I’ve been mulling for a while whether to post about this. But for all the conventional wisdom (very well-grounded conventional wisdom, I might add) that says Democrats are going to get crushed in November, the last month or so of polls have shown a number of hints of a turnaround. Again, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. And I’d call them just hints at this point. But they’re there. Read More

Having bailed on his run for governor, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is now going to run for Lt. Governor.

The President is pushing back the departure of his trip to Asia next week from Thursday to Sunday in hopes of shepherding health care reform through a vote in the House.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) holds a knife to the throat of immigration reform to try to stop reconciliation on health care reform. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

What exactly do we know about what House leaders knew about the Massa story going back into the winter and fall? We take a close look at everything that is known in our own Massa Mess Timeline.

As you probably know, yesterday House Republicans pushed a vote on reopening the House Ethics Committee’s Massa investigation — now focusing not so much on Massa but on what House leadership knew about his situation prior to last week. When I first heard what the known things were, they seemed not just thin but close to ridiculous. Massa was boarding with some members of his staff (not unprecedented and basically who cares), he used a lot of foul language (join the club) and he’d gone to dinner, possibly as a date, with a young gay staffer from Barney Frank’s office. Again, really not clear to me why that would be anyone’s business, let alone something that should lead to an ethics inquiry. Read More

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), who voted for the original House health care bill, says he can’t vote for the Senate version, apparently costing Nancy Pelosi yet another vote.

In the clearest indication yet that the House leadership is prepared to push forward with a vote on the Senate health care bill with or without pro-life Democrats onboard, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told reporters this morning: “We don’t want to go without their votes, but we do want to forge ahead …”

In order to get a Health Care Reform bill, the compromises that have been necessary on immigration and abortion rights have been painful and galling. For what it’s worth, the restrictions on illegal immigrants accessing the health insurance exchanges seem very unwise on policy grounds as well as being needless on the cost side. Indeed, they probably jack up the costs since undocumented workers tend to skew younger than the population at large. Still, with all that, is it really moral, let alone wise politically to kill legislation that would provide insurance for 30 million people because immigrants in the country illegally would be barred from access?