White House to Harry Reid: Cut deal with Joe Lieberman

By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN

The White House is encouraging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to cut a deal with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), which would mean eliminating the proposed Medicare expansion in the health reform bill, according to an official close to the negotiations.

But Reid is described as so frustrated with Lieberman that he is not ready to sacrifice a key element of the health care bill, and first wants to see the Congressional Budget Office cost analysis of the Medicare buy-in. The analysis is expected early this week.

“There is a weariness and a lot of frustration that one person is holding up the will of 59 others,” the official said. “There is still too much anger and confusion at one particular senator’s reversal.”

The White House disputed this account, saying any notion that officials there are trying to push Reid into cutting a deal with Lieberman is inaccurate. White House officials say they are on the same page with Reid, working with him to find the best way to move forward with reform – not pushing him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

“The report is inaccurate,” said Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director. “The White House is not pushing Senator Reid in any direction. We are working hand-in-hand with the Senate leadership to work through the various issues and pass health reform as soon as possible.”

But the source reaffirmed the account, saying that the White House recommended that Reid cut a deal with Lieberman that would allow the health reform bill to pass by Christmas, and that Reid wanted more time before making a final decision.

Also, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin told POLITICO, “The White House is encouraging us to find 60 votes and to preserve some of the most important parts of the bill.”

He added: “I don’t want to go into the specifics – we want Sen. Lieberman’s support.”

Lieberman threw health care reform into doubt Sunday when he told Reid that he would filibuster the bill if it allowed Americans ages 55 to 64 to purchase coverage in Medicare. His comments on CBS’s “Face the Nation” set off a series of private meetings Sunday between the Senate leadership and top White House aides, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who encouraged Reid to cut the deal with Lieberman, the official said. The White House declined to comment.

Reid has called a special Democratic caucus meeting for 5:30 p.m. Monday.

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$446B spending bill clears Congress

By DAVID ROGERS

A $446.8 billion omnibus spending bill, covering the heart of the domestic budget, cleared Congress Sunday, capping a year that has seen double-digit growth for many agencies on top of the giant economic recovery package approved just 10 months ago.

The 57-35 Senate roll call came as negotiators neared agreement on a $626 billion defense bill, the final piece of the 2010 budget and a powerful locomotive to pull a pre-Christmas legislative train of year-end items.

Chief among these could be a much-needed adjustment to the Treasury’s borrowing authority to manage the growing national debt which will soon top $12.1 trillion.

Democrats project that $1.8 trillion in new authority will be needed to carry the government through the coming year and past the 2010 elections. No more than half of this increase can be directly attributed to President Barack Obama’s spending appetites, but it’s his burden to carry now and a major challenge in leading his party.

Absent some agreement, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told POLITICO he is open to a short-term interim adjustment giving the Treasury whatever authority it needs to keep managing assets into February, for example. “It’s been done before to just do it by a date,” Conrad said. “30 days, 45 days.”

For Obama, the timing of the fight now could not be worse for the president who is already struggling to hold Senate Democrats together on health care reform. Second, the economy itself is in transition, with the White House predicting job growth in the spring even as it tries to blunt demands to do more to address unemployment.

Appearing on the Sunday talk shows, Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, walked a narrow line, stressing that the president was willing to work with all sides but most wanted the debt and deficit problem addressed.

“People need to understand that we need to do both and focus both on jobs in the short run… and on the deficit situation for the medium run, because, if we don’t have confidence that comes from sustainable deficits, it’s going to be very hard to grow jobs,” Summers said on CNN. “What’s fundamentally important is that we find a solution that works. And the president will be open — is open to any approach that offers the prospect of controlling the budget deficit.”

Against this background, moderates are demanding a greater commitment to deficit reduction, either in the form of statutory “pay-go” requirements or the creation of an independent commission able to address such difficult issues as long-term savings from Social Security.

Conrad has championed such an 18-member task force, and the idea has already drawn support from 31 senators, including 12 Democrats altogether. Liberals are frustrated by the compromises Obama’s already made on health care — to especially Conrad. And the president’s big-thinker image hurts him here, since he’s prone to skip over details after famously promising to go through the budget line by line to find more savings.

