Weekly unemployment claims spiked up again today, and the NY Fed’s survey of regional manufacturing, a key indicator of the economy, was down sharply relative to expectations. This is a crisis time in the economy, and big solutions are needed to arrest the slide.

I guess all these Congressional hearings about BP’s oil disaster aren’t entirely a waste of time.

I don’t take Peter DeFazio’s carping about the health care bill entirely seriously. But his substantive argument – that Democratic leaders took out a Medicare reimbursement measure that would have changed geographic disparities – could shift other members of the caucus: “Unless they put that back in, I can’t support it,” Defazio said, referring to [...]

DEFAZIO: I think the Senate bill is a disaster. I mean, anybody who’s watching this noticed that insurance industry stocks has gone up since the Senate bill passed, because It gives them a lot of new customers and no meaningful controls. They took out my language stripping the industry of the anti-trust immunity. They established meaningless, spineless weak state exchanges instead of a national exchange.