The lead story in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal today was New York State AG Andrew Cuomo’s revelations that Wall Street’s biggest recipients of bailout money were simultaneously handing out a combined $32.6 billion in employee bonuses. Goldman Sachs, for example, gave 953 of its employees bonuses in excess of $1 million, while getting a bailout.

One question here is why is it Andrew Cuomo who’s telling us about this? Obama has a pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg. He has a Troubled Asset Relief Program Inspector General, Neil Barofsky. There’s an entire Securities and Exchange Commission, supposed to investigate investment banks. I know that the administration has proposed a major overhaul of the financial regulatory system. But shouldn’t the current regulatory system be keeping track of investment banks on government welfare that hand out multi-million dollar bonuses?-MB

Tracking and trying to understand the health care debate, and how "the American people" feel about it can be tough.  Reporters and editors have to find a hook, and the hook is usually, in some form, President Obama.  This can lead to a "who’s up/who’s down" approach that includes phrases like "in a setback for President Obama,"  but a review of coverage from around the country shows that the public seems to be taking a more nuanced approach than many of the sound bites about "government control" or "creeping socialism" or "greedy insurance companies" are able to convey.  (more…)

The Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton gives a round-up of the food safety bill that passed the House yesterday that would expand the Food and Drug Administration’s powers, especially the ability to more frequently inspect farmers and food processors. Layton reports it to be the most consequential FDA bill since 1938 legislation that gave the agency jurisdiction over most food products.

Barring energetic opposition from Senators with strong industrial ag ties, Some form of the bill should become law — it easily passed the House 283-142 and Barack Obama endorses it. One issue the bill doesn’t deal with is how to get the FDA to better cooperate with the Dept. of Agriculture and other regulatory agencies. But it’s a promising start, responsive to a food industry both more consolidated and international.-MB

I blogged about this once before, but Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, wants more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and might fight with the White House over it. The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports on ideas being developed in an Afghanistan assessment report that McChrystal will deliver to Defense Sec. Robert Gates in August. McChrystal is arguing for a lot of counterinsurgency-sounding tactics like "focus more on tribal and social dynamics" and "increase contact with Afghans."

But he’s also focusing on tactics that will cost more money and more U.S. soldiers’ lives, such as an increase beyond the 68,000 U.S. troops who will be in Afghanistan by fall. McChrystal also wants to almost double the homegrown Afghan security force from 134,000 to 260,000.

This proposed escalation of a war that Obama has already escalated raises the question: What, again, is it that we’re doing in Afghanistan? If these indirect steps are aimed at weakening the Taliban, is it worth it to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan, especially if they may turn up elsewhere? The health care reform debate is dominating the headlines now and it’s mostly about the projected costs of program X v. program Y and how much each program contributes to the federal deficit. People’s health is perhaps a greater existential problem than the security threats in Afghanistan. Yet there’s rarely any talk from Democrats or Republicans about the eight year-old war’s role in our current fiscal crisis.-MB

The New York Times’ Matthew Wald reports on a government program that worked really well . . . the so-called "cash for clunkers" program.  After the GM bankruptcy, the Transportation Dept. promised to subsidize a total of $1 billion worth of trade-ins at car dealers across the country, allowing people with cars with low fuel-efficiency standards to trade up to more fuel-efficient models. The Transportation Dept. gave $3,500-$4,500 per car and after the first week the agency’s $1 billion in appropriations is gone.

Not to sound like a car dealer, but I guarantee that this program could continue to  improve both the environment and the auto industry. It got money going through the economy really quickly. Congress would be seriously smart to appropriate more money for cash for clunkers before their August recess begins.-MB

I just got to reading Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday on counterterrorism. The report by Brian Knowlton of the New York Times (the link includes a link to the speech) is good as far as it goes: "Ms. Napolitano…seemed intent in her speech on a shift of tone from that of the Bush administration, which critics say too often appeared to exaggerate threats and sow fear. But she unveiled no new specific initiatives in this regard." The idea that Obama has shifted the tone but not the actual substance of the "war on terror" seems to be becoming the conventional wisdom (this view is perhaps best articulated in a piece by Jack Goldsmith, the Bush administration Justice Dept. lawyer turned "war on terror" dissenter). 