Within the Cabinet, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, backed by veto threats, has had a major impact in the Pentagon budget debate as seen in the final appropriations bill now. But Democrats ran roughshod over Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s requests earlier this fall, cutting funds to pay for water projects and in the process decimating some of the Nobel laureate’s prized initiatives.

A much ballyhooed $5 billion infrastructure bank in the transportation budget is a shadow of itself in the omnibus bill. At the same time, Southwest and California lawmakers salvaged $330 million in Justice Department funds for an immigrant-related prison program — which Obama had targeted for elimination.

Where domestic savings have been achieved, such as ending the Coast Guard’s outdated Loran navigation system, the victory has seemed driven less by the White House than the internal dynamics of the Appropriations Committees. And without penalty, Democrats have felt free to reshuffle funds, like squirrels stowing away nuts in anticipation of leaner budgets ahead.

Within the omnibus now, for example, $5.1 billion is provided to help low-income families pay their energy bills this winter — $1.9 billion more than Obama sought. Title I funding for public school districts would be $1.5 billion over his request and $2.5 billion is banked away for future high-speed rail investments — more than twice the president’s request.

To be sure, there’s a shared commitment to major investments in such areas as science, education, clean water and veterans care. Veterans Health Administration funding will be 22 percent, or $8.1 billion, above the last full fiscal year under the Bush administration. The National Institutes of Health 2010 budget is up $1.6 billion since 2008; the National Science Foundation has grown 13 percent to $6.9 billion in the same period.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30540.html

Who’s in charge — generals or President Obama?

By DAVID ROGERS

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, goes before Congress this week, and with him comes this question: Who’s really in charge here, the generals or President Barack Obama?

The long-awaited hearings, beginning Tuesday before the House and Senate Armed Services committees, are a bookend of sorts to Obama’s address last Tuesday at West Point committing 30,000 more troops to the war effort in Afghanistan. Implicit in the president’s decision is an effective cap of about 100,000 for the American force, but top Democrats fear that unless Obama is more assertive, the military chain of command will undermine his July 2011 target to begin some U.S. withdrawal.

“The president’s decision is already being softened and made mush of,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) told POLITICO. And within the House and Senate Appropriations committees, senior Democrats — themselves veterans of past wars — have grown increasingly concerned by the political clout of a generation of younger, often press-savvy military commanders.

McChrystal and his strong ally, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. Central Command, are quotable stars in today’s modern media; their wartime budgets not only are large but also give them exceptional discretion that is the envy of their foreign policy partners in the State Department.

The September leak of McChrystal’s confidential report on the need for more troops helped box in Obama and quickly became grist for the Republican political mill. Even before that, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House defense appropriations panel, complained of what he saw as a pattern of news reports from the military in Afghanistan promoting a buildup. And while Obama has a retired general of his own in National Security Adviser Jim Jones, the 65-year-old Marine four-star has not been the counterweight that many of his admirers had predicted.

“I’ve always believed that the president of the United States is the commander in chief,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who won the Medal of Honor in World War II. “It concerns me when I see my president, the commander in chief, having to debate with generals. They can do that privately, but he should be able to say to General A, ‘This is the way we’re going to do our business.’ … I would expect generals to advise the president but not to go public.”

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry — whose own cables critical of a military buildup were leaked in November — appears alongside McChrystal this week. And having them side by side underscores the need for greater clarity and cooperation going forward.

“The pace [of withdrawal] is condition-based. The location is condition-based. But what wasn’t condition-based is the beginning,” Levin said of the July 2011 date. “I want to see if McChrystal says, yes, he understands that.”

“Second, does he support it? He’s not obligated to. I’m asking for his honest personal opinion. If he has a different opinion, he should tell us. He’s obligated to tell us. … Their advice should be private, … with the one caveat [that] if they are asked by a congressional committee for their best professional opinion, they are duty bound to give it to us.”

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CAIR: Too soon for Ft. Hood ‘rush to judgment’

CAIR: Too soon for Ft. Hood ‘rush to judgment’

Council for American-Islamic Relations national communications director Ibrahim Hooper said Sunday that the U.S. still isn’t clear if the shootings at Fort Hood were an act of terrorism.

