Tom Daschle was supposed to be the Secretary of HHS under President Obama. That means he was supposed to manage the roll out of Health Care Reform. We asked him what he thinks of the last 8 weeks.
Sen. Cruz (R-TX) says that killing the filibuster (and that’s really what it is) “will poison the atmosphere of the Senate.”
All the snark aside (and this deserves plenty of snark), I think this does point to the bad position Senate Republicans put themselves in – namely, that it is just not really credible that any more poisoning is possible in the Senate. And no person captures that more clearly than Sen. Cruz.
Really excited to have my old friend Ed Kilgore in our pages here at TPM. Don’t miss this piece. “It’s the Fundamentals, Stupid: Elections Aren’t Determined By Short-Term ‘Game Changes’“
Late last week Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) made a big show of trying but failing to sign up for Obamacare because of the notoriously buggy website. (Actually he appears to have been using the DC exchange site.) He even did a special tweet noting his hopeless situation. Not terribly surprising given the frustrating experiences so many have had.
Actually, it turns out he had successfully enrolled and got a call confirming that about an hour after his tweet. But it gets better.
An essay in a Harvard student-run journal of Christian thought that claims Jews suffered because they “killed Jesus” is taken down for “further editing.”
I just wrote about this below. But I wanted to say a bit more. I think all of us have probably seen that iconic video of Walter Cronkite announcing President Kennedy’s death live on CBS and then struggling, not entirely successfully, to hold back his own tears. It’s incredibly affecting but almost worn into cliche by decades of repetition.
What I’d never seen before was the half hour or so lead in to that moment. I just posted the video here.
It sure seems like it’s getting harder and harder for Mitch McConnell’s campaign to hide its frustration with the tea party.
Some people have serious projection issues: Mary Landrieu’s senate challenger’s campaign tweets image of Landrieu as Mussolini …
Sahil Kapur points out that filibuster reform holds a lot of good news for Obama: He can tilt the balance of the D.C. Circuit Court, pile up potential liberal Supreme Court justices and, ahem, fire whomever he wants.
On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Larry J. Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half Century, says this, “There is only one prediction I can make with certainty: A hundred years from now, there will still be books written and TV documentaries proposing theories while sifting evidence about the Kennedy assassination.”
We’ve been so thrilled to have Larry this week as we bring back TPM Cafe’s Book Club. Do him a solid and buy his book.