Steve Benen with the story about the Republican plan to obstruct health-care reform:

We learned yesterday that Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has distributed a three-page memo to his Republican colleagues, reminding them of various procedural tactics they can utilize to obstruct, delay, and undermine the debate on health care. Sam Stein called it "the equivalent of an obstruction manual -- a how-to for holding up health care reform."

This morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) seized on the document: "The good news is that Senate Republicans finally, at long last, have put a detailed plan down on paper. The bad news is that it's not, as we'd hoped, a plan to make health care insurance more affordable; it's not one to make health insurance companies more accountable; and it's certainly not a plan to reverse rapidly rising health care costs and draw down our deficit.

"The Republican plan we've waited weeks and months to see ... [is] not even about health care at all. The first and only plan Senate Republicans could be bothered to write up is an instructional manual on how to bring the Senate to a screeching halt. We knew that was happening anyway, but they had the audacity to put it in writing."

The Democrats are finally starting to take a look at changing procedural rules.

Fortunately, Sen. McCain has excellent healthcare coverage and can get checked out for early signs of Alzheimer's disease! Via Media Matters:

In what will, no doubt, be a recurring trend from Senate Republicans as they fight health care reform, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) decried the Senate Democrats' legislation by using faulty and fact-less rhetoric. McCain falsely accused the Senate health care reform of using "Enron accounting" measures. His comments are ironic, however, in light of his close, personal relationship with Phil "Mr. Enron" Gramm.

Gramm Was National Co-Chairman Of McCain's Campaign. Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm is the general co-chairman of McCain's presidential campaign. [JohnMcCain.com, accessed 6/3/08]

• McCain Was Chairman Of Gramm's 1996 Presidential Campaign. The Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported that in 1996, "McCain was national chairman for the presidential-nomination bid of U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas." [Pittsburgh Tribune Review, 9/3/07, via LexisNexis]

McCain: As President "I Would Rely On" Gramm. During the January 24 Republican debate in Florida, John McCain said, "But I as president, as every other president, rely primarily on my secretary of the Treasury, on my Council of Economic Advisers, on the head of that. I would rely on the circle that I have developed over many years of people like Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm, Warren Rudman, Pete Peterson, and [think tank] The Concorde Group." [New York Post, 1/26/08, emphasis added]

McCain: Gramm Is "Smartest" Politician. John McCain said the following about Phil Gramm to the Houston Chronicle: "He's probably the smartest - not just economist, but politician - there is." [Houston Chronicle, 2/25/08, via LexisNexis]

McCain Praised Gramm's Strategic Advice. The Houston Chronicle reported, "In an interview with the Chronicle, McCain called his friend's ability to frame issues and come up with clever campaign tactics 'just remarkable.'" [Houston Chronicle, 2/25/08, via LexisNexis]

• McCain Looked To Gramm When Campaign Was Floundering. The Houston Chronicle reported, "After working in the background for months, Gramm stepped into the center of the McCain campaign at its nadir last summer. Gramm said McCain 'asked me to come to Washington to look at the books and see what we needed to do to straighten them out.' The man famous for the Gramm-Latta budget cuts of the Reagan era recommended deep cuts in the McCain campaign budget and a radical change in strategy so that voters would hear the old 'straight-talk express' again. It worked. In January, Gramm stepped out of the shadows. He traveled with McCain in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and stumped solo for his friend in his native state of Georgia." [Houston Chronicle, 2/25/08, via LexisNexis]

McCain Said Gramm Was His "Mentor" On Economic Issues. New York Times business and economics columnist David Leonhardt wrote, "Mr. McCain begins the story of his economic education in 1982, when the country was in recession and he was first elected to the House. Once in Congress, he worked with Jack F. Kemp and Phil Gramm, who conservatives who were also in the House then, and Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist who was an aide to President Ronald Reagan, to pass tax cuts and spending restraints. Mr. McCain said that Mr. Gramm - 'a guy who taught economics for 12 years at Texas A&M' and has endorsed Mr. McCain - had been an especially important mentor." [New York Times, 1/26/08, emphasis added]

We have a national health emergency, and Senate Republicans are stalling the surgeon general's confirmation. But then, they don't live in the same country as the rest of us:

A GOP stall on all Health and Human Services nominees has left the department without a surgeon general during a period of a global flu pandemic, prompting the HHS secretary to call for Senate action.

