An article in today’s Washington Post by Karen de Young (H/T Spencer Ackerman) highlights the determination to race to catastrophe by the Obama administration. In an ever-ending reconsideration and analysis of Afghanistan party, the Obama administration is said to be internally assessing the progress of the Afghan-Pakistan War over the next few weeks.

Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson Sr.’s outburst last night is just another in a series of political WTFs from the Palmetto State.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters makes clear she wishes the President had gone further last night in endorsing the public option. She re-iterates that Obama wants to hear other, better ideas if anyone has any, but does not think there are better ideas than Public Option

Watching the Glenn Beck show this past month, one might have assumed that Van Jones had assaulted Beck, insulted his wife, and stolen his kids’ lunch money. Beck devoted time on a whopping 16 shows to crafting a distorted, despicable portrait of Van that few who know him would recognize. As political smears go, it was as serious as it gets.

But make no mistake: this attack was not about Van Jones. Beck, in league with big business groups, is seeking to derail the President’s progressive agenda, and taking out Van became the vehicle for undermining clean energy and green jobs.

There was another, more personal motivation too. Beck was trying to change the subject from the previous week, when headlines were dominated by dozens of major advertisers dropping his show.

This week, the UAW published a list of 2010 union-made cars, trucks, vans and other vehicles. It’s also Union Label Week, which we hold annually to highlight howunion-made goods are high in quality and help support middle-class communities. These two events reminded me: Making a case for Buy American means we in the union movement need to do our job and show U.S. consumers how and where to buy American, and buy union.

Or at least we can try. I’ve seen an awful lot of brand-new BMWs, Mercedes and Lexus brands of all types driving around here in Washington, D.C., recently. Something tells me my money helped purchase those vehicles—no doubt some of the drivers are beneficiaries of taxpayer-bailed out financial institutions.

Still, not everyone is laughing all the way to making high-end purchases of foreign-made goods with U.S. taxpayer dollars. And for those who still have a conscious that can be appealed to, this list is for you.

This company still holds a $189 million contract to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Still. I cannot get a State Department response to the basic question of why that is.

Obama says he will include a public option in his health care plan, but stipulates that co-ops or triggers could satisfy his definition. But 179 members of Congress signed on to HCAN’s health care principles, which explictly define a “public option” as not co-ops or triggers. It’s not going to be easy to walk that one back.

Long before Joe Wilson (R-SC) made a complete ass out of himself and his party on national television, he tried to keep the Confederate battle flag flying over South Carolina.

Ezra has written a thoughtful follow-up to my complaint that discussions of the role of insurance company in writing our legislation neglect to discuss profit. I agree with parts of it and disagree with others. The most important point Ezra makes–which explains his focus on providers to the exclusion of insurance companies–is this passage:

The insurance industry is not a particularly profitable industry.

The deals they have negotiated with health care industry stakeholders do not include a public plan, they don’t believe they can back out of them without triggering a rush of lobbyist money to GOP coffers. At some point there will be a day of reckoning when the public understands that the public option is gone. The White House wants to stop their opponents — and let’s face it, progressives who are insisting on the inclusion of a public plan are at this point their opponents — from being able to exploit that gap. Because every day that goes by the base gets more and more wedded to the promise of a public plan, encouraged by the positive rhetoric of the President himself. And it becomes that much harder for the White House to extract itself from the double bind they have created without paying a huge political price.