Month: March 2009

Change Comes From Bill Richardson

by dday

Not only do I like Gov. Richardson’s conclusion, I appreciate his thought process. A two-term governor has spent time with victim’s families, no question. He has witnessed the grief and the anger and the frustration. But in the end, he went with the moral choice.

Gov. Bill Richardson signed legislation Wednesday to repeal New Mexico’s death penalty, calling it the “most difficult decision in my political life.”

The legislation replaces lethal injection with a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe,” the Democratic governor said at a news conference in the Capitol.

New Mexicans will be safer with the punishment of life in prison without parole because the worst criminals “will never get out of prison,” he said.

The toughoncrime ™ language of “safety” remains prevalent, but I admire the recognition that life in prison without the possibility of parole is a sufficient deterrent, rather than using the power of the state to roll the dice on killing a potentially innocent human being.

15 states now have no death penalty, but New Mexico is just the 2nd to ban the practice since the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. New Jersey did the same in 2007, suggesting that the issue is somewhat less politically charged. It remains a very tough move, however, and nobody really knew what Richardson would do after the legislature voted to repeal. He sought guidance from the people who elected him, a novel idea:

In preparing for his decision, the governor solicited input over the weekend from state residents. According to his office, he got more than 9,000 responses by e-mail and in person.

“In a society which values individual life and liberty above all else, where justice and not vengeance is the singular guiding principle of our system of criminal law, the potential for wrongful conviction and, God forbid, execution of an innocent person stands as anathema to our very sensibilities as human beings,” Richardson said in prepared remarks. “That is why I’m signing this bill into law.”

As a practical matter, the consequences are relatively small: New Mexico has executed but one prisoner in the last 49 years. As a moral matter, inching this country closer to the international consensus that state-sponsored killing does not comply with modern civilization, the consequences are large.

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It Burns&trade

by digby

From Dave Neiwert:

Now, we’ve been saying for a long time that Beck is a right-wing populist; lately, a number of other observers have reached the same conclusion. So Beck has been making special note of being called a populist, and in his guest appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, he talked about it:

Beck: The second thing is, is that — you know, I was called — who was it that called me today, “a populist”? I’m not a populist! I’ve been saying this stuff when it was unpopular! I’ve got news for you: It’s still pretty unpopular!

O’Reilly actually had to clue him in on what populism really means. He honestly didn’t know.

No wonder Beck’s being touted as the new Rush Limbaugh.

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Willful Misunderstanding

by digby

The media, for reasons I don’t quite understand, still seem to think they’ve caught Chris Dodd lying about something. As dday pointed out last night, we knew that high officials in the Obama administration were lobbying for the carve-out provision be put into the conference report and Dodd confirming that is simply not news. For some reason, all day today, the media seemed convinced that there was some mystery surrounding this event and were passing on dark suspicions that this happened because Dodd took AIG money (as did a whole bunch of other politicians) when that clearly wasn’t the motive. It was all very confusing.

Dodd tried to explain this on TV today but unfortunately he didn’t do it very well and was understood to have admitted to doing something nefarious, which isn’t the case. He thought he was making a common comprimise with the administration.

Here’s Greenwald’s explanation of Dodd’s comments today:

I’m receiving email regarding the remarks Dodd made today on CNN in which he stated that, at the White House’s insistence and over his objections, he agreed to include the pre-February, 2009 carve-out in the stimulus bill. Some of these emailers have suggested that Dodd’s comments are at odds with what I wrote. They quite plainly are not.

The narrative I wrote here (and which Hamsher wrote in her post) both included exactly that sequence:

That was the exact provision that Geithner and Summers demanded and that Dodd opposed. And even after Dodd finally gave in to Treasury’s demands, he continued to support an amendment from Ron Wyden and Olympia Snowe to impose fines on bailout-receiving companies which paid executive bonuses.”

I explicitly wrote that it was Dodd who, after arguing vehemently against this provision, ultimately agreed to its inclusion. And the statement from Dodd’s office that I quoted above included the same series of events (“Because of negotiations with the Treasury Department and the bill Conferees, several modifications were made, including adding the exemption”). That’s exactly what Dodd said today on CNN.

The point was — and is — that Dodd was pressured to put that carve-out in at the insistence of Treasury officials (whose opposition meant that Dodd’s choices were the limited compensation restriction favored by Geithner/Summers or no limits at all), and Dodd did so only after arguing in public against it. To blame Dodd for provisions that the White House demanded is dishonest in the extreme, and what Dodd said today on CNN about the White House’s advocacy of this provision confirms, not contradicts, what I wrote.