Regina Benjamin, the surgeon general nominee, “is ready to be voted on in the Senate, and we would just strongly urge the United States Senate” to act, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said during an MSNBC interview Friday in which she discused the department's response to the spread of the H1N1 virus.

President Barack Obama on Saturday declared the H1N1 outbreak a national emergency.

“We are facing a major pandemic, we have a well-qualified candidate for surgeon general, she’s been through the committee process. We just need a vote in the Senate,” Sebeilus said. “Please give us a surgeon general.”

Benjamin was unanimously approved by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Oct. 7, but Senate Republicans are holding up all HHS nominees over a so-called gag order on insurance companies that have been critical of Democratic efforts to reform health care.

“We’ve not received any recent calls from the administration about their nominee,” a senior Republican aide said. “There won’t be any time agreements for confirmation of HHS nominees until their actions have been fully reviewed.”

Well, I suppose we should have known. Apparently the big holdup with Max Baucus's Finance Committee bill is... abortion. (Yeah, I wondered what the hell that has to do with finance, too.)

But wait, it gets better! The Senate Republicans not only demand that abortions not be paid for with public funds (something already forbidden by the Hyde Amendment), they want to prevent private insurance plans from paying for them, too.

Wow. If the Dems knuckle under to this extortion, it'll be war.

TAPPED has more:

Many supporters of health reform believe that systemic questions, such as whether or not reform will include a public insurance option, should inform the congressional and public debates. But the truth is that Americans, unsurprisingly, seem to be most concerned about coverage specifics. After reform, what procedures will and won’t be covered? Will my array of choices expand or contract?

Those fears have been artfully exploited by the increasingly enthusiastic and radical conservative anti-health reform movement. In response, today the White House launched “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check“, a website modeled after “Fight the Smears,” a campaign season effort to dispel rumors about Barack Obama’s background and positions.

The new site is built around a simplified, eight-point explanation of how consumers will benefit from health reform. Using this messaging, the administration plans a public relations push during the congressional recess, with a focus on drumming up grassroots support via the Obama’s team’s email list and outreach to the liberal blogosphere. But given the intensity of anti-reform protests over the last week, there is little doubt that the president seems to be on the defensive. The continued lack of one, concrete, completed health reform bill means that opponents of reform can grandstand on a number of hypothetical issues. For example, both the House tri-committee bill and the Senate HELP committee bill create an independent council of medical experts to advise HHS on what services will be covered in the new health exchanges. Conservatives have suggested that the council — which, of course, does not yet exist — will prevent terminally ill patients from receiving life support or continuing care, or will mandate abortion coverage.

Both of those outcomes are completely improbable. Neither are on the White House’s agenda. But by kicking some tough choices on coverage down the line, to after reform passes, Democrats have opened the door to this kind of scare-mongering. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, and opponents of reform — along with skeptical moderates — are exploiting that simple truth.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the abortion debate. None of the health reform proposals in Congress threaten the Hyde Amendment, which currently prevents the federal government from funding abortions. But anti-choice legislators are not satisfied. Many women will receive government subsidies to buy health insurance after reform, and Republicans — including some senators in the all-powerful “Gang of Six” — would like those women to be banned from accessing abortion with those funds, whether they are covered through private insurance plans or a potential public option. This would be a significant curtailing of reproductive rights, since most private insurance plans currently do offer some abortion coverage.

In this case, the current reform proposals actually do maintain the oft-heralded “status quo:” Medicaid won’t cover abortion, but private insurance plans will. It is reform opponents who are pushing to change the way health care is delivered, by curtailing women’s ability to access abortion coverage in the private insurance market. This morning, a senior administration official, speaking on background, told me that some moderate Republicans are choosing to understand health insurance subsidies as tax credits, and thus, from a libertarian point of view, might support a woman’s right to access any health procedure she wishes with that “tax credit,” including abortion. And yet, this official affirmed that abortion is among the issues holding up the Senate Finance Committee — right alongside long term cost containment and debates over whether the federal or state governments will pay to expand Medicaid.

In other words, almost everything about health reform remains up in the air. Stay tuned.

