It’s been an amazing/crazy week month season here at FDL, so I wanted to just take a moment, take a breath, and clue folks in to some great content that is now available around the site.

It really is quite remarkable how much stupid Republicans can pack into just a few short paragraphs. Check out today’s NYT story about the GOP’s brilliant political strategy of all-obstruction, all the time:

The tea leaves tell us conflicts — between lowering the excise tax and wanting to ensure affordability of coverage for all Americans — yield heightened tensions in the Senate ahead of the blending of health bills. Ultimately, the money for subsidies has to come from somewhere, one of the major battles in the debate.

10% of all US stock trades no longer happen on public, regulated stock exchanges; that’s 10%, trading in “stealth exchanges,” unregulated. Think about it.

It’s becoming obvious now that the protracted drama of the Senate Finance Committee, long feared to be the beginning of the end for meaningful healthcare reform, really was just the end of the beginning.  Now that a version of the bill has been pried loose from Sen. “Max Tax” Baucus and his committee, the real [...]

  Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) opposes the public option and voted against both public option amendments in the Senate Finance Committee. And now, she has told the local Arkansas News that she is open to Olympia Snowe’s worthless trigger idea:   “If within those first three or four years all of the things that we’re doing [...]

As the president and his war council meet to finalize the latest most updated new new new strategy review in Afghanistan, ex-CIA man Paul Pillar gave the House Armed Services Committee the right question to ask. . .

Here we go with the revolving door. The Sunlight Foundation has completed a study of how the US Chamber of Commerce is using former government officials as part of their lobbying team on financial regulation. According to second quarter lobbying disclosure reports, the Chamber currently employs, directly or through outside lobbying firms, thirty-four lobbyists registered [...]

  The Senate is planning to move with remarkable speed (for them) to pass $245 billion doctors fix for Medicare. The bill will completely skip the normal committee process and head straight to the floor next week. At issue is the Medicare sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula. The formula would mandate automatic cuts to Medicare [...]

The wingnut jihad du jour, started by Glenn Beck and picked up immediately by the Anchor Baby, is that Antia Dunn once quoted Mao Zedong, which means she’s a radical Maoist Communist, hell bent on leading a Cultural Revolution in America.