Bloomberg says that the financial regulation bill would force US investment banks to raise $250 billion in capital, create strange fiduciary obligations where none previously existed, and send much of the global swaps and derivatives business to foreign institutions:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among U.S. investment banks that may be forced to raise an additional $250 billion in capital, cut executive pay and divest some of their most lucrative assets under a bill on the U.S. Senate floor today, analysts say.

A two-page provision tucked inside the 1,558-page bill on April 21 would change the structure of about 40 of the largest U.S. investment banks by forcing them to spin off their derivatives businesses. Another measure added this month would require derivatives dealers to maintain a “fiduciary duty” to municipal, pension and retirement plan investors, which some analysts say would wipe out that market altogether.

“The bill has moved so far left so hard, that it’s caught everybody by surprise,” said FBR Capital Markets analyst Paul Miller…The spin-off provision would result in a capital deficit of $85 billion at eight of the largest global investment banks, analysts led by Kian Abouhossein at JPMorgan Securities in London estimated in a research note today….“We continue to believe that the proposed regulatory changes would have a significant impact on global return on equities, declining from 19 percent pre-regulation to 12 percent,” Abouhossein wrote.

Is any of this surprising? We have an out-of-control administration aided and abetted by 20-something congressional staffers who write the legislation and who know nothing about business, except that it’s bad. Oh well, no big deal. We just now live in an America that wants to drive its best paying jobs out of the country, and sends SWAT teams to harass grandma and grandpa. It’s America 2.0 — new and improved.

The Washington Post‘s editorial on the Goldman hearings makes an interesting point about what it says were the contrasting strategies of that firm and Citigroup:

the broader implication raised by senators at Tuesday’s hearing — that Goldman somehow rigged the market in subprime mortgages, and that this led to the meltdown — does not strike us as a terribly useful or even accurate analysis of the crisis. Yes, in its capacity as a market-maker, the firm sold complex derivatives to market players who wanted to bet on a rosy view of housing long after Goldman had turned more pessimistic…

these were large, sophisticated institutional investors who had the opportunity to conduct the same analysis of economic data that Goldman did. They knew that there was someone on the short side of every trade. And Goldman had no legal obligation to trade in the same direction as these clients did.

Indeed, if it had, then Goldman could not have started hedging its own bets on housing early, as it did. The firm would have lost billions, and it might have wound up needing an even bigger bailout by U.S. taxpayers than it actually got. It could have ended up like Citigroup, which tried to ride the bubble until it was too late and had to be propped up with hundreds of billions of dollars in federal cash and credit guarantees.

Perhaps you will recall that as of June 2007 — several months after the deal that the SEC sued Goldman about — the Citigroup CEO was saying that his bank was “still dancing” and that “liquidity rushes in” wherever it is needed.

Jack Cafferty was not pleased with the response of the Obama administration to Arizona’s immigration law, which is supported by 70% of voters versus 23% who oppose it:

Arizona passes a tough law against illegal immigration and suddenly they’ve got Washington’s attention. One poll finds 70 percent of Arizona voters support this new law, so hey, maybe we better do something, too…President Obama called the Arizona law misguided. What’s misguided, Mr. President, is the federal government’s ongoing refusal to enforce the laws that are already on the books.

Read the Arizona law. Parts of it are word-for-word the same as the federal statutes which continue to be all but ignored. Now we’re hear all sorts of blathering from our Washington gerbils about the need for a new federal law. There’ll be news conferences and interviews and committee hearings and draft legislation and polling, all the usual carnival acts that accompany any hot button Washington issue.

Instead of simply closing the borders and enforcing the existing law so they could turn their attention to something like the national debt and the fact that the country is bankrupt, instead we’re going to get this freak show. Washington’s position on illegal immigration is patently dishonest from the top down. No enforcement, no border security. Just pandering to the Hispanic voters and the corporations that hire the illegals. And then, when one of our states that’s being ravaged by the presence of 460,000 illegal aliens inside its borders does something about it, the President says that’s misguided. What a shame.