For those of you who follow the inside baseball, National Journal has a look at the Republican strategy on healthcare reform: Delay, misinform, obfuscate... You know, the usual:

Grassley, the Finance Committee's ranking member, is the influential wild card among Senate Republicans, and he covets his reputation for independence. McConnell stays in close touch with the folksy Midwesterner, eager to keep him in the GOP fold. Many congressional observers have decided that Grassley is negotiating in good faith with Democrats to see if he can help get a reasonable bill out of Finance, but these sources expect him to reject a conference report later this year if it moves too far left.

In an interview, Grassley contended that Republicans should be delighted that he's on the job. "If they wonder whether or not our being involved [in the Finance talks] is doing any good, wouldn't you rather have a conservative Republican at the table than have nobody at the table?" he asked. "And secondly, hasn't our party, plus the grassroots of America, been pleading for time to study [legislation]? And suppose I was not at the table: There would be debate on the floor of the Senate, not in the Finance Committee."

Grassley said that Republican leaders asked him to block any Democratic moves to ration health services or implement a public option, although he tentatively supports a public cooperative that is not government-run. "So, the two things that Republicans are most concerned about -- the public option and rationing -- ain't going to be in it," he concluded.

Asked about his balancing act with Grassley, McConnell said that his colleague has been "very open" with the caucus. "I think it's been just fine," McConnell said of the Finance discussions. "I do read that some of the Democrats may not be that happy with it. But I don't think I have felt, nor do I think most of my members have felt, that they were trying to hide the ball on us."

Meanwhile, his "reputation for independence" is looking a little compromised. The New York Times:

"Some Republicans have begun to warn that Mr. Grassley should tread carefully on the health care bill if he wants to become the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee."

Politico:

"The three Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee are under pressure from their leadership not to cut a deal too quickly .. and that message has been delivered frequently in recent weeks."

The Hill:

"Senator Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, has assured his GOP colleagues that he will not sell them out and strike a private deal with Democrats on healthcare reform."

[...] On Wednesday morning Senator Grassley said, the group was "on the edge" of agreement. But later in the day he walked those comments back, saying, "I think we’re on the edge of getting something. Now, when I say ‘on the edge,’ that could be within a week. It could be within two weeks, or it might not be until we get back after Labor Day."

Awww. I think it's sweet that they let him think he's independent -- and that Max Baucus is playing along with it.

After the rape and pillage of the last several decades, do we really care all that much about the survival of the insurance companies? If they were providing adequate service at a reasonable cost, it might not be so infuriating. But to pay all that money and get so little in return?

Yet the Senate Republicans, the Party of No, the Handmaidens of Corporate Welfare, are more concerned about losing their political patrons than the fact that people all over the country are, quite literally, dying.

WASHINGTON — The mood was upbeat in early March when scores of powerful lawmakers and lobbyists joined President Obama in the East Room of the White House to talk about fixing the nation's health care system. Still, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, rose to tell Obama that many Republicans had a problem with his plan to let the government compete with private insurers.

"There's a lot of us that feel that the government is an unfair competitor," Grassley said. "We have to keep what we have now strong, and make it stronger."

Translation: We can't possibly let you cut into insurance companies' obscene profit margins!

Three months later, disagreement has turned to discord over a key element of Obama's health care prescription: his insistence on a "public plan" to compete with private insurers. America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, is joined by the American Medical Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others that have expressed misgivings about greater government involvement.

"We're not sure that the government is very good at running a health plan," said Nancy Nielsen, president of the AMA, which heard Obama defend his plan Monday.

Except for Medicare, with that measley 3% in administrative costs - and the V.A. system. But we'd rather not talk about that!

That has led to a number of compromise proposals, designed to inject choice and competition into the market without letting the government set prices or shift costs to the private sector.

"What I am trying to do — and what a public option will help do — is put affordable health care within reach for millions of Americans," Obama told the American Medical Association.

The first Senate and House bills to emerge this month would offer a public plan, but a third bill, in the Senate, to be unveiled soon might not include it. Ten of 11 Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee wrote Obama this month in opposition.

An analysis by the Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm, found that a public plan such as Medicare would draw 119 million people away from private insurers. That's because a plan patterned after Medicare could pay doctors and hospitals 20% to 30% less than its private competitors. Limiting who can join and regulating what the plan must pay providers would reduce the upheaval, the analysis said.

In other words, we need to make sure the people who need it can't get it...

