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Ah, if only we had China's socialized journalism in the USA!  Then no one would notice huge stonking ripoffs like this:

Senate Dems quietly move a bill to countermand a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors, which will add $247 billion to the deficit over ten years. Of course, the Baucus health care reform bill achieves its famed deficit neutrality through cuts in Medicare fees, mainly to non-physicians--saving (by my reading of the CBO analysis) at least $184 billion from Medicare over the same period. Plus there is a special panel set up to recommend further cuts. Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein might productively explain a) Why this isn't a shell game, with Dems granting Medicare increases in one bill and then taking ostentatious credit for partly-offsetting cuts in a separate bill; b) Why Congress' unwillingness to put up with the scheduled Medicare doctors' cuts this year doesn't indicate that it won't put up with scheduled cuts in future years...link

[etc]

There are a number of people who seem to be trying to defend Obama, but this doesn't really reflect poorly on him at all.  Whoopee, he won another popularity contest that he didn't enter.

Who needs defending is the Committee, which has picked plenty of losers (Arafat and Kissinger are just the lowest-hanging fruit), and has apparently been mostly interested in voting themselves a chance to meet Obama.

(An entertaining effort has been made by tongodeon , who is apparently even up for giving the award to warmongers who are temporarily less mongulatory)

Dead!

Our President is urging Congress not to "lose heart" on health care.

His previous plan was to take people's money without asking and give them something they don't want.  Heartless!  Were Congress not the target, I would be optimistic about his exhortation.

I'm sure that nice Obama fellow would never do anything wrong with your private e-mail, right?

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. Link

"The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act." Link

From a constitutional law professor, this is especially disappointing.

au lait!

Via boingboing, which is usually stupid:
(n.b.: only one of the above is a Cylon)

From the oft-incisive Daniel Larison:

one figure that caught my attention in the breakdown of the Iraq responses.  When told that it was the Republican position, Republican respondents were significantly more likely to support that position than otherwise.  Agreement was 69-28 in the “partisan” group and 55-38 in the “non-partisan,” so when not conditioned to respond tribally according to party loyalty Republicans were much less likely to support the party’s standard Iraq position.

When told that it was the Republican “free trade” position, Republicans agreed with it 63-33.  Without partisan cues, Republicans agreed with a less “free trade”-oriented Democratic statement that included a call to renegotiate NAFTA 54-43.  That’s a forty-one point swing that apparently hinges entirely on partisanship.  All that cognitive dissonance has to give these people a headache. Link

Maybe Republican policymakers (or at least policy promoters) should not think of an elephant!