The Senate Banking Committee basically passed the Dodd draft with almost no work done on it. So that meant that Senators would get a crack at it on the floor. And the biggest victory in this entire process has been the promise on the part of the Democratic leadership not to put in artificial 60-vote thresholds for every amendment. With a majority-vote standard, Senators knew they were getting a fair shake to shape the bill. And under the watchful eye of advocates who can easily paint any vote to the public as a case of putting the interests of banks over the people, Senators were forced to vote in the interests of their constituents. And that has been very beneficial.

The health insurance industry makes a substantial part of its profits by hanging on to premium dollars as long as possible — premiums which are established after assessing anticipated risk and expected claims. But if all claims are paid, there’s no need for managing risk by reserving premium dollars, and no need to hold reserves for investment. Getting insurers and Wall Street to give up the reserves is going to be a challenge.

Kit Bond, who cares very much about not overstating threats. . . .

Democrats have two options – give up the charade and change the derivatives piece before June 8, with Lincoln having to suffer the consequences; or leave it intact to do its intended purpose, and actually pass a substantive and wide-ranging change to how Wall Street does its business. I’ll bet lots of people in the Democratic leadership and inside the White House are hoping that Lincoln gets over 50% next Tuesday so they don’t have to make such a determination.

Democrats are suffering from a dangerous enthusiasm gap. On the generic ballot, Democrats are currently tied with Republicans for the 2010 midterm election at 44 percent each, according to the new NBC/WSJ poll. That’s bad news for Democrats, given that they are holding several Republican-leaning seats and suffer a built-in disadvantage based on the layout of Congressional districts.

From the Deepwater Horizon Response website, footage of the failed attempt to use a 100-ton cofferdam to cap the main oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Big Oil found their target. Just now, as expected, Robert Menendez sought unanimous consent for the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010, which would raise the liability cap on oil spills from $75 million up to $10 billion. And it would have surely passed. Big Oil needed one Senator to raise an objection [...]

The Congressional Budget Office just revised upwards the projected cost of the new health care law by $115 billion, a law written, supported, and sold to Americans by PhRMA and the for-profit hospitals. Until Congress is actually willing to take on these groups directly, we regular Americans will continue to get ripped off. . . and our deficit will continue to increase.

I would hope as much progress is being made on the criminal side, too, as on stopping the underwater gusher. Because that’s what we have here: criminal negligence.

As I noted earlier in the week, there is a growing realization that the previously heralded counterinsurgency (COIN) plan developed by General Stanley McChrystal for US efforts in Afghanistan is failing, both in our ability to clear areas of insurgents and in the ability of the Afghans to govern cleared areas. The huge budgetary impact of the COIN strategy is finally beginning to be discussed by the Pentagon, and as a result, plans are now being floated for “counterinsurgency light“. Sadly, it appears to me that these “improvements” are just as flawed as the underlying plan. In contrast, Osama bin Laden’s plan to bankrupt the US through drawing us into expensive and unwinnable wars is working just as he described it in 2004.