But the actual thrust of Napolitano’s speech was on the danger of cyber-networks. "This networked climate forces us to rethink how to best protect our values and security in a world where the tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools for buying music online," Napolitano claimed. Napolitano also bragged that she had brought on a computer hacker to the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

On the most controversial aspects of the Bush administration "war on terror" legacy — torture, Guantanamo Bay, military commissionunderstandinggov.organtless wiretapping — the case can be made that Obama is at least similar to his predecessor. But when it comes to new initiatives being created, cyber-security is a much bigger concern in the new administration than it ever was in the old one.-MB

Here is a positive example of money from the $787 billion stimulus bill that’s had an instant impact. The New York Times’ Michael Cooper reports that the stimulus bill gave $100 million to food banks, a sizeable addition to the $250 million the Ag Dept. hands out each year to food banks. Already all this has been spent and gone to food pantries and soup kitchens. With requests for emergency food assistance up by 30 percent from 2008, according to one survey Cooper cites, this seems a sensible, humane way to combat the recession.-MB

The Obama administration is serious about cracking down on people who evade paying taxes by setting up overseas accounts. The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Sanders and Carrick Mellenkamp report that the Justice Dept. has started to investigate UBS Bank in Switzerland and has requested the bank give the names of 52,000 U.S. clients who may not be reporting how much income they store offshore. It’s not clear if the Swiss government will cooperate — they say for now that’s private information.

Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service has set up a clemency program that lets people with offshore accounts voluntarily pay delinquent taxes and, in turn, only, at most, face civil charges. With 400 people voluntarily disclosing prior missed tax payments, Obama is apparently taking a shrewd approach to tax evasion.-MB

R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post reports that despite the efforts of Barack Obama and Defense Sec. Robert Gates, utterly useless programs have made their way into the House military spending bill:

Roughly $2.75 billion of the extra funds — all of which were unanimously approved in an 18-minute markup Monday by the House Appropriations Committee — would finance "earmarks," or projects demanded by individual lawmakers that the Pentagon did not request. About half of that amount reflects spending requested by private firms, including 95 companies or related political action committees that donated a total of $789,190 in the past 2 1/2 years to members of the appropriations subcommittee on defense, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Smith diligently itemizes all the wretched Jack Murtha-related earmarks added in the appropriations process (they really are astonishing considering the ongoing investigation of the PMA Group lobbying firm that Murtha, the defense appropriations committee chair, is intimately connected to). And he lists all the weapons systems that will be funded even though Gates says they’re not needed: the C-17 transport plane, the F-18 jet, a missile-defense interceptor. So even if the Senate killed the F-22, other wasteful weapons live on.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that this pork adds up to $6.9 billion. That’s a stupendous and unacceptable waste of taxpayer money. But it’s a fraction of the $638 billion overall defense spending bill. If you were to tell Obama and Gates back in April, that $6.9 billion in defense pork would be added, I think they would have taken it. Of course, the appropriations process is not over — more useless spending might be added in the Senate.-MB

Michael Gordon of the New York Times’ reports that Col. TIm Reese, who works as a U.S. adviser to the Baghdad command of the Iraq military, says that the Iraq Security Forces are "competent enough" and that we should "declare victory and go home." Gordon doesn’t come out and say for whom this memo was intended, though military spokesman Lt. Col. Jossylyn Aberle says it was "sent to selected personnel within Multi-National Division Baghdad on our classified e-mail system."

The context of the memo is that it comes two days after Def Sec. Robert Gates called for a "modest acceleration" of the U.S. troop withdrawal timetable, which calls for every last servicemember to be out by Dec. 2011. If Reese’s assertions are accurate, the memo is hardly a vote of confidence in the post-Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq. Reese writes that in trying to marginalize the continued U.S. presence, Iraq ground forces have made "unilateral restrictions" that "violate the most basic aspects" of the Status of Forces Agreement.

So Reese is mostly arguing that Iraq security really, really, doesn’t want U.S. troops there anymore. Maybe that’s a good enough reason for speedier Iraq withdrawal regardless of the homegrown security forces’ competency.-MB