“To call it an act of terror is to jump to conclusions, to rush to judgment,” Hooper said in an appearance on TV One’s “Washington Watch.”

“Why can’t the killer at Fort Hood just be a crazy guy? Don’t take it out on American Muslims because you’re upset about another issue,” he said in response to questions the shooting has raised about American Muslims in the U.S. Army.

Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani offered such a judgment, saying the Obama administration has been “very slow to react to the whole situation with Major Hasan, which was clearly a terrorist act in the name of Islamic terrorism.”

“I would want to see the facts develop,” Giuliani said. “I think the administration has been very slow to come to the conclusion that Major Hasan was an Islamic extremist terrorist. I mean, the reality is, he announced “Allah akbar” when he shot and killed those people. He was communicating with a cleric who was encouraging terrorism. And now it turns out he has — he even has business cards saying ‘solder of Allah.’”

Hooper said that CAIR has been the target of death threats since the shootings, and asked: “Are those terrorist threats or is it only a terrorist threat if a Muslim does it?”

The group issued a statement immediately after the shooting strongly condemning it as inimical to Islam, and its president called it “particularly heinous in that it targeted our nation’s all-volunteer army that includes thousands of Muslims.” It also issued a statement condemning an Iman who praised the alleged shooter.

Dianna Heitz

Hillary Clinton puts John Kerry in Afghan spotlight

Kabul’s still shaky, but Afghanistan has done one thing already for Washington power-sharing: gotten John Kerry and Hillary Clinton working together.

Traveling in the region last week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman was drawn into five days of often intense talks with President Hamid Karzai.

Clinton, as secretary of state, helped clear the way with a long call to Karzai but also gave Kerry the room to run. And the result — Karzai’s agreement to hold a runoff election next month — was a joint triumph for the onetime rivals.

“We have an immense amount at stake in Afghanistan, and I felt ‘when you see a moment, move,’” Kerry told POLITICO Wednesday.

“We had a terrific working relationship,” Kerry said of Clinton, who holds the job he wanted but didn’t get. “I reached out to her, she gave me her confidence, she was completely supportive.”

Kerry and Clinton talked by phone Wednesday, but Washington being Washington, it didn’t help when White House press secretary Robert Gibbs slipped up and called the senator “Secretary Kerry.” And Clinton, who had a speech appearance elsewhere, wasn’t part of a small Oval Office meeting later in which the Massachusetts Democrat briefed President Barack Obama on his trip — and his strong view that the president should wait until after November’s runoff before sending more troops.

It’s difficult to know how it all played with Clinton. Efforts by POLITICO to reach top aides or the secretary went unanswered. But interviews with administration officials this week gave no hint that she’s privately seething; sources said she made the decision to step back and give Kerry more leeway — and the spotlight.

In truth, the two former Senate colleagues seem more settled these days in their parallel, post-presidential-candidate lives. “He’s never been more happy in the Senate,” said a longtime aide.

When much of the competition took place with Clinton regarding who would be secretary of state, Kerry wasn’t yet sure that he would have his chairmanship to fall back on. Now more secure, he proved helpful to Clinton in Kabul — building trust with Karzai, whose relations with special envoy Richard Holbrooke have grown strained. In fact, Holbrooke met with Kerry at length before he left Washington, and administration officials said Clinton, who was in touch with Karzai by phone, welcomed the senator’s involvement as the Afghan president was threatening to oppose any runoff.

More than most secretaries of state, Clinton brings with her a set of past ties to Congress. “She has her unique network of relationships, and she uses them,” said one administration official. “Kerry was very helpful.”

And just a week before Kerry’s trip, her old friend and political ally, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), made his own visit to Kabul and delivered a strong warning to Karzai about the need to address both corruption and election fraud issues. Holbrooke later told associates that he thought the Inouye visit had proved useful, and, taken together with Kerry’s diplomacy, it was almost a good cop, bad cop routine.

The administration’s willingness to use Senate delegations for its own ends is not without risk to the senators themselves.