Dodd did not indict the administration in his comments today. He didn’t name any names and he said that he didn’t think AIG was on the radar at all at the time. He was being a good soldier, as he was when he agreed to the changes thinking he was compromising. But at some point he may have to name names since somebody in Washington is determined that he take the fall for these bonuses and the press is on the hunt to prove that the Obama administration has been lying about when they knew about it.

That is, of course, not really the point, but it’s the kind of thing that makes for a village scandal. They’d better get ahead of this right now. The only thing that’s keeping things from devolving into a frenzy is the fact that the fatuous gasbags on the right aren’t on the same page. That’s not much to hold on to. I don’t see this ending well.

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Institutional Memory

by digby

It occurred to me today that the way to get Wall Street’s so-called best and brightest to slink off in shame is to dig into their sex lives. After all, that’s all it took to conveniently take down one of the Democratic party’s top experts on corporate crime and turn him into a pariah. It’s really too bad. He would be very useful right about now.

It doesn’t always work, however. After all, there’s Rep. Barney Frank, who the Republicans once tried and failed to destroy for his personal life and are now holding personally responsible for the collapse of the world financial system. And he’s not having it.

Frank reminds them of the facts in his inimitable style:

In the House of Representatives, the majority party has almost unlimited power over the minority party. The majority party owns the committee chairmanships; it controls what bills come to a vote; and it is under no obligation to consider the ideas of the beleaguered minority. When the Republicans were in the majority they ruled with an iron first; it is no accident that Tom DeLay was known as “The Hammer.”

That is why I find it particularly flattering the Republicans now claim that in the years 1995 to 2006 I personally possessed supernatural powers which enabled me to force mighty Republican leaders to do my bidding. Choose your comic book hero — I was all of them.

I wish I had the power to force the Republican leadership to do my bidding! If I had had that power, I would have used it to block the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to stop the war in Iraq, to prevent large tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, and to stop government intervention into the private life of Terri Schiavo. Yet that power eluded me, and I was unable to stop those things.

According to the Republicans’ misty memories of the period before 2007, I allegedly singlehandedly blocked their determined efforts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and my supposed intransigence literally caused the worldwide financial crisis.

Fortunately, we have tools to aid memory — pencil and paper, word processing, transcripts, newspapers, and the Congressional record. And as described in the most reputable published sources, in 2005 I in fact worked together with my Republican colleague Michael Oxley, then Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, to write a bill to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We passed the bill out of committee with an overwhelming majority — every Democrat voted in favor of the legislation. However, on the House floor the Republican leadership added a poison pill amendment, which would have prevented non-profit institutions with religious affiliations from receiving funds. I voted against the legislation in protest, though I continued to work with Mr. Oxley to encourage the Senate to pass a good bill. But these efforts were defeated because President Bush blocked further consideration of the legislation. In the words of Mr. Oxley, no flaming liberal, the Bush administration gave his efforts ‘the one-finger salute.’

The Republicans can claim some supposed successes despite my awesome power. In 1999 they passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which overturned a Depression-era law preventing commercial banks from acting like investment banks. In 2000, they passed another bill which loosened regulation of derivative markets. I voted against these bills — but to no avail.

Under Republican President George W. Bush, many federal agencies turned a blind eye to activities which would later precipitate the global financial meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission decided to allow the nation’s largest financial institutions to “self-regulate;” the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan declined to use its power to regulate subprime mortgages; the Comptroller of the Currency decided to preempt state consumer laws on subprime mortgages.

Meanwhile, President Bush himself demanded that Fannie and Freddie increase the percentage of subprime loans they purchased, supposedly because of his belief in an “ownership society.” Incidentally, increased lending to subprime borrowers would also fuel astronomical profits by the financial services industry. I publicly opposed giving mortgages to unqualified borrowers because I believed that some families are better off renting.

Yet somehow none of this was recorded in the Republican collective memory.

The problem is that their “collective memory” is actually a post-modern alternate reality that has nothing to do with anything that actually happened. And too many people accept the idea that that is a perfectly reasonable way to organize the world.

