The president barely finished his remarks regarding WS reform - a bill he didn't even sign yet - when a reporter asked: "What's next Mr. president? Immigration?"
Yep, even the media begins to get it: There's a serious, serious president in the White House, someone who's actually came to work and no matter how much crap is thrown at him - he just keeps going, doing things that no one even dare to dream of doing for decades.
First, Bob Shrum, thank you very much.
Sometimes, in the swirl of events, we forget that the president has already kept us out of depression, saved the auto industry, passed health care after a century of delay, overcome fierce lobbying and achieved the wholesale reform of college student loans, and will soon sign into law the most comprehensive financial reform since the New Deal. And if anyone continues to harbor the cliché that Obama’s too professorial, too indecisive, they should try offering that opinion to Stanley McChrystal. Barack Obama just understands that decisiveness is not impulsiveness—and eloquence is not empty boasting. In that, he’s different from his predecessor, who got us into so much of this pervasive mess.
With his cool steadiness, his capacity for thought, his strength under pressure, Obama is uniquely a president for our time. After watching the week that was in June, there is new reason to believe that he will come through the storms and finish the job.
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"Over the past 17 months we passed an economic recovery act, health care reform, education reform and we are now on the brink of passing Wall Street reform":
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NYT: Financial regulations not only remained strong but in some cases got stronger
A 20-hour marathon by members of a House-Senate conference committee to complete work on toughened financial rules culminated at 5:39 a.m. Friday in agreements on the two most contentious parts of the financial regulatory overhaul and a host of other provisions. Along party lines, the House conferees voted 20 to 11 to approve the bill; the Senate conferees voted 7 to 5 to approve.
With the agreement in place, President Obama said Friday morning that Congress was "poised to pass the toughest financial reforms" since the Great Depression, homing in on the consumer-protection measures that he said would make lending agreements easier to understand and protect small borrowers from hidden penalties and fees.
He said that the bill contained "90 percent of what I proposed when I started this fight."
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The bill has been the subject of furious and expensive lobbying efforts by businesses and financial trade groups in recent months. While those efforts produced some specific exceptions to new regulations, by and large the bill’s financial regulations not only remained strong but in some cases gained strength as public outrage grew at the excesses that fueled the financial meltdown of 2008.
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Benen:
And in the larger context, this will add to an impressive list of historic accomplishments spanning President Obama's first 18 months in office, a list that will now include Wall Street reform, health care reform, student loan reform, economic recovery, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, expanded civil rights protections, expanded stem-cell research, new regulation of the credit card industry, new regulation of the tobacco industry, a national service bill, and the most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years, among other things. Taegan Goddard noted this morning, "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform the country." That's not a hyperbolic observation in the slightest.
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Nouriel Roubini:
In particular, the congressional bills would require systemically risky financial institutions to (1) pay a fee into a resolution fund for failed institutions, (2) hold less leverage and have greater liquidity, (3) restrict their risk-taking activities (the so-called "Volcker rule," made explicit in the Senate version) and (4) be subject to a resolution process if they fail, one that would resemble the FDIC's current, successful approach for taking over failed banks.
If all these requirements sound familiar, they should - because they roughly mirror the successful protections put in place for deposit insurance in the 1930s. It's a model that worked for generations.
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MSNBC:
Hardly a Do-Nothing Congress: The agreement -- and the likelihood that Obama will sign it into law -- is yet another reminder about how much the White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress have done in the past year and a half (stimulus, health care, Wall Street reform, perhaps energy). You can’t say this is a Do-Nothing Congress; Then again, Republicans would argue it’s a Do-Too-Much Congress. It will be interesting to see how many Republicans end up voting for the final financial reform bill.
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Financial Reform Bill Looks Like Game-Changer:
WASHINGTON (TheStreet) -- If Wall Street had become a high-flying Las Vegas casino -- as several lawmakers recently put it -- it's about to become a little old lady buying lottery tickets.
It took more than 20 hours of wrangling after many more weeks of bickering, but finreg finally passed around 6 a.m. ET on Friday. Some of the harshest elements against big banks were watered down just enough to get a coalition of Wall Street-friendly representatives from New York to pledge their support.
But, overall, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 is much harder on big banks than anyone had suspected at the start.
