Senate committee rejects public option

On September 29, 2009 the Senate Finance committee considered the public insurance option and rejected it. It became breaking news for The Washington Post.

News Alert - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/IKR2QE/TKWOK/NF5C2T/37U6E3/X8JBR/T3/t

03:52 PM EDT Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Senate Panel Votes Down Second 'Public Option' Amendment - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/IKR2QE/TKWOK/NF5C2T/37U6E3/DD0XV/T3/t

The Senate Finance Committee voted twice Tuesday against the creation of a new government-run health insurance plan. The panel rejected a proposal from Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) on a 15 to 8 vote, then voted down one sponsored by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on a 13 to 10 vote.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/IKR2QE/TKWOK/NF5C2T/37U6E3/EYCKA/T3/t
w.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/interact/longterm/talk/members.htm#privacy?referrer=email

The Archivist search for "senate rejects public option" began 10:00 p.m. on September 29, and the initial search found 1087 micro messages. The first was at 10:47 a.m. beating the Post by five hours.

At 10:00 p.m. the twitter streamgraph looks like the stream is fading quickly.

That is 14:00 p.m. to 19:00 to produce 1,000 micro messages.

The stream died very quickly as the figure below shows.

A big surge and then nothing. I could have stopped the search much earlier, but I was not certain it would not return.

The final count was 1562.

The data files are senate rejects public option.xml and senate rejects public option.txt, which is a tab delimited file that can be read by Excel.