The late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana was an early champion of the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ultimately killed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1963. And at one level, the Obama administration’s willingness to embrace more Senate participation in Afghanistan reflects the fact that none of the policy choices are politically popular or easy.

But Kerry has been here before and prides himself on his ability to negotiate settlements, whether labor disputes at home or the often thankless task of being co-chairman of a Senate panel in 1991 that was charged with investigating the fate of Americans missing after the wars in Indochina.

“My principle became, ‘How do you make some good come out of this mess?’ and I think the way to make it come out is to try to see Vietnam move toward freedom through the marketplace, … through its own transformation, and I think that can happen,” he told this reporter in a 2004 interview. “That’s what life is about; there’s no shortage of messes. That’s the challenge. That’s what makes it fun.”

A diplomat’s son, he wasn’t above playing Hanoi and Phnom Penh against one another, sometimes stopping in Cambodia en route to Vietnam to make the Hanoi government worry it was losing a step to its neighbor.

“He worked on the issue with finesse and effectiveness, knowing there were mounting obstacles on both sides,” a Vietnamese official said. And there was an almost dogged acceptance of details. “He learned every bit of the history, every allegation,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recalled in a 2004 interview. “So when we were talking to the Vietnamese, if they were trying to BS him, he’d say, ‘Wait a minute, our records show this person was shot down on such and such a date and radio signals were heard.’”

To hear Kerry describe his days in Kabul with the often-wavering Karzai is to hear some of the same. The senator’s travel itinerary called for him to go to Pakistan, but he was willing to return to Kabul — and did —at the Afghan president’s request. Their meetings stretched for hours, including a long walk on the day of the final announcement, and Kerry speaks impatiently of clearing out the “hang-ups.”

“If you have those hang-ups, don’t leave them hanging,” he told POLITICO. “Get them out of the way.”

“I think I see the situation much more clearly now,” he said prior to going down to meet with Obama, but back in Washington now, he must also sell that vision to his colleagues.

Republicans, for example, are pressing hard for a quicker decision on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops, and there appears to be some gap, too, between the views of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and top White House political aides.

“You want to make sure that, one, it’s going to take place; two, that it’s going to be well-supervised,”said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.). “But I think these decisions can be made once you have that confidence of it going forward.”

“Kerry did a superb job. Frankly, I think this could be, in retrospect, a turning point in the sense that, with all the cynicism, if they follow this constitutional form, it’s going to help the next [Afghan] president to be much more resilient.”

These pressures are driving efforts to truncate the election process by having Karzai and his chief rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, enter into a power-sharing relationship. “It’s my understanding that, even today, there may have been some conversation between the two of them,” Kerry said, but insisted that he had been careful to stay away from any such brokering.

“It would have given Afghans a sense that the United States is calling the shots, and we want to avoid that always,” he said.

“I’ve done this for a while, but I had one of the more interesting personal journeys, if you will, talking with [Karzai] about Afghan history, about his family, their tribe, his father, their long history in Afghanistan and its politics, the period of Soviet domination, the Taliban,” Kerry told reporters outside the White House.

“He took me on a personal tour of the old palace where the king lived. He showed me what the Taliban did to the tapestries. We walked around his personal residence at great length, just talking about the challenges of the country. And it was really, you know, as personal and as intriguing and productive as, I think, this kind of endeavor could be.”

By DAVID ROGERS

Pelosi pushes strong public option

Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats Tuesday night that she wants to move forward with the more liberal version of a House health reform bill that would peg government-run coverage to Medicare – setting up a clash with moderates in her caucus who oppose the plan.

Pelosi told her rank-and-file that she has more than 200 votes for a public option tethered to Medicare and that she wants to “see if we can find the remaining votes,” one member present said afterward.

“We are very close and I count tough,” Pelosi told the room, according to one person in the room. She asked Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) to ask his deputies to survey members in the next 24 hours to see if she could get to 218 votes for the bill, several members said after the meeting.

According to preliminary numbers, the final bill being sought by Pelosi would cost an estimated $870 billion over the next 10 years — well under President Barack Obama’s $900 billion target — and cover 96 percent of those Americans who qualify for coverage. The plan wouldn’t add to the deficit over its first decade, but it’s less clear whether it is deficit neutral in the second 10 years.

