Reid to Baucus: Stop Chasing GOP Votes on Health Care

Now that's good news. And even some leadership.

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

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Froomkin hired by Huff Post

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin has been hired by the Huffington Post. And all was well with the world once again. Read the rest of this post...

One-day Obama blog poll is over

I conducted an unofficial poll today of our readers, asking them if they approved or disapproved of President Obama's job performance to date. Here is where you came down:

Do you approve of the job Obama is doing as president overall? (2,543 votes)

37% Approve
22% Disapprove
39% I'm in the middle

Contrast that figure with Obama's national approval numbers, now averaging around 56.9%. Read the rest of this post...

Anybody have suggestions for good health care reform blogs?

I wanted to add another news update box specifically for health care reform blogs. What sites do you guys find useful? Read the rest of this post...

House progressive caucus warns Obama against dropping public option in health care reform after Rahm undercuts reform effort to WSJ

UPDATE: Ezra Klein and Brian Beutler think that reports that Obama subsequently repudiated Emanuel's comments are flat our wrong.

This is a rather significant political story for a number of reasons.

In the past 24 hours, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel undercut the health care reform public option by expressing his support for a "trigger" under which the public option wouldn't come into existence unless the market couldn't provide enough competition. Many on the pro- health care reform side of things think the trigger is simply a cute way to kill the public option. Thus, when Emanuel embraced it, it signaled that Obama was backing away from the public option.

Amazingly, liberal members of Congress and MoveOn fought back. The House Progressive Caucus wrote Obama a public letter telling him they'd walk if the trigger was included in legislation, and MoveOn asked its millions of members to express their disappointment to the White House.

I say "amazingly," because up until now, members of Congress have been loathe to criticize Obama on anything, as have liberal groups. MoveOn, to its credit, has been trying to work with the administration as a friend, not an adversary. Today that all changed. This not only signifies that we may be reaching a perilous moment in the health care debate, but it also signifies that other constituencies, besides the gays, are becoming concerned with where this White House is headed on key legislative promises. For their willingness to speak out when it's still not entirely PC to do so, the House Progressive Caucus and MoveOn both deserve our praise.

Liberal groups on Tuesday made it clear that they are not happy with news reports that the White House may be considering alternatives to a public plan in health care reform.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the 77-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, fired off a letter to President Barack Obama warning him against dropping a public insurance option from health care reform plans.

Grijalva described the “alarm and dismay” he felt after reading a Wall Street Journal story that cites White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel offering support for a “trigger” mechanism, under which a public plan option is only part of health care if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own.

“I want to be crystal clear that any such trigger for a strong public plan option is a non-starter with a majority of the Members of the Progressive Caucus,” Grijalva said....

Those with lingering concerns include the liberal group MoveOn, which sent an e-mail urging its millions of members to call the White House to express their disappointment with Emanuel’s comments.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is one of the main reasons Joe and I - who were both early Obama supporters, and raised $50,000 for him via this blog - have been so outspoken about the Obama White House's inaction, and backtracking, on the president's gay civil rights promises. We have long suspected that Rahm Emmanuel was the problem (though I've now heard from multiple sources that White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also has a big problem with gay civil rights issues), whispering in Obama's ear, pushing the president to abandon his campaign promises and take a more "moderate," "centrist," Republican course on our civil rights. Now we see the same concerns arising about Emanuel, that he is watering down the president's promises - but the concerns are coming from members of Congress and MoveOn on an entirely different issue, health care reform. That is significant. And, as it is now also a trend, it is troubling, and has significance for every constituency seeking change via this administration. Read the rest of this post...

A few gay updates

Former Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand seems to agree with Joe and me that Obama can and should oppose DOMA in the next brief the DOJ files. Hildebrand seems to contradict Gibbs, says Obama wasn't pleased once he actually read the DOMA brief, while Gibbs recently implied that Obama stood behind the brief.

Same sex marriages performed in other states are now legally recognized in DC. Note that the Republicans didn't do or say squat about this. The GOP seems to be avoiding social issues at all costs. One might argue that this would therefore be an opportune time to push such issues, so as to follow through on one's promises at a time that the opposition doesn't have the stomach for a fight, and to make the GOP squirm at the same time.

Ft. Worth police brutality victim speaks out. Read the rest of this post...

