Congratulations to the winning hockey team from Canada, and to Sid the Kid for the winning goal in OT. Great hockey, great game!! Guess we'll all be drinking Labatt Blue now, eh?
Bristol (CT) Press:
According to a report released Thursday by a nonprofit consumer group, failure to enact health care reform this year will lead in the next decade to about 1,700 premature deaths of people between 25 and 64 years old in Connecticut.
Pass it and move on.
WSJ:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday expressed confidence that Democrats would have enough votes to pass a broad health-care overhaul, but acknowledged that it could come at a political cost to lawmakers who back the measure.
Asked in an appearance on ABC's "This Week" program whether Democrats would have the votes to pass the health bill in the House, Ms. Pelosi (D., Calif.) offered a one-word "yes." She said Democrats in both chambers were working out details, with the aim of producing a final bill. "We'll see what the Senate can do," she said.
Ms. Pelosi added, in an appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" that Democrats would have more specific legislative language in "a matter of days."
NY Times:
Suppose Congress and President Obama fail to overhaul the system now, or just tinker around the edges, or start over, as the Republicans propose — despite the Democrats’ latest and possibly last big push that began last week at a marathon televised forum in Washington.
Then "my health care" stays the same, right?
Far from it, health policy analysts and economists of nearly every ideological persuasion agree. The unrelenting rise in medical costs is likely to wreak havoc within the system and beyond it, and pretty much everyone will be affected, directly or indirectly.
Politico:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Sunday he believes Democrats will pursue a rarely used parliamentary tool to muscle health care legislation through the chamber over the angry objections of Republicans.
"I think they will pursue the parliamentary device called reconciliation," McConnell said on CNN's "State of the Union."
I think he's on to something, myself.
Paul Krugman:
So, on the This Week panel today I didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the biggest whopper from Sen. Lamar Alexander, who told Elizabeth Vargas that reconciliation — I don’t have the exact transcript — had in the past been used for small things and "to reduce the deficit".
In fact, reconciliation was used to pass the two major Bush tax cuts, which increased the deficit — by $1.8 trillion.
And there’s no penalty for this kind of deception.
Paul Krugman:
So here’s the situation. We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all momentum for serious banking reform has been lost. The question now seems to be whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the second option is starting to look preferable.
Ross Douthat channels conservative activist chit-chat:
Mitt Romney? He couldn’t make the voters like him last time ... Sarah Palin? She’d lose 47 states ... Mike Huckabee? Better as a talk-show host ... Tim Pawlenty, Jim DeMint, Bobby Jindal, David Petraeus? Too blah, too extreme, too green, and stop dreaming ...
But murmur the name Mitch Daniels, and everyone perks up a bit. Would he win? Maybe not. But he’d be the best president of any of them...
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