It’s truly done. The House just passed the slightly modified ‘reconciliation’ fix bill by a 220-207 vote.
It would be as foolish to say where things are going based on the last week as it was to make predictions on the same basis two or three weeks before. But I hope the current sense of turnabout (whether temporary or lasting) shows people once and for all the importance and transformative impact of winning. Big fights and wins don’t deplete political capital; they create it.
The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform. Whether the people who actually did this over the last week did so in reaction to his call to arms is not clear. But he’s happy to take credit and others are crediting him too.
But Vanderboegh really is a classic exemplar of scream-at-your-TV tea-partyish extremism. A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people’s backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.
Sarah Palin will be down in Arizona today helping to bail out John McCain in his primary against Rep. J.D. Hayworth. That and the day’s other news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
The Richmond Police Department confirms to us this morning that the gunfire incident Minority Whip Eric Cantor described as a direct threat to himself was in fact a “an act of random gunfire” not targeted at Cantor at all.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): “100 percent of our economy was private” before September 2008.
Kirsten Gillibrand seemed like one of the weaker incumbent senators going into the 2010 election cycle. She was appointed to the job by the now-disgraced Gov. Paterson. She’d only served little more than a single term in Congress when she was appointed. And she had some issue positions that worked for her upstate district but didn’t necessarily fit that well for running statewide in New York. But somehow over recent months numerous Republicans and Democrats have sounded out a run against her, only to decide against it — Ford, Zuckerman, Giuliani, McCarthy, Maloney, the list goes on and on. Is she an unstoppable force in politics? Evan McMorris-Santoro has the story.
Still trying to emulate one of the iconic moments of a decade they mostly despise, tea partiers under the banner of the Republican-consultant-created Tea Party Express will gather in Harry Reid’s hometown this weekend for what they’re dubbing a “Conservative Woodstock.”
With today’s announcement of a new nuclear arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, we look back at Hillary Clinton’s just completed trip to Russia where the final groundwork was laid for the agreement:
