Doctors to Obama: Come back at 50

by Mark Silva

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, maintaining that she has the votes in the House to pass a final healthcare bill regardless of remaining differences -- and allowing herself an "A'' for effort -- suggests that the Senate's grade will have to be given "on a curve.''

And any final evaluation, the speaker says, comes on Election Day.

"The grade is given on Election Day,'' Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in an appearance on ABC News' This Week today. "We're fully prepared to face the American people with the integrity of what we have put forth, the commitment to jobs and health care and education and a world at peace and safe for our children and with the political armed power to go with it to win those elections.

Pelosi addressed the ethics problem that her Ways and Means chairman faces, with the House ethics committee having found that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) ran afoul of House rules in accepting corporate sponsorships for trips to Caribbean conferences.

"The fact is, what Mr. Rangel has been admonished for is not good. It was a violation of the rules of the House,'' Pelosi said of an ongoing inquiry into Rangel's failure to immediately disclose large sources of income. "It was not something that jeopardized our country in any way, so it remains to be seen what the rest of the work of the committee is. I hope it will be soon. But again, it's independent and they go at their own pace."

Pelosi said this about the TEA Party: "The Republican Party directs a lot of what the EA Party does, but not everybody in the TEA Party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots.

"But, we share some of the views of the TEA Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as it just has to stop,'' the speaker maintained. "That's why I've fought the special interest, whether it's on energy, whether it's on health insurance, whether it's on pharmaceuticals and the rest."

Asked to rate her own performance during the past year, Pelosi said: "I think I get an A for effort. And in the House of Representatives, my mark is the mark of our members. We have passed every piece of legislation that is part of the Obama agenda."

Obama famously has given himself a "solid B-plus,'' with the option to reassess that pending the outcome of the healthcare drive. As for the Senate, Pelosi said, "Let's grade this all on a curve.'' See more of what Pelosi had to say today here in The Swamp:

by Andrew Zajac

The Obama Administration has made increased transparency a priority, and few government agencies are in greater need of it than the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA's recent handling of conflict of interest allegations against the agency's top drug official shows that openness has not yet triumphed over opacity.

Earlier this month, the FDA announced that it had found no merit to accusations that Dr. Janet Woodcock had a conflict because of her links to a firm vying for agency approval of an application to make a generic version of the commonly-used blood thinner heparin.

It wasn't so much the decision itself that's odd, though it's difficult enough to assess because the FDA hasn't offered much of an explanation for it.

What's unusual is the way that the FDA announced that Woodcock was in the clear.

Four FDA officials, including Principal Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein and Chief Counsel Ralph Tyler, placed a conference call to a Tribune Newspapers reporter on Feb. 4 to tell him about the decision. An attorney for Amphastar Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif, which made the complaint, said the FDA confirmed its findings to him only after he read them in the paper the following morning.

From a journalism standpoint, it's great to be handed information before anyone else has it, but contacting a reporter before notifying interested parties is considered a breach of protocol in many business and government circles.

In a follow-up interview on Friday, Sharfstein conceded the matter could have been handled differently, "but we thought it was important to call the people who had been writing about it...I don't think there's a protocol for this."

In its Feb. 4 phone call, the agency made two main points:

--That neither the FDA nor the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General found a conflict of interest in Woodcock's dealings with scientists connected to Momenta Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is competing with Amphastar to win FDA approval of enoxaparin, the generic version of low molecular heparin currently marketed as Lovenox.

--That Woodcock had voluntarily removed herself from any involvement in evaluation of the Momenta and Amphastar applications. The removal came either in October 2007 or August 2009 - the FDA first offered the earlier date, then the second, with no explanation for the switch.

In broad strokes, Amphastar's complaint is that a series of contacts in 2007 between Woodcock and Momenta-connected scientists, and her collaboration with them on an investigation of contamination of Chinese heparin the following year created the appearance of a conflict of interest that required her recusal from evaluation of the competing enoxaparin applications.

Why does any of this matter?

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, as expected, has named Julianna Smoot to serve as social secretary for the White House.

The announcement today follows the departure of Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, who was credited for running an open White House -- too open, perhaps, at one State Dinner where three uninvited guests showed up. Rogers' resignation was announced Friday.

Smoot has served as chief of staff for the Office of the United States Trade Representative isince February, had been co-chair of the Presidential Inaugural Committee and was national finance director for Obama's presidential campaign. Before that, she had been finance director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Smoot was a senior adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and the North Carolina native served as finance director for former Sen.John Edwards' bid for the Senate. She also has worked for Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). She has a bachelor's degree in government from Smith College.

"Julianna shares our commitment to creating an inclusive, dynamic and culturally vibrant White House, and Michelle and I are pleased to have her join our team," Obama said in a statement issued by the White House today.

Smoot voiced humility and excitment about the new role.

"Over the last year, I have had the honor of building relationships in the international community through my work at USTR, and I am looking forward to implementing this experience at the White House., '' she said in an issued statement.

Smoot will work in the East Wing of the White House, where the first lady and staff oversee the social functions of a residence that has served as a stage for several musical events during Obama's first term and has opened the garden to schoolchildren. The new director has an Easter Egg Roll on her hands soon.

"Julianna Smoot brings extraordinary organization and people skills to the role, and sharp attention to detail - all attributes critical to the highly complex responsibilities of the White House Social Secretary,'' Susan Sher, chief of staff for the first lady, said today. "I know that she will continue on the path of creating beautiful events and opening up the White House in new and creative ways that have been established this past year.''

by Mark Silva

One year into a still loosely defined and generally leaderless movement known as the TEA Party -- for "Taxed Enough Already'' -- the relationship between the Republican Party and an angry and voluble faction which some view as little more than the base of the party still is a work in progress.

Leaders are eager to embrace an energized conservative force, while worried where it might position the party in that great equalizer of election contests: The contest for the hearts of more moderate, independent voters alienated by wing-talk of all stripes.

In a movement which surfaced at town halls and led to anti-Obama administration rallies in Washington and provided forums for the likes of Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, and which provided showcases for the xenophobic rhetoric of retired Rep. Tom Tancredo and palm-prompted talking points of former Gov. Sarah Palin at a "convention'' in Nashville, there are few faces of leadership which might appeal to a sense of moderation.

Based on polling that has found that the movement is largely white, generally well-heeled and notably Southern and Western, it hardly represents the "diverse'' nature of the American electorate that a prominent Republican leader is honoring today.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that the TEA Party will "disappear'' when the economy revives. But House Republican Leader John Boehner embraces the TEA Party today, on the designated anniversary of a movement that really has no address and no singular leader. The TEA Party itself, Boehner suggests, is what's leading the party's parade.

"The TEA Party movement has reminded us who's really in charge of this country, and that's the American people,'' Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement issued by his office today. "These great patriots have been at the forefront of a growing political rebellion born from the American people's opposition to greater government control over our economy and our lives.

"They are leading a diverse and growing movement, one comprised of Americans from all walks of life, many of whom are becoming engaged in politics for the first time because they are so fed up with Washington and the direction of the country.

"It's not enough, however, for Republicans to simply voice respect for what the tea partiers are doing, praise their efforts, and participate in their rallies,'' Boehner said. "Republicans must listen to them, stand with them, and walk among them.

"In these uncertain times, when government is growing and our nation is being driven deeper and deeper into debt, the TEA Party movement has given Americans who believe in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the opportunity to band together and say 'enough is enough.' the GOP leader said.

"Government is no substitute for the hard work and common sense of the American people, and only by preserving this most self-evident of truths can we truly protect the blessings of freedom and liberty. This is exactly why the American people want us to scrap this massive government takeover of health care and start over."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, citing the team spirit of the U.S. Olympic athletes' successes in Vancouver, suggests today that Democrats and Republicans should be able to work together on needed healthcare reforms -- though the White House and the president have made it clear that they are pushing ahead with or without cooperation.

To the Republicans, that means the Democrats "can try to ram through a partisan bill that will divide and bankrupt America.''

Obama summoned Republicans and Democrats to a healthcare summit this week, a daylong conference that did more to expose the depth of the divisions between them than find any common ground. Yet Obama today maintains that cooperation still is possible, in the same spirit that is bringing home the gold and silver from Vancouver.

"We need that same spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship when it comes to finally passing reform that will bring down the cost of health care and give Americans more control over their insurance,'' Obama says in his weekly radio and Internet address today.

"Some of these disagreements we may be able to resolve. Some we may not,'' the president says. "And no final bill will include everything that everyone wants. That's what compromise is...

"But I also believe that we cannot lose the opportunity to meet this challenge,'' the president says today.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) one of the Republicans who countered the president's plans at the bipartisan summit held at Blair House this week, maintains that the White House and Democratic leaders are not listening.

"I'm concerned that the majority in Congress is still not listening to the American people on the subject of health care reform,'' Coburn says in the GOP's response to the president today. "By an overwhelming margin, the American people are telling us to scrap the current bills, which will lead to a government takeover of health care, and we should start over.

"Unfortunately, even before the summit took place the majority in Congress signaled its intent to reject our offers to work together.,'' Coburn says. "Instead they want to use procedural tricks and backroom deals to ram through a new bill that combines the worst aspects of the bills the Senate and House passed last year.''

See the president's address above, the Republican address below and read the texts of both below, here in the Swamp:

by Mark Silva

It's always good to get a little distance between a big embarrassment and the consequences of it, such as the time between the White House's admittance of a couple of gate-crashers last fall and the departure today of White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers.

"When she took this position, we asked Desiree to help make sure that the White House truly is the People's House, and she did that by welcoming scores of everyday Americans through its doors, from wounded warriors to local schoolchildren to NASCAR drivers," President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama said in a statement issued today. "She organized hundreds of fun and creative events during her time here, and we will miss her."

In through the doors came a couple from Virginia who had no business attending the first State Dinner at the White House in November, the one held for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Secret Service took the fall for that security lapse, but Republicans where threatening subpenas of Rogers over the question of her office overlooking the protocol for events such as that dinner.

With Rogers' departure, Obama fundraiser Julianna Smoot is a leading candidate for social secretary, an administration official tells our Washington bureau's Katherine Skiba.

Those Virginia socialites -- Tareq and Michaele Salahi -- who invited themselves to the State Dinner aren't the only ones who found their way into a White House seeking an open door policy, according to an administration which also has been distributing lists of all visitors to the White House. (t turned out later a third uninvited guest made that dinner as well.)

"I think countless numbers of people have come to events here that have -- that showcase the people's house, as they said in their statement.,'' Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today. "I think the doors of this house were open to folks that had not necessarily always gotten to be here, whether it was schoolchildren from the area, whether it was low- income kids that got an opportunity to see the White House, not from outside of Pennsylvania Avenue through a fence or a gate, but instead
up close and inside of it.''

Fridays also are traditional days for the departure of people identified with embarrassments at the White House -- the administration had signaled that there was no way Rogers would be talking to any congressional committee, citing excecutive privilege.

Rogers was among the cast of Chicagoans who came to Washington with Obama. She was a successful businesswoman and had run the Illinois State Lottery.

A native of New Orleans with a Harvard MBA, she had married John Rogers Jr., founder of Ariel Capital Management. They have been divorced for a decade. When Republican Jim Edgar was elected governor in 1990, he made her lottery director.

At the lottery, Rogers launched new games and gained some celebrity appearing often on television as the face of the lottery. In 1997, she joined Peoples Gas, and served as president of the company from 2004 to 2008. She left Peoples last year, briefly working on a social networking initiative for Allstate Insurance.

When she was chosen as social secretary, Rogers told the Tribune: "This is the perfect combination of some of the skill sets that I have. I don't think it can get much better than this."

(Desiree Rogers is pictured above at the State Dinner hosted by President Barack Obama for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a few gate-crashers at the White House in November. Photo by Gerald Herbert / AP)

by Mark Silva

It was nearly one year ago, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled it today, that the president initiated a bipartisan discussion at the White House on healthcare.

"It was a great day,'' said Pelosi (D-Calif.) "It was House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, outside stakeholders, consumers all present, of course. The biggest presence outside the president was when Sen. Kennedy came into the room and said I'm here to enlist as a foot soldier in the fight -- in the campaign to pass health care reform.

"It had been his life's work,'' she said of the late, longtime senator from Massachusetts. "He would later say to the president, 'This is not about the details of policy; it's about the character of our country.'"

One year later, and one more bipartisan Blair House meeting behind them, the House speaker said today at her weekly news conference that she and many of our colleagues "carry that with us as we go forward.'' And going forward, they are.

President Barack Obama, Pelosi said, has demonstrated both a passion for the pursuit and "encyclopedic knowledge'' of the issue.

The seven-hour session at Blair House this week "made a difference,'' the speaker said, suggesting that it has "moved us closer to passing a bill that meets the sort of triple-A standard of accountability of the insurance companies, accessibility of many more people and, very important to us in the House, affordability for the middle class.''

And the path forward may not be that complicated, the speaker said.

""What you call a complicated process is called a simple majority,'' she said. "And that's what we're asking the Senate to act upon.... It's up to them.''

The House, she said, is ready to act on what "the Senate is able to do with a simple majority'' - which means adding, by budget reconciliation, whatever measures can win 51 votes, in addition to the bill that already has cleared the Senate. "But I believe that we have good prospects for passing legislation.''

Republican Sen. John McCain, who complained at the healthcare summit that the notion of adopting something as sweeping as the healthcare legislation that the president is seeking with budget reconciliation is a threat to the integrity of the institution of the Senate.

"Back some years ago, when we Republicans were in the majority, (we) resisted the so-called nuclear option, which was that would only require 51 votes to confirm judges, which I felt would have been on the path to destroying the 60- vote procedure in the Senate,'' McCain (R-Ariz.) told FOX News Channel's Sean Hannity last night, echoing his remarks from the summit.

