The New York Times’s informs us that President Obama is launching a major effort to generate support for health care reform, including a public health insurance option. But the Times story would have you believe the battle is already lost and there’s no support for a public plan.

The NYTimes is reporting that the Obama Administration is considering changing the law to permit prisoners at Gitmo to plead guilty to death penalty cases without need for a trial. This is apparently a reaction to the stated desires of 5 Gitmo prisoners to become “martyrs.”

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the

Walt Minnick has the most reactionary voting record of any of the Democratic freshmen elected last November. He’s voted more frequently with the GOP than with the Democrats and the leadership just lets him slide because his district is so hopelessly red– the home of the Aryan Nations and America’s biggest concentration of neo-Nazis and domestic terrorists (Obama barely managed a third of the vote last November). Minnick has been very careful to tow a very right-wing line when it comes to voting, so right-wing in fact that the GOP’s #1 recruitment target, state Treasurer Ron Crane, has just announced he won’t challenge him. The district likes Minnick; he’s proven that despite the Democratic Party affiliation, he’s just like they are– against anything remotely progressive and very much a part of what author Charles Pierce has dubbed Idiot America.

One of the hardest things to understand about our politics is that there’s always two struggles going on, and they don’t match up neatly. There’s the grand and permanent struggle between parties and ideologies, between left and right, Democrat and Republican; and underneath, around, and in between the pixels of that more visible conflict is another: the struggle between insiders and outsiders.

You don’t matter, you are only part of the labor force. And there are more of you than is needed. Under normal circumstances, job losses of 345,000 in a single month would be a matter of consternation, particularly because job destruction is continuing at the same pace. What has changed is that for several months, hiring was virtually at a stop.

Senator Dorgan addresses the most severe crises America needs to confront, going far beyond the specific problem he tackled in Take This Job and Ship It. Each chapter discusses a specific set of related problems and suggests specific steps to respond to the problems.

There is no universal theme to the book, but there is a consistent approach and tone. The author is a prominent Democrat that is critical of the Bush administration and Congress when Republicans dominated it. The tone of his criticism of Republicans is moderate. The book is not a partisan screed. Indeed, he strongly criticizes the leaders of the Clinton administration’s Treasury department. (Those leaders continue to dominate economic policy under the Obama administration.) His critiques combine populist roots and academic training and an accommodation of his state’s (North Dakota) interests (coal).

This is what’s known in baseball as a hanging curve ball:

Obama’s top spokesman, Robert Gibbs, told reporters about Sotomayor: “I think she’d say that her word choice in 2001 was poor.”

And here’s Newt Gingirch on “Face the Nation” this morning, hitting it out of the park.

GINGRICH:

The lack of transparency in the markets makes me wonder about the way big banks acted as GM slid into bankruptcy.

The racist attacks on Judge Sonia Sotomayor fit a tragic pattern in America. Is it possible an answer’s right in front of us, big as a mountain?

The NYT got a handful of emails that made it clear that Jim Comey had attempted to dissuade the Bush Administration from torture. But instead, it reported that he had approved of torture. Here’s the other stuff the NYT doesn’t seem fit to tell you about Comey’s emails.