Rich Lowry discusses more of the negative reactions to the Arizona statute: “The Arizona law makes it a state crime for aliens not to have immigration documents on their person. This sounds draconian, except it’s been a federal crime for more than half a century — U.S.C. 1304(e).” (AT notes that the Mexican drug cartels now control the trails into Arizona and that the crime problem had become acute, but the Feds did little or nothing to enforce existing law.)

This is what the administration line was in March, when Caterpillar and other firms took big charges because of Obamacare:

“These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general,” says a White House legislative affairs staffer. “Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative websites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It’s BS.”…

Henry Waxman was determined to investigate the outrages committed by the nasty CEO’s. Here is the result of the investigation. NYT:

“In a memorandum summarizing its investigation, the Democratic staff of the committee said, “The companies acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards in submitting filings to the S.E.C. in March and April.”

Moreover, it said, “these one-time charges were required by applicable accounting rules.” The committee staff said this view was confirmed by independent experts at the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the American Academy of Actuaries.

Mr. Waxman, the chairman of the committee, and Mr. Stupak canceled a hearing at which they had planned to question executives on the effects of the law.

These people know nothing about business and are too arrogant to overcome their ignorance.

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “So why the long face?” Here’s another one. A National Security Advisor walks into The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and says:

in order to set the stage for my remarks, I’d just like to tell you a story that I think is true, and it happened recently in southern Afghanistan. A member of the Taliban was separated from his fighting party, and wandered around in the desert or a few days lost, out of food, no water. And he looked on the horizon and he saw what looked like a little shack, and he walked towards that shack, and as he got to it, it turned out that it was a shack, a store, a little store owned by a Jewish merchant.

And the Taliban warrior went up to him and said, “I need water. Give me some water.” And the merchant said to him, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any water, but would you like to buy a tie? We have a nice sale of ties today.” Whereupon the Taliban erupts into a stream of language that I can’t repeat about Israel, about Jewish people, about the man himself, about his family. He was just saying “I need water, you try to sell me ties. You people don’t get it.”

And impassively the Jewish merchant stood there until this Taliban was through with his diatribe, and said, “I’m sorry I don’t have water for you. And I forgive you for all the insults that you have levied against me, my family, my country, but I will help you out. If you go over that hill and walk about two miles, there’s a restaurant there, and they’ll have all the water you need.” And the Taliban, instead of saying thanks, still muttering under his breath, disappears over the hill, only to come back about an hour later.

And walking up to the merchant says, “Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant.”

We agree with those who find the joke about an Israeli and an Afghani Taliban fighter very peculiar, possibly revealing, and not very funny. Speaking of ties, maybe retired 4-star General Jones could try this next: a man walks into a bar and the bartender says, “I’m sorry, I can’t serve you here unless you are wearing a tie.” The man says, “Okay, I’ll be right back,” and goes to his car to find anything he can use for a tie. All he finds is a set of jumper cables, so he ties them around his neck, goes back in and asks, “How’s this?” The bartender replies, “Well, okay, but don’t start anything.” Not so funny, but less peculiar.

The author of the Almanac of American Politics is Michael Barone. In a recent piece he is scathingly critical of the Obama administration and says he doesn’t like the financial reform legislation currently before Congress for a variety of reasons:

At the top of the list is the $50 billion fund that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation could use to pay off creditors of firms identified as systemically risky — i.e., “too big to fail.” “The Dodd bill,” writes Rep. Brad Sherman (D., Calif.), “has unlimited executive bailout authority. That’s something Wall Street desperately wants but doesn’t dare ask for.” Politically connected creditors would have every reason to assume they’d get favorable treatment. The Dodd bill specifically authorizes the FDIC to treat “creditors similarly situated” differently.

Second, as former Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey points out, the Dodd bill gives the Treasury and the FDIC authority to grant an unlimited number of loan guarantees to “too big to fail” firms. CEOs might want to have receipts for their contributions to Sen. Charles Schumer and the Obama campaign in hand when they apply.

