Morning Must Reads -- Tripping up on Capitol Hill

From Chris Stirewalt and the DCExaminer

Boston Herald -- Hush comes to shove
Columnist Michael Graham looks at the debacle that was Martha Coakley’s Washington health-industry lobbyist fundraiser on Tuesday night.

He argues that for a campaign that can’t shoot straight (spelling Coakley’s state “Massachusettes” in an ad, saying in a debate there were not terrorists in Afghanistan, etc.) – the event (first reported by Examiner colleague Tim Carney) crystallized a lot of what Bay Staters don’t like about the candidate.

The event got extra attention in Boston because part of Coakley’s entourage shoved The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack into a rail. To tell the tale in Boston, reporters had to explain where she was (schmoozing with health industry lobbyists) and what question she was running from (whether she still thought Afghanistan was free from terrorists after recent bombings.)
Shoving McCormack made irresistible video and pictures for TV and Web sites, and Graham thinks what’s said setting up the shot may turn the tide for fed up Massachusettes and Massachusers.

“All the guy did was ask a question and the Coakley campaign pushed him to the curb. How many Massachusetts voters watched that video and thought ‘Pal, I know just how you feel’?
Coakley may not realize it, but we’re tired of being pushed around. Tuesday is our chance to push back.”

Los Angeles Times -- Tax expansion could pay for healthcare overhaul
Washington’s attack on capital investment has come to the health discussion as Democrats make their final push on a health bill.

Meeting for six hours with President Obama at the White House (which you didn’t see on C-SPAN) congressional Democrats tried to hammer out a deal that could pass both houses swiftly. With fears that the Massachusetts Senate race could deliver them an unhappy surprise the president and his party are plunging into the work of passing a plan right away.

A sticking point has been that the Senate plan is partially funded through a tax on high-end health insurance, including many union policies, including government workers’. The House wants a special “millionaires’ tax” that Senators worry will hit small businesses and do nothing to discourage expensive health plans.

Why would the government want to "discourage" expensive health plans? What constitutes "expensive"? Who decides? It's my money and if I want the best healthcare coverage I can afford, I shouldn't be penalized or "discouraged". Not only is it unconstitutional, it's stoopid.

Writers Janet Hook and Noam Levey tell us that one solution seriously discussed at the meeting with President Obama was to exempt union policies from the plan and repace the lost revenue by applying Medicare payroll taxes to investment income.

A bill that punishes senior citizens already would take another swipe at anyone living off dividends or annuities. Plus, disincentives to investments in a sluggish economy seem like a daft thought.

That Democrats would even include such a wild idea at this point suggests that things are getting a little loose in the turns as Democrats try to get into the home stretch.

“Under current law, the top rate on capital gains and dividend income is 15%. That is scheduled to rise to 20% in 2011 if the George W. Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire.”

Washington Post -- Obama administration seeks tax hike on financial firms to recoup cost of bailout
Writer Binyamin Appelbaum has learned that the financial industry tax to be proposed by the Obama administration today will take the form of a special penalty on inter-bank borrowing: loans taken by financial firms to make investments without disrupting their main holdings.
The "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee” would apply to the 50 largest financial institutions, including those owned by the government, and is designed to rake in the $90 billion estimated cost of the financial bailout, and then some.

The goal is to prevent another financial crisis by discouraging investments and big profits on Wall Street. The proposal does not address that improvidently arranged government policies for backing bad mortgages at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made the crisis possible.

“The president's proposal will be included in the draft budget delivered to Congress in early February. What emerges from Congress, however, could be markedly different. Some members of both chambers are calling for a more punitive tax. Proposals range from a 75 percent levy on bonuses to a toll on financial transactions.”

Dana Milbank -- 'Sorry' still seems to be the hardest word on Wall Street
Lloyd Blankfein seems like the kind of guy who accepts the loathing of others like a military decoration. If that’s so, he wears more medals than General Petraeus.

Testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Wednesday, the Goldman Sachs CEO sneered his way through the session.

Milbank rings his bell for refusing to accept any responsibility for incinerating the financial system by selling souped-up investments to customers while simultaneously placing big bets that those investments would crash and burn.

What sticks out most to me about Bully Blankfein’s testimony, though, is his inability to admit that he’s no capitalist swashbuckler, but a mooch who relies on friends in government to survive.

“When Wall Street collapsed 16 months ago, Goldman benefited from multiple forms of government bailouts: $10 billion in TARP money from the Treasury, billions more in payments to Goldman as part of the AIG bailout, and much more in the form of federal government lending programs. Regulators also allowed Goldman to convert itself into a bank holding company, an extension of federal backing that let the firm avoid the fate of Lehman Brothers. Without the federal government propping up Wall Street, Goldman, like most firms, probably would have failed.”

Bloomberg -- Haiti Rescuers Race to Find People Buried in Rubble
Writers Peter Green and Bill Faries provide a clear, useful overview of post-earthquake Haiti, with a good picture of how the surges of relief pouring in from the U.S. and elsewhere are being frustrated by the weak infrastructure of the nation.

While we don’t know the death toll now, it is increasing by the moment as those trapped in rubble expire and could reach six figures. With the New York Times and others calling for a long-term commitment to stabilizing Haiti after the relief effort, the task ahead could be enormous for America.

“Haiti’s population of 9.6 million has a per capita income of about $560, with 54 percent of Haitians living on less than $1 a day and 78 percent on less than $2 daily, according to the World Bank. The gross domestic product was $7 billion in 2008. The country is still recovering from four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed at least 800 people in 2008.”--

Chris Stirewalt's column on a health bill designed to fail is here.