Ooopsies! Someone got caught with their pants down...literally:

Sources in Washington and Nevada say Republican Sen. John Ensign, a rising star in the Republican Party considering a 2012 presidential bid will hold a press conference later today in which he will acknowledge an extramarital affair.

Ensign, a member of the Senate GOP leadership, flew back to his native Las Vegas today in anticipation of the public announcement, sources said, missing a vote considered key to the Nevada tourist industry.[..]

Elected in 2000 and reelected in 2006, Ensign has been a leading conservative among Senate Republicans, playing a key role in demanding the resignation of Larry Craig in September 2007. Ensign called Craig a "disgrace" after he was arrested in June 2007 in an airport men's restroom on disorderly conduct charges. Craig resisted the calls from Ensign to resign but retired from the Senate last November.

Per TPM, the woman worked on the Ensign re-election campaign and her husband worked as one of his Senate staffers. The reason it came to light now?

For a guy who harbored presidential ambitions, this is tough blow to his hopes for 2012. So something had to give. What was it?

Late Update: Politico has more detail, including a reported demand for money from the husband of Ensign's lover: Political insiders in the Senate and in Nevada told POLITICO that Ensign began an affair with a staffer several months after he separated from his wife. When Ensign reconciled with his wife, the sources said, he gave the aide a severance package and parted ways.

Sometime later, a Nevada source said, Ensign met with the husband of the woman involved and had what this source described as a positive encounter. Sources said that the man subsequently asked Ensign for a substantial sum of money - at which point Ensign decided to make the affair public.

Ouch. So cheating on your wife and extortion from former employees? How does that square with this statement made in 2004 regarding the sanctity of marriage:

“Marriage recognizes the ideal of a father and mother living together to raise their children,” Ensign said. “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America has relied.”

Ensign, in his comments, noted that Nevadans had amended the state constitution to guarantee the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Ensign emphasized the need to preserve the will of Nevadans who voted overwhelmingly to preserve marriage as well as the need to preserve the will of the majority of Americans.

“I am deeply concerned that a few unelected judges and some locally elected government officials have taken steps to redefine marriage to fit their own agenda,” said Ensign. “It is not right to mold marriage to fit the desires of a few, against the wishes of so many, and to ignore the important role of marriage.”

Yeah, good to see you uphold that sanctity, but my uncle and his partner of 15 years are somehow a threat to it.

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I meant to get to this yesterday, but time flew by. Anyway, Chris Matthews had on Manuel Miranda, disgraced right-wing hack and former hired hand of Bill First, to discuss his provocative letter that attacked the GOP over Sonia Sotomayor. Matthews tried to appear to be very tough on Miranda, but never brought up his criminal background or his over-the-top comments about Mitch McConnell.

Greg Sargent:

The New York Times reports that a coalition of heavyweight conservative groups has signed a letter pressuring Senate Republicans to filibuster Sonia Sotomayor. The organizer of the pressure campaign — which has angered Senate GOP leaders — is identified as one Manuel Miranda, whom the paper only describes as a “former adviser on judicial issues to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.”

There’s a bit more to Manuel Miranda than that, however. Miranda, as longtime Congressional insiders will recall, was the GOP Senate staffer who was nailed in 2004 for hacking into the computers of Senate Dems and downloading thousands of documents relating to the strategies of Dem Senators on judicial nominations.

Miranda’s scheme — widely referred to as “Memogate” — was a big deal. A Senate probe found that many of the swiped files had been systematically downloaded “from folders belonging to Democratic staff,” with some leaked to friendly reporters. Miranda resigned, and a Washington Post editorial denounced his “political spying operation” that indicated “how low the nominations process has sunk.”

Miranda called Mitch McConnell "limp-wristed":

A group of conservative Republicans questioned Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's handling of President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday, with one suggesting Kentucky's senior senator should resign if he is unable to aggressively challenge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination.

Manuel Miranda, a former aide to McConnell's predecessor Sen. Bill Frist, orchestrated a letter signed by 145 GOP conservatives urging lawmakers to scrutinize Sotomayor. Miranda resigned his position in Frist's office in the wake of a probe into alleged hacking of Democratic computer files.

In an interview with Politico, a Washington based publication, Miranda said McConnell should "consider resigning" as Senate minority leader if he can't take a harder line on President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee.

