Watch an expert teach a smug U.S. senator about Canadian healthcare | Los Angeles Times

This is how you take down someone's ignorance and stupidity:

"BURR: On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year? Do you know?
MARTIN: I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all."

FactChecking ‘Pernicious’ Obamacare Claims | FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org wades through a number of the Obamacare Claims made by Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Rand Paul, and President Barack Obama.

They also fact-checked a number of Obamacare Myths last week that are worth reading.

It’s Cory Booker’s race to lose | The Fix - Washington Post

"With Republicans unable to land a top-tier candidate, the real action is in the Democratic primary, and two new polls show Booker with a huge early lead.

According to a new Rutgers-Eagleton poll, Booker leads Rep. Frank Pallone 55 percent to 9 percent, with Rep. Rush Holt bringing up the rear at 8 percent.

And a new Quinnipiac University poll shows very much the same picture, with Booker at 53 percent, Holt at 10 percent and Pallone at 9 percent."

Read more at The Washington Post's The Fix blog.

More reasons for why the filibuster is bad.

Ezra Klein with a blog post on why the filibuster promotes partisanship:

"The crucial idea here is that it is very different to kill a bill than to vote against a bill. When the minority party kills a bill, they have made the majority into a failure. And when voters perceive the majority as failing, they vote in the other guys. If you’re in the minority, there’s no faster path back to power than killing bills."

David Frum: Why our government is broken - CNN.com

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum pens an excellent column on how politics has changed from the 1950's to the 1980's to today:

"Under the old rules, there were certain things that political parties did not do -- even though theoretically they could. If one party controlled the Senate and another party controlled the presidency, the Senate party did not reject all the president's nominees. The party that controlled the House did not refuse to schedule votes on the president's budgets. Individual senators did not use secret holds to sway national policy. The filibuster was reserved for rare circumstances -- not as a routine 60-vote requirement on every Senate vote.

It's incredible to look back now on how the Reagan tax cut passed the Democratic House in 1981. The Democratic House leaderships could have refused to schedule votes on Reagan's tax plans. Instead, they not only allowed the tax plan to proceed -- but they allowed 48 of 243 Democrats to break ranks on the key procedural vote without negative consequences to their careers in the Democratic party. (Rep. Dan Glickman of Kansas, for example, who voted for the tax cuts would rise to become Secretary of Agriculture under President Clinton.)

Hard to imagine Speaker John Boehner allowing his Republicans to get away with similar behavior on a measure proposed by President Obama."

Although I personally think he conveniently avoids the issue of how usage of the filibuster has became so prominent (Republican senators after the 2006 Democratic takeover of both Houses of Congress), the column is an excellent read on how our politics got to where it is today.

The White House Blog - American Jobs Act: Get the Facts

If you only watched it on TV, check out the "PowerPoint" version of President Obama's address last night:

Experts Say The Economy Needs A Boost That Is Big, Fast, And Smart. The American Jobs Act Fits That Criteria. | The New Republic

The New Republic breaks down The American Jobs Act by the numbers and finds it comes close to what economists believed the act should be.

Fiscal policy: Flying blind | The Economist

This is why politics is scary:

"...as new data have revealed the true dimensions of the 2008 collapse, the public's perception of events hasn't much changed. Critics still jeer the stimulus for its failure to deliver promised results, despite the now-obvious inadequacy of the package."

Washington's Dirty Little Secret

Ezra Klein uncovers something most people don't realize: tax expenditures and government spending are really the same thing:

"The government pays employers $700 billion to offer health insurance to their employees, which no economist would say is a good idea. We’re subsidizing select parts of the energy sector, spending almost $2 billion, for instance, to subsidize “open-loop biomass” rather than simply pricing carbon emissions and letting the market work out the details, and we’re handing $4 billion to oil and gas companies that explore for new reserves.

Midway through my excavation, however, when I was really just getting warmed up, I realized I had made a mistake. I wasn’t looking at the federal budget — I was looking at the U.S. tax code. So cutting all those costly programs wouldn’t count as cutting spending to Republicans in Washington. It would count as raising taxes.

All those programs are tucked in the tax code, classified as “tax expenditures.” Like traditional government spending, the point is to achieve specific ends by throwing money at a problem. The only difference is that the beneficiaries don’t receive checks from the government, they simply have their tax liabilities reduced. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that, in 2010 alone, tax expenditures cost the government more than $1 trillion — more than Medicaid and Medicare combined."

United States of Influence: Why is Congress a millionaires club?

Great post on CBSNews.com today as part of their "United States of Influence" series:

"As a congressional candidate, "every waking minute of every day is devoted to that campaign," said Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee. "It requires an extraordinary amount of time, and it becomes difficult for a lot of people if you have a full-time job... When you've got a mortgage to pay and college tuition and braces to pay for, those kinds of day-to-day, real-life expenses come before putting six months into a campaign.""

At what point will people start feeling like they're being treated like serfs?

Playing chess among checkers players...

The details of the budget cuts are coming out and the Right isn't happy about it. A key blurb from the article:

"The full details of Friday's agreement weren't being released until overnight as it was officially submitted to the House. But the picture already emerging is of legislation financed with a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially "score" as savings to pay for spending elsewhere, but that often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.

As a result of the legerdemain, Obama was able to reverse many of the cuts passed by House Republicans in February when the chamber passed a bill slashing this year's budget by more than $60 billion. In doing so, the White House protected favorites like the Head Start early learning program, while maintaining the maximum Pell grant of $5,550 and funding for Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative that provides grants to better-performing schools."

Before everyone jumps off the deep end, this is actually the first example of true compromise in a long time. One important aspect of negotiation is to allow your adversary to back out of the deal without losing face. The adversary for Obama here wasn't the Rebpublican leadership but rather the Tea Party. This deal allowed John Boehner to get it passed with the votes he needed and the votes Harry Reid needed in the Senate without Boehner having to rely upon the Mike Pences and Michele Bachmanns of the world.

This also allowed Pence and Bachmann to continue kowtowing to the Tea Party by voting 'Nay' on the continuing resolution.

See, everybody wins!

NYT: The Senate’s Health Care Calculations

Is there anything Nate Silver does not analyze? He's quickly developing a reputation for himself as a person of focused objectivity.

House and Senate to Vote today; Stimulus bill now $787 Billion

Looks like the House will hold a vote around 1:00pm today and the Senate sometime later in the day on the stimulus bill. Looks like President Obama could get his wish of having the bill on his desk prior to President's Day. Stay tuned...