Yes, Someone Is Actually Liveblogging The Senate Finance Committee Markup
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post, you are one brave blogger, and a service to the Republic! Yes, the Senate Finance Committee is slowly working its way through 500 amendments and 500,000 opening speeches today on its terrible health care bill. How’s it going? Oh look, Chuck Grassley is being an ass, weird: “He acknowledged that the bill did not include a government-run insurance option, but raised the specter that might yet lie in the future and lead the U.S. in the direction of Europe, where ‘countries have inevitably turned to government imposed rationing to control costs.’” Ha ha, “raised the specter”/”Europe” — this is one sassy markup liveblog, MMHMM. [Washington Post]











You should read this whole Ezra Klein interview with Sen. Jay Rockefeller if you have the time, because Rockefeller is doing his best to preserve some kind of decent health care bill in the Senate, and candidly hints at all sorts of things: “I think the world of Olympia Snowe. She’s got incredible courage, and the Republican leadership is brutal in the way they apply pressure… They bring the hammer down on her, and I’m not going to say how,” and “If you really want to be honest about it, eight to 10 percent of the members of Congress understand health care. At maximum. I chaired the intelligence committee, and health care makes it look like riding on a tricycle it’s so complicated. So what you have is lobbyists picking on congressmen who don’t know health-care reform…” In other words, it’s a brand new Washington! [
Following the Senate’s lead, the House of Representatives has
The term “war room,” which was once used to describe actual rooms from which powerful people went about warring, has now been watered down to the point where it just refers to some 9-year-old intern in an undisclosed Washington dungeon linking to articles about Bob Corker, on Twitter. This is the macho macho new Senate Democrats’ War Room! Look at how buff ‘n’ tuff they are, the Senate Democrats. Ha ha, nice try. An accurate “Senate Democrats’ Twitter Page” would feature a picture of an exasperated Ben Nelson and only one message, “Whoa whoa whoa, let’s slow things down and think this through,” reposted every hour on the hour. [
It has only been a week — one week — since Ted Kennedy died, and already some gal has exploited this by declaring her candidacy for the special election happening like 2 minutes from now. Her name is Martha Coakley and she has been the state’s Attorney General since 2006. We checked out her
The race to fill Ted Kennedy’s
Ted Kennedy might have a mean old liberal Democrat replacement in the Senate soon! All the Massachusetts legislature must do is