A gruff former combat Marine officer, Murtha provided political cover for Pelosi and other left-wing Democrats in their opposition to the Iraq war. After having initially supported the war, Murtha became an outspoken opponent, calling for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2005. As a once reliable Bush administration ally, his defection signaled the growing disaffection with Bush's war policies. Murtha's long history of pro-military votes and close alliance with the military helped rebuff Republican charges that Pelosi and other anti-war Democrats were endangering national security.

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  • Rep. John Murtha Dies at 77

    Katie Connolly | Feb 8, 2010 03:32 PM

    Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha died this afternoon at a hospital in Virginia, following complications related to gall bladder surgery he underwent in January. Murtha, 77, had served in the House for 36 years. The first Vietnam veteran elected to Congress and chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Murtha wielded enormous power over defense related issues and boldly sought earmarks that benefited his district.

    For more on Murtha, his life, achievements and brushes with scandal, The Washington Post has a comprehensive obit.


  • Forget the Crib Notes, It’s Palin’s Unsavvy That Really Worries Republicans

    Daniel Stone | Feb 8, 2010 01:53 PM
    Palin 2012 buzz is again in the air, this time after her punchy and oft-replayed address to the national Tea Party Convention on Saturday. The fallout from the speech has been predictable. Her base unified firmly while the left calculates just how big a threat she’ll pose in November and 2012. Meanwhile, the cable and Web echo chambers have honed in on the delectable story of some crib notes that Palin conspicuously wrote on her hand to remind herself of prepared talking points.

    Embarassing, perhaps, especially after Palin knicked Obama in the same hour for also trying to appear candid by reading from a teleprompter. But it’s far from a fatal gaffe. There was much more included in Palin’s speech and her general self-promoting strategy to pick apart, and Republican politicos aren’t happy with any of the above.
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  • Study Confirms: Millennials Are Apathetic

    Sarah Kliff | Feb 8, 2010 01:36 PM

    That is not an article from The Onion; it’s actual, real news.

    The Pew Research Center has some new, interesting numbers up on public opinion and health-care reform. The general takeaway is that, while the same numbers of Americans support  reform, they’re increasingly pessimistic about its odds of passing. It’s notable that, despite all the roadblocks in the legislative process, the same number of Americans generally stand behind it.

    What I found most interesting was a section on millennials and health care—partially because I’m a millennial who covers health care, partially because it reveals many interesting schisms in my generation’s support for reform.
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  • White House Casts Brennan in Unusual Political Role

    Michael Isikoff | Feb 8, 2010 12:47 PM

    Michael Isikoff reports on the Declassified blog:

    White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan played an unusual role Sunday when he swiped at congressional Republicans for bashing the administration's handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect.

    Normally, it is the White House political aides such as David Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, both seasoned veterans of the 2008 Obama campaign, who take the offensive against the president's GOP critics on the Sunday talk shows.

    But this week, it was Brennan─a professional U.S. intelligence official who now serves on the president's national-security staff─who played the attack-dog role. While national-security aides─like Richard Clarke after 9/11─have been used in the past to rebut political attacks by providing "background" briefings, and Brennan himself did the Sunday talk-show circuit immediately after the Christmas Day bombing─it is extremely rare for a White House aide in his position to so directly target the president's critics, much less members of Congress by name, according to several former White House staffers and congressional staffers.

    Read the entire post here.


  • The White House Health-Care Summit: Jedi Move or Giant Fail?

    Katie Connolly | Feb 8, 2010 11:08 AM
    Jon Stewart has said on a couple of occasions that he can’t tell if Obama is like a Jedi master, three moves ahead of the rest of us all the time, or if this health-care thing is kicking his ass. It’s unclear which category yesterday’s announcement of a televised, bipartisan health-care-reform summit at the White House falls in to.

    On first blush it seems like a smart move. Rather than letting Republicans snipe on the sidelines, slowly killing the bill, Obama is bringing them in, squarely implicating them in the legislation’s fate. Keep your enemies close and all that. Republicans will get what they’ve been clamoring for─a transparent set of negotiations, live on TV. They’ll be able to raise their issues with the bill and be forced to articulate their alternatives, rather than just offering blanket opposition. But (and for Republicans this is a big but) they won’t be starting from scratch. They’ll be working to alter the bills that have already passed the House and Senate.
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  • Why Sarah Palin Can't Run for President

    Daniel Stone | Feb 6, 2010 11:12 PM
    In what was Sarah Palin’s highest-profile speech since her address to the Republican National Convention in 2008, the former veep candidate addressed the National Tea Party Convention Saturday evening in Nashville. From the start, she took aim at President Obama and Democrats in Congress. Yet she also referred frequently to the problems with Washington in general, an insinuation that Republicans might also be to blame for the problems she and tea partiers see with the federal government. The basis of her speech, as she put it, was simple: rein in government spending, be more firm on national security, and keep the government out of businesses and people’s lives. And not one person in the room didn’t think she was dead right.

