I've been seeing a number of references on Ezra Klein's blog about the Wyden-Bennet Healthy Americans Act and it sounds like something to be enthused about (click here to see most or all of them).  The bill (S.334) currently boasts a bipartisan collection of some 15 co-sponsors in the Senate, and Ezra appears to think it just may be the vehicle through which a Democratic president might get us on the way to Universal Health Care.

A key point: It actually saves money:

[T]he CBO, along with the Joint Committee on Taxation, has estimated that the Wyden-Bennett Healthy Americans Act, which reorganizes the health system and implements universal coverage, is fully financed in year one (the year of transition), revenue neutral in year two, and creates surpluses after that. In other words, we can cover the 47 million uninsured without spending more money. As a talking point, this is huge. And that's not a fact missed by Wyden, Bennett, or their cosponsors. At the press conference today, Republicans Bob Corker and Mike Crapo both exulted in the findings, and Corker was particularly insistent that "today is a historic day, because we've proved that every American can have health care, provided by the private sector, and it won't bust the bank. What Wyden and Bennett have done is laid health care on a silver platter for the next president."

Senator Wyden's web site describes it this way:

...from Political Animal:

APPALACHIA....This map of voting patterns in the Democratic primary race has now shown up on a bunch of different blogs, but I'm reproducing it yet again because it really is kind of fascinating. It comes from DHinMI, and it shows all the counties where Hillary Clinton has won 65% or more of the vote. Her area of greatest strength, it turns out, isn't whites per se, or old people, or the working class. It's all those things, but it's all those things mainly in Appalachia.

(The gray areas are states that haven't voted yet. Last night, West Virginia filled in nearly of its counties with purple, and Kentucky is expected to do likewise next week.)

The working theory here, of course, isn't that Appalachians love Hillary so much, but that Appalachians are uniquely uncomfortable voting for a black guy. Josh Marshall chalks this up to history: "Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the linchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed."

This stuff is way, way outside my wheelhouse, so there's nothing much I can add. But the concentration of those purple dots is really striking. It's not clear if this really means much for the general election, but it might. ...

MoveOn has put together a Bush-McCain Challenge to clarify just how close the two are.  You can take the challenge yourself here.  Here's a little of their text:

It's hard to tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain. Here are resources where you can get the facts:
ThinkProgress - The Real McCain - McCain Source

Here are sources for all the questions in The Bush-McCain Challenge:

1. Q: Who promised that U.S. troops would be greeted as “liberators” in Iraq?
   

   A: McCain. (Dick Cheney said that, too. In fact, McCain is more of a Bush-Cheney hybrid. Which is a pretty scary thought.)

   Source: "But I believe, Katie, that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators." --John McCain, NBC's "Today Show," March 20, 2003
   "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." --Dick Cheney, NBC's “Meet the Press,” March 16, 2003

2. Q: Who went on a nationwide speaking tour trying to convince Americans to privatize our Social Security? .....

Take the challenge yourself and learn more. And there are lots more illuminating questions (and answers, with documentation) online, here.

Here's Hiram's observation in response to yesterday's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana:

John McCain Still Can’t Convert 20-25% Of GOP Primary Voters

Since Barack Obama is already the Democratic nominee in all but name, the real news last night is that the GOP Presidential nominee John McCain still has Republican primary voters voting against him even though he’s running uncontested and already has more than enough delegates to win the nomination officially. I’ve discussed the prior races, including Pennsylvania, where more than one in four GOP primary voters voted against John McCain, and Mississippi, where one in five voted against him. Last night more than one in four North Carolinians voted against John McCain in the GOP primary - and more than one in five did so in Indiana.

If Republicans vote against John McCain when he’s the only candidate - how can McCain hope to win in the general election? John McCain cannot afford to let McCain defectors vote for Barack Obama - but he can’t afford for them to stay home either. If he’s going to have any hope of winning, John McCain will need to have Republicans vote for him - and the 75-80% GOP compliance evidenced in the last four uncontested primaries most likely isn’t enough in a general election.
 

DuPage County Board 5 Candidate Tony Michelassi Gets Press -

Democratic Candidate Tony Michelassi got picked up by the Lisle Sun in a profile here - and Progress Illinois picked it up here. I met Tony a while ago (he was then with Ruben Zamora’s 14th Congressional District campaign) - and he is certainly enthusiastic. You can check out Tony’s campaign blog here.

[WurfWhile]

Ed Kilgore writes this today at The Democratic Strategist:

McCainCare Equals BushCare

by Ed Kilgore, April 30, 2008 09:26 AM EST

In non-Jeremiah-Wright related political news, John McCain has re-released his health care plan, and the bottom line is that if follows George W. Bush's most recent proposals, which were assessed by most health care experts as representing some point along the spectrum that leads from unserious to dangerous.

Like Bush's plan, McCain's focuses on replacing the employer subsidy for health care with tax incentives for the individual purchase of health insurance. Thus it arguably represents an attack on the very idea of group health insurance purchasing, throwing federal resources into subsidies for the expensive and highly discriminatory individual market. This is somehow supposed to hold down costs.

...

Read the rest here.

Something exciting from one of my favorite bloggers:

The Youth Vote

A year and a half ago, the New York Times took a look at the party affiliations of different generations, producing a fascinating chart that showed a tremendous movement among young voters toward the Democratic party. By 2006, Democrats had opened up a lead among 20-year-olds of 52-37, the largest measured gap ever.

So what's happened since then? Acording to Pew, the gap has gotten even bigger. In polling done over the past six months, voters in their 20s identified as Democrats by a margin of 58-33. That's a 25-point gap. For comparison, the biggest recorded gap before now was 11 points at the height of Democratic dominance during the late 40s and 13 points after Watergate. But it turns out that even Nixon couldn't come close to doing the damage to the Republican brand that George Bush has. His administration has nearly doubled the previous record.

Via Mori Dinauer, who suggests that this means at least an extra million votes for the Democratic candidate in November. And the even better news? There's a good chance it means an even bigger advantage in 2012 and beyond.

I got a chuckle out of this note, which came today from Bob Peickert, Chair of the Democratic Party of DuPage County.  Thanks, Bob!

Dear DuPage Democrats,

Many of you probably had the chance to read about the GOP challenges leveled against our newly slated candidates. If not, here is the first article that appeared on April 15, entitled "DuPage GOP challenges all new Democratic candidates" The second part of the story, found here, appeared two days later with this title: "DuPage election board to Kachiroubas: You're too late"

The real punchline to this story is that, after making false public statements challenging our procedures, the challengers themselves were unable, given an entire week to do so, to walk 100 yards from the circuit clerk's office to the election commission to file a HANDWRITTEN, MISSPELLED and NEARLY ILLEGIBLE complaint on time.