michigan

There will be no cloture vote on a $245 billion proposal to prevent pay cuts to Medicare doctors, according to the office of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who sponsored the bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) filed a motion yesterday to hold a cloture vote on the bill Monday — the procedural move required to [...]

The Michigan Messenger reports that Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) temporarily laid off state workers at midnight after the state legislature failed to pass a budget for fiscal year 2010. However, two hours later, Granholm signed a resolution passed by the Senate allowing the government to continue operating for 30 days while lawmakers continued to negotiate [...]

The Michigan Messenger reports that Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) has notified state employees that they will be temporarily laid off at the stroke of midnight if the legislature does not pass a budget by the end of the day. Follow events as they develop here.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has rejected a written request, penned on Sept. 18, by his fellow armed-services-committee senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to compel testimony from Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Afghanistan ahead of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. Here’s Levin’s letter, sent early this evening:

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) read the McChrystal strategy review before Bob Woodward put it on The Washington Post’s frontpage, and among the thing he’s tried to do for the past two weeks is play up Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s emphasis on what McChrystal calls “radically expanded and embedded partnering” with Afghan forces as a way to [...]

It went kind of underneath the radar yesterday when President Obama decided to replace the proposed outdated-before-it-was-ever-built anti-ballistic missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic with a new four-phased plan for Iran-based missile defense, but Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had an intriguing speculation about what the [...]

In sharp contrast to the Lieberman, Boehner and Cantor statements is this missile-defense-shield reaction from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who must find issuing such things to be a tiresome and unfortunate concession to the reality of being surrounded by dishonest people. I’m going to highlight the good parts.
President Obama has made a sound choice that [...]

As I pointed out a couple weeks ago when reporting on a joint press conference, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seems more comfortable with increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan than Defense Secretary Bob Gates does. And today, when Mullen, testified for his Senate hearing to be renominated as chairman, he [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) may have made quite the bureaucratic gambit today by calling for an acceleration of the schedule to train Afghan security forces ahead of any new U.S. troop deployment. That position attracted the support (with caveats) of respected counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners like John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security. Accordingly, [...]

Remember how I said on Tuesday to keep a watch on what Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, says about Afghanistan now that he’s back from his trip there? This morning, the eighth anniversary of 9/11, he’s giving a speech on the Senate floor — in advance of the expected [...]