Brian Beutler reports: Pelosi said afterward that there's a good chance that Congress will have a bill on the President's desk by Christmas. But asked by TPMDC whether she believed that, if given the choice, Obama would ultimately choose to e...

Recognizing the difficulty that death row inmates have in bringing innocence claims before the court, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) has introduced H.R. 3986, "The Effective Death Penalty Appeals Act." (Received by e-mail from Amnesty Internatio...

Ezra Klein writes: There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies ha...

Scarecrow at Firedoglake explains the consequential difference between negotiated rates (in the House Health Care Reform Bill) and the Medicare +5% wanted by progressives: CBO estimated that a Public Option available only to the uninsured, self-...

The DEA issued this statement today on the DOJ revised policy on medical marijuana busts in states where it is legal: “DEA welcomes the issuance of these clarifying guidelines pertaining to the use of federal investigative and prosecutorial reso...

I'm off to court for the afternoon. BTD has many posts up this morning on health care and politics, just scroll down for them. Via the ACLU: The 9th Circuit held oral argument today in the Boeing-Jeppeson Ghost Air/states secret case. "To this...

This is the month that many bloggers balance the ledger sheet and reassess their time commitment to blogging. There's no question blogging is a financial drain -- time that could be spent making real money at our day jobs. Whether blogging is an act...

Today is Bill of Rights day. Tim Lynch at Cato provides a brief tour around the essential provisions and notes: while we ought to be alarmed by the various ways in which the government is attempting to go under, over, and around our Bill of Rights,...

President Obama will announce today that the Guantanamo detainees will be moved to Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois. (Background here.) That's a good thing. As the Constitution Project reminds us though, the move must not be used as an...

Jon Cohn pats progressive activists on the head: Disappointed progressives may be wondering whether their efforts were a waste. They most decidedly were not. The campaign for the public option pushed the entire debate to the left--and, to use a...