Epic Rockefeller on Conrad smackdown on Medicare buy-in!
Like I said, only for policy geeks.
One of the ne-er-do-wells from the C Street Group House, former Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) is under investigation for assaulting an opposing team’s youth league soccer coach after what I suppose must have been a particularly intense game. In a nice extra touch, the unfortunate soccer coach was allegedly already wearing a neck brace when Pickering got all pro wrestling on him.
Pickering was last in the news after his wife accused him of adultery and sued him and his mistress for “alienation of affection” — not unlike fellow C Streeters Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford.
As you can see we are down to the wire on health care reform in the senate. The ten Democrats Sen. Harry Reid has hashing out a compromise on the Public Option expect to wrap things up tomorrow. So with everything happening so quickly now and with the story changing so rapidly, we’re shifting gears in our coverage. In addition to our regular posts, we’ve started a live-updating Health Care Reform Wire to bring you moment by moment developments from Capitol Hill. You can see it through the day just below our feature story under the “Health Care Wire” rubric or at the main page here.
We have TPMDC’s Brian Beutler up at the Senate each day following the latest developments and the rest of our team following different threads of the story. But we’re always looking for more. So I wanted to reach out to all of you who are involved in whatever fashion in the negotiations, lobbying, advocacy, etc. involved with this story to ping us when there are new developments we should know about or new angles we should be pursuing.
You may have heard that an independent report found that there was “no pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN.” But what they also found was that not only were the videos substantially edited but that the editing also involved substitute voiceovers of the faux pimp and hooker who made the videos. So it’s not really possible to see what the ACORN staffers were responding to.
One of President Obama’s most persistent critics on the left has been House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), and it got to the point that the President called Conyers to tell him to stop “demeaning” him. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Tonight is the primary to choose the Democratic nominee in the upcoming special election to replace Ted Kennedy. Because of the dynamics of Massachusetts politics, the winner tonight is most likely the next senator from the Bay State. We’ll be here bringing you results live when the polls close at 8 PM.
Jon Stewart recounts the latest horrors on the road to universal health care coverage.
After getting dinged about it earlier this Fall, the Wall Street Journal decides to “bury” the phrase “death tax.”
Robert Gibbs this morning: “If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I’d visit my doctor.”