“Louise Slaughter” on The Daily Caller

WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of Congress, battling single digit approval ratings, are paying attention to the perception that some lawmakers enriched themselves through insider trading. (more)

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests are garnering more institutional support, this time in the halls of Congress. Liberal congressmen have been coming out this week to voice their support for the demonstrations, whose actual demands remain unclear. (more)

New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter told a crowd of pro-choice advocates on Wednesday that Republicans want to “kill women.” (more)

Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs could soon join the team at Facebook.com in a senior role, unnamed sources told Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Sunday. We don’t know if or when it will happen, as both parties are playing coy, or for how much. What we do know is that snagging Gibbs would make Facebook’s D.C. team one of the best in the tech industry. (more)

To say the government regulates everything is an understatement. Aside from the black market, which is only unregulated insofar as it avoids taxes and bypasses age restrictions on such things as alcohol (not including illegal products), there really isn’t much in which the government doesn’t have a hand. And now they’re thinking about coming after your hand…well, your hand soap, anyway. (more)

Could the fairness doctrine be coming back? (more)

This week is enough to make one long for the days when we’d just blame the Arizona shooting on video games and flagrantly use the tragedy to regulate that kind of speech. (more)

In the coming days, the House of Representatives will take up and overwhelmingly pass a bill to repeal the health care bill signed into law last year. The repeal bill will then languish in the Senate; Democrats simply have the numbers, and the president’s veto. Yet, this doesn’t mean that more subtle reforms to the bill are off the table — in fact, they’re likely to see implementation, presidential signature and all. (more)

Extremism occurs among the political left and the political right. But to listen to some media, you would think that the violent-prone are all conservatives. (more)

The House Rules Committee on Wednesday turned a single vote on a procedural issue — with some bearing on Obama’s health-care bill — into a partisan back-and-forth regarding the placement of cameras in the hearing room. (more)

Democrats are set to release a final Congressional Budget Office report on their health-care bill early this afternoon, which would put them on pace to pass a bill by Saturday, before President Obama leaves the country for a week. (more)

Over the past several weeks President Obama has made the line “Congress owes the American people a final up-or-down vote” central to his pitch for final action on health care reform. It’s how he describes the complicated process of reconciliation. It’s very smart. (more)

Democrats Tuesday were on the defensive as Republican outrage grew over the possible passage of health care without a vote, which one House lawmaker called “un-American.” (more)

House Minority Leader John Boehner called on Americans to “rise up” against President Obama’s health-care bill, and gave Democrats a first taste of the kind of TV ads the GOP plans to run against them if they vote for it. (more)

Democrats appeared to be closing in Monday on achieving support from enough lawmakers in the House to pass a historic and sweeping health-care reform bill, though the outcome was still far from certain. (more)

Republicans now expect Democrats to pass health care through the House with a trick only Capitol Hill could dream up: approving the Senate bill without voting on it. (more)

Are Democrats marching toward a health-care bill behind the scenes, or are they slipping backwards? (more)

I had a brief interview with House Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter today, in which I asked her whether House Democrats will indeed use the procedure now known as the “Slaughter Solution,” in which the House would pass a reconciliation bill that would deem the Senate bill passed. (more)

Every day, someone sends me a puzzling e-mail in which he tells me what he’s had for breakfast. And it’s not within the context of a larger narrative, or because I’ve asked him what he eats for breakfast, or to agitate some kind of Hegelian dialectic—nor is it particularly friendly. It’s simply declarative: “Today I had a corn muffin.” Or, “Today I had a Spanish Omelet.” I’m not sure if this is his attempt at engaging me—does he want to know what I had for breakfast? Or if it’s just his way of documenting his eating habits. In any case, it just isn’t the kind of information with which I can do anything of real consequence. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, I keep them all. (more)

Unions tentatively struck a deal Tuesday to exempt collectively bargained health care plans from a tax on high-cost plans expected to be used to help raise revenue for the health care overhaul. (more)