WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration is scrambling to fix a potential problem with a much-touted benefit of its new health care law, a gap in coverage improvements for children in poor health, officials said Tuesday.

Under the new law, insurance companies still would be able to refuse new coverage to children because of a pre-existing medical problem, said Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the main congressional panels that wrote the bill President Barack Obama signed into law Tuesday.
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Full protection for children would not come until 2014, said Kate Cyrul, a spokeswoman for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, another panel that authored the legislation. That's the same year when insurance companies could no longer deny coverage to any person on account of health problems. link

British government ministers - Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Alan Johnson - landed a heavy blow on Israel yesterday by expelling a diplomat from the Israeli embassy in London (who according to news reports was the head of the Mossad mission there). The minister condemned Israel and warned Britons of what may happen to their passports when they receive visas or encounter immigration officers. The move was coordinated with other countries - Germany, France, Ireland and possibly Australia - and may signal the start of an avalanche.

This is a blow to Israeli arrogance on all levels. First, the promise made by Shimon Peres to Geoffrey Howe in 1987 that British passports would no longer be used for Israeli intelligence operations was apparently no longer in effect. William Hague, the foreign secretary in the conservatives' shadow government who may replace Miliband in two months if David Cameron wins the elections, is the one who reminded parliament about Peres' promise to Howe.

The two-week-old dispute between Israel and the United States over housing construction in East Jerusalem has exposed the limits of American power to pressure Israeli leaders to make decisions they consider politically untenable. But the blowup also shows that the relationship between the two allies is changing, in ways that are unsettling for Israel's supporters.

President Obama and his aides have cast the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not just the relationship with Israel, as a core U.S. national security interest. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the military's Central Command, put it starkly in recent testimony on Capitol Hill: "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel." His comments raised eyebrows in official Washington -- and overseas -- because they suggested that U.S. military officials were embracing the idea that failure to resolve the conflict had begun to imperil American lives.

NYT

I seriously doubt that Gen. Petreus would be saying those words if the GOP were still running this country... into the ground.

It's really looking like a brutal year for Democrats in the Big Ten states.

Barack Obama's approval numbers in the two places we polled this week- Wisconsin and Ohio- tell the story. He won Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008 but we find his approval there at a net -2 (46/48) for a 16 point drop since the election. It's a similar story in Ohio. He won there by four points in 2008 but our approval numbers there for him tomorrow will show him at -13 (40/53) for a drop of 17 points. If his national approval rating was falling the way it is in these two states he'd be at about 43/53 for the whole country.

If the election was today Democrats would likely lose something they currently hold in every state where they have something to lose- Pennsylvania Governor and perhaps Senate, Michigan Governor, Ohio Governor, Indiana Senate, Iowa Governor, Wisconsin Governor and perhaps Senate, and Illinois Senate and/or Governor. Only Minnesota doesn't join the party because Democrats have nothing to lose there.