State Visit of Hu Jintao

Guests at the state dinner for China's President Hu Jintao. New York Times photo.President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama host President Hu of China at a State Dinner at the White House:

Nia-Malika Henderson & Roxanne Roberts of the Washington Post on the guests & the festivities.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times on the guest list for the state dinner. Here's the guest list, & I'm sorry to report Tom Friedman is on it. ...

... Ben Smith: labor is mighty miffed at being snubbed in favor of bankers & Mrs. Murdoch. ...

... Jena McGregor of the Washington Post on John Boehner's declining to attend this and two other state dinners the Obamas have hosted. Many say Boehner is just plain rude; others accuse him of dereliction of duty.

Secretary Clinton & Vice President Biden welcome President Hu to lunch at the State Department:

President Obama & Hu hold a lo-o-o-ng press conference:

New York Times: At a joint press conference, "President Obama and President Hu Jintao of China both pledged on Wednesday to nurture what they called their two nations’ growing common interests, but they also acknowledged differences in the areas of trade and human rights as they held their eighth meeting in two years."

Paul Kane of the Washington Post: "As Chinese President Hu Jintao was being feted at the White House Wednesday, a bipartisan collection of congressmen gave a much sharper welcome to the leader of the world's most populous nation, questioning China's handling of its domestic economy and its alleged human rights abuses.... On Thursday, after Wednesday night's state dinner hosted by President Obama, Hu will come to Congress for meetings on both ends of the Capitol with some of his critics."

President Obama and President Hu of China hold an expanded bilateral meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. White House photo.Washington Post: in a brief news conference, "President Obama, hosting Chinese President Hu Jintao on a state visit, announced Wednesday that a series of new commercial deals would increase U.S. exports to China by more than $45 billion."

President Obama & Hu meet with business leaders:

President Obama, Vice President Biden & Secretary Clinton held a bilateral meeting with President Hu this morning. AP story here.

President Obama welcomes President Hu:

... Here's the whole shebang. It lasts for a little more than half-an-hour:

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post: Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of industrial policy. But when competing against countries that practice it skillfully and aggressively, we may have no choice but to respond in kind - if for no other reason than as a way to negotiate a more level playing field for American firms and American workers. China has already leveraged this advantage to wipe out large swaths of American industry, build up a $3 trillion dollar war chest and help to put the U.S. economy in a rut characterized by low growth, high unemployment and unsustainable trade deficits."

Don Lee & Paul Richter of the Los Angeles Times: "Little headway may be made on intellectual property, currency valuation and other issues that Obama and others in Washington want China's president to address."

John Pomfret of the Washington Post: "Chinese President Hu Jintao will highlight [Chinese company] Wanxiang's U.S. operations on Friday during an event in Chicago. Hu is hoping to show Americans that in addition to providing them with cheap goods, Chinese companies can also give them good jobs.... In speeches last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke both complained that China was not open enough to U.S. products, had not done enough to let the value of its currency appreciate against the dollar and was not respectful of U.S. intellectual property rights."

Nicholas Johnston & Hans Nichols of Bloomberg News: "The itinerary, which has a business focus..., is an illustration of the importance both countries place on their economic relationship and meshes with the U.S. president’s goals of boosting exports and spurring job growth."

January 21 News Updates on President Hu's Visit

New York Times: "President Obama warned President Hu Jintao that if China did not step up its pressure on North Korea, the United States would have to redeploy its forces in Asia to protect itself from a potential North Korean strike on American soil.... Mr. Obama’s warning, first made in a phone call to Mr. Hu last month and repeated over a private dinner at the White House on Tuesday, persuaded China to take a harder line toward North Korea..., which opened the door to a resumption of dialogue between North and South Korea."

The Hill: "House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday urged Chinese President Hu Jintao to bolster his commitment to human rights and climate-change prevention...."

Reuters: during the welcoming ceremony on Wednesday, Sasha Obama practiced her Chinese with President Hu.

The Commentariat -- January 19

President Obama & Vice President Biden issue statements memorializing Sargent Shriver, who died yesterday. ...

... Rick Hertzberg remembers Sargent Shriver.

This Defies Conventional Wisdom. Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times: "... child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country...."