Wall Street against Stimulus Part II

Quite frankly, who cares what Wall Street wants at this point? After the recent trading run-up, where few outside of the big trading firms profited, what Wall Street likes or doesn't like is of lesser concern. The more important goal now is to stem the rising unemployment and keep money moving in the economy until the private sector can re-start.

As usual, CNBC cherry picks a brief moment in time and talks about stocks falling 1% as Stenny Hoyer talked up the stimulus -- but again, who cares? Wall Street goes up and down all the time, so get over what happened in an hour or a day. Long term everyone -- Wall Street included -- will be better off when unemployment is dropping. CNBC:

As talk escalated about another stimulus — House Majority Leader Rep. Stenny Hoyer said Congress needs to be "open" to talk of another measure — stocks fell more than 1 percent.

"Talk of a new stimulus plan is actually a confidence killer," Joseph Battipaglia, market strategist for Stifel Nicolaus, told Reuters. "That would mean we've added a trillion dollars of debt without anything to show for it."

"You'd immediately have inflation and deficit concerns that would weigh on the equity market," Karl added. "The market sees modest recovery at this point, not terribly robust but some improvement since March... I can't see that (the stimulus) would be positive."

Moreover, any gains stocks would see could be temporary.

A strong argument can be made that the first stimulus should have been larger, but we're beyond that now. The focus today is that the economy remains delicate, and with increasing unemployment causing stress for families and banks as well, we need this. Wall Street is just going to have to deal with it. Read the rest of this post...

More consumer credit problems

And it's bound to get higher as unemployment rises. We may be hearing more about this as the quarterly reports hit the street.

The overall delinquency rate actually understates consumer pain because it excludes bank-issued credit cards, where credit deterioration was severe.

Delinquencies on the value of all card debt soared to a record 6.60 percent from 5.52 percent in the fourth quarter. The rate of delinquent accounts rose to 4.75 percent from 4.52 percent, near the record 4.81 percent in the spring of 2005.

"The biggest driver is job losses," ABA Chief Economist James Chessen said in an interview. "When people lose their jobs or work fewer hours, it makes it that much harder to meet their obligations. Unfortunately, we're going to see higher job losses in the next year, and I expect elevated delinquencies."

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That's Senator Franken

(Hat tip, ThinkProgress) Read the rest of this post...

Service sector better than expected, but...

Even with some of the good economic news these days, there are a lot of "buts" out there. From what I can see, we remain in a strange area at the moment, as if everyone is taking a deep breath after the mini run (read: Wall Street thrashing to pump up bonuses with little value to the broader market) and waiting to see what happens next.

In the IT world where I live business is booming right now after a sluggish patch. Corporate buyers aren't as enthusiastic as they were pre-crash, but they are at least moving again. The big fear at the moment is that the autumn could get ugly and push global economies back to where they were a year ago. Hopefully not, but we are not out of the woods yet.

The U.S. services economy — from retailers and restaurants to real estate brokers — contracted less than expected in June in its best showing since before the financial crisis struck last fall, according to a private trade group's gauge.

But with rising unemployment and constrained credit driving consumers to spend less and save more, one analyst says a sustained economic recovery likely is years, not months, away.

"It's going to take a long time before the economy is really back up to its potential," said Capital Economics analyst Paul Ashworth.

While the U.S. should see growth in the next few months, he said it could be 2011 or 2012 before the economy reaches a rate of activity that helps boost wages, he said.

What are you seeing locally? Are people shopping or going to the restaurant? We looked in a few stores last weekend during the big sales (they only happen twice a year here), and the stores varied from empty to hoards of people, but overall few buyers. Read the rest of this post...

Smile!

I'm not sure what's creeping me out more. That I'm watching the Michael Jackson funeral, that his family set up a photo opp stop for the mourners to mug for the camera, that mourners are actually taking advantage of the photo opp at a funeral (Jesse Jackson is actually smiling), or that the media is covering Jackson's coffin like the OJ chase:



I guess I get what I deserve for tuning in. But still... Read the rest of this post...

POLL: Do you approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president?

I'm just curious, overall, what you guys think. Obviously this isn't scientific. But overall, do you approve, disapprove, or are you in the middle, in terms of your view to date of the Obama presidency? I can imagine some liberals being upset about the recent string of disappointments, but others arguing that Obama is still far better than George Bush - and still others, divided. So, overall, how do you rate his presidency so far? Feel free to share your vote, and explain why, in the comments.