"Basically his answer was, well, the people want a vote,'' McCain said of Obama. "That was really the most disturbing part of this meeting today...Reconciliation, that's the word, the meaning of it is, reconcile small differences between House and Senate on budgetary matters. Never was it envisioned to affect one-sixth of our gross national product, and that's clearly the path that he signaled that we are on. It would be an outrage to the American people. ''

by Michael Muskal and updated

David Paterson, who became governor of New York when his predecessor was forced to quit in disgrace, is expected to announce he will not seek election this year because of another scandal.

Paterson, the son of a prominent political family, is expected to announce his withdrawal from the 2010 election contest today. He already has told some political allies, including officials in Washington, and the decision was reported in a variety of newspapers.

"There has been a lot of back-and-forth in past few months," Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine said in an interview on MSNBC. "He came into office under very, very difficult circumstances but I respect his decision. The party will have to pull together to find another nominee."

Just days ago, Paterson announced his intention to run this November. But recent reports that his administration may have interfered in a police probe involving a top aide accused in an incident of domestic violence.

Paterson was the lieutenant governor when former Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in the midst of a scandal involving his use of a high-priced call-girl ring, Empire VIP.

"David was not in a strong position even before this controversy,'' said Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a former DNC chairman, in an interview with MSNBC's David Shuster today. He suggested that Democrat Andrew Cuomo will make a great candidate and governor. He also suggested that governors must be careful of the power they possess.

"When the world revolves around you... and there are so many yes people... it's very hard to stay grounded,'' Rendell explained of the challenges of being a governor and averting problems that might come your way. "It's a tough road to walk.''

by Mark Silva and updated

Longtime Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York said he was "saving the best for last'' when he finally was called on to speak near the end of President Barack Obama's daylong bipartisan healthcare summit yesterday.

But a long day was not over for the Democrat who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee: He faced his own hastily called news confernce on the House ethics committee accusing him of accepting corporate money for trips to Caribbean conferences in violation of House rules -- word of the findings leaked last night.

The committee has concluded that it couldn'tdetermine whether Rangel knew about the financing of the trips, but found that his staff did know -- Rangel maintains that he did not know and had left the details to his staff. The question now will become how long the 20-term congressman can maintain control of another staff and committee: Ways and Means.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declined to say today whether the Ways and Means chairman should step aside because of the committee's finding.

"They did not take action against him," Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference today. Noting that the ethics committee is investigating Rangel on other matters, she said: There's obviously more to come, and we'll see what happens with that."

The trips are not the only problem for Rangel. The committee still is looking at the congressman's use of official stationery to raise money for a college center in his name as well as his belated financial disclosure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unreported assets and income. Those included a federal credit union account worth between $250,001 and $500,000; a Merrill Lynch account between $250,000 and $500,000; tens of thousands of dollars in municipal bonds and $30,000 to $100,000 in rent from a residential building in New York.

The ethics committee has exonerated five other members of the Congressional Black Caucus who also were on the 2007 and 2008 trips to conferences in Antigua and St. Maartenm but has told them they will have to pay the costs of the trips.

""Common sense dictates that members of Congress should not be held responsible for what could be the wrongdoing or mistakes or errors of staff unless there's reason to believe that member knew or should have known, and there is nothing in the record to indicate the latter," Rangel said at a news conference last night back on Capitol Hill -- a statement, really, where no questions were fielded.

The House members on the trips who didn't know about the corporate financing, according to the committee: Democratic Reps. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Yvette Clarke of New York, Donald Payne of New Jersey, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of Michigan and Donna Christensen, the nonvoting delegate from the Virgin Islands. The committee says they relied on false information from the listed official sponsors of the trips, the Carib News, a New York newspaper, and the Carib News Foundation.

Peter Flaherty of the National Legal and Policy Center, an ethics watchdog group, attended the 2008 conference in St. Maarten and filed an ethics complaint that listed companies with signs and materials at the event: Citigroup, Pfizer, American Airlines, AT&T, Verizon, Macy's, and IBM among them.

While lawmakers have attended the Caribbean conferences for many years, the House adopted stricter travel rules before the 2007 and 2008 trips. Rangel, 79, first was elected to the House in 1970 from New York's Harlem district, defeating Adam Clayton Powell Jr., at the time the most prominent black politician in the country and one with his own ethics problems.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

by Mark Silva

The lineup for the deficit-cutting commission that President Barack Obama has created is starting to take shape. The president's front line includes David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International, and Alice Rivlin, a fomer White House Office of Management and Budget director and Federal Reserve official, according to reports this morning.

The president's picks for the 18-member commission also include, Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, a politically active union that helped campaign for the president, and Ann Fudge, former Young & Rubicam Brands CEO and a campaign supporter of Obama and Democrats, Bloomberg News' Hans Nichols and Roger Runningen report, citing an administration official speaking on background before the announcement.

Obama already has named a Democratic former White House official in the Clinton administration, Erskine Bowles, an ex-chief of staff, and Republican former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson as co-chairmen of the commission.

The White House appointees will be joined by 12 other panel members chosen by Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.

Obama has created the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility to make recommendations for reducing the federal deficit, forecast to reach a record $1.6 trillion this year. Obama has said that the nation cannot cut its way out of the problem, and that tax increases of some manner must remain on the table.

The White House already has proposed a 2011 federal budget with a somewhat smaller deficit and projects that it will fall to $752 billion by 2015 -- still greater, in dollar terms, than any of the records reached during the previous Bush administration.

"Everything's on the table, that's how this thing's going to work," Obama said earlier this month, after signing the order to create the commission.

The Senate's Democratic leader has named Sens., Dick Durbin of Illinois, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Max Baucus of Montana to the panel. The Republicans and House Democratic leaders have not named their appointees yet. An attempt to create a congressionally chartered budget commission failed in the Senate.

Posted at 7 am EST, updated at 5:30 pm

President Barack Obama closed a bipartisan summit on healthcare today the way he opened it, with a speech about how much the Democrats and Republicans actually agree upon -- or should be able to agree on.

(Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

It was an optimistic reading of a conference that was dramatic for its civility today, and equally dramatic for its divisions -- with the Democrats insisting upon the urgency of a comprehensive solution to the lack of health care for millions of Americans and rising costs for millions more and Republicans pleading to wipe the slate clean -- an Etch A Sketch, Republican Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois called it -- and start from scratch.

"Baby steps don't get you to the place where people need to go,'' Obama said in his closing remarks at a conference ending now. "A step-by-step approach sounds good in theory,''' he said, but it will not address the many problems that conspire to drive up medical costs and prevent people from getting healthcare.

"I suspect that, if the Democrats and the administration were willing to start over and then adopt (House Republican Leader) John Boehner's bill, we'd get a whole bunch of Republican votes,'' Obama said. "I don't how many Democratic votes we'd get... The concern, I think, that a lot of colleagues in the House and Senate on the Democratic side have, is that after a year and half... (actually five decades, he said)... of dealing with this issue, starting over, they suspect, means not doing much.''

"If we can't close that gap,'' the president said, then there will be "a lot of arguments about procedures in Congress in moving forward... (Read: budget reconciliation, 51 Senate votes for passage of a final plan.)

"When I talk to the parents of children who don't have healthcare because they've got diabetes or they've got chronic heart disease or when I talk to small businesses that are laying off people because they can't afford health insurance, they don't want us to stop,'' Obama told the lawmakers. "They don't want to wait five decades....

"We cannot have another yearlong debate over this,'' the president said, asking all to search their souls and see if.there is something they can agree to in the next several weeks. "If we can't, then we've got to make some honest decisions,'' the president said, with an implicit promise to proceed with passage of a healthcare bill over the objections of Republicans, "and that's what elections are for.''

And the bipartisan summit is finished.

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

Seldom have so many lawmakers "behaved themselves'' for so long in front of television cameras, one lawmaker said near the close of a close-to-seven-overtime-hours-minus-the-lunch-break bipartisan session on healthcare at Blair House.

Seldom has so much dialog gone into changing so few minds.

When the day was done, President Barack Obama and a few dozen members of Congress of both parties, had drawn a neat little circle, concluding where they began.

Republicans are asking the president to turn over that Etch A Sketch which we all remember so well from our childhoods -- the dial-a-drawing machine that scrapes the magnetic dust from the inside of the screen. Shake it upside down and the screen goes gray again. But scrape it all the way, and the screen goes clear.

The GOP wants to shake the Etch A Sketch on healthcare reform and start from scratch, with the president suggesting that the Republican plan for solving the essential problem of health care, a lack of coverage for millions of Americans spiraling, government-sponsored costs for those who are covered, is a blank slate.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) broke out the opinion polls near the end of the meeting -- it's not even close, he said. "The solution is to put it on the shelf and to start over with a blank piece of paper to see what we can agree on.''

"I hear from constituents in every one of your districts, and every one of your states,'' Obama said -- suggesting that issue by issue, the proposals in the healthcare package actually poll well. "Your polls... are important in taking the temperature of the public... My hope had been, and continues to be, that based on this conversation, there might be enough areas of overlap that we could think about moving forward... without everybody just going to their corners and this ends up being a political fight.''

(Photo of President Barack Obama outside the bipartisan healthcare summit at Blair House today by J. Scott Applewhite / AP)

-- Mark Silva

* * * *
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, had an explanation of the GOP's position.

"Let's start over in the sense that we change the vision..." Barton said, "If we do that, we can make a deal."

"Start over," is the mantra of the day for the Republicans, most commonly articulated as a call that Congress return to a "blank piece of paper."

Blank sheets haven't just been waved at the summit -- they also were faxed last night to the offices of members of Congress, as part of a campaign organized by the Doctor Patient Medical Association, a group that opposes the heatlhcare bill.

-- Kim Geiger

* * * *

We're in the home stretch now, not far from the scheduled ending of the summit, which, incidentally, keeps getting pushed back because -- in classic Washington fashion -- not everyone has had a chance to speak.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) has a fairly simple message for the group: the summit was a train to nowhere and the Democrats' bill is a dog.

Wait. Those are our metaphors. Roskam had plenty of his own.

He compared the bill to something thrown in "the microwave." Later he compared to something drawn on an Etch A Sketch. He said the problem with the bill was "the message," not the "messenger."

Roskam, who worked with Obama in the Illinois state Senate, suggested that the president had not come to Blair House to work out a compromise with the GOP. Instead, Roskam said, the president wanted to know, "what is it going to take for you Republicans to vote for my bill?"

The president's bill, he said, was like a microwaved dish with "a little salt, a little pepper, with some Republican bread crumbs on top."

But, he said, the bill's unpopularity with the GOP and the public wasn't Obama's fault, that Obama had sold the bill the best he could. "This is a problem with the message," he said, "not a problem with the messenger."

His constituents, he said, had turned against the bill theymore they heard about it. "They listened and they listened and they listened," Roskam said. "In my district, they've become increasingly disappointed with what they've seen come out of this process."

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

Abortion has made its way into the discussion.

House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio says the healthcare legislation, "for the first time in 30 years, allows for the taxpayer funding of abortions."

So, does it?

President Barack Obama's proposal is mum on the issue.

The Senate bill, on which the Obama plan is modeled, would require insurers to segregate funds that are used to pay for abortion coverage from those that are used to buy the policy itself. Under this system, consumers who receive federal subsidies for insurance would probably have to make a separate payment for the abortion portion of the policy. That payment would have to come from private funds -- some have suggested it would be as small as $1 a month.

Abortion was a hot topic in the House, which adopted what's now known as the 'Stupak Amendment.' Named for Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who proposed it, that provision prohibits consumers from purchasing a plan that covers abortion using federal subsidy dollars. Consumers can instead buy supplemental abortion coverage with their own funds.

Some could argue that because a low-income consumer gets a subsidy to help buy insurance, they are able to afford the cost of abortion coverage.

Rep. Jan Schakovsky (D-Ill.) and a group of pro-choice Democrats maintain that they won't vote for the final bill if it contains the Stupak amendment.

-- Kim Geiger

* * * *

For a bunch of elected politicians, President Barack Obama said today, they've done a pretty good job at the healthcare summit of keeping their remarks within check in front of television cameras and the meeting on time -- though the cable networks were starting to tune out this afternoon. Yet Obama has allowed two extensions now -- pushing the closing time of the Blair House meeting to 4:30 pm EST.

* * * *

The deeply-tanned Republican leader of the House, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, must have been biding his time, because he finally unleashed a broadside against the healthcare bill this afternoon. And if there was ever any question before whether there was an unbridgeable divide here between the two sides, Boehner put any lingering doubts to rest.

"This 2,700-page bill will bankrupt the country," Boehner declared. "This is a dangerous experiment."

He assailed the requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance as "unconstitutional." He warned the bill would result employers dumping health coverage, forcing employees to go to the new insurance exchanges.

"I could go and on and on," Boehner said. "Let's start with a clean sheet of paper." (We're five and a half-hours in, and we're pretty much where we were this morning, which is, basically: GOP: Start over. Democrats: No.)

Obama was clearly nonplussed with Boehner. "There are so many things you just said that people on this side would profoundly disagree with and based on my analysis is just not true," Obama said in the same sort of moderating tone he's tried to use all day.

Both in Baltimore last month and in the summit here, Obama has shown a willingness to critique Republican arguments in a way that drives many of his detractors crazy.

As our colleague Kim Geiger wrote earlier: He's the teacher, they're the unruly students. He'll judge whether an argument is legitimate rather than get into a scorched-earth exchange, sounding like he's above the fray.

Republicans call it lecturing. Democrats appreciate his restraint.

Call it what you will.

