Follow BeltwayBlips on Twitter
Wonk Room Latest Blog Posts |
Add as Favorite
Claim Blog 
|
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/
In a rather dramatic and long winded speech on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AK) announced today that she would provide the 60th vote “in support of cloture on the motion to proceed” to the health care reform bill. But Lincoln also stressed that she is ...
Congress
Blanche Lincoln
Health care
This afternoon, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) took to the Senate floor to announce that she would vote on a motion to proceed with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act . Landrieu is the 59th Senator to commit to voting to open debate on the floor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Ried (D-NV) ...
Congress
Health care
With House Democrats seriously considering proposing a financial transactions tax (FTT) to pay for a new jobs creation package, the financial services industry has gone on the defensive. The premise behind a financial transactions tax is that it is so small (a fraction of a percentage point) ...
World
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has agreed to include a watered-down version of Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) ‘Choices Amendment’ in the merged Senate bill. Wyden, an ubiquitous presence on cable television, has been hawking his idea of instantly opening up the insurance ...
Congress
Rush Limbaugh
Health care
Washington Times national security editor Barbara Slavin has an article on Iranian filmmaker and dissident Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who has become a spokesperson for Iran’s Green Movement in the wake of the June 12 elections. Makhmalbaf called upon President Obama to more explicitly support ...
World
Iran
Homeland Security
Israel
Washington, D.C
United States
Over at FiredogLake, Jon Walker points out that the merged merged Senate bill would “ create two exchanges per state . There would be an exchange for individuals and a “Small Business Health Options Program” know as the SHOP exchange for businesses .” “This is, pure and ...
Congress
Health care
Yesterday, Republican members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC) dedicated a three and a half hour long pseudo-hearing in a nearly empty room in the Rayburn building to spewing their “well-worn rhetoric about the hordes of illegal aliens destroying the American way of ...
Congress
Steve King
Thousands of “ emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server” — a top climate research center in the United Kingdom — “ were hacked recently ” and dumped on a Russian web server. Global warming deniers are sifting through the illegally obtained ...
World
Global Warming
United Kingdom
Australia
Michelle Malkin
In response to the threat posed by the H1N1 virus (swine flu), Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) have proposed legislation that would require all businesses with more than 15 employees to provide seven days of sick leave. As I’ve noted before, the Centers for Disease ...
Congress
Rosa DeLauro
Following the endorsement of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) Wednesday for her campaign to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina questioned the science of climate change. Boxer, as the chair of the Senate environment committee, is the chamber’s leading advocate for ...
Congress
Carly Fiorina
James Inhofe
Global Warming
Barbara Boxer
Cosmetic surgeons and some conservative lawmakers are mischaracterizing that the new 5% “botox tax” on cosmetic surgeries and procedures in the merged Senate health reform bill. The tax, which would raise an estimated $5 billion over the next decade to help fund health reform , is ...
Congress
Tom Coburn
Health care
Welcome to The WonkLine , a daily 10 a.m. roundup of the latest news about health care, the economy, national security, immigration and climate policy. This is what we’re reading. Tell us what you found in the comments section below, and subscribe to the RSS feed . Also, you can now ...
Congress
Can Kanjorski break them up? Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee approved an amendment to its regulatory reform bill that would allow federal regulators , in consultation with the Treasury Secretary, to require any firm deemed a threat to the U.S. economy to break up and shrink. ...
Congress
Paul Kanjorski
Judd Gregg
A new congressionally commissioned report just stuck it to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Kyl is the leading advocate in the Senate for testing nuclear weapons and has led the charge against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) – a treaty that seeks to stop countries from testing nuclear weapons.
...
Congress
Jon Kyl
Homeland Security
Republicans often use immigration as a wedge to kill initiatives and policies they don’t like, but Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) most recent antics are quite a stretch. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee put Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in the hot seat over the decision to hold ...
World
9/11
Eric Holder
John Cornyn
Our increasingly extreme climate is devastating American agriculture. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, strengthened by global warming , caused $1.6 billion in agriculture damage in Louisiana alone. Now it appears that a Thanksgiving mainstay — pumpkin pie — is next on the global boiling ...
World
Global Warming
The Senate Finance Committee’s health care reform bill and the House legislation require insurance issuers to meet certain basic benefit standards, but grandfather all existing insurance plans for a period of 5 years (the House bill only applies this restriction to current ...
Other
Health care
Our guest blogger is Michael Linden , Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
There’s been a fair bit of hemming and hawing over the news that the federal debt has now surpassed $12 trillion . Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), widely known for his ...
White House
Our guest blogger is Winny Chen , Research Associate for the National Security and International Policy Team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Looking at the deliverables from President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao’s first summit is a lot like looking at the box score ...
World
China
Homeland Security
Back in May, Congress approved and the President signed legislation reforming the credit card industry , ensuring that credit card companies couldn’t raise rates for no reason or retroactively increase rates on existing balances. However, most of the new rules don’t go into effect ...
