Pelosi is absolutely correct that going into conference with the strongest public option puts the House in the best possible negotiating position. It puts pressure on the Senate to finish their deliberations and come up with something approximating the House’s bill, and strengthens the hand of Senate liberals who are pushing Harry Reid to include the measure. Even Kent Conrad, inventor of co-ops, is now saying that a weaker public option with negotiated rates “could pass,” a sign of real movement in the Senate. Plus, the House moving forward will make it easier to reach the year-end deadline and get something to the President’s desk.

Ben Nelson is now using a lie from the Washington Post to fight against a real national public option.

  Obama’s Organizing for America webcast from New York City, which seemed more like a campaign speech than a Presidential address, featured a very strong defense of the progress made in his first term, and a vow that he is “just getting started” on the change for which people voted last November. When challenged from [...]

This Hudson wingnut really didn’t do her team any favors.

The Speaker is taking the lead on Health Care.

Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal – She Caught The Katy.

What’s on your mind?

There are just too many people on earth, and sadly contraception is out of reach of the millions of women who want it. Our food and water supplies are dwindling, and carbon emissions increasing.

I believe that the theatrics are the message. By going all cloak-and-dagger for this unrevealing waste of time, Beck is reinforcing the paranoid fantasy that he shares with his viewers: The Obama administration is so vindictive and all-powerful that any decent ordinary patriotic American who would dare speak out against it must be disguised so the black UN helicopters don’t spirit their family away to the FEMA camps in the middle of the night.

  A new report from the Death Penalty Information Center takes a look at an often-neglected piece of the debate over capital punishment – the financial cost.   The death penalty in the U.S. is an enormously expensive and wasteful program with no clear benefits. All of the studies on the cost of capital punishment [...]

  The Supreme Court has decided to rule on whether federal judges can mandate the release of detainees at Guantanamo Bay who represent no terrorist threat into the United States, over objections from the Obama Administration.   The case could set up a major separation of powers battle before the court, which decided more than [...]