I’m glad Frank is fighting back on this. The Republicans are working overtime to rewrite the history of this financial catastrophe. He is a very big target as the public Democratic face in the House on this financial issue and the kind of “Tassachusetts liberal” the right wing loves to use as a punching bag. It’s important that history be documented and disseminated, especially to the press who, where they have any capacity for recalling the facts of the past are always willing receptacles of the right wing narrative.

I wish more Democrats would take the time to do this work. Looking back isn’t a waste of time. In fact, the future depends upon it.

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Too Big To Be Legitimate

by dday

I think we need to stop looking at AIG as simply a failed company and more like a criminal enterprise.

Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being “healthy,” as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it “a house of cards.” Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG’s own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG’s 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree.

Most of this as-yet-undiscovered problem, Gober says, lies in the area of reinsurance, whereby one insurance company insures the liabilities of another so that the latter doesn’t have to carry all the risk on its books. Most major insurance companies use outside firms to reinsure, but the vast majority of AIG’s reinsurance contracts are negotiated internally among its affiliates, Gober says, and these internal balance sheets don’t add up. The annual report of one major AIG subsidiary, American Home Assurance, shows that it owes $25 billion to another AIG affiliate, National Union Fire, Gober maintains. But American has only $22 billion of total invested assets on its balance sheet, he says, and it has issued another $22 billion in guarantees to the other companies. “The American Home assets and liquidity raise serious questions about their ability to make good on their promise to National Union Fire,” says Gober, who has a consulting business devoted to protecting policyholders. Gober says there are numerous other examples of “cooked books” between AIG subsidiaries. Based on the state insurance regulators’ own reports detailing unanswered questions, the tally in losses could be hundreds of billions of dollars more than AIG is now acknowledging.

The implications of this include the invalidation of up to 30 million insurance policies in the US alone. If there’s anything regulated worse than the financial services industry over the past decade, it’s the insurance market, where no federal regulator exists, and the various state agencies have limited reach.

You can add to this what we know about the Financial Products Division, also looking like a criminal enterprise, and the risk becomes much greater than the political fortunes of those who authorized bonus payments, or the bonuses themselves. I agree that the time has come for the Justice Department to involve itself, but prison might start to look like a paradise for the victims of this. At least they get three squares a day.

Update: from digby.

I agree. There’s this too.

And meanwhile, they are holding yet another gun to the government’s head, with this as well.

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You Talkin’ To Me?

by digby

They just don’t give a damn and they don’t care who knows it:

Some Wall Street firms are looking for ways to sidestep tough new federal caps on compensation.

In response to expected bonus restrictions, officials at Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions that got government aid are discussing increasing base salaries for some executives and other top-producing employees, people familiar with the situation said.

The crackdown, part of the economic-stimulus package passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last month, limits bonus pay for the top five executives of any recipient of taxpayer capital through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, plus the 20 next-highest-compensated employees.

I think one of the most revealing aspects of all this is the defiance of these guys. It would be very easy (and very, very smart) for them to keep a low profile, offer all kinds of concessions, be helpful, “patriotic,” and contrite. They are, after all, masters of the universe. Unless the end of the world really is upon us, this too will pass and they will be back swallowing firehoses full of money.

The Galtian attitude is truly disturbing, not because it is immoral or even greedy, but because it is sostoopid. If these are the greatest financial minds in the world we are in much bigger trouble than I realized.

But I suppose I shouldn’t be all that surprised:

Asked by committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, whether his free-market convictions pushed him to make wrong decisions, especially his failure to rein in unsafe mortgage lending practices, Greenspan replied that indeed he had found a flaw in his ideology, one that left him very distressed. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right?” Waxman asked.

“Absolutely, precisely,” replied Greenspan, who stepped down as Fed chief in 2006 after more than 18 years as chairman. “That’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence it was working exceptionally well.”

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Food: The First Spinach

by tristero

So I had a spare 30 minutes or so – as well as a ton of spinach lying around for no good reason – and so I decided to try this simple White House recipe for “No Cream Creamed Spinach” by Cristeta Comerford:

No Cream Creamed Spinach
Serves 6

2 pounds baby spinach, washed and cleaned
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 shallots, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
Salt and freshly ground pepper.

1. Blanch half a pound of spinach in salted, boiling water. Immediately, “shock” the blanched spinach in a bowl of iced water. Drain and squeeze out the excess water. Puree in a blender. Set aside.
2. In a large skillet, sweat the shallots and garlic until translucent. Add the rest of the spinach leaves. Toss and sauté until wilted. Fold in the spinach puree. Season with salt and pepper.