You'll find our poll at the top of the next column - poll closes at 9pm Eastern or so this evening. Thanks, JOHN

PS You need to vote in order to see the updated results. Read the rest of this post...

Obama moves to improve food safety

Good news and hopefully they are working with Congresswoman DeGette who has done so much on this issue in Congress.

The actions, to be unveiled by the administration at an event Tuesday, were based on recommendations from a Food Safety Working Group created by President Barack Obama in March after a salmonella outbreak in peanut products forced the largest food recall in U.S. history.

"The Working Group is recommending a new public health-focused approach to food safety based on three core principles: prioritizing prevention, strengthening surveillance and enforcement and improving response and recovery," the White House said in a statement.

Groups briefed on the recommendations praised the administration for placing prevention at the heart of the plan.

Donna Rosenbaum of Safe Tables Our Priority called it "a large step in the right direction."

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Sarah Watch

Palin says she's a fighter, not a quitter.

Pawlenty, another possible 2012 GOP contender, subtly questions Palin's move.

Palin says she won't run for prez in 2012, then says she might. Makes odd fish analogy.

First Dudette says ethics complaints led to her resignation. I suspect that's closer to the truth than she's admitting. Meaning, I still think someone worked out a deal that Palin resigns and they drop the charges. You just don't resign abruptly on a Friday night before a major holiday unless you are trying to bury bad news. If Palin thought she were being a hero, and saving her state, and jump-starting her 2012 campaign, she'd have hired a band and bought balloons. This is not someone who shuns publicity when she thinks she's being feisty. She clearly thinks she's in trouble, and thus the odd timing of the announcement.

Politico on Sarah Palin's lame lame-duck excuse. (So, had Palin won the election and not chose to run for a second term, would she have resigned the vice presidency?)

Richard Cohen thinks the Palin pick shows that the GOP has lost its mind:

It would behoove us, though, to consider how close we all came to utter disaster -- the "counterfactual" suggested above. A recent Vanity Fair article clarifies just how awful a vice president (or president) Palin would have made. During the campaign, she proved allergic to briefings and remained determined to stay uncorrupted by knowledge. More recently, she explained her decision to -- permit me some GOP talk -- cut and run as Alaska governor by lapsing into no known language, explaining herself afterward in a burst of Tweets that only raised more questions. One question, though, has been settled: She is unfit for office.

Naming Palin to the GOP ticket -- a top-down choice by McCain -- was the most reckless decision any national politician has made in the longest time, and while it certainly says something about McCain, it says even more about his party. It has lost its mind.

USNews says Palin's excuse for quitting has Republicans perplexed:

Condemning the "MSM" is often good politics on the Republican right, where the media are seen as hopelessly biased against conservatives. But GOP strategists say Palin went too far, seeming to say that she could no longer abide criticism from the media—and from her political opponents on the left. Prominent Republicans wondered how she would do in the hothouse environment of a campaign if she ran for president and how she would stand up to the harsh treatment every president eventually gets once in office.

Eugene Robinson says John McCain owes us all an apology:

You can say that all of us who ever took Sarah Palin seriously -- or pretended to take her seriously -- should be deeply ashamed. And you can say that John McCain should publicly apologize for putting the nation he loves at risk by choosing Palin as his running mate. Imagining Palin within a heartbeat of the presidency should be enough to make even die-hard Republicans shudder.

The reasons she gave for stepping down are not just contrived or implausible but literally nonsensical. She can most effectively serve the people of Alaska by ceasing to exercise the powers of chief executive? She worries that as a lame duck she would somehow be compelled to waste taxpayer money on useless junkets? In her "Don't Cry For Me, Alaska" news conference announcing her departure, the folksy non sequiturs -- "Only dead fish go with the flow" -- were like nuggets of Cartesian logic amid a tub of mush.

Read the rest of this post...

Obama advisor suggests need for second stimulus

The second stimulus package that the administration has pooh-poohed twice in the last two weeks is now on the table, as I suggested it would need to be. It was dismissed as unnecessary as recently as last weekend, and the previous week David Axelrod shrugged it off as well.