Christopher Beam: "As Simon & Schuster prepares to release O: A Presidential Novel, based on the Obama administration and starring a thinly veiled Barack Obama as the character 'O,' the publisher is trying to keep the identity of its anonymous author under wraps. Slate imagines a few possibilities." Happily for New York Times readers, Tom Friedman has been on hiatus; perhaps he was busy writing O. Beam thinks the Friedman book would read something like this:

The situation room was dark and shadowy. Five-star General Donald Patroclus was explaining the new Afghanistan strategy to O.
'Afghanistan is like a burrito,' he said. 'When you bite one end, a little bean juice is gonna come out the other.'
O looked intrigued. 'Go on.'
'So you need two things. First, you need to make a better tortilla. Wheat instead of cornmeal. Then you gotta wrap it tight. And then, just in case, you need napkins—lots and lots of napkins.'
'That makes perfect sense,' said O.
'But really, it's all about India. See, India's like a giant bag of Funyuns …'

     ... Read all of the "writers"' literary efforts. They're a hoot. AND, since we're doing Friedman, here's this from David Rees (click on the cartoon to see a larger image):

Okay, so while we're being uncivil to media personalities:

American economist Richard Wolff in the Guardian: " The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes. Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures." ...

... David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "Alone among the world’s economic powers, the United States is suffering through a deep jobs slump that can’t be explained by the rest of the economy’s performance.... One obvious [reason] is the balance of power between employers and employees. Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints.... Study after study has shown that unions usually do benefit workers." ...

... There's more from Leonhardt on the U.S. jobs slump here. ...

... Edward Wyatt of the New York Times: "The new regulatory board charged with overseeing the stability of the financial system took its first big steps on Tuesday to set out tentative guidelines to limit trading by banks for their own accounts and to restrict the growth of the biggest financial companies. The Financial Stability Oversight Council ... created by the Dodd-Frank Act, also proposed rules as to which large financial companies that were not banks would be regulated by the Federal Reserve.... The recommendations made public on Tuesday are subject to revision based on public comments and the recommendations of various other state and federal regulatory agencies." ...

... Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post: "The nation's four biggest banks can grow even bigger, with the potential to add at least another trillion dollars onto their balance sheets before they even reach the limits imposed by the Obama administration, according to an administration study released Tuesday." ...

... Susanne Craig & Eric Dash of the New York Times: "Goldman Sachs executives ... are now poised to reap a windfall that was sown in the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008. Nearly 36 million stock options were granted to employees in December 2008 — 10 times the amount issued the previous year — when the stock was trading at $78.78. Since those uncertain days, Goldman’s business has roared back and its share price has more than doubled, closing on Tuesday at nearly $175." ...

... Eric Dash: "Industrywide, [bank] revenues are off 17 percent from their peak in 2007, and the latest figures are flat or declining.

Paul Krugman: "... in general right-wing think tanks prefer people who genuinely can’t understand the issues — it makes them more reliable. Doesn’t this apply to both sides? Not equally. There was a time when conservative think tanks employed genuine policy wonks, and when asked to devise a Republican health care plan, they came up with — Obamacare! That is, what passes for leftist policy now is what was considered conservative 15 years ago; to meet the right’s standards of political correctness now, you have to pass into another dimension, a dimension whose boundaries are that of imagination, untrammeled by things like arithmetic or logic." CW: I'm so glad to see Krugman coming right out & saying this -- it needed to be said. ...

... NEW. Ezra Klein: "Republicans have refused to play by [the] rules. They have claimed, as Doug Holtz-Eakin, Joseph Antos and James Capretta do in today's Wall Street Journal, that the CBO's work is now the product of 'budget gimmicks, deceptive accounting, and implausible assumptions....' They have created a separate world for themselves when it comes to this bill, a world where there are no accepted estimates except the ones they choose to accept (notably, they regularly mention the CBO results that they think help their case), where there is no neutral arbiter who can be relied on to set the premises of the debate, and thus, where policy debate is not really possible." ...

... NEWER. What about the Uninsured? This from Klein: "The lack of concern for how more than 30 million Americans will get their health-care coverage makes for an ugly contrast with the intense concern that Rep. Andy Harris -- a proponent of repeal -- found when he heard that his congressional health-care coverage wouldn't begin until a month after he took the oath of office." ...

... Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP: "Private health insurance plans catering to Medicare recipients are making millions by taking money the government sends in advance -- but isn't immediately needed -- and using it to make investments, federal investigators say.... In financial parlance, it's called 'playing the float.' In contrast with another government program that also deals regularly with health insurers, Medicare lets its plans keep the cash.... A Medicare official said ... little can be done to change the situation.... The inspector general's office disagrees."

Stephanie Cutter of the White House on the costs of repealing the Affordable Care Act:

Kate Nocera of Politico: "The pharmaceutical industry, which spent months cutting deals with Democrats to protect its interests, has remained mum on Republican repeal efforts.... This method of laying low makes perfect sense, according to Chris Jennings, who was senior health care adviser to former President Bill Clinton. Rather than support the repeal effort, which has little chance of becoming law, PhRMA and AHIP are saving their firepower for more practical targets." ...