Lindsey ticks off other special favors. “Labor gets ‘proxy access’ to bring its agenda items before shareholders as well as annual ‘say on pay’ for executives. Consumer activists get a brand-new agency funded directly out of the seniorage the Fed earns. No oversight by the Federal Reserve Board or by Congress on how the money is spent.”

Nonsense. Barone is probably just a “classic American know-nothing populist — nativist, isolationist, paranoid.” Yeah, that must be it.

Washington Examiner:

The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to lower the boom on sodium content in American food…the salty and the sweet will be carted off in Michelle Obama’s great food roundup. The rules are being worked out with the producers so that consumers won’t notice any big shift, but one day it will be illegal to sell food that exceeds federal standards for saltiness…

after decades of failing to scare people off salt, the government will simply turn it into a controlled substance. They claim that thousands of lives will be saved from decreased incidence of high blood pressure and hail the move as a blow against Big Food…Big Food will be able to use the regulations they help design to dominate the market even more. They are already spending millions to find new chemical compounds that keep the foods yummy but skirt the new sodium prohibition.

The local potato chip maker whose greasy treats taste divine will find that they can’t afford Frito Lay’s Space Age salt substitute. Mom and Pop will have to sell chips that taste like a fried dishrag and eventually close…the president’s health program will be imposed in pieces over the next four years. By the end, the government will have a fiduciary interest in the waistlines and cholesterol counts of every American.

If someone told you twenty years ago that salt and carbon dioxide were slated to become controlled substances subject to strict federal regulation, would you have believed it?

Reuters:

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders huddled in the Capitol on Tuesday to discuss legislative priorities in what is rapidly becoming a tight schedule this election year. During the meeting, Pelosi and Reid discussed which bills the Senate might be able to pass this year, according to one House Democratic leadership aide. The aide said that Pelosi told Reid “if you can do immigration first, that’s fine.”

So far the agenda is playing out pretty much as we thought it would.

The GOP decided to question the political theater surrounding the Goldman suit:

the events of the past five days have fueled legitimate suspicion on the part of the American people that the Commission has attempted to assist the White House, the Democratic Party, and Congressional Democrats by timing the suit to coincide with the Senate’s consideration of financial regulatory legislation, or by providing Democrats with advance notice. In fact, the aggressive campaign by Democrats in support of the legislation neatly coincided with the Commission’s announcement of the suit. For example:

– The Commission approved the Goldman suit in a vote that spit along party lines – a rare occurrence for approvals of enforcement litigation.

– Before the Commission had released its announcement, the New York Times published on its website a story describing the suit.

– Less than half an hour after the Times story’s publication, Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America and now a project of the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”), sent millions of supporters an e-mail message from President Obama urging support for “Wall Street Reform.”

– Within hours, the Democratic National Committee had purchased AdWords advertising from Google, Inc. The DNC’s Google campaign fundraising advertisement, headed “Fight Wall Street Greed,” appeared whenever a user ran a Google search for the phrase “Goldman Sachs SEC.” It read, “Help Pres. Obama Reform Wall Street and Create Jobs. Families First!” and included a link to www.BarackObama.com, the website of Organizing for America.

Occasionally, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.

The NYT has a piece on the Goldman matter that says the case is not a slam dunk:

Rather than asserting that Goldman misrepresented a product it was selling, the most commonly used grounds for securities fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a civil suit filed Friday that the investment bank misled customers about how that product was created. It is the rough equivalent of asserting that an antiques dealer lied about the provenance, but not the quality, of an old table.

To a layperson, the case against Goldman may seem clear cut. After all, investors did not know some information about the product that they might have considered vital, and they lost $1 billion in the end. But the rules that govern these kinds of transactions are not so plain. Several experts on securities law said fraud cases like this one, which focuses on context rather than content, are generally more difficult to win, because it can be hard to persuade a jury that the missing information might have led buyers to walk away.

