Video- Dick Morris on "earthquake that hit Massachusetts": Obama "will never get another major piece of legislation passed"

And so it starts...

Cartoon of the Day

Click to enlarge, via. Good luck today Mr President.

Harry and Louise: The Sequel

Fine, whatever, let's just kick this thing into high gear and get it done.

National Journal: "They're back -- and fighting for an overhaul of the nation's health care system. Starting this weekend, Americans can rejoin the famous and influential 'Harry and Louise' at their kitchen table, this time as part of a $4 million ad campaign warning that the status quo is untenable."

White House to Push Forward on National Urban Policy Agenda

By GottaLaff

Keeping promises is such a nice trait. Keeping campaign promises provides extra crunchy goodness:

After remaining out of the public eye since its creation in February, the White House Office of Urban Affairs plans on Monday to launch a public conversation to create a national urban policy agenda, said Adolfo Carrión Jr., its director.

The White House will host a daylong urban policy discussion including mayors, county executives, governors, urban policy experts, and heads of various agencies, Carrión said in a telephone interview yesterday .

President Obama is expected to address the conference and announce plans to send Carrión and other senior administration officials on a tour of American cities to discuss urban issues, Carrión said.

The conference is the first indication that the White House could back its urban policy office with the kind of muscle that Obama suggested during his campaign, before the economic collapse. He called for a new kind of urban policy to address cities and also their suburbs, and urban advocates hoped that this could be a focus of his administration's economic development approach.

"We have not had a national urban policy for decades," said Carrión. "Meanwhile, the economy has changed."

Those gathered Monday will consider local initiatives that could become best practices to emulate, with the goals of increasing the competitiveness, sustainable development and opportunity of metropolitan regions.

The conference is to present an interdisciplinary approach to urban issues and include the heads of the Departments of Labor, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Small Business Administration. [...]

"For too long government has operated from the top down," said Carrión. "We've always heard why does the national government send down these unfunded mandates, under funded mandates, mandates that are not necessarily universally applicable. The bottom-up approach speaks to the need for this to be flexible."

Nancy Pelosi Warrantless Wiretapping & The Military Industrial Complex

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White House Pleased to Have "Card Check" Pushed Off

One less hard battle, but I'm sure it will come up again soon. Didn't happen soon enough to save Arlen Specter though.

With the "card check" legislation now dead for this Congress, First Read notes the White House "appears to be happy (but very quietly so) to have this debate out of the way. No doubt they were for it. But it was always more of a Biden cause than a Barack cause. At this point in time, with everything else on their plate, sticking a finger in business' eye wasn't something the White House was looking forward to. Would Obama have signed it? Yes. But he doesn't have to worry about it now, at least maybe not until 2011."