As John has posted previously, the administration hasn't done a very good job of defending the stimulus package that already passed, and in the face of relentless GOP criticism, public support for the first stimulus package has been dropping. That's only going to make passage of the second package that much harder. (Fortunately, some of that GOP criticism is being refuted.)

It's frustrating to watch. I want Obama to succeed, and Joelle and I were ecstatic the night he won the election. But it seems there is sometimes an arrogance to this administration that makes policy making more difficult than it needs to be. The GOP has done a much better job at raising questions about the stimulus and eroding support for it than Obama has done to promote it. A second stimulus is needed, and quite frankly the first stimulus should have been larger in the first place. (Krugman was screaming about this to anyone who would listen all the way back in January).

Unique times call for unique responses, and muddling through a watered down plan was foolish and naive. It's now going to make passing a second much-needed plan that much harder. I know we've been critical of the Obama administration, a lot, lately. But there are very real consequences to the mistakes they're making.

This once again raises the serious question of who President Obama is listening to about the economy. ABC's Jake Tapper just interviewed the president in Russia. Obama told Tapper that no one could have predicted that the economy was so bad that we needed a larger stimulus:

[T]he President said that when Vice President Joe Biden recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that the White House “misread” the economy when planning the stimulus package in January, the president said that “what Vice President Biden was referring to was simply the fact that when we passed he stimulus, we hadn’t gotten the full report of the first quarter contractions in the economy that turned out to be way worse than anybody had anticipated.”

Krugman anticipated it. So did Stiglitz. But the president's economic team refused to listen.

Obama's team was in the thick of the credit crisis during the Bush years. Unless they were a crazy outsider during the build up, it's doubtful they will have any strong ideas about working outside the business-as-usual model. Reuters:

The United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus to further prop up the economy after the $787 billion rescue package launched in February, an adviser to President Barack Obama said.

"We should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus," Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a member of the panel advising President Barack Obama on tackling the economic crisis, said on Tuesday.

Addressing a seminar in Singapore, Tyson said she felt the first round of stimulus aimed to prop up the economy had been slightly smaller than she would have liked and that a possible second round should be directed at infrastructure investment.

It would have been far easier to come clean with the American people in December, January and February, and simply tell them that we were going to need $2 trillion in stimulus spending to save the economy -- and that that might mean a second bill. Yes, a second stimulus package would add to the Bush deficit. But we had no choice if we wanted to save our economy. Now, instead, the administration has to explain to the American people why they thought the first bill would be enough, and why they were wrong. While admitting you got it wrong is better than sticking with a bad course, such admissions do not instill confidence, and only make it that much harder to pass the second much-needed package. The president needs to figure out who got it wrong in his administration, and make sure it never happens again. Read the rest of this post...

Democratic Senators "pose biggest threat to President Obama's agenda"

This doesn't come as a surprise, but that doesn't make it any easier to swallow. We've been saying for months that Democrats would undermine the agenda of change. Today, The Hill identifies the six main culprits in the Senate:

Half a dozen members of the Senate Democratic Conference pose the biggest threat to President Obama’s agenda, giving Senate Republicans a fighting chance to block the administration’s major expansions of government.

GOP leaders have begun reaching out to these centrists, hoping they will buck their party on Obama’s two biggest initiatives: healthcare reform and climate change legislation.

Yes, the GOP leaders, who have led their caucus into minority status, hold sway over these Democrats:

Leading the pack of potential defectors are Sen. Ben Nelson, a pro-business Democrat from Nebraska; Sen. Joe Lieberman, a self-described Independent Democrat from Connecticut; and Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat who represents a conservative state.

All three have expressed concerns about the core element in Obama’s healthcare proposal: a government-run insurance program that would compete with the private sector. The three also worked together this year to successfully cut more than $100 billion from Obama’s economic stimulus package.

The other Democrats who are expected to voice the most serious objections to either or both of the administrations top priorities are: Sens. Evan Bayh (Ind.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.).

Yes, some of those Senators cut money from the stimulus package. Smart move, since now we know (well, Krugman knew last Christmas) the bill wasn't even large enough to begin with.

