Democrats unveiled their legislation to repeal Big Oil tax subsidies today, giving the high-profile legislation to three Senators with elections next year in tough states (Claire McCaskill, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester) along with Bob Menendez, who appears to be the point person on oil-related issues in the caucus. Given that he was so successful in getting the oil spill liability cap lifted- oh wait, he didn’t, and I suspect that this legislation will end up somewhere on the same shelf with that one.

Virtually every time that Republicans or the Obama Administration talk about working together, they specifically cite the South Korea free trade agreement as a point of covergence. The agreement, modified by Obama’s negotiators last year but substantially similar to the corporate-written agreement originally negotiated under George W. Bush, looks like it’s on a glide path to passage, given that unanimity. In fact, the only person standing in the way is noted grassroots labor organizer Max Baucus.

From today’s Washington Post: “Earlier this month, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing tax policy, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), gave himself a birthday-party fundraiser – on the same day that the chamber took its first vote on an $858 billion tax package that would provide breaks to wealthy citizens and business interests.”

Let’s move out of the tax-cut frying pan and into the South Korea free trade agreement fire. The Wall Street Journal says that KORUS, which is the nickname the White House has been using for the deal, is picking up support. But the first piece of their article concerns how Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is very frustrated by it.

In the last few days, several bloggers – among them Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein — have written faulty defenses of the health care bill. They used theoretical, counterfactual alternatives in defense of the health care legislation they’ve supported, calling to mind Voltaire’s classic, Candide. In it, Voltaire heavily mocks the extreme optimism of Pangloss, who concludes all is good no matter how terrible things are because we live in “the best of all possible worlds.”

Yesterday, I mentioned the Office of the Homeowner Advocate, an attempt by Sen. Al Franken to get an independent review process for HAMP, the Treasury Department foreclosure mitigation program which has failed homeowners while merely extending foreclosures out a bit and squeezing additional payments into the hands of the banks. Today, this common-sense effort to get some accountability and oversight over what the banks have been doing in HAMP has found its way into a new version of the tax extenders bill, a catch-all, end-of-the-year effort that could be a vehicle for several measures which have hung around in the Senate.

It’s a sad commentary on American politics that the only honest man left on the playing field, when it comes to the deficit, is Alan Greenspan.

It’s a nice trick, WellPoint: send your VP to write a law mandating that the middle class buy shitty products like yours, then watch that VP move into the executive branch to “oversee” the implementation of the law. What could go wrong?!?!

The media are finally waking up to the fact that the temporary high-risk pools created by the new health-care law were completely unfunded. Only $5 billion was set aside for the program, which is probably less than a third of what would be required to keep the program funded until 2014. This should not be news to Congress or people closely following the health-care debate. Back in December 2009, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) clearly concluded, “By 2011 and 2012 the initial $5 billion in Federal funding for this program [high risk pools] would be exhausted.” A fact FDL chose to highlight.

On Friday afternoon May 21, WellPoint released the official tally for the voting from their contentions annual shareholders meeting on the 18th. Our resolution to return Wellpoint to non-profit status received over 30 million votes, 9.4% of the shares voted. That is a jaw dropping vote of no confidence in the management of this company. But the story isn’t over yet. Our shareholder resolution for WellPoint to return to its non-profit Blue Cross roots will be back next year. And the SEC has proposed a new regulation that would allow shareholders to directly nominate corporate board members called “Proxy Access.” If this goes into effect this fall as expected, I intend to run for the WellPoint board.