Pelosi, who has long favored the most robust public option, made clear to members that part of her strategy was to strengthen her hand by taking a strong public option bill into the House-Senate conference.

She left open the possibility of going with a different version of the bill if she couldn’t muster the votes. She also told the members the next time they meet, she will tell them how many votes they have for each of three possible public options. But she cautioned that her leadership team is still awaiting final projections from the Congressional Budget Office about a plan with negotiated rates.

“There’s no question that the robust public option always scores better,” Pelosi told reporters earlier in the day after she emerged from a two-hour leadership meeting. “It has enormous savings. There are other considerations, and that’s what we’ll be talking to our members about.”

Moderate and conservative Democrats, particularly those from rural states, are expected to object vehemently to any public option linked to Medicare.

A rebellion among Democratic moderates could force the speaker to retreat to a public option in which doctors would be able to negotiate rates with the government, but only if those more conservative Democrats could prevent her from getting the 218 votes she needs to move the bill through the House.

But Pelosi’s desire to move ahead on a liberal bill also puts her on a collision course with the Senate — where the Finance Committee approved a bill that doesn’t include the public option at all. Leading senators also say there’s no way the upper chamber will support the “millionaire’s tax” included in the House bill; the Senate Finance Committee bill instead pays for the bulk of reform efforts through an excise tax on so-called Cadillac health insurance plans.

That idea, in turn, has drawn fire from a key Democratic constituency — organized labor — and would struggle to gain support in the House.

For weeks, Pelosi has done little to hide her preference for a strong public option in the health reform bill, even as Obama made clear he could live without it and the Senate Finance Committee moved ahead without one.

Pelosi has been considering three options, including the one she plans to include in the House bill. The other two options are considered more palatable to moderates in her party — one in which doctors can negotiate fees directly with the government and another with a “trigger” that would impose the Medicare-plus-five rate if the negotiated rates didn’t save enough money.

But moderate and conservative Democrats — including the fiscally conservative Blue Dogs — have raised strong objections to the robust public option in the past, meaning Pelosi will face a struggle to rally support behind it in the final bill.

AFSCME’s Gerry McEntee takes on White House

The president of one of America’s largest labor unions, Gerry McEntee, has emerged as a major obstacle to the White House’s efforts to maintain a unified front in the health care debate.

The veteran president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has crossed lines that few labor leaders – even those who quietly agree with him – would go near.

McEntee led workers in chanting a barnyard epithet to describe Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus’s health care bill, which would levy a new tax on expensive health care plans. He published an op-ed in U.S.A. Today warning, in terms that could be used against Democrats in the midterms, that the plan could tax the middle class and cost workers their health care. And he blew off a plea from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and published an open letter promising to “oppose” legislation that contained the tax – published over the objections, several labor officials said, of other union presidents whose names appeared on the letter.

“We have had just about enough of his gratuitous slaps,” said a senior White House official Friday, calling the politically charged language “outrageous and unacceptable” from an ally — even from one that had, the official noted, devoted substantial resources to health care efforts.

“He’s doing his members a real disservice,” said the official, who said that while all other labor leaders had been careful to keep their opposition to elements of health care proposals modulated and largely inside the tent, McEntee was “beyond the pale.”

But a spokesman for AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka stood by McEntee.

“We work closely with the White House and count ourselves among their strongest supporters,” said the spokesman, Eddie Vale. “Sometimes being supportive means staking out a tough position, and nobody understands that better than President McEntee.”

McEntee’s posture – and the fierce response from a White House determined to keep allies in line – reflects a broader dilemma on the left of the Democratic Party, which is feeling both lingering satisfaction at Obama’s victory and frustration at his caution.

From labor to civil libertarians to anti-war activists, progressive organizers have had to choose between biting their tongues and losing the access and power that comes with friends in the White House. McEntee is among the most prominent leaders who has been willing to challenge the administration.

Despite his investment – and AFSCME’s – in health care reform, he has been willing to risk his relationships and his influence with powerful Democratic leaders in the White House and the Senate for a bill he can more fully embrace.

