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Dana Milbank / Washington Post:
An ugly finale for health-care reform — Going into Monday morning's crucial Senate vote on health-care legislation, Republican chances for defeating the bill had come down to a last, macabre hope. They needed one Democratic senator to die — or at least become incapacitated.
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Paul Krugman / New York Times:
A Dangerous Dysfunction — Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It's a seriously flawed bill, we'll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it's nonetheless a huge step forward.
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New York Times:
Health Bill Passes Key Test in the Senate With 60 Votes — WASHINGTON — After a long day of acid, partisan debate, Senate Democrats held ranks early Monday in a dead-of-night procedural vote that proved they had locked in the decisive margin needed to pass a far-reaching overhaul of the nation's health care system.
Robert Pear / New York Times:
Deep in Health Bill, Very Specific Beneficiaries — WASHINGTON — Buried in the deal-clinching health care package that Senate Democrats unveiled over the weekend is an inconspicuous proposal expanding Medicare to cover certain victims of “environmental health hazards.”
Tony Romm / The Hill:
Corker: GOP may shift healthcare strategy — Senate Republicans will discuss Monday whether to adjust their healthcare strategy to allow a vote on raising the debt limit. — Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told CNBC that Republicans could retool their efforts to derail the healthcare bill …
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Washington Post:Health-care bill clears crucial vote in Senate, 60 to 40
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Wall Street Journal:Change Nobody Believes In
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Marc Ambinder / The Atlantic Politics Channel:Breaking Analysis: The Senate Votes For Cloture
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Byron York / Washington Examiner:Who's responsible for the Senate's middle-of-the-night vote?
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Ezra Klein:
The amazing disappearing bill — There's a lot of talk over whether the health-care bill should begin before 2014, and whether the long delay will give the GOP sufficient time to foment a backlash. On the one hand, the bill should certainly begin before 2014.
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Kevin Drum / Mother Jones:Why 2014? — Josh Marshall mentions something about the …
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CNN:
CNN Poll: 6 point jump in support for health care bill — Washington (CNN) - Support for the health care reform bill that Democrats are pushing through the Senate has risen six points since early December, according to a new national poll, and although a majority of Americans still oppose its passage …
Kpicket / The washington times Blogs:
Sen. Whitehouse: foes of health care bill are birthers, right-wing militias, aryan groups — ****Updated with video link and more transcript — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) today took shots at those who are not supporting the health care legislation.
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Howard Fineman / Newsweek:
Tim Pawlenty Gets No Respect — He doesn't have Sarah Palin's pizzazz or Mitt Romney's money. But the governor of Minnesota may be a shrewd Republican bet in 2012. — Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty — From the magazine issue dated Jan 4, 2010 — In the run-up to the 2008 Republican convention …
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Digby / Hullabaloo:
Bipartisan Tragedy — I quoted David Gergen earlier saying that public opinion may cause the final bill to ultimately fail, which I agree may be remotely possible. But that's the last rational thing he said all night. At the moment of the passage of the cloture vote in the Senate, he blurted this out:
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Rasmussen Reports:
Election 2010: North Dakota Senate — 2010 North Dakota Senate: Hoeven 58%, Dorgan 36% — Incumbent Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan may have a serious problem on his hands if Republicans recruit Governor John Hoeven to run for the U.S. Senate in North Dakota next year.
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Hot Air, Scared Monkeys, Scorecard's Blog, TPMDC, Don Surber, Real Clear Politics and Wake up America
Drew Westen / The Huffington Post:
Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator — As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent …
Martina Stewart / CNN:
Obama gets an ‘A’ for effort from Schwarzenegger — Washington (CNN) - Not every Republican is a critic of President Obama. At least one thinks the president is doing a fine job - at least when it comes to the effort involved in being the country's chief executive.
John R. Bolton / Human Events:
Dick Cheney: HUMAN EVENTS' Conservative of the Year — In Washingtonian “inside the Beltway” terms, the most amazing aspect of former Vice President Dick Cheney's new clout is that he is achieving it the old-fashioned way: talking about public policy. He is not running for President or any other office.
Breeanna Hare / CNN:
Cynthia Nixon: Abortion debate's new voice — (CNN) — It's been a little more than a week since Cynthia Nixon flew back from filming “Sex and the City 2” in Morocco, and she's already diving headfirst into the debate surrounding abortion and health care reform.
Jonathan Chait / The New Republic:
The Rise of Republican Nihilism — What happened to all those GOP ideas? — Does the Republican Party have any ideas? The query may have a familiar ring. Five years ago, the question of substance was demanded incessantly of the Democrats. Indeed, in one of those intellectual fads …
Paul Krugman:
The WYSIWYG president — There's a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn't the man progressives thought they were voting for. — But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance …
Jane Hamsher / Firedoglake:
10 Reasons to Kill the Senate Bill — FDL has become the go-to place for coverage of the health care bill due to the work of our incredible team. Jon Walker's second-to-none knowledge of the health care bill has made the policy and political analysis he offers up at FDL Action a driving force.
Kaiser Health News:
The Senate Bill Saves Families Money — Health care reform looks like it's finally ready to pass the Senate, now that the Democrats have 60 votes in hand. But here on the left, not all of us are jumping for joy. Some think the Senate bill is just barely better than nothing.
Ezra Klein:
Remembering Obama's campaign health-care plan — “Though the American left and right don't agree on much,” wrote Frank Rich over the weekend, “they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama's brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger's public image.” — It's hard to imagine why.
Ben Smith / Ben Smith's Blog:
Dems anticipate a health care bounce — There's no point in the White House saying this, so it won't. — But an official predicted to me the other day that Obama's numbers would hit 60 after the health care bill passes, and Chuck Schumer seems to think roughly the same thing …
Justin Elliott / TPMMuckraker:
Report: Bush Admin Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man's Al Jazeera ‘Decoding’ Scam — A self-styled Nevada codebreaker convinced the CIA he could decode secret terrorist targeting information sent through Al Jazeera broadcasts, prompting the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange …
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