-- Jim Oliphant
* * * *

"Our job... is to listen,'' Rep. John Boehner said at the healthcare summit this afternoon. "The thing I've heard is... the American people want us to scrap this bill.''

Which meant that, less than an hour from the scheduled end of this daylong event, Republican leaders were saying pretty much the same thing that they were saying at the start of the conversation -- as was the host, President Barack Obama.

"Having the government take over healthcare, which I think this is, is a dangerous experiment,'' Boehner told the president. Obama maintains that it is not a government takeover -- so it's good that's all straightened out now.

(Photo of House Minority Leader John Boehner and Sen. John McCain -- told by the president today that "the election's over'' --' by Shawn Thew / Pool via Bloomberg)

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

Vice President Joe Biden knows what he thinks.

He thinks he knows what the American people think.

But he doesn't know, for sure, what people think -- Biden said so this afternoon at the healthcare summit. It takes a lot of "humility'' for anyone to suggest they do, he said.

Republicans think they know what Americans think -- and they've pointed to polls today showing that most people don't want what the Democrats are selling.

"The American people are engaged,'' said Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican arguing that the true costs of the president's healthcare bill go well beyond what even the Congressional Budget Office has found in its analysis of the congressional versions. "f you think they're calling for a government takeover of healthcare,'' the congressman told the president and vice president, "you're not listening.''

"I think I have a good feelng for what's out there in the grass roots,'' said Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who said he has held 32 town hall meetings and is fairly certain that people don't like the fact that, for the first time ever, the government is about to tell people there is something they have to buy -- health insurance.

(House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Joe Biden are pictured in a photo by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

The Republicans were slamming Democrats for fuzzy accounting.

Despite starting his soliloquy with agreeable words, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., then moved on to accuse Democrats of double-dipping by making cuts in Medicare to pay for their bill. (Ryan has a point -- in budgetary terms, cutting Medicare spending is not the same as, say, raising taxes to bring in revenue.)

And, he says they've disingenuously excluded a $371 billion (or $210 billion, depending on whose numbers are used) item to prevent looming cuts in doctors' payments. Congress legislatively ignores those cuts each year.

Another point of disagreement: Medicare Advantave, a private alternative to traditional Medicare that offers enrollees enhanced benefits. Democrats have targeted the program as bloated. Republicans say those cuts would come on the backs of seniors.

They'll continue to debate these points, but a resolution is unlikely and, frankly, moot.

"There really is a difference between us," Ryan said. "And it's basically this: We don't think the government should be in control of all this."

To be fair, both Medicare programs in question here -- Medicare Advantage, where Democrats want to make cuts, and Medicare Part D, where they propose to increase spending -- are programs that were created by a Republican Congress and president.

The problem with Part D, the prescription benefit, is they didn't pay for it, as Obama reminded some Republicans quick to say that they didn't vote for it.

-- Kim Geiger and James Oliphant

* * * *

Now came Vice President Joe Biden's turn -- to talk about the federal deficit, and how much money is wasted on healthcare.

The deficit is probably the area of greatest disagreement between the parties.

Earlier this morning, President Barack Obama said: "Almost all of the long-term deficit and debt that we face relates to the exploding cost of Medicare and Medicaid."

That's true, if you consider deficit projections over time. Medicare enrollment is expected to grow rapidly as more baby boomers reach the eligibility age of 65. Plus, people are living longer, and new, life-saving technologies are expensive.

Obama says his healthcare proposal would cost $950 billion, yet reduce the deficit by $100 billion over 10 years. That's partially because the plan would cut some spending in Medicare. Republicans want those savings to go back into the Medicare program, not to be used to pay for other elements of the bill. Biden said that, in addition to cutting waste, the plan does steer some of the savings back into Medicare, including the closure of that "doughnut hole'' in benefits for prescription drugs.

Then, Republicans don't want 'the bill' at all.

-- Kim Geiger

* * * *

"The Blair House Project'' -- not only Chris Matthews, of Hardball renown, was calling the bipartisan healthcare summit that today.

Like many on the sidelines of the summit, media observers such as Matthews were writing off the meeting as a theatrical event.

And by the time the summit resumed after a lunch break this afternoon, the main cable news networks also were starting to tune it out. Through the morning, FOX News Channel was paying closer attention to live coverage of the summit than CNN was, with CNN breaking away for commentary. But by the early afternoon, neither FOX nor CNN was providing gavel to gavel coverage anymore -- deferring instead to their own commentators. MSNBC was showing the winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. (Yet, we're showing MSNBC's live stream below.)

Back at Blair House, the summit went on.

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

As the second half of the healthcare summit got underway (we enjoyed that halftime performance by The Who, didn't you?), let's revisit what we said a few hours ago about winners and losers today. We wrote: "It's possible both sides can walk away with what they're looking for -- which isn't always the same as winning, of course."

Four hours in, it appears both sides are going to get what they wanted.

Democrats will argue that Republicans are obstructionists who aren't willing to engage on healthcare reform even, as the president has painstakingly outlined, when there is common ground. And if they don't want to work with us, they'll say, we don't have to work with them.

Hence: the stage will be set for reconciliation in the Senate, where Democrats can pass a healthcare bill with 51 votes. (It won't be a sweeping bill; That already has been passed by the Senate in December. It's more likely it will revise the Senate bill that will soon be passed by the House.)

(Senate Majoirty Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) turning to the left, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) turning to the right, in a photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

Republicans will argue (indeed, they already are), that Democrats and the White House never acted in good faith in setting up this summit. That Obama ruined any chance for a new day on healthcare when he released his own blueprint this week that mirrored the existing Democratic bills. And that by not willing to junk those bills and start over, Obama was never serious about engaging Republicans.

So that's where things stand.

But even if Democrats make a case for moving forward with reconciliation, that won't be the same as convincing a skeptical public that this particular bill is desired. Consider the recent CNN poll which found that 25 percent of those surveyed say Congress should pass legislation similar to the bills passed by both chamberswith 48 percent saying lawmakers should work on an entirely new bill and one quarter saying Congress should stop all work on healthcare reform.

Such is the box that Democrats are in: A majority of Americans want reform, but not this reform necessarily. Will those feelings change after this summit? Recent history suggests they won't.

So indeed Obama could emerge from the summit having, in a sense, owned the room on healthcare, rebutting every Republican argument with some solid facts. But that may not make what may lie ahead any more popular with the American public. We may not truly be able to judge the winners and losers from today until 2010, 2012, or beyond.

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

After a break for lunch, President Barack Obama promised the members of Congress assembled for his healthcare summit that they would finish up by 4:15 pm today.

But that's only the beginnng of the battle: For all the suggestions by some, such as Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa at the start of the afternoon session, that the two parties may be a lot closer than they appear to be on healthcare, today's forum has served largely to showcase the divide between the parties.

It was good that they came together like this today, said Rep. Mke Enzi, an Arizona Republican. It should have happened about nine months ago, he suggested.

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

Almost three hours into the healthcare summit, Vice President Joe Biden could not hold his tongue any longer.

He blasted House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has been using the 2,000-plus-page healthcare bill as a baseball bat to bludgeon President Barack Obama and the other Democrats.

Biden argued that there was no fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about insurance reform -- that the only question was the role of government in regulating the marketplace.

And, if Cantor was playing Al Capone in the bat-waving scene from "The Untouchables," the vice president found his inner Danny Ocean, hectoring Cantor and the GOP, saying: "You're either in or you're out!"

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

"The election's over,'' the president said -- to his election rival:

"Eight times (during the campaign) you said the healthcare negotiations would be conducted on C-SPAN,'' Republican Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today told his erstwhile adversary, President Barack Obama.

(Photo by President Obama by Pablo Martinez Monsivais (AP)

That time finally has come, McCain said at the televised heatlhcare summit today -- but unfortunately the legislation before them now is the product of months of backroom deals. That included an agreement reached early on at the White House with the pharmaceutical industry, McCain said in a highly pointed series of accusations.

"John....'' Obama said.

"May I just finish?'' McCain said. "When my constituents and Americans who now object to this proposal say they want us to go back to the beginning, they want us to go back to the beginning.''

That means going through the 2,400-page document and removing all the special provisions for special interests, McCain said.

"We're not campaigning anymore -- the election's over,'' Obama finally said.

"I'm reminded of that every day,'' McCain said with a laugh.

"We can have a debate about process, or we can have a debate about how we're going to help the American people,'' Obama told McCain. "The latter debate is the one they care about more.''

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

The president repeatedly is attempting to describe where Democrats and Republicans agree, even as Republicans argue, as Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona just has, that there are fundamental disagreements between them.

(Health care is complicated, the president said to repeated Republican references to the size of the legislation today. Photo by Shawn Thew / Pool /Getty Images)

Undeterred, Obama ticked off four areas of agreement:

- prohibiting insurers from dropping customers when they get sick

- extending dependent coverage for young people, allowing them to stay on family member's insurance plan

- no limits on the amount of health benefits people can consume under a plan in a year or in their lifetimes

- prohibiting insurers from discriminating against customers with preexisting medical conditions

Even if this is true, it's almost beside the point, as Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) is explaining. The underlying issue is the mechanism that is created to bring about these reforms. For example, Democrats argue that if insurers are forced to accept sick people, then the only way to keep insurance affordable for them and everybody else is by forcing young, healthy people to buy insurance through the individual mandate. The way to help those individuals buy insurance, he said, is through regulated exchanges.

Republicans appear to have no interest in setting up insurance exchanges, which is the centerpiece of the Democratic bill, or in expanding Medicaid for low-income people.

No doubt, some of the above could be done in a small-scale bill, but that arguably would do little to extend coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who currently don't have it.

The question is why Obama is so interested in telling the room (and America) where Democrats and Republicans agree -- even if they don't necessarily agree that they agree. Is it to paint Republicans as unreasonable? Is it to show the country that more of a consensus actually exists on reform than they believe?

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

Finally, in Washington: Agreement.

Rep. Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Republican and physician, told his Republican and Democratic colleagues at the healthcare summit today that the one thing everyone can agree on is that insurance companies shouldn't be able to simply drop people.

"That's a no-brainer,'' Boustany said.

Thirteen million people last year were denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) "This is a very important part of this discussion,'' he said. "I hear about this from the people I represent...''

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich) has been charged with addressing some cost containment issues, but he has, in some swift strokes, basically covered most of the vitriolic GOP attacks on the Democratic healthcare legislation.

(With President Barack Obama asking all to focus on their areas of agreement today, Republican leaders, from left, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Ariz., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.., arrived at Blair House carrying papers -- the one talking point that Rep. Dave Camp got inidsputably was the thickness of the Democrats' healthcare bill. (Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais) /AP)

In a few minutes, Camp, the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee:

1) said the bill costs "A trillion dollars." (Democrats argue that the bill pays for itself and cuts the deficit).

2) would be paid for by cutting Medicare benefits for seniors (Democrats say the bill cuts waste in Medicare).

3) is more than 1,500 pages long (granted).

4) would result in government-run healthcare via the insurance exchanges that forces Americans to carry insurance (Democrats counter that it sets up more competitive marketplaces).

Obama grew so weary of this that he cut Camp off, saying, "If every speaker on one side is going through saying what they don't like, it's going to be hard for us to reach agreements."

The latter isn't looking too promising at the moment.

By the way, Camp mentioned that tort reform, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would save $54 billion. Both sides are guilty of fuzzy math when it comes to healthcare, but when you hear numbers such as that, take it with a grain of salt.

Like most numbers bandied about, they cover a period of 10 years. That's how the CBO scores bills. So Camp is correct, except that aggressive tort reform would save $5.4 billion per year over 10 years. Whether that is significant or a drop in the bucket, obviously, depends on your point of view.

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

"You're right, there was an imbalance (of time) on the opening statements -- because I'm the president,'' President Barack Obama told Republicans counting the time for talk at the bipartisan healthcare summit today.

He hadn't counted himself in the Democratic and Republican back and forth -- but he also resisted attempts today to clock this session like a congressional hearing.

--- Mark Silva

* * * *

Square table. Round "doughnut hole.''

At the healthcare summit today, talking points continued to dominate the discussion -- so we'll take this time to explain one of them: the Medicare "doughnut hole."

(Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama sat at one side of the square table arrangement today. Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images.)

Under the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan, seniors pay just 25 percent of the cost of their drugs, but only until they reach a threshold of $2,830. For drugs purchased beyond that level, seniors are on the hook for 100 percent of the cost. Medicare will again pick up a portion of the tab -- 95 percent -- once the beneficiary's costs have reached $4,550.

The "doughnut hole," or coverage gap betwen $2,830 and $4,550, is of great concern to seniors, who often skip pills or stop filling prescriptions once they're responsible for the entire cost.

The House healthcare bill would close that gap, as would President Barack Obama's proposal.

Democrats and Republicans alike have complained about the doughnut hole, so there really isn't much disagreement about closing it. That said, it's a popular topic, so prepare to hear more about it throughout the day.

-- Kim Geiger

* * * *

It's time to walk into the weeds a bit. We've hit the first discussion topic: Cost containment.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a physician, is making a case for cost containment focused on preventative care and medical malpractice reform. He is suggesting that healthcare costs could be shaved by a third if more attention is paid to creating incentives for doctors to treat patients in a more proactive way, limiting lawsuits, and eliminating waste in Medicare.

(President Barack Obama, challenged by Republicans today asking him to start from scratch on healthcare reform, listened and countered. Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais /AP)

He referred to the bank robber Willie Sutton, saying "Let's go where the money is."

He also is advocating better nutrition for children, which is something than everyone in the room would be happy to agree with.

The tort reform gambit was long expected. But the Democratic version of lawsuit reform in the current bills is nothing nearly as sweeping as what the Republicans desire. While many observers have suggested that Democrats could reach a compromise with Republicans on this issue, it would be unlikely to be as far-reaching as senators such as Coburn would like. And it's unlikely that such a deal, even if reached, would be sufficient to spur Republicans to support the overall legislation.

Obama countered by saying the Democratic bill is out to eliminate fraud and abuse in Medicare--in fact, the bill relies on those savings to help finance an expansion of coverage.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) agreed with Coburn that a third of healthcare dollars spent aren't being used "efficiently." And he agreed with Coburn saying that the bill needs to focus on "wellness" not "sickness."

But now he has shifted the discussion from talking about costs to the healthcare system to costs to the individual, focusing on establishing larger insurance-purchasing pools, capping out-of-pocket expenses, eliminating discrimination for preexisting conditions, and closing the Medicare "donut" hole. So, in a sense, Coburn and Hoyer are talking past each other.

And we've had our first "public option" sighting--a phrase we thought was on the list of verboten topics today.

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

Pay attention to the message behind the president's remarks.

Several times, he has signaled the duality at work in the room. He has been careful to advocate reaching a compromise, but has (realistically) also suggested that "the gulf" will be too large to bridge. In other words, he's giving everyone, Democrats and Republicans, an out. And right now, that gulf looks as broad as ever.

Remember too, that this summit is as much about transparency as it is about policy. Democrats have been stung by criticism that the healthcare bill in the Senate was the product of too many closed-door deals.

Six hours on cable TV is an attempt to remedy that.

After that, President Barack Obama and Democrats will be able to maintain that 1) they tried to reach a deal and 2) it took place in an open forum, in front of the American public. And that gets us back to "reconciliation'' -- the Senate Democratic strategy for passing a bill without the support of Republicans.

-- James Oliphant

* * * *

President Barack Obama asked for no "talking points'' today -- but rather an open discussion at the bipartisan healthcare summit at Blair House.

(President Obama with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner. Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images.)

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) faces a tough reelection race ahead. So it's no surprise that the Nevada senator jumped at the chance to talk about his home state -- and plainly said that he didn't want to talk about Washington.

Reid hit on the popular Democratic talking point -- the Medicare "donut hole," which affects senior citizens, a prominent voting bloc in his state. And he used constituent stories to illustrate his points, at one point referring to someone in Reno, Nev. getting, "jerked around by an insurance company."

But Reid couldn't help himself, and his comments eventually wound their way back to Washington. Reid took the opportunity to justify the use of reconciliation, a parliamentary sidestepping of the need for a supermajority to bring a bill to vote in the Senate. If Democrats are to pass a healthcare bill without Republican support, it's Reid who will be responsible for employing the controversial tactic.

So much for Obama's goal that the summit avert talking points.

-- Kim Geiger

* * * *

As the healthcare summit neared, Republicans worried that the event would be shaped to provide the kind of platform that President Barack Obama had a few weeks ago in Baltimore, where he stood on a stage in a hotel ballroom and fielded questions from GOP members of the House.

From a Republican perspective, the optics weren't great. Obama, literally, towered over the members, microphone in hand, standing throughout as the members were seated, conducting the session as if he were hosting his own version of Oprah, dominating the conversation. Now, at the summit, the president has signaled that he is reserving the right to counter Republican arguments as he sees fit, meaning that if he chooses so, he could again serve as a one-man counter-offensive.

(President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden walked from the White House to the nearby Blair House for the summit. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA)

This time, of course, he's sitting down. But he knows no one is about to interrupt him. We'll watch how this dynamic plays out.

-- James Oliphant

(President Barack Obama is joined by (L-R): Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner. Photo by (Saul LOEB / AFP / Getty Images)

* * * *

The Republicans have tapped Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to make the opening case for the GOP approach to healthcare reform.

It's a smart move on several levels. Alexander, a former presidential candidate, has been a governor and a former Cabinet secretary. Alexander has a homespun speaking style, someone who sounds less officious than Republican leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Rep. John Boehner (Ohio).

Perhaps more importantly, Alexander is a fresh face in the debate, someone who hasn't dominated the airwaves over the past eight months.

To the extent that Americans have health-care overhaul fatigue syndrome (HCOFS), he may be someone they don't reflexively tune out. He has a reputation of being a senator who works across the aisle. His votes to confirm controversial nominees State Department adviser Harold Koh and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor are examples. But he has opposed the Democratic healthcare bill from the start and, to no one's surprise, he already has thrown down a marker on reconciliation. He's arguing that the Senate isn't meant to be governed by simple majority rule

. "We'll have to renounce jamming [the bill] through in a partisan way," Alexander said in the GOP's opening comments at the bipartisan healthcare summit. "The only thing bipartisan will be the opposition to the bill." He also, as expected, called upon Congress to start the process over "to earn the trust of the American people."

Obama smiled, his face in his hand, as Alexander spoke of starting from scratch. Alexander also is a classical and concert pianist, which could be helpful if things get slow.

People "don't have time for us to start over,'' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in the House's opening comments this morning.

-- James Oliphant and Mark Silva

* * * *

"You're entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts,'' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) bluntly told Alexander in his opening remarks.

The facts, Reid said, are that too many Americans are going without medical care. Elderly Americans are cutting their prescriptions to make them last longer, he said, again turning to his Republican colleague and saying, "Lamar, you're entitled to your opinion, but not your own facts.''

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

"I right now have as good health care as anyone could have -- I've got a doctor right downstairs,'' President Barack Obama told a roomful of congressional leaders this morning. But there are millions of Americans who do not have that care.

The president, wearing a blue tie, sat adjacent to the vice president, also wearing a blue tie, in a Blair House assembly of red and blue lawmakers asked to find as much of a bipartisan agreement as possible on healthcare in a daylong summit.

Obama read a roll call of Republican lawmakers and the concerns that they have expressed about the need for better health care -- "Mitch, you've said the need for reform is not in question,'' the president told Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell ( R-Ky.) "Here's the bottom line. We all know this is urgent.... But this became an ideological battle,'' Obama said, and "politics trumped common sense.''

The goal today, he said, is to "focus on where we agree.''

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

En route to Blair House, Obama greeted the press: "Hi, guys."

"Comment to make?'' one asked.

"Looking forward to listening,'' Obama said.

"Do you have a Plan B?'' a reporter asked.

"I've always got plans,'' Obama said.

-- Mark Silva

* * * *

Read more from the start of our day of live-blogging below.

The summit also is viewable here, in a live-stream from MSNBC:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

by Mark Silva

In the spirit of this special day in Washington, where a few dozens members of Congress of both parties are sitting around a square table with the president, vice president and secretary of health and human services to see what might be hammered out on health care, we're offering an early Swamp caption contest.

The man pictured in a loincloth above was standing in a muddy rice paddy at Mimusubi shrine in Yotsukaido, near Tokyo, where hundreds of local dwellers took part in "the muddy rite," a ceremony to pray for a good harvest for the year and good health for babies.

(Photo by Koji Sasahara / AP)

We're accepting your captions here.

by Mark Silva

Sen. Dick Durbin, the majority whip of the Senate, insists that finding a common ground with Republicans on healthcare still is possible -- on the eve of a bipartisan healthcare summit in Washington -- but Democrats are prepared to move ahead with the president's proposed reforms, regardless of what Republicans do.

"Of course we are,'' Durbin (D-Ill.) says in an interview with National Public Radio's Morning Edition that will air tomorrow morning.

NPR's Steve Inskeep asks Durbin, one of President Barack Obama's strongest supporters and political mentors: "Are you willing to say flat out, 'Democrats are willing to pass this bill that most Americans tell pollsters they oppose, even without a single Republican vote. We're prepared to do that, if that's what's necessary?'

"I hope it doesn't come to that,'' Durbin replies in the interview, "but I can tell you, at the end of the day, if we end up doing nothing, the American people have a right to be upset. In the end, many of those who are critical of that package, I think when they see it in action are going to feel a lot different, more positive.''

"You hope it doesn't come to that,'' Inskeep tells the No. 2 Senate leader in their talk, "but part of the negotiation with Republicans would be that you would be prepared to go without them, if they don't go along. Are you prepared to go without them and just pass this, even though people seem to oppose it?'

"Of course we are,'' Durbin says. "You know the simple fact of the matter is, with the exception of Sen. Snowe voting for one form of the bill in committee, there's not been a single Republican senator who has voted for health care reform. Ah, they just haven't come around. Maybe this meeting with the president will make a difference.''

The interview airs in the morning -- with excerpts available tonight at NPR's The Two Way blog -- as the president prepares to assemble a cast of Democratic and Republican lawmakers at Blair House, the official visitors' residence across the street from the White House, for a summit on the way forward.

The meeting will be televised live by a number of cable TV networks, and The Swamp will be live-blogging the event, which starts at 10 am EST.

(Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and President Barack Obama, allies from Illinois and allies on healthcare, pictured above in a file photo by AP.)

by Mark Silva

With a nation still "emerging from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,'' in which eight million Americans have lost their jobs during the past two years, President Barack Obama says it's "no wonder'' that "people are "frustrated'' - and neither "the usual answers from the right or left'' are "inspiring much confidence.''

Other than that, all's well here in Washington - where another round of blizzard-force winds and some snow are predicted by week's end.

It's mostly cloudy in America, it seems.

"What's more, this recession follows what some have called the "lost decade" -- a decade in which the average family income fell while the costs of health care and tuition skyrocketed,'' Obama said at a quarterly meeting of The Business Roundtable a couple of blocks away in Washington today - "a decade in which a continued erosion of America's manufacturing base hollowed out many communities around the country and put too many good jobs out of reach...

"It's no wonder, then, that people are frustrated,'' the president said. "They're frustrated with government and they're frustrated with business. They're angry at a financial sector that took exorbitant risks by some in pursuit of short-term profits, and they're angry at a government that failed to catch the problem on time.

"They're angry at the price they paid to prevent a financial meltdown that they didn't cause, and they're angry that recovery in their own lives seems to be lagging the recovery of bank profitability,'' he said. "And although both parties are predictably scrambling to align themselves with people's frustrations, neither the usual answers from the left or the right seem to be inspiring much confidence.''

The president told the leaders of American companies that comprise nearly a third of the total value of the U.S. stock markets, with nearly $6 trillion in annual revenues and more than 12 million employees, that he has no interest in a "government takeover'' of the economy that critics have accused him of engineering -- not in health care, education or energy. But innovation across a variety of fronts, Obama said, will be the key to the nation's future economic well-being.

by Mark Silva

The "TEA Party,'' that anti-tax, anti big-government movement of people intent on turning out incumbents this year, will "disappear'' as the economy improves.

So says Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California whom some in his own party view as a RINO. Whatever his own situation may be, "Ahnold'' suggests that a movement without a leader, such as the leaderless TEA Party, which offers no apparent agenda, will dissolve as underlying economic unrest yields to recovery. With midterm elections looming, that still could be a question of timing, however.

"The TEA Party is an expression of anger and of disappointment,'' Schwarzenegger said in an interview last night with Greta Van Susteren on FOX News Channel's On the Record. "I'm just saying they're not going anywhere with it because nobody is coming up and saying, 'Here's our candidate, here's our solution, here's what we're going to do,' and have a whole policy debate over the various different issues....

"So this is why I think, in the end, when the economy comes back, I think that the TEA Party will disappear again,'' he said -- which begs the question of how quickly the economy will offer any signs of real recovery sufficient to quell that tea revolt.

With a new Congressional Budget Office report that the president's economic stimulus bill has offered new jobs for as many as 2 million people and added as much as 3.5 percentage points to the turnaround in the nation's Gross Domestic Product, the Californian suffering perhaps the worst state budgetary criris of any governor said this about the stimulus: "I think that not only I like it, but I think there's a lot of Republican governors that like it... I think that it has done great things for the state of California.

""I'm happy about it, and I told this to the president and I tell this to the world that during a time of crisis like this, anything is helpful,'' he said. ""I think that having a job is just such a fundamental and important thing because you feel productive. You make money. You don't feel like a loser that you've lost your job, and all those kind of things. I think it has been terrific. And you know, like, it has been very helpful for us."

by Mark Silva

With that bipartisan health-care summit coming Thursday, and the White House's plan for a health-care insurance overhaul on the table, one of the thorniest issues of the debate appears to be far from resolved within the president's own party.

Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan complains that the White House's proposal lacks the language which he insisted on including in the bill that cleared the House last year, prohibiting anyone who gets assistance from a proposed new health-insurance exchange from purchasing an abortion.

"It was at the last minute that Bart Stupak lined up enough Democrats and Republicans by saying that his amendment really was the status quo - it really was not, this went way past the current law,'' Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill) says.

And Schakowsky, who appeared on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show last night, had this to say about any final bill that House members ultimately address: "The pro-choice members, 42 of us who signed a letter saying we want to maintain the status quo, will not vote for the bill if it includes the Stupak language.''

That is the understanding of those working on the final version of the language, the Illinois congresswoman maintains - "that it is not going to pass if it has the Stupak language.''

Within the president's own party, the ideological clash of someone such as Stupak, who represents a sprawling region of northern Michigan, including the Upper Peninsula, and Schakowsky, an urban Democrat, is only part of the brew that makes any final passage of a health-care bill more than a matter for a bipartisan summit. The House's health-care bill passed with only one Republican vote, the Senate's with none -- and any final measure may not look much different, provided Democrats hold their own ranks.

by Christi Parsons

President Barack Obama will name Berkeley Law Professor Goodwin Liu to serve on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, making him the only active Asian-American judge on that court -- or possibly any federal appellate court -- if he navigates the confirmation process with the kind of credentials some conservatives love to hate.

