I was on a conference call with White House budget director Peter Orszag and Office of Health Reform chief Nancy-Ann DeParle today, and both of them were adamant that the health care reform moving through Congress would cut costs over the long term and "move us into the future of health care," as Orszag put it.

The story is that the release of visitor logs is scheduled for the last Friday of every month, and this was moved up because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but nonetheless, the White House released a document dump right before Thanksgiving of another 1,600 records of visits to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The White House has raised yet another trial balloon about empowering a deficit-cutting commission, a day after meeting with key Senators in favor of the idea.

Phillip Carter helped found Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America after a tour of duty advising the Iraqi police in Baqubah. He wrote amicus briefs in two Supreme Court cases, FAIR v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the Court reined in the Bush Administration's executive over-reach, and became a leading critic of their methods in the war on terror. When he was hired by the Defense Department in April to coordinate detainee policy and help with the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, civil liberties groups considered that the Obama Administration was moving in the right direction. He abruptly resigned late last week.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops released an "Ethical and Religious Directive" this month that would ban any Catholic hospital, nursing home or hospice program from removing feeding tubes or ending palliative procedures of any kind, even when the individual has an advance directive to guide their end-of-life care. The Bishops' directive even notes that patient suffering is redemptive and brings the individual closer to Christ. The Church has staked out a radical position on end-of-life care, without patients of the 565 Catholic hospitals and other Catholic care facilities even knowing about it. As Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group, put it, "When a patient goes to one of these facilities, they don't know that they're choosing Catholic dogma. The bishops see the hospitals as an extension of their ministry."

President Obama held a final war council meeting before the holidays last night, and it looked from the timing that it could be decisive. After the meeting, Robert Gibbs released a statement saying "After completing a rigorous final meeting, President Obama has the information he wants and needs to make his decision and he will announce that decision within days." That decision? Most accounts see an increase of 34,000 troops in the near term.

On a conference call with reporters, US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reiterated the President's support for a controversial measure in the Senate health care bill that would ban undocumented immigrants from purchasing insurance coverage on the exchanges with their own money. Sebelius was asked if she thought undocumented workers should be allowed on the exchange, and she replied, "The President has made it clear that he feels undocumented immigrants should be able to purchase health insurance in the private market, not on the exchange."

"If we have to pay for the healthcare bill, we should pay for the war as well," Obey told ABC News in an interview, "by having a war surtax."