Bob Schieffer is sitting on a scoop he needs to share with the world, unless his rules for ‘off-the-record’ are the same as the late Tim Russert: everything is always off-the-record unless the newsmaker specifically grants ‘permission to use.’

We keep looking for silver bullets in solving our energy issues that carry major risks to our environment and public health. Meanwhile renewable technologies that offer great promise don’t get the same level of attention or interest.

[Welcome author Helene Jorgensen, and Host Kris Newby, Senior Producer, Under Our Skin] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev] SICK AND TIRED: How the U.S. Health Care System Fails Its Patients In 2003, economist Helene Jorgensen was bitten by [...]

SEIU has a new President. The union’s executive committee elected health care organizer Mary Kay Henry as SEIU’s first female president today, after now President Emeritus Andy Stern announced his resignation several weeks ago.

Gates is taking on a lot of opponents. Legislators who never met a defense platform they wouldn’t throw money at. Pentagon bureaucrats and staff officers who never met a needless regulation they couldn’t cite to interfere with a low-level commander’s common-sense assessment of his/her needs or capabilities. A system that — I loved this line — comes up with something like this: “The one area of real decline in overhead was in the area where we actually needed it: full-time contracting professionals, whose numbers plunged from 26,000 to about 9,000. We ended up with contractors supervising other contractors – with predictable results.”

We need a Supreme Court Justice who will undo the poisonous statutory construction rules of the corporatist Justices. A Senator to ask questions to determine whether we are getting a Democratic version of Federalist Society pro-business nominee.

Dr. James A. Forbes, the retired senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, is preaching today at the National Cathedral in Washington. He’s a friend, and he asked me to look over an early draft. I haven’t been the same since, and I told him so. “That’s a sign of a good sermon,” he said. [...]

The White House press made a bit of a todo over the fact that Eric Holder was finally allowed to go on a Sunday show today (he’s appearing on both ABC and NBC). Given all the somewhat bizarre claims from people like Rahm that Holder botches his public statements, it sort of makes you wonder what he’d have to agree to before he’d be allowed out without a minder.

Sure, the big news out of Utah today was that Senator Bob Bennett’s career ended at the hand of the GOP invasion by teabaggers, but across town, US House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer couldn’t convince Democrats to spare their Blue Dog anti-HCR-vote Congressman, Jim Matheson, a primary.

After failing to slow the spew of oil into the Gulf of Mexico with a big can, the next kitchen sink is rubbers. No shit.