Obama plans to send Liu's nomination to Capitol Hill today, according to a senior administration official, adding Liu's name to the list of seven other appellate court nominees currently awaiting approval from the Senate.

A prolific writer who has supported school choice as a solution to problems in inner-city education, Liu has served as faculty advisor to the California College Prep Academy, a public charter school, and thus came to the White House with the recommendation of some conservatives. At age 39, Liu's confirmation to the appellate court could eventually make him an attractive candidate for a future Supreme Court nomination.

In the political world, though, Liu is sure to be remembered as a past critic of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, co-authoring a report critical of Alito's record on capital cases as a lower court judge- the paper called Alito's opinions "disturbing" -- as well as testifying against the nominee in his 2006 confirmation hearings.

Liu is also the chairman of the board of the American Constitution Society, which in its mission statement opposes the "activist conservative legal movement." His most recent book points out shortcomings of the conservative legal theory of originalism, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning.

Even without a possible ideological fight, the confirmation process is already highly charged for Obama nominees, with Republican lawmakers stalling votes even on nominees they later go on to back. At the moment, there are a total of 26 judicial appointees awaiting votes in the Senate.

Still, once floor votes are allowed, Obama's judicial nominees have won strong bipartisan support. Supporters hope that Liu's personal story and slightly unpredictable politics will help him win confirmation.

by Mark Silva

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was admitted to a hospital overnight suffering from chest pains, has experienced a "mild heart attack,'' according to a spokesman.

Tests on the former vice president, who was said to be resting comfortably, showed "evidence of a mild heart attack,'' an aide said.

This would represent the fifth heart attack for a longtime and now retired political figure in Washington who has served at the White House of four presidents and served as a congressman from Wyoming.

Cheney served as an adviser or Cabinet-level aide in the administrations of three Republican presidents and as vice president to former President George W. Bush for two terms.

Cheney, 69, wears a pacemaker and has had four previous heart attacks since he was 37 years old. He has had quadruple-bypass surgery and two artery-clearing angioplasties.

Cheney aide Peter Long issued a statement today about the results of lab tests at George Washington University Hospital, where Cheney was admitted Monday and underwent a stress test and an unspecified heart procedure.

He said Cheney was expected to be released from the hospital by the end of the week.

by Mark Silva

The federal government's economic stimulus created jobs for at least one million people and as many as 2.1 million by the end of last year, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office today concludes.

When part-time and fulltime work is considered, the CBO reports, the act added as many as 3 million "full-time-equivalent'' positions to the nation's payrolls.

The controversial infusion of spending on public-sector jobs, tax cuts and development of new programs also added between 1.5 and 3.5 percentage points to the growth of the economy, according to a CBO report on the impact of the bill that President Barack Obama signed a year ago.

The ranges in the congressional office's findings have to do with the use of mathematical models: "CBO has estimated the law's impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies on the economy and using various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy,'' the agency reports.

The congressional office also estimates that the act increased federal outlays by about $158 billion and reduced revenues by $114 billion through December 2009.

The report provides new fodder for the White House's claim that the stimulus has aided in the recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression. It also hands ammunition to critics -- every Republican member of the House and all but three Republican senators opposed the bill -- who contend that no one can pin down the impact of legislation for which Republican leaders still ask: ''Where are the jobs?''

by Mark Silva

In the highly-charged, polarized world of oddly-attracting opposites that we call Washington, there is not a lot of room for political nuance.

You're for a bill, or against it.

You're with someone, or against him (her).

You can talk your way through an explanation about why you haven't reached an opinion on something like, say, gays in the military. But if you do, you're labeled evasive.

Enter Scott Brown, newest member of the U.S. Senate, the Republican from Massachusetts who claimed the seat that the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy held for nearly five decades and stripped the Democratic Party of its filibuster-proof super-majority.

And then proceeded this week to hand Democrats one of the votes they needed to overcome a filibuster on a jobs bill that the leadership and White House want.

This may be a senator who defies any simple branding: Supportive of abortion rights in a party long united against that choice, a GOPer unabashedly eager to see the White House and meet the "dynamic'' president with the "handsome'' family who reside there.

All of this comes across clearly in a refreshing piece that Frank Bruni has produced for the coming weekend's New York Times Magazine.

A seasoned writer with credentials in political reporting as well as restaurant reviews serves up a Sunday menu of anecdotes about a handsome young man whose sister once entered him in Cosmopolitan's Sexiest Man in America contest (he won that one, his first big national contest) -- and who pulled a $1,000 fee for posing nude at 22 with only his hand as a fig leaf, launching a brief modeling career that helped him through law school in New York -- a guy who excelled at high school basketball, got into Tufts, married a TV newscaster and built a career as a real estate lawyer, got into local politics as a property appraiser and served 12 years in the Massachusetts legislature before tackling a once seemingly impossible goal.

When it appeared that the Republican could actually win that Senate seat in that bluest of blue states, millions of dollars of campaign funding poured in, more than he could spend on TV ads.

In that simplified world of politics, charisma counts.

And winning is everything.

So a fiscally conservative father of two (perhaps not-so-"available'') girls, as he famously called them on victory night, a running guy who has kept himself in shape at 50, figured out the cache of navigating a GMC Canyon pickup truck on a campaign trail through some of the toughest times that Americans have seen and who also refuses to be categorized politically during some of the most categorically divisive times in modern politics could actually have quite a future in Washington.

The Swamp suggests taking the time to read this one.

(Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) is pictured above at a ceremonial swearing-in on Feb. 4. Photo by Alex Wong / Getty Images)

by Mark Silva

Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has gained a certain following among an anti-government crowd, says he has "no plans'' to run for president again.

Not even that CPAC straw poll vote over the weekend -- where Paul collected 31 percent of the straw vote among a few thousand people taking part in the conservative convention -- has convinced Paul to make a reprise of his 2008 bid for the GOP nomination.

"I have no plans to do that, that's a long way off and it's not very practical to do it,'' Paul said today in an appearance on FOX News Channel's FOX & Friends. "I haven't absolutely said, 'No, I will not,' but right now I have no plans to do it."

Having beaten out the three-time winner of previous CPAC straw polls, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Paul boasted today that "we had the largest percentage vote of anybody at CPAC historically.''

Still, a little less than one third of the straw vote "means there are people in opposition,'' Paul said, evoking the boos in the hall when the vote was announced. "It sounded to me like they might have been sore losers or something, maybe they couldn't take it very well. But, the truth is, the votes were there so they have to accept it."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama is confident that the widely touted, and in some quarters doubted, televised summit of bipartisan leaders on health care this week "will be the most productive if both sides come to the table with a unified plan to start discussion,'' a spokesman says today.

The public also should have a chance to see both parties' plans, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer says in a pre-dawn blog posting at the White House's Website.

"That's why yesterday the White House posted online the president's proposal for bridging the differences between the Senate- and House-passed health insurance reform bills,'' Pfeiffer writes.

"But you don't have to take our word for it: the proposal is posted right here at WhiteHouse.gov for everyone to examine,'' he notes. "You can read through the plan's bipartisan ideas section by section, or you can select your health care status and find out what the proposal would mean for you. You can even submit a question for our policy staff to answer.

"What you can't do just yet is read about the Republicans' consensus plan - because so far they haven't announced what proposal they'll be bringing to the table,'' Pfeiffer contends. "To be sure, there are many Republicans who share the president's conviction that we need to act on reform, and there are several pieces of Republican health care legislation out there. Previously we were told this was the House Republican bill. Is it still?''

The House's Republicans aren't impressed.

"Bear in mind, at this point, the White House's "plan" consists of an 11-page outline, which has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office or posted online as legislative text,'' Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House Republicans (not to be confused with the Republican National Committee chairman of similar name), writes in an email today. "So they want to reorganize one-sixth of the United States' economy with a document shorter than a comic book, and they're complaining that they can't find our plan on their own website? C'mon.''

"We look forward to hearing whether this is the proposal they'll bring,'' Pfeiffer writes today of the House GOP plan. "The Senate Republicans have yet to post any kind of plan, so we continue to await word from them. As of right now, the American people still don't know which one congressional Republicans support and which one they want to present to the public on Thursday.''

by Mark Silva

As congressional hearings into the recall of millions of Toyotas get underway today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood plans to inform his former colleagues that the government's investigation of the matter includes the possibility that electronic problems played a role in the sudden acceleration of the company's vechicles.

The company, which has apologized to customers and started retrofitting the gas pedals on vehicles,, has blamed the problem on floor mats and sticking pedals.

LaHood, a Republican former congressman from Peoria, Ill., will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's investigative panel, which is conducting the first congressional hearing into Toyota's problems with unintended acceleration.

Committee investigators have made preliminary findings that the government was slow to respond to 2,600 complaints of sudden unintended acceleration from 2000 to 2010. LaHood denies that and maintains the government had consistently pushed Toyota to correct its problems.

He also is ensuring the safety of cars going forward.

Or in reverse.

by Mark Silva

For years, John McCain ran as "the maverick.''

Now the Arizonan is running as the target.

J.D. Hayworth, a conservative Republican former congressman challenging the longtime senator for the seat that Barry Goldwater once held, suggests that McCain is "really a moderate.''

In an interview on the FOX Business Network, the senator's rival in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona this year isn't buying McCain's explanations for supporting the bank bailout that former President George W. Bush authorized in his final days.

"This is not his first rodeo,'' Hayworth said of McCain, the GOP's 2008 nominee for president. "To say he was misled when he suspended his campaign, when he forced the hand of President Bush to have that big meeting at the White House and suddenly he wasn't clear about what's going on...

"With all due respect to John, really he is sounding more like John Kerry than the John McCain I used to work with."

Fighting words.

"The country wants change -- this time the right kind of change, as in basic conservative policies,'' Hayworth said of McCain. "After 28 years in Washington, he's been there too long. It's time to replace the so-called maverick who's really a moderate with a consistent conservative."

Arizona isn't alone, Hayworth maintains -- pointing to another sunbelt state where the incumbent Republican governor is facing a fight within his party with a conservative Republican from Miami: Gov. Charlie Crist versus former state House speaker Marco Rubio. Like Hayworth, Rubio is giving a powerful incumbent Republican fits in the polls.

"People In Arizona and nationwide want a common sense consistent conservative,'' Hayworth said. "That's what we're seeing in Florida with Marco Rubio's rise. That's what we saw even in New Jersey, and that's what you're going to see in Arizona. With the help of the voters, I'll win the Republican primary and be elected to the Senate in November."

(J.D. Hayworth is pictured above at the kickoff of his Senate campaign last week at a rally in Phoenix. Photo by Ross D. Franklin / AP)

by Mark Silva

Former President Bill Clinton went for health-care reform his first year in office, failed, and lost the House to the Republicans in the midterm elections the next year.

President Barack Obama has gone for health-care reform his first year, failed so far -- though the White House rolled out a new plan today and vowed to push it with or without Republican help -- and polls show incumbents are in for a rough midterm ride.

But Clinton suggests that things won't be as bad for Obama as they were for him during his party's first midterm contest -- and that Obama has an advantage with the early political storm warning in Massachusetts that cost the party its super-majority in the Senate, offering him time to prepare for the fight ahead.

"He's a persuasive man and I hope he helps,'' Clinton said of Obama, in an interview today with FOX News Channel's Major Garrett. "I think the main thing is they've got a lot of advanced notice, and I think.... if they really focus and catch a break or two, I don't think it'll be as bad as it was in '94."

Asked about comparing this year's midterm challenge to the Republican rout of 1994, Clinton said: "Little bit... I think that the same thing happened. The health care is hard to do, but I thought it would happen this time because all the trends that prompted me to act are worse."

"If we get any breaks on the economy and my party's rank and file of leaders, you know, kind of keep their heads on straight and keep focusing on the need to show up and get counted, I don't think it'll be as bad as '94,'' Clinton said. "I think we'll do much better."

The challenge, he said, remains the same.

"Te problem is, it's very hard to see how America can be a leading economy in the world, in the 21st Century, if we spot everybody else a trillion dollars before we ever start to work,'' he said. "And that's essentially what we're doing with healthcare costs."

As for his own personal health these days, in the aftermath of some coronary artery stent implants not too many years after a four-way bypass operation, Clinton said that he is feeling fine, walking more and sleeping more -- he used to get by with five or six hours a night, he said, but is going for seven now.

"You walk a lot and you're used to staying active and you have a certain rhythm to your day, then when there's a variation, you can feel it,'' he said. "And you're not being a hypochondriac once you're over 60 to respond to something that's just different...

"I feel fine. I'm still trying to sleep a little more than normal because I'm just kind of getting used to it, but I have no pain. I feel great, my oxygen level's good, my energy level's good. I think it's fine... My advice is to keep doing regular exercise...I try to sleep at least seven hours now. I used to sleep five to six, and I need more now...''

The former president also is looking forward to walking his only daughter, Chelsea, down the aisle at her wedding. The secretary of state -- who spearheaded that push for healthcare in 1993 -- is looking forward to becoming a grandmother

"All I'm supposed to do is walk her down the aisle -- and pay for the wedding, of course -- and that will be one of the great honors of my life,'' he said. "I'm looking forward to it. And you know, I wouldn't mind being a grandparent and her mother really wants to be a grandparent."

"it is a ritual which symbolizes the fact of the passing of the bride out of her family's house and into her own house,'' Clinton said of the impending nuptuals. "It's a coming of age ceremony. It is a recognizing a passing of a generation ceremony. It's a profoundly important thing, I think.''

by Mark Silva

In his address to the nation's governors at the White House this morning, President Barack Obama assured them that he is "not going to rest" until there is more economic progress in each of their states. In his Economic Report to Congress last week, Obama said, ''My administration will not rest" until jobs are created to replace those lost.