... Lisa Lerer & Drew Armstrong of Bloomberg News: "With a symbolic vote to repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is starting a two- year campaign to undermine the law through piecemeal dismantling tactics and efforts to weaken public support." ...

... House Republicans Debate Healthcare Repeal. Dana Milbank: "In the debate's early stages, they avoided virtually all violent speech, instead resorting to less provocative insults to describe the health-care law.... The new GOP majority generally showed a skill that had been lacking in the Republican caucus for the past two years: self-restraint."

Emily Bazelon of Slate, a Connecticut resident, on why she loathes, loathes, loathes Joe Lieberman. Her friend Judy Chevalier writes that there's a "peculiar Connecticut liberal cocktail party game: 'I hated Joe Lieberman before you hated Joe Lieberman.'" ...

... Her colleague Dave Weigel notes that "Lieberman would have lost anyway." ...

... Here's the backstory: New York Times: "Saying his independent-minded approach to politics does not 'fit comfortably into conventional political boxes,' Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, made it official on Wednesday, formally announcing that he would not seek a fifth term in 2012." Here's the Hartford Courant story, with videos of Lieberman's announcement speech. Here's the text of Lieberman's speech, via the Courant.

AP: "A federal grand jury has indicted the suspect in the deadly Arizona shooting that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The indictment against Jared Loughner ... accuses him of attempting to assassinate Giffords and trying to kill two of her aides. It does not include two murder charges included in an earlier criminal complaint for the deaths of another Giffords aide and a federal judge." ...

... Richard Oppel, Jr., et al., of the New York Times: "The chief investigator for the [Pima County] sheriff’s department ... has for the first time publicly described the brief and gory video clip from a store security camera that shows a gunman not only shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords just above the eyebrow at a range of three feet, but then using his 9-millimeter pistol to gun down others near her at a similarly close range. The video ... also reveals that Judge John M. Roll appears to have died while saving the life of Ronald Barber, one of Ms. Giffords’s employees. Mr. Barber ... has since left the hospital." ...

... James Grimaldi of the Washington Post: "An old policy memo from the Clinton administration paved the way for accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner to buy his first firearm. Put in place by then-Attorney General Janet Reno, the policy prohibited the military from reporting certain drug abusers to the FBI, which manages the national list of prohibited gun-buyers.... The Reno policy told federal agencies not to report people who had voluntarily given drug tests for fear it would deter them from seeking treatment...." ...

... Diane Sawyer of ABC News interviews Mark Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords:

     ... Here's a related story by Bradley Blackburn of ABC News. ...

... Denise Grady & Jennifer Medina of the New York Times: "In an exuberant e-mail to family and friends Tuesday, the mother of Representative Gabrielle Giffords described remarkable progress by her daughter. According to the e-mail, Ms. Giffords scrolled through photographs on her husband’s iPhone, tried to undo his tie and shirt and even began to look at get-well cards and pages of large-print text taken from a Harry Potter book.... Members of Ms. Giffords’s staff said they worried that the message ... might paint an overly optimistic picture of the congresswoman’s condition." ...

... Sam Dolnick of the New York Times: Rep. Gabrielle "Giffords’s aides opened ... the congresswoman’s district office [in Tucson], two days after the shooting..., and the office has stayed open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday since. It has been one of the staff’s few constants since a gunman opened fire at a community event on Jan. 8...."

Adam Liptak of the New York Times: the Supremes hear a state secrets case. "But the justices did not seem inclined to use the opportunity to give the lower courts guidance about its contours." ...

... ** Dahlia Lithwick tells the story much better: "the court today seized the opportunity to conduct a rollicking roller-derby smash-up on American contract law." ...

You say they're at fault, they say you're at fault. Under the state-secrets doctrine we can't resolve that question. Why don't we call the whole thing off? -- Chief Justice John Roberts

... Federal Judges Are Really Old. Joseph Goldstein of Slate: "Today, aging and dementia are the flip side of life tenure, with more and more judges staying on the bench into extreme old age. About 12 percent of the nation's 1,200 sitting federal district and circuit judges are 80 years or older...."

Local News

Joe Romm of Climate Progress: "$#*! My Texas AG Says: 'It is almost the height of insanity of bureaucracy to have the EPA regulating something that is emitted by all living things.' So the EPA shouldn’t regulate the discharge from living things.  I guess the Texas AG just wants crap all over the place.  Literally. [Insert your joke about sewage treatment here.]" Via this Krugman post: "... given the way we’re heading — with politicians arguing that the federal government has no right to ban child labor — don’t be surprised to see the anti-sewer movement making a comeback, and to see elected representatives, even if they know better, holding their noses and going along."

