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Winning the Lobster Marriage Debate With Colbert
By John Nichols
A surprising number of U.S. House members still stumble through their "Better Know a District" segments on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
Not Chellie Pingree, the freshman Democrat from Maine who host Stephen Colbert says "has the cocktail sauce to represent" the lobster capital of the world.
Noting that Portland has the nation's third highest concentration of women living together, Colbert said at the start of his 57th interview with a House member, "You don't have to explain it, I just like the image."
(61) CommentsAugust 11, 2009
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The Cheney-Like Secrecy of the Obama White House
By John Nichols
Those of us who proposed the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney for violating his oath of office and engaging in a Nixon-on-steroids spree of high crimes and misdemeanors began to recognize the abusive nature of the previous administration when Cheney refused to release details of the industry insiders with whom he met to craft energy policies.
The refusal of the Bush-Cheney administration to permit public review of White House visitor logs detailing who was meeting with the vice president's energy task force during the very first weeks of their tenure was a deliberate decision made to cloak dirty dealing by officials who were determined to serve corporate rather than public interests.
It also provided an early indicator that darker and dirtier deeds would eventually be done by Cheney and his compatriots. And they were.
(126) CommentsAugust 8, 2009
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor
By John Nichols
Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed to serve as the 111th justice on the United States Supreme Court.
President Barack Obama declared that the vote, by an overwhelming 68-31 Senate majority, "moved America yet another step closer to a more perfect union."
The president's meaning was clear, his sentiment correct.
(121) CommentsAugust 6, 2009
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Why Single Payer Advocacy Matters Now More Than Ever
By John Nichols
How should serious supporters of healthcare reform spend the month of August?
Not by getting trapped in the narrow "debate" between "party of no" Republicans who favor no reform at all, and Blue Dog Democrats, whose "reform" is to make a bad system worse.
And not by campaigning for "buzz words – "public option," "employer mandates" – or whatever President Obama or Speaker Pelosi happen to favor this week. There will be plenty of advertising and organizing to that end, including a $15 million expenditure by the AFL-CIO.
(186) CommentsAugust 1, 2009
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Sonia Sotomayor is Not a “Consequence”
By John Nichols
Politics does not get much creepier than the line from conservative Republican senators who say they have decided to support the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court because "elections have consequences."
Both South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, in announcing they will vote to confirm Judge Sotomayor, have used the "elections have consequences" line to explain their choices.
Balancing gripes about ideological differences ("liberal… liberal… liberal… left of center," to quote Graham) with grudging admissions that she is "one of the most qualified nominees to be selected for the Supreme Court in decades," the senators looked for an easy out.
(79) CommentsAugust 1, 2009
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Key Committee Backs Health Plan; Pelosi Allows Single-Payer Vote
By John Nichols
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday evening voted 31-28 for a health-care reform plan that uses a relatively robust "public option" and other strategies to insure the nearly 50 million Americans who currently lack health-care coverage.
The plan, which would cost $1 trillion over ten years, would be financed by controlling Medicare and Medicaid costs and by taxing businesses and the wealthiest Americans.
With the House breaking for its August recess, the roughly 1,000-page Energy and Commerce plan will become an improtant focus of an intense month of grassroots campaigning for reform and high-stakes lobbying against it.
(192) CommentsJuly 31, 2009
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Blue-Dog "Fix" Makes Health Reform "Cure" Worse Than Disease
By John Nichols
More and more House Democrats are pledging to oppose compromises on health care reform now being entertained by at least some aides to President Obama and Democrat leaders in the House and Senate.
"We have compromised and we can compromise no more," an angry Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-California, declared at news conference that felt more like a rally outside the Capitol.
Woolsey and her Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva, have now attracted 60 signers for a letter condemning compromises that make the cure worse than the disease.
(131) CommentsJuly 30, 2009
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Squeeze Insurance Profiteers, Not Medicare
By John Nichols
At a critical moment in the tense health care debate -- when the U.S. House and Senate are scrambling to forge compromise reform plans that might be passed before the Congress embarks upon its traditional August recess -- President Obama is retooling his health-care reform message.
Instead of the bold rhetoric of last year's campaign, or even of last month's press conferences, the president is now pitching reform as more of a consumer-protection gambit.
"No one is talking about some government takeover of health care," Obama explained to the crowd at his latest town hall meeting in North Carolina on Wednesday.
(112) CommentsJuly 29, 2009
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For Sotomayor, Against the Confirmation Process
By John Nichols
Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold joined fellow Democrats and one Republican (South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham) on the winning side of last week's 13-6 vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
But the chair the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution wishes he knew a little more about the thinking of the woman who is now all but certain to be confirmed before the Senate breaks next week for the traditional August recess.
"I cannot say that I learned everything about Judge Sonia Sotomayor that I would have liked to learn," he said in an endorsement of President Barack Obama's first high court nominee by the Judiciary Committee's most determined defender of the Constitution. "But what I did learn about her makes me believe that that she will serve with distinction on the Court, and that I should vote in favor of her confirmation."
(50) CommentsJuly 28, 2009
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Hope for Health Reform? Push Single-Payer Now
By John Nichols
It is unsettling to listen as President Obama and House Speaker Pelosi talk up a health-care reform "plan" that has yet to take shape in any realistic form.
The vagueness on the part of the president and the speaker is, of course, intentional.
Obama and Pelosi are still pushing the notion that they can get some version of their public-private stew cooked up before the year is done -- although not, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, before the president and the Congress take the extended summer vacations that will kill whatever sense of official urgency might have existed.
(202) CommentsJuly 26, 2009
John Nichols
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