Mr. Boccieri is a crucial flip for Congressional Democratic leaders. On Monday President Obama visited Ohio to rally support for the legislation in part because of a letter he received from one of Mr. Boccieri’s constituents, a woman named Natoma Canfield, who said she could no longer afford her health insurance. Since sending the letter, Ms. Canfield, who survived an earlier bout with cancer, has learned that she has leukemia.

Mr. Boccieri invoked Ms. Canfield’s name and also spoke emotionally about standing at the foot of his mother’s bed as a small boy as she told him that she had breast cancer.

‘Thank God she had health insurance,’ he said, adding, that he was thinking ‘about what could happen to the 39,000 people in my district who don’t have health insurance.’

Noting the threats that his yes vote could cost him his job in November, Mr. Boccieri said, ‘I want my mom to know I am standing up today and doing what I believe in.’

It’s sad that people like Frank Kratovil here in Maryland don’t get that.

Though Marylanders live just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, their attitudes and even their accents straddle that border. These days, leaders feel they’ve got more in common with states to the north.

In one sign of the shift, lawmakers successfully petitioned to move from the Southern Region of the Council of State Governments to the Eastern Region, where they’ll be able to trade ideas with fellow officials from Pennsylvania, New York, and other states they consider more like-minded.

‘I just don’t think we’re as Southern as people used to think,’ said state Sen. Catherine Pugh, a Baltimore Democrat.

Maryland is not even remotely a southern state anymore.

In that vein, I’d like to keep a long list of the Republican/conservative predictions of DOOM relating to the passage of Health Care Reform, which seems – knock on wood – quite likely to finally happen this weekend. Please put your suggestions in the comments along with a link to the source and I will collect them here so we can check them against reality in the coming years.

Maybe the story is true, but no credible outlet has reported it.

Why is the World Tribune not credible?

From 2003:

Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, “U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have finally been located.” The apparent scoop—of stop-the-presses significance—was unsigned, and billed as a “special to World Tribune.com.” The Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, meanwhile, not only got beat but failed even to acknowledge the news in the days that followed. What gives?

Not everyone ignored it: Rush Limbaugh, for instance. “There’s a piece in the World Tribune today—one of the papers in the United Kingdom—exactly as theorized on this program early on,” he said on his radio show. “It’s unconfirmed, but it’s a story that many of the weapons of mass destruction are at present buried in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.” Fox News, catering to a similar demographic, enlisted a military analyst that evening to discuss potential ramifications—military intervention in Lebanon?—on “The O’Reilly Factor.” According to the story, the weapons were probably delivered to the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, in a caravan of tractor-trailers that was spotted leaving Iraq in January, two months before the war began, as part of a multimillion- dollar storage deal between Saddam Hussein and the Syrian government.

In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that “there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird.” (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.) Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former “corporate editor” for News World Communications, the Times’ owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Morton and his wife, Choon Boon, are themselves followers of the Reverend Moon.) Among the World Tribune’s other recent half-ignored scoops are that Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for last month’s blackout and that a North Korean defector stressed, during a meeting in July with White House officials, the need for a preëmptive military strike against Kim Jong Il.

This is the kind of media outlet that makes Fox News look semi-credible.

The German archdiocese led by the future Pope Benedict XVI ignored repeated warnings in the early 1980s by a psychiatrist treating a priest accused of sexually abusing boys that he should not be allowed to work with children, the psychiatrist said Thursday.

‘I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,’ ’ the psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, said in a telephone interview from Munich. ‘I was very unhappy about the entire story.’

Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times.

Dr. Huth said he issued the explicit warnings — both written and oral — before the future pope, then Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich and Freising, left Germany for a position in the Vatican in 1982.

Comprehensive health care reform will cost the federal government $940 billion over a ten-year period, but will increase revenue and cut other costs by a greater amount, leading to a reduction of $130 billion in the federal deficit over the same period, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, a Democratic source tells HuffPost. It will cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years.

The source said it also extends Medicare’s solvency by at least 9 years and reduces the rate of its growth by 1.4 percent, while closing the doughnut hole for seniors, meaning there will no longer be a gap in coverage of medication. The CBO also estimated it would extend coverage to 32 million additional people.

