Senate staffers predict major health care reforms in 2009
Once President-elect Barack Obama, HHS Secretary-designate Tom Daschle and a Democrat-led Congress take office in 2009, broad scale health care reforms are likely to occur, predicted Senate staffers who spoke at a recent Alliance for Health Reform and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation forum in Washington, D.C. ... Read more…

Mass. health plan has national appeal

WASHINGTON - Key players in the debate over how to provide healthcare coverage for the nation's 47 million uninsured say they view Massachusetts' landmark 2006 law as an important model for what Washington could do and how to get it done.

Check out who Senator Kennedy has been talking to: Read more…

Charlie Rangel is one of our health care heros. That’s right, the Chair of the powerful Ways and Means committee supports single payer. Think of what that means to our movement!

All of a sudden Whoever kidnapped Joshua Micah Marshall is floating pseudo scandals. Who is feeding his publication this drivel? We have no way of knowing, but I suspect it is the same anonymous sources who are attacking Pete Stark. Read more…

CQ Health Beat News

House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark , D-Calif., never shy about attacking industry profits, also issued a statement slamming the private health plans in Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage plans, for making big money at the expense of taxpayers and health plan enrollees.

Now we know who is going after Pete Stark.
Anonymous Industry Sources Control Congress Read more…

Mureen Dowd

I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.

What are the chances that some guy in Bangalore would actually constitute an improvement?

Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

You’ve got to hand it to them. Torture aficionados at the White House and CIA have conned key congressional leaders into insisting not only that torture-lite would be a swell idea, but advocating that the overseers of torture be kept on.

From change-you-can-believe-in, we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on.

It is not just Obama, or even the Intelligence Committees, it is the entire palace of moral bankruptcy that makes this possible.

Robert Parry

Surprisingly this Thanksgiving, the Washington Establishment had a lot to give thanks for. And its chief mouthpiece – the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page – was glowing over its good fortune in the three-plus weeks since Barack Obama's election.

On Friday, the Post’s lead editorial thanked President-elect Obama for settling on insider favorites for key jobs, especially officials with long records of promoting the neocon foreign policy agenda. ... Read more…

Elizabeth Drew does her own "angling", you decide what for:

"But Washington has been taking in Obama's victory in its own idiosyncratic way. Hostesses are angling to be the first to entertain the Obamas at their first private dinner in Washington. Read more…

MSNBC's Brzezinski falsely asserted "the average Big Three automaker union worker's compensation is $73/hour" Read more…

Via Back Alley Media we learn the latest in Versailles pretentiousness, Sally Quinn presumes to tell the Obamas where they should go to church.

It tells you everything you need to know about the National Cathedral that they would consent to be quoted in such an article. Anything less spiritual would be difficult to imagine.

President Obama's global agenda, part two: Iran Read more…

Via Atrios: Senate Throws Good-Bye Party For Ted Stevens, Gives Convicted Felon A Standing Ovation

For your viewing pleasure we have exclusive video of the evening's festivities.

According to Chapman, Barack Obama:

makes a habit of claiming that “wages are shrinking,” working families have lost ground and the country desperately needs his “Rescue Plan for the Middle Class.”

July 14November 4 can't come soon enough.

I want more power

In the near future we are going to see a great deal of manuvering for power. As a long time observer of Versailles, I thought I would destruct Rahm Emanuel's pathetic manuvering.

On Sunday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) whether he would be interested in serving as Obama's chief of staff. Emanuel did not rule it out. Read more…

Investment News

The $700,000 billion financial services industry bailout plan has a critic in Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair, who said yesterday the initiative does not do enough to prevent Americans from losing their homes, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

At some point Versailles will work out that the well being of the big shots is connected to the well being of the little guys.

It truly sickens me the way Republicans can spend a lifetime of running our country into the ground, go on Sunday morning TV, make a few nice sounds and presto, he's cabinet material.

The latest from Steve Clemons: Chuck Hagel Will Help Obama Find his "Inner Nixon".

Clemons says this like it was a good thing. Yeah, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the destruction of Chilean democracy, and so many other things were such a good idea and worked out so well for our country. Read more…

Post Debuts Fashion Washington With Pink Party at Ben Bradlee's Home

Behind the firewall: Bush loyalist Mike Connell controls Congressional secrets as his email sites serve Karl Rove Read more…

More evidence that the Village really is a sack of pus comes from Saturday's Washington Post:
AIDS Funding Binds Longevity of Millions to U.S.
Open-Ended Commitment of Money Is Implied

President Bush plans to sign a bill next week that commits the United States to spending about $40 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS overseas, a major expansion of what many consider his most successful foreign policy initiative. Read more…

Shakesville alerts us to Insurance industry forming activist army

“On an issue as big and far-reaching as health care reform, you need to be working with real people and you need to have a reach outside the Beltway,” AHIP spokesman Michael Tuffin told Politico in an interview outlining the industry’s strategy. “The issue isn’t going to be settled just by lobbyists in Washington. The American people are going to have their say.”

Projection, thy name is AHIP.

Speaker of the House Rahm Emanuel?

Single-Payer Health Coverage, HCAN And Health Care Reform:

What strikes me about the three quotations I start with above is how they really encapsulate the single-payer problem in the upcoming universal health care debate. Single-payer advocates are often dedicated and strong-willed grassroots activists for their cause - but they are as of now marginalized in the policy discussion, with a public that doesn’t really understand its options. Single-payer advocates have already lost the crucial framing of the current universal health care political debate because as noted the compromises for ’some sort of universal health care’ are what’s on the table - not adherence to single-payer, or we walk away. The time to win the debate was before, or at worst, during the Democratic primary. Part of why single-payer advocates have lost for now, I suspect, is because they lack the resources of “K-Street professionals” and are, as a group, not as experienced or skilled at “building mailing lists and fundraising and get[ting]-out-the vote for November.” Look at Massachusetts’ recent reform, or what happened much earlier in 2002 in Oregon, where single-payer forces lost massively...

Let's look at the assumptions here. Read more…

David Broder’s Moonlighting: Post columnist benefits from corporate speaking deals

So it’s surprising to see that Broder, who recently took a buyout, but will continue to write his Post column, appears to be a regular presence these days on the business lecture circuit, and has even spoken to major health care groups. Do a Google search and you’ll see that Broder is represented by a number of speaker’s bureaus, including Grabow, which says it is “your David Broder booking agent for private corporate events.” Read more…

Broder is identified (in various promotional and other online materials I found) as a featured speaker at events such as these: