There is no liberal plan that Sen. Joe Lieberman won’t try to scuttle. Now he is pushing cuts in Medicare as a way to reduce the deficit on the backs of elderly Americans. Hell of a guy, isn’t he?

It seems President Obama has succeed in shifting the deficit debate dramatically to the right. The right-of-center plan Obama laid out that relies on two parts spending cuts for every one part new tax revenue has already been declared the left extreme in the debate by top senate Democrats. From ABC News: Senator Dick Durbin, [...]

Nancy Pelosi dug her heels in last night and told her caucus that the President wants no extension of the Bush tax cuts beyond the $250,000 threshold. She’s also signaled that she’ll put it up for a vote on the suspension calendar, which means Republicans can’t make amendments or the motion to recommit. But it also means she’ll have to get 290 votes in order to pass it, and there’s no way she can bring enough Republicans on board to do that.

So it’s a purely symbolic vote that will fail. But she’s asking members to take it anyway, because she says that’s what the President wants.

As Lynn Sweet reports, Rahm Emanuel himself has been totally mute on the subject of running for mayor.  The campaign in the press has been waged entirely by David Axelrod, Dick Durbin and others.  And today, Barack Obama himself enters the fray. When asked by Matt Lauer if he would endorse Rahm in the Chicago [...]

To the surprise of — well, absolutely nobody I guess — Harry Reid is rolling in drug money. Tim Carney reports that “no incumbent is receiving as much air support from the drug industry as is Reid, who championed a health care bill that pads drug company profits”: Right after [PhRMA head Billy] Tauzin’s July [...]

Well this is encouraging. Dick Durbin is one of the “liberals” on the President’s Debt Commission, which is currently studying cuts to Social Security and Medicare as a way to reduce the deficit. And he certainly has mastered the fine art of messaging to the Democratic base: [Durbin] admonished “bleeding heart liberals” to be open [...]

As a pure matter of principle, after almost a year of blaming its exclusion on lack of votes in the Senate, there is no way it should die in the House.

Call progressive members of Congress who pledged to vote against any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option, and tell them to insist on its inclusion in the House bill. Then let us know what they say.

Call Now

Now that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has sent out his spokesman to lie for him to obscure that Durbin plans to whip against the public option, the hot potato has been passed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Pelosi is saying she will not include the public option because it does not have the votes [...]

After Dick Durbin (D-IL) got attacked for saying that he would whip against the public option, he sent out his spokesman to lie about reconciliation in a pathetic attempt to justify Durbin’s role in trying to kill the public option. (Which is curious because we were told we could not have a public option because [...]

The good news is that Democrats might have to include some form of student loan reform in the reconciliation bill to meet the cost-saving requirements of their reconciliation instructions. From Politico: The Senate parliamentarian notified Democratic leaders that, in order to meet the reconciliation requirements, both the Senate health and finance committees would need to [...]