Kristofer Rios of the New York Times: "After fighting for more than a decade for better wages, a group of Florida farmworkers has hashed out the final piece of an extraordinary agreement with local tomato growers and several big-name buyers, including the fast-food giants McDonald’s and Burger King, that will pay the pickers roughly a penny more for every pound of fruit they harvest. Farm laborers are among the lowest-paid workers in the United States, and the agreement could add thousands of dollars to their income.... Some labor experts said the agreement could set a precedent for improving working conditions and pay in other parts of the agriculture and food industries, nationally and worldwide."

The Commentariat -- January 18

President Obama & President Hu Jintao of China begin their working dinner in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House. White House photo.

R. Sargent Shriver. Undated photo, 1960s, by Life magazine.New York Times: "R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who became the founding director of the Peace Corps, the architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, the United States ambassador to France and the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1972, died Tuesday. He was 95." ...

... Former Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy remembers Sargent Shriver, who died today.

New York Times: "Senator Joseph I. Lieberman will announce on Wednesday that he will not seek a fifth term, according to a person he told of his decision. Mr. Lieberman, whose term is up in 2012, chose to retire rather than risk being defeated, said the person, who spoke to the senator on Tuesday. 'I don’t think he wanted to go out feet first,' the person said." ...

    ... Update: Here's a more extensive Times article on Sen. Lieberman's decision not to seek re-election.

Ben Smith & Byron Tau of Politico: "American Muslim leaders, who have struggled to present a clear public voice or organize politically in the decade since Sept. 11, are increasingly apprehensive about the direction Rep. Pete King will take when he convenes hearings next month on the threat posed by radical Islam in America. King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, plans to focus on the Times Square bombing attempt and the Fort Hood shooting, both involving American-born Muslims, as well as other incidents and on what he sees as the failure of Muslim leadership to combat extremism."

Manu Raju of Politico: Rand Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky, will present "his own sweeping budget plan that would result in a $500 billion cut in just one year — about five times more than what the House GOP has promised to do."

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP shows how Republicans turned the CBO's slight labor loss estimate into an untrue "job-killing" claim about the healthcare law. The labor loss: the CBO assumes that some people will retire early because they don't have to work for health insurance -- their jobs will still be there for others to fill. Ezra Klein made the same point last week in a post titled "There's no 'job-killing health-care law.'"

Pre-existing Conditions. Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post: "As many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have medical problems that are red flags for health insurers, according to an analysis that marks the government's first attempt to quantify the number of people at risk of being rejected by insurance companies or paying more for coverage. The secretary of health and human services is scheduled to release the study on Tuesday, hours before the House plans to begin considering a Republican bill that would repeal the new law to overhaul the health-care system." ...

     ... Update: here's the report from HHS. It's very readable. Here's a more readable blogpost from HHS covering the study's findings (the report isn't that bad).

... David Herszenhorn of the New York Times has more on what Democrats will do today to make the case for the Affordable Care Act.

Michael Grunwald's cover story for Time on gun control is now available online.

Philip Rucker & Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post: "A statute buried in [Arizona] state law says that if a public officeholder ceases to 'discharge the duties of office for the period of three consecutive months,' the office shall be deemed vacant, and that at such time, a special election could be called to fill the opening." The law could endanger Gabrielle Giffords' hold on her seat, though at least one Constitutional lawyer said it was up to Congress, not the state, to determine if a vacancy has occurred, & those close to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said it was unlikely she would call a special election under the circumstances.

David Nakamura, et al., of the Washington Post: "A team of 250 federal investigators and 130 local detectives trying to understand why Jared Lee Loughner went on his alleged killing spree has conducted more than 300 interviews with family, friends and neighbors since the shooting. But they remain stumped about what ultimately prompted the 22-year-old's descent into violence." ...

... A. G. Sulzberger & Jennifer Medina of the New York Times: "No one has suggested that [Jared Loughner]'s use of a hallucinogenic herb or any other drugs contributed to ’s apparent mental unraveling that culminated with his being charged in a devastating outburst of violence here. Yet it is striking how closely the typical effects of smoking the herb, Salvia divinorum — which federal drug officials warn can closely mimic psychosis — matched Mr. Loughner’s own comments about how he saw the world, like his often-repeated assertion that he spent most of his waking hours in a dream world that he had learned to control."

The speaker says that here in Washington we're all friends after 6. -- President Ronald Reagan, to Chris Matthews. Matthews has a nice remembrance in the Washington Post on the cordial relationship between Reagan & Speaker Tip O'Neill, for whom Matthews worked. ...

