When Barack Obama‘s campaign pledge of a transparent and C-SPAN covered debate over health care reform failed to materialize, he was fairly pilloried by both right and left-wing critics. Since then, he’s invited party leaders – and C-SPAN cameras – for a White House health care negotiation. Last night House Minority leader John Boehner sat down with Greta Van Susteren to discuss this and sounded pretty skeptical of the political theater.

A few days ago, Charles Krauthammer was not so impressed with President Obama. He was vain. He was a mediocre one-term president. His SOTU was strained and unctuous, not to mention strange and incongruent. Bah! But today, all that changed — thanks to Obama’s extraordinary 85-minute GOP Question Period.

White House Party Crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi went somewhere in Washington by invitation yesterday: A meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee as part of a criminal investigation of the incident. Though that “investigation” didn’t yield much, as the Salahis took the Fifth Amendment, on the advice of their lawyer, and refused to answer any question. Any question. At all.

Glenn Beck snapped back to the present for a moment last night to jump on the CSPAN debacle over whether the health care debates will be televised. Watching Nancy Pelosi’s remarks (“hallucinations,” “lies”) regarding the whole situation made Beck feel like a Soviet citizen for the first time in his life!

Through a letter addressed to Henry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb is requesting that all “important negotiations” in reconciling the differences between the House and be opened up to C-SPAN’s cameras. Update – White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about this today; view video of his response after the jump:

As we noticed last night, much of cable news was curiously occupied with taped programming yesterday evening in the midst of giant weekend news. Both the House passage of a health care bill and a live Fort Hood press conference occurred Saturday night, but CNN and MSNBC were locked in with pre-taped shows and thus missed a few big moments.