A few comments:

First of all, it is delicious. Amazing what simple preparation and proper cooking can do for a dish I used to dread like the plague.

Ms. Comerford doesn’t give timings and heat so this is approximate. I blanched the spinach for about 1 1/2 minutes in the (well-) salted boiling water. I used medium heat and cooked the shallots for, oh, about 5 minutes plus, I think. The spinach (I used grown-up, not baby, spinach) took quite a while to wilt down – maybe 10 minutes, maybe longer. There seems to be a magic spot to stop cooking the stuff before it turns to mush, but you do have to get the water out of it and that takes a while.

Now, one thing to look out for, which is probably patently obvious to experienced cooks. You can’t puree blanched, shocked spinach in a blender, at least not in mine. Within a tenth of a second, centrifugal force slammed the spinach onto to the sides of the blender, out of reach of the blades. Scraping it back down and pureeing again gives you another 1/10th second of pureeing and after you do that four or five times, you’ve got chunky spinach, not a fine puree. So then you start to think that maybe your time would be better spent writing a post in which you carefully discuss the problems with Richard Perle’s worldview… Nah, it’s far more intellectually challenging to wrestle with a blender. So back you go and eventually you end up with something reasonably puree-like.

Not that it matters if what comes out of the blender isn’t perfect. The resulting texture is smooth, creamy, and tasty. Go ahead. Try it.

Note: If you think this isn’t a post about politics, then you don’t know Jack about politics in 21st Century America.

“AIG Stimulus”

by digby

In case you were wondering, the Republicans have found a new mantra:

Cantor on AIG Stimulus Provision to Protect Executive Bonuses

WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) today issued the following statement on how taxpayer dollars were used for bonuses for AIG executives:

“One of our biggest concerns with the bailout, the stimulus, and government intervention in the private market was the stunning lack of accountability for taxpayer dollars. To date the Administration still has not put forth a plan to show taxpayers how the government will be accountable for how their dollars are spent. Whether it is Secretary Geithner or someone else, the Administration must account for the spending of taxpayer dollars and answer the question as to why taxpayers were forced to reward some of the executives who created this mess.

“Today, news reports reveal that a last minute provision in the stimulus bill inserted by Democrats protected bonuses like those received by AIG executives. Taxpayers deserve better than this from their government, and this is just the latest reason why legislation must be transparent for all Americans to see before it is recklessly signed into law.”

BACKGROUND:

Inserted By Democrats And Signed Into Law By President Obama, The Executive Compensation Rules In The Stimulus Bill Specifically Exempt Bonuses In Contracts Signed Before February 11 From The New Rules. “The new rules, introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) mark one of the major concessions Obama made in the last days of wrangling over the stimulus package he is expected to sign into law on Tuesday in Denver. … Additionally, the rules in the stimulus bill apply not only to companies that receive bailout funds in the future, but also to those that have received TARP money in the past – although executive bonuses doled out in contracts signed before February 11 would not be impacted.” (Carol E. Lee, “Dodd Banker Pay Cap One-Ups Obama,” Politico, 2/14/09)

Fox Business: “Dodd Unexpectedly Added An Executive-Compensation Restriction To The Bill” That “Exempts The Very AIG Bonuses Dodd And Others Are Seeking To Tax.” “Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on Monday night floated the idea of taxing American International Group bonus recipients so the government could recoup the $450 million the company is paying to employees in its financial products unit. Within hours, the idea spread to both houses of Congress, with lawmakers proposing an AIG bonus tax. While the Senate constructed the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd unexpectedly added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. That amendment provides an ‘exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009,’ which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are seeking to tax. The amendment is in the final version and is law. Also, Sen. Dodd was AIG’s largest single recipient of campaign donations during the 2008 election cycle with $103,100, according to opensecrets.org.” (Rich Edson, “Amid AIG Furor, Dodd Tries to Undo Bonus Protections He Put In,” Fox Business, 3/17/09)

Stimulus Bill Text: “The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.” (H.R. 1 – The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act of 2009)

This has been debunked, but that doesn’t mean anything.

I just want to thank the members of the administration who leaked this lie to the press. They’ve given the Republicans a big, fat theme that can easily blow back hard on all Democrats, especially the president. They are now conflating AIG and the Stimulus. Don’t ever think this stuff can’t work, we know it can. (Saddam and 9/11, anyone?)