Morning Must Reads from DCExaminer

Wall Street Journal -- Coakley's Saviors
A shout-out from the Journal editorial page for Examiner colleague Tim Carney’s reporting on the desperate dash by the drug and insurance industries to prop up the Senate candidacy of Martha Coakley and save the president’s health-care program.
Team Obama is giving Coakley a bit of the Creigh Deeds treatment, with lots of blind quotes about problems with her campaign. The high-profile event Coakley attended for drug and insurance lobbyists at Capitol Hill wine bar Sonoma gives credence to the arguments that she lacks good sense.
With new polls showing the race to fill what David Gergen called “Ted Kennedy’s seat” heading down to the wire and Republican state Sen. Scott Brown looking increasingly plausible to voters, Coakley rubbing elbows in D.C. with the same corporate interests that helped the president dash liberal health-care dreams is about as bad a PR move as I can imagine in a race where Democratic dissatisfaction is the primary obstacle to her success.
“Against overwhelming public opposition, the only things keeping ObamaCare alive at this point are power politics and the misguided corporate cease-fire that Democrats have either coerced or bought—or is homegrown at companies like Pfizer that are deeply invested in more government control of the economy. Ms. Coakley's election would make that outcome a certainty.”

New York Times -- Labor Campaigns Against Tax on Health Plans

Like a employee demanding a raise without another job offer, the House has little leverage when it comes to making demands on the Senate on health care.
The increasingly frosty national political climate for Democrats and their health plan means that Ben Nelson and others in the Senate would be happy to have an excuse for 86ing the legislation.
Writers Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn show House members looking for just a little dignity – the public option is gone and the tax on union health plans is staying, but please, please, couldn’t they have a national insurance exchange instead of the regional ones in the Senate bill. The answer will be no again, leaving it up to President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to keep restive liberals and anxious moderates in the narrow winning coalition that passed a very different bill in November.
“At their caucus, House Democrats said, they felt pressure to make concessions to get a deal on health care. ‘A lot of people think we have a gun to our head and don’t like it very much,’ said Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York.”

Associated Press -- Obama wants $33 billion more for war
The president’s pivot to fiscal responsibility is starting to look more like a double dribble as health care lingers and new spending demands pile up.
The spending plan being built by budget stud Peter Orszag reportedly calls for a largest-ever $708 billion in defense spending.
The president will also ask Congress for a supplemental war appropriation of $33 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite a pledge that all war spending would now go into regular budgets. It’s a cheat that may allow Orszag and Obama to make deficit forecasts look better, but invites a revolt in Congress.
“The extra $33 billion in 2010 would mostly go toward the expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Obama ordered an extra 30,000 troops for that war as part of an overhaul of the war strategy late last year.
The request for that additional funding will be sent to Congress at the same time as the record spending request for next year, making war finding an especially difficult pill for some of Obama's Democratic allies.”

Wall Street Journal -- Job Data Set to Fuel Fight Over Stimulus
The White House is phasing out “saved or created” as a term of use and backing off the Bidenous claims that the $787 billion stimulus plan would kick the economy into a higher gear. The new pitch in the days of double-digit unemployment is: things would have been much worse without the stimulus, which, by the way, has already run its course.
David Axelrod is warning Republicans that this year’s elections won’t be a referendum on Obama, but even under that unlikely scenario, can defending the status quo really be the smart move for the administration.
But writer Louise Radnofsky tells us that’s what the new report from the president’s economic advisors says: it could have been worse.
Of course, these were the same people who told us that if Congress didn’t pass the stimulus unemployment could be headed as high as 8 percent.
“Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, described the latest CEA numbers as ‘self-serving and deceptive.’”

New York Times -- A Year of Terror Plots, Through a 2nd Prism
Good news from writer Scott Shane: very few of America’s murders were committed by terrorists!
There were 14,000 murders last year, but only 14 committed in the name of jihad, so why is everybody so worried about terrorism when they should be thinking about bigger concerns?
In a foolish news analysis, Shane argues that the domestic terrorist attacks in 2009 weren’t very well planned and killed very few people when you think about it.
Shane’s points is that though we had no domestic terror attacks after 2001 until two successful strikes and several thwarted attacks in 2009, it was really the work of, as President Obama might say, “isolated extremists.” Since it was not al Qaeda proper pulling the strings directly and that the attacks were amateurish”, Shane says it shows that the group is losing steam and that radical Islam itself is not such a great threat. Nidal Hassan may have been a rookie, but he scored big, eliminating 13 high-value targets and sewing worry throughout the U.S. armed forces.
If it weren’t so scary that to think of the commonness of this view, it would be a funny piece.
“In 2008, in his book ‘Leaderless Jihad,’ Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer who has long studied terrorism networks, wrote that Al Qaeda was in decline, to be replaced by dispersed terrorists for whom it provided mostly inspiration. The new generation of extremists, he believed, would be less skilled and would likely pose less of a threat than the network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Dr. Sageman said he saw no reason to revise that judgment today. The plots of the last year should be carefully analyzed and the findings used to improve counterterrorism, not turned into fuel for thoughtless anti-Muslim panic and discrimination, he said.
‘If we overreact and upset 1.5 billion Muslims,’ Dr. Sageman said, referring to the global total, ‘then we’ll have a lot bigger problem on our hands.’”