Several Republican politicians have used the hoopla over OBL’s death to quietly drop the scheme to privatize Medicare. Brian Beutler writes,

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is the latest GOP leader to acknowledge that his party’s plan to privatize Medicare — which passed the House as part of the Republican budget — will hit a wall in the White House and Senate.

Responding Thursday to the news that one of his most powerful chairmen, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) of the House Ways and Means Committee, will not push ahead with the Medicare plan, Boehner told reporters, “My interpretation of what Mr. Camp [said] was a recognition of the political realities that we face. While Republicans control the House, the Democrats control the Senate and they control the White House.”

Translation: This thing is going to kill us in the 2012 elections.

Some of them actually are making noises about cooperation.

Senior Republicans conceded Wednesday that a deal is unlikely on a contentious plan to overhaul Medicare and offered to open budget talks with the White House by focusing on areas where both parties can agree, such as cutting farm subsidies.

However,

On the eve of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) said Republicans remain convinced that reining in federal retirement programs is the key to stabilizing the nation’s finances over the long term.

Translation: Are there no prisons? Are there no work houses?

That search could start, Cantor said, with a list of GOP proposals that would save $715 billion over the next decade by ending payments to wealthy farmers, limiting lawsuits against doctors, and expanding government auctions of broadcast spectrum to telecommunications companies, among other items.

Limiting lawsuits against doctors ain’t going to do squat to lower the federal deficit. And “wealthy farmers” is an oxymoron, unless you’re talking about corporate factory farms. But any plan Republicans might come up with won’t end payments to anything “corporate.”

But this is relatively picayune stuff. Reading the entire article, I get the impression some Republicans are fishing for some token concessions to give them some cover from the baggers for voting to raise the debt ceiling.

Elsewhere —

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged Thursday that Republican plans to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health care law were “dead.” Instead, Camp predicted, the GOP would turn its focus to overturning the most controversial portion of that legislation: the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance.

I still predict that won’t happen, because the insurance industry likes that mandate.

Speaking of which, one little-noticed feature of the apparently dead Ryan Medicare plan is … an individual mandate. Simon Lazarus explains — the Ryan plan would have changed the tax code so that people who didn’t purchase insurance would have faced a tax penalty. which, bottom line, is what the evil individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act does. Rightie bloggers object to this characterization of the Ryan plan, saying the plan provided for a tax incentive, not a tax penalty.

In other words, under the Dem plan the glass is half empty, but under the Ryan plan, it is half full.

Stuff to read — how the Affordable Care Act already is changing the insurance industry, and Loony-ass Insurgents vs. Waffling Bores: GOP Presidential Fight Starts Tonight!