The only hope we have is that the supreme leader of the Republican Party gets upset with what his minions are doing and little Eric Cantor has to go running and apologize again. After all, the 250 million dollar man is a big defender of AIG against “the peasants”:

During the March 17 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh — “a great leader for conservatives” — defended American International Group (AIG) from criticism of the company’s controversial employee retention bonuses. Limbaugh declared, “A lynch mob is expanding: the peasants with their pitchforks surrounding the corporate headquarters of AIG, demanding heads. Death threats are pouring in. All of this being ginned up by the Obama administration.” Limbaugh later claimed, “This $500,000 limit on executive pay — let me tell you why it won’t work. New York City will die. New York City needs a whole bunch of people being paid a whole lot of money, so they can tax their butts off, so that the city can maintain its stupid streets, potholes, and welfare state. Without the super wealthy in New York, it’s over. … This — it’s just a populist ruse. It’s just designed to people go, ‘Yeah, yeah!’ “

In addition, on March 16, Limbaugh challenged a caller who opposed the bonuses. The caller said, “I do agree with [President] Obama trying to get these bonuses back from the AIG execs because, I mean, that’s our money.” Limbaugh replied, “Let me ask you a question. … You have a company — let’s take AIG out of this ’cause they’re so emotionally charged. Let’s say that the company being bailed out is the XYZ Widget Company. … We need them to manufacture widgets and sell widgets and so forth. So why in the world — or how do you get to the point where you’re going to bail out the company, but you don’t want the employees to get paid?” Limbaugh later added: “[T]his is not just executives, but executives are employees, too. And in many of these firms, Nathan, their salaries are pretty small. They work on bonuses, via contract based on merit.”

You can certainly understand why Rush is a defender of useless,overpaid fat cats.

There is a battle going on within the Republican Party between the Big Money Boyz and the Real Americans and Rush is very strangely taking the wrong side. (I would bet money that he’ll be on the other side of this issue within days.) This “AIG stimulus” slogan is far better than the tired crap they’ve been spouting and I’d bet he finds a way to get on board. It’s a keeper.

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Letting Them Fail

by digby

Dean Baker makes the case for nationalization in terms I think everyone can understand, by framing it in the context of a post-Lehman world. The moral hazard of letting these institutions, and more importantly, these executives, continue to believe that they are beyond the reach of failure or sanction get greater by the day. (I’m not sure that “shame” is something that actually means much among the ruling class, so there has to be something more.)

He writes:

But now we have had six months to adjust. The Fed and Treasury are now guaranteeing deposits in money-market mutual funds. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation doubled the size of the bank accounts it guarantees, and non-interest-bearing accounts of any size are guaranteed. In addition, the Fed is now lending hundreds of billions of dollars directly to non-financial corporations, establishing a channel of funding that goes outside the banking system. These and other measures have restored some measure of stability to the financial system. Now that we have these measures in place, is it still true that we can’t subject Citigroup, Bank of America or Goldman Sachs to a managed bankruptcy (aka “nationalisation”) without the world coming to an end? With a managed bankruptcy, all the insured deposits would be fully covered. However, the government would only repay bondholders a portion of their investment, depending on how severe the banks’ losses are. By not compensating bondholders in full for their losses, the government could save taxpayers hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions, of dollars. In addition, a managed bankruptcy would also help to address the problem of moral hazard created by the bailouts thus far. Investors did not pay adequate attention to the health of banks and other large financial institutions like AIG because they assumed that the government would bail them out if things went badly. If the government makes these investors eat some of their losses, maybe they will put more thought into their investment strategies in the future. This could also let some big investors make some of the “sacrifices” for which fiscal conservatives – including some big investors – are so eager.

Exactly. Baker also asks the question I’ve been asking:

The silence of the fiscal conservatives on the vast sums going to the banks is hard to understand. After all, how can someone get so upset about the prospect of $200m being spent to re-sod the National Mall in Washington, but be unconcerned when $160bn – almost 1,000 times as much money – goes out the door to AIG? The sums of money going to bail out the financial industry dwarf the waste and pork that get John McCain and other budget hawks excited. Yet they are strangely calm about the bailout money. In fact, the amount we spent patching the financial system could well be large enough to make the Social Security system fully solvent over its 75-year planning horizon, yet we barely hear a peep from the Peter Peterson Foundation and its merry band of anti-Social Security crusaders.

