I sure do remember a time when the GOP made Barack Obama denounce Jeremiah Wright, insisting that if he didn’t it was an explicit endorsement of anything Wright said.

But the same does not seem to apply to Republicans when it comes to Rush Limbaugh.  We’ve got video coming of Mike Stark asking Republicans on the Hill what they think of Rush.  By virtue of the “Wright rules” I guess we’re left to assume that every Republican agrees with him.

In deliberations that relied upon the Yoo/Delahunty memo that found the President’s powers to fight terror to be almost limitless, former Vice President Cheney argued for the use of US troops to takedown the Yemeni cell in Lackawanna, NY, in 2002. Is this legacy-polishing week for the Bushies, after the TIME article and Cheney’s pushback on Scooter? Perhaps — the NYT mentions Condoleezza Rice as among those who fought to have law enforcement handle the terror cell.

The Republican position in a nutshell: Most of them know there’s a crisis, and they just don’t care. It doesn’t matter what’s best for the country, only what’s best for the Republican Party, their wealthy friends, and their corporate donors. It doesn’t matter if 20,000 people die every year, as long as the victims’ families are so pissed off that they start voting Republican.

The latest word out of the Hill after the talks broke down so famously between Chairman Waxman and the Blue Dogs, is that the tentative agreements are back on, and that the mark-ups of H.R. 3200, the health care bill, will resume on Monday.

The special inspector general for TARP says Treasury should demand information about what the banks did with the money they got from TARP. Treasury didn’t ask, but SIGTARP did. He says the banks didn’t increase lending.

At the end of his impromptu appearance in the White House briefing room earlier today, President Obama indirectly admitted why he was making yet another statement on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “Over the last two days as we’ve discussed this issue, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody has been paying much attention to health care.” The press laughed, but Obama was telling an important truth. Just as the ginned-up Whitewater and other investigations of President Clinton in 1994 were all about derailing healthcare reform, so is the Gates brouhaha.

FDL Action asked Congress to put off the August recess and stay in DC to pass a health care reform bill that includes a robust public option. We asked you to join the fight, and you responded with over 32,000 signatures in just 36 hours.

Those signatures were presented to House Majority Whip James Clyburn, who personally accepted them, and told our Mike Stark that America has waited for 61 years for this, and any delay will just sentence another generation to disparate, inferior care.

Let’s match dollars to petition signatures: can we raise $32,274 to pressure the House to pass health care reform before vacation? 

Mike Stark caught up with Peter DeFazio (OR-04) on the Hill and asked him about his position on health care.

Representative DeFazio told Mike that any bill “has to have a strong public plan” and he’s committed to voting against a bill without a strong public option. Speaking about the health insurance industry specifically, Defazio told Mike:

So much of DC politicking over the last few years has been centered around the idea that if Democrats actually act like Democrats, they’ll lose their seats “just like they did in 1994″. Guess what? It’s not 1994, chronologically, culturally or demographically.

Chellie also gave a great floor statement yesterday about the need to vote on a health care bill before recess (vide0). 

We’re adding her to our Health Care Heros page.