It was attached to the defense appropriations bill, and Obama just signed that into law.
That’s not all, the bill also (finally) puts a stake through the heart of the unnecessary and gold plated F-22, and provides funding for the (IMNSHO essential) 2nd engine for the JSF.
It looks like one of the bad policies out there is on a path to be extended,
The Senate is close to a deal to extend the new home buyer tax credit, which means that we will continue to keep paying people to overpay for their houses.
I like this.
It appears that theHouse Financial Services Committee has gotten to work on a resolution (i.e. liquidation) process for failed mega-banks, and at its core is the idea that financial firms with more than $10 billion in assets would pay for the cost of unwinding failed firms:
The proposal would require financial firms with more than $10 billion of assets to pay for the unwinding of a collapsed competitor. The measure would also give the Federal Reserve the power to direct any large financial holding company to sell or transfer assets or stop certain activities if the central bank determined there could be a “threat to the safety and soundness of such company or to the financial stability of the United States.” This suggests the Fed would win new authority to order companies to shrink.
It’s a good step, though I really don’t want this under the Fed.
They have already proved themselves to be completely captured by Wall Street.
So, oe Lieberman is now saying that Jhe will vote to filibuster on any healthcare bill that includes a public option.
Uniform, state opt out, state opt in, trigger, it does not matter.
<Sarcasm>That is such a shocker.</Sarcasm>
Hoocoodanode?
The press conference is still going on, but Reid was very clear, and said that he hoped that President Olympia Snowe would come around to supporting the measure.
There will also be “Co-ops,” but they have just been made irrelevant.
We have the House Judiciary Committee voting to strip insurance companies of their antitrust exemption, and the the House leadership is aggressively pushing an expansive model for the public option for health insurance.
This may very well be a winner. I would note that 3 ‘Phants crossed aisle in the HJC vote to strip the antitrust exemption, which is an indication of how unpopular the insurance companies have become.
When ¼ of the Republican members committee of the “party of no” vote for this, it is an indication of just how unpopular they are.
I am still not optimistic about the prospect for meaningful healthcare reform, but I am more optimistic, and is largely because the Democrats have largely found their feet, largely on the (largely true) message that insurance companies are evil.
Obama is expected to sign it.
One surprise:
The 68-29 vote was a victory for civil rights groups that have long sought to expand the federal statute beyond attacks motivated by religion, race, color or national origin.
The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, includes penalties for assaults based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender, disability or gender identity.
(emphasis mine)
For some reason, I thought that disability was already a protected class.
In fact, Sharon,* who does special ed consulting and advocacy, thought that the disabled were already a protected class too.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
The House Dems are now trying to call the public option Medicare Part E, as in “Medicare for Everyone”.
They should have done it months ago, and they won’t be able to make it stick, but it’s worth a try.
Gee, I guess that they aren’t done with trying to pretend that they care about the ordinary folks, because the Federal Reserve has now issued pay guidelines for banks, allegedly in an attempt to reduce risk.
I’ve had multipule posts about the Fed doing this so that they can keep or expand their regulatory purview, including that essay that I sent to the WaPo, and they just keep doing it.
Well, at least it makes my essay that much more timely.
Basically, after the clusterf%$# that was support for Pervez Musharraf and His Evil Minions™ by George W. Bush and His Evil Minions™, where military aid to Pakistan went to parts unknown, Congress has placed restrictions on military aid to ensure that it will go to fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda, and not to building up the military for a war with India…And yes, maybe it will reduce graft a bit too:
Military payments to Pakistan must be in the interests of U.S. national security and mustn’t “affect the balance of power in the region,” according to a provision attached to the defense authorization bill passed yesterday by the Senate.
The restriction comes as the Pakistani army continues its biggest offensive against militants in the northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, where 28,000 soldiers have been deployed to fight guerrillas blamed for 80 percent of terrorist attacks in the country.
