Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a message for seniors about health care reform: “You’re gonna die sooner.”

I wanted to be charitable and considered the possibility that Sen. Coburn really said, “You’re gonna die a Sooner.” As in, Oklahoma will opt out of a public option and everyone will want to retire there. But that generous interpretation doesn’t really work in context. Watch.

Last year CNBC was touting the conspicuous consumption of politically-connected Indiana businessman Tim Durham, in a segment called “Untold Wealth: The Rise Of The Super-Rich.” Today Durham is accused by the feds of running a Ponzi scheme. It’s not the first time CNBC has been burned by its fawning coverage (Durham has almost 70 cars “but sometimes loses count”) of tycoons later accused of running Ponzi schemes.

Obama administration officials briefing reporters this afternoon on tonight’s presidential address are calling the additional troop deployments a “surge.”

Justin Elliott, with a gentle reminder on how the costs of war continue to be hidden by outsourcing war-fighting to private contractors.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) plans to introduce an anti-abortion amendment to the Senate health care bill “as identical to Stupak as it can be.”

We’ll be here covering the President’s address at 8 p.m. ET. Excerpts from the speech are expected soon (they’re actually behind schedule on that release).

This comes as a bit of a surprise. Four HIV-support groups have graded President Obama’s performance on their issue as a “D.” One activist describes the situation as “heartbreaking,” in an interview with TPMDC. Obama’s performance is actually worse than President Bush’s, two activists tell us.

Reading between the lines, the story is a bit more complicated. You might say Bush was graded on a curve: he exceeded low expectations whereas Obama has fallen short of high expectations. But it’s an interesting dynamic and I’m guessing a bit counterintuitive for a lot of people.

Evan McMorris-Santoro has our report.

The White House just released a short excerpt of the President’s prepared remarks:

Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011. Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.

8:00 PM … A pivotal moment tonight …

8:04 PM … Before the President took the stage, Col. Mike Durham, West Point’s chaplain, delivered the invocation. Sgt. Kay Messenger, a soloist, sang the National Anthem, and Col. Ty Seidule, a professor at the academy, welcomed the audience and gave a brief history of West Point, according to the pool report.

8:05 PM … The President immediately ties the present situation to 9/11. Short history lesson.

8:06 PM … The text of the President’s address, as prepared for delivery.

8:07 PM … George W. Bush sure screwed up Iraq, but let’s not get into that.

8:10 PM … Administration officials were referring to this move as a “surge” today with reporters, but the word “surge” appears only once in the prepared remarks and it’s the phrase “civilian surge” — sort of a nation-building effort.

8:12 PM … 30,000 more troops. The focus of so much of the reporting and the debate, but troop numbers are a tactical issue. This was a strategic review, and so far the speech is much more strategic in focus than I might have hoped. Troop numbers secondary to strategic objectives and limited war aims.

8:15 PM … Strategic review requires inclusion of Pakistan, which is mentioned 21 times in the speech.

8:20 PM … Strategic objectives followed by strategic directives to achieve them. Sure, they’re vague (“we will work with our partners”), but there’s a logic and deliberate process here.

8:22 PM … Process may not yield the outcome you want, but it’s much more likely to yield a reasonable outcome.

8:24 PM … He’s mostly right on the differences between Afghanistan now and Vietnam in the 1960s. Mostly.

8:25 PM … The Obama Doctrine: “As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests.”

8:27 PM … This is the Peter Orszag section of the speech. Ties war efforts to domestic economy and costs.

More here.

8:29 PM … Still stuck on the July 2011 target for beginning withdrawal. That gives him a year with all the additional troops on the ground. Of course that date is pegged to “conditions on the ground.” Where have I heard that before?

8:31 PM … As the Afghanis stand up, we will stand down?

8:34 PM … I know many progressives are disenchanted with this decision, but I’m struck again by how Obama is crafting a new progressive narrative for foreign policy and national security. Not just reality-based, though it is that. But an affirmative, positive rationale. Not a reaction to the conservative foreign policy orthodoxy, though it certainly acknowledges it.