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Powerful, independent consumer-protection bureau
The vast Wall Street regulation bill – a top priority of the Obama administration – launches a powerful, independent consumer-protection bureau, sets up an early-warning system for financial groups deemed too big to fail, revamps oversight of credit agencies, mandates lower fees on debit-card charges, and directs much of the $600 trillion over-the-counter derivatives trade through clearinghouses and exchanges.
The 2,000-page bill was voted out of conference on a party-line vote, 27 to 16, and now heads back to the House and Senate for final passage. Unexpectedly, the draft legislation didn’t reduce to the least common denominator or cave to powerful industry lobbying during negotiations.
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Obama inks bill sparing doctors from Medicare cuts
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has signed a bill that temporarily spares doctors from a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments.
The measure delays cuts through the end of November while lawmakers work on a more permanent solution.
There was some urgency to approve the $6.5 billion bill. Medicare officials announced last week that the program would begin processing claims it had already received for June at the lower rate.
The money had been part of a larger bill to extend unemployment benefits for laid-off workers and provide states with billions of dollars to avert layoffs. That bill has been blocked by Senate Republicans because of the cost.
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NYT: Democrats See Signs of Hope in Job Trends
A struggling economy has historically meant trouble for the president’s party in midterm elections. So it comes as no surprise that Democrats are girding for a tough November. But digging deeper, beyond the national numbers, reveals at least a few glimmers of hope for Democrats — still fairly distant and faint, but bright enough to get campaign strategists scanning the horizon and weighing the odds.
That is because different parts of the country are recovering at different rates — and, in a bit of electoral good luck for the Democrats, some of the areas that are beginning to edge upward more quickly, like parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, happen to be in important battlegrounds for the House and the Senate.
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The Times has identified 114 House seats and 17 Senate seats that are expected to be the most competitive in November. The largest numbers of closely contested elections are expected to be in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio, where The Times projects a combined 26 competitive House races.
All three states, coincidentally, are considered to be on the leading edge of the nation’s recovery. Since December, they have added jobs at a faster rate than the country as a whole and even led the country in the total number of jobs added in April.
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LA Times: Aetna scraps 19% rate increase for individual policyholders
A second insurance company in California has killed plans for double-digit rate hikes for individual policyholders because of errors in its filing that would have inflated premiums, state regulators said Thursday. Connecticut-based Aetna Inc. had sought an average 19% increase in rates for its 65,000 individual customers. Aetna's decision follows a similar move by Anthem Blue Cross, which canceled a rate increase of as much as 39% for many of its 800,000 California policyholders in April.
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The nation's new healthcare law gives the Health and Human Services secretary the authority to review "excessive" premium increases, without defining the term. The law also will require insurers to spend at least 80% of their premiums on medical care.
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"It seems like there is a lot of momentum building toward rate regulation," said Jamie Court, president of Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. "Insurers have to worry about that because they haven't had anyone looking over their shoulder."
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Here's a cute story, from Politico of all places, about how Michelle Obama and Jill Biden became (almost) BFF. :)
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Earlier this month, when Jill Biden celebrated her 59th birthday with staffers at an intimate gathering on an Eisenhower Executive Office Building balcony, Michelle Obama stopped by to join in on the fun.
The first lady gave the second lady a hug, and the two chatted over a cake adorned with flowers made of frosting and cooed over a Biden staffer’s newborn baby.
Those close to Obama say the moment speaks to the close relationship the first lady and Biden have forged since getting to know each other while stumping for their husbands on the campaign trail two summers ago
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Although neither has much free time, "whenever they can find moments together, they catch up and chat about everything from their work on military families to the kids to ‘girl things,’" one Biden aide said, adding that the second lady appreciated Obama’s early and emphatic support for her decision to continue her teaching career at a Northern Virginia community college after moving to town.
"They genuinely have each other’s backs," an Obama aide added.
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All these by AP:
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More of President Obama hang out with President Medvedev yesterday:
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(Official WH photo by Pete Souza)
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President Obama at the G-8 summit, Deerhurst resort, near Huntsville, Ontario, Canada.
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With Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
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President Obama with Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Russia's President Dimitry Medvedev, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berloscony, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.