It’s about fracking time that we made it clear to Pakistan that we would not be supporting another useless and bloody war with India.
He demolishes a wingnut “expert” on healthcare from the Manhattan Institute.
H/T Blue Texan at Firedoglake.
*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.
Why Senator David Vitter is the only politician in Louisiana of either party who is unwilling to condemn the actions of Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace for Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, who refused to marry an interracial couple.
It’s because he’s a bigot.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Yesterday, I posted that the folks in the White House had no balls because of their hands off attitude toward the public option in healthcare reform.
Scarecrow at FDL has an alternate theory, and current behavior does not make it seem far fetched, that the White House is actively opposed to a public insurance option, either because they cut a secret deal with the insurance companies, or because these people are profoundly afraid of real change:
It is hard to avoid the fear that this White House has now become a principal obstacle to getting meaningful health care reform. It claims it wants major cost reductions in Medicare, via a semi-autonomous cost-cutting commission. But the White House has already bargained away the savings it can achieve from most of the major providers: PhRMa ($80 billion), hospitals ($155 billion) so they can give it back to the doctors (for whom AMA is demanding $240+ billion more over ten years in relief from automatic Medicare reductions).
Why should we not also believe that the White House has a deal to shield insurers from competition by preventing the creation of a public option in exchange for the insurers agreeing to reforms on guaranteed issue and limited community ratings (with the flexibility Baucus provided) and to support this framework with tv ads? (Read Ignagni’s WaPo op-ed today; while defending the PwC study, she says they made a deal, but Baucus broke it; she didn’t say the deal’s off.)
The White House isn’t taking up most of the chairs in Harry’s Reid’s meetings just to watch him make decisions on his own. They’re there to make sure Harry Reid doesn’t undo the White House deals and wander off the reservation.
(emphasis mine)
If the White House sees healthcare reform as an electoral tool, i.e. that if Barack Obama signs a bill that he can call comprehensive healthcare reform, he can run on in in 2012.
The problem is that the natural result of this, forcing people to buy overpriced health insurance from the insurance parasites, will kill the Democratic Party for a generation.
Karl Rove did not manage to create a permanent Republican majority, but, if this analysis is accurate, it looks like Barack Obama might.
The word is that the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill will have the public option, but only if Barack Obama actually asks for it:
There is a growing sense on Capitol Hill that the White House’s refusal to weigh in more forcefully in the health care debate could come at the cost of a public option for insurance coverage.
Democratic aides said that a “handful” of senators who are skeptical of a public plan likely could be persuaded if not to support it then at least to oppose a Republican filibuster, if the administration were to apply a bit more pressure — or even guidance.
(emphasis mine)
Barack Obama has two problems here:
So he is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because he does not have the guts to even try to win, even though it appears that Harry Reid is pretty much begging him for some backup on the public option.
I know that it is only 9 months into his term, but it’s already screaming “1 term wonder” in my ear.
Someone else can filk the rest of the song, but it appears that even the Blue dogs are starting to get a clue:
At this moment, all Democratic politicians, even the most conservative, are realizing that their voters will blame them, not the insurance companies, if the policies the voters are required to buy are so expensive that premiums consume over 20 percent of those voters’ annual incomes. Suddenly, more generous tax subsidies to cover middle-class premiums seem like a good idea. And if the public option can bring down the cost of premiums those subsidies have to pay for, then the overall size of the reform price tag can be kept under control – a long time demand of moderate Democrats.
(emphasis mine)
Yeah. It took a while, but the Blue Dogs now realize that most people hate their insurance companies.
Hoocoodanode?
As I have noted before, now that Congress is looking at having an agency dedicated to protecting consumers from the worst excesses of the banking industry, and the Federal Reserve Feels believes that this role belongs to it.
Of course, the history of the Fed over the past 40+ years is that they believe in dismantling consumer protections, so their record is less than stellar.
In response to numerous proposals which would make consumer protection more formal in financial markets, which they see as a reduction in their bailiwick, they have continued to make “a day lat and a dollar short” regulations in an an attempt to convince Congress that they do not need to assign this task to some other agency.
Case in point, is how, after decades of skyrocketing fees and increasingly punitive “overdraft protection” schemes, Bernanke and his merry band have decided to clamp down on overdraft fees:
The Federal Reserve is likely to soon pass new rules making it harder for banks to hit customers with fees for overdrawing their accounts, a top official told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.
Note that it appears that these rules will require that banks have customers positively affirm their desire to opt in to overdraft protection.
It’s amazing what the prospect of some regulatory competition will do to a bureaucracy.
Earlier posts on the subject here.
It’s true. As a part of updating financial regulations, Senator Shelby is trying to change the way in which the presidents of the Federal Reserve district banks are selected, by removing the ability of the lending institutions subject to that Fed bank to nominate their new president, he correctly notes that, “Any institution that is going to be involved in any way picking their regulator is not good policy.”
As to the current governance structure:
Each of the 12 Fed district banks has a nine-member board that includes three bankers, three non-bankers chosen by banks and three non-banker directors picked by the Fed’s Senate- confirmed governors in Washington. The directors nominate a president who is approved by the Board of Governors. The presidents vote on interest-rate decisions on a rotating basis, with New York having a permanent vote.
The idea that banks can hand pick one of their primary regulators has always been a bad idea, so I would go further, and remove banks from selecting the directors of the regional banks too.
While we are at it, how about shortening the terms of members. It’s currently 14 years, and it’s too long, and makes the board far to unresponsive and insular.
Additionally, one of the controls on the behavior of the Fed is meaningful criticism of its actions in academic economic publications, but the central bank has control over most of the academic economic publications, because so many of the editors out there are also on the Federal Reserve payroll, so a legal injunction prohibiting anyone working for the fed from acting as an editor of an economics journal would be a good thing.
So, the House of Representatives by a vote of 307-114 has passed an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act which exempts torture, because, I guess, everyone in Washington wants them covered up, because with knowledge is the possibility of accountability, and accountability is an anathema to the Beltway Boyz.
What is most repulsive is that this is designed just to cover up Bushie malfeasance:
To follow up on my earlier post about Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and her speech on her colleagues’ move to amend the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, it’s worth looking at the conference report on the bill. The bill is called the “Protected National Security Documents Act of 2009,” but refers not to any “documents” per se, but only to any “photograph” taken between Sept. 11, 2001 and Jan. 22, 2009, that “relates to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”
(emphasis mine)
Big surprise, the guy supporting this the strongest is Joe Lieberman.
David Stevens, HUD’s Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner, basically the head of the Federal Housing Administration, has drawn a line in the sand against legislation increasing the minimum downpayment for an FHA loan from 3.5% to 5%.
This is the same FHA, that has had its reserves sucked dry by increasing defaults on its mortgage (here and here), and now they are fighting against making their loans less likely to default.
The reason given? That, “limiting the pool of eligible home buyers could dampen a fragile housing recovery.”
This is an extension of two largely bipartisan policies:
Both policies have proven disastrous, but decisions are still being made on this basis.
It should be noted that this is the same FHA was spitting in the face of sanity for some time by allowing “seller funded downpayment assistance loans”, where the seller raised the price of the home in order to lend the buyer the money for the downpayment (!). It was called the Down-payment Assistance Program (DAP).
This procedure is one of the reasons that they are in a pickle now, because it made it too easy for people who could not afford house payments to buy a house.
Thankfully, Congress made this illegal, and they are now looking at a further tightening of lending standards, but just as in the case the DAP, they are fighting the change tooth and nail.
This is odd. He will be resigning in January to take a job at a Washington think tank.
Thankfully, the district is very blue, but his decision is out of the blue, so I’m wondering if something odd is going here, and I do not mean the coke and prostitutes:
It goes without saying that Stephen Colbert is a genius.