Props needed: football (optional), left over from prior seasons’ FISA and war funding performances. Slightly used, but never seems to get old.

How many community colleges are supposed to shut down, how many kids are supposed to forgo job training and higher education just so JP Morgan can have themselves another bailout good earnings quarter?

President Barack Obama has a fetish for “splitting the difference” that defies both logic and common sense. It is like he is incapable of deciding what is the correct path, and feels some overwhelming desire to just take the halfway point between any two positions. Look at this passage in his health care proposal to [...]

New Research 2000 polling by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee shows that the Senate health care bill is very unpopular–but the public option is extremely popular (via Greg Sargent, full results): * In Nevada, only 34% support the Senate bill, while 56% support the public option. * In Illinois, only 37% support the Senate bill, [...]

The big question right now is, how do you sell Obama’s new health care proposal? His proposal is basically the Senate bill with some minor tweaks. Some of the changes should be popular–like a minor increase in affordability tax credits–and some changes–like an increase in the individual mandate penalty–should end up very unpopular. What I [...]

The White House finally made official what we have known for a long time: President Obama is against the public option. How do we know this? Because Obama, for the first time ever, released his own official health care reform proposal — and it does not contain a public option. You can’t claim to support [...]

The President’s new health care bill does not include a public option, but it does increase the maximum penalty for failure to comply with the mandate to buy health insurance, which rises from 2% to 2.5% of annual income (PDF). But for months now, polling has shown that a mandate with no public option is [...]

This morning, Obama released his new health care reform plan. It was a series a changes to the Senate health care bill. One was the addition of a new Health Insurance Rate Authority. It was an idea recently introduced by Dianne Feinstein. Can this new authority become law or is it just a cynical pure [...]

The “60 vote” bar on the public option was always a sham. But now that it’s gone, nobody wants to be Joe Lieberman and play the role of spoiler so PhRMA can have their deal. Ezra Klein reports: I’ve spoken to a lot of offices about this now, and all of them are ambivalent privately, [...]

Greg Sargent is reporting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now expressing openness to possibly including the public option in a reconciliation measure. But, apparently, unnamed Senate aides think there might be procedural problems: It’s far from decided whether reconciliation will ultimately be used to pass reform. What’s more, senior Senate aides still think [...]