The Wonk Room

On Monday, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) described SCHIP as an ‘illegal alien’ ‘magnet’: “President Obama even voted for the SCHIP bill…I know one thing: The people in my district are not interested in paying for the health care for illegal aliens that are coming across our border to be yet one more magnet to bring people in that should come here legally.”

“Millions of Americans suffering from at least one chronic health problem are putting off care, not taking needed medications, and resigning themselves to feelings of isolation and depression,” a new study finds.

Health Care For All files this dispatch from the Obama administration’s Regional Forum on Health Care in Vermont.

President Obama has decided to “significantly expand” Afghanistan’s security forces, hoping that a larger professional army and national police force will “fill a void” left by the central government.

The Army will phase out its stop-loss program and offer extra pay to soldiers who continue to serve under the policy. “To hold them against their will . . . is just not the right thing to do,” said Defense Secretary Gates.

In a new video, Osama bin Laden “called for the overthrow” of Somalia President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate Islamist.

A New York state judge “rejected a bid by Bank of America Corp. to keep details confidential about individuals who got bonuses at Merrill Lynch & Co,” because BofA “didn’t make [previous] efforts to keep compensation data confidential.”

Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh writes that “AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit.”

Nouriel Roubini: “Madoff is the mirror of the American economy and of its over-leveraged agents: a house of cards of leverage over leverage by households, financial firms and corporations that has now collapsed in a heap.”

China’s top climate change official rejected as protectionist “a U.S. idea to put tariffs on some imports from countries that do not place a price on carbon, chiding the United States to do more to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Potentially fatal to the polar bear, global warming has already left its mark on the species with smaller, less robust bears that are increasingly showing cannibalistic tendencies.”

A Saudi Arabian official claimed yesterday that “strict measures across the world to act against climate change could seriously affect the economies of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations.”