(Meanwhile, others are not amused by those taking Goldman’s side in the matter.) Arguably the most interesting aspect of this case is what it reveals about the integrated news/propaganda/lawmaking operation that is run out of the White House. We wondered for a brief moment whether it was a coincidence that we got an email from President Obama on his finance bill within hours of the Goldman suit, but only for a moment.

Final point: it seemed clear enough to us that if the GOP used a green-eyeshade approach to opposing Obama’s financial reform bill, they would look like they were carrying water for Wall Street, and that was a terrible strategy to employ. However, the way in which the administration has orchestrated its political/media program in favor of the bill is another matter. Aspects of the campaign, such as directing Google searches to the White House political machine seem more than a little contrived and overbearing. This bad political theater is getting to be a bit much and deserves the criticism it increasingly is getting.

The Pew Center has an interesting poll illustrating just how dissatisfied Americans are today. Perhaps the highlight is how far trust in government has fallen — it’s at a modern all time low today. 22% of Americans trust government during the Obama administration:

Perhaps the number was this low during the Buchanan administration. It might be interesting to find out.

NBC science correspondent Jay Barbree on President Obama’s NASA appearance:

I’m a little disturbed right now, Alex. I just found out some very disturbing news. The President came down here in his campaign and told these 15,000 workers here at the Space Center that if they would vote for him, that he would protect their jobs. 9,000 of them are about to lose their job. He is speaking before 200, extra hundred people here today only. It’s invitation only. He has not invited a single space worker from this space port to attend. It’s only academics and other high officials from outside of the country. Not one of them is invited to hear the President of the United States, on their own space port, speak today.

The media begin to see what is happening, but they can’t bring themselves to face the consequences. Tick tock.

MIT Professor Richard Lindzen shares a few more thoughts on AGW:

In a world where we experience temperature changes of tens of degrees in a single day, we treat changes of a few tenths of a degree in some statistical residue, known as the global mean temperature anomaly (GATA), as portents of disaster.

Earth has had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a 100,000-year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels.

More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th century, these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.

For small changes in GATA, there is no need for any external cause. Earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Examples include El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, etc. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all change in the globally averaged temperature anomaly since the 19th century.

Of course Lindzen is one of those litmus test figures — sensible fellow or nut? HT: AJ Strata

Whatever its ultimate merits, the SEC complaint against Goldman Sachs makes fascinating reading. Essentially, Goldman is alleged to have bilked its own customers by not disclosing that the deck was stacked against them from the get-go, because the securities in the fund (ABACUS 2007-AC1) were being selected precisely for their weakness:

GS&Co marketing materials for ABACUS 2007-AC1 -– including the term sheet, flip book and offering memorandum for the CDO -– all represented that the reference portfolio of RMBS underlying the CDO was selected by ACA Management LLC (“ACA”), a third-party with experience analyzing credit risk in RMBS. Undisclosed in the marketing materials and unbeknownst to investors, a large hedge fund, Paulson & Co. Inc. (“Paulson”), with economic interests directly adverse to investors in the ABACUS 2007-AC1 CDO, played a significant role in the portfolio selection process.

After participating in the selection of the reference portfolio, Paulson effectively shorted the RMBS portfolio it helped select by entering into credit default swaps (“CDS”) with GS&Co to buy protection on specific layers of the ABACUS 2007-AC1 capital structure. Given its financial short interest, Paulson had an economic incentive to choose RMBS that it expected to experience credit events in the near future. GS&Co did not disclose Paulson’s adverse economic interests or its role in the portfolio selection process in the term sheet, flip book, offering memorandum or other marketing materials provided to investors.

In sum, GS&Co arranged a transaction at Paulson’s request in which Paulson heavily influenced the selection of the portfolio to suit its economic interests, but failed to disclose to investors, as part of the description of the portfolio selection process contained in the marketing materials used to promote the transaction, Paulson’s role in the portfolio selection process or its adverse economic interests…

The deal closed on April 26, 2007. Paulson paid GS&Co approximately $15 million for structuring and marketing ABACUS 2007-AC1. By October 24, 2007, 83% of the RMBS in the ABACUS 2007-AC1 portfolio had been downgraded and 17% were on negative watch. By January 29, 2008, 99% of the portfolio had been downgraded. As a result, investors in the ABACUS 2007-AC1 CDO lost over $1 billion. Paulson’s opposite CDS positions yielded a profit of approximately $1 billion for Paulson.

