The AP mobile alert I got this evening read: “Haiti Capital largely destroyed in quake.”

Charlie Rangel says House/Senate negotiations are at an impasse. “We’ve got a problem on both sides of the Capitol. A serious problem,” Charlie Rangel tells Roll Call. Another senior Dem says no progress has been made at all. And they probably won’t have a bill for the president until February. This article in the AP confuses me even more, suggesting the negotiators may drop the mandate for large employers to provide coverage and some other points about the exchange system that don’t even square with my understanding of the two underlying bills.

All the details aside, are we really serious about this? Are they going to fumble this ball at the five yard line? February? March? Why not May?

Grijalva: New compromise on “cadillac tax” is a good start. But it’s not enough.

One thing that emerged from yesterday’s Massachusetts senate debate is that while Republican Scott Brown clearly wants to filibuster the Health Care bill on final passage, he doesn’t seem clear on why he opposes it. In last night’s debate one of his arguments was that since Massachusetts already has the equivalent to the federal bill within the state, why do people from Massachusetts need to help provide it for the rest of America. Does that make any sense? I think if Dems look a little more closely at Brown’s series of positions on Health Care reform they’ll see some good grist for attacks.

Next, is that the end of Health Care reform if Brown pulls out a win?

Not necessarily. The Democrats do have the option to take the senate bill, have the House pass it verbatim and then bring it to the president’s desk. There’s no constitutional or parliamentary impediment to doing that. Whether Nancy Pelosi could get her caucus to do that, that’s another matter. But there is this alternative to getting 60 votes in the senate again.

New poll from Rasmussen: Coakley 49%, Brown 47%.

Where do black people get off thinking they know more about racism than Republican talking heads and strategists?

There must be something wrong with me. Because I’m starting to find the Leno-O’Brien feud fairly compelling. And the weird thing is that it’s actually been a long time now since even watched late night TV. And when I did, I was a Letterman man.

Also somewhat upsetting is that in his press release here, Conan says he’s been on the air for 17 years. This is shocking in itself.

Frank Gaffney is on Fox right now making his argument that Obama needs to appoint a ‘Team B’ to come in and analyze the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to make sure that Obama — as Gaffney thinks — isn’t radically underestimating the threat. The Fox spot goes on to draw the analogy to the first ‘Team B’ — which emerging neoconservatives got appointed to double-check what they then deemed to be the CIA’s grave underestimate of Soviet power. Really? You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. All the above is reasonable history up till that point. What they somehow failed to mention was that we later got a chance to do what amounted to a post-mortem of the Soviet Union — something seldom wholly possible in intelligence work. And it turned out that the neocons and the fabled ‘B team’ hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about. Not only were the neocons off base, even the CIA had greatly overstated Soviet military and especially economic power in the 1970s. Read More

Changing the name from Blackwater to Xe only changes so much: Justin Elliott rounds up the latest homicide case against Blackwater operatives, this time in Afghanistan.

After he left the presidency, Teddy Roosevelt famously went on Safari in Africa. George W. Bush is following in his footsteps by keynoting a safari & hunting convention in Reno.