Golly, it sure is heartwarming how conservatives everywhere are suddenly discovering a deep concern for the well-being of senior citizens. Why, as soon as they realized that requiring Medicare to reimburse end-of-life counseling is the same as requiring seniors to participate in it, Courageous Compassionate Elder Lovers like Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, John Boehner, Thad McCotter, and Virginia Foxx sounded the alarm against Obama’s plans for a Grey Holocaust.

The NYT writes a pathetic puff piece in which the Finance Committee leaks snippets to concept the fact that they’ve still failed to deliver any worthwhile health care reform proposal.

We don’t have much influence over Senators so whipping them doesn’t do any good, but it’s something that they certainly might do on their own. If the Enzi-Baucus-Snowe deal picks up 3 Republican votes, there are still more than enough progressive votes in the Senate to derail the Baucus bill.

If we raise this debate in these districts during the August recess, it makes a crappy sell-out vote very hard to take. Lots of young enthusiastic people would like to have those seats, and if old dinosaur progressives have grown ineffective in those jobs, it’s time for new blood.

In his post on the story that Cheney wanted to use the military to capture the Lackawanna Six, Scott Horton somewhat bizarrely claims that the October 23, 2001 memo was written (seemingly exclusively) for the kinds of actions Cheney envisioned. But we know it was also written to authorize domestic surveillance.

We got our health care pitch down to three points. What are our three points for financial re-regulation?

In his ongoing series on the Hill to ask questions of our elected officials that enquiring minds want answered, Mike Stark ran into Rep. Pete King of New York.

Gibbs: Again, maybe I want to be clear for Laura and for you. I don’t believe that the President has come down one versus the other in terms of denoting co-ops equal to or above public option. I can talk to the health team about that.

The Republcans still haven’t offered their health care bill.

WATERS: Well the thing about it is, you can’t make empty threats of course. As I’m talking to you today, and trying to be very honest about the Blue Dogs, who they are how they got there, which is a step beyond what we would normally do, I intend certainly to continue to bring clarity to what is going on. I will be meeting with the progressives and Barbara Lee and the Black Caucus and the Tricaucus to talk about what we do.