Tom from Illinois, a conservative who is one of my best-informed readers, wrote me yesterday to alert me to the storm I had kicked up with my column on Sarah Palin. Very few of the comments that follow my columns are useful — most are angry, accusatory and partisan, written by wingers on the left and right who will never be happy with anything they see under my byline. I credit and criticize both parties, respect people and ideas in both parties, and value bipartisanship and independence. It's lonely in the middle.
Why avoid investigating the fact that our
military allowed one of its own, who would eventually murder 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, to continue communicating with radical
clerics who advocate terrorist acts? Why recommend women stop getting mammograms in their 40s
and cause such a backlash that Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelious has to come out and disavow the recommendations? And in a
nation riven by unemployment, how did our government mess up the stimulus
data so badly that not 10, not 20, not 50 but up to 700 congressional districts
were mistakenly credited stimulus grants out of 130,000 grants given, according
to
ABC News?
The Hill's A.B. Stoddard answers viewer queries about some of the unanswered questions regarding healthcare reform and looks at how, in some districts, lobbyists are taking the place of congressmen.
The discovery of water on the moon — exciting as it is — was actually not the most dramatic news of the weekend. The details and implications are fascinating, but it was actually when I saw that the Obama administration is pledging to push for immigration reform next year that I nearly fell out of my chair.
This is not a joke. If you missed it, please update yourself on the White House plan to drive conservative Democrats absolutely nutty and deepen the growing divide among Democrats in advance of next year's midterm elections, when the party is expected to get slammed.
Former President Bill
Clinton hit up the weekly caucus lunch of Senate Democrats on Tuesday,
imploring them to shelve enough differences to pass healthcare
reform. "We're winning," he told them, which couldn't be further
from the truth.
As I listed
in my column this week,
obstacles to passage of healthcare reform continue to mount. Getting to 60
votes in the Senate appears not implausible but impossible at this point — yes,
it can happen, but nobody knows how.
On his first Veterans Day as president, Barack Obama was seen in all the usual places, paying homage and his respects to all those — fallen and still among us — who fight for our freedom. The day of honor and remembrance came as a painstaking review of his strategy for the war in Afghanistan is under way, and Obama is reportedly poised to increase troop levels there in the coming months.
A.B. Stoddard and Republican strategist John Feehery discuss how the Republican Party could open itself up to a centrist base, and how the abortion amendment might be the downfall of the Democrats' healthcare bill.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told us all we needed to know this week about the divide that threatens the Democratic Party's majorities in next year's midterm elections.
"We got walloped," said Warner, a former governor of Virginia, about Democrats losing both gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, in his home state by 17 points.
Sarah Palin couldn't
deliver New York's 23rd district for Republicans with her endorsement of Conservative third-party candidate Doug Hoffman, but candidates across the
country are still scared of the power of Palin, Tea Parties and the Club
for Growth combined.
The morning after
Hoffman went down and a Democrat was elected in NY-23 for the first time since
1870, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) got to work soliciting an endorsement from Palin
for his campaign to win President Barack Obama's old Senate seat next year.
The Hill's A.B.
Stoddard and Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis consider what the future will
hold for the Democratic agenda on Capitol Hill and in the White House after the
2009 elections if the majority party starts slipping in numbers.
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