If you only skimmed the headlines, you’d think that Beck went bravely into the belly of the beast, and had some kind of Sister Souljah moment. Except Beck didn’t do that. He blew smoke up the CPAC audience’s white asses by regurgiating exactly the same tired spiel Republican leaders have been parroting nonstop since they lost control of Congress in 2006.

The President’s new health care bill does not include a public option, but it does increase the maximum penalty for failure to comply with the mandate to buy health insurance, which rises from 2% to 2.5% of annual income (PDF).

But for months now, polling has shown that a mandate with no public option is an extremely unpopular combination. The annual penalty for failure to comply makes it even more unpopular in swing districts.

The White House’s health reform plan is up at WhiteHouse.gov, or you can take a peek here. This represents a compromise document, one prepared to pass by using the Senate bill as a base and making changes that the Administration thinks could pass through the reconciliation process if need be, “informed by the process” that has already taken place of the House and Senate bridging their differences, according to White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer.

What’s in this bill that differs from the Senate bill? Let’s take the main pieces. . .

This morning, Obama released his new health care reform plan. It was a series a changes to the Senate health care bill. One was the addition of a new Health Insurance Rate Authority. It was an idea recently introduced by Dianne Feinstein. Can this new authority become law or is it just a cynical pure politics play?

Sen. Diane Feinstein’s fellow radical moderate, Barack Obama (again, sarcasm), has picked up on her proposal for a national health insurance regulator and will apparently include it in his health insurance bill presented to the nation in advance of the bipartisan summit.

• What’s in Obama’s health care plan.
• Looks like Maddow’s reporting is paying dividends.
• Dave Petraeus, terrorist coddler.
• Will McCain get teabagged?
• Where the jobs went.
• The latest version of ‘I got mine.’

Hope and Change after the miracles are over.

Featuring music of Bettie Serveert and The Happy Hollows.

The legacy of America’s Hephaestus, Alexander Haig: an unaccountable Executive; Ronald Reagan’s presidency; and the disastrous reach into the twenty-first century of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, returned from the never-extinguished wreckage of the Nixon years to shape America’s destiny as their own.

Pop Surrealist Anthony Ausgang’s cover art for the Grammy award winning duo MGMT is stirring up some fan controversy.