I think that proves what their real agenda is. If they were really worried about fiscal responsibility they would be using some of their credibility to weigh in on this crisis. They are clearly using disaster capitalist tactics to destroy the safety net, period.
As for the bonus issue that has everyone captivated, Obama just made a political error that I wish he hadn’t made. The press doesn’t understand any of these issues and so they are now fixating on “what did Obama know and when did he know it” and why hasn’t he returned the campaign contributions of AIG mployees. This is the way they see their world and Obama avoided answering the questions when they were put to him a few minutes ago in a brief press avail. You can’t do that. Chris Matthews’ and Andrea Mitchell’s heads are now spinning like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist and they are in full blown frenzy. It may blow over because of the plethora of news, but it’s the sort of thing to which the DC press corps has a pavlovian response.
And poor Chris Dodd. They threw him under the bus and the dumbest of the cable media vultures are still feeding on his living carcass. It’s political poison for the administration — Obama is already in grave danger of losing solidarity among the Dems. If they feel the administration is willing to sacrifice them on something like this, he’s going to have a very rough go. Democrats aren’t very good at holding together in the best of times. Running scared, they will be unmanageable. I thought Rahm was some sort of political genius who understood all this.

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Irreconcilable Differences

by dday

The Administration has obviously sensed discomfort among Blue Dogs and moderate squishes who think the change election of 2008 actually meant that nothing should change. So we are seeing a full court press on getting the budget proposal passed. This is safer ground for President Obama, where he and the majority of the public are actually on the same side. And he’s employing a multi-pronged attack:

During an appearance on Tuesday at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Mr. Obama took a swipe at Republican critics of his $3.6 trillion budget and its agenda for health care, energy, taxes and economic recovery.

“If there are members of Congress who object to specific policies and proposals in this budget, then I ask them to be ready and willing to propose constructive, alternative solutions,” Mr. Obama said. “ ‘Just say no’ is the right advice to give your teenagers about drugs. It is not an acceptable response to whatever economic policy is proposed by the other party.”

The strong words were the latest in a push that has come to resemble elements of the two-year-long presidential campaign. Mr. Obama may hold his second prime-time news conference as president, perhaps as early as next week, to talk up the budget.

On Wednesday and Thursday, he is taking his budget show on the road to California, where he will hold two town-hall-style meetings and will even try to talk about the economy on Thursday on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

In particular, Organizing for America is taking an active role. They have a call Congress tool with an example script for those calls, and today they released a message from Obama himself urging people to either call Congress or participate in a canvass for the budget this weekend. And the messaging is right – that we cannot use the current crisis as an excuse to ignore the long-term challenge in our economy, that investing in the future will ensure that a crisis like this does not happen again. It’s the post-bubble economic strategy.

What the Senate really hates is the proposed use of budget reconciliation to evade the filibuster. Republicans like filibusters because they get a piece of the action. Moderate Democrats like filibusters because they hate being held accountable for their votes and actually have progress made on their watch. Peter Orszag makes a good case for reconciliation, which more than anything is a neogtiating tactic.

Orszag said he wouldn’t rule it out, however. The legislative tactic is being considered to push through Obama’s global warming and health care programs, and perhaps his proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy.

“We’d like to avoid it if possible,” Orszag told reporters at a luncheon in Washington. “But we’re not taking it off the table.” […]

There is plenty of historical precedent of using it by both parties, including Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who used it force through big tax cuts.

“Pretty much every major piece of budget legislation going back to April 1981, April ’82, April 1990, April 1993, the 1990 act, the 2001 tax legislation, they were all done through reconciliation. Yet somehow this is being presented as an unusual thing,” Orszag said.

“The historical norm as opposed to the exception is for a major piece of budget legislation to move through reconciliation.”

Judd Gregg is whining about it, calling it “running over the minority” and saying that it would “ruin relations” between the parties. I would term it more as “giving the people what they want” and suggest that relations between the parties are already irreparably damaged by constant filibustering from one side, but YMMV. Of course, Evan Bayh and his new Obstructionist caucus would be hostile to this tactic, but the members of it aren’t even willing to admit their membership, so that seems less than cohesive.

I would be more excited about this if it wasn’t coming on the same week as the AIG bonuses and the overall financial mess, which represents a real threat to the Obama agenda. The President should not assume he can get around that right now until a resolution is reached.

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