Miranda accused McConnell of being "limp-wristed" and "a little bit tone deaf'" when it comes to judicial nominees.

Asked by McClatchy Newspapers to explain those statements, Miranda said the Senate as an institution hasn't properly vetted previous court nominees and "should do more."

He specifically criticized how McConnell "holds the gun" to judicial nominees. "He doesn't hold it very firmly. He doesn't hold it very well."

Hmmmmm. I wonder why he used the term limp-wristed against Mitch ...

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Mitch McConnell joined John King of CNN to discuss judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination. King asked him to comment on Limbaugh's racist rant against her. McConnell took the cowardly way out by not denouncing Limbaugh-Gordon Liddy and all the rest of them for their hate speech and instead used a different tactic.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: So, here you have a racist. You might want to soften that and you might want to say a reverse racist. And the libs, of course, say that minorities cannot be racists because they don't have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone, because reverse racists certainly do have the power to implement their power. Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one.

MCCONNELL: Look. I've got a big job to do, dealing with 40 Senate Republicans and trying to advance the nation's agenda. I've got better things to do than be the speech police over people who are going to have their views about a very important appointment, which is an appointment to the United States Supreme Court.

So I'm not going to get into policing everybody's speech. The important thing here is to look at the nominee, her qualifications, read the 3,600 cases, and do it right. That's what the American people expect of us.

In other words, McConnell is whispering, "hey Rush/Newt/Cheney/Buchanan/Tancredo! Keep saying what you're saying and I'll make believe that the Senate Republicans are above it all."
Think Progress:

Asked if Sotomayor is a "racist," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) ducked the issue on CBS this morning. "I'm not going to get involved in characterizations before I've even met her," Kyl said.

CNN's transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

Ian Millhise writes in an email:

More evidence that conservatives will engage in scorched earth opposition, no matter who President Obama nominates:

An aggressive fundraising group that targeted moderate GOP lawmakers earlier this year has issued a stern warning to Senate Republicans who might vote for President Obama’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

In a letter sent Wednesday, the National Republican Trust PAC cautioned the senators they may become targets of the group’s advertising campaigns if they fail to “stay true to your Republican conservative values and beliefs as you anticipate potential nominees put before you by this Administration.” . . .

Scott Wheeler, the PAC’s executive director, said he is prepared to unleash the same resources on Republicans who do not oppose Obama’s as-yet-unnamed court pick.

Truly, President Obama could nominate Rush Limbaugh, and the conservative talking point would be that Limbaugh has too much empathy for drug addicts.

Last week, when we first heard that Baton Rouge porn star Stormy Daniels was going to tackle Louisiana obstructionist Senator David "Diapers" Vitter, we thought it was one big joke.

Then the plot thickened as it started to appear that Republicans even further to the right than Vitter -- if that's possible -- were looking to take him on in Louisiana's newly modernized primary next year.

Suspicion for recruiting Daniels fell on Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana senatorial candidate who thinks Vitter's serial sex scandals make him unfit to serve in the Senate.

Now that Daniels is doing interviews, however (above on CNN) with Rick Sanchez and here with Max Blumenthal, it's becoming apparent that she's one smart cookie with huge charisma and a far more sensible outlook than Vitter.

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Remember how a couple of weeks ago everyone was writing about how the vanquished John McCain was going to be Barack Obama's best Republican buddy in the Senate and help pave the way for a new era of senatorial bipartisanship?

Well, et tu, McNasty: He's now leading the charge against Obama's stimulus plan in the Senate. He went on CBS today and explained why:

Schieffer: You have emerged as the main opponent of the President's economic recovery plan. ... But I want to ask you, now that you have made your point, do you intend to support this plan, because I think economists on all sides of this say something has got to be done here.

McCain: Well, I can't, Bob. And I can't because I think it's the greatest transfer of not only spending but authority and responsibility to government. I think it's massive, it's much larger than any measure that was taken during the Great Depression. I think it has policy changes in it which are fundamentally bad for America. For instance, there are 'Buy America' provisions -- that's protectionism. It didn't work at any time in our history.

