×
- The new Senate HELP Committee heath care reform bill has been scored by the CBO and when the employer mandate is included, the cost drops to $597 billion over ten years, extending coverage to an addition 21 million people. This, however, does not take into account Medicaid expansion -- the Senate Finance Committee's jurisdiction -- the savings of which cover an additional 20 million people, or about 97 percent of the population by 2019 at a total price tag of $1 to $1.3 trillion. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn have more on this.
- I think we can all agree that sex scandals are more or less a bipartisan, er, affair. That being said, Politico does a little research and discovers that class of 1994 Republicans have been hit especially hard: "In the 14 years since that star-crossed class arrived in Washington espousing an agenda that placed family values at its core, no less than a dozen of its members have been caught up in affairs, sex scandals or in messy separations and divorces from their spouses that, in more than a few instances, led to their political downfalls."
- Fresh off of rooting for al-Qaeda to slaughter more Americans, former CIA operative Michael Scheuer is back, telling Alan Colmes that he doesn't think Barack Obama can or wants to protect the country. I've always found this particular tactic of claiming X has no interest in the national security of the United States to be especially disgusting. Even when liberals were arguing that Bush's policies were making the country less safe, no one was seriously arguing that Bush had no interest in protecting the country. Bush thought he was doing the right thing, but lacked the judgment to realize he wasn't. Scheuer's accusations are not of incompetence but of pure malevolence.
- Even more strange than Republican actors-turned-politicians criticizing Al Franken for being an actor-turned-politician is why they're making this argument now. It didn't work during the election. It didn't bear on the recount and court challenges. It's not going to change the fact that Franken's going to be sworn in on Tuesday. Oh, and there's the fact that he's probably wonkier than most members of the Senate in the first place. Oh, what has Minnesota wrought upon the world's greatest deliberative body?
- Remainders: The White House staff salary list; the administration embraces net neutrality in a roundabout way; Mitt Romney's foreign policy, reduced to a PowerPoint slide; and "Smokey Joe" Barton sprints ahead to the House GOP's race to the bottom of the stupidity barrel.
--Mori Dinauer