There was even a federal disaster proclamation from some George W. Bush guy.

Sometimes righties, just before you hit “publish”, do a Google. It won’t hurt. I promise. For now, at least.

To Democrats.

Barack Obama appears to be really bad news for Al Qaeda.

A strike by an unmanned drone last week killed a senior Qaeda commander who had played a significant role in planning the killing of Central Intelligence Agency operatives in late December at a base in Afghanistan, according to American officials.

…

The official described Mr. Yemeni as an “al Qaeda planner and facilitator” in his late 20s or early 30s, who had established ties with the Haqqani network, which has planned many Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, and with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. His role was described by one American official as a “conduit in Pakistan for funds, messages, and recruits, but his real specialty was bombs and suicide operations.”

One of the ideas that Glenn Beck cultists and Tea Party attendees have championed in the last year or so is the perfection of the founding fathers. It’s a convenient trope for people who are – after supporting eight years of Bush – suddenly very concerned at the supposed harm Obama and the Democrats are doing to the constitution.

Putting aside that fantasy (Obama and the Dems have hewed probably too close to the old way of doing things than anything, allowing GOP procedural roadblocks to work in concert with the whims of conservative Democrats to halt the legislative process), the fetishism of the founders ignores important history.

Were they brave and bold, standing up to the British Empire and declaring independence? Absolutely. And the form of government they championed turns out to be among the world’s best and most durable (I would say the best).

But America was flawed at the founding. These brave and brilliant men owned other human beings and kept the levers of power away from women and those who weren’t wealthy landowners. From its inception the reality of America has not lived up to the ideals laid out in its founding documents.

Our history has been a constant struggle of moving towards the realization of that goal. But we do a disservice to our history when we act as if the America the founders created was perfect at its conception. It ignores the struggles of those who improved upon the founder’s foundations, and the strides we’ve made – progressive strides – towards a better America.

The founders were great men. The likes of which the world had never seen. And we were lucky for them to intersect at that time and that place. But they were men, not gods, and imperfect.

Wait, so Obama’s strategy to hit them in Pakistan and wherever they are seems to be working?

Relentless attacks against al-Qaeda in the Pakistan tribal region appear to have driven Osama bin Laden and other top leaders deeper into hiding, leaving the organization rudderless and incapable of planning sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday.

So profound is al-Qaeda’s disarray that one of its lieutenants, in a recently intercepted message, pleaded to bin Laden to come to the group’s rescue and provide some leadership, Panetta told The Washington Post in an interview.

Panetta credited an increasingly aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, including more frequent strikes and better coordination with Pakistan. He called it ‘the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in in our history.’

So. A president actually interested in disrupting and fighting Al Qaeda is having some effect? Who would have known?

Previously undisclosed records from Mitchell’s case reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.

The revelations come at a time when President Barack Obama, in his frantic push to rescue the administration’s health care plan, has stepped up his criticism of insurers. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote later this week on an overhaul of the health system, which Obama has said is essential to do away controversial and unpopular industry practices.

Insurance companies have long engaged in the practice of ‘rescission,’ whereby they investigate policyholders shortly after they’ve been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. But government regulators and investigators who have overseen the actions of Assurant and other health insurance companies say it is unprecedented for a company to single out people with HIV.

This budget, of course, helped lead to a huge economic boom for America and a reduction in the deficit that lasted until the presidency of George W. Bush.

Right-wing media have seized on a dubious, three-month old email “survey” that purports to show that physicians are concerned about health care reform and that 46 percent of the primary care doctors surveyed “indicated that they would leave medicine – or try to leave medicine – as a result of health reform.” Many media figures have falsely attributed this survey to the New England Journal of Medicine. For example, on Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said: “The New England Journal of Medicine has published a report and did a survey, and they said the impact of reform on primary care physicians, 46 percent, they say, feel reform will force them out or make them want to leave medicine.”

This is false.

Media Matters for America contacted the New England Journal of Medicine, which confirmed it neither conducted nor published the “survey.”