All of which has given CBS News' Mark Knoller a nagging case of deja vu -- or is it deja ecoute?

Since taking office, Knoller reports today, the president has used the phrase at least 11 times about different aspects of his domestic agenda. "I will not rest until anybody who's looking for a job can find one," he told workers at a GM plant in Ohio in September. "I will not rest until the dream of health care reform is finally achieved in the United States of America," Obama said last May.

He has asserted his restlessness on the international front as well: "We will not rest until we account for our fellow Americans in harm's way." After the attempted attack on a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day, Obama said: "We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable."

But Obama is far from the first restless occupant of the Oval Office.

By Knoller's count, President George W. Bush uttered the words, "will not rest" at least 40 times about the challenge of defeating all Qaeda: "This country will not rest, we will not tire, we will not stop until this danger to civilization is removed."

President Bill Clinton said well after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103: "We will not rest until Libya complies with the requirements of the World community and surrenders for trial in the United States or Scotland the two Libyans accused of that brutal crime."

President George H. W. Bush told a gathering of federal prosecutors in 1990: "We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison."

President Ronald Reagan had called "America's education system...once the finest in the world,'' and vowed, "we will not rest until it is so again."

President Jimmy Carter told the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia in May 1980: "We will not rest until our fellow Americans held captive in Iran - against every tenet of law and decency - are safe and home free." In his failed reelection campaign, which had a lot to do with that first promise, Carter said he "reelection, the "will not rest" clause showed up with increasing frequency in Mr. Carter's political speeches. He said he "will not rest... until the working men and women in the auto industry are back on the job will full-time, steady work... (or) ...until every Soviet Jew is free to emigrate.''

President Gerald Ford said in 1976: "I will not rest until every American who wants a job can find a job and we have put all of America back to work."

President Richard Nixon told the families of American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia in 1970: "We will not rest until every prisoner has returned to his family and the missing have been accounted for."

All of which has led Knoller, CBS' relentless counter and chronicler of words-and-travels on the White House watch, to conclude that he may have finally figured out why all these presidents "grow old and tired-looking so quickly during their terms in office.''

(It could be time to give one promising phrase a rest, we suggest.)

by Mark Silva

If there's anything less meaningless than a "straw poll'' in which 2,395 people -- the great majority of them 25 and younger -- voiced 31-percent support for Texas Rep. Ron Paul as a presidential contender, we'd like to know what that might be.

The outcome of the weekend head-count of some, but not all, of the people who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference here may say more about Mitt Romney and the Republican field in general than it says about Paul, however.

Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who gave Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona a run for his money (with a lot of Romney's own money) in the 2008 GOP presidential primaries, had carried the straw poll at the annual CPAC event for three years in a row -- 2006, '07 and '08.

But this time, Romney was finishing second -- with 22 percent of the straw ballots -- to Paul, who also ran for president as a Republican in '08 without much visible yet very vocal support, and claimed 31 percent of the 2010 CPAC straw vote.

Does this mean that Romney is yesterday's news? And Paul is hot?

No, it doesn't really mean much of anything about Paul or Romney, other than the fact that Paul's fans are better at stuffing a straw ballot box than Romney's fans are.

But it does speak to the Republican field in some ways: That a crowd of young political activists are more interested in a Ron Paul candidacy than they are energized by former Gov. Sarah Palin, who pulled 7 percent in the wekeend CPAC straw poll, or Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who pulled 6 percent, suggests that the GOP is a party still in search of a leader. Which, after all, isn't a real news blast.

In this same straw poll, only 2 percent of the participants voiced approval for the job that President Barack Obama is doing, which is not surprising, but 70 percent voiced a favorable view of radio's Rush Limbaugh and FOX News' Glenn Beck, which is what it is.

With 10,000 registered at CPAC, just 2,395 participated in the straw poll. Almost half (48 percent) were students, more than half (56 percent) 25 years old or younger. Nearly two thirds ( 64 percent) were men. We didn't see an ethnic breakdown in the results, but we suspect we know the answer.

A crowd of angry young white men with enough energy to work a convention and a straw-poll campaign like Ron Paul as a political leader and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as spokesmen for their cause.

The GOP has its work cut out for it.

by Noam N. Levey and updated with reaction

Four days before his planned health summit with congressional leaders, President Barack Obama this morning unveiled his proposal to overhaul the nation's healthcare system, building on the gargantuan legislation developed by Senate Democrats last year.

The proposal, which the White House has posted on its website, includes all the major provisions backed by congressional Democrats, including a major expansion in coverage, broad new insurance regulations and initiatives to make the healthcare system more efficient.

It also represents the president's stated commitment to move forward with sweeping healthcare changes in the face of public anxiety and calls from Republicans to scrap the sweeping legislation and pursue more limited changes.

White House officials said the total cost of the plan would be around $950 billion over the next decade, offset with a mix of new taxes and cuts in federal Medicare spending.

The centerpiece of the president's plan to expand coverage to some 30 million people over the next decade is a new state insurance exchange in which people who do not get coverage through work would be able to shop for plans.

The federal government would oversee the plans, as it does now for members of Congress and other federal employees.

Additionally, the president would give the government new authority to regulate the premiums charged by private insurers, a new proposal that the White House made in response to steep rate hikes in California and elsewhere in recent months.

Following the Senate's lead, the president did not include a new government insurance plan - or public option - in his outline, reflecting the political delicacy of the concept.

Obama's plan also makes several other substantial changes to the Senate legislation, paralleling agreements hammered out by House and Senate Democrats last month.

House Republican Leader John Boehner was quick today to contend that the White House's new push for a health-care bill modeled largely on versions that already had cleared the House and Senate would undermine the bipartisan summit planned later this week.

"The president has crippled the credibility of this week's summit by proposing the same massive government takeover of health care based on a partisan bill the American people have already rejected,'' Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement issued by his office. "This new Democrats-only backroom deal doubles down on the same failed approach that will drive up premiums, destroy jobs, raise taxes, and slash Medicare benefits.''

Boehner complained that the televised health-care meeting this week "has all the makings of a Democratic infomercial.''

by Mark Silva

There are kind words for what it's called when someone opposes a multibillion-dollar economic stimulus bill in Congress and then touts its benefits back home:

"Having your cake and eating it'' -- President Barack Obama's term.

There's a tougher word for it, too:

"Hypocrisy'' -- retired Republican Sen. Alan Simpson's term.

Both are applied to the case of a couple of Alabama Republicans, Reps. Jo Bonner and Robert Aderholt, who "took to the U.S. House floor in July, denouncing the Obama administration's stimulus plan for failing to boost employment. "Where are the jobs?" each of them asked,'' as Bloomberg News tells the story this morning.

"Over the next three months, Bonner and Aderholt tried at least five times to steer stimulus-funded transportation grants to Alabama on grounds that the projects would help create thousands of jobs. They joined more than 100 congressional Republicans and several Democrats who, after voting against the stimulus bill, wrote Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood seeking money from $1.5 billion the plan set aside for local road, bridge, rail and transit grants.''

The $787-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed last year with no Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate. The Democratic Party and the president have chided congressmen who opposed the bill for touting its benefits.

Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming recruited by Obama to co-chair a new budget and deficit task force, tells Bloomberg's Alison Fitzgerald and Justin Blum that about-faces on government funding aren't surprising.

"It's the original sin of Washington -- it's hypocrisy," Simpson said. "You can't do that then say you go out and cut the other stuff."

Obama, during an address last week to the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, said congressional critics are calling the stimulus a "boondoggle" while "making appearances at ribbon-cuttings" for local projects financed by the bill. "They're trying to vote against their cake and eat it, too," the president suggested.

See the more of the story at Bloomberg News.

by Mark Silva

"It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or have visited his home,'' says the retiring Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, voicing a lament about a lost sense of camaraderie that lawmakers once enjoyed.

The demonization of the American political scene should be cause for concern among more than the few political leaders who bear the brunt of the assaults. It represents a degradation of a greater quality of life in America.

President Barack Obama is neither devil nor anti-Christ, though he has been called as much by some who cannot abide by his policies, his politics or his personality. Neither the speaker of the House nor majority leader of the Senate -- nor the minority leaders of either chamber - wears horns. None have laid claim to a halo either, neither the president nor his allies or adversaries.

Yet the ferocity of the political debate lately would suggest that evil is afoot in the government. But the greatest evil, perhaps, is the willingness of too many people to objectify the characters enmeshed in that debate as soulless warriors, robotic combatants as interchangeable as worn batteries.

Bayh, who is leaving the Senate at his term's end in January, recalls a time when senators of one party actually dined at the home of another party's senator, a time when a Republican leader laid a hand on the shoulder of a Democratic lawmaker and offered his help.

Bayh is the son of a senator who once ran for president - Birch Bayh. That was 1976, at a time when the White House was recovering from scandal within it, a long "national nightmare'' that ended with then-President Gerald Ford's pardoning of his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon.

There was no shortage of Democratic candidates to contest the Republican-held White House - among them Indiana's Bayh, Arizona's folksy and humorous "Mo'' Udall, the inimitable Fred Harris of Oklahoma, who lamented, when losing the first primary in New Hampshire, that "the little people" could not reach the levers on the voting machines, and certainly the "peanut farmer'' from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who marched through divided early primaries with but one-fifth of the vote to claim the nomination.

Carter, who attempted to blame a nation's recession on its own "malaise,'' wasn't long for the office - there's something about a "misery index'' that doesn't inspire much confidence. In his place came a Republican who knew how to court Democratic support, Ronald Reagan, followed by another, George H.W. Bush, who also understood that demonization has little value in the pursuit of consensus. Democrat Bill Clinton played a Republican hand with welfare reform. Republican George W. Bush parlayed Democratic support - with the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy and others - for passage of an educational reform.

Yet through the years, starting perhaps with the notion of one party that it had signed "a contract with America'' which the other party couldn't fulfill, and heightened with the complaints of one party that a presidential election had been "stolen'' by the other in Florida, a rift has opened that now seems impossible to heal. Health-care reform, one Republican claimed, would be the "Waterloo'' for Obama, who had pledged to help close the partisan rift - even while attempting to label the other camp as "the party of no,'' with Rush Limbaugh as its leader. It was Limbaugh who famously said early on that he hoped that Obama would fail. It is a filibuster-happy Senate minority that has done its best to make that dream come true. In the fray: No health-care reform.

by Christi Parsons and updated

President Barack Obama will announce an initiative to raise standards in public schools on Monday as part of a broad plan to upgrade the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, an administration official said Sunday.

In a speech to the annual meeting of the National Governors Assn., the president is expected to unveil a new requirement that states develop common standards in order to win a significant portion of NCLB funds.

A key feature of the 2002 education reform sponsored by then President George W. Bush was the use of yearly standardized tests to gauge school progress. The law was credited for improving accountability for educators and raising the standards for school children, but has been widely criticized for setting unrealistic goals and not giving schools the money to meet them.

The law also has been criticized for letting the 50 states set 50 different standards. The president's move on Monday will encourage states to adopt a common set of college and career-ready standards - generally, standards that are higher than what most states currently have.

Obama was one of the chief critics of the Bush-era law during the presidential campaign, often noting that the problem with "No Child Left Behind'' was that it "left the money behind.''

Now, the Obama administration may also be planning to leave the controversial name of the act behind as it crafts a new approach. The name was applied in 2002 to the revision of an existing federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is due for another revision.

Shortly after taking office, Obama challenged states to come up with standards and measurements that would better prepare public school children for college and careers.

On Monday, officials said, the president will applaud the governors for joining in a consortium to come up with new reading and math standards that better prepare students for life after graduation.

There will be two bonuses for states that either adopt their own higher readiness standards or aling with those of a consortium. They will be eligible to compete for the ESEA's "Title I'' funds, and also will have a competitive edge in other federal programs.
Federal law requires that each state set standards for what students should know and be able to do in critical subjects, but the law did not require states to consider whether the standards might help prepare students for college and the workplace. Many complain that these standards are too low.

"Over time, this race to the bottom threatens to place American students on a decline in relation to international peers," an administration official said Sunday. "Results on international assessments reveal that, in math, American students lag almost a full year behind students from the top-performing countries. In response to their international comparison results, other countries have raised their standards while we have lowered ours."

by Mark Silva

The bad news is, the government is broken.

The good news is, it's fixable.

This is the overwhelming consensus of the vast majority of Americans surveyed by CNN and Opinion Research Corp., in the results of a poll released today.

The survey of 1,023 adults, including 954 registered voters, was conducted Feb. 12-15. and carries a possible margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

But there seems little room for error in these findings:

Asked if "our system of government'' is broken, 86 percent said yes.

The other 14 percent no, which left no room for indecision.

Among those surveyed, 81 percent said yes, the government is broken, but it also can be fixed. Just five percent said yes, it is broken, and it cannot be fixed.

These are ominous findings, because we aren't only talking about a House and a Senate here, but "our system of government'' -- does that mean democracy is broken? Does that mean a bicameral Congress is broken? Does that mean the concept of three branches of government and checks and balances is broken? Or just the House, just the Senate, just the White House?

The interesting thing about this, too, is that similarly high numbers of people had concluded that the government was broken in October 2006, when CNN and Opinion Research asked the question -- 78 percent then said it was broken.

What followed was a turnover of the House that handed control to the Democratic Party in a midterm election which then President George W. Bush called a "thumpin.'''

Now, the architect of that Democratic takeover, former Rep. Rahm Emanuel, is working in the White House, chief of staff for the president of a government that even more people now called broken.

The theme seems to have taken hold.

