Emanuel, the provocative and profane White House chief of staff, slammed his hand down on the table and shook his head with seething exasperation. He did not yell, according to others in the meeting, but his thoughts were obvious. How had this happened? What the bleep was going on? He ordered calls made to Massachusetts and the Senate Democratic campaign committee to assess the situation. “We’ve got to get up there and take it over,” Emanuel told colleagues. As the election got closer, Emanuel and David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, arranged for President Obama to rush up to Massachusetts for a last-minute campaign trip.

It made no difference. The Republican, Scott Brown, who campaigned by driving a pickup truck around the state, was riding a tide of popular anger that would dramatically end the opening chapter of the Obama presidency. By the time Election Day arrived on Jan. 19, Emanuel tried to prepare the White House senior staff, during its 8:30 a.m. meeting in the Roosevelt Room, for the storm of second-guessing that was about to hit. “I’ve been in a White House before when we lost both the House and the Senate in ’94,” he said, according to notes taken separately by two people in the room. “In about 12 hours, we’re all going to be stupid. Like Axe says, you’re never as smart as they say you are when you win, and you’re not as stupid as they say you are when you lose. We were smart before. Now we’ll be stupid.”

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Magazine Preview – The Limits of Rahmism – NYTimes.com.

You probably didn’t have time to watch the seven hours of debate, but we did.  So we thought we’d put together a quick guide to the moments that mattered in today’s historic bipartisan health care summit.

1. Tons of personal stories: Throughout the day, Democrats tried to emphasize the human cost of our current system with lots and lots of personal anecdotes. President Obama recounted his worries as a parent and witnessing his mother’s wrangle with insurance industry bureaucrats as she was dying of cancer. Sen. Harry Reid told the story of a constituent named Jesus whose child couldn’t get health insurance because of a cleft palate.

But no story was more jolting than the one shared by Rep. Louise Slaughter.

“I have a constituent that you won’t believe and I know you won’t, but her sister died,” said Slaughter. “This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit. Do you believe that in America that’s where we would be?”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK YAHOO! WATCH: The moments that mattered in today’s health care summit – Yahoo! News.

Challenges of historic import threaten America’s future. Action on the deficit, economy, energy, health care and much more is imperative, yet our legislative institutions fail to act. Congress must be reformed.

There are many causes for the dysfunction: strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.

Many good people serve in Congress. They are patriotic, hard-working and devoted to the public good as they see it, but the institutional and cultural impediments to change frustrate the intentions of these well-meaning people as rarely before. It was not always thus.

While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father’s time. My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.

FOR CONTINUATIN OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: Op-Ed Contributor – Why I’m Leaving the Senate – NYTimes.com.

Mr. Haig was a rare American breed: a political general. His bids for the presidency quickly came undone. But his ambition to be president was thinly veiled, and that was his undoing. He knew, Reagan’s aide Lyn Nofziger once said, that “the third paragraph of his obit” would detail his conduct in the hours after President Reagan was shot, on March 30, 1981.

That day, Secretary of State Haig wrongly declared himself the acting president. “The helm is right here,” he told members of the Reagan cabinet in the White House Situation Room, “and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.” His words were taped by Richard V. Allen, then the national security adviser.

His colleagues knew better. “There were three others ahead of Mr. Haig in the constitutional succession,” Mr. Allen wrote in 2001. “But Mr. Haig’s demeanor signaled that he might be ready for a quarrel, and there was no point in provoking one.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: Alexander M. Haig Jr. Dies at 85, Commanding White House Aide – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

Clinton entered the hospital around noon, underwent surgery to open his arteries, and within hours his counselor and closest aide Douglas Band had released a statement indicating that the former president would soon return to work at the Clinton Foundation and as U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti. Based on his past record, there is little reason to doubt that promise. His cardiologist Alan Schwartz told the press on Thursday evening that his patient had already gotten up and walked around in the hospital, and that he could be expected to resume his “very active lifestyle.” According to the cardiologist, that lifestyle did not cause the chest discomfort that sent him back to the hospital.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR SALON: Joe Conason – Salon.com.

In a statement, Douglas Band, a longtime aide to the 63-year-old former president, said Clinton “was admitted to the Columbia Campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital after feeling discomfort in his chest.

“Following a visit to his cardiologist, he underwent a procedure to place two stents in one of his coronary arteries. President Clinton is in good spirits, and will continue to focus on the work of his Foundation and Haiti’s relief and long-term recovery efforts,” Band added.

A stent is a small mesh tube inserted into a narrowed or weakened artery to support it.

Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, met Thursday afternoon with President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. She “is now headed to New York City,” a State Department official said Thursday afternoon. “If we have anything to add beyond that, we will, including any changes to her schedule in the coming days.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: 44 – Bill Clinton hospitalized in New York, receives two stents.

The Pennsylvania Democrat had been suffering complications from gallbladder surgery. He died at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va., spokesman Matthew Mazonkey said.

In 1974 Murtha, then an officer in the Marine Reserves, became the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress. Ethical questions often shadowed his congressional service, but he was best known for being among Congress’ most hawkish Democrats. He wielded considerable clout for two decades as the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending.

Murtha voted in 2002 to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force in Iraq, but his growing frustration over the administration’s handling of the war prompted him in November 2005 to call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST: John Murtha Dead: Congressman Died At Age 77.

Both Palin and the blogs were upset by comments reported in a profile in the Wall Street Journal last week. The paper quoted Emanuel telling a group of progressives at a strategy session on healthcare reform, held last August, that they were being “fucking retarded” if they carried out plans to run ads attacking conservative Democrats who opposed parts of the reform bill.

Of course, the line bothered liberals because it underscored Emanuel’s typical refusal to see the world they way they do. “It’s like watching a sixth grader snatch the lunch money from a kindergartner for calling him a bully,” Jane Hamsher wrote on FireDogLake. “The day that becomes ‘tough’ is the day Rahm fits the bill.” Hamsher had already been calling for Emanuel to get the boot, joining up with, of all people, conservative activist Grover Norquist (the guy who wants government to be small enough to “drown it in the bathtub“) in December to call for the Justice Department to investigate him.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK TO SALON: War Room – Salon.com.

His State of the Union speech skipped over a variety of complex realities in laying out a “common-sense” call to action.

A look at some of his claims and how they compare with the facts:

OBAMA: “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t.”

THE FACTS: The anticipated savings from this proposal would amount to less than one percent of the deficit — and that’s if the president can persuade Congress to go along.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO AP & YAHOO! FACT CHECK: Obama and the ‘hatchet’ job – Yahoo! News.

Even as the economy has begun clawing its way out of the Great Recession and job losses have slowed dramatically, critics on the left and right — even party loyalists — say the president has failed to articulate a clear economic vision.

That is stoking public anxiety over high unemployment, continuing home foreclosures and widespread financial insecurity. It also feeds popular resentment over government bailouts that restored soaring profits and paydays for Wall Street firms while the rest of the country faces alarming budget deficits and a still-faltering job market.

“It’s not clear what Obamanomics is,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “That does hurt the administration. It becomes harder to convey a vision of where you want to go.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE L. A. TIMES: Obama critics say his economic vision is hazy – latimes.com.