    Palin was clearly preaching to the choir, an audience of 1,100 hanging on her every word. In the style of the State of the Union, the speech included dozens of applause lines that brought the room to its feet. The crowd even broke into chants of “Sar-uh, U-S-A!” and later on, “Run, Sarah, run,” when discussing the prospects of a Sarah Palin presidency (a subject she skirted strategically). She even did something that Sarah Palin almost never does: take questions.
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  • Blueprint of a Tea-Party Platform

    Daniel Stone | Feb 6, 2010 02:51 PM
    Tea partiers will be the first to tell you that they don’t intend to start a third party. They’re angry with Washington and with the behavior of both parties, but the way toward the nation’s salvation is to hold current leaders more accountable, not sending new ones to fill the ranks of Congress. “We just don’t have enough time to do that,” says Joyce Smith, a retiree from Ellijay, Ga.

    Since the movement’s first-ever convention started in Nashville on Thursday, the pursuit for reporters has simply been to figure out the force of the movement and how formidable its voice will be in November. Partiers are uniformly against public spending and expansion of government, but it’s harder to figure out what exactly they’re for. Campaigning on "throwing the bums out" might help win an election, but it’s not a governing strategy. And until now, one of the movement’s biggest snags has been its inability to articulate concrete changes it would make to Washington and the federal government.
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  • Obama Seeks to Change the Narrative at DNC Meeting

    Katie Connolly | Feb 6, 2010 11:51 AM
    A tieless Barack Obama ditched his presidential limo in favor of an SUV this morning and made a short trek up 16th Street in snow-covered D.C. (four minutes, according to the pool report) to fire up the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting.

    If one thing has become abundantly clear about Obama throughout both his campaign and his time in the Oval Office, it’s that he is most energized when his back is against the wall. For all the talk about the woes his administration is facing, the president brought his game face today, his feisty demeanor demonstrating he’s in the mood for a fight. And he’s not giving up on health-care reform. “We are moving forward,” he forcefully declared, twice, to a rousing ovation from the audience.
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  • Obama Considered Turning Underpants Bomber Over to Military Courts, Rejected the Option

    Newsweek | Feb 5, 2010 06:17 PM

    Since "underpants bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed Christmas Day bombing plot, his prosecution has become a political football, with the Obama administration opting to try him in civil courts and Republicans pushing for him to be turned over to the military. NEWSWEEK's Mark Hosenball reports that Obama and officials including Attorney General Eric Holder considered that path, but opted to stick with civil courts:

    The subject of whether Abdulmutallab should be transferred to military custody came up at a meeting the president held in the White House Situation Room in early January, shortly before the Justice Department announced it would proceed against him in the civilian-court system, according to little-noticed statements made by one or more "senior administration officials" who gave a background briefing to White House reporters on Feb. 2.

    But according to [an] official, "nobody advocated for that position. People were comfortable throughout this process that it was going in the right direction and that given what we can do in a military commission, what we can do in the criminal justice system, there was full unanimity on the part of the seniors that this was the right way to go."

    Read the full story on the Declassified blog.


  • Photos From the (Tea Party) Revolution

    Daniel Stone | Feb 5, 2010 04:05 PM

    The revolution may not be televised, but it has been photographed by your humble man on the ground. Photos from the trenches at tea-party HQ.


     
    Everyone wanted a piece of this fellow, William Temple, who showed up in full Revolutionary costume. Extra points? Absolutely. But it's worth noting he's a historical actor.
     
     
    Where else can politics become fashionable? Tea-party jewelry.
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  • Will Incorporating the Tea Party Fly With Its Activists?

    Daniel Stone | Feb 5, 2010 03:10 PM

    The only press conference open to all media at the Tea Party Convention just wrapped, and the newsiest component from it was the announced effort to incorporate the tea party into what organizer Mark Skoda said would be called the Ensuring Liberty Political Action Committee. Except not. It wouldn't be part of the tea party, per se. It would be a separate corporation (and we would normally call it a PAC, but Skoda repeatedly used the word "corporation," so we'll go with it).

    Skoda said that such a corporatization didn't take anything away from the tea-party movement, which has experienced most of its success at the grassroots level. In fact, it would be completely unrelated except that it would appeal to the values of the same conservative thinkers who have formed the tea party proper. The money will be managed by Skoda, who at the moment is the only member of the board of directors. Who else will be leading this group, someone asked? "I don't—I'm not going to announce that yet," said Skoda.

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