kent conrad

It’s no news that the Obama administration has pushed hard for the creation of a public-plan option to accompany whatever health care reform overhaul the Democrats come up with this year. But Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, has just softened that stand.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television airing Friday, [...]

As select members of the Senate Finance Committee race to finalize their health reform bill before August recess, it’s worth noting just how few Americans those lawmakers represent.

When the news broke that they’d received special deals on loans furnished by Countrywide Financial Corp., Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) both denied wrongdoing, saying they had no idea they’d gotten preferential treatment. Today, The Associated Press reports a different version of the tale, citing statements from a Countrywide employee claiming that [...]

As Congress delves into its much anticipated health care reform debate, the discussion thus far has been framed as a black vs. white clash between those (mostly Democrats) in support of a public plan to compete with private insurers, and those (mostly Republicans) for whom such an option is a non-starter.
Enter Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), [...]

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag kept up the pressure on Senate Republicans over the weekend by continuing to raise the possibility that the White House may use the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to pass comprehensive health care reform if the Republicans don’t show more flexibility.
From a Bloomberg report on Saturday.

Democrats probably won’t decide [...]

President Obama made headlines last month when he announced a budget wishlist eliminating a number of budget gimmicks used by Washington policymakers to, in effect, purposefully lie to the country about how much the government will collect and spend.
Breaking from previous administrations, Obama’s budget acknowledged that fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will actually [...]

John Harwood of The New York Times has sketched an emerging scenario in which the Obama administration seeks comprehensive health care and energy reform without significant Republican support. Democrats are increasingly talking about abandoning the pretense of bipartisanship and putting the historic legislation in a filibuster-proof budget resolution could be passed by simple Democratic majorities [...]

Give this to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.): He wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t a good fit in President Obama’s cabinet.
Gregg, of course, withdrew his nomination for commerce secretary in a storm of media attention last month. The senator, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, cited concerns that his spending philosophy was [...]

What was bad news for Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefer, Tim Geithner and now Hilda Solis might be good news for the federal government.
Their recent tax woes — by which we mean their getting caught not paying their (or their spouses’) taxes — mean that the IRS is probably right about (or even underestimating?) the extent [...]

Is there an echo in here?
In The New York Times today, op-ed columnist David Brooks blasts the Democrats’ House-passed stimulus package with the charge that it doesn’t meet the “timely, targeted and temporary” criteria pushed by supporters:
In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big [...]