Sen. Schumer tells House Republicans they won’t let them sweep their Medicare Phase Out vote under the rug.

48 Senate Democrats have sent a letter to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) applauding his decision to drop Paul Ryan’s Medicare Phase Out Plan.

TOP GOP moneyman David Koch (the real one, not a crank caller) says President Obama deserves no credit for the bin Laden raid, but Koch says he does find Obama “scary.”

Cantor says Medicare Phase-Out push falling victim to Obama’s attacking the idea so many times.

The Deputy Leader of Canada’s new main opposition party, the (in American terms) left-liberal NDP, has come up with a whole new angle on bin Laden death conspiracy theories. He doesn’t doubt that bin Laden is dead and that US forces killed him … only that we’ve really got pictures.

Sort of like the commandos had everything figured out but forgot to bring a camera?

#packingfail

We’re doing running updates on today’s events at Ground Zero and at the Pentagon in our TPM Live-Updating bin Laden Wire.

TPM Reader MO just wrote in …

Is the GOP message now that if only they controlled the Senate and the White House as well they would phase out Medicare? Is that their ’12 campaign message?

I guess it sort of is.

Now Boehner bails out on plans to end Medicare.

Late Update: In the annals of desperate tweets, Speaker Boehner just tweeted this …

Saving Medicare off the table? Absolutely not. Nothing is off the table except raising taxes. Tax hikes will hurt economy & job creation.

The weird thing is that I didn’t realize that spittle could be embedded in a tweet. But the API gets more powerful by the day.

Eric Cantor’s spokesman Brad Dayspring tells TPM that Republicans are still behind the Ryan Plan to phase-out Medicare and replace it with private insurance. The issue, he says, is simply that they realize it can’t get past this president.

That sounds like a logical enough point. But I don’t think it disguises the fact they’re jettisoning phase out as a real-world policy goal, at least before 2013. As noted earlier, House Ways & Means Chair Dave Camp says he’s not going to waste time pushing it through committee — not wasting the time or exposing Republican Reps to unnecessary political danger.

But remember, all but six Republican members of the House voted for the Budget Resolution that includes the Ryan Medicare Phase-Out Plan. They’re on the record. They supported it. You can go on the record supporting it and take the votes or you can pass on that. I don’t see any getting around the fact that the House Republicans just shifted gears from option one to option two.

58% of registered voters say they would never vote for Donald Trump.