White House officials sought to reassure Democratic groups and activists that they did not intend to rule out the public option, a position they are able to maintain, for now, because no final version of the bill exists. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina told some groups involved in the effort that the administration's positions have not changed.

We should not lower our expectations on health care. We won the election and a bad plan could lose the next one-America needs real reform.

• No discrimination for preexisting conditions.
• No exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays.
• No cost-sharing for preventive care.
• No dropping of coverage for the seriously ill.
• No gender discrimination.
• No annual or lifetime caps on coverage.
• Extended coverage for young adults.
• Guaranteed insurance renewal.

Extramarital affairs, gambling, alcohol abuse, prostitution and sexual pursuit of minors have taken a toll on the GOP.

But contrary to others, my abilty to exhaust vehement hatred toward people like Tom Daschle for having a very stupid accountant is limited by, well, I guess shit that might actually have damaged the country. After eight years of George Bush having a cabinet filled with cronies who thought spying on Americans and torturing non-Americans were awesome activites, you'll excuse me for not being fazed and/or hurdled into a screaming rage over the discovery that rich people fuck around on their taxes. I mean, for godssakes, Obama's nominee for Attorney General is being held up because he apparently recognizes that 24 is a fictional television program. Can we get started with that decade-due return to focus, please?

Musharraf's Party Accepts Defeat - New York Times

LAHORE, Pakistan -- Pakistan appeared to be heading for a transition to an elected civilian government Tuesday after President Pervez Musharraf told visiting United States senators that he accepted the resounding defeat of his party in elections, and would work with a new Parliament.

Castro resigns as president, state-run paper reports - CNN.com
HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) -- Fidel Castro announced his resignation as president of Cuba and commander-in-chief of Cuba's military Tuesday, according to a letter published in the state-run newspaper, Granma.

Paul Krugman

Since I've just published an op-ed about the enduring influence of race on Southern voting, I'm sure to be accused of being a typical Northeastern snob talking about poor white trash who don't know what's good for them. So I thought I'd mention an important point about Southern white voting that didn't fit in 800 words: namely, the poor whites are not the issue.

In fact, if you look at voting behavior, low-income whites in the South are not very different from low-income whites in the rest of the country. You can see this both in Larry Bartels's "What's the matter with What's the Matter With Kansas?" (pdf), Figure 3, and in a comprehensive study of red state-blue state differences by Gelman et al (pdf). It's relatively high-income Southern whites who are very, very Republican. Can I get away with saying that rich white trash are the problem? Probably not.

Oh hell, Paul, I think you can. At least, I'd agree. I'd also suspect high-income Southern whites are residual plantation stock, carrying on the tradition of pappy in the finest of efforts.

The New Republic

Of course, the Democrats have not threatened to take many incremental steps that would pose any real political risks to themselves. One, for example, would be to hold real hearings on whether there is any way to avoid reinstatement of the draft and maintain our national security if we continue an indefinite presence in Iraq, so that the American people begin to connect voting Republican with realistic anxiety about the lives and well-being of their teenage children. (The question Democrats have never asked Republicans since the war began is the only one that really matters: Would you send your own child to die in Iraq? And if so, have you done everything you can to convince your children that, if this is truly the war you say it is--for our freedom, for our very way of life, to keep the terrorists "over there" so that we don't fight them "over here"--they should drop their lucrative investment banking careers and be all they can be in Baghdad? Surely, with American freedom at stake, Jenna Bush could wait a few months to don her wedding gown and spend some time in army fatigues.) And while we're on our children, as Congress considers yet another supplemental appropriations bill for the war, the least Democrats can do this time around for our children, grandchildren, and generations yet unborn is to stop taxing them for this war (which is what deficit-spending for a war is), and to require that Bush and the Republicans put their money where their mouth is: Tell us whose taxes they're going to raise to pay not only for the next hundred billion dollars but for the half a trillion they have already spent from the piggy-banks of the innocent.

nytimes.com

BAGHDAD, Sept. 12 -- A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq's rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.

huffingtonpost.com

I chaired a hearing on the GAO Report yesterday, the report that stated that Iraqi civilians overall aren't any safer, that the political benchmarks aren't being met in Iraq, that, in short, none of the rationales for the escalation in Iraq have come to pass. It unfolds with maddening, enraging regularity: the Administration claims goals for their policy, they gradually back off of those goals and substitute smaller, less easily measured goals, and then muddy the waters hopelessly on whether even those modest new goals have been met. Time and again we've been through this.

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons