The Obama administration continues the Republican practice of negotiating with corrupt business executives instead of locking them up. Negotiation encourages. Prosecution deters. If you want to be able to trust your hamburger, get a government that will lock up the people who make tainted meat.

Conrad’s state-based co-ops idea was once seen as the great “compromise” for health care reform and the public option issue. It is an idea which never really picked up broad support, and recently seems to be on the outs. The latest CBO report on the Baucus bill might just be the nail in the coffin for Conrad’s co-ops.

Five more people were arrested yesterday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in front of health insurer CIGNA’s world headquarters.

I’m hearing from sources about a letter to Harry Reid from a collection of liberal Senators, led by Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown, insisting that Reid publicly commit to putting a public option in any health care bill that reaches the Senate floor.

photo via CAPAFThe blog Main Justice reports that Eric Holder told reporters on Tuesday that he expects Dawn Johnsen to be confirmed as head of the Office of Legal Counsel:

In a discussion with reporters at the Department of Justice, Holder said Johnsen had been in limbo for “far too long.”

“I expect that Dawn Johnsen will be confirmed,” Holder said.

From the department of really stupid messaging.

Nancy Pelosi has tremendous sway with the caucus, and the caucus overwhelmingly supports the Medicare plus five public option. Pelosi’s credibility is on the line with progressives. She’s promised that a public option would be in the final bill, only to turn around and start singing the praises of triggers. Then she joined in the White House effort to beat Richard Trumka into dropping his insistence on a public option.

If she wants the votes for this, there is absolutely no conceivable way she can’t get them. If she decides to act as a White House toady over the interests of progressives (who have now been repeatedly forced into voting for bills they don’t believe in just so Rahm can have another neoliberal “win”), it will all have been for show to keep the base quiet while Wellpoint and PhRMA prepared their taxpayer feast.

Not only is Walmart the country’s largest employer but it has the largest number of employees who receive Medicaid, food stamps and public assistance. Today the NYT reports that bi-partisan support is growing for tax credits for businesses that create new jobs. But what kind of jobs? Walmart jobs or jobs that pay real wages?

Nelson Lichtenstein, Pat O’Neill, Mark Moore, and Matt Ryan on Walmart’s brave new world of business and its impact on working people.

Followed by an interview with Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise.

The “Democratic” think tank Third Way just put out a memo parroting AHIP’s demand for a stronger individual mandate and other changes.

Last week the Democracy Alliance defunded ACORN, just as SEIU was giving the heave-ho to the Louisiana local where former ACORN head Wade Rathke worked as an organizer. I wouldn’t say the DA are in the “veal pen” really — it’s the financial models of these “liberal” organizations that make them so easily controlled by rich donors that the White House can influence with one phone call. The DA is more like the walls of the pen.