The TEA Partiers say it's broken. Sarah Palin's palm notes suggest it's broken. A lot of senators are retiring this year, too -- with retiring Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana lamenting in an Op-ed in The New York Times today that the days of human rapport in politics, the days when a Democrat could have a Republican over for dinner, are gone.

Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty has suggested that it's time to take Tiger Woods' nine iron to the plate glass windows of the government -- he said so at the CPAC summit this week -- though it may be too late.

Most people think it's already broken -- but fixable for sure -- which will make for quite a glass repair bill.

by Christi Parsons

Predicting that the level of U.S. casualties in the nine-day-old military operation in Afghanistan will be "tough" to bear, Gen. David Petraeus said this morning that the assault on Marjah is just the beginning of a 12- to 18-month campaign to wipe out the country's safe havens for terrorists.

"These types of efforts are hard, and they're hard all the time," Petraeus said. "I don't use words like 'optimist' or 'pessimist,' I use 'realist.' ... We're in Afghanistan to ensure it cannot once again be a sanctuary for the kinds of attacks that were carried out on 9/11.''

The flow of 30,000 new troops which President Barack Obama recently ordered to the region - 5,400 have arrived there already - is starting to produce "output," the head of the U.S. Central Command said. He called the Marjah operation the "initial salvo" in the overall campaign.

Petraeus offered his assessment on NBC News'Meet the Press, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell praised the "comprehensive strategy" under which the Obama administration is ratcheting up pressure on al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan.

Speaking on CBS News' Face the Nation,Powell said the success of the Afghan assault can't be judged now, while U.S. Marines and other NATO forces are fighting to clear the Taliban out of Marjah, their most populous stronghold in the country.

"The whole success of this operation will hinge on the ability of the Afghan government ... to keep people from coming back" said Powell, noting that Americans and other allied forces "can't stay forever."

But generals on the ground are focused on carrying out the operation, now nine days old, part of a larger plan to put the nation more securely under the control of Afghan authorities. Twelve NATO service members, including at least Americans, died in the first week of the offensive.

In his interview with NBC's David Gregory, Petraeus suggested that loss is inevitable, given the intensity of the action launched just over a week ago.

"When we go on the offensive, when we take away sanctuaries or safe havens, they're going to fight back, and we're seeing that in Marjah," Petraeus said. "But we are going after them across the spectrum."

by Mark Silva

In the spirit of the Olympic Games underway, we could think of few more fitting role models than the late John Belushi, featured here in the high jump and track events.

It was not only the performance on the field that distinguished the dean of the original Saturday Nighta Live.

It also was the rigor of the training: That breakfast of champions, cigarettes and chocolate donuts.

Enjoy the show. We're heading back to training table.

See you back in the real world on Monday.

by The Swamp Guy

Sarah Palin complained that it wasn't very funny when the girl whom "Chris'' was dating on The Family Guy, a character with Down syndrome, said her mother is the governor of Alaska.

The woman who played that character on the FOX cartoonish program last Sunday, who actually has Down syndrome, suggests that Palin, the former governor of Alaska, needs to "lighten up.''

No word from The Family Girl on Rahm Emanuel.

by Mark Silva

That potential Sunday morning news show-debate between Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, and Marco Rubio, the former Republican state House speaker challening him for their party's 2010 Senate nomination, is on.

FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace will moderate the debate.

Crist, long popular in Florida, suddenly faces a rigorous challenge from a more conservative competitor, a Miamian who has the backing of outside conservative groups complaining that Crist has played too cozily with President Barack Obama's stimulus spending in a state where employment has reached nearly 12 percent.

by Michael Muskal

Unlike colleges, high school commencements often have to settle for minor celebrities and former graduates whose fame is local at best.

Now high schools have a chance to snare a Nobel Prize winning president of the United States.

The White House today announced that public high schools will have a chance to win President Barack Obama as a commencement speaker this spring. To win the contest, the school must demonstrate how it is best helping prepare students to fulfill Obama's goal of having the United States lead the world in college graduates.

"Public schools that encourage systemic reform and embrace effective approaches to teaching and learning help prepare America's students to graduate ready for college and a career," Obama said in a video announcing the competition, called The Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge.

Education is one of the administration frequently cited goals. Obama has pitched for more aid to all levels of schools and has called for an increase in federal funding for education.

Applications to win Obama must be submitted by March 15. Details are at whitehouse.gov/commencement.

by Mark Slva and Kathleen Hennessey and updated.

Google Tiger Woods.

You'll find Tiger Woods, the scandalized and long-sequestered golf star returning to the public stage today with a news conference.

Google Tiger Woods.

You'll find Tim Pawlenty, the retiring Republican governor of Minnesota thinking about a campaign for his party's presidential nomination in 2012, on stage today at the CPAC convention.

That must have been what Pawlenty, usually a fairly mild-mannered politician, had in mind when he mouthed an attention-getter for his conservative audience this morning:

""A big event is happening in America this morning. Tiger Woods is holding his press conference.

"I think we can lean a lot from that situation -- not from Tiger but from his wife. So she said, 'I've had enough.' She said, 'No more.' I think we should take a page out of her play book and take a nine iron and smash the widows out of big government in this country!"

Smashing the windows out of big government.

Sort of like Smashing Pumpkins?

"For all that I have done, I am so sorry,'' Woods said at his official re-entry to the limelight today.

Pawlenty has nothing to apologize for yet.

But tt could get pretty windy in the nation's Capitol without the windows.

by Mark Silva

What's paid in Las Vegas at a presidential-level fundraising reception stays in the coffers of the Democratic National Committee - until it's time to rescue troubled party leaders such as Sen. Harry Reid.

President Barack Obama, who has had a few controversial words of his own for the excess that is Vegas, made a "pit stop'' at the ornate Bellagio hotel and casino last night before heading to the home of George J. Maloof Jr., owner of the Sacramento Kings, the Sacramento Monarchs and the Palms Casino Resort, for a DNC fundraiser.

This was the president's third fundraiser of the day on a swing through Colorado - where he slipped on the home state of the Colorado governor in the state where Obama was nominated for the presidency, calling Gov. Bill Ritter governor of California and then begging forgiveness for a certain time-zone disorientation.

The fundraiser at the Sheraton in Denver had drawn several hundred people to a small ballroom, where Sen. Mike Bennet (D-Colo.) was the beneficiary of the party's presidential fundraising prowess.

Obama recalled that far bigger political rally at the Mile High stadium: "I made a promise to you not that I was going to tell you what you wanted to hear, not that I was always going to do what was popular."

The president also acknowledged the mood of a nation upset about lingering unemployment in the aftermath of the worst recession since the Great Depression: "Understandably, people are scared. And sometimes when people are scared, politics can get rough."

And the president, who has reached out to Republicans lately, also called some within the rival party "more interested in tearing the other party down than building America up."

And he gave his rivals some "hell'' - ala Truman.

At one juncture, Obama referred to Ritter as governor of "California," Bill Ritter, and quickly realized his mistake. "East Coast time - it's past my dinner.''

At another fundraiser at The Fillmore Auditorium in Denver, the president acknowledged "your outstanding governor.... Bill Ritter...'' and the Denver mayor who hopes to replace the retiring Ritter.

"An outstanding mayor, who I think actually might make a pretty good governor - John Hickenlooper in the house,'' Obama said. "It is great to be back in Colorado.''

"We love you!'' someone yelled, launching a refrain reminiscent of the campaign days when the president's party wasn't so troubled.

"I love you back,'' Obama said.

"I've got some good memories of Denver, including one just down the road at Mile High Stadium,'' Obama said of his nomination by the party. "Some of you may have been there. You know, that night I talked about the promise of America. And I want you to know that not a single day goes by that I don't think about the obligation that I have to keep that promise alive for every single American and every single Coloradoan... Thank you for giving me the privilege of every single day thinking about how can we make that American Dream live for everybody, not just for some...

"One year later, thanks largely to the Recovery Act, we can stand here again and say that a second depression is no longer a possibility,'' the president told his audience. "An economy that was shrinking by 6 percent a year ago is now growing by nearly 6 percent. According to independent, nonpartisan economists, there are about 2 million Americans who are at work today who would otherwise be unemployed....

"Now, you wouldn't know any of this if you just listened to those who are trying to score political points by attacking me or attacking Michael (Bennet_ or what we did, despite the fact that a lot of these guys, when it comes to the ribbon-cuttings for the projects they show up,'' he said. "They were holding up those big checks - 'Look what I did for you."

"You know, I'm not going to give them hell,'' Obama said. "I'm going to tell the truth, and they'll think it's hell.

"That's what Harry Truman said.''

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama has tapped a bipartisan pair of budget hawks to help steer a path out of the deficits that have consumed the federal government; Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff for President Clinton, who left office with a budget surplus for his successor.

First Clnton's successor, President George W. Bush, went on to record record new annual deficits in excess of $400 billion. And then Bush, leaving office in the midst of a financial market meltdown, federal bank bailout and recession-starved federal revenue, handed his own successor, President Barack Obama, a $1.3 trillion deficit.

Obama, who maintains that he can rein in the record $1.6 trillion annual deficit projected for 2010 -- cutting it to less than $800 billion by the end of his term -- has called on help to recommend ways out of the hole further along the road. The president also has said that all ideas are on the table, and that means taxes as well as budget cuts -- the nation cannot cut its way out of these deficits, the president maintains.

Bowles, joining Simpson on the PBS NewsHour this evening, described their task as "staggering.''

by Mark Silva

A couple of Nobel Peace Prize winners will meet today at the White House:

The president of the United States, and the exiled Buddhist spiritual leader of Tibet.

President Barack Obama's meeting in the Map Room today with the Dalai Lama isn't so much about the words the two share as it is the message they send to Tibetans and China, which is infuriated over the meeting.

Obama, remember, was awarded his Nobel last year for the promise of peace that he presents in the world - not for any realization of it. The 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the prize n 1989, after the protests in China that culminated in a crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

The Chinese, we're told, will be "watching closely to see how great a stage Obama offers'' the Dalai Lama, the renowned man of peace whom Chinese authorities view as a dangerous separatist.

When former President George W. Bush met with the Dalai Lama, they convened their talks in the private residence of the White House - though Bush made a high-profile appearance at the 2007 awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to a leader exiled since 1959. (Pictured here with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia in an AP photo from the ceremony.)

Obama will meet the man in the Map Room, where the great charts of history are collected - including one old working map depicting the fronts of the armies of World War II. This room in the basement of the White House is not the Oval Office, which the president reserves for meetings with other world leaders.

"The optics of this thing are incredibly important to the Chinese," Michael Green, Bush's former senior Asia adviser, tells the AP. "The Chinese government is preoccupied with protocol and how things look."

That means: What will be portrayed of the meeting? The White House plans to release an official photo of the two, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace, both with world-size conflicts on their hands.

by Mark Silva

There's a certain circularity to this little spat:

It revolves around a FOX universe, where a cartoon program that knows few boundaries featured the character Chris on Sunday falling for a girl with Down syndrome. When he asked what her parents do, she said, "my mom is the former governor of Alaska."

On FOX News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor on Tuesday night, the real former governor of Alaska took exception to the FOX program's joke about her youngest child, Trig. Palin also is a FOX News contributor.

It was OK a while back, however, in Palin's recent appearance on FOX News Sunday, that radio's Rush Limbaugh had dismissed Democrats as "retards.'' That was "satire,'' Palin explained.

That had led Comedy Central's Steven Colbert rather indelicately to ask who was the retard, with a modifier that we'll leave to Palin's own narrative below - a modifier which the White House's own Rahm Emanuel had once employed, leading to a recent apology to the people who sponsor the Special Olympics. (The president, too, once had had to apologize for likening his own bowling skills to those of Special Olympiads.)

Last night, on The O'Reilly Factor, Palin, the GOP's 2008 nominee for vice president and recent star of the TEA Party "convention" in Nashville, weighed in from Arkansas with some thoughts about the show, The Family Guy.' And she had some thoughts about the White House's chief of staff as well.

"This world is full of cruel, cold hearted people, who would do such a thing,'' Palin told host Bill O'Reilly, who made an effort at sorting out the difference between the pass that Palin had given Limbaugh and the criticism that she had for Emanuel and now The Family Guy.

"Look, I look at Trig and I see perfection,'' his mother said. "I see a precious little child already toddling around. You can see that he has a heart of gold. I also can see into the future that Trig is going to have a pretty tough challenging life in front of him. He's going to face things special needs children will be facing, much more difficult than we ever will. So why make it tougher on the special needs community? That's what I thought when I first heard about this episode that really isn't funny....

"You know, you had Rahm Emanuel using the f'ing retard term, calling people out,'' Palin said. "And you've had other people mocking, even our president mocked Special Olympiads. And well, what do you say about this FOX Hollywood episode of this cartoon?...

"When is enough enough?'' Palin asked. "And when are we going to be willing to say, you know, some things just aren't really funny.''

by Mark Silva and updated

One year after the signing into law of a $787-billion economic stimulus bill, Republicans still are asking, 'Where are the jobs?' -- while Democrats accuse the GOP of enjoying the benefits of the act back home even as they complain about it.

"Republicans don't want to acknowledge that the recovery act has created jobs -- many of them in their own districts," a Democratic National Committee Web-ad says today. ""Except when they're asking for funding to create those very jobs."

The DNC claimed this week that as many as 93 Republican lawmakers have claimed benefits from the stimulus in their states or districts after having voted against the package. The ad targets three senators -- Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) -- and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Ala.) for alleged flip-flips on the recovery act.

McConnell contends that, with unemployment still near 10 percent, the White House has fallen short of its initial predictions that joblessness could be reined in below 8 percent by this stage in the recession recovery.

