Any day now. Any. Day.

Sources tell ABC News that as of now President Obama will likely announce his decision about a new strategy in Afghanistan at some point between the Afghan run-off election, November 7, and the presidentÂ’s departure for Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, November 11.

...Sources emphasize that no decision has yet been made, but as of now it looks as though the president is leaning towards sending more troops to Afghanistan, though not as many as Gen. Stanley McChrystal requested, 40,000.

Or the decision could be put off until after Obama gets back. Either way.

As for Rahm Emanuel, you may recall he said the Obama administration had to start from scratch on Afghanistan because those damn Bush people did nothing. Per Gibbsy today, that little slander is no longer operative.

Q Was your administration briefed (on Afghanistan options by the Bush Administration)?

MR. GIBBS: With people that -- it's been public that we got these reviews. I mean, we can show articles where these things are discussed.

While some of the information was helpful, the President obviously found it instructive to do a review of his own, and that's what Bruce Riedel did in the spring, which led to the President signing off on additional forces that went to Afghanistan.

One other thing Bruce Riedel found that the White House and Sheriff Joe Biden are as worried about the politics of Afghanistan than they are the strategy. Maybe even more worried about the politics.

“I think a big part of it is, the vice president’s reading of the Democratic party is this is not sustainable,” Riedel told the New York Times. “That’s a part of the process that’s a legitimate question for a president–if I do this, can I sustain it with political support at home? That was the argument the vice president was making back in the winter.”

And you wingnuts were worried Obama might vote 'Present' on important issue rather than exercise leadership and maybe risk some political capital.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:35 PM | Comments (87)
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The Buffalo News just broke this sad story.

Posted by: Open Blog at 02:00 PM | Comments (158)
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With an opt-out for states, though it's unclear to me if states opting out will still have to pay for the states opting in. Which would not be an opt-out at all.

Olympia Snowe will walk away from this bill, by the way, which seems to mean the Democrats can't get cloture on it, unless they have not a single defector.

Meanwhile, Democrats push to get ObamaCare's benefits started early, rather than later; before the 2010 elections, rather than in 2013, as the "plan" calls for now.

Bear in mind it was only by delaying benefits for three years -- so that taxes began coming in immediately, while benefits didn't start getting paid out until 2010 -- that got the Baucus Bill scored by the CBO as supposedly reducing the deficits.

So, my guess: They keep hat on paper, so they can parade around that "fact."

Then, in a separate bill, they push all the pay-outs three years early.

They blow up the budget in two parts, getting the tougher part through on a lie.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (126)
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First, class warfare from the Democratic National Congressional Committee: more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (155)
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Ah. Well, if Jigsaw endorses ObamaCare, I guess that settles the issue!

Jigsaw would fare better than Keith Olbermann in a Fight Against Death. And yet still -- he lost too.

Meanwhile, in a little-noticed corner of reality, those "greedy" health care officials are earning a paltry 2.2% profit.

Posted by: Ace at 12:22 PM | Comments (102)
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Excellent. A likely 2012 candidate who had to stop and see which way the wind is blowing.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota is now adding to the momentum becoming the first sitting Republican Governor to endorse Hoffman. This comes on the heels of Sarah PalinÂ’s endorsement from last week.

What makes this stand out even more than the Palin endorsement is that Pawlenty has not been seen as diverging with the Republican establishment. HeÂ’s not seen as the maverick that Palin is.

But Pawlenty has a huge amount of stature inside the Republican establishment, more so than Palin. That he is now willing to come out in favor of Hoffman is going to resonate among the Republican establishment in ways PalinÂ’s endorsement will not.

How's that for reversal? Indeed, T-Paw almost certainly got the green light to do something so "mavericky" as supporting an actual conservative for a conservative district.

Be sure to click over to RedState for fawning coverage of Pawlenty finally getting around to doing the right thing.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:13 AM | Comments (238)
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Dan Riehl collects up the stories.

Among them:

House Speaker Pelosi Friday dismissed questions about abortion, saying that how to "procedurally" handle floor debate on health care has not yet been decided. Still, leadership aides acknowledge Democrats need to make some changes to the bill's abortion language before the bill comes to the floor.

"This is not a done deal; I do think there is an impressive effort to find a compromise," a Democratic leadership aide said. "I don't know if we are ever going to be where Stupak is, but we'll be in a place that will satisfy a majority of those folks that he considers with him right now."

If they don't, Stupak will carry through on his threat -- and "I guess they run the risk" of losing, Stupak said.

If leaders can't agree on changes to the abortion language, they will have to court anti-abortion rights members one by one, hoping to peel enough away to strip the group of its power to hold up the bill. The question is whether other changes will resolve the concerns of members who might not be willing to derail all of health reform because of abortion.

