Frankly, it’s a little bit embarrassing to be citing the Commentary crowd so often. But the fact is that the other powerful venues which seem to understand that the Palestinians do not really want peace--or act as if they don’t--are few and far between. Yes, there is the Washington Post, where Jackson Diehl, Charles Krauthammer, and Chuck Lane analyze what everyone can (but most refuse to) see or describe. Then, of course, there are the editorials, the collective voice of the Post, which strike an independent voice free of Arabisant cant and America bashing.
It's Wednesday morning. House leaders have indicated they want to vote on both the Senate health care bill and amendments to it by Saturday night. But, as you may have noticed, they still haven't said precisely what the wording of those amendments will be. And that's because they still haven't finalized them.
It’s roughly two weeks shy of the September 12 march on Washington, and Glenn Beck is distraught. Behind him on the cavernous Fox News set is Beck’s familiar dry-erase board, upon which various insults are written in Beck’s looping print. “This is what people have said about me just this week ... the blogs and everything else,” Beck says, before proceeding to tick off a few: hysterical, cult leader, shameless opportunist.
From: Kevin Carey
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Ben Wildavsky
Subject: Looking for answers to the problems plaguing education? Diane Ravitch doesn't offer them.
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports today that a lot of people at Fox News don't like Glenn Beck:
Pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell have a Washington Post op-ed urging the Democrats to abandon health care reform out of their own self-interest:
As first reported by Chris Cilizza in the Washington Post, pollster Joel Benenson is circulating a memo arguing that health care reform has become more popular. Writes Benenson:
Allow me to posit a case study: Two high-ranking government officials are the subject of multiple newspaper and magazine profiles in the span of a few weeks. The first official resists the attention. He isn’t so much as quoted in any of the pieces, whose authors glumly note his lack of enthusiasm for their projects. By contrast, the second official goes out of his way to cooperate with the profile-writers. He submits to numerous, on-the-record interviews and mounts a detailed defense of his actions. His aides even distribute one of the articles after the fact.
Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
WASHINGTON -- For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president's determination to press ahead and get health care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief.
Obama's critics have regularly accused him of not being as tough or wily or forceful as LBJ was in pushing through civil rights and the social programs of his Great Society. Obama seemed willing to let Congress go its own way and was so anxious to look bipartisan that he wouldn't even take his own side in arguments with Republicans.
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt devotes most of his column today to showing that President Obama cares a lot about covering the uninsured. He then lands at the conclusion that this goes to show Obama doesn't really care about controlling costs:
Over the weekend, The Washington Post reported that John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are preparing to unveil their much-discussed Senate climate bill in the next few weeks. The eye-opening twist, though, is that their bill probably won’t include a single cap-and-trade program for the entire economy. Instead, it would include different types of pollution controls for different sectors.
The Washington Post has a good recap of how Republicans decided to abandon health care reform last year:
The New Orleans Saints’ strategy in last month’s NFC championship game was primitive and perfectly suited: Take advantage of quarterback Brett Favre’s 40-year-old body by inflicting a caveman’s clubbing. Hundreds of pounds of muscle and anger and adrenaline hit him at high speed a total of 17 times, and Favre, perhaps playing the last game of his career, managed to withstand the punishment until the third quarter, when he severely hurt his ankle.
"Southern voters are interested in solutions,” said Harold Ford Jr. in 2003. “They can spot a fake.” Perhaps this explains Ford’s subsequent decision to decamp from the South in search of a more gullible electorate.
"Southern voters are interested in solutions,” said Harold Ford Jr. in 2003. “They can spot a fake.” Perhaps this explains Ford’s subsequent decision to decamp from the South in search of a more gullible electorate.
The ability of a minority in the Senate to prevent the federal government from dealing with pressing national problems -- or even to staff the executive branch -- is so glaring that few people, outside of partisan Republicans, can deny that there's a problem. Unfortunately, much of official Washington remains unable to recognize the nature of the problem. The problem is that the minority party has a strong political incentive to block the majority's agenda and render the president a failure, and the filibuster gives it the incentive to do so.
The Washington Post's Jonathan Capeheart calls Evan Bayh's retirement a "brain drain." Hmm. How to out this. I once had the chance, along with numerous other reporters and editors, to speak with Bayh in an off-the-record context.
How can we measure whether President Obama’s health care summit on Feb. 25 is a success? Well, the obvious answer is that it will succeed if Congress passes comprehensive health care reform soon afterwards. But there is an intermediate step that may be necessary. The effect of Obama’s summit has to be to boost the public’s approval of the health care plan that Obama and the Democrats in Congress will be pushing. And it has to show up in opinion polls, because that’s what members of Congress will look at.
The Washington Post examines Scott Brown's record in the Massachusetts State House. There's isn't much of one:
If you clear a parking space in the snow for your car, are you allowed to keep that space? The Washington Post has a good rundown of the laws surrounding this question:
Bill Kristol writes in the Washington Post:
The idea that Republicans haven’t had a chance to present their ideas on health care reform is a bit mind-boggling. Five separate congressional committees had hearings; each chamber had floor debates. That’s hundreds of hours the GOP had to talk about health care, all of it in public view and televised on C-SPAN. And that’s not even including all of the unofficial channels at the Republicans’ disposal. Generally speaking, the party of Rush Limbaugh and Fox Television doesn’t struggle to get across its message.
