The president is expected to present a more emotional appeal during a conference call Wednesday with liberal religious groups. A senior White House official said the message would be tailored to the groups’ moral emphases, although he cautioned the president’s message to religious groups may not herald a broader shift in themes.
“This is such a technical issue, it’s easy to get bogged down in the weeds,“ said Dan Nejfelt, a spokesman for Faith in Public Life, one of the groups scheduled for the Wednesday call. “It’s important to have a voice saying, ‘This is about right and wrong. This is about honoring faith.‘“
The president’s revised health-care emphasis is likely to roll out as summer ends, when White House officials believe a broader group of voters will tune into the debate. The new strategy envisions speeches rather than informal town-hall meetings, said a senior official.
SIDEBAR: I get so annoyed with anonymous sources. Please, serious journalists. If these “senior White House officials” want their message out there, demand that they use their names. No name, no news. You have a responsibility to your readers to give them this information so they can properly assess credibility—not only of the source, but also of you. END SIDEBAR
So President Obama is going to get back to the basics. Fewer number-crunching bullet points; more touchy-feely stories in the Teleprompter, please.
Judging from the results at the ballot box returned by Obama’s campaign-trail speeches, this is a good strategy.
The problem for the president is that it may already be too late.
Newest Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor cast her first vote on the high court late Monday, agreeing with three of her liberal colleagues that a convicted killer in Ohio should have gotten a stay of execution as his lawyers sought to challenge the state’s lethal injection protocol.
The majority of justices disagreed, declining to hear the appeal, and the execution proceeded early Tuesday morning.
The court’s brief order offered no reasoning, and the dissenters merely said they would have granted Mr. Getsy’s application for a stay of execution.
But the alignment of the justices in the Getsy case gave a preliminary indication that, as expected, the ideological fault line at the court was not changed by Justice Sotomayor’s succeeding Justice David H. Souter, who often voted with Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer.
No surprises here, but there are two interesting things to note: The killer, Jason Getsy, murdered his victim in 1995, so he’s spent more than 10 years on Death Row.
He was 33 when he was executed this morning, making him about 19 when he did the crime.
The other interesting component of this case is that Getsy, who was the hired hit man, got the death penalty, but the person who hired him did not.
Conservative columnist and longtime Washington pundit Robert Novak died today after a long battle with brain cancer.
He was 78.
Novak was known for his stern demeanor. For many, he was the archetype Republican: All business. He will probably be most remembered for his involvement in the Valerie Plame/CIA affair. But Novak was many other things.
He was a soldier, an Army veteran of the Korean War. He was a journalist, in the days when that meant hanging around courthouses and city halls all day to develop leads for long-buried stories and researching ... without Google (gasp). While writing the longest-running political column in American history—his columns appeared from 1967 through the early part of this year—his impact was such that he became a newsmaker himself, to the point that satirists even took after him (stay classy, Jon Stewart).
I became aware of Novak during his days on CNN’s Crossfire, when he appeared with Tucker Carlson opposite James Carville and Paul Begala. If you follow my Twitter feed (@jefoster), you know: I love Carville. But I’m no fan of Begala.
But Novak vs. Begala was good TV, if for no other reason than that the former was just as stubborn as the latter was (is) shrill.
Robert Novak was a political watcher of the old school. There aren’t many of his kind left among us, and we are poorer—and lesser informed—because of it.
First of all, the plan being spotlighted here is in San Franciso. We’ll get back to that in a minute.
Secondly, the woman featured here ... well, let’s just say that she’s got a penchant for the drama.
Once believed to be somewhat dangerous, mitral valve prolapses are now known to be quite common. It’s estimated that as many as one in 10 women may have them. If they present problems, it is generally in an ancilliary way: Doctors used to recommend antibiotic premedication for invasive procedures, such as surgeries, etc., to guard against endocarditis, an infection of the heart lining. But they no longer do so because the risk of serious complications are so low.
Yes, I know a lot about this. I am one of those one in 10.
I tell you all that to say that MVPs, on their own, are anything but fatal. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes when this woman said that she “probably, eventually, would have died” without the medical care she gets from this group in San Francisco.
But all that aside, I have searched for the last half hour through CNN’s available transcripts for the exact phrase with which the CNN anchor introduced this clip. It was with a line, both entering and coming back from a commercial break, akin to, “Can universal health care really work? We’ll take you to one place where it is,“ or something like that.
I laughed when I heard that.
Generally, it’s not great strategy to try to prove to the rest of the United States that a liberal philosophy can hold up in their world by demonstrating in in ... San Francisco.
So, two questions on that point:
One, if this model is so wildly successful, then why is the San Francisco example the only one spotlighted? Shouldn’t we be besieged by such examples?
Two, if this model is so wildly successful, then why is it necessary for the federal government to overhaul the entire American health care system? Healthy San Francisco was conceived by local folks. It was started off of local money (a city grant). It is maintained through state and federal grants, an employer requirement for health care spending and participant fees, which are based on a sliding scale. You heard the announcer: Any uninsured adult in San Francisco (note, he didn’t say “citizen”) is eligible. If that’s the model, then little more is required of Uncle Sam than the redirection of some health and human services funds and a relatively benign requirement that businesses devote a fraction of their earnings to health care. But in the meantime, what is precluding folks from starting similar groups, with alternative means, around the country?
Wait. Maybe that brings us back to our first question.
It’s sort of like the premise of this TIME Magazine piece by Ramesh Ponnuru. Ponnuru discusses “The fatal flaw of Obamacare”—that is, the contention that America’s current health care system is wasteful, discriminatory and and rife with fraud—but if you like it, you can keep your piece of it.