McEntee’s stand also reflects the messy internal politics of the labor movement. His arch-rival in organizing public sector workers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern, has aligned himself closely with the White House, pushing McEntee, an associate said, to define himself as the loyal opposition.

The posture is entirely in character for the brawny, brawling Pennsylvanian, who has a long record of confrontational politics, stretching back to the 1980s, when he led fierce attacks on Democrats who backed a balanced-budget amendment.

Unafraid of making enemies, he has a history – unusual for a union leader – of diving early and aggressively into Democratic primaries, supporting the unsuccessful presidential candidacies of Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, and, most recently, endorsing Terry McAuliffe, who lost to Creigh Deeds in the Virginia gubernatorial primary.

McEntee first angered the Obama camp during the 2008 campaign with his support for Clinton , especially in the early, demure days of the primary season, when his union mailed a harsh attack on Obama to New Hampshire voters, which asked: “How can we be sure the new President is ready?”

In labor circles, McEntee is regarded with a mixture of pride, indulgence and disdain.

“Gerry’s never been shy about standing up to his members, regardless of who’s in power – he’s there to fight for his members,” said the president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, a longtime McEntee friend, Rick Bloomingdale.

“A lot of people have made the political calculus that we don’t want to piss of the White House, so we don’t want to be that overt – but they’re certainly glad that somebody is,” said one prominent labor official. “That’s the great thing about him – you can’t edit the guy – and he likes to do the ‘bull***’ chant whenever he can find an excuse.”

McEntee, traveling in Puerto Rico to oppose layoffs of public workers there, was unreachable Friday, according to his spokesman, Chris Policano.

“No one’s worked harder than AFSCME to support the president’s vision of providing quality, affordable health care for all Americans,” said Policano, who said the union has spent more than $2 million on advertising for health care reform, lobbied Congress, paid campaign organizers in 13 states, and turned out workers to town hall meetings, while planning a large-scale “national day of action” October 20.

“President McEntee is fiercely committed to the principles we’ve been advocating for months, including a public option and keeping costs off the backs of working families. He’s more than willing to keep the heat on Congress to make that happen,” he said.

When Emmanuel recently requested that he tone down his public criticism of compromise legislation, McEntee responded dismissively. “He told us that we really don’t want to be looked upon as the group that stopped meaningful health-care reform,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg News . “We would love to be on the exact same page as the White House, but we see ourselves as fighting for our members.”

So instead of backing down, McEntee convened a conference call Tuesday afternoon of AFL-CIO union presidents, and presented them with an ad that would run the next day in POLITICO, the Washington Post, and other Washington newspapers containing this uncompromising language: “Unless the bill that goes to the floor of the U.S. Senate makes substantial progress to address the concerns of working men and women, we will oppose it.”

The last phrase shocked other union leaders on the call, and three of them – Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers, and Harold Schaitberger of the International Association of Firefighters – questioned the language.

“It’s gone,” McEntee said of the ad, and when Schaitberger – a longtime foe — tried to pass a resolution blocking the letter, he objected on procedural grounds.

“Is there any imaginable scenario where even AFSCME – the big blowhard – would oppose a health care reform bill by this congress and this president?” asked an official at one objecting union, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Is there any scenario that that would happen? So why would we say it in an ad?”

Others said they might still oppose the legislation, but that the ad was unnecessarily strident. “This is very premature to be putting markers down,” Schaitberger said. “There are so many steps left. There are two Senate bills to be merged. We’re going to get a lot further down this road by being prospective.”

The unions that thought McEntee had gone too far are circulating a letter to the Senate that changes the word “oppose” to “not support it.”

Another union president on the call, Unite Here’s John Wilhelm, downplayed the differences.“The president and the labor movement have the same agenda on health care. There might be tactical disagreements from time to time,” he said. As for McEntee, he added: “There’s a lot of different styles in the labor movement, and that’s ok.”

One longtime McEntee associate said the president and his aides will just have to get used to him. “That’s just the kind of bare-knuckles politics McEntee has played for a long time,” the person said. “I know the White House is pissed off at him, but it’s awful early in the presidency to be tossing someone over the side.”

