Media Hype on Next Supreme Court Justice Pick

After watching Jon Kyl and Chuck Schumer discuss the selection of the next Justice, I came away thinking that it's the media is stirring up controversy on the replacement of Justice John Paul Stevens. Kyl all but rules out a filibuster. From everything that I've read, no matter who Obama chooses, the court can only become more conservative because Stevens was very liberal. And given Obama's choice of Sonia Sotomayor, it doesn't strike me that Obama is going to pick someone based on their ideology.

This Week roundtable discusses the next Justice. George Will says there will be no fight over Obama's choice and Arianna Huffington says there will be. Arianna, seeing through her very liberal eyes, didn't even hear what Kyl said this morning. Arianna's pick: Elizabeth Warren. Good grief. I like Warren's oversight work with TARP, but she's clearly not judge material. Some people only see the world through political ideological eyes and Arianna is one of those.

Meet the Press roundtable on the next justice:

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GOP Using Reid's Comments to Derail Healthcare

I'm already so sick to death of hearing about Harry Reid's comments. The GOP, which attracts very few minorities to its party, but plenty of bigots, doesn't care about Reid's comments. Republicans are only desperate to throw healthcare off the rails. They don't care about anything except for party politics and climbing out of the hole they threw themselves down. Republicans still have no ideas.

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Does Senate Have 60 Votes to Pass Healthcare?

Dick Durbin discusses the challenge of getting 60 votes on Morning Joe. Progressives, such as Howard Dean, say democrats only need 51 votes using the so-called "reconciliation" process. Here's a good explanation of why that won't necessarily work. It seems to me that if you can't muster 60 votes for a bill, then it probably isn't a very good bill and it probably shouldn't pass.

Durbin also tells why allowing people to buy insurance across state lines wouldn't work, unless a national standard was put into place.

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Ford: Liberals Will be Disappointed With Obama's Speech to Congress

Harold Ford, one of my favorite politicians, says liberals are likely to be disappointed by Obama's speech. The public option isn't being considered the end-all to health reform. People don't understand that unless the democratic party grows some more democrats, the votes aren't there for a public option. People such as Sen. Claire McCaskill don't believe the public option is the only means to get reform, the way liberals have laid it out. So Obama has to find other ways to get enough votes to pass some kind of reform. Something is better than nothing. Once you have something, you can build on it. But if liberals are willing to throw it all out as a complete FAIL, we could all lose.

In this video, Ford takes on Rudy Giuliani.

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Robert Gibbs says Obama will talk about the value of a public option on Wednesday. Gibbs makes it sound as though Obama will continue to make a case for the public option but not demand it:

Jarrett: Obama Absolutely Committed to Health Care Reform

Obama and his advisors

Obama is meeting with his cabinet this weekend, and this morning on the Meet the Press roundtable, Harold Ford suggested that part of their meeting will include coming up with strategies to combat the trolls, uh, I mean the republicans who are merely trying to derail reform --to kill the bill, as Ford says.
In this interview, Valerie Jarrett says Obama won't be derailed.

AL HUNT: Welcome back. We continue our look at health care with the president’s top aide and confidant, Valerie Jarrett. Valerie, let me ask you this - Congress missed the president’s deadline of August to pass both measures to both houses, Senate Finance Committee seems deadlocked, lobbyists are going to be out in full force in August. Are you worried that this thing may be slipping away?

VALERIE JARRETT: No not at all. We have a great deal of confidence that we’re going to have health-care reform passed this year. If you look at how far we’ve come, we’ve come further in health-care reform this year than we probably have in the last 50 years.

There are ample areas where there’s a great deal of agreement and I think we’re at that home stretch and it was important that the president set a deadline, it added some discipline to the process, and we’re confident that we’ll see it come to fruition in the fall.

HUNT: What will he do in the next couple weeks? What will be his message the next few weeks? What new message will he put out there?

JARRETT: Well, the message will be the message that he has been taking to the American people since this began; he laid forth a framework for why we needed this, why it was so urgent to have them right now. We have to reduce costs; we have to make sure that it is affordable. We have to make sure that if you lose your job you don’t have to worry about health care. If you have a pre-existing condition you don’t have to worry about health care.

We have to make sure that we’re really focusing on outcomes and that we’re looking towards making people healthier. The basic parameters that the president set forth are the ones to which there’s a great deal of consensus, not just in Congress, but if you look at it this is the first time we’ve been able to have AARP and the pharmaceutical industry and the physicians and the nurses -

HUNT: But not the insurance industry.

JARRETT: - one cross-section of support. We’re working on them. A lot of the insurance companies are coming along as well.

HUNT: The president expressed his frustration in the Time magazine interview with the critics and in his speech this week he said he was sick and tired of some of this criticism. Is this getting to him?

JARRETT: No, not at all. Listen, there is no one more resilient, more tenacious and more committed to this issue of health-care reform than the president.

The economy is fragile, if you think about what happened in the last six months, the president really was able to rescue the economy, bring it back from the precipice of disaster, and now we’re working on rebuilding it. So as people are trying to focus on making ends meet, feeding their family, paying for college tuition; health care is the single biggest challenge that we face.

HUNT: He’s done that and yet the Pew Poll shows that support for his agenda; health care and his handling of the economy, he slipped rather dramatically in the polls. Why is that?

Jarrett answers the poll question and also talks about CEO pay. Read the rest at Bloomberg.

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Tea Bagger Dick Armey on Meet the Press

Congressman Harold Ford makes the case for government spending, answering Dick Armey, chairman of FreedomWorks. Ford asked Armey what is your alternative--nothing is not an alternative.
Too bad they cut to commercial cause I would've loved to hear Armey's response.
Ford also suggested that the tea baggers and the rest stop calling Obama a socialist and questioning Obama's intentions. In other words, let's all grow up and debate in a civil manner.
Armey is a much more reasonable and likable man on TV, even though off camera he engages in the socialist rhetoric and his organization uses fear tactics, inciting the already fearful. His website says "Congress could sneak through socialized medicine."
His wife calls him "honey."

Take Two on Cuba and Hugo and Guns. Why on Earth would anyone need an assault weapon. This gun issue strikes me as ironic. All the people who cling to their guns tie it to freedom. But they're all so afraid, walking around with their guns in their holsters, living in fear that they'll have to defend themselves. That's not freedom.

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