Monday, the House Budget Committee approved a budget reconciliation bill that jumpstarts the process that Democrats hope will end in the Senate passing sweeping health care reforms by a simple majority.
The reconciliation bill, which will be the vehicle for the health care “fixes” the Democrats will add later this week, passed through the panel on a 21-16 vote. Two Democrats, Reps. Allen Boyd (Fla.) and Chet Edwards (Tex.), joined every Republican in opposing the measure. The process is starting in the House because, by …

In a fairly muted online Q&A with Florida U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio — questions were along the lines of “what can we do to stop this health care takeover?” — Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) let the cat out of the bag on the possible effect of a Democratic victory on health care reform.
“If the president is successful,” said DeMint, answering a question about the prospects for cap-and-trade, “I think it will give him some boldness to go back to other programs.”

DeMint, of …

Washington memoirs are all about settling scores. Karl Rove’s “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight” takes that tradition to new and self-parodying heights. To read Rove’s recollections of George W. Bush’s White House is to believe that, for eight years, men of “courage and moral clarity” governed the United States and were beset by critics who refused to give them any credit. On page after page, Rove names the naysayers and picks apart their claims. He’s most at ease …

One of the reasons many people work for government even when there’s not a recession going on (despite the fact that government jobs often pay lower salaries than private sector ones) is the job security and generous benefits. Particularly for the younger generation of workers, there remain relatively few companies that offer traditional pension plans, but they still abound for workers in government jobs. But if Mary Williams Walsh’s story in The New York Times is any guide, those supposedly secure government pensions are …

Prominent Tea Party Leader, Tom Tancredo, does an interview with the Dutch paper Handelsblad — which treats him, credulously, as a “Tea Party prominent” — and drops the hammer on his co-Tea Party Convention speaker Sarah Palin.
“I really don’t have this feeling about her as being presidential,” Tancredo said. “I don’t know what it is exactly. I don’t know if the issues really are that difficult for her or not.”
He questions if she has what it takes, and whether she really …

There’s plenty of criticism being directed today at Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who single-handedly prevented the Democrats from extending the filing deadline for unemployment benefits, which arrives Sunday.
Bunning says that he wants the $10 billion cost to be paid for with cuts elsewhere, and, despite his past support for much larger unfunded bills, we’ll take him at his word. But there’s another good reason that Republicans want to prolong the debate over the unemployment benefits bill: Namely, it keeps all other Democratic …

Jonathan Rauch — one of the few libertarian/conservatives, like Bruce Bartlett and David Frum, who has remained more hopeful than partisan in the Obama era — pens a compelling essay about the roots of modern GOP populism. It’s all about the legacy of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, argues Rauch. (Wallace, a Democrat and independent, gave his final presidential endorsement to Bob Dole in 1996.)
Supporters of Sarah Palin won’t like this passage — to say nothing of neoconfederate Wallace-lovers:

The hottest ticket in the Republican …

It is almost a cliché that layoffs lead to higher mortality rates, but now there is science to back up some of the anecdotes. Michael Luo of The New York Times reports on the three men laid off from a Lackawanna steel plant who suffered heart attacks in the wake of the announcement, and how they fit into broader research on the topic of economic stress and personal health.
One 2006 study by a group of epidemiologists at Yale found that layoffs more than doubled …

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) got Fred Roitz of Blackwater — sorry, “Xe Services,” the new name for the company — to say that Blackwater shell company “Paravant” came into existence shortly before “Paravant” got a subcontract from defense giant Raytheon to train Afghan security forces. But then Levin read from the contract submission: “Paravant has many years of experience identifying and selecting top candidates for training.” How could that possibly be true? Levin asked.
Roitz first tried to parry that the language referred to …

With the advent of new credit card regulations designed to keep credit card companies from engaging in the most predatory practices, the companies are very, very busy trying to find legal ways to keep making money in the exact same ways they always have: with confusing rules, crazy fee structures and unexpected interest rates changes. About the only effective part of the government’s regulation is the requirement that companies disclose when they are doing things to your credit card program that will make them …