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We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.

Physicians jammed a town hall meeting in The Woodlands on Thursday, expressing fears about the cost and effectiveness of a health care reform bill that could come up for a vote in Congress as early as September.

U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, hosted the meeting attended by about 90 physicians at Memorial Hermann Hospital-The Woodlands.

“The bottom line is that doctors don't want socialized medicine — another flawed health care system like Medicare. They don't believe it will lower the costs or improve quality,” Brady said. “Medicare is already going bankrupt and not quality care. It also shifts medical costs onto other paying customers. It needs to be fixed first.”

President Barack Obama said Friday his administration had saved the US economy from catastrophe and the worst of the recession may be over, after a surprise drop in the unemployment rate.

"This morning we received additional signs that the worst may be behind us," said Obama in remarks in the White House Rose Garden after new figures showed the jobless rate slipped to a better than expected 9.4 percent in July.
"This morning, we received additional signs that the worst may be behind us," Obama said.

"We are losing jobs at less than half the rate we were when I took office. We have pulled the financial system back from the brink.

"While we have rescued our economy from catastrophe, we have also begun to build a new foundation for growth," Obama said, but he also warned that tough times lay ahead before the economy would be restored to full prosperity.

Congress plans to spend $550 million to buy eight jets, a substantial upgrade to the fleet used by federal officials at a time when lawmakers have criticized the use of corporate jets by companies receiving taxpayer funds.

The purchases will help accommodate growing travel demand by congressional officials. The planes augment a fleet of about two dozen passenger jets maintained by the Air Force for lawmakers, administration officials and military chiefs to fly on government trips in the U.S. and abroad.

The congressional shopping list goes beyond what the Air Force had initially requested as part of its annual appropriations. The Pentagon sought to buy one Gulfstream V and one business-class equivalent of a Boeing 737 to replace aging planes. The Defense Department also asked to buy two additional 737s that were being leased.

ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports: The effort to inject another two billion dollars into Cash for Clunkers has hit a potential road block in the Senate that could kill the bill.

Republiicans are throwing their support behind an amendment offered by Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that would limit clunker rebates to individuals with annual incomes of 50 K or less. With Republican support the amendment stands a good chance of passing unless the majority of Democrats, who mostly favor the amendment, vote against it.

Rielle Hunter, John Edwards' former mistress, went inside the federal courthouse in Raleigh Thursday morning. A grand jury is meeting in the courthouse.

Hunter was taken into a back entrance at the courthouse shortly after 8:30 a.m. by her New Jersey-based lawyer, Michael Critchley, an FBI agent and an agent with the Internal Revenue Service. She was carrying her 18-month-old daughter, Frances.

Twitter and Facebook, two of the Web's hottest hangouts, suffered service problems on Thursday, raising speculation that they had come under a pre-planned coordinated attack by hackers.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.

Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. The social networking site is working with Twitter and Google Inc to determine whether there was foul play, a person familiar with the company said.

Facebook has confirmed to Wired.com that — like Twitter — it was the victim of a denial-of-service attack Thursday morning.

The service has been working just fine for me, but I contacted the Facebook press office to ask whether the rumors of an attack were true.

“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” responded Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin via e-mail.

“No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users,” she added. ” We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, the Charles Manson cult follower who tried to kill President Ford, is scheduled to be released from prison next week.
Fromme, now 60, took aim at the president with a semi-automatic .45-caliber pistol Sept. 5, 1975. There were four bullets in the gun's magazine, but none in the chamber and an alert Secret Service agent grabbed the gun from Fromme.

Fromme was a devoted member of the demonic Manson "Family." At the time of the assassination attempt, Manson and several of his followers were serving life terms for killing nine people in his grisly Helter Skelter plot to start a race war.

She told her defense attorney that she targeted Ford because she wanted to garner attention for a new trial for Manson.

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables — nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours — and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.

But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress.

The Air Force had asked for one Gulfstream 550 jet (price tag: about $65 million) as part of an ongoing upgrade of its passenger air service.

But the House Appropriations Committee, at its own initiative, added to the 2010 Defense appropriations bill another $132 million for two more airplanes and specified that they be assigned to the D.C.-area units that carry Members of Congress, military brass and top government officials.