While most politicos are looking at gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia to determine whether Democrats gain maintain a short-term advantage in 2010, it’s clearly the battles over marriage equality and gay rights in Washington state and Maine where the true potential of a progressive realignment can be measured. On the heels of the [...]

  I’m still reading Dexter Filkins’ New York Times Magazine profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal but I’m hung up on this quote:   In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its [...]

  Yesterday on Hardball, Chris Matthews argued that a public option would be impossible to pass the Senate:   CHARLES BLOW: The public, by far, wants a public option. The president has said it‘s a good idea to have a public option. MATTHEWS: How come—I don‘t want to argue with you all night. Only 30 [...]

  Olympia Snowe and Rahm Emanuel are both pushing hard for their “trigger” idea recently. The idea is the public option would only go into effect if the health insurance industry kept raising people’s rates at a rapid pace. (I believe, after studying the trigger created by Snowe, that it was designed to never be [...]

Jeffrey S. White, judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has entered a new order denying the government’s request for a stay pending appeal in the telecommunications companies’ documents FOIA case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its efforts to investigate the government’s warrantless wiretapping. And Judge White did it before the government ever really asked for a stay!

Between the flawed PricewaterhouseCoopers study and the scare-seniors attack ads to the secret talking points they’re sending to local insurance offices attacking the public option and Medicare (!), the insurance lobby has clearly shown themselves to be an enemy of reform. Whether trying to torpedo any bill or to give space to the Baucus bill [...]

Rahm Emanuel is meeting with Harry Reid to tell him what the White House wants in the final Senate bill. It’s Reid’s call, and no matter what happens, he gets to wear it. But maybe people will finally disabuse themselves of the “Obama wants a public option” fantasy:. Here’s Rahm last night on the News [...]

Let’s take a look.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy On the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) publicly delivered a message that is likely not to sit well with Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Schumer basically said it was completely up to Reid if he wanted to put a [...]

Live today: Is Congress going to “opt-out” of real health care reform, or is the so-called opt-out provision a worthy compromise for progressives who’ve already compromised just to get to discussion of a public option? We’ll have Adam Thompson of the Progressive States Network, Paul Waldman from The American Prospect, and Representative Raul Grijalva, Co-Chair [...]