WASHINGTON — A woman did it.
WASHINGTON — Here’s a phrase you can expect to hear a lot in the next few days: “According to the CBO.” The CBO is the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper of the costs of proposed legislation. Rarely has a CBO report been more anxiously awaited than the analysis released Thursday of the proposed changes to the Senate health care reform bill. Democrats are delighted with the bottom-line analysis that the measure would save $138 billion over the next 10 years, and as much as $1.2 trillion in the second 10 years — all this while expanding coverage to 32 million people who would otherwise be uninsured.
WASHINGTON — The chief justice is a big crybaby.
WASHINGTON—Sometimes I think I’ve gotten too cynical after so many years in Washington.
WASHINGTON — Boy, you could see that one coming. It was a pivotal moment earlier this month when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates backed repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Pivotal, but not enough. I don’t spend a lot of time chatting up military officers, but enough to know that, just below the top-most ranks, there remains an enormous, if incomprehensible, amount of squeamishness about letting gay men and women serve openly in the military.
WASHINGTON — How big a deal was Marco Rubio’s speech to CPAC Thursday? If you are asking, as former President George W. Bush did jokingly the other day, “Who the hell is Marco Rubio?” you probably won’t be for long. Rubio is the 38-year-old former speaker of the Florida House and a conservative challenger to the state’s Republican governor, Charlie Crist, in the GOP Senate primary. If you are asking, what is CPAC? you probably aren’t a conservative Republican. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is, for several days every winter, the epicenter of the conservative movement; Ronald Reagan spoke before the group a dozen times.
WASHINGTON — The most striking part of Sen. Evan Bayh’s retirement announcement was his on-air job application. He’d be interested in managing a business, Bayh suggested, heading a university, or maybe running a charity.
WASHINGTON— Jenny Sanford was my role model, until I read her book. Well, not role model, exactly, but improbable heroine. When her cheating, blubbering, disappearing-with-his-soul-mate husband turned up on national television to confess that he had not been hiking the Appalachian Trail, Jenny Sanford was neither standing by his side nor crawling into a hole.
One morning, at the breakfast table, while eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, your chest begins to hurt. The pain worsens and you feel breathless. You briefly consider the possibility that what you’re eating really are pebbles.
WASHINGTON — My husband and I were away last week — working, but away. My mother was watching the kids, but she also works. So it was particularly important, I told my new but already somewhat spotty baby sitter, that she turn up on time, every day.
WASHINGTON — This won’t comfort Democrats mourning the loss of their filibuster-proof majority, but the existence of the filibuster is,…
Weekly Note: Ruth Marcus will be replacing Ellen Goodman’s column. Goodman retired at the end of 2009. WASHINGTON — Since…
Weekly Note: Ruth Marcus will be replacing Ellen Goodman’s column. Goodman retired at the end of 2009.
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