I’m sitting in the Media Room with John Fund, Ron Reagan Jr., Arlen Specter, Shira Toeplitz of Roll Call, and a bunch of other reporters. I actually just shook hands with Specter, who’s working the room. We’re getting geared up for the big debate. It appears that Specter prefers Coca-Cola to Sprite. Hows that for hard reporting? Actually, we’re gonna do a press conference here.

Here are some quick notes I took:

Specter: 4 town hall meeting that have been widely publicized, where a lot of the people got their information from blogs. Blogging has influence on other nations; the genie is out of the bottle in Iran for example…. It’s a powerful tool of American diplomacy.

[Calls firewalls “stonewalling”]

Doesn’t want Iran to be able to buy equipment to stop bloggers.

Respects what Howard Dean has to say but wants to wait to hear from Max Baucus before he thinks about moving ahead with a partisan health care bill.

Thinks climate legislation that emerges from Senate will be more Warner-Lieberman than Specter-Bingaman.

Specter jokingly says he expects heat to not-exceed 211 Fahrenheit in appearance with Sestak.

After he asked for an easy question, I asked him if he was enjoying being a Democrat.

Mike Stark challenged him on Clarence Thomas.

I’m going to head in and watch the Specter/Sestak thing now, and I’ll make some observations in the comments.

Update [2009-8-14 12:29:22 by BooMan]: Now I am in Sestak’s press conference.

Jpol, asked a great question about why Sestak opposed Kucinich’s amendment on PA single-payer health care. Sestak has some strange explanation about how he opposes single-payer because it doesn’t allow for more than one payer.

Sestak is for granting habeas corpus for all prisoners, no matter where they are held.