Feed: Slate Magazine - Politics - AggScore: 79.5

If Americans were concerned about Congress getting its grubby hands on their Medicare, wait till it touches their breast implants. Among the ways the Senate health care bill pays for itself is a 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgery like tummy tucks, face lifts, hair plugs, collagen injections, and any other nonrequired procedures—a proposal known as the "Botax."

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What is the single worst sentence in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue? According to Slate's Going Rogue index, it comes on Page 102: "As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on." Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times didn't have to read past the first paragraph for her nomination: "I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."

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Health care, Sarah Palin, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's iTunes playlist.

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The future of the Republican Party will be shaped by a governor—but it's not likely to be Sarah Palin. The twin poles of the Republican Party were on display this week. One was at a Republican Governors Association meeting in Texas. The other was on the airwaves across the country as Palin methodically went rogue.

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As a professor of constitutional law, Barack Obama gave his students eight hours to complete his exam—even though the exam was designed, he wrote in the instructions, "to be completed in three hours." Now that he's president, Obama could use that kind of cushion. Upon taking office, the president promised that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would close in a year. He now says it will not. He demanded that Congress pass a health care bill by August. It still hasn't. The president's promise to sign a health care bill this year has now been pushed into 2010. Obama was also going to announce his new Afghanistan strategy in early November. It may now come as much as a month later. There are also delays—some, of course, beyond his control—in seating judicial nominations and passing climate-change legislation.

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