"In the first year of the trillion-dollar stimulus, Americans have lost millions of jobs, the unemployment rate continues to hover near 10 percent, the deficit continues to soar and we're inundated with stories of waste, fraud and abuse,'' McConnell said today. "This was not the plan Americans asked for or the results they were promised."

McConnell's office also says "the DNC ad gets it wrong on McConnell. He has talked about funding for the Bluegrass Army Depot for their efforts to destroy chemical weapons,'' a perennial issue for the senator. It was funded tthrough the 2010 fiscal year military construction budget, his office says -- not the stimulus bill.

"The DNC's research department isn't perfect,'' McConnell's office suggests.

(Actually, neither is McConnelll's statement entirely on track: The deficit which the White House predicts for 2011 is somewhat smaller than the record projected this year, with an added projection that it shouldl be cut in half by 2013.)

The White House and supporters of the act contend that, in addition to the far-reaching tax relief that the act provided in its first year, more than 1 million jobs have been created or saved -- 595,000 during the last quarter of 2009 -- and that the climb out of recession would have been much more gradulal without it.

The Gross Domestic Product has grown significantly during the first two quarters of an economic turnaround from a recession that started in December 2007. The White House acknowledges that unemployment will remain high this year.

The public, for its part, has seen a lot of road signs touting the work of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in fixing roads and bridges, but a CBS News New York Times poll finds that few believe the act has created jobs.

The White House is seeking a new job-creating act, with $100 billion in tax incentives for investment in small business and credits for those that create jobs.

The stimulus act was passed without any Republican votes in the House and two Republican votes in the Senate. The president signed it into law on Feb. 17, 2009.

by Michael Muskal

President Barack Obama today pledged $8 billion in loan guarantees needed to build the first U.S. nuclear power plant in nearly three decades.

Speaking at a training center at the Landham, Md., headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 26, the president spoke favorably of nuclear power as part of a mix of energy alternatives to oil.

"In order to truly harness our potential in clean energy, we'll have to do more," Obama said. "In the near term, as we transition to cleaner energy sources, we'll have to make tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. We'll need to make continued investments in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies, even as we build greater capacity in renewables like wind and solar.

"And we'll have to build a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in America.," he said.

The Obama administration plans to supply about $8 billion in loan guarantees for the plant that will provide thousands of construction jobs in the next few years, and about 800 permanent jobs in the years to come.

"This is only the beginning. My budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe, clean nuclear facilities - and we'll continue to provide financing for clean energy projects here in Maryland and across America," Obama said.

Acknowledging that some environmentalists will oppose the decision to help fund the construction of the nuclear power plant, Obama also insisted that clean, safe nuclear power is environmentally preferable to burning coal in outdated plants. Obama has also called for upgrading coal facilities as part of his push to break the nation's reliance on oil.

by Mark Silva

There's a reason that Secretary of State Hillary Clnton, traveling in the Middle East this week, is warning that Iran is bcoming a "military dictatorship.''

The warning, Clnton says, may solidify support for international sanctions against the Islamic republic intent on developing its nuclear capability -- for peaceful power generation, the Iranians maintain; for bomb-building, the West asserts.

In an inteview today with Bloomberg Television in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia , the traveling chief U.S. diplomat maintained that her comments are "important for countries that are still evaluating" whether to support sanctions and that may still believe that Iran is "a democracy, but for a flawed election."

It's also a message to Iran's religious and political leaders, she said.

On Monday, Clinton told a student audience in Qatar that those Iranian civic and relgiious leaders are being "supplanted" by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has played a key role in suppressing anti-government protests since last summer.

The United Nations is moving toward a resolution with new sanctions against Iran that "will be targeted at the Revolutionary Guard," Clinton said.

The Guard has "assumed greater and greater responsibility, not just in the security sector and not just in the nuclear program but in the economic and political arenas as well," she said in the interview with Bloomberg TV.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki earlier today rejected Clinton's allegations of growing army influence, calling it a "trick" intended "to divert public opinion in the region."

Clinton's three-day trip carried her to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, oil- and gas-producing nations where the he U.S. is seeking support for objections to Iran's nuclear development. See more of the Clinton interview and the background at Bloomberg.

by Michael Muskal

After dropping out of a re-election campaign, Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana stepped up another campaign today, by pushing his objections to the partisanship which he says has crippled the political process.

"There's just too much brain-dead partisanship," Bayh, 54, said during his morning appearances on television. "The extremes of both parties have to be willing to accept compromises."

Complaints about partisanship are nothing new in Washington, though it has again become a popular excuse for why the Obama domestic program, and in particular, healthcare overhaul, have hit roadblocks. President Narack Obama has called for greater bipartisanship and has met with congressional leaders of both parties to try to ease the path.

Obama's pitch to Republicans has had little impact so far, though some of his appointees have been freed from the grasp of the Senate. He is scheduled to meet in a bipartisan healthcare summit next week that will be closely watched.

Most polls have shown an angry, anti-incumbent mood among voters, hit by a collapsing economy, dismay with Wall Street bonuses and Washington's focus on healthcare that has yet to yield any result.

An Associated Press-GfK poll in mid-January found just 32 percent approving of how Congress was handling its job and people were almost evenly split about how they felt about their own congressman. That is a bad sign, because people traditionally hate the institution but tend to like their own representative.

A CBS News/New York Times poll in early February was even more dire; 81% said it was time to elect new people to Congress. Only 8 percent said most members deserve re-election.

With those numbers nationwide, it is hardly a surprise that the number of senators choosing to retire has reached 11, the largest since the mid-1990s.

The move to the exits, however, is at least one good example of bipartisanship -- with six Republicans and five Democrats on the way out.

by Mark Silva

JACKSONVILLE, Fla -- This may say it all:

In the midst of the political turmoil roiling in so many places, there are places in America that stand out for their excellent senses of "well-being.''

This is not one of them.

Indeed, Florida is unique in the newest report of the Gallup Poll's Healthways Well-Being Index for having three major metropolitan areas near the bottom of the well-being measure: Jacksonville, Tampa and Miami, three big points of a substantial triangle.

And, as the president heads west this week for some fundraising and campaigning to bolster his party's prospects in the tough midterm elections ahead, he will be leaving from one of the most satisfied places in the nation -- Washington, D.C. -- bound for one of those cities at the bottom of the well-being list: Las Vegas.

It could be that the view of the economy from Washington has been hindered by the well-being of its own surroundings. Out in Las Vegas, the Senate majority leader faces a fight for reelection.

We all know the way to San Jose, but we may not have known that the metropolitan area of California enjoys the highest measure of well-being in Gallup's survey of several factors. The Washington, D.C./Alexandria, Va., stands just a notch behind it. Raleigh, N.C., stands close behind, and Minneapolis, too.

The Las Vegas/Paradise (don't you love it the name?) area sits at the bottom of the list of 52 major metropolitan areas -- places with more than 1 million people. Providence, R.I. -- on a clear day, you can see Fall River -- ranks close to the bottom.

Tampa weighs in next, with Jacksonville right behind it and Miami close behind.

Chicago weighs in somewhere around the middle of this list, alongside St. Louis, Baltimore and Milwaukee. Los Angeles weighs in just a notch above them.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index score measures "an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities.

It's measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 representing "fully realized well-being.'' And for the record, nobody comes out close to 100 on this test.

Here in Florida, where unemployment stood at close to 12 percent in the last count, mortgage foreclosures have decimated many communities -- "Bank owned,'' read the sign on one house out at Jacksonville Beach over the weekend, as we watched the sun lift off from the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.

Charlie Crist, the governor here once viewed as a shoo-in for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Republican Mel Martinez of Orlando, now faces a fight within his party for the GOP nomination. Marco Rubio, a young and former state House speaker from Miami, enjoys the backing of conservative interests, including the many outside forces such as the Club for Growth which have sought to seize the party from moderates.

Not a time for moderation, it would appear, here at the bottom of the well-being barrel. Does this list even mean anything? Maybe not. But the perhaps-coincidental findings and political pictures aren't easy to overlook.

We can report, however, that we have delivered our father on his annual winter sojourn south, and the level of well-being in the small beach communtiy where he has staked his temporary homestead is pretty fine. So if you're not hearing a lot from us this week, you'll know why. We're looking for some well-being of our own.

by Janet Hook and updated

Adding to Democrats' political woes in the 2010 midterm elections, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) unexpectedly announced today that he will not run for a third term in a Republican-leaning state, opening up a seat that his party now is likely to lose.

Bayh, a centrist Democrat who served as governor of Indiana from 1988-1996 and had a short-lived run for president during the 2008 campaign, faced a re-election challenge from former Republican Sen. Dan Coats.

But Bayh said that did not figure in his decision to quit Congress. Instead, sources close to him said, Bayh had long been frustrated with the partisanship and gridlock that made it hard to make important policy changes in Congress.

``After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so in Congress has waned,'' Bayh said..

Two Democratic House members from Indiana - Reps. Brad Ellsworth and Baron Hill - are considered possible candidates to succeed Bayh, but the popular former governor's departure from the ticket gives Democrats a new burden in their already troubled bid to hold on to control of the Senate.

It is already widely taken for granted that the midterm elections will reduce the 59-seat majority now held by the Senate Democratic caucus; the only question is how big a bite the GOP will take.

Bayh's is the latest in a steady stream of retirements and other bad news for the Democratic candidate field.

In recent weeks, the party's prospects dimmed significantly in Delaware, where the party's preferred candidate - Vice President Joe Biden's son Beau - decided not to run. In North Dakota, Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan decided not to seek reelection, leaving the conservative state an almost-certain pick up for Republicans. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is facing a potentially bitter primary fight to win the seat she received by appointment after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left the Senate.

President Barack Obama commended Bayh for devoting his career to serving his "fellow Hoosiers. During that time, he has fought tirelessly for Indiana's working families, reaching across the aisle on issues ranging from job creation and economic growth to fiscal responsibility and national security.''

by Mark Silva

We heard a certain tone-setter last night, heading into this week of living politically, in a year of living politically:

It came from Ann Coulter, who had a lively conversation with FOX News Channel's Sean Hannity in which Coulter, the popular online conservative columnist, said this to the audience: Remember, America, "There are a lot of bad Republicans. There are no good Democrats.''

That's one measure of the polarization the nation's major political parties face heading into the 2010 midterm elections, with voters telling pollsters they are likely to show roughly the same support for the generic candidates of each party but voters also saying they are more inclined to turn out the incumbent of either party.

There's a long way to go from here to November, time for congressional leaders and the White House to see what they can salvage of a domestic agenda that provides either a new measure of job security for Americans, a promise of health care, or perhaps both. If neither emerges from the spring and summer sessions, the fall's contests will become only that more contentious.

President Barack Obama, who will tour a job-training program in the Washington area on Tuesday, will leave town on Thursday -- following a meeting with the Dalai Lama at the White House. The president will head for Denver, where he will speak at a fundraiser for Sen. Mike Bennet (D-Colo.)

On Friday, the president will head for Las Vegas -- where the president's own words for corporate excess in the city of sin have prompted some explaining.

The president will be the headliner at a Democratic National Committee fundraising reception in Las Vegas on Thursday night.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is one of the incumbents in trouble this year. He faces a tough reelection fight this fall. The president and the senator on Friday will be meeting with business leaders and citizens "about how he and Sen. Reid are working together to address the economic challenges facing Nevada.''

Not to mention the political threat facing the Democrats who control Congress, at a time when discontent with incumbents is as high as it was in 2006, when the Republicans took a "thumpin''', and in 1994, when the Democrats were put in the dog-House.

It's going to be that kind of a year.

by Mark Silva

Dick Cheney had a lot to say today.

On the question of what the former vice president makes of his party's nominee for vice president in 2008 -- and on Alaskan Sarah Palin's prospects as a presidential candidate -- Cheney said: 'I haven't made a decision yet on who I'm going to support..

"I think all of the prospective candidates out there have got a lot of work to do if in fact they are going to persuade a majority of Americans that they are ready to take on the world's toughest job," Cheney said in a wide-ranging interview today on ABC News' This Week.

Asked by ABC's Jonathan Karl if the government should have had the option to use "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Nigerian accused of trying to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day, Cheney said: "I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table...

"Now, President Obama has taken them off the table,'' Cheney said. "He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake.''

The former secretary of defense during the first Bush administration does support something that Obama is ordering, however: Repeal of the policy that prevents gays and lesbians from openly serving in the military, which Obama's chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has supported.

"Twenty years ago, the military were strong advocates of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' when I was secretary of defense. I think things have changed significantly since then," Cheney said. "I'm reluctant to second-guess the military in this regard... When the chiefs come forward and say, 'We think we can do it,' then it strikes me that it's -- it's time to reconsider the policy.''

The former vice president is in agreement with the president on something else too -- the escalation of military forces in Afghanistan:

"I'm a complete supporter of what they are doing in Afghanistan. I think the president made the right decision to send troops into Afghanistan," Cheney said. "I thought it took him a while to get there."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama today is talking about the budget, federal spending and reining in the deficit.

He is talking about "paying as you go.''

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is talking about something else: The trial of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, with a complaint that the White House is treating al Qaeda terrorists as if they were "common criminals.''

We're starting to see a theme here, in the duel;ling weekly addresses of the White House and the GOP. See the president's address above, the GOP address below and read them both below, here in the Swamp.

And let us know what you think the theme might be.

by Mark Silva

Ben Quayle, son of a former vice president, plans to run for Congress in Arizona, father Dan Quayle announced today in an appearance on FOX News.

And here came word from another former Republican vice president -- Bush 41's political partner -- about the Obama administration: Quayle accused President Barack Obama of having a "''we know best" attit