Rush Limbaugh pounces on Barack Obama’s nobel peace prize!

Conservatives pounced on the the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, with talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh calling it a “greater embarrassment” than losing the Olympics.

“This fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama,” Limbaugh told POLITICO in an e-mail. “And with this ‘award’ the elites of the world are urging Obama, THE MAN OF PEACE, to not do the surge in Afghanistan, not take action against Iran and its nuclear program and to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States.”

Limbaugh continued: “They love a weakened, neutered U.S and this is their way of promoting that concept. I think God has a great sense of humor, too.”

The Nobel award comes a week to the day after Obama’s personal pitch for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago was rejected by the International Olympic Committee.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28124.html#ixzz0TRlPP7Tm

Obama: Iran ‘on notice’ to comply

PITTSBURGH — President Barack Obama on Friday warned Iran to “come clean” about its nuclear program and its once-secret underground fuel site, saying world powers are united like never before to curb Tehran’s atomic ambitions and that “it’s up to the Iranians to respond.”

Obama stressed that he prefers a diplomatic solution and ultimately, sanctions that “have bite” if Iran doesn’t come around but declined to take the military option off the table.

“Iran would make a mistake in ignoring the call for them to respond in a forthright and clear manner, and to recognize that the choice they make over the next several weeks and months could well determine their ability to rejoin the international community, or to find themselves isolated,” Obama said at a news conference to close the G-20 economic summit here.

Asked about the possible use of force, Obama said, “We do not rule out any options when it comes to U.S. security threats, but I will re-emphasize that my preferred course of action is to resolve this in a diplomatic fashion.”

Obama’s comments capped a day when the U.S. president accused Iran of building a secret underground facility to enrich nuclear fuel — calling it a direct breach of global laws governing nuclear weapons and demanding an immediate international investigation.

“Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow,” Obama said at a dramatic morning news conference before the main sessions of the G-20 economic summit, flanked by British Prime Minster Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The leaders called on Iran to open the facility to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency and to take concrete steps to show what it is being used for. Iran has long claimed its nuclear program is purely peaceful, but Western nations believe Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

In his earlier remarks, Obama called the facility “inconsistent with a peaceful [nuclear] program.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasted Obama’s comments in an interview with Time magazine, calling Obama’s charges about an underground fuel facility “a mistake.” Ahamdinejad said the facility wasn’t a secret because the Iranians had disclosed to the IAEA. He called on Obama to apologize to the Iranian people.

At the later news conference, Obama stressed that new evidence about the underground site came from the three nations’ intelligence services, was checked in a “painstaking fashion” to avoid any mistakes and called the intelligence “solid.” It was an attempt to tamp any global skepticism about the evidence — particularly after some of the intelligence President George W. Bush cited in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 turned out to be faulty.

But Obama sounded fully committed to the diplomatic route on Iran, touting the joint statement by the three nations as a sign of unprecedented unity in standing firm against Iran. “That kind of solidarity is not typical. Anybody who has been following the response to Iran would have been doubtful just a few months ago that that kind of rapid response was possible. So I think Iran is on notice,” Obama said.

Told that some of his aides described the revelation of the new underground facility as a “victory,” Obama pushed back. “This isn’t a football game, so I’m not interested in victory; I’m interested in resolving the problem,” he said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27579.html#ixzz0SFhHGunx

By JOSH GERSTEIN & NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON

Obama: Job numbers won’t improve this year By CAROL E. LEE

The nation’s jobless numbers may worsen, President Barack Obama says, and won’t begin to turn around until next year.

“Probably the jobs picture is not going to improve considerably – and it could even get a little bit worse – over the next couple of months,” Obama said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN “State of the Union.” “And we’re probably not going to start seeing enough job creation to deal with a rising population until some time next year.”

The country lost such a large number of jobs that regaining them will “require really high growth rates,” Obama said.

One part of the push to generate that growth is by creating more exports, a topic Obama said will be discussed at next week’s G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.

“We can’t go back to the era where the Chinese or the Germans or other countries just are selling everything to us, we’re taking out a bunch of credit card debt or home equity loans, but we’re not selling anything to them,” Obama said.