Reps. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican, have been nominated by President Obama as Congress' representatives to the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

General debate in the session opens Wednesday in New York.

One lawmaker from each party in the House is selected in odd-numbered years and one from each party in the Senate gets the nod in even-numbered years. Delahunt, who was recommended by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, served in the same capacity in 2007. Texas Republican Ted Poe was Delahunt's counterpart that year.

Delahunt chairs the House Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight, which has jurisdiction over American involvement with the U.N.

Donald Rumsfeld, the two-time former Defense secretary, has a well-chronicled penchant for posing his own questions and then answering them.

So does someone working in the Obama administration.

The New York Times reported this weekend that President Obama had send an emissary to New York Gov. David A. Paterson to ask him not to run in the 2010 election. Paterson, the former lieutenant governor who took over from resigned Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer in March 2008, has approval ratings that are near rock bottom.

And the story included this trip-down-memory-lane nugget:

"Is there concern about the situation in New York? Absolutely," the second administration official said Saturday evening. "Has that concern been conveyed to the governor? Yes.

The faces and issues change, but media strategies are timeless.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone with even a modicum of respect for Congress who thinks Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., has a leg to stand on in breaking the standard decorum of a presidential address to a joint session by yelling "Lie. You lie" during the speech.

Even Wilson was for apologizing before he was against it. But the episode raises an interesting set of questions: Is his sin one of tone? Is it one of content? Is it one of venue? Is it one of timing?

The answer: All of the above.

It's not the first time a president has heard a catcall during a joint session. It's not that public officials are innocent of using even more personal terms to denounce a president.

Decorum has been breached in the House chamber many times before. And presidents routinely are accused of lying -- or at least intentionally misleading -- even by members of their own party sometimes. Put them all together, though, and Wilson is the outlier as a contestant in the lying game.

For a more socially and politically graceful way to say the president lied during a joint session of Congress, recall the words of a certain junior senator from Illinois in his response to President Bush's 2008 State of the Union address.

Here's what then-Sen. Barack Obama said: "And finally, tonight we heard President Bush say that the surge in Iraq is working, when we know that's just not true."

And, as Warner Wolf used to say, let's go to the videotape.

To add a bit of bipartisan flavor to his address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night, President Obama said that he wants to review options for altering the nation's medical malpractice laws, an idea supported by most Republicans and at least a few Democrats.

For the job of looking into malpractice options, he tapped Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a former executive director of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association who has said she doesn't believe that litigation is a significant driver of costs in the health care system.

In early 2008, Congress instructed the Justice Department to investigate whether any crimes were committed in the earmarking of $10 million for a proposed Florida interchange known as the "Coconut Road" project in the 2005 highway law.

But despite the congressional mandate for an investigation, which was included in a measure making technical corrections to the highway law, neither the Justice Department nor Alaska Republican Don Young, the 36-year House veteran at the center of the controversy, will say whether the probe is under way. The senator whose interest sparked Congress to act, Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, wants answers.

Chief among his questions is who covertly funneled money to the Coconut Road project by rewriting an earmark in the highway bill after both chambers had passed it but before the president signed it into law.

"Dr. Coburn believes those who inserted the $10 million Coconut Road earmark into a bill that had already passed both houses of Congress acted outside the bounds of the law and Constitution. The Coconut Road episode was about more than earmarking; it was about the integrity of the democratic process," Coburn spokesman John Hart said. "As Congress once again takes up transportation funding, DOJ should complete its assignment and fully investigate this matter in order to restore and safeguard the integrity of the legislative process."

President Obama is calling lawmakers today to discuss his health care plans in advance of next Wednesday's address to a joint session of Congress.

The outreach to Capitol Hill, in the form of at least one conference call, comes as liberals are fretting over their expectation that Obama will abandon their beloved government insurance option for the otherwise uninsured.

Here's my story from this morning. I'll update with reaction in the middle of the afternoon.

The leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent President Obama a letter that threatens to withhold support for a health care overhaul if it does not include a public option -- and if it does not reverse a deal with Blue Dogs for negotiated rather than fixed reimbursement rates for providers.

"Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Medicare rates -- not negotiated rates -- is unacceptable," CPC co-chairs Lynn Woolsey of California and Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona wrote.

The letter was first reported by Plum Line blogger Greg Sargent.

Just like the president's arm's-length treatment of the public option is not new, the response of the liberal leaders is more a restatement than a news-breaker.

Shortly before they left town for the August recess, President Obama offered an open September invitation to his house for any lawmaker who wanted to discuss his health care overhaul plans in detail.

"They will have all of August to review the various legislative proposals. When we come back in September, I will be available to answer any question that members of Congress have. If they want to come over to the White House and go over line by line what's going on, I will be happy to do that," Obama said at a Raleigh, N.C., high school on July 29.

Now some of his harshest critics are calling him on that promise and asking for an invitation.

President Obama's campaign, Organizing for America, took aim at the media again today for failing, in its view, to properly counter false claims made by opponents of health care overhaul.

"Over the past few months, two things have become clear about the fight for health insurance reform: Our opponents will create and spread outrageous lies to try to stop President Obama from creating real change. We just can't count on the media to debunk them," OFA chief Mitch Stewart wrote to Obama's e-mail list.

Since every major Democratic entity and its sister organization have spent the month of August filling inboxes with "mythbuster" tip sheets citing news reports and columns, it really isn't that hard to find fact-checking resources.

Here are a few URLs for OFA's review.

• Vetting the Health Care Rhetoric from CQPolitics.
• Twenty-six lies about HR 3200, from factcheck.org.
• Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact.
• The Associated Press
• More from the AP
• Even more from the AP, via MSNBC
• The New York Times
• ABC News
• The Chicago Tribune
• The Boston Globe