Where wingnut welfare meets the con!

GM’s CEO wants to improve Congress’ impression of the corporation. He can do that by improving the overall brand through a streamlined dealer network and elimination of rebates.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association says credit default swaps are innocuous. Consider the source.

Our country’s Congress–especially the Senate–is incredibly broken. The disproportionate power of the minority in the Senate, the amount of money it takes to run for office, the overwhelming power of lobbyists, and just good, old-fashioned corruption have been slowly ruining our country. Good policy reform in this country has been made impossible because of how terrible our political system has become. What this country needs is government reform before we can ever truly get good policy solutions to problems like health care, immigration, global warming, or financial regulation.

Much discussion today about Chris Dodd as a potential candidate to replace Tim Geithner atop the Treasury Department, which I think overlooks a much better idea: get Byron Dorgan to oversee America’s economy and, specifically, Wall Street.

This is unbelievable. They conspired to lie to the taxpayers, to Congress and to investors. Do they really expect that nothing will come of it?

It’s clear that the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback,” Ben Nelson’s deal to have the federal government pick up the cost for the expansion of Medicaid in Nebraska, will not survive to the final bill. What form the kickback will eventually take is not clear, and according to Live Pulse, Nelson is in negotiations to move it in one of two directions, which are truly diametrically opposed from one another.

The Employee Free Choice Act, perhaps the most bitterly contested bill currently facing the U.S. Congress, would strengthen workers’ right to choose a union and bargain with their employers over issues of wages, benefits and respect on the job. When making the case for this landmark legislation, its supporters often point to the actions of the country’s most aggressively anti-union employers. And there are plenty of good examples to go around.

The Senate bill has a gaping loophole in it that could negate a central promise of health reform – that insurers can no longer charge more because you are sick.

The loophole comes in the form of an expansion to so-called “workplace wellness programs” that are supposed to reward employees for healthy habits. In practice, however, it could allow insurers to charge thousands of dollars more because, for example, a person is sick or overweight or has high cholesterol.

There’s a lot of talk from defenders of the President about how every campaign breaks a promise or two when they get in office, and nobody voted for Barack Obama because he was going to televise health care negotiations on C-SPAN. But if there’s anything Obama ran as, it was as a reformer. He ran explicitly to “change the game” and not “play it better.” Yet everything in this health care deal represents a playing of the game better than past efforts, basically by buying off stakeholders and creating compromises favorable to their bottom lines. Every single thing.