Senator Whitehouse, Ranking Member Enzi, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to participate in this very important hearing on health care delivery system reform.

With the threat of a veto hanging over its head, the National Defense Authorization bill heads to the House floor today for debate. Among the provisions are several dealing with the question of a nuclear weapons armed Iran, and what the United States should do to avert a crisis, prepare to handle the threat, or eliminate the threat altogether.

The Obama administration’s recent focus on finding a compromise to allow the Iranian regime to maintain some enrichment capabilities “for peaceful purposes” distracts from the underlying nuclear threat at hand.

The Fix over at the Washington Post—a political staple in this election year—has a little bit of election analysis out for us the night after the president of the United States slow jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon. The Fix pronounces the meme of the race: Barack Obama is cool. Mitt Romney is not.

John McCain and Barack Obama are right to focus on health care.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association has concluded that there's an extra 13 auto accident deaths attributable to Income Tax Day (i.e., generally April 15, but which falls on April 17 this year). This is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual carnage that might be reasonably attributed to paying taxes in America.

Talks aimed at resolving the Iranian nuclear weapons threat will again resume this Friday. In Seoul late last month, the President reminded Iran that it must act with “‘urgency.” “There is time to solve this diplomatically,” Obama enthused. “It is always my preference to solve these issues diplomatically. But time is short.”

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, with six members of the Supreme Court present, President Obama famously attacked the Court’s Citizen’s United decision. At the center of Obama’s criticism was his completely erroneous contention that the decision opened the floodgates to foreign corporate spending in U.S. election campaigns.