The New Republic

With the Senate debate over health reform inching closer to an actual vote, attention has naturally turned to what comes next. You know the civics textbook answer: The House and Senate leadership appoint a a conference committee, with members from both chambers, in order to negotiate a compromise between the two bills. But it doesn't have to work that way. READ MORE >>

From Bloomberg: Uganda will drop the death penalty and life imprisonment for gays in a refined version of an anti- gay bill expected to be ready for presentation to Parliament in two weeks, James Nsaba Buturo, the minister of ethics and integrity, said. READ MORE >>

Update: Added missing link to the original item I was responding to. READ MORE >>

Sounds like someone might've "fallen down a well" in Saudi Arabia. Not everything we do to thwart an Iranian bomb can be found in presidential speeches. READ MORE >>

I agree with Chait and, to offer him some fancy synonyms, think this may have been the deepest and most elegaic speech of Obama's presidency. But what a strange one it was. Obama is a man trapped amongst the contradictions created by America's awkward place in the post-Bush world. READ MORE >>

After winning the Democratic primary to fill the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is poised to become the Bay State’s first female senator. It's a bit late. Indeed, many Northeastern states only recently entered the female-senate-representation club, while the first women senators were from the South and Midwest. READ MORE >>

I’m not a big fan of political speeches in general, but I thought President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech today was unusually good. (If I were a speech-y kind of writer, like Rick Hertzberg, I’d have used a better adjective in the last sentence than “good.”) READ MORE >>

Should Obama Try to Create More Jobs or Lower the Deficit? An Exclusive Account of the White House Debate. by Noam Scheiber Tigergate Isn’t a Black Thing--Despite What Some Would Prefer by John McWhorter READ MORE >>

Over the last couple of weeks, tensions between the Congressional Black Caucus and the Obama administration boiled over, with ten CBC members on the financial services committee skipping a key vote on regulatory reform legislation and threatening to scuttle the reform bill altogether if the president didn’t take greater steps to addresses unemployment and home foreclosures in the African American community. READ MORE >>

The latest installment in a disturbing trend of U.S. citizens found to have connections to radicals in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Five young men who vanished from the Washington area last month are believed to be held in Pakistan while authorities investigate possible links to extremists there. READ MORE >>