If he so chooses, Obama can use the un-filibusterable reconciliation process to pass health care reform -- meaning he'll only need 51 votes in the Senate, rather than face a 60-vote threshold needed to break an almost certain filibuster. Good thing, because weak Democrats like those above may force his hand. No doubt, we'll be reading much more about these turncoats over the next few weeks as they try to water down both the health care and climate change bills. They all need a lot more pressure from their constituents, not less. Read the rest of this post...

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Your president has already had a busy day in Moscow. He's got meetings with Putin, Gorbachev and Medvedev. (No soul searching this trip.)

Back in the U.S., at the Capitol, Al Franken will finally, finally, finally be sworn in as the Senator from Minnesota. Finally.

But, to the traditional media, all of this is practically insignificant considering it's the day for Michael Jackson's burial service. Sigh. Read the rest of this post...

Housing takes another hit

At least Obama can claim victory in his bi-partisan stimulus plan that was watered down for no good reason. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the administration continues to float the idea (without really floating the idea) of a second stimulus. What is funny today is to hear those people who fought against the stimulus now crying that it isn't working quickly enough even though they insisted the economy didn't need it. Since it wasn't necessary in their eyes or needed, what's not working? Either way, the second half looks like it could involve a lot of nail biting. Earnings reports are starting to come out soon and that will likely have an impact on the attitudes for a few months. Reuters:

Standard & Poor's Monday boosted its expectations for losses on risky loans backing U.S. mortgage securities to as much as 40 percent, suggesting a darkened outlook for the troubled housing market.

The more dire assessment will likely "significantly impact" bonds originally carrying AAA ratings, S&P; said in a report.

Increased assumptions for total losses on subprime and Alt-A residential mortgage-backed securities come amid declines in market value of the debt and a surge in the inventory of bank-owned properties, S&P; said.

It is another blow to investors who are already suffering from downgrades to their portfolios over the past two years as the housing market fell to the weakest levels since the 1930s.

Read the rest of this post...

Italy to be removed from the G8?

It sounds as though Berlusconi's team has focused more on locating women for his parties than on the affairs of state. Italy is a wonderful country but in business, you never really get the impression that anything ever makes progress. It just drifts aimlessly. The talk of Spain as a replacement sounds interesting and at first glance sounds like a much better choice. Berlusconi really is leaving his mark on the country. The Guardian:

In the last few weeks before the summit, and in the absence of any substantive initiatives on the agenda, the US has taken control. Washington has organised "sherpa calls" (conference calls among senior officials) in a last-ditch bid to inject purpose into the meeting.

"For another country to organise the sherpa calls is just unprecedented. It's a nuclear option," said one senior G8 member state official. "The Italians have been just awful. There have been no processes and no planning."

"The G8 is a club, and clubs have membership dues. Italy has not been paying them," said a European official involved in the summit preparations.

The behind-the-scenes grumbling has gone as far as suggestions that Italy could be pushed out of the G8 or any successor group. One possibility being floated in European capitals is that Spain, which has higher per capita national income and gives a greater percentage of GDP in aid, would take Italy's place.

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More protests in western China

And the death count has risen from yesterday. Every country has protests - they're normal and often healthy - but only the backwards countries respond by indiscriminate killing of civilians in such large numbers. The overreaction only exposes how weak the government is.

Ethnic Uighurs scuffled with armed police Tuesday in a fresh protest in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where at least 156 people have been killed and more than 1,400 people arrested in the worst ethnic violence there in decades.

Most of the group of about 200 Uighurs were women protesting the arrests of their husbands in the massive crackdown on members of the Muslim minority by Chinese authorities since the violence was sparked Sunday in the Xinjiang provincial capital.

The incident played out in front of reporters who were being taken around Urumqi to see the aftermath of Sunday's riots, when hundreds of vehicles and shops were attacked.

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Report: Justice Antitrust division to investigate telecom industry

It's about time and well deserved, but what about going after Wall Street? Telcos in America have certainly abused their position and limited competition courtesy of GOP friends, but this is the peas and carrots, not the main course. The administration is going to have to go after the meat and potatoes sooner, rather than later.

CNBC.com:

The U.S. Justice Department has begun looking at big telecom companies to try to determine if they have abused their market power, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition Monday.

The journal, which cited people familiar with the matter, said that the Antitrust Division's review was in its very early stages and was not official.

Lawmakers have recently raised questions about whether large wireless carriers were hurting smaller rivals by entering exclusive agreements with the makers of popular phones.

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