... Rick Hertzberg: We have experienced "a two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives — not just from professional radio and television propagandists but also from too many Republican officeholders and candidates for office. The portrayal of the national government as a sinister tyranny and President Obama and his party as equivalent to Communists and Nazis — as alien usurpers bent on destroying the country and the Constitution — spawned a rhetoric of what a Nevada candidate for the Senate approvingly referred to as 'Second Amendment remedies.'"

In a situation like we have just faced in these last eight days of being falsely accused of being an accessory to murder, I and others need make sure that we too are shedding light on truth so a lie cannot continue to live. If a lie does live, then of course your career is over and your reputation is thrashed and you will be ineffective in what we intend to do. -- Guess Who ...

... And while we're on distasteful subjects, T. Bogg has a good post which explains why "Erick Erickson is Sarah Palin with slightly smaller tits." CW: Feminists, give me a break please; I'm one of you. And I have slightly smaller tits.

Elizabeth Williamson of the Wall Street Journal: "President Barack Obama plans a government-wide review of federal regulations, aiming to eliminate rules that stymie economic growth. In an article published in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Obama said he intends to issue an executive order initiating a review to 'make sure we avoid excessive, inconsistent and redundant regulation," focusing on rules that "stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.'" ...

     ... Here's the WSJ op-ed by President Obama.

White House Revolving Door. Ken Vogel of Politico: "Candidate Barack Obama repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail that working in his administration would not be 'about serving your former employer, your future employer or your bank account.' But with his administration at its midpoint, a traditional time for personnel turnover, it’s clear that despite Obama’s avowals, a longtime truism of Washington life — that a prestigious-sounding administration post can be a lucrative career enhancer — remains unchanged."

Ben Pershing of the Washington Post: "For all the ink spilled on the success of the conservative-leaning tea parties and their chosen candidates, the winners last Election Day included a host of centrist GOP lawmakers" who are moderates. We'll learn how many of the new crop are moderates "when the Tuesday Group -- the House GOP's centrist coalition -- has its first meeting of the 112th Congress."

Brady Dennis of the Washington Post: the "'resolution authority' created under the landmark financial regulation bill enacted last year, gives the government broad powers it didn't possess two years ago when companies such as Lehman Brothers and American International Group spiraled toward bankruptcy. Back then, federal officials faced an unenviable choice -- allow the firms to collapse into bankruptcy, possibly dragging others down with them, or put billions of taxpayer dollars at risk to bail them out."

Ben Protess of the New York Times: "J. Bradley Bennett, over the last two decades, has defended financial advisers, brokerage firms and corporate chieftains accused of everything from insider trading to accounting fraud. Now, he’s switching sides. On Jan. 3, Mr. Bennett became the top cop at Wall Street’s self-policing organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra.... During the financial crisis, critics say, the organization missed the forest for the trees, cracking down on small boiler rooms in Florida while ignoring big warning signs on Wall Street." CW: no kidding. Wall Street self-policing? Bennett sounds like a Wall Street dream -- a guy who was defending the same miscreants he is now supposed to "police." How dumb do they think we are?

AP: "... as the House prepares to vote on repeal this week, public support for that has flagged. Only about 1 in 4 respondents said they wanted to do away with the law completely. Even among Republicans, repeal draws markedly less support than it did a few weeks ago: 49%, compared with 61% after the November election." And, as this pdf of the poll demonstrates, a plurality wants the law to do more. Or, as Peter Wade, the Brooklyn Mutt, puts it, "Americans Want More Job-Killing Health Care."

Adam Hochschild, in a New York Times op-ed I missed, gives a brief history of U.S. culpability in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba & the installation of craven dictator Joseph Mobutu in the Congo.

Los Angeles Times: "The dramatic shrinking of Arctic sea ice and the Northern Hemisphere's glaciers and snowfields has reduced the radiation of sunlight back into space more than scientists previously predicted, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience. As a result, the ocean and land mass exposed by the melting ice and snow have absorbed more heat, contributing to global warming."

Local News

Florida, at the Forefront of Education. "Classes without Teachers." Laura Herrera of the New York Times: more than "7,000 students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools enrolled in a program in which core subjects are taken using computers in a classroom with no teacher. A 'facilitator' is in the room to make sure students progress. That person also deals with any technical problems. These virtual classrooms, called e-learning labs, were put in place last August as a result of Florida’s Class Size Reduction Amendment, passed in 2002. The amendment limits the number of students allowed in classrooms, but not in virtual labs."