Jon Stewart previews the health care summit. Watch.
We’re following every wrinkle of the health care summit over the next six — count ’em, 6! — hours in our Health Care Summit Wire.
Bush and Cheney meet today in person for the first time since leaving office. That and the days other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Former Rep. Harold Ford (who voted for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in 2004) went to face the New York City chapter of the Stonewall Democrats tonight at the LGBT Community Services Center in Greenwich Village. And our Rachel Slajda and Jillian Rayfield were there.
“I freely admit there are issues I’ve evolved on,” Ford told the sometimes boisterous crowd.
Here’s their report.
Frank Gaffney has never been a stranger to the crazy. I remember the first time I saw him was on a panel about ten years ago talking about Chinese plans to take over the Panama Canal. But this one really breaks new ground. Frank has discovered that Obama has used the Pentagon’s new logo for national missile defense to send a secret coded message about his plans to submit America to Islam and the rule of Sharia law. To quote the man: “Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.”
In an interview with Salon, Sen. Harkin (D-IA) pretty much said the Public Option just ain’t going to be in this bill. Not exactly closing the door or saying it can’t happen. But he clearly doesn’t think it’s likely and expects it will have to wait for a subsequent piece of legislation.
You would figure that after a top Justice Department official writes a scathing memo about how the department’s own Office of Professional Responsibility handled a case there would be some changes made in that office, right? Stands to reason.
So after reading associate deputy attorney general David Margolis’ rebuke of OPR’s handling and analysis of whether torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee violated their professional responsibilities, we decided to ask Attorney General Eric Holder whether he plans any review of OPR or to make any changes there. His response may surprise you.
A fun moment on the House floor today as Republicans got their knickers in a bunch over Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) declaration during a health reform debate that “the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of insurance companies.” Watch.
It was always hard for me to buy into the idea that we’d learned our lessons from the dotcom bust or the 2008 financial collapse so long as we were still producing and purchasing the Hummer. There are other emblems of our excess but none quite so blatant. Now it looks like the Hummer will be no more. GM has been unable to find a buyer for the Hummer line and will discontinue production later this year.