But most of all, because I think this can only be described as generational theft. What we are doing is amassing multi-trillions of dollars -- if you look at what's going to be announced Monday or Tuesday, a new TARP -- we've already spent $700 billion, another how many have you trillion --

Shieffer: This is aid to the banks --

McCain: Yes. Then we're going to have a supplemental to pay for the war. We're going to have what we call a continuing resolution -- another $400 billion. We're going to have already a $1.2 trillion deficit by estimates and it's just begun. We're going to amass the largest debt in the history of this country by any measurement and we're going to ask our kids and grandkids to pay for it.

So I thought we needed -- I know we're in trouble, I know America needs a stimulus, we need tax cuts, we need to spend money on infrastructure and on other programs that will put people immediately to work. But this is not it.

In other words, Republicans' idea of a "bipartisan bill" is a "Republican bill". That is to say, just more of the same old crap that got us in this mess in the first place.

Yeah, that's some bipartisanship.

But McCain also makes it clear he thinks that Democrats have to completely bend over -- or, as Rush would put it, "grab the ankles" -- to make bipartisanship work. On Planet GOP -- where the rampant fear in fact is what will happen to them if Obama succeeds -- the failure of bipartisanship has nothing, no nothing, to do with Republican ideological rigidity. It's all the Dems' fault:

Well, I think from the beginning, when the Speaker of the House said, 'We won so we're writing the bill,' that set the stage. It was put through both House and Senate without serious, fundamental, at-the-beginning discussions and negotiations with Republicans. Democrat staffers, as we speak, started last night -- and by the way, we just got the bill last night at 11 o'clock, 778 pages -- they're negotiating now. They will come up with a bill, but unfortunately Republicans will not be involved in those negotiations. And I regret that.

In the interest of full disclosure, that's the way the Bush administration, when we were in charge, that's the way we did business. But I thought we were going to have change. And that change meant that we worked together. This is a setback. This is a setback for all Americans, in my view, because we promised, all of us, that we would work together in a more bipartisan, inclusive fashion, and that's certainly not been the case with this bill. And I regret that deeply.

If he weren't being so obviously disingenuous, one could just assume that Republicans like McCain don't realize that the kind of complete rewriting of the established rules of congressional governance he proposes aren't going to happen overnight -- Democrats aren't going to just set aside their well-earned positions of power and let Republicans start writing their stimulus plan. Republicans have to demonstrate they are trustworthy enough partners in making an effective change.

And what they actually just proved is that they aren't. They still are unable to put their narrow ideological interests above the national well-being, to actually take the ample opportunities to work with Democrats that Obama has given them and do something with them.

Instead, all we've gotten is "I hope he fails" and "porkulus." For which they have earned their seat in the back row of the room for many weeks and months to come.

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On Neil Cavuto's Fox News show yesterday, Michelle Malkin tried to appeal to Republicans', ah, base instincts in how they deal with the Obama economic-stimulus plan:

Malkin: I've heard from so many grassroots conservatives who have, ah, managed expectations but still, fairly high ones, that in the wake of the House Republican, uh, holding the line yesterday, that the Senate Republicans will stiffen up their spines and other parts of their body as well.

Cavuto: Careful, this is a family show.

Of course, Malkin views obstruction as their duty, so obviously impugning their virility should they stray seems the natural right-wing thing to do. And I'm sure it'll be very persuasive.

Just wondering, though: Does this mean Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are excused?

Shorter stimulus bill:

We're going to spend a whole boatload of money that won't have much useful effect to massage the ideological egos of Republican congressmen and senators. Because, you know, Republicans have proved they're so good with money!

See, here's the thing. This is exactly the sort of thing for which Obama should be expending political capital. He should go on TV, explain why the Republican tax cuts won't work, and ask people to contact their representatives and insist that they support his plan.

That's what leadership is.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Toyota) is of course urging the White House to leverage concessions from the UAW:

WASHINGTON -- The White House tossed out no lifeline for the teetering auto industry Sunday, although President George W. Bush reiterated that he was considering using money from the $700 billion financial bailout fund to provide loans to the carmakers.

"An abrupt bankruptcy for autos could be devastating for the economy," Bush told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One during an unannounced trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. "We're now in the process of working with the stakeholders on a way forward. We're not quite ready to announce that yet."

Bush wouldn't give a precise timetable but said, "This will not be a long process because of the economic fragility of the autos."

Because, you know, the autos go bad if they sit too long!