This could be an interesting, beneficial outcome of this year’s election: Debbie Stabenow ascending to Chair the Agriculture Committee. As of his last calculation, Nate Silver gives the Democrats an 84% chance of keeping the Senate. But they’ll keep it without Blanche Lincoln, whom Nate gives a 100% chance of losing to John Boozman. And [...]

It was not Ben Nelson who killed the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, nor was it Arlen Specter or Senate Republicans. No, the sole reason Dawn Johnsen is not leading the OLC is that Barack Obama and his coterie of advisors did not want Dawn Johnsen leading the OLC.

John Dingell says he is going to try to persuade Stupak to drop his efforts to sink healthcare with his anti-choice efforts. The Congress is a place where we represent our people and where we serve our conscience. I strongly disagree with Bart, I think he’s wrong. But he was my friend. He is my [...]

ThinkProgress has an absolutely devastating report on 111 Republican members of Congress who have attacked last year’s stimulus bill, but who have since taken credit for it. Click through for details on Republican hypocrisy close to you, but for a taste, here are the MI GOP stimulus hypocrites. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) Signed A Letter [...]

This story is several days old. But I wanted to go back and show how, after a pack of lobbyists killed one attempt to get government to use its power to save money and improve health care, another pack of lobbyists are trying to do the same with higher education. Eric Lichtblau (who, IMO, does [...]

Thus far today, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, and Blache Lincoln have come out against passing health care reform through sidecar reconciliation. Of course that means they’re defending all the corrupt aspects of the Senate bill that proved to be so unpopular in MA, starting with the Cornhusker Kickback (and including the Louisiana Purchase that similarly [...]

The press, other members of Congress, everyone have to stop reporting over and over again that the Bad Nelson and Holy Joe “oppose” some aspect of health care reform. Two key senators criticized the most recent healthcare compromise Sunday, saying the policies replacing the public option are still unacceptable. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben [...]

ProPublica has done a comparison of the House and Senate stimulus packages which shows in stark fashion the degree to which the Senate bill steals from the poor to give to the affluent. The Senate bill gives more in tax cuts to the upper middle class–in the form of the AMT patch and the house flipping subsidy–than they give in all the programs targeted to the poor.

We really shouldn’t be calling the Senate stimulus bill the Collins-Nelson compromise bill. We ought to be calling it the Grassley-Isakson-Coburn-Collins-Bad Nelson bill, to memorialize where all the stupid comes from in the bill.

When will Obama actually ask the millions of people on his email list to actually make calls to Congress?