Katie Connolly

In 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger launched, school teacher Christa McAuliffe was among the crew. Awed and inspired by McAuliffe, teachers and students across the country watched the launch live in their classrooms.

The White House released the text of the president's speech to the nation's schoolchildren yesterday. As promised, the speech urges children to work hard and stay in school.

'Tis the season to retire, if you are a moderate Republican senator. Judd Gregg, George Voinovich, and Mel Martinez all announced they would vacate their Senate seats by 2010, leaving Democrats covetously eyeing their seats.

Just when you thought August recess couldn't get any wackier, conservative talk show hosts have stirred up a hornets' nest over President Obama's planned speech to the nation's schoolchildren next Tuesday.

Yesterday I had an interesting email exchange with Gaggle reader Tim Tumlin, a psychologist in Illinois. He highlighted a health-care problem I hadn't thought all that much about: the complexities of medical billing systems.

On Tuesday, David Brooks wrote a column in The New York Times about the rapidity of Obama's decline in opinion polls. Toward the end of the piece, he wrote the following, which caught my attention: Some now argue that the administration should just ignore the ignorant masses and ram health care through using reconciliation, the legislative maneuver that would reduce the need for moderate votes.

Earlier today, Holly wrote about the mixed messages emanating from the White House on the public option. They've been dancing around the question of whether a public plan is an absolutely essential component of health-care reform for months now, frustrating the left and providing ammunition for the right.

Yesterday, Politico's Josh Kraushaar compiled a list of the casualties of what's been a particularly brutal August recess. Kraushaar is right—bodies are piling up on both sides of the aisle as the health-care debate becomes increasingly volatile.

Gallup has today released some analysis on public perceptions of health insurers based on polls conducted from 2006-08. The data cuts to the heart of why the the President is having such difficulty in selling plans to reform health insurance: public or private, people like their health insurance.

One of the most pervasive lies about health-care reform is that it provides free coverage for illegal immigrants. The claim, circulated in a long chain e-mail, is categorically untrue.

Conservative Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship with Ted Kennedy over the years they shared in the Senate. It was a hugely unexpected relationship.

Along with his multitudinous gifts as a legislator, Edward Kennedy also held one of the most coveted prizes in the Democratic Party─a Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate.

That RNC Chair Michael Steele said something confusing isn't really news. Steele has been an erratic leader at best since he won the chairmanship earlier this year.

Much of the debate about health care reform in recent weeks has focused on a just a few elements of the entire reform proposal - things like the public option and end of life counseling.

On Sunday, John McCain told George  that Ted Kennedy's absence was sorely impacting the health-care debate. "No person in that institution is indispensable, but Ted Kennedy comes as close to being indispensable as any individual I've ever known in the Senate because he had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions," McCain said, adding that health-care reform would likely be in a very different place today if Kennedy was present.

Greg Sargent over at The Plum Line is reporting that Chuck Schumer is urging his Senate colleagues to ramp up their criticisms of their Republican counterparts.

Is Hillary Clinton less powerful now than she was as a senator? Forbes Magazine's list of the 100 Most Powerful Women indicates she is. ABC's Kirit Radia notes that in 2004, Forbes ranked then Senator Clinton at number 5.

Curious about what President Obama is planning to read during his vacation? Well, now we know, thanks to Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton. Obama has taken five books (that we know of) to Martha's Vineyard, a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. (Watch for these titles to rocket up bestseller lists.) They're all American authors.

For the second time this week, polling shows that a worrying number of people believe that health-care-reform legislation will create so-called death panels.

Over the past few weeks, misinformation circulating about Obama's health-reform bill has gone from mildly plausible to downright demented. The myths are so pervasive that even the White House is worried.

Many pundits have noted of late that August has rarely been kind to Barack Obama since he hit the national stage. The folks over at First Read have pointed this out numerous times.

Today Gallup has posted some interesting figures on the percentage of uninsured people in each state, based on survey data they have collected over the first six months of the year.

My colleague Kate Dailey, who writes our Human Condition blog, has an interesting post examining who precisely is outraged by Michelle Obama's decision to wear shorts during a recent sightseeing trip to the Grand Canyon.

Yesterday I took a break from reading about health care reform to flip through Rebecca Johnson's story about Jenny Sanford in this month's issue of Vogue.

Surprise is perhaps the mildest way to describe the reaction to Jake Tapper's Monday morning scoop: former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay will join the cast of Dancing With the Stars (DWTS).

Today in things we never thought we'd see ... The White House has posted a video on its blog of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel reading a children's book to a group of kids as part of a summer reading initiative organized by the Department of Education.

Major newspapers today are reporting that the Obama administration is backing away from including a public option in health-care-reform legislation. I'm in the camp that tends to believe that the cautious language employed by officials like HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in recent days isn't actually new, nor does it necessarily signal the death of the public option.

Reading Politico's daily health-care roundup Pulse this morning reminded me of a statement Sen. Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, made to Charlie Rose earlier this month.

People tend to overestimate racial tensions between races other than their own. For instance, two thirds of black Americans said blacks and Hispanics get along well; 60 percent of Hispanics agreed. But only 43 percent of whites thought so. "When it is your group involved, you judge based on your own … experiences," says Gallup's Lydia Saad. "You're drawing on a different set of information," not just the strife that makes news.