One example is Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, D-Pa., a freshman in a swing district facing a possibly tight re-election contest without President Obama on the ballot. With the election likely becoming a referendum on the president's domestic programs, she has yet to announce whether she will support the healthcare package -- even though Pelosi spent an hour at a briefing touting Dahlkemper's efforts to allow children to stay on their parents' insurance policies until they turn 27.

The media is never interested in covering wedge issues that effect Democrats. A wedge issue is any issue that divides the party. They're always damaging in terms of getting elected or getting legislation passed, because, if there is a resolution on the issue, it is clear one wing has won and another wing has lost, and that causes all the internecine fighting we see all the time on the Republican side of the aisle.

A party's best strategy -- as far as simply acquiring and maintaining political power -- is to obscure these wedge issues, ignore them, finesse them, leave them unresolved, to keep it unclear as possible who has won and who has lost.

And then, only later, once they've accomplished their short-term goals, do they deal with the political fall-out.

It is against a party's interests to see these splits come to the forefront before they've achieved their short-term goals.

Clarity, in other words, hurts in politics. Witness Obama's gauzy, empty campaign of change and hope without many people knowing what that meant. Liberals, leftists, independents and even some Republicans each read those empty words in a different way, each believing Obama would govern as they preferred.

Three of those groups were wrong. Had Obama been clear about his intentions and politics, three of those groups would have known they would be in the Out Group in any Obama presidency, and would have voted differently.

But because the media gave Obama a free pass on remaining utterly obscure, he prevailed.

Now, of course, that is why the media is relentlessly interested in wedge issues in the Republican Party. They want that furious knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth coming before elections and votes. They want the party to split along angry lines.

On the other hand, they always, always push the stories that divide Democrats into deepest background, playing along perfectly with the Democratic Partys' preferred strategy of delay, de-emphasize, and obscure on these issues.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (129)
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In response to a run-of-the-mill email press release from Connie Mack, a reporter for the Key West Citizen (which appears to be a "real," if small, newspaper) responded thus:

“The Republican Party is now a mentally ill group of people who want nothing more than to destroy Obama’s first term no matter how much the country needs his policies. I despise your party’s activities and the hatred you spew on Fox and other sounding boards for the insurance companies. Please don’t you dare get him killed, which is the underlying goal of you right wing nuts.”

Ed Driscoll rounds up some other interesting comments made by our Neutral and Objective media.

And related: Students at Columbia's J-School mock FoxNews in a parody rap.

"But there's no need to hear crazy, Or create false sense of parity, Like Fox News and Hannity."

But you know -- it's not like these people "have a viewpoint" or anything, as Axelrod or Emmanuel (I think) said of FoxNews.

The problem isn't that some J-school students think they know this -- it's that all J-schools think they "know" these things about Fox, and think everybody whose opinion matters knows these things.

They are a hotbed of socially-enforced groupthink and yet parade around as fair-minded objective truth-seekers, and call liar on anyone who doesn't "know" what they "know."

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (127)
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Allegedly, he will announce that the Senate's healthcare bill will include a public option with an opt-out.

More from Bloomberg:

Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who has shown a willingness to work with Democrats to craft legislation, said last week she would vote against allowing Democrats to bring legislation with a public option to the floor. Snowe favors triggering the plan only if the private insurance market fails to lower premiums after a certain period of time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has championed the public option in legislation being drafted in her chamber, told reporters Oct. 23 that she “didn’t think there’s much problem” with allowing states to opt out of the government-run insurance plan.

Reid needs 60 votes to overcome the ability of Republicans to block consideration of legislation. Virtually all Republicans oppose the measures passed by two Senate committees.

Reminder: Reid and the Democrats (and, eventually, the President when he gets done with his golf game) will pose as if adding the opt-out is a compromise. They will protest that they were "reasonable" and now the Republicans are just being intransigent. This is a lie.

The opt-out is worth almost nothing. It does not give states the power to opt out of the insurance mandate. It does not give states the power to opt residents out of paying for the public option and the rest of ObamaCare via taxes. The opt-out does nothing to address the problems with the so-called "competitive public option", which does nothing to provide bonafide competition to private insurers.

In short, the Democrats are giving away nothing and they will expect to be congratulated for it. No thanks:

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:56 AM | Comments (26)
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I say "weak" because they polled 300 people, and I thought that 400 was basically the industry minimum for reliable numbers.

The poll of 300 likely voters, conducted October 24-25, 2009, shows Conservative Doug Hoffman at 31.3%, Democrat Bill Owens at 27.0%, Republican Dede Scozzafava at 19.7%, and 22% undecided. The pollÂ’s margin of error is +/- 5.66%. No information was provided about any of the candidates prior to the ballot question.

And it's not a poll by a disinterested third party. Club for Growth is running ads for Hoffman.

Still. Not bad news, certainly.

Context: The Hill notes the last Club-for-Growth poll had it as a 3-way tie, when no other polls showed Hoffman in such a strong position.

Just tryin' to keep it real.

Posted by: Ace at 08:57 AM | Comments (127)
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