We are not persuaded of the merits of the SEC case after reading the complaint. Unless it can be shown that the portfolio selection agent, ACA, was acting inappropriately, we don’t see the problem with the deal. (If ACA did do bad things, then game over, however.) Paulson was betting that certain adjustable sub-prime mortgages in places like California and Florida were going to have problems. He was right and made a lot of money, but what if he had been wrong? Only in retrospect do we know that Jon Paulson was almost immediately to be proven right and that plenty of other sophisticated investors were spectacularly wrong. At the time of the deal in question, it was unclear what was happening in the markets. (Goldman has its own set of responses to the complaint.)

In a way, the merits of the case are beside the point. It’s a good story with winners and losers and lots of money, so it has legs. More importantly, it’s a good political story, and we bet there are more of these waiting in the wings as 2010 heads towards November. (We note that observers like Tom Maguire, Barry Ritholtz, and Bloomberg see big problems ahead for Goldman.) Whatever the ultimate outcome of this and similar cases, it’s likely to be a big political loser for the GOP to be seen as carrying Wall Street’s water — no matter how awful the financial reform legislation turns out to be (and it’s probably going some very negative elements).

The Obama administration and the Democrats have a popular issue if the Republicans make themselves look like shills for unscrupulous bankers. It’s no accident that Obama’s first target is Hank Paulson’s Goldman Sachs — the GOP ought to recognize the shot across its bow and act accordingly.

Dana Milbank is not happy with the Tea Party crowd, whom he says are in the 53% of Americans who pay federal income taxes and are not pleased to be subsidizing the other half of the country:

A CBS News/New York Times poll released on Tax Day found that Tea Party activists are wealthier than average (20 percent of their households earn more than $100,000, compared with 14 percent of the general population) and better educated (37 percent have college or postgraduate degrees vs. 25 percent of Americans ).

This is in line with a USA Today/Gallup poll last month that found 55 percent of Tea Party supporters had incomes of $50,000 or more (compared with 50 percent in the general population), and only 19 percent had earnings below $30,000 (vs. 25 percent overall)…

the messages on signs (other than those calling Obama a socialist and a traitor) were from a particular type of people, an aggrieved elite: “Stop the war on success” and “Do you think I’m made of money?” When one speaker, radio host Neal Boortz, mentioned the “47 percent of the people in this country [who] don’t pay any federal income taxes,” the crowd gave a healthy boo. These populists are clearly in the upper 53 percent.

A majority of Americans — 53% — now constitute an “aggrieved elite”? Huh? You’d think that Milbank, who recently compared Obama’s treatment of the press to the Soviet Union’s, would be able to follow his logic of his own observations.

It’s spring in Washington, so tourists from Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, Armenia, and so forth came to town. Their counterparts from North Korea and Iran were not immediately available for comment

President Barack Obama, center, poses for a group photo with the delegation heads attending the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Tuesday, April 13, 2010. There are left to right from the bottom row to the top, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Finnish President Tarja Halonen, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, President Barack Obama, Jordanian King Abdullah II, Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Chinese President Hu Jintao, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, Armenian President Serge Sarkisian, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Nigeria acting President Goodluck Jonathan, Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, South African President Jacob Zuma, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Swiss President Doris Leuthard, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Union President Herman Van Rompuy, Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, Moroccan Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, Poland’s Ambassador to the U.S. Robert Kupiecki, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Algerian Foreign Affairs Minister Mourad Medelci, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed force

Mark Steyn on the fundamental lack of seriousness on display: “in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand…but not even mentioning Germany. Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago -– and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.”

The backtracking on AGW is ever so gentle. The FT quotes a damaging report on East Anglia, but notes that it “should not be seen as invalidating climate science”:

A key piece of evidence in climate change science was slammed as “exaggerated” on Wednesday by the UK’s leading statistician, in a vindication of claims that global warming sceptics have been making for years.

Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said that a graph shaped like an ice hockey stick that has been used to represent the recent rise in global temperatures had been compiled using “inappropriate” methods. “It used a particular statistical technique that exaggerated the effect [of recent warming],” he said…It is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” the report concluded.

The hockey stick graph was a key part of the scandal. In the e-mails, UEA’s Professor Phil Jones referred to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures suggested by certain sources of data. A similar trick was used in the hockey stick graph.

Maybe there’s global warming, maybe not. In any event, it is interesting to contrast theories that may or may not have impact in some gauzy future with the starker realities of life on this earth.

Dana Milbank:

World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow. They entered a capital that had become a military encampment, with camo-wearing military police in Humvees and enough Army vehicles to make it look like a May Day parade…

In the middle of it all was Obama — occupant of an office once informally known as “leader of the free world” — putting on a clinic for some of the world’s greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.

The only part of the summit, other than a post-meeting news conference, that was visible to the public was Obama’s eight-minute opening statement, which ended with the words: “I’m going to ask that we take a few moments to allow the press to exit before our first session.”…

Obama’s official schedule for Tuesday would have pleased China’s Central Committee. Excerpts: “The President will attend the Heads of Delegation working lunch. This lunch is closed press…The President will meet with Prime Minster Erdogan of Turkey. This meeting is closed press…The President will attend Plenary Session II of the Nuclear Security Summit. This session is closed press.” Reporters, even those on the White House beat for two decades, said these were the most restricted such meetings they had ever seen…

In “bilateral” meetings with foreign leaders, presidents usually take questions, or at least trade statements. But at most of Obama’s, there were only written “readouts.” Canada: “The president and the prime minister noted the enduring strength of our bilateral partnership.” India: “The two leaders vowed to continue to strengthen the robust relationship between the people of their countries.” Pakistan: “President Obama began by noting that he is very fond of Pakistan.”

The essence of Obama’s very methodical plan to put in place the changes in America that he has wanted since he was a young man are gradualism and concealment. He is blessed with a mellifluous voice and an Elmer Gantry like willingness to say anything he thinks will soothe his listeners. Gradually, however, actions speak louder than words — loud enough for even the Washington Post to notice, at least for a moment.

The NYT says that members of Congress and their staffs may not have any healthcare plan because of the law they just passed:

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the “personal health insurance coverage” of senators, representatives and their staff members…the law may “remove members of Congress and Congressional staff” from their current coverage, in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, before any alternatives are available…

The law apparently bars members of Congress from the federal employees health program, on the assumption that lawmakers should join many of their constituents in getting coverage through new state-based markets known as insurance exchanges…“a law takes effect on the date of its enactment” unless Congress clearly specifies otherwise. And Congress did not specify any other effective date for this part of the health care law. The law was enacted when President Obama signed it three weeks ago…

The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?

Not only that, but the law raises taxes on the middle class, contrary to the assertions of the President, and has no provision to put in the price controls on the insurance industry that were promised. Apparently Nancy Pelosi wasn’t kidding. HT: Taranto

Rasmussen reports that 50% of likely voters “strongly favor” repeal of Obamacare:

Three weeks after Congress passed its new national health care plan, support for repeal of the measure has risen four points to 58%. That includes 50% of U.S. voters who strongly favor repeal…Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans and 54% of voters not affiliated with either major party favor repeal. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Democrats are opposed…

Sixty-five percent (65%) of the Political Class oppose repeal, while 75% of Mainstream voters think repeal is a good idea…Voters strongly believe the health care reform plan will cost more than official estimates, and 78% expect an increase in taxes on the middle class to pay for it. Sixty-six percent (66%) of voters believe America is already overtaxed.

Arguably the greatest divide in the country is between the Mainstream and the Political Class — 88% of Mainstream Voters are angry